First Published: Guardian, August 21, 1985.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Whatever happened to the “party-building movement” of the 1970s?
The explosive movements of the 1960s–particularly the antiwar movement, the Black liberation movement and the student movement–gave birth to a new revolutionary left. U.S. activists were inspired by the example of the Vietnamese revolution. Venceremos Brigades to Cuba defied U.S. authorities and for many China loomed as a revolutionary beacon in the world.
In France in 1968 strikes of 10 million workers triggered by the student movement almost toppled the government. Hundreds of thousands struck in Italy in the Hot Autumn of 1970. The struggle for socialism in advanced capitalist countries was reopened for thousands of young activists.
In this country, serious radicals recognized that the spontaneous movements of the 1960s could not sustain themselves, that better forms of organization were needed. Thousands of activists saw the need for a new communist party and set about building one in what came to be called “the new communist movement.”
Fifteen years later, the wave of radicalism that began in the 1960s has exhausted itself. Many of the organizations launched with high hopes in the early 1970s have disappeared. The parties that were formed are gone or have become irrelevant sects. This article will describe some of the main contours of that period. Future articles will discuss why the party-building movement collapsed and what contemporary Marxists and Marxist-Leninists see as the tasks for today.
Much of the revolutionary movement of the 1970s traced its origins to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest radical student organization of the 1960s. The Progressive Labor Party (PL)–a militant split from the Communist Party (CP)–formed one of the strongest factions in SDS with a heavy workerist bent and strong antagonism toward Black nationalism. It was opposed by the Weathermen, who totally wrote off the U.S. working class, and by groups which later became the October League (OL), based in Los Angeles and the Revolutionary Union (RU), based in San Francisco. In 1969 SDS split, with PL taking over the organization and Weathermen controlling the national office. The organization collapsed soon after, but the death of SDS marked the birth of the new communist movement.
These activists had little use for the CP, which was seen as advocating reforms, not revolution. “The collapse into irrelevancy of the Communist Party, around which radical opposition to the system tended to gravitate, had the effect of closing down discussion of radical opposition generally,” noted Fred Gordon, SDS national education secretary at the time of the split. The Soviet Union had long ceased to be a revolutionary force in the eyes of most radical activists of the 1960s. China was seen as a revolutionary model. Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book” became a bible for many–even though one of its slogans was “oppose book worship.” The anti-authoritarian and egalitarian impulses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution meshed well with the rebellious mood of activists in the early 1970s. In Europe other radical currents flourished: Trotskyism, forms of non-dogmatic Marxism, syndicalism. But in the U.S., the “Maoist” movement was the strongest force of the new-radicalism of the 1970s.
Believing the CP was hopelessly reformist, these groups set about to build a new communist party. In 1973 a Guardian-sponsored forum on “What Road to Building a New Communist Party?” attracted over 1200 activists and requests for information about the conference poured into the Guardian office. At the event, Irwin Silber, then executive editor of the paper, argued that party building was “the single most important question confronting left forces in the U.S. today.” In addition to the Guardian, the OL, the RU–both by then national Marxist-Leninist pre-party organizations–and the Black Workers Congress presented their views on party building. Some combination of these and other organizations into a new party seemed in the offing. But it was not to be.
Concerning the conference, a Guardian editorial noted, “A particular danger to be guarded against at this time is an almost inevitable tendency towards sectarianism and ultra-leftism.” This came to pass with a vengeance as most of the major groups were soon at each others throats over a variety of political questions, ranging from international line to whether Blacks in the U.S. constituted a separate “nation.”
The major issue which finally split these forces and marked the end of the new communist movement came in 1975-76 over China’s foreign policy. In an effort to combat what it viewed as “Soviet social imperialism,” Beijing sided with U.S.- and South African-backed forces in the civil war in Angola. This put the U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement to the test: would they remain loyal to China or support genuine liberation movements in the third world?
The OL, RU, Workers Viewpoint and other national formations supported China. On the other side a number of local groups, such as the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) and the Guardian were described as making up an “anti-revisionist, anti-dogmatist” trend. The RU had declared itself the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975 and the OL became the Communist Party (M-L) in 1977. In its program the latter argued, with the hubris typical of the times, “With the exception of the Communist Party (M-L), all other political parties in the U.S. are defenders of the capitalist system.”
The strongly pro-China groups were to suffer all the problems that the revolutionary left in the U.S. and around the world was to suffer. But in addition, they had their ideological rug pulled out from under them when, after the death of Mao in 1976, Chinese domestic policies moved sharply to the right. These groups had supported reactionary international positions–China’s role in Angola, support for the Shah of Iran, support for the U.S. military buildup–but now the Cultural Revolution they had backed so strongly was under domestic attack, and Beijing’s new policies offered little that could justify the previous adulation. The ranks of “Maoist” groups around the world dwindled: over 100 telegraphed their sorrow over Mao’s death; the 11th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1977 got less than 50 messages from these groups and the 30th anniversary of the Chinese revolution in 1979 saw only 24 messages.
The RCP suffered a major split in 1977 and has now dwindled to an isolated sect. The CPML disappeared in 1982. The only other remaining national “Maoist” group is the West Coast-based League for Revolutionary Struggle.
During this time in the Black movement, there were parallel attempts at party building. Some of these–such as the Black Workers Congress–interacted with the largely white new communist movement. Others organized strictly within the Black community. Marxist-Leninist groups also formed in the Chicano, Puerto Rican and Asian communities. While these groups followed their own particular dynamic, they by and large also demonstrated a burst of organizing activity in the early 1970s, followed by fragmentation and dissolution by the end of the decade.
The other trend which hoped to avoid the sectarianism and dogmatism which plagued the uncritically pro-China groups tried to consolidate itself, but it fared little better. In early 1978. PWOC and four other local groups initiated the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center (OCIC). The Guardian supported much of the outlook of the OCIC but did not join. This effort also ended disastrously. A “Campaign against White Chauvinism” launched in 1980 led to a paroxysm of expulsions and resignations that destroyed the OCIC.
The Guardian made errors of its own. In 1977, seeking to have an organizational expression of its politics and to play a more active role in the party-building movement, the paper launched an ill-conceived effort to build “Guardian Clubs.” Several groups were formed, but the Guardian did not have the resources to build up a national organization and put out a first rate newspaper at the same time. In addition, differences developed in outlook, about the degree to which the clubs should emphasize party building versus anti-imperialist work and support for the Guardian. In 1979 the Guardian and the clubs separated, with the clubs becoming the basis for what is now the party-building group Line of March.
By the mid-1980s this anti-dogmatic trend, which called itself “the Trend,” was in a shambles, with most of its organizations shattered and its activists burnt out or submerging themselves in mass work.
This survey of 15 years of the party-building movement is in very broad strokes which necessarily omit many of the complexities and concrete political battles. The emergence of disastrous ultra-left errors was perhaps inevitable in reaction to the reformism of the preceding period and given a near total cutoff from previous socialist experience and the strong student and youth base of the party-building movement. The decline of the U.S. revolutionary movement of the 1960s and 1970s was matched in all the advanced capitalist countries.
The leftism of the late 1960s and early 1970s could not adapt to the decline of the mass movements of the mid-1970s. Why this happened will be the subject of the next article.