With their piece on “The class struggle in the U.S.” our Mensheviks undertake a systematic and vicious (if petty and disjointed) assault on the revolutionary line of our Party. As with all they do, it begins with a theatrical hype (“Comrades the rebellion is real.”) and inflated accounts of their “rebellion” (“reaction” is more to the point). Of course there is a method to their madness– as well as a madness to their method. Hand in hand with their method of engineering a split (split first, study the line later), this paper seeks to divert its audience’s attention away from its painfully obvious lack of substance and whip it up with numbers, desperate appeals (“Comrades Hold Firm!”) and silly promises that if they do, they will be the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.
Of course the essence of the question is line, not numbers. But despite these wild claims and this orchestrated hype, dear Mensheviks, we can count, too. As usual, your results don’t measure up to your appetite, not to mention your claims. Despite all your factionalizing, you’ve fallen short. Even Bruce Franklin did better, both according to percentage of the organization and in terms of advancing and struggling for a clear political line.
This is testament not only to your bankruptcy but to the fact that in spite of all your efforts, Marxism is not so easily pushed aside by pragmatism in the ranks of this Party. In sum, as the Soviet anti-Trotsky caption (reprinted in the February 1978 Revolution) put it “The opportunists’ show is unsuccessful.” The RCP is indeed the Party of the proletariat–you, Mensheviks, who tried to wreck it, have learned this truth the hard way.
Today the situation in our Party is indeed excellent. An atmosphere is growing in which comrades are engaged in vigorous and healthy study, discussion and struggle over the question of China and, in a beginning way, over the class struggle here. And even now comrades are beginning to apply this understanding to practice, in our work, including support of the miners strike. A revolutionary spirit is growing, a spirit in which, as Comrade Gert Alexander put it, people want to make revolution so much they’re willing to be scientific about it. More and more comrades are approaching all these questions from the high plane of the struggle between two lines.
Into this situation comes the paper by our Mensheviks. One would hope it would help us seize the opportunity to deepen our grasp of the struggle between two lines. But unfortunately in substance it’s a bit more like grasping a handful of slime. In its very pettiness, in its whole approach, in the questions it chooses to address and the way it addresses them, it stands in sharp contrast to the situation where people are trying to grapple with the questions of linking our daily work with the revolutionary goal. It is most definitely living proof of what Stalin said–paper will, indeed, put up with whatever is written on it. The fact that such a paper could be a convincing argument for a relatively sizable number of people to split from our Party certainly shows the degenerative influence of this line in our Party, the depth to which this clique and its line has kept people in ignorance and promoted pragmatism, to the extent that many were not even aspiring to any heights.
Still this paper shows some things. Even its whole approach shows how thoroughly reformist this clique is in essence. We ask comrades to consider if overwhelmingly even the questions it poses are the ones which are posing themselves as obstacles to the Party doing revolutionary work. Their whole approach shows they have no concern at all for the crucial question of how to maintain and develop a revolutionary Party and revolutionary work in our situation.
They claim there is a major retreat from the “actual struggle.” Where is this big retreat? Can it be seen in our efforts in the struggle of the miners–work which increasingly has been under the leadership of the proletarian line in our Party? Can it be seen in the years’ long struggle which has been carried out at the I-Hotel? Can it be seen in the struggle we waged to even get their student headquarters to take up the battle at Kent State, or in the fight to get them to even take up vets work? Do we find it evidenced in smaller struggles like that over the fired workers at Chrysler Trenton Engine or in many struggles in steel, despite interference from their narrow revisionist line?
It is apparent that there is no such retreat, that they are raising a quite transparent smokescreen and that by raising this now these Mensheviks are doing exactly what Lenin described in What Is To Be Done?– “wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day”–the problem in the Party in fact is not that we are retreating from involvement in struggle, but that we have not made enough advances in doing strictly Marxist work in all such struggles.
On the face of it their charge is both ludicrous and criminal. Here our Party, for some time now, has been correcting right errors, waging a struggle against the right–an effort to nurture and develop those revolutionary qualities which, along with the spontaneous pull of imperialist society, these Mensheviks had almost drummed out of our ranks. Here we are trying to correct something, bring back politics, and ideological work (even while making clear ideological work is not the main thing). And in doing this have we been saying that our Party should give up on the economic struggle, that nothing can be accomplished there, that this is just bowing to spontaneity? Obviously not.
But to take on rightist lines at all, to correct some things that obviously need correcting, is described as going from quantity to quality into Trotskyite interventionism! What a vivid self-exposure! These people have the same response as a common reformer to communist politics–“what are you bringing that around here for? You’ll mess everything up!”
In light of all this, the pettiness and whole approach of this paper, it is in a way unfortunate to introduce it into the struggle. In contrast to the situation developing among the comrades, it tends to degrade the Party and its level. In answering this paper it will be necessary to descend for a time into the mud it inhabits in order to give it a few necessary bangs on the head. Through the further development of this whole process, we should soon get beyond this particular task. We hope comrades will be tolerant and try to keep their sights high–not limited to our Mensheviks’ petty efforts.
Still there is much to learn by the negative example of our Mensheviks. Their line, or more to the point its pragmatist, rightist essence, represents a tendency that will occur again many times in the future. As both our Programme and first Main Political Report make clear, such rightism and pragmatism have historically been and will continue to be overall the main danger facing the revolutionary movement in an imperialist superpower like this.
The fact that such a struggle has broken out in our Party reflects some very real things about the class struggle, and in fact is in some ways a by-product and a measure of the progress we have made in integrating with the struggles of the working class. Before the Party was formed most–though not all–of the struggles were against “leftist” deviations, pulling away from the working class into adventurist or dogmatic isolation and sectarianism. But now, exactly as a reflection of having defeated such tendencies and deepened our ties with the actual struggles of the workers, the kind of lines which can find some following among sections of our Party, which can “fuse” to a certain degree with spontaneous errors, are more likely to be from the right.
While struggles against such a pragmatist, rightist line will inevitably occur in the future, this particular variant has features of its own which are largely determined by the period we are in. Because it is the beginning of a new spiral, and the working class struggle is at a relatively low level overall, a pragmatic reformist line in this period will tend to be less political (in a reformist sense) and more puny and petty than at a time of bigger upsurge. Overall the rightist essence of this Menshevik line determines its apolitical form. By its very nature it is so glued to whatever is going on at a given moment that its horizons are incredibly limited. There is no sense at all of the laws that underlie the objective situation that will give rise to big things and bring many into motion, and no sense of the danger of revisionism. Our Mensheviks prove utterly incapable of giving any real revolutionary meaning to the high road and have no sense at all of the sweeping, anti-revisionist world view poetically summed up by Mao Tsetung “Look, the world is being turned upside down.”
For all these reasons the Mensheviks’ paper, despite its apolitical pettiness, does raise some important things. We should welcome it. It represents an opportunity to join a struggle with a rightist line and to smash a revisionist headquarters. Fine. Both events are worth celebrating.
Even the form of this Menshevik paper hints at its content. It is a paper that is a disjointed jumble of points, picking (and distorting) some from our Party’s history while leaving out most.
This sort of method, compared with that of previous major opportunists, including Franklin and the Bundists, is disappointing and uninspiring. Both Franklin and the Bundists (especially as the latter got into dogmatism) put out and struggled over a clear, if opportunist, line. Answering this immediately required study of Marxism. If our answer to the Franklins was titled ”Proletarian Revolution vs. Revolutionary Adventurism” and to the Bundists “Marxism vs. Bundism” we might be tempted to title this paper “Marxism vs. Marshmellowism.”
But our Mensheviks’ paper does, after all, have a line and a method. In its approach–even its form–this Menshevik paper has provided us yet another worthy, herky-jerky example of eclecticism. Lenin’s words on eclecticism from “Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin” (Vol. 32) are apt: “Dialectics requires an all-round consideration of relationships in their concrete development but not a patchwork of bits and pieces.” and “When two or more different definitions are taken and combined at random. . the result is an eclectic definition which is indicative of different facets of the object, and nothing more. Dialectical logic demands that we go further.”
The definition of eclecticism given in Selsam’s Handbook of Philosophy is worth reprinting and comparing to the Menshevik paper: “Eclecticism (Gr., eklegein–to pick out, to choose), the tendency to combine, in mechanical fashion, ideas, theories and conceptions which have originated in different schools and movements. At its best, eclecticism is an impossible attempt to create unity among disparate and irreconcilable philosophies, such as, for example, to combine ’the best features’ of materialism and idealism, or of Marx and Freud. At its worst it is a deliberate effort to confuse issues by indiscriminate borrowing which results in a hodge-podge of nonsense.” Daring to descend the depths, our Mensheviks have produced eclectics at its worst.
Still, in this patchwork of pettiness, there is an even more specific method. It is the same one they employ in their “analysis” of China. First, while claiming to “seek truth from facts,” in reality they twist facts to fit falsehood. Second, as on China, when they analyze the situation they wipe out of consideration any active role of the bourgeoisie–in this case their own role in this “history.”
Their theme is clear–there is a “left idealist” line and headquarters leading our Party which has gone from quantity to quality with the latest CC Report. We have already begun to speak to this some earlier, but here it is useful to analyze how they try to put over this summation.
They attempt some overt appeals to rightism (such as their case on the “center of gravity”–more on this later). But they also seem to realize that it would be hard (if not laughable) to get over saying “ultra-leftism” is the main tendency in the work of our Party. So–just as they do in reference to China–they set out to blame the (genuine) left for the existence of the right: “Leftism” at the top is responsible for rightism at the bottom. A cute trick, but it won’t stand.
The clear fact is, as any serious examination of the facts and the development of our Party will show, that rightism, especially economism, has been the main danger and that this has been due both to spontaneous tendencies and increasingly the influence of this Menshevik headquarters.
One obvious fact that exposes both their method and the conclusions they seek to draw is that, despite its modest claim to ”serve as a guide to understanding the development of this [“left idealist”] tendency and the development of two lines and two roads in our Party” (see “Introduction”–p. 396), this paper attempts to write out of history the great majority of the key questions which have been the focus of the two line struggle in our Party. And when they do venture to speak of struggle waged against the right (as in the summation bulletin of the NUWO convention), they conveniently picture it as “attacks on the cadre” when they know damn well and acted on the understanding that these were criticisms of their line and headquarters.
Their “guide” to the two line struggle never mentions: the Party Branches articles (Revolution, August and September, 1977); the struggle over the YCL; vets work; and other key things they opposed such as, the “Theoretical Struggle” article (Revolution, January, 1977), the “High Road” article on the October Revolution (Revolution, November, 1977), the miners “Crossroads” article (Revolution, December, 1977), the question of building an independent union in one industry. It never mentions the War Conference. (Could this be not only because under the label of criticizing “idealism” they undermined building for this in such areas as the Midwest but also because the strong line our Party took against social chauvinism is looking embarrassing to them now?) They deal powerfully with the Worker bulletin in two potent sentences on supposed “lack of investigation.” They deal in a phrase with the 1976 election campaign (apparently our Party’s line was no good because it didn’t center on promising palpable results to the masses).
They fail to mention in the history of the development of the “left idealist” tendency the articles in Revolution (April, 1977) and The Communist, (May, 1977) against the dogmatism of Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO). Perhaps this is because, since the Chair of the Party wrote the article “Undaunted Dogma from Puffed Up Charlatans” in the midst of his supposed “left idealist” tailspin, this “strange” fact wouldn’t fit their little story. And perhaps it is also because this article exposes WVO from the high plane of ideological and political line, and exposes the rightist essence that underlies WVO’s dogmatism, including on the question of theory. Perhaps this hits too close to home since they, too, in their new student paper (The Young Communist) for example, have taken to attacking what WVO was attacking–the concept of “theory in its own right” (not “for its own sake”) being of special importance now in our Party.
How else can we tell that their method of twisting facts to suit their conclusion that “the left produced the right” in our Party is indeed phony? Our Mensheviks themselves say it well in their paper: “we can only use one criterion–practice (sorry, Bob).” Yes, Mensheviks, it is you who are indeed sorry–a sorry bunch of rightists. Already, only a month after being free of our Party’s “left idealism” your consistently rightist practice is coming out even more crudely. You have already dropped “Communist” from the name of your student organization (while, significantly, putting it into the name of your student newspaper, which now has the same name as the paper of the CP(ML)’s youth group–quite a coincidence!) You call in leaflets and speeches for “support” for the miners in the form of you scratch their back, they’ll scratch yours, saying, for example, that postal workers and steel workers should support the miners not because the miners are waging a key battle of the working class against the capitalists, but because postal workers and steel workers need the right to strike, too. These Mensheviks have even advocated capitulation in the miners strike, saying, weakly, when the pressure was on that they, too, wanted the miners to go back to work, but only when “enough” of the miners’ demands were met so they could call it a “victory”–and this when the Miners Right to Strike Committee was calling for no compromises in the face of Miller’s backstabbing and the government’s threats.
No, Mensheviks, your line and practice are clear enough proof that, far from the “left” creating the right, it is the influence of your rightist line which has nurtured rightist tendencies, your rightist line that has correctly been fought in our Party and needs to be fought still more.
The whole attempt of their paper to sum up a two line struggle out of what they can draw and distort out of a few events, above all July 4 and the NUWO campaign, is itself an exposure. It is a perfect example of what they later describe as a “straw man argument”–“the song and dance about the ’entire general resides in the particular’ ” (p. 433). It is exactly an attempt to evade the essence of the matter, to evade seeking out the interrelations of things in an all around way, concentrating especially on the differences in ideological and political line. Instead it seeks to substitute its eclectic method of drawing the entire general–the two line struggle–out of a handful of facts it picks and chooses. And, the facts it does present, as we will get into later, are perverted. It all amounts to an attempt to pickpocket the advances made through the line and work of the Party as a whole, to turn them into their own personal capital and to sum them up in such a way as to turn real gains into their opposite–into opportunism.
In studying the method of this paper, it is also interesting and revealing to note that its “history” begins at the Founding Congress. For our Mensheviks, apparently, only a void existed before. This is to serve two purposes. First is to present the Founding Congress itself undialectically. The Congress didn’t come from nowhere. It was itself the product of a process, and in turn gave rise to a process which, like all things, divided into two. This paper attempts to deny this. In particular, to puff up their “big role” in founding the Party, they dwell at ridiculous length on small points they added to documents, thereby glorifying their role in making more of the economic struggle than should have been made.
The second reason for wiping out history before the Congress is that they thus are able to ignore the previous history of the Revolutionary Union, in particular its major contributions to developing Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought in the U.S. This further downplays what they seek to downplay in general– the key role of ideological and political line and of two line struggle–especially as it came out in the struggles with Franklin and the Bundists. These are lessons these pragmatists are indeed best advised to steer clear of. While dealing thoroughly with the history of the Party and the Revolutionary Union before it is beyond the scope of this reply, it is clear that this is a necessary task, one which would add to the understanding of our Party and one which should be undertaken soon.
But, again, while our Mensheviks have given us a most disappointing and empty “polemic” it is important to see that in it there is a line, even though it is less clear and consistent in principle than that of Franklin or the Bundists. It is a line for non-revolutionary work in any situation. Lenin’s remark from What Is To Be Done? applies here, “Once again Parvus’ apt observation that it was difficult to catch an opportunist with a formula was proved correct. An opportunist will put his name to any formula and as readily abandon it, because opportunism is precisely a lack of definite and firm principles.”
This Menshevik clique has been characterized by philistinism–smug in its narrowness and contemptuous of real revolutionary theory guiding consistent revolutionary work. It has downgraded political line and practically wiped out the role of ideological line with pragmatism, and as we have pointed out in our Programme as well as other places, pragmatism is far more than a spontaneous tendency expressing ignorance of Marxism. It is bourgeois ideology which leads to revisionism–“the movement is everything, the final aim nothing.”
This clique has promoted economism in our Party and, as we shall soon go into, their paper promotes it still more. But this has been determined less by any firm economist principles than by a general narrowing, bowing to, and attempt to capitalize on whatever seems to be going this morning or can be led by you this afternoon. Today, for this kind of petty bourgeois tendency, cashing in on the still low level of the working class movement appears to be where it’s at–just as the national question was cashed in on when it was more of an icon. (In fact some of the leading Mensheviks were late seeing the crucial nature of that struggle, others never did see it and wavered, while still others continue today to bow to this particular pole of spontaneity as well–arguing for instance that liquidating the national question was the main tendency in our ranks as soon as the first sharp blows were delivered to the Bundists, a conscious distortion of the correct summation of this at the 1976 CC. Some have argued that a major reason for taking up Africa work among students is “to get Blacks.”)
There is a close analogy between the line and behavior of this clique, particularly the behavior of M. Jarvis, and that of Trot-skyites. The form of the opportunists’ line is constantly changing, but its rightist essence remains. Its only consistent principle is lack of principle. But this “tactics are everything” is nonetheless a line. In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Lenin said:
When we speak of fighting opportunism, we must never forget a feature that is characteristic of present-day opportunism in every sphere, namely, its vagueness, diffuse-ness, elusiveness. An opportunist, by his very nature, will always evade formulating an issue clearly and decisively, he will always seek a middle course, he will always wriggle like a snake between two mutually exclusive points of view and try to ’agree’ with both and to reduce his differences of opinion to petty amendments, doubts, good and pious suggestions, and so on and so forth.
What underlies this behavior is not only careerism and eclectics, but the particular method of trimming your sails to the wind. This characteristic is one reason this line was not so easy to expose for some time. It is also why its line on democratic centralism–factionalism–was for a time its sharpest manifestation.
But such a line cannot co-exist forever with a proletarian line and sooner or later it had to jump out fully in opposition. And so it did. In “Marxism and Revisionism” (Vol. 15) Lenin sums up the character and behavior of such a revisionist line:
A natural complement to the economic and political tendencies of revisionism was its attitude to the final aim of the socialist movement. ’The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing’–this catchphrase of Bernstein’s expresses the substance of revisionism better than many long arguments. To determine its conduct from case to case, to adapt itself to the events of the day and to the chops and changes of petty politics, to forget the basic interests of the proletariat, the main features of the capitalist system as a whole and of capitalist evolution as a whole; to sacrifice these basic interests for the real or assumed advantages of the moment–such is the policy of revisionism. And it patently follows from the very nature of this policy that it may assume an infinite variety of forms, and that every more or less ’new’ question, every more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of events, even though it may change the basic line of development only to an insignificant degree and only for the shortest period of time, will always inevitably give rise to one or another variety of revisionism.
Or as he put it in “The Russian Radical Is Wise After the Event” (Vol. 11): “Opportunism is the sacrificing of the long-term and vital interests of the Party to its momentary, passing, secondary interests.”
The Menshevik paper starts with a whole section on “fusion of socialism and the working class movement” and lays out the murky theme which runs throughout the paper that the “left idealist” headquarters has approached this task with “vacillation and doubt” and is now running head long to abandon this task. Well, the task as they pose it is a task no revolutionary party should ever take up, since their whole idea of fusion amounts to confusion of socialism with the spontaneous level of the working class struggle.
It has nothing in common with the actual task of fusion which is a political task of organizing and raising the level of the class struggle of the proletariat so that, as Lenin put it,
When this fusion takes place the class struggle of the workers becomes the conscious struggle of the proletariat to emancipate itself from exploitation by the propertied classes, it is evolved into a higher form of the socialist workers’ movement– the independent working-class Social-Democratic party. (“A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social Democracy,” Vol. 4, p. 257).
To take up this task means building the working class struggle so that, in the words of our Programme,
Fighting blow for blow on all fronts, and led by its Party, the working class will develop its movement of today into a revolutionary workers’ movement that fights exploitation and all oppression in order to end wage-slavery. To do this the working class must take up and infuse its strength, discipline and revolutionary outlook into every major social movement. (pp. 102-3)
Our Mensheviks appear very proud and seem to fancy themselves (together with Lenin we would presume) the defenders and developers of this line on fusion–both in their paper and, we are told in the next section, at the Founding Congress. However, what they are really responsible for is the political narrowing of this task. The RU long ago struggled for a correct understanding of this question. The “left” adventurism of the Franklins was opposed with the deepening of the understanding of the need to go to and mobilize the working class. This task was not, however, proposed in the narrow way our Mensheviks are arguing for it. “Left” adventurism was not countered by economism, but by putting out the task of politically organizing the workers (in fact the unity between economism and terrorism was demonstrated). What Is To Be Done? was studied and out of this struggle May Day was revived. So, too, in struggling against the Bundists, the need to organize the actual struggles of the working class was stressed.
Again, overall this was not done narrowly. For example in one of Comrade Avakian’s speeches on Party-building printed at the time (1974) it says “And we raised the slogan [’Workers Unite to the Fight Against All Oppression’] to begin to develop in the working class its understanding that it wasn’t its fight just in the plants, it isn’t just around a particular strike or economic question though those are important, but that its fight is the broad political struggle uniting all that can be united in firm struggle against the imperialist enemy.”
But where would our Mensheviks lead us with their idea of “fusion”? Where else but to the right? While they give one passing mention to the fact that Lenin was criticizing bowing to the spontaneous struggle when he talked about fusion, in the very essay they quote, this is immediately dropped. Nowhere is it developed or applied to today’s conditions. Instead we get treated (and twice inside of three paragraphs in case we missed the point) to their idea of fusion–“basing ourselves on the actual contradictions and conditions of the working class.” There can be no doubt from the whole context–from the stress they proceed to put on the “center of gravity,” to “fighting big battles” etc.–that by this formulation they do not refer to the basic, fundamental and long term conditions of wage slavery under the political rule of the capitalist class, but narrowly, statically, to today’s conditions and struggles.
Lenin, again in “Retrograde Trend,” characterizes this well:
It is as though a man setting out on a long and difficult road on which numerous obstacles and numerous enemies await him were told in answer to his question ’Where shall I go?’: ’It is desirable to go where it is possible to go, and it is possible to go where you are going at the given moment’! (Vol. 4, p. 274)
In case there remains any doubt what our Mensheviks mean by “fusion” they oblige us later on (p. 421) by explicitly separating out “fusion” from organizing the political struggle: ”Just like we did not break through the middle on the all oppression question we are not breaking through on the fusion of Marxism with the workers movement.” Our Mensheviks are in fact the ones pro moting separation, not fusion, by their political narrowness. This is a mistake our Party should not make, and it certainly is one Lenin did not make. Despite our Mensheviks waving around Lenin’s essays on fusion, in these very essays he is aiming his at exactly the line they are advancing. When Lenin, as they quote him in “Urgent Tasks,” is speaking of “vacillation and doubt” (the sin they wish to tag our Party with) he is blasting at economism:
Russian Social-Democracy is passing through a period of vacillation and doubt bordering on self-negation. On the one hand, the working-class movement is being sundered from socialism, the workers are being helped to carry on the economic struggle, but nothing, or next to nothing, is done to explain to them the socialist aims and the political tasks of the movement as a whole. On the other hand, socialism is being sundered from the labour movement; Russian socialists are again beginning to talk more and more about the struggle against the government having to be carried on entirely by the intelligentsia because the workers confine themselves to the economic struggle. (Vol. 4, p. 366-7)
Come on Mensheviks, if your aim is to distort Lenin at least you could be a little clever about it.
As if he was speaking to our Mensheviks, Lenin again speaks in the same essay to this same tendency:
’Organise!’ Rabochaya Mysl keeps repeating to the workers in all keys, and all the adherents of the ’economist’ trend echo the cry. We, of course, wholly endorse this appeal, but we will not fail to add: organise, but not only in mutual benefit societies, strike funds, and workers’ circles; organise also in a political party; organise for the determined struggle against the autocratic government and against the whole of capitalist society. Without such organisation the proletariat will never rise to the class-conscious struggle; without such organisation the working-class movement is doomed to impotency. (Vol. 4, p. 369-70)
Perhaps realizing they are on shaky ground on the fusion question, the Mensheviks try out a parallel to Lenin’s “Left Wing Communism” but, alas, there is no help for them there either. As near as we can figure, their parallel is this: the 60’s in this country is Was World War I; and today in this country like the period of “Left Wing Communism.” They’re wrong on two counts. They miss the Point that Lenin was, in fact, expecting a new upsurge soon. And he certainly didn’t regard the period as less “political.”
But, basing themselves on this wrong view they begin, ”He [Lenin] targeted a number of these new parties who failed to deal with the changing conditions and the new character of the class struggle. This new character was not as thrilling or ’political’ as the previous period of upsurge.” Having drawn this revealing and wrong parallel, they then go on: “Lenin particularly hit these parties for their failure to be based in the socialized industries and the everyday struggle of our class, failure to work in the bourgeois trade unions and failure to use bourgeois elections as a political platform to expose the bourgeois political parties and their role.” (p. 399) Two things should be pointed out–Lenin’s answer here was not to limit or curtail communist political activity but to broaden and deepen it. And second, anyone who thinks the situation described above represents the line of our Party or a major deviation that needs to be rooted out is so far “separated” from reality that a little “fusion” wouldn’t be a bad idea at all for them.
The Menshevik clipping and curtailing of the real political meaning of fusion is no mere omission. It means separating fusion from politics and it represents–far from a line for merging socialism and the working class movement–a line for submerging our Party under the spontaneous level of the working class struggle at any point. This is the purpose to which they try to put the quote from the Communist Manifesto on communists having “no interests separate and apart” from the workers as a whole–a purpose and a context quite the opposite from its real meaning and from the context in which it was put and explained in the Worker bulletin.
What is stressed in that bulletin is also summed up later in the Manifesto: “in the movement of the present [the communists] also represent and take care of the future of that movement.” Who can deny that in carrying out our tasks among the masses, in organising them, this is what we need to emphasize today–that in all these battles our Party represents and works for the revolutionary interests of our class. Isn’t the failure to do this the clearest expression of the failure to carry out real fusion, of the low road? Shouldn’t the whole experience of the degeneration of the CPUSA, together with what we know about the pull of spontaneity, especially in an imperialist country, be enough to warn us–to urge us toward the correct and revolutionary path?
The Founding Congress of our Party was a great victory, but not for the reasons our Mensheviks give us in their paper. Their reasons amount to economism and to a downright silly glorification–more accurately whitewashing–of their role. The founding of our Party, which we said we were determined would be the second and last founding of the revolutionary Party of the working class in the U.S., was a declaration of war on the bourgeoisie. It concentrated and consolidated the advances made by communists in the class struggle and the struggle between two lines in this country on all fronts–ideologically, politically and organizationally. It forged one Party with one line. This was concentrated in the MPR and Constitution and, especially, the Party Programme.
But our Mensheviks, as we have said before, wish to present this Congress as if it came out of nowhere and as if it didn’t divide into two, especially on the question of economism. From the line of their paper, one can only conclude that they want to go back to the Congress, with the rightism intact and uphold everything. Besides being an impossible dream, this is reactionary and would amount to turning a victory into its opposite.
Their paper introduces the Congress by saying “We would rather not get into a ’who shot John’” (p. 400). This, of course, is a dead giveaway that this is exactly what lies in store and lo! we are not to be disappointed. Playing on people’s ignorance of small details of the Congress, they treat the reader to a dizzy and distorted account of a few things, clearly aimed at puffing up their own roles as heroes. (It should be noted that a thorough study of Party documents and bulletins adds up to a good refutation of their whole paper.) Even taking their story at face value, their efforts at the Congress are silly. Missing altogether is any sweeping view of the accomplishments of the Congress, and especially any summation of the development of the revolutionary line of the Programme, or even an all around view of the MPR (to these, of course, Jarvis’ contributions were minimal). Instead we get a picture of their heroic activities of adding a phrase here and there. As to most of these changes–what we said in Revolution about the CP(ML)’s Program comes to mind: they have two aspects, trite and wrong.
This is especially so if one wants–as our Mensheviks do–to make a federal case out of them today. For example there is the change they take credit for in altering the Draft Programme section on the IWO’s from the original version, “While these organizations must be based mainly in the plants and other workplaces their overall role is to apply the single spark method. . . ” M. Jarvis claims credit for the change to “These organizations must be based in the plants and other work places, must take an active part in building the fight there and play a leading role in the struggles of the rank and file workers. Their overall role is to apply the single spark method. . . ” (RCP Programme, p. 109)
There is plenty of correct emphasis given in the Programme to the economic struggle, but as experience in building IWO’s–and especially in building the NUWO and at its convention, has underlined, the key point about them is their political role in the struggle. They cannot play their role if the core of workers who must form their backbone is not won to understand this and specifically to the question of the working class leading the fight against all oppression. The original version gives this proper emphasis and the second version (in the Programme) tends toward eclectically muddling this point. (Nonetheless, the Programme can stand “as is”–but the Mensheviks can’t.)
Both at the Congress and in this paper M. Jarvis headquartered a move to exaggerate tendencies, which did exist, to downplay the day to day struggle of the workers. It was as if this struggle had just been discovered–by M. Jarvis–and for the first time. That this was new to him is possible (although unlikely), but as we have already pointed out, the RU, both in practice and in polemics, had given proper weight and emphasis to that struggle.
Even in criticizing things that should have been criticized, such as the summation of the May First Workers Movement experience, the tendency was to act as though the problem was “too much politics, not enough economics” instead of the real problem which was a tendency toward a liberal, not communist (strictly Marxist) approach to both economic and political struggle. The purpose of all this, in retrospect, seems to have been to puff up Jarvis’ role as the champion of these struggles and, especially, to huff up a big rightist wind. This had to be struggled with to some degree at and to a greater degree right after the Congress. It has persisted, and now this Menshevik paper seeks to blow it up to gale force once again.
Their paper also raises up the question of the “center of gravity,” giving M. Jarvis credit for ”initiating” this line. The paper carries on about the “center of gravity” and related questions for a while and then ominously poses the question, are the “left idealists” out to reverse this verdict? OK, Mensheviks, we’ll bite. It is necessary to sum up this line and the way you blew it up into an economist wind in our Party. First off, to raise this question as this paper does and carry on as if the liquidation of the work in the economic struggle is the major danger facing our Party today would be ridiculous if it weren’t criminal. This is once again a case of “many happy returns of the day” to funeral mourners. Once again our Mensheviks are getting sore muscles and bruised feet from lifting so many rocks only to drop them straight down.
Here, while they scream “foul!” for accusing them of pushing economism at the Congress, they once again openly make a big case out of the “center of gravity.” But can we find even a single mention in their whole paper of the need for comrades to be tribunes of the people? Search as we may, we cannot find it. And with their quoting Lenin, do we find any reference at all, any attempt to sum up and apply the essence of What Is To Be Done? to our situation? Not at all.
Perhaps these philistines actually did not read any of the bulletins or articles of the last two years which deal with this and which they omit mentioning in their paper. If they haven’t, we wish they’d quit trying to raise their ignorance to an arrogant principle which they try to impose on others. But we are inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and credit them with greater opportunism than this. Not only are they so driven to tout their own role that they can’t help revealing their economism, even more they are out to promote narrowness, pragmatism and rightism in such an all around way that they must jump out and distort Marxism, attack the Party’s line, and promote economism which is one big feature of their rightism in this period.
These Mensheviks are once again guilty, just as they were before and after the Founding Congress, of the main deviation which occurred around this “center of gravity” question–turning necessary and urgent work in these struggles into a “special slogan.” This was the error pointed to in Comrade Avakian’s article in the May, 1976 Revolution ”The Day to Day Struggle and the Revolutionary Goal”. It is worthy once again to look at this article and to quote from an essay by Lenin it referred to which speaks exactly to this question:
There is nothing more warranted than the urging of attention to the constant, imperative necessity of deepening and broadening, broadening and deepening, our influence on the masses, our strictly Marxist propaganda and agitation, our ever-closer connection with the economic struggle of the working class, etc. Yet, because such urging is at all times warranted, under all conditions and in all situations, it must not be turned into special slogans, nor should it justify attempts to build upon it a special trend in Social-Democracy. A border-line exists here; to exceed the bounds is to turn this indisputably legitimate urging into a narrowing of the aims and the scope of the movement, into a doctrinaire blindness to the vital and cardinal political tasks of the moment. (“On Confounding Politics With Pedagogics,” Vol. 8, pp 452-3)
Actively taking up the economic struggle remains a crucial task for our Party today. And this was very true at the time of the Founding Congress. The advances our Party has made would have been impossible if we hadn’t been involved in and led these struggles and, along with this, achieved big progress in the reorganization and concentration of our forces in basic industry.
The 1976 CC Report was correct in pointing out that today the economic struggle “is where in fact the workers, as workers, are waging their battles and in the embryonic way they are beginning to develop a sense of themselves as workers by fighting against an opposing group of employers, the way the Programme puts it.” (See page 43. See also Revolution, July, 1977.) And since, as the MPR points out, quoting Lenin, our “task is not to concoct some fashionable means of helping the workers” (a criticism that, as we’ll see later, applies directly to the Mensheviks with their reformism and gimmickry), this means our Party today must do a lot of our work in these struggles, striving consistently to fulfil all three objectives.
But as the MPR itself and many subsequent documents warned, this cannot be taken to mean that this is all there is to the workers struggle–even the spontaneous struggle today–and still less to mean we should liquidate our Party’s independent work. Taking account of this situation cannot mean reducing the Party’s role to mere subservience to the workers movement as such. Our attitude toward this must be a revolutionary communist attitude, spelled out by Lenin: “It is the task of Social-Democrats, by organizing the workers, by conducting propaganda and agitation among them, to turn their spontaneous struggle against their oppressors into the struggle of the whole class, into the struggle of a definite political party for definite political and socialist ideals.” (“Our Immediate Task,” Vol 4, p. 216. Imagine–“ideals”!)
Even the phrase “center of gravity of our Party’s work” does tend to make a separate stage out of our Party’s work in the economic struggle. This is something we should sum up and correct, while grasping that the main deviation was not a phrase that appeared once (yes, once–with all the hubbub it’s hard to believe) in the MPR. The main deviation was the tendency to turn it into a special slogan. This meant in practice putting forward the erroneous line that everything must be judged in relation to the economic struggle, that the basic connections and links between different struggles against particular abuses lie not in their relation to the overall fight against the capitalist system but in how they “fit into” the “center of gravity” struggles.
Coming off the Founding Congress, due in large part to a deviation headquartered by today’s Mensheviks, there was even a tendency to equate being the Party “of the working class” with this “center of gravity.” There was a tendency to erroneously take agitation to mean a call to action–a wrong understanding which in practice limits what we do exposures on to what we can organize a struggle around today. There was a narrow tendency to see “Marxist work” as simply bringing light to the current struggles of the working class, and not all around political work.
This latter tendency has been further developed, especially by these Mensheviks, even as they moved off their most blatant economism, into a line that limits political and ideological work to what can be unfolded from particular struggles. This is an expression of their one-sided pragmatic line on the relation between struggle and consciousness. It is true that tendencies toward all these things can be found in some parts of the MPR (this is more true of the CC Report on the Congress which came out afterwards). But it is also true that this is not the main thrust of the MPR, and that other, contrary, statements can be found in it as well. The point is not to negate the MPR, or fail to sum it up as a big advance, but to understand it, as we have said before, as something which was both a product of a process and itself divided into two. This is precisely what our Mensheviks in this paper refuse to do, as they seek to promote themselves and promote rightism.
Our attitude toward errors like the “center of gravity of the Party’s work” formulation in the MPR, and on the other hand toward our Mensheviks, can be well summed up in Lenin’s words, speaking of the early period when the Russian communists initiated work among the workers:
At first it was inevitable that this work should have a narrow character and should be embodied in the narrow declarations of some Social-Democrats. This narrowness, however, did not frighten those Social-Democrats who had not in the least forgotten the broad historical aims of the Russian working class movement. What matters it if the words of the Social-Democrats sometimes have a narrow meaning when their deeds cover a broad field they go to that class which alone is the real revolutionary class and assist in the development of its forces! They believed that this narrowness would disappear of its own accord with each step that broadened Social-Democratic propaganda. And this, to a considerable degree, is what has happened.
But then he sums up another development: “a gross exaggeration of this (absolutely essential) aspect of Social Democratic activity, which could bring some individuals to lose sight of the other aspects... It is in this extreme exaggeration of one aspect of Social-Democratic work that we see the chief cause of the sad retreat from the ideas of Russian Social-Democracy. Add to this enthusiasm over a fashionable book, ignorance of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, and a childish claim to originality, and you have all the elements that go to make up ’the retrograde trend in Russian Social-Democracy.’”(“A Retrograde Trend” Vol. 4, pp. 279-80) (Lest our Mensheviks get too excited, we should point out that Lenin is not saying here that line doesn’t matter, only practice, as our Mensheviks would have it. He is not denying the importance of rational knowledge as they do–otherwise he would not have bothered to write this work!)
A mistake can be summed up, an erroneous tendency corrected, but as Lenin also put it, “It all goes to drive home the truth that a minor error can always assume monstrous proportions if it is persisted in, if profound justifications are sought for it, and if it is carried to its logical conclusion.” (Left Wing Communism, Vol. 31, p. 43). This is an excellent description of our Mensheviks’ pathetic efforts around the “center of gravity” question in their paper.
To sum up this point, it was correct coming off the Congress to sum up that objectively the struggle of the workers, as workers, is now centered in the economic struggles. But it is definitely wrong and economist to see concentrating there as a separate stage of work and to wall it off from our all around political tasks–even as the phrase “center of gravity” and the policy of concentrating our work in the economic struggle tend to do.[1]
Of course, as Lenin pointed out to the economists in What Is To Be Done?, if it’s quantity (as well as quality) of work in the economic struggle you want, we will gladly compare. The correct line of our Party in many areas (auto is just one example) has given leadership to lots of economic struggles, big and small, and will continue to do so and to a growing extent. In almost every area which was under Menshevik leadership (New York/New Jersey is a good example) work on this front stagnated, too–as a product of the incorrect line. And it was the line of the self-styled NUWO president–not the line of the proletarian headquarters–to downgrade the importance of the miners’ contract strike in advance–opposing making an important task of supporting it in the NUWO nationally unless and until it had proved itself to his satisfaction not to be just a routine strike, but a rouser. Aside from being way wide of the mark (shit!) this whole approach failed to base itself on the real political significance of the battle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie that was focusing even then on the contract battle, because of the nature of the miners’ movement in the years preceding. Sorry, again, Mensheviks.
In their summation of the Congress, of course, the authors of this paper from the degenerate Menshevik hindquarters conveniently fail to mention, while they talk about their heroic phrase-adjusting contributions, that the lines over which there was most struggle at the Congress itself were championed there (on the wrong side) by those who are leading members of their headquarters. Even though those lines were defeated there, these forces still persisted, and the further development (degeneration) of these lines was dealt with at the 1976 CC and afterwards.
Comrades can refer to the CC Report that came out reporting on the Founding Congress to see what these lines were and how they were struggled against. They included the line of “everything through the IWO’s”, which gave rise to the sharpest struggle at the Congress, especially focused in one committee. This line promoted the narrowing down of our Party’s work and also tended to negate the need to build the national movements.
In addition some in the Menshevik headquarters raised an empiricist line on the tasks of the Party branches, attempting to change Article 12 Section 1 of the Constitution in a way to narrow down the task of constant education concerning the ideological and political line. Besides being struggled against and summed up as empiricist at the Congress, this line is hit at sharply in the second Party Branches article (Revolution, Sept., 1977). Though this was not reported on in the Congress summation document, some who are part of this clique also raised up the idea that there was no qualitative leap involved in joining the young communist organization–a line they later developed in a big way in their “youth appeal.”
Finally it should be noted that the line for which they “wisely” and “even-handedly” criticize the MPR in a passing reference–that it “failed to explicitly distinguish between economic and political struggle, although that is done without using these particular terms”–was a line M. Jarvis waved the baton for. The passing “criticism” in their paper is the sheerest hypocrisy, since they know well what Jarvis’ role was around this, and that Comrade Avakian in particular waged struggle against this erroneous tendency several times leading up to the Congress.
All this, previously summed up by the Party and agreed to by them in words, is of course ignored by this Menshevik summation, while they dish out their petty accounts of this and that wording change as the real essence of the Congress.
At the Founding Congress members of (what has become fullblown as) the Menshevik clique pushed another rotten line that is of considerable significance, especially in light of what has happened since the Founding Congress and especially with the full flowering (weeding) of this clique. That was the line of social-chauvinism–a line that in essence called for support for “our own” imperialists in the international struggle–which of course means capitulating to them in an all around way.
This line was put straight out by some who are now “rank and file” members of the Menshevik camp, in the form of calling for support of NATO and the struggle for “independence” in the lesser imperialist countries in the U.S. bloc–all in the name of fighting against the two superpowers and directing the main blow (though that phrase was not specifically used) against the Soviets. At the Congress itself this line was supported, especially in the committee directly concerned with this question, by that “herky-jerky theoretician,” who in typical and revealing fashion dragged up all kinds of documents from the Comintern and the Soviet Union during the 1930s, when they were talking about how the imperialists were divided into so-called “aggressor” states and “peace-loving democracies.” The point of this “theoretician” was that our Party should support the same kind of line in regard to the international situation today–once again an indication of this clique’s desire and determination to repeat the errors of the Comintern and the revisionist tendencies of the old CP which were the quantity leading up to its leap into utter revisionism (once again, first time tragedy, second time farce). This line was specifically repudiated at the Congress itself and criticized in the CC Report on the Congress. (In this light, note that in their paper attacking the CC Report on China the Mensheviks blast the Four and our Party for what they call failing to uphold “China’s foreign policy” (see p. 176)–which means the stuff filling the pages of the Peking Review on the international situation. Here is yet another indication of our Mensheviks inching–perhaps “yarding” is a more accurate description–their way toward the CP(ML).
Also of significance in the same direction is the fact that, along with promoting this junk through the use of Comintern and Soviet documents from the 1930s, this “herky-jerky theoretician” pushed essentially the same revisionist stuff through another means-arguing that defense of China was the “cornerstone” of proletarian internationalism today. This was another way of trying to smuggle in the line of directing the main blow at the Soviet Union and capitulating to “our own” bourgeoisie. It was also repudiated at the Congress and criticized in the CC Report on the Founding Congress.
Finally on this point, one of the main scribblers for this bunch of philistines co-authored a critique of the section of the Draft Programme on “Life Under Socialism.” This critique, while supposedly “improving” this section by focusing more on the class struggle under socialism, actually promoted an erroneous view of socialism and of class struggle. As to the essence of this line and its relevance for the present struggle, we have only to quote the CC Report on the Founding Congress:
This line was characterized by the stand of the petty bourgeoisie and tried to paint socialism as an attractive alternative–for the petty bourgeoisie–to the present form of capitalist rule. In reality it put forward not socialism at all–not the rule of the working class, its collective ownership of the means of production and its struggle to transform all of society–but a slicked up version of capitalism, which would give new bourgeois forces a chance to ride on the backs of the workers and exploit them.
It was essentially revisionist, and as part of its revisionist outlook put forward the ’theory of the productive forces’–reducing the workers to mere producers without class consciousness, without the ability to consciously change the world in accordance with their revolutionary interests as a class.
(As stated this Menshevik dilettante wrote this piece together with another comrade; the other co-author summed up his error and moved forward, while the first has gone further with this erroneous tendency and gone further in his capacity as a “ghost” whose moanings haunt the pages of the papers by the Mensheviks attacking the CC Report.)
The Menshevik paper also criticizes Comrade Avakian’s role at the Congress, and challenges the idea he struggled against their rightism. They say, “In the two times he spoke during all the plenary sessions of the Congress, we don’t get one word about economism, syndicalism, or overemphasis on industrial concentration.” This, too, is a dishonest trick, and they know it–although they hope many others won’t.
First it should be pointed out that Comrade Avakian did, to a certain degree, hold back from struggle in the plenaries, not because he was afraid, as is implied (note: our Mensheviks, who claim to have feared open struggle with Comrade Avakian, are now attributing their avowed spinelessness to others), but because for him to wage extensive struggle in the plenary sessions would have meant a major struggle at the Congress, and it was a correct political decision to unite with the overwhelmingly positive thrust so as to preserve the genuine unity and achievements which had been forged.
Secondly, as these Mensheviks know, Comrade Avakian did struggle sharply at the Congress against their rightism. This came up around the previously referred to struggle in a committee that went on around the “everything through the IWOs” line. The wife of M. Jarvis, though not in that committee, had been outside of meetings going to those she considered “her people” in that committee and directly encouraging them to struggle for this wrong line–which they were doing in a very stubborn and arrogant way. This was going directly (and behind their backs) in opposition to the other leading comrades who were heading this committee. (M. Jarvis himself encouraged his wife in this but let her play the more up-front role.)
Comrade Avakian struggled very sharply in the leadership group at the Congress against this line and this behavior. Under these conditions, M. Jarvis and his forces finally agreed to the criticism, but then-supposedly to “unify” the Congress-they suggested that M. Jarvis, not Comrade Avakian, be the one to raise the criticism of the “everything through the IWOs” line on the floor of the Congress. Taking this suggestion at face value, it was agreed to. (It should be noted that people under M. Jarvis’ leadership were overheard mumbling at the time–”that hypocrite, this is his line he’s blasting us for.”) Now all this gets turned around by those who know better, into an attack on Comrade Avakian for his “silence.” (It is, we suppose, necessary to answer all this tripe, although exposing M. Jarvis and Co. for double dealing is getting about as new and exciting as it was to expose Mayor Daley in Chicago for corruption. All it can produce after a while is yawns.)
It is more revealing to study how these Mensheviks sum up the main distinction that marked the founding of our Party. They say:
There was the opening sentence in the Workers Movement section of the Programme that blasted all Trotskyite idealism and metaphysics: ’The working class learns through its day to day struggle.’ There was the push in the MPR to unite with the concrete battles of our class, and there was the call in the orientation section of the MPR to rely on, learn from and bring forward our class brothers and sisters, about which there is too little talk today. There was our determination not to be condescending saviours and lecturers, because we saw our class had far too many of these. All these things marked our distinction from every political organization which has existed over the last 20 and more years. It reflected the determination of the RCP to do what had not been done during that period: fuse socialism with the working class movement. (p. 403)
They go on to say “Isolating this contradiction from all other contradictions led to certain problems.” Here they once again reveal themselves. The problem was not that this “contradiction” was one-sidedly stressed, but that it’s wrong to say, as they do, that this was what “marked our distinction from every political organization which has existed over the last 20 and more years.” This was not the essential thing. What about the minor point that we are revolutionary communists, not revisionists, like the CPUSA, which was and is also involved in the daily struggle?
In fact this paragraph, more vividly than elsewhere in this paper, expresses our Mensheviks’ open yearning to have a party “just like the party of dear old Mom and Dad”–the CP of “20 or more” years ago–with all its pragmatism intact and all the revisionist tendencies it embodied even before its complete and decisive leap into counter-revolution.
It is this kind of line that the founding of our Party represented a break with–that its line and Programme represent a repudiation of–and which gives content to our expressed determination not to go down the path of the old CP into accommodation with revisionism and imperialism. It is precisely for this reason that our current struggle to stick to the high road and repudiate these Mensheviks is a continuation of the actual great victory of the Founding Congress, a struggle which continues our Party on the road of revolution and steering clear of the rocks, so that a Party will not have to be founded for a third time.
There is, of course, no way to reconstruct and return to the old CP even if we wanted to, like our Mensheviks. History moves in spirals, not circles. As Mao puts it, characterizing this outlook:
We are opposed to die-hards in the revolutionary ranks whose thinking fails to advance with changing objective circumstances and has manifested itself historically as Right opportunism. These people fail to see that the struggle of opposities has already pushed the objective process forward while their knowledge has stopped at the old stage. This is characteristic of the thinking of all die-hards. Their thinking is divorced from social practice, and they cannot march ahead to guide the chariot of society. . . (“On Practice,” Selected Readings, p. 79-80).
Their kind of thinking is the real idealism and rampant metaphysics.
This is the reactionary outlook that also had that Menshevik chieftain M. Jarvis in the CPUSA in the late 1960s. Perhaps this helps to explain the hatred for the revolutionary upsurge of that period that one finds throughout this Menshevik paper. On every imaginable front the CP stood in complete opposition to everything that was revolutionary in the movement of that period and stood for the most blatant revisionism. If you were part of the CP at that time you hated the revolutionary movement and the feeling was mutual. (Of course, the CP is no less revisionist today, but because this is the beginning of a new spiral and there is not yet a mass revolutionary upsurge, the revisionism of the CP does not always stand out so starkly as it did before and as it will, even more fully, in the future.)
This Menshevik paper also has a summation of the struggle against economism. Difficult, you might think since it actively promotes economism? Undaunted by this problem, our Mensheviks advance the amusing view that it was they–and “their” July 4 campaign in particular– that started this struggle and were responsible for its victory. At one point in commenting on what they call “the absurd view that [the Chair] played a major role in the struggle against economism” (p. 411), they concede that “He did make certain contributions”–such as the “Mass Line” articles and the “Day to Day Struggle and the Revolutionary Goal” article (though they tell us they found it lifeless–small wonder since it squeezed the life out of some of their economism and pragmatism). “But,” they go on to say in a stunning statement, “this was after the Party had already broken through on the major line questions.”
Most comrades, once they recovered from laughing, would probably voice surprise at the idea that they had “already broken through” on economism as of spring 1976–or that even today it doesn’t represent a major problem. But to these Mensheviks, stuck in real idealist apriorism–their preconceived notion that their work on July 4 made them the conquering heroes of all opportunism–there was simply a minor mop-up operation underway.
This negates the fact that there was a specific struggle in the realm of theory over an economist line, and while practice on July 4 and its summation related to this, it was not identical to this struggle. Articles and documents which they, of course, find irrelevant and lifeless played a major role in this as did struggle on this question throughout the Party. All this they are blind to or seek to deny. This approach is the same one that shows up in their view on China that “class struggle runs through everything”–an eclectic view aimed at negating the key link of class struggle and resurrecting in new form the revisionist formulation “take the three directives as the key link.”
The struggle against economism in our Party was a struggle waged before July 4 (in no small part against them), during July 4, and after it, and it had to be raised to a rational level–and without this struggle July 4 would not have been nearly so successful, judged by correct, political standards. Their view of ideological struggle reveals that these are exactly the kind of people characterized in the Mass Line campaign as putting out the view “fight, fight, fight” (though they don’t seem to do too well at that either). Their view of the motion of knowledge is in fact “practice to practice and back to practice again.” They actually do not think raising things to the level of rational knowledge is necessary at all in this process and those who do are, according to them, “stuck” at the level of rational knowledge.
A final point on their summation of the struggle against economism. Their paper claims that others were the real supporters of economism and these forces are now the chief supporters of the “left idealist” line. This, as usual, is a gross distortion. Some comrades did not hold these views, especially after the Founding Congress, while others spontaneously made errors, and were encouraged in this by M. Jarvis. The Chair struggled with these comrades as well as with the economist line generally. Over time, these comrades got off it, but M. Jarvis–while sometimes adhering to other forms of rightism–sunk deeper into it. This was because these comrades were making errors, while M. Jarvis had a rightist line, stuck to it and entrenched it in his thinking.
Because they consider July 4 the biggest feather in their cap and because to them it sums up what they consider to be the heart of the correct line–the correct concept that small forces can lead big battles–the Mensheviks deal at length and stake a lot on the July 4 campaign. They attribute all kinds of wonders to this campaign–from defeating economism, to establishing the standard for future work (thus their comparison to the NUWO) and, last but not least, to establishing their credentials as great leaders who must not be removed, demoted or even criticized.
Most comrades agree with the correct summation in the 1976 CC Report that the July 4 campaign was a big advance and with what that Report sums up politically as the content of that advance–the working class mounting the political stage to fight a key battle. But most also hold the obviously mistaken view–or so it seems to listen to these Mensheviks–that while some individuals, including some of the departed Mensheviks, certainly played important roles in this, these achievements were mainly due to the correct overall line of our Party, the work of many comrades, and the collective leadership of the Party. Oh well, fooled by “left idealism” again.
This Menshevik paper sets out to reverse these verdicts. Perhaps M. Jarvis has learned from his comrade Hua Kuo-feng. If Hua can turn the example of Tachai into its opposite in China, Jarvis believes he can do the same thing here with July 4. Well, it is not so easy. Comrades can distinguish form from content and right from wrong, and especially since Jarvis lacks state power and since the RCP is under the leadership of a correct line, our Party can persist in its correct summation of the 4th and rebuff these attempts to turn this around.
Their view of this campaign reflects their idea of a perfect action: put the right people in the right place at the right time with the right gimmick and. . . “it’ll spin!” This is hardly the essence of the matter. The principal thing in building this demonstration was the line and role of the Party as a whole, including its collective leadership bodies. As to the role of individuals, which they make so much of in this campaign, this becomes more important especially in times of sharp two line struggle. The July 4 campaign did not overall mark such a period, especially on the leading bodies. Some rightist lines did crop up, particularly at the start, but these were struggled with and generally corrected. And these were definitely not taken by the Chair, whose role they seek to contrast with their own heroics.
Since Comrade Avakian’s role in this campaign has been made an issue in their paper and elsewhere, it is necessary to go into it a bit. For someone who is overall characterized as drifting, drifting into “left idealist” neverland, it is interesting to note that it was the Chair, not the Mensheviks, who came up with the main slogan for the campaign, “We’ve Carried the Rich for 200 Years, Let’s Get Them Off Our Backs.” This slogan, as the Party has summed up, did in fact concentrate the feelings of the masses and provide an important orientation for the whole battle. As a passing point, it should be noted that “thinking up slogans and making speeches” is not just some clever knack, but one important indication of line. Specifically it is exactly an example of correctly combining the general and the particular–returning the ideas of the masses to them in a concentrated form so they can grasp and take them as their own.
On the key tactical question of the campaign–how to handle the threat of troops–our Menshevik master tacticians didn’t do so well, with some tending toward retreat to New York, and M. Jarvis not sure but tending to fall into the “we’ll march anyway” trap. It was the Chair who came up with the correct tactic of persisting in the line of exposing this as a political attack and expressing confidence that the masses wouldn’t allow it. This is again worth pointing out, not only because such ”inability to return general line to practice” has been made an issue, but also because it shows that correct tactics themselves are a product of a correct overall line and analysis.
Finally, in regard to the Chair’s role in July 4, it should be pointed out that in the divison of labor at the Center he was assigned to other tasks in this period, including giving assistance to others in leading the work around the ’76 auto contracts. This work, in contrast to some other efforts in economic struggles in this period–particularly under the leadership of this clique–was a definite advance in applying the mass line and in putting out a line that clearly took up this battle as part of the broader class struggle. However, the same paragraph in this bulletin ends up turning back on itself with the following two-into-one formulation: “But the Bicentennial work itself serves primarily to advance the struggles of the class, including at the ’center of gravity’ where they are presently focused.” This tends, again, toward narrowing things and making the main question with regard to different struggles, how do they relate to and build the “center of gravity” battles instead of how do they relate to the building of a revolutionary workers movement against capitalism.) And, the complaints and objections of our Mensheviks notwithstanding, it is also clear that it was the direction given by the Center, especially the “left idealists,” to linking every battle with the overall fight against the capitalist system and with the long-term goal, rather than taking them up as “things in themselves,” that led to the development and deepening of the correct line and the real advances around July 4th. This is an important lesson to sum up, though no doubt it is an outrage to our Mensheviks, who want to treat July 4th not only as a “thing in itself” but the thing by which to judge everything else and to which everything else must be related–rather than the overall struggle and the long-term goal.
The sum-up bulletin on July 4th is also highly advertised, so it is worth noting that the draft originally submitted by M. Jarvis (written under his close direction) was so sectarian–attacking “left” and right lines right and left–that it was characterized by those now attacked as “left sectarians” as the “Gloria Fontanez bulletin” (after the ultra-sectarian head of PRRWO). Its effect would have been to disorient and dizzy comrades so badly as to demoralize many. Besides reflecting an outlook, this also reflected the fact it was supposed to serve M. Jarvis’ factional purpose in putting some people under attack. The criminal thing is that Jarvis didn’t care about the effect on comrades, so long as it suited his purposes. After sharp criticism, this draft was rejected by the Center, which directed a new one to be written. Fortunately, despite all the claims for his virtues at political summation, the Party Center didn’t subject the comrades to another sample of M. Jarvis’ bulletins on July 4th after the first one.
While July 4 was a major advance, and overall Jarvis’ leadership in it reflected and contributed to the correct line of the Party, there was of course even then interference from the incorrect line he and his cronies pushed. This came out in several ways. First, in many ways the normal centralized chain of knowledge and command of the Party was often disrupted and short-circuited by M. Jarvis’ reliance on “his own people”, particularly the roving team he set up to lead the demonstration. Several regional conferences, especially in the Midwest, suffered from the undermining of Party leadership caused by this method of work–a method which Jarvis popularized and persisted in.
Second, there tended to be an exaggeration of the question of tactics, of how we outmaneuvered the authorities, and to divorce tactics from line–which, of course, is the same error that led the Jarvis bunch to fall into confusion and nearly into disaster around how to handle the threat of troops in the first place. This even took the form of saying, in effect, that the police could not attack us, because of our clever tactics, with the implication that so long as we outfoxed the ruling class it would never be able to launch such an attack–hardly a Marxist presentation of the role of the state! Erroneous tendencies in this direction were common in the popularly held summations of the demonstration among Party members (and some others), but it was also pushed and encouraged by those now constituting the Menshevik headquarters. We should keep in mind the sum up in the 1976 CC Report. It makes clear that the real significance of the 4th was not tactics. The real “we did it” was the working class entering the political arena to battle the bourgeoisie, not “we did it”–the bourgeoisie couldn’t stop our demonstration because of our brilliant tactics.
It should also be pointed out that, closely related to this error, this Menshevik headquarters underestimated and even in some cases just plain sabotaged the use of Party propaganda at July 4th, including distribution of newspapers and the Party pamphlet (which they never mention as part of the campaign) at the demonstration. The way our Mensheviks view July 4 and use it in their paper as the centerpiece in relation to which all sorts of lines, events and people are to be judged represents another negative influence of their line in relation to July 4. As noted before, they have developed a tendency to measure everything in comparison to July 4, rather than against the criterion of how everything contributes to the goal of revolution. In this paper the factional purposes behind this stand out. But more is involved. This has influenced even the methods of work in the Party and a tendency has developed–especially evident in UWOC and youth work, for example–toward “campaign-itis” and “everything aimed toward a big demonstration”. This has seriously damaged the method of mass line in the Party’s work.
Mao addresses such a tendency (though our Mensheviks’ method amounts to a rather puny version of what Mao criticizes) in “On Contradiction”: “The dogmatists. . do not understand that different methods should be used to resolve different contradictions; on the contrary, they invariably adopt what they imagine to be an unalterable formula and arbitrarily apply it everywhere, which only causes setbacks to the revolution or makes a sorry mess of what could have been done well.” (Selected Readings, p. 99).
In fact in their paper, the Mensheviks only discuss the mass line in relation to the question of “big battles with small forces.” July 4 is described as “an excellent living example of the use of the mass line and revolutionary theory”, so we anxiously await our lesson. In describing this concept of mass line they state: “Grasping the key issues of concern for the masses, the vulnerable points that the bourgeoisie is trying to cover up (moves to war, unemployment, housing in Philly, etc.) and concentrating these particular phenomena into a general line that concentrates the felt needs of the masses and exposes the class relations of capitalism. This enables relatively small forces to have far greater political impact and influence than their numbers.” (p. 409) To this we reply with all the appropriate profundity it deserves–HUH??? This brilliant contribution to our understanding of the mass line and leading struggle calls to mind Lenin’s words “turgid nonsense,” an attempt “to palm off a mere jumble of words as philosophy.” (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Vol. 14, p. 132).
If our Mensheviks wanted to understand mass line, why not go back to what our Programme says:
[The Party] takes these scattered and partial experiences and ideas, and by applying the science of revolution, sums them up, concentrates what is correct, what corresponds to the development of society and will move the class struggle ahead. The Party returns these concentrated ideas to the masses in the form of line and policies, which it perseveres in carrying out and propagating in linking itself with and leading the struggle of the masses, and these concentrated ideas become a tremendous material force as the masses take them up as their own and use them to transform the world through class struggle. (p. 59-60)
If we compare our Mensheviks’ creative, if turgid, development to what the Programme says, we can once again see their line. Their concept of mass line here leaves out science, and especially any attention to the laws of class society,(“Expose[s] the class relations of capitalism” is given no real content or meaning by them, and the more general laws of capitalism are systematically ignored–in this paper and by this Menshevik bunch in general. Certainly they never think of arming the masses with an understanding of these laws, which would be difficult for these Mensheviks, since they lack such knowledge and even a desire to acquire it themselves.) In fact this view of mass line leaves out the masses (especially in the form of downplaying the fact that ideas can become a material force when taken up by the masses). It is a true “heroes make history” (not to mention narrow reformist) line. The first Mass Line article speaks to this. “It is not a question of a few ’smart people’ drawing up a blueprint for ’how society ought to be’ and imposing this on reality, but of the masses of people struggling to change the world and in the process learning more about it, and the laws governing it, in order to change it further. . and on, in an endless spiral.”
And more: “the Party must not only ’process’ the ideas of the masses and raise their experience to rational knowledge, but must continually arm the masses themselves with the science of revolution, to enable ever broader numbers to know and change the world, and develop the struggle of millions, more and more in conformity with the revolutionary outlook and interests of the working class. (See Revolution, Dec. 15, 1975 or “Mass Line” pamphlet.)
This real understanding of the mass line, not the chopped and narrow understanding promoted by the Mensheviks, needs to be more deeply grasped and taken up by our whole Party.
Here they again push their “unalterable formulas” line of compare everything to July 4. In giving guidance to building the NUWO the Party Center specifically pointed out the error of equating this campaign with that around the Bicentennial. But this didn’t stop the Mensheviks, who treated the convention in particular like another rally. And now their paper tries to take up and roast the campaign to build the NUWO in this light, specifically by comparing it to their view of July 4. We have to reject this method, but should take up the task of summing up the NUWO campaign. A few of their charges need to be answered here. First off, in contrast to their line that the campaign to form this organization was an idealist flop from start to finish, we should affirm that the formation of this organization represented an important advance in the struggle, one that needs to be built off of in order to develop this organization as a powerful force in the class struggle. We should affirm it both because it is true and because otherwise a real advance will be turned into its opposite.
They call the campaign the campaign of the “four no’s”: “No line on why form the organization at this time; no line developed to build it; no line and leadership at the convention; no reason why the cadre should be criticized for the way the convention came out.” All this, of course, is blamed on the line and leadership of the Chair–in contrast to their July 4 heroes (see p. 415). Any careful study of the Party documents relating to this (including bulletins, the Party pamphlet, the ’76 CC Report and parts of the Worker bulletin) stands as a clear refutation to this. We urge comrades to do such study, both in relation to the NUWO and the Mensheviks’ other distorted accounts of history throughout their paper.
In their summation of this NUWO campaign, their general line of wiping out the role of the bourgeoisie (their role, in this case) stands out most starkly. Here is a campaign waged in the midst of a two line struggle with great factionalism on their part, with many of the leaders of their headquarters running around the country leading such factionalizing around their incorrect line, and we find not even the slightest reflection of two line struggle–simply the Chair’s so-called “left-idealism” ruining the campaign. In fact the campaign involved sharp struggle against their line and sabotage–a fact which they try to hide in various ways. We certainly agree with their fourth “No”–no reason why the cadre should be criticized for the way the convention came out–and these Mensheviks know it. The criticism was directed at their line and leadership. This campaign was certainly interfered with by the fact that throughout there were two centers of leadership in the Party. Unified leadership was sabotaged from top to bottom by this clique. They have the nerve to blast the Chair and write “The Party chain of knowledge/chain of command did not function Their style of going around central and local Party leadership and relying on telephone conversations with “key people” or on their own “road shows” did significant damage to the chain of knowledge and command. Time and again, right down to the eve of the convention, they forced cancellation or postponement of meetings of the Party work team, or when they did show they didn’t struggle in these meetings. But all this, we suppose, is also the fault of the Chair’s “left-idealism.” The fact that this latest Menshevik paper is written to rationalize a split is apparently irrelevant to the development of the campaign. These people know they were out factionalizing, but at least from what they try to push over in this paper, cadre are asked to reject the Marxist theory of contradiction and instead take up the “Deborin school” described by Mao in “On Contradiction”: “the Deborin school maintains that contradiction appears not at the inception of a process but only when it has developed to a certain stage. If this were the case, then the cause of the development of the process before that stage would be external and not internal. Deborin thus reverts to the metaphysical theories of external causality and of mechanism.” (Selected Readings, p. 93) These Mensheviks had a line on the NUWO which they actively pushed. The line was defeatism, rightism, and gimmickry. Their general take was that the NUWO couldn’t really be formed. This comes through even in their paper where they say “This is not to say it was wrong to go ahead and build the NUWO. A powerful campaign could have possibly led to decent advances for our class and Party” (p. 417, our emphasis). What a ringing endorsement!
Once the campaign was underway, however, this pessimistic, defeatist view didn’t seem to prevent them from attempting to build up their careers by using their positions in it. Although no serious attempt is made in their paper to put out another line on building the NUWO, such a line generally came through in their practice. It amounted to: do a couple things, “single spark” them, and get a reputation (making sure it’s not too “left,” or “dual unionist”). To them the correct policy of single spark is turned into its opposite–essentially boiling down to press work and other forms of P.R. As our Party has stood for it, the single spark method requires building the struggle internally at the “spark” itself, as well as building broader struggle and understanding.
With their approach, mass line goes out the window and the political approach to advanced and active workers of “let’s get down politically on the key questions facing our class” goes out the window. All of this was a problem which weakened the (generally successful) Cleveland meeting (to initiate the mass campaign to build the NUWO) and it got worse throughout the campaign–culminating in the convention hype-job to substitute for politics.
Their “get a reputation” approach came through in a number of cases, most notably how they handled the Klanbusters. They plastered about a leaflet and poster with the well known picture of the Ohio Wizard getting punched with the message: Do you want to know what the national workers organization is about? Ask the Klan. While the Ohio action was certainly correct, their approach in this smacks of opportunism (aimed at “getting Blacks”). Besides, the Ohio action was partly initiated by the RSB, a fact which, while hidden in these leaflets, would have been good politically to help raise workers’ understanding.
They tried the same “get a rep” and “PR” approach around the Brach strike in Chicago, which took place shortly before the convention. But due to this line, directly under the leadership of M. Jarvis (that great hero of the “center of gravity”), capitulation was practised to a great extent within the strike, especially when it got tough; hence it was not built by relying on the strikers, so ultimately, as our Mensheviks would say, “it didn’t spin.” This trend of rightism came out in other ways. One of the self-appointed NUWO “president’s” right hand men, on tour on the West Coast, got on TV in L.A. and put out a line on the cancellation of the B-1 saying “They’ve started cruise missile work in Milwaukee and we’re supposed to cheer while our brothers and sisters are laid off in LA.” What does that kind of line say about a supposedly political organization of the working class?! Or take their line on the convention demonstration against the attacks on Black people around school opening and integration in Chicago. This demonstration, on the eve of a very tense opening day of schools in Chicago, with sharp divisions among the masses, was generally a good thing. This was in spite of the confusion spread about the line of the action. (This, too, can be laid at the doorstep of the Mensheviks and the influence of their line. Under M. Jarvis’ leadership the line of the Party work team in Chicago was reversed on the most narrow rightist basis to oppose a busing plan that should not have been opposed.)
This demonstration would have been better still if, as a militant demonstration, it had stood out more sharply as a change from what should have been a serious meeting of political discussion. Still it was good, but the self-styled NUWO “president” opposed it from the beginning, using various pretexts to cover his rightism. First he said there would be “no time” for it. Then, in a move that exposed that argument as bogus, he said there should be a demonstration at two sites–one targeting layoffs. To have only a political demonstration, according to him, would give too “left” an impression of the NUWO.
With this right wing line it is no wonder why at the beginning and once again in their paper, they attack “the potential idealist trip” (p. 416) in the ’76 CC Report that says:
The key to it we feel is a political question, not the question of do we have the ties and contacts, but the political question of can we bring home to workers who would be the base of this organization and consolidate in their understanding the question of what it means for the working class to take up and lead the fight against all oppression, to infuse its strength, discipline and outlook into every battle and to develop key struggles into campaigns of the class? Because if we can politically solve that question we can develop such an organization. (1976 CC Report, p. 46)
The CC line is exactly the line of “grasp revolution, promote production” as opposed to their line “produce, produce, produce.” This is the view that led them to conduct the convention itself as a hype, not a political meeting.
Viewed from the correct line of the CC, the basic purpose of the convention should not have been an extravaganza and a “show,” and should not even have been principally a discussion of various campaigns from the point of view of how to carry them out (though this should have been discussed). Instead it should have been a political meeting where some of these campaigns and, even more, the basic stand of the NUWO, should have been mainly discussed exactly from the standpoint laid out in the CC Report–to unify the workers there around a common basic understanding and sense of purpose. There was some unclarity about this point among many leading comrades before the convention (and this is reflected somewhat in the pre-convention bulletin, though it basically emphasizes the correct approach). But this was largely due to inexperience with such a meeting. For the Mensheviks, however, an approach of putting emphasis on political discussion, of politics in command, is “yak-yak” pure and simple.
This kind of political approach was key to forging unity and forging organization. We may ask our Mensheviks, if you can’t focus on this kind of basic political struggle at a founding convention of an organization, when the hell can you? And this method of “politics in command,” while particularly important in founding the NUWO and at its convention, is also important to the continued functioning of the NUWO with a “life of its own.”
If meetings and discussions of the NUWO on all levels are not political meetings focusing on why and how to take certain stands and actions–how in the political sense, not just “how to” pass out leaflets, when and where, etc.–the NUWO will never develop. In short, if the meetings are just “organizing sessions” devoted to making concrete, tactical plans for various actions and campaigns, then the advanced workers in particular will be unable to fully take part, their sense of organization as well as class consciousness will not be developed, and they and the NUWO will not play their important role as levers to the class as a whole. This is an important part of the correct dialectical relationship between struggle and consciousness which must operate in the NUWO as well as in the Party. Party members are not the only people who can have rational knowledge, with the workers being only interested in action.
Especially in the light of Menshevik attacks on the Party for “lying to the masses” on matters like China, an interesting footnote to their attack on the NUWO as being built out of Comrade Avakian’s head can be found by examining the statements of one of the Menshevik leaders in a letter to NUWO members protesting his removal from the Executive Committee. In it he baits RCP “wrecking activities” and states “the struggle to build a united workers movement and the NUWO grew out of the struggle and work of thousands of hard working people. . . The idea of the NUWO grew out of the struggle of working people. . . ” (our emphasis). This is quite an interesting statement in contrast to the line he and his ilk put out internally. It appears that this clique’s careerism perverts everything about them, including even their concept of “truth.”
Their paper accuses the CC of failing to deepen our general line on the NUWO throughout the campaign. Fundamentally, of course, that comes down to a question of deepen what line–the correct line or their opportunist line? As a basic response, we once again urge comrades to read the various Party documents during this campaign.
These Mensheviks don’t even mention the Party pamphlet, which on a number of questions was and remains an excellent tool in both deepening and popularizing our line both on the objective situation facing our class and on concrete methods of struggle. Each of the bulletins that came out during the campaign took up and gave guidance around new contradictions that had arisen. And after the convention the Worker bulletin also took up some of these questions, in large part’as a result of experience accumulated by our Party and concrete investigations during the NUWO campaign. It talks about why we must step up our efforts to concentrate on key battles and on being tribunes of the people and goes into the relation between these things today. Doesn’t this bulletin take up the question of the single spark method and how it fits into both today’s conditions in the class struggle and the long term revolutionary goal? Because they oppose all this, our Mensheviks, of course, are blind to it–or at least they hope others will be.
In defense of what the Mensheviks would call “idealism,” it should be (and was) pointed out that the idea of a NUWO is indeed a powerful one, which can be grasped by the masses. All, even most of the workers’ experience in the class struggle is not together with us or under our leadership. This is true, no matter how much it may offend the pride of our heroic Menshevik “organizers.” For this reason an important and often underestimated part of our work is broadly summing up this experience, including putting out key tasks like building the NUWO. Putting this together with years of life experience, workers can take up these ideas as their own and make them a powerful material force–as indeed many did in building the NUWO.
All this has bearing on why the leadership given in the campaign to the question of building the NUWO “in its own right” and “in the course of struggle” was correct, and why it was correctly stated that during that time “in its own right” was principal. These so-called “breakthrough tools” and their relation during the campaign are attacked by the Menshevik paper. (By the way, their claim that the “all oppression” question was not taken up at that time is easily blown away if comrades look at that bulletin, Vol. 2 #3, and others.)
It should seem quite obvious that building an organization “in its own right” would be the main task in founding it, but apparently this isn’t so to our Mensheviks. Apparently from their paper and practice, “T-shirts and beer mugs” are the essence of building this organization “in its own right.” Both of these are fine, and the bulletins even gave some guidance on them, but never made them the main thing. The Mensheviks refuse to understand that building the NUWO “in its own right” did indeed involve and, even mainly involved, going into struggles–not mainly to lead and build them broadly, though assistance could be given–but to listen to the experience of our fellow workers, speak to it and get down together with them on why founding the NUWO was a crucial step in that period for the struggle of our class as a whole. This political task was downplayed by them in favor of their “PR” approach. While the relation between these tasks of building the NUWO “in its own right” and in the course of struggle is now different in building the NUWO–and building it in the course of struggle is principal between them–a correct dialectical handling of this question has continued importance to the on-going task of building this organization.
In the light of all this, it is important to sum up some of the code words these Mensheviks used to try to guide the campaign to found the NUWO. For some time in many places they pushed the slogan “Get organized” as the central theme. Besides being an attempt to dump the “all oppression” question–a constant tendency throughout the campaign from Cleveland to the convention and a consistent tendency of the Mensheviks in general–this was blatant right idealism. While not wrong to raise under any circumstances, making “get organized” the central slogan really didn’t speak at all to the political questions and the real obstacles faced by all active workers. It didn’t speak to why get organized and for what. It tended to make us sound like just another group with a game to run.
This apparently was obvious enough after a while and after some summation, so along came the heavy emphasis on the concept of an “active minority,” which soon began to assume the proportions of the key concept to grasp in forming the NUWO. First off, it should be said that although some errors were made in making an empty slogan out of “the masses in their millions” following the Founding Congress, there is no need to flip the other way and make some kind of principle out of being a minority. We should always try to think and act in terms of and rely upon our class as a whole.
Standing on its own and divorced from broader political content, this slogan of “active minority” is not at all helpful. It is helpful if understood precisely in connection with the question of winning a core of workers to a political understanding of the role of the working class in the struggle against all oppression.
This is the way it is treated in the Party pamphlet, for instance when it says:
Many illusions spread by the rulers for years are starting to crack, but only a relatively small number of workers have been able to develop a consistent understanding of the nature of the enemy and recognize the struggle as one between two opposing classes. The character of the struggle today is that sometimes the organizers for the workers organizations seem to be leading an army, other times they seem to be leading only a few soldiers. (p. 10)
This is in line with how the Programme discusses the IWOs in relation to the “backbone of working class organization”–those workers who “have developed a basic understanding of the nature of the enemy and the class struggle against this enemy.” (p. 108) All this helps to give correct political content to the concept of “small forces can lead big battles.” Robbed of this political content, and removed from presenting some basic laws of capitalism, the concept of “active minority” becomes nothing but a replacement for a political approach, a recipe for gimmickry and for bypassing the masses and promoting hackism–splitting a few off from the masses. It is only the logical extension of this line that led the self-appointed NUWO “president” to spread the line that “there are only 5 good organizers in the country.”
Overall, the line they put out on the NUWO will almost certainly lead these Mensheviks before long to repudiate the Party’s basic line on the IWOs altogether–and thus join a host of other opportunists in doing so. The motive is all the stronger now that the pedestal of their “official posts” is crumbling. While the NUWO will continue to be built, the most these Mensheviks will be left with is a shell organization, an occasional coalition, good for staging periodic extravaganzas. After all from the “Fight Back Committees” to their new “JOIN” this has been the OL(CP-ML)’s approach for years. When the political basis for welding the advanced workers into class concious members of the organization, developing their understanding and sense of organization, is wiped out–nothing is left but such a shell.
A few final words should be said on the NUWO founding convention. First, it is interesting to see that in their summation of it they take no line on the hype job except to hypocritically “defend the cadre” for being “attacked” for it and to say “the plenary sessions were inspiring.” (pp. 423-6) In other words they defend the hype–no surprise since they led it and it reflects their line and orientation as petty bourgeois overlords capitalizing on the still low level of the working class movement. The sum-up bulletin of the convention accurately assessed it. They knew and know that the focus of its attack was not “the comrades” as they feign, but their line and leadership (although they did resort in at least some places under their leadership to directing its spearhead away from them and onto the cadre).
As for their summation of the lack of leadership at the convention, two things should be said. First, the only leadership that would have made them happy was leadership according to their opportunist line–anything else is “bad” or “no” leadership. Secondly, this is the worst hypocrisy. Not only did they sabotage the Party’s unified leadership throughout the campaign, but they scheduled a NY/NJ area UWO meeting in such a way that it forced cancellation of the final work team meeting set up to play a key part in planning the convention and the Party’s role in it. Then they blame “Avakian’s left idealist line” for lack of planning.
Finally it should be pointed out that, although instructed months ago by the Party leadership, their “NUWO leader” never produced even a first draft of a needed bulletin summing up the whole NUWO campaign and pointing the way forward. Since its line was to be based on collective summation, it is obvious why he didn’t. Now, based on repudiation of the Menshevik clique and its line, such a task should be undertaken so our work in building this organization can make the needed advances.
The first thing that strikes you about the section of the Menshevik paper on this subject is, as usual, its pettiness. Here is a meeting in which the Central Committee is broadly summing up the class struggle, concentrating on the question of hewing and keeping to the path of revolutionary struggle in an imperialist superpower, and even according to their own account what we get is a picture of these Mensheviks busying themselves with pious doubts and petty amendments. Such are M. Jarvis’ great contributions to Marxist theory. Their eclectic additions are a reflection of their line. They point out (p. 412) that the original draft of the CC Report read “’But it is the beginning of the new spiral–and so the fact that it is an advance is not immediately evident.’ This was changed to ’not always immediately so evident.’”
It is clear from what they write that what they mean by these additions makes them worse, not an improvement over the original. They go on to recount some struggles (meatcutters’ strike, the rank and file movement in steel to dump Abel, miners’ struggles and, of course, July 4). Their purpose is clear. They mean to make the essence of the advance of the new spiral such struggles as these. But the fact is that, besides the key step of the founding of the Party, what basically marks the advance of the new spiral is exactly “not immediately evident”–in opposition to this line. It requires the science of Marxism, not simple and spontaneous perception, to grasp it because there is not a high tide of mass struggle (no matter how important July 4th actually was and how much they want to exaggerate it).
The basic reason the new spiral is an advance is revealed by concrete analysis, Marxist analysis, as in the sentence just before the changed one in the Report, “where things are now is an advance because it is the spiral that will lead to a major change in the relation of forces and will lead to the real prospect of proletarian revolution in this country as well as others.” (CC Report, p. 5) These Mensheviks’ understanding is so shallow and non-revolutionary as to be unbelieveable. Are we to go to the masses– particularly workers with any experience in the class struggle–and convince them that this period is an advance because we held a July 4 demonstration, or because the meatcutters struck, even because of the miners’ strikes? Most would pat us on the head and think we were crazy, even if well-intentioned. And they should, if that’s what we do. Don’t we need to bring out what they cannot spontaneously grasp–that which is revealed by the science of Marxism–while not ignoring, of course, the perceptual knowledge the masses have? If we don’t do this–then what are communists for anyway? These Mensheviks write this kind of drivel, glory in the eclectic additions which they inserted and used to defeat the main, revolutionary points, and then pour out phoney outrage that we accused them in the latest CC Report of making “big battles with small forces” principal over the correct understanding of the high road in the last CC Report. The essence of their line just discussed is a perfect example of this approach. Apparently the world view of these careerists is so philistine and bourgeois that they actually believe this period is an advance because they have the opportunity to put themselves at the head of some struggles–which amounts to capitalizing on the still low level of the mass struggle.
While their paper putters around for awhile singing the praises of their petty additions, soon enough it gets around to a headlong assault on the ’76 CC Report. Of course this is not done openly, but it is done just the same.
First they skid over the struggle against the right–themselves–at that meeting with the empty phrase “while there were criticisms from the right.” They even try to imply elsewhere in this paper that these rightists were people other than themselves. Then they give the impression that their minor additions were the main content of that meeting, and that the real struggle there was against a “one sided and demoralized view”, and “ultra-leftist” current, characterized by “vacillation and doubt” about today’s objective situation. Of course all this refers to is the majority of the CC’s refusal to be fooled by the kind of reformist stuff described above and a determination, clearly reflected in the whole Report, to make genuine and lasting revolutionary advances by facing the situation as it is, grasping its underlying laws and doing revolutionary work on that basis. There is no other basis. Their penny-ante reformist hype just won’t cut it.
They then move on to flagrantly attack and try to reverse the verdict on the main and very sharp struggle that did go on at the meeting. This was the struggle (described in the recent CC Report) over whether or not the “Some Points” report was correct “as is”, which they try to wish away into non-existence in their paper. The struggle was indeed sharp, with some people from this clique saying things like “I’m not saying the report is revisionist, but. and then going on to say, in fact, it was.
A significant number of the members of this clique were putting forward that the report “didn’t even deal with the right questions.” According to them it should have dealt with what they term “summing up practice,” i.e., narrow summation, speaking to the development of the struggle in specific sections of industry and so on. This line was sharply struggled against and defeated.
It is obvious that these people were never reconciled to this, worked to undermine the central thrust of the report, and now this comes out clearly in this paper where, in their section on the NUWO, we find the statement ”It is here that the question of developments in different industries, society, etc., and the response of different sections of our class (miners, steel, etc.) must be summed up. . Attempts to take up these questions at the CC meeting were written off as pragmatic.” (pp. 416-17) This is their real summation of the key struggle at the CC meeting–an open reversal of the correct verdict.
The idea that these things were not summed up at that CC meeting is both a lie and a revealing self-exposure by these Mensheviks. In fact the whole Report, in particular “Further Remarks,” sums up the experience of our Party in these struggles. Lessons about the problems that arise if we limit ourselves to the daily struggle are summed up from experience such as the miners struggle; lessons about tactics as well as the basic nature of the enemy are summed up from the auto contracts fight.
But such political summation, taken to the level of rational knowledge and generalized so it can be grasped and applied by the whole Party, is not at all “summation” to these Mensheviks. No wonder they attack us for “being stuck” at the level of rational knowledge. They don’t want to get there at all. To them to deal at all with ideas, at least in any sweeping political way, is itself “idealism.” And their idea of “summation” is to apply their reformist, stagist view of practice and their accompanying “cookbook” view of theory.
Mao spoke well to this question:
Fully to reflect a thing in its totality, to reflect its essence, to reflect its inherent laws, it is necessary... to make a leap from perceptual to rational knowledge. Such reconstructed knowledge is not more empty or more unreliable; on the contrary, whatever has been scientifically reconstructed in the process of cognition, on the basis of practice, reflects objective reality, as Lenin said, more deeply, more truly, more fully. As against this, vulgar ’practical men’ respect experience but despise theory, and therefore cannot have a comprehensive view of an entire objective process, lack clear direction and long-range perspective and are complacent over occasional successes and glimpses of the truth. If such persons direct a revolution, they will lead it up a blind alley. (“On Practice”, Selected Readings, p. 75)
The Menshevik paper’s attack on the concept of the “high road” of revolutionary struggle is blatant and its attempt to pose as the true defender of the high road is laughable. They claim (p. 414) that the recent CC Report redefines the high road and makes it into a call for an idealist and Trotskyite retreat from the class struggle. They say “the [’76] CC Report always has ’making every possible link with all struggles against the enemy’ or ’waging big battles, together with the masses’ as part of the high road. The rectification paper takes this out of the ’high road’ formulation and poses it against the high road.”
While there is no question that we cannot stick to the high road without being a part of the daily struggles (and even the quote they chose to pick at implies this), we should ask ourselves what is the main danger in our Party? Are we mainly failing to pay attention to linking up with these struggles and waging battles? Or is there a greater danger?
Can there be any doubt when they stress “both” leading big battles and preparation for revolution what they mean to be principal? To them, in practice and throughout their paper, from the “fusion” section on, the essence of what they would feebly call the “high road” is these “big battles” and merging with the day to day struggle. There is not the slightest sense of revolution and the danger of revisionism.
Of course these Mensheviks know very well what the essence of the “high road” question is. That is why they jumped out to oppose the whole thrust of the ’76 CC Report and why, ever since they were defeated on that, they have tried to redefine it. Isn’t it crystal clear if one studies that Report that the whole problem being grappled with there, the essence of the “high road” point is how, in this country today, not to fall into the easy road of reformism and narrow rightism and end up capitulating to the enemy–and instead to do the most for the revolution at every point along the way?
The road these Mensheviks would have our Party follow is more like a rut. It is a well defined groove, worn and channeled by the force of spontaneity and pioneered for us by the old CPUSA. You can close your eyes and do what they’re doing. It’s very easy. At most what you do is do some good things, accumulate some forces, get mired down further and further in spontaneity and end up capitulating.
Here was a meeting whose whole thrust was trying to begin charting a basically uncharted course–realizing there has never been a successful revolution in an advanced, imperialist country–taking into account the real and significant influence of a labor aristocracy and of the bourgeoisification of a sizeable section of the workers, the danger of war and more–facing all this squarely and looking beneath the surface to chart a course to revolution, basing ourselves firmly on Marxism and the masses. The very thought of this drives these Mensheviks up the wall. With their slide into the rut and their frenzied attacks they have tried to kill our revolutionary Party outright in its infancy–to turn it into a lifeless reformist sect which would degenerate, wither and die. But defeating them is exactly part of the class struggle to stick to the high road, and our Party is determined to do it so we can make our contribution to revolution and communism.
First off, their paper attacks self study being the main form of study in the Party, saying it only results in “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” The thinking behind this, they say is “once again, it’s simply ’the idea’ which is supposed to make everything flow automatically.” (pp. 427-28)
In fact, self-study has historically, and correctly, been considered the main form of study in revolutionary parties. Why is this? Our Mensheviks should know, since they pose as defenders of studying with particular problems in mind when they attack the line of the “Theoretical Struggle” article that theory “in its own right” is principal right now in our Party. Self-study is the main form for study exactly because studying with particular problems in mind, as that article pointed out, is overall the main way people’s theoretical level develops. Making use of both basic Marxist works, and Party literature such as Revolution, such study must go on individually because the problems and questions that arise in different comrades’ work and experience are, of course, varied.
There is no substitute for developing the habit of study, no get rich quick schemes to theoretical development so, no matter what promises our Mensheviks may make, they won’t be able to deliver. While the Party can and should give comrades assistance in various ways in their theoretical development, the greatest assistance the Party can give now is to smash the anti-theory pragmatic overall line of this clique–whose influence in our Party has been the greatest single obstacle in the past period to raising the theoretical level.
Of course self study can’t be the only form, and people cannot be simply told to “sink or swim.” For a starting point, certainly, a basic fundamentals class is needed for every new recruit. One thing we should sum up from all this is that we have had shortcomings on this front. Had more people had an even basic grounding in Marxist-Leninist theory, even more would have been able to avoid falling for this clique’s anti-Marxist garbage. (It should be said, however, that the fact that the great majority of comrades, despite the pull of spontaneity, rejected these Mensheviks’ line does attest to the fact that the Party–and the RU before it–has made significant, if only beginning, progress in waging the theoretical struggle and has accumulated important lessons in waging struggle over line–which should also be summed up more fully.)
But even from the beginning we realized the importance of fundamentals, and this was why everyone was directed to study the Banner book–to get a basic grounding in political economy and the basic method of Marxism. This was to be modified self study, with everyone studying one thing at once and some guidance to be provided. The “Theoretical Struggle” article, with its–correct–emphasis on theory “in its own right” now, was aimed, in part, at stressing the importance at this time of concentrating on getting a grounding in such important fundamentals of Marxism. After a time, when it was summed up comrades were having difficulty and where some of the difficulty lay, some further guidance was provided–the article on commodities in the first Communist was written and people were directed in a bulletin to discuss this article in connection with the first chapter of the Banner Political Economy book. At the same time, people were directed to forward summations of their progress and difficulties. Admittedly, little of this was done–both because of spontaneity and the sabotage of the Mensheviks.
Around the same time the herky-jerky Menshevik “theoretician” was directed to draw up some further guidelines for study on this book. This he never did. (Some months after this, since he was working on his counter-revolutionary paper on China, he was told he could concentrate on that, not the guidelines–at that time we didn’t know his paper would be counter-revolutionary, it was thought it might just be wrong.) Later other forms such as local forums were suggested by the proletarian headquarters. (In some cases the Mensheviks took over this form for their own purposes.) Some attention was given to trying to sum up and popularize experience. For example the article on some comrades’ experience in studying the Banner Book appeared in Revolution (Sept. 1977).
Throughout this period, despite shortcomings, the Party was trying to sum up experience and give more leadership to study–including the development of a special study plan for middle and upper level leadership cadre, to arm them theoretically and assist them in leading others in studying and waging the theoretical struggle–which these Mensheviks also boycotted and sabotaged. It is the height of hypocrisy for these Mensheviks to pose as the upholders of theoretical development in light of all this, of their sabotage and, of course, as is plain from reading their paper, their anti-theory line.
Comrades should ask themselves from their own experience whether it has been the Mensheviks or the proletarian headquarters that has encouraged the correct attitude toward theory in the Party. Take Revolution and The Communist, for example. Who has strengthened them and who has ignored and sabotaged them? These have been strengthened in part to assist in the theoretical struggle–writing the article on that subject (Revolution, Jan. 1977) which was in part a polemic against the Menshevik line and which they attack, but also other articles on theory, including the theory of knowledge (Workers Viewpoint article, The Communist, Vol. 1, No. 2), and such questions as democracy and dictatorship, as well as theoretical principles underlying our line on war and revolution and other key questions of line.
Comrades should also ask themselves who has put forward the line and worked to make the Worker newspapers more Marxist in their content, and thus a key tool in the work of the Party and the class struggle?
Toward the end of their paper, in their typical scattershot fashion, these Mensheviks raise a whole series of particular points against the CC Report on Rectification. Answering them all would be like chasing mice across the field–not to mention insulting to comrades who can study the CC Report, the thrust of their paper and deal with these silly arguments on their own. So we’ll just direct a few passing remarks at these points, and rely on comrades to recognize and repudiate the revisionist line “running through” these points as well as their whole paper and their whole line.
The CC Report made the following statement: ”We must struggle against the concept of division of labor that reduces basic level Party members to ’Jimmie Higgins’–good for loyal and hard work and little more.” Those on the “hot shot heavies” and “big time Party bureaucrats” end of this Menshevik division of labor seem to have been offended by this and appear driven to uphold the CP’s line on “Jimmie Higgins workers”–saying attacking it is idealism and denying that the masses are the real heroes (p. 430).
To anyone who knows how the CP used this Jimmie Higgins concept, this is downright criminal. It was used to promote pragmatism and just plain old employee mentality in the ranks of CP members. As we sum up in our Programme this kind of method was one big reason revisionism triumphed in the CPUSA. It was the farthest thing in the world from Mao’s concept of the masses are the real heroes.
Even the way William Z. Foster writes about Jimmie Higgins is basically no good. It certainly is not based on the view that the masses of oppressed people have always struggled heroically against oppression, but what is fundamentally different now is that with the development of the proletariat and of its Party they can struggle consciously and actually put an end to oppression.
The most Foster says is that “by infusing him with class consciousness”, “the Party enormously increases his efficiency.” The image created here is certainly not Lenin’s concept of the communist’s ideal being a tribune of the people. Neither does this Jimmie Higgins picture Foster creates (let alone the one the CP practiced) give you the model of a communist fighter able to use Marxism to find his bearings independently in the class struggle, or especially in the inner-Party struggle. It treats qualities like loyalty, courage, dedication, etc. statically, metaphysically, and doesn’t link them dialectically with the question of line.
The concept of Jimmie Higgins wasn’t good when the CP invented it. Lenin’s concept of a tribune of the people was far better. This Jimmie Higgins model is far worse now, with the experience summed up by Mao, especially in the Cultural Revolution, about the urgent question of the struggle between two lines in the Party and the key role of the masses in that struggle.
The CPUSA top hacks found the Jimmie Higgins concept useful in keeping the members mired in pragmatism, and when push came to shove it was a nice way to say “Shut up and go to work.” This is a lesson our Menshevik hacks seem anxious to learn from their brethren revisionists.
“Attack on Results–Cover to Attack Direct Experience” (p. 430) they say, referring to the CC Report’s attack on their line of immediate results are everything. Seemingly unabashed by the fact they have just finished blasting at us for “sabotaging” the theoretical struggle, here a few paragraphs later they give us more of their empiricist line against rational knowledge, opposing such knowledge with their narrow view of summation. Here is where they take on the Worker bulletin on the high plane of theory–by charging (falsely) that the leading comrade in that area of work never left his city to investigate before the CC put out the line on bi-weeklies.
Here, too, they say “anyone who thinks this ’dizzy with success’ is a major current in the Party today is very out of touch with the cadre.” True, but not out of touch with their Menshevik UWOC and NUWO hacks, about whom this was written. (True, too, the CC Report was written before the self styled “president” was toppled from his NUWO throne, so we may be “out of touch” with the fact that the poor fellow’s only dizziness now may be from his fall from what he conceived of as high office.)
Here, too, they ask why make such a fuss about the “immediate results” line, saying “Since the MPR and certainly since the last CC Report it is generally understood that results means 3 objectives/3 fronts.” [Economic, political, theoretical–our emphasis]!!! What world are you living in? With arguments like these, who needs refutation?
Here we are told that the CC Report on Rectification has invented a straw argument (p. 432). No one, apparently, ever put forward the line of trying to reduce down the universal–to make the entire general reside in any one or a few particular struggles or exposures (as the Report puts it). Jesus! After subjecting us to page after page of their paper, whose whole method is exactly that–to wander through twisted “facts,” for example comparing the NUWO and July 4th campaigns in order to “prove” they’re proletarian revolutionaries and the line of the CC is “left idealist”–they’ve got a lot of nerve to make the statement that no one is trying to reduce the general down to a few particulars!
Then our undaunted Mensheviks proceed with another whopper: “It is true that sometimes comrades limit the amount of exposures, ideological work, etc. to only the questions that exist within a particular phenomena” (p. 433, our emphasis). “Comrades!” Here we have a real attempt to “blame the comrades” and make this whole thing appear like some innocent spontaneous tendency–coming from a gang which, in the face of sharp struggle, was forced to make considerable self-criticism at the CC meeting, saying not only that they had a line against ideological work, but that they organized a campaign around “the general resides in the particular” coming off the ’76 CC, which they admitted sabotaged its main thrust. Lie, lofty Mensheviks, since you must, but please do better than this!
We will leave it to comrades to judge which represents the most important struggle the Party faces at this time to advance its revolutionary work: the Mensheviks’ solution–struggle to get rooted in the particulars of today’s struggle–or another kind of “getting rooted” spoken to in the ’76 CC Report:
(We can] never forget the revolutionary goal. If we do it will affect the smaller battles because they are also dialec-tically related–whether we understand it or not, whether anyone wants it to be true or not–it is true that what you can achieve in changing the conditions of the masses for example, is related to the big question of how society is going to be organized. There is no way to get around that. If we think we can plug along and just change conditions step by step without running up against the question of changing the whole way society is organized then we have forgotten some very basic things and we need to re-root ourselves in those basics. So while we have to take up these particulars, look at the question of quality within the quantitative buildup, we have to keep in mind always the general, sweeping goal and the big qualitative change that we are talking about. (“Further Remarks,” p. 39)
“Steering the truck Is Easier When It’s Moving”–so they write (p. 434). Since M. Jarvis’ motion has landed him and his truck in the swampy marsh, we’ll leave it to him to figure out how best to steer in there.
This little gem of an appendix (p. 148) fairly oozes with Confucian “benevolence” and the conceited tone of the condescending savior who wrote it–and who still tries to play his behind the scenes “kingmaker” role (even not putting his name on the Menshevik roster at the start of their paper–so we’ll add it here, Leibel Bergman).
Once again these Mensheviks have produced a scenario that writes the bourgeoisie–in this case themselves–out of the script. This paper sets out to sum up what it pictures as a deceitful and “orchestrated” series of bulletins on China. It is laced with choice little goodies like “Bulletin 2: did not sum up the questions raised in #1” and Bulletin 3 “did not at all discuss the Gang of Four.” And why, may we ask, weren’t these questions gone into; why was it not possible to organize study and discussion in a different way? Must have been because of the evil sectarians, plotting to keep comrades in the dark, right? Not quite.
The author of this little piece led a conscious and constant stalling “let’s bury our heads in the sand” routine to forestall any such development. The appendix to the last bulletin documenting factional activities in Chicago quotes another leading Menshevik crediting this fellow for sabotaging the Center’s efforts to take up the question of China in a systematic way and arrive at a conclusion.
Then we have the cute remark “We are told to lie to the masses, and tell close forces the truth only if they promise to lie to the masses.” We thought you were a veteran. Then you must know that the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee “lied to the masses” for years–saying nothing after it had come to conclusions on the revisionist degeneration in the Soviet Union. Though the situations are not exactly the same, is there nothing to learn from this example? For a veteran you don’t seem to know much about the principles of communist organization. Or perhaps you’re just a regular old demagogic hypocrite.
In the introduction to their whole paper, we find the following note of explanation for why these Menshevik leaders voted at the last CC to go along with the way the China question was taken up. They say in part it was “because of our fear of having to take on The Chairman in a big face to face battle. . . ” (p. 144).
This is interesting on two counts: First it is an open admission of cowardice and lack of principle, which certainly establishes your credentials as great leaders. What rebels! What go-against-the-tiders!
Second it is as much as an open admission of the factional intent of your behaviour for some time before and then at the CC meeting–since rather than “take on The Chairman in a big face to face battle” you factionalized in a big way for over a year, and then after the CC went back and cooked up a double-dealing, splitting way to try to gain your ends. And why? Because of the “question of principle” of China? Hardly. You openly admitted at the CC that you “don’t give a shit about China.” If, as was the case, you were determined to go deeper into the swamp, your ass was on the line before the whole Party, and you just couldn’t face that thought, could you? In fact you couldn’t even face the prospect of criticism from the cadre.
Given the petty and putrid nature of this clique of philistines, which has been so openly exposed in recent months, many comrades ask how could it arise, how could it gain as much influence in our Party as it did–especially since it is now so hated? The key to understanding this, and to learning still more from their negative example, is grasping how it is that the struggle between two lines in our Party, including this particular struggle, is a product and a key part of the class struggle in society as a whole.
When you think about it, is it even possible to imagine that persevering on the high road of revolutionary struggle in our country could mean anything but constant struggle with the bourgeoisie, including its pull and influence on our own Party and its line? Sticking to the high road, charting a revolutionary course, can only mean struggling not only against the pull of spontaneity but also against revisionism and opportunism of all kinds, a struggle to truly apply the mass line in a correct, scientific sense–joining with the masses, learning from them and assisting in their struggles on the basis of being, as Mao put it “proletarian revolutionary utilitarians”, taking “as our point of departure the unity of the present and future interests of the broadest masses, who constitute over 90 percent of the population; hence we are revolutionary utilitarians aiming for the broadest and the most long-range objectives, not narrow utilitarians concerned only with the partial and the immediate.” (“Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art”, Selected Readings, p. 270)
There are bound to be struggles in our Party in the future to stick to this path, to chart it in the face of new contradictions that arise. These struggles will occur in various forms–from small, daily struggles in every unit over how to proceed, to periodic larger struggles against a full blown bourgeois line and headquarters. There will certainly be struggles against “ultra-leftism,” but overall, especially as we continue to become more deeply integrated with the struggles of our class and the masses as a whole, the greater danger, the greater pull will be to revisionism, to the right. This is one reason we should not be surprised at, but should welcome the opportunity to defeat this revisionist, philistine clique and to learn from this struggle.
As we pointed out earlier, the particular starkly apolitical characteristics of this clique are a product of the still generally low level of the struggle, the fact it is the beginning of a new spiral. Their Philistinism, their utter contempt for genuine revolutionary theory and principles, leads them to attempt to tailor fundamental principles to what they see as the “actual conditions,” instead of grasping these principles, using them as a guide in analyzing the conditions, and applying and deepening them in the course of working to advance the struggle from today’s conditions to revolution. Failure to concern themselves with all this leads to the positively stunning lack of revolutionary sweep that stands out in their paper.
This, too, is partly a product of their totally anti-Marxist understanding of what objective conditions are. Is it not clear from their paper and their “tactics are everything” practice that by “objective, actual conditions” they mean the most immediate, narrow and superficial phenomena, and that they do not at all grasp the existence of laws, of big forces at work underlying all this which inevitably lead to big leaps and changes in the situation and in the moods and struggles of the masses? A slightly “left” Bureau of Labor Statistics report would be a perfect model of what they mean by analyzing objective conditions; but to them the very real and objective fact of the existence of a new spiral is empty of meaning.
It seems morally unacceptable to them to conclude that conditions are difficult–and this prevents them from grasping the essence of what constitutes the actual advance today and from building on the real advances that are occurring today, including the mass upsurges that are on the horizon and already showing themselves in particular battles. This is why they can and do swing wildly from voluntarism (chanting “we got the power”) to determinism, whose confined and rightist view and political program fairly oozes from every page of their paper. They are the ones who are stuck in metaphysics. They do not grasp dialectics, in this case the unity between tough conditions and the real development underlying these conditions, so they cannot grasp the urgent need and possibility of doing revolutionary work in today’s non-revolutionary situation. These pragmatists who promote narrowness and capitalize on the backward aspect of today’s situation, are the furthest thing in the world from proletarian revolutionary optimists. They are–obviously–the real retreaters and you can’t do anything-ers–at least anything revolutionary.
These Mensheviks’ particular variant of pragmatism–which flies in direct opposition to and cuts the revolutionary heart out of the concept of high road–has some soil in today’s conditions in this country. Some of the specific features of this period enable them to hoodwink some people who have not had experience–at least experience summed up according to Marxism-Leninism–in a revolutionary upsurge. Today we are moving through and beyond a stage where to a degree it appears that to “get things going” depends on the activity of a handful of communists who think up a plan, write up the leaflets and “make things happen.”While such a view doesn’t fundamentally correspond even to today’s situation, today’s conditions can tend to mask the laws and social forces which are actually at work and the real role of communists in the struggle, which stand out all the more clearly in times of revolutionary upsurge–and even to a degree today at high points of mass struggle. This understanding was laid out clearly in the Party Programme:
Millions of people have become involved in these struggles, entering them for various reasons, with conflicting class viewpoints, and with varying degrees of understanding of the source of the problems and the links between the struggles. Millions more will continue to do so.
The policy of the proletariat and its Party, in building the united front against imperialism under its leadership, is: to unite with those engaging in every such battle; to make clear through the course of these struggles the common enemy and the common cause of the masses of people; to develop fighters on one front against the enemy into fighters on all fronts; and to show how all these contradictions arise from and relate to the basic contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and can only be finally resolved through the revolutionary resolution of this basic contradiction–the seizure of power by the proletariat and the continuation of the revolution to the elimination of classes and class conflict. (p. 98-99)
Today’s situation may seem to give a degree of credence to these Mensheviks’ anti-Marxist petty bourgeois view of methods of leadership, which is having everything in your hands and under your control, or as the Chinese said of Lin Piao, wanting to “have everything under his command and everything at his disposal.”
With this line and outlook, it is no wonder that these Mensheviks in their paper evidence such a high degree of hatred for the revolutionary upsurge in the 1960s. Such periods, viewed from a Marxist point of view, underscore even more clearly the true facts of the situation, the real forces at work, the actual role of communists–all of which are absolutely necessary to grasp in order to do correct communist work in any situation.
The fact is that the objective conditions, the laws and big forces at work, inevitably will and do throw far more people into motion than our hard work ever can (though such hard work on our part is absolutely necessary and does play a role in this). In periods of upsurge it is absolutely clear that we cannot have everything in our hands and under our control and that is not our basic role. As our Programme puts it, people come into motion for many conflicting reasons, and communist leadership means and requires applying the mass line, giving all around political leadership, not only in the concrete struggle but also in the struggle between conflicting lines and ideas among the masses–in short doing revolutionary work.
No, dear Mensheviks, we do not need our “nostalgia for the ’60s” to understand this point. Lenin brings out the same points in many of his writings, because such principles reflect real and universal laws of the class struggle. Lenin wrote that in the initial stages of the movement, the communists (Social-Democrats) had ”to concentrate almost exclusively on economic agitation. Now these functions, one after another, are passing into the hands of new forces, of wider sections that are being enlisted in the movement. The revolutionary organisations have concentrated more and more on carrying out the function of real political leadership, the function of drawing Social-Democratic conclusions from the workers’ protest and the popular discontent. In the beginning we had to teach the workers the ABC, both in the literal and in the figurative senses. Now the standard of political literacy has risen so gigantically that we can and should concentrate all our efforts on the more direct Social-Democratic objectives aimed at giving an organised direction to the revolutionary stream. . Naturally, Social-Democrats will now have to pay greater attention to combating the influence of the bourgeois democrats on the workers. But this very work will have much more real Social-Democratic content than our former activity, which aimed mainly at rousing the politically unconscious masses.
The more the popular movement spreads, the more clearly will the true nature of the different classes stand revealed and the more pressing will the Party’s task be in leading the class, in becoming its organiser, instead of dragging at the tail-end of events. The more the revolutionary independent activity of all kinds develops everywhere, the more obvious will be the hollowness and inanity of the Rabocheye Dyelo catchwords, so eagerly taken up by the new-Iskrists, about independent activity in general, the more significant will become the meaning of Social-Democratic independent activity, and the greater will be the demands which events make on our revolutionary initiative... (“New Tasks and New Forces”, Vol. 8, p. 215-6)
And in criticising some people who, like our Mensheviks, are truly “stuck” Lenin wrote:
Once again, excessive (and very often foolish) repetition of the word ’class’ and belittlement of the Party’s tasks in regard to the class are used to justify the fact that Social-Democracy is lagging behind the urgent needs of the proletariat. The slogan ’workers independent activity’ is again being misused by people who worship the lower forms of activity and ignore the higher forms of really Social-Democratic independent activity, the really revolutionary initiative of the proletariat itself. (“New Tasks and New Forces”, Vol. 8, p. 212)
Or again in the same essay, addressing the real question of “vacillation” facing us today:
Social-Democracy in Russia is once again passing through such a period of vacillation. There was a time when political agitation had to break its way through opportunist theories, when it was feared that we would not be equal to the new tasks, when excessive repetition of the adjective ’class’, or a tail-ender’s interpretation of the Party’s attitude to the class, was used to justify the fact that the Social-Democrats lagged behind the demands of the proletariat. The course of the movement has swept aside all these short-sighted fears and backward views. The new upsurge now is attended once more, although in a somewhat different form, by a struggle against obsolete circles and tendencies. (p. 212) (This whole essay, obviously, is full of relevant points and worthy of study.)
Does the situation Lenin is describing here exactly fit our situation today? No it does not; he is writing here at the start of a revolutionary upsurge. But Lenin, while he is contrasting different periods here, never promoted and practiced stagism, and never made a principle–let alone a holy crusade–out of narrowing down the political tasks of communists. And Lenin’s words here help us grasp principles which enable us today to break with the incredible nearsightedness and narrowness of these Mensheviks. We must grasp the underlying laws of class struggle to do revolutionary work in today’s situation. And these laws, together with an understanding of communist methods of leadership and the need at all times to do all around political work, are the principles we can and must draw from Lenin.
In this way we will not only fight better today, but maximize our preparation for the future, exactly along the lines of Lenin’s statement quoted in the ’76 CC Report: “The task is to keep the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat tense and train its best elements, not only in a general way, but concretely so that when the popular ferment reaches the highest pitch, they will put themselves at the head of the revolutionary army. The day to day experience of any capitalist country teaches us the same lesson. Every ’minor’ crisis that such a country experiences discloses to us in miniature the elements, the rudiments, of the battles that will inevitably take place on a large scale during a big crisis.” We must not narrow our sights. We must step up our work in every aspect, including organising the daily struggles of the masses, but above all we should step up our efforts to truly function as communists–as tribunes of the people–so as to continue to truly carry out our central task and united front strategy.
Today in our Party, while we continue and deepen the struggle against the line and influence of this philistine Menshevik headquarters, we must not get bogged down in their pettiness, but build on the excellent atmosphere that is developing among the comrades and set our sights toward the future.
We should fully grasp the opportunity of this struggle and make the best use of these counter-revolutionary teachers by negative example to train ourselves and the masses in the science and method of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought and the revolutionary line of our Party. We should use this weapon in order to build our Party still more powerfully, in order to grasp the basic trends that underlie today’s conditions. Doing so, we can arm the masses and ourselves to wage struggle ever more consciously, so that we will not only weather the storms of difficulty but plunge into the gathering storms of mass struggle in order to advance through them toward the revolutionary goal.
[1] In the original text of this “Reply” while the formulation “center of gravity” was criticized and repudiated, it was still stated that it was “generally correct” to concentrate the Party’s work in the economic struggle of the workers. At the Second Congress of the RCP, on the basis of deepening the struggle against the revisionist line of our Mensheviks, this was also criticized and repudiated, and it was unanimously agreed that such concentration–which in fact the “center of gravity” formulation was a description of–was incorrect for the same reasons that the “center of gravity” formulation itself was wrong. At the same time it was stressed that the Party must pay particular attention to uniting with, building and giving political leadership to the economic struggles of the workers as an important part of developing the workers’ movement into a class conscious revolutionary movement. But it was also emphasized that this does not mean that the Party’s agitation and exposure should center exclusively or even mainly on the economic struggle. For more on this, see especially “Economic Struggle and Revolutionary Tasks,” Revolution, organ of the Central Committee of the RCP, July 1978 (p. 3) and the “Introduction” to Revolutionary Work in a Non-Revolutionary Situation, the Report of the Second Plenary Session of the First Central Committee of the RCP (1976), published as a pamphlet by the RCP in 1978.