The network’s own development will be a key part of uniting Marxist-Leninists, but it obviously cannot be the only part. For outside of the group will be all those in the existing self-proclaimed vanguard parties, as well as those who did not agree with some part of the unity required to join the network.
If the history of revolutionary movements is any guide, unity among all these forces is unachievable. As a consistent Marxist-Leninist trend develops, many comrades will gravitate towards it, but the forces they leave behind will probably consolidate around more consistent and more clearly non-Marxist varieties of socialism, rather than just the serious deviations which they already manifest.[1]
No one can spell out how the process of winning over the better comrades will unfold, but there will certainly be a dialectical relationship between the network’s taking up its tasks, and the building of broader unity and the defeat of the opportunist lines. If comrades in a party-building organization develop our theory, improve our mass work, deepen our unity, see to it that comrades whose main work is in practice also have a good grasp of theory, develop good communist styles of work, and begin to recruit workers, we will become a definite tendency within the communist movement and—at some point, a real trend within the workers’ movement. Such a development, combined with patient struggles with rank-and-file members of the existing parties and with working-class pressure for communist unity, will help create the conditions in which some comrades will become disillusioned with the opportunist tendencies which they are with now and will develop increasing unity with us (while pointing out some of our own shortcomings to us).
In the absence of testing how a positive example of consistent Marxism-Leninism affects comrades aligned with the various deviations, it is impossible to judge confidently how consolidated they are. What is predictable is that taking up our communist tasks well will assist the process of broader communist unification. What is not predictable is how much can happen before changes in the objective situation make the opportunist lines even more clearly untenable, whether there are any parties which might undergo serious rectification and be won over as a body, or whether unification will come solely through defections from their ranks, whether the kind of unity committee we described elsewhere will ever be a practical solution,[2] etc. Nor can anyone predict for certain how much of this process is possible before we have developed into a party ourselves.–
It will clearly take the building of another active political tendency to begin this process of unification at all, and it must be a tendency that actually takes up our theoretical and practical tasks. We emphasize this point because we firmly disagree with the P.U.L., which seems to believe that first comrades must struggle to win virtually the entire movement to a unified analysis of the situation, our tasks, and the forms of opportunism that have been preventing us from carrying them out well, before a section of the movement should take up those tasks.[3] This is an idealist line. Though we should avoid the sectarian error of parties which have no time for struggle with anyone else and believe that unity will be won only when others see the success of their line in practice, there is enough opportunism among those forces–including opportunist avoidance of ideological struggle–that such struggle and their own negative experiences will be insufficent to win them over. These must be combined with the positive example of our work. They must also be combined with the kind of struggle with the rank and file of these groups that will be impossible except where we are engaged in common practice with them. (And such struggle should definitely take place, which is one reason why the network should assign forces to prepare reports on the lines of these organizations. Another reason is that we can probably learn something from the other parties, despite their opportunism.)
It is right opportunism to neglect the urgent theoretical and practical work that a part of the communist movement could be doing, out of fear of proceeding without uniting the entire movement. As we have tried to show already, a small number of people can make progress on these tasks–even if far less than a unified party could–and the unity itself will never come if, in the main, we spend our time just arguing for it. Despite the P.U.L.’s heavy focus on criticizing “left” sectarianism, they overlook the fact that at present it is strong enough to prevent us from even influencing the existing parties in any way until our theory and our practice start opening the minds of rank-and-file communists working alongside us. Polemic after dazzling polemic by the anti-“left” tendency which the P.U.L. speaks of organizing would go unread by these other forces in the meantime. So we cannot wait until they are won over before taking up our other work in a very serious way.
Building the organization to take up this work and develop another tendency is as important to our work as the theoretical and practical tasks themselves.
[1] For an explanation of why we consider it incorrect to treat the existing parties as if such consolidation and such consistent opportunism are already proven, see our pamphlet Party-Formation and the Circle Spirit: A Reply to the MLOC, pp. 5-7, 10-15.
Nearly everyone at least pays lip service to the idea of winning many “honest comrades” away from the existing parties. Therefore, in the present general discussion of how to unite with them, it is not necessary to go into whether it is mainly a matter of winning them to Marxism-Leninism from other ideologies or winning them to consistent Marxism-Leninism from serious opportunist deviations in its application.
[2] In Learning From Past Mistakes to Avoid Future Ones in the Struggle for Unity, we responded to alleged unity proposals made by the MLOC and the CP(M-L) by saying that any serious efforts at unifying most communists would require a multilateral form (not the MLOC’s closed bilateral negotiations), a rule that all major polemics be studied and discussed by all members of participating groups, and a serious commitment of a good deal of time.
[3] This is the essence of the P.U.L.’s line, despite occasional contrary statements in their text. For they consider it wrong to form a party that does not unite all or most communists (pp. 88-91). They see ideological struggle or else developments in objective conditions as the primary means to achieve unity (197-238, especially pp. 235 and 237-38). They so de-emphasize the development of political line prior to formation of this party that unites the movement that the emergence of a consistent political trend before such unification would be impossible (pp. 47, 200-20), and they question whether significant agitational work among the working-class masses will be possible even for a time after the party is formed (53, 208), although they also do acknowledge the need for agitation (30, 208). They do state firmly, but almost as an afterthought, that unification of existing communists will be impossible without deepening our fusion with the working-class vanguard (229-33). Overall, there is no conception of the largely separate development of a consistent Marxist-Leninist trend, through its taking up today the theoretical, practical, and organizational tasks which all communists should be taking up, as the bridge to eventual unification with other forces. Instead they hope to consolidate anti-“left”-sectarian forces for the struggle to win over the rest of the movement.