by the Editorial Board
Introduction
The Worker has reached out to New Labor Press and affiliates via email. In our letter we stated our support for their activity, and our agreements with their positions and analysis. We further stated our intention of struggling for unity under Maoism, and of course this means stating our intention to deepen two-line struggle. Since the comrades have had many months to reply to our letter and engage in critical direct exchange in private, and showed either unwillingness or inability to struggle in this manner, which was preferable, we are obligated to correct the mistaken ideas of the comrades in public. This, too, is with the full intention of deepening two-line struggle, which will happen with or without the comrades’ approval and on the field of their choosing: public criticism.
In this respect, we place our issues with the comrades before the workers of the world, the domestic revolutionary groups, and most importantly the World Proletarian Revolution, of which we are a part and to which we are in service. The fact is this, comrades, ideological struggle will take place between us whether or not you accept it. Those who refuse to conduct two-line struggle are already on a stale course and have their fates sealed. Our assessment of you comrades is still rather positive and we hope it becomes better by doing what we do best, fighting for the proletarian line.
Our critique focuses on the political line and methods of the NLP. We are highly concerned with pointing out the clear, and the not so clear, deviations of these comrades, because they are mainly good, and also to warn others.
The task of uniting under Maoism characterizes the current stage of the effort to reconstitute the Communist Party of the USA. For our part, we consider the task of reconstituting the Party to be the principal task of all revolutionaries in this country and we are well aware of the fact that the comrades share our view to a degree: the degree in which they see reconstituting a communist party as a very important and necessary task. The comrades are correct in their focus on the class as the base and leading force of the revolution in this country—many seek to avoid the question of workers entirely. This all provides a basis from which we can start to state our differences. Our position is that the entire reconstitution effort with only the exception of the inveterate liquidators are worth struggling to unite with, and that of course this requires learning from past mistakes so as not to repeat them. We think that Chairman Mao was correct in instructing communists to be willing to discuss things even with those who they dislike.
The aim of struggle is to uphold the principles of Marxism, which means being principled; that is on one hand. On the other is to unite. We use two methods. The aim of unity is to provide comrades with a way out, to compromise with them, which means being flexible. We reaffirm our desire for unity and commence on the field of public criticism to struggle for it. It is understandable then that our tone with these comrades be measured, and that we have left aside all the minor points of disagreement in order to be flexible and not rigid in our views of them.
On the Question of Students
NLP recently issued another of their many polemics, this time directed at the young people active in the Palestinian solidarity struggle. Like the previous polemics from NLP they fall short of representing a struggle for unity under Maoism and inflate secondary matters. They begin by labeling the article “Center Revolution to Center Palestine” as revisionist and imply the signatories are revisionist themselves, as the comrades define revisionism in the opening paragraph as “a veiled or open rejection” of Marxism. We have no qualms with criticizing this article; there is a lot incorrect about it and we agree with some of the criticisms made by NLP. The issue we have is with labeling the young students as revisionists, rather than following the methods ascribed by Chairman Mao to correct mistaken ideas.
Chairman Mao provided clear analysis on whether or not a youth is revolutionary: “How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a nonrevolutionary or a counter-revolutionary. If today he integrates himself with the masses of workers and peasants, then today he is a revolutionary; if tomorrow he ceases to do so or turns round to oppress the common people, then he becomes a nonrevolutionary or a counter revolutionary.”
With this in mind, we condemn the use of the term revisionist to label the young comrades, especially those outside of explicitly communist organizations. It is quite reasonable to expect that these students, who lack revolutionary leadership in the Party sense and are new and inexperienced, will make many deviations in the struggle to consolidate and develop their grasp of the ideology of the international proletariat, and to have a lot of confusion on the question of theory and practice. First they are young, second they are educated by bourgeois universities, and third they are just beginning to develop in the class struggle, specifically the anti-imperialist struggle. The comrades are revolutionaries among the masses in the US and active in the struggles; they are not revisionists for not having figured everything out yet, and they deserve a patient and flexible approach, not the arrogance and labeling provided by the NLP comrades, who make their own deviations and still provoke further splits in the name of struggle.
In our view, because of the lack of political and social experience, a long period of arduous work in lively and effective political education is needed among them which must be flexibly applied by revolutionaries of the working class; this is what it means to seek unity. Not every mistake or omission means revisionism. Such labeling does more to repel the young comrades and to consolidate rather than correct their mistaken ideas. The young comrades do represent part of the most active force in society who are eager to learn and the least conservative in their thinking. Therefore they cannot be treated like everyone else. They must be viewed in their special circumstances. Older revolutionaries and especially revolutionary workers must teach them, reach agreements with them, and struggle in the same trenches. Revisionists are another matter—revisionists are not to be united with and no one desires unity with revisionism, just as we do not desire unity with the reactionaries and imperialists whom we must combat alongside the revisionists implacably and inseparably. It is one thing to identify deviations and seek to correct them with principles, patience, flexibly and compromises. It is another thing entirely to consider mistakes to be revisionism of the fundamental principles of the ideology.
NLP attempts to present the fact that students are a diverse and complex group, but nonetheless falls into simplistic abstraction when regarding them. Of course we are in full agreement with the NLP comrades that students as such or university students in particular are not any sort of vanguard. The fact is that our young comrades are using terms loosely and inappropriately in their statement on Palestine, and in reality they only mean to indicate that college students in the US will be the first to advance in struggles that directly and indirectly confront the crimes of imperialism. Can anyone seriously doubt that the comrades’ mistake is based on observations of reality? University students are a critical force in US society. They have generated new fighters against imperialism and many youth who reach out for Marxism and clamor for communist leadership. Student radicals in the last 80 years have been more common than radical workers and there are reasons for this. Of course, these are a minority among university students, which is no different than any other trench of struggle; everywhere Marxists are a minority. The class conscious revolutionary workers must make good allies of the students. It is important here to stress that in the Communist Party according to Lenin, no distinction is to be made between intellectual and manual laborers among its militants:
“[T]he organization of the revolutionaries must consist first and foremost of people who make revolutionary activity their profession (for which reason I speak of the organization of revolutionaries, meaning revolutionary Social-Democrats). In view of this common characteristic of the members of such an organization, all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals, not to speak of distinctions of trade and profession, in both categories, must be effaced. Such an organization must perforce not be very extensive and must be as secret as possible.”
Hence, inside the Party is where we become communists, who are the highest expression of the proletarian revolutionary. The Party is the head of the proletarian movement, and all in it are proletarian revolutionaries, belonging to one of its organizations.
After concluding that “students” can be any manner of person, the NLP comrades then go on to indicate that students are incapable of having proletarian class consciousness. “Student” denotes a relationship to formal academic education, not a relationship to production. If a factory worker sends her child to the university neither she nor her child stop being proletarians. If a factory owner sends his child to university neither stop being bourgeois. There are proletarian students, petty-bourgeois students and bourgeois students. The environment on campus is nothing like that of the workplace where so many of the working class are grouped together; at the university, proletarian students are few and far between. Nonetheless, these students are vital because they are given access, and if they become revolutionary by integrating into the mass struggles (for instance the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination and the struggles of the masses of the world to support them) and develop the class position that the current order of imperialism must be overthrown in a violent act, then they too are proletarian revolutionaries and must return to their class and carry out propaganda work.
One’s class background is not so important as their class stand and worldview. NLP find fault in the students while making a similar deviation themselves. Sectarianism and falsely labeling a new generation of young revolutionaries as revisionist for their mistakes is such a deviation. Being unable to assess the class composition of the student movement, how many come from working families and what these youth can do with their education is another mistake. By not taking into account the age and experience of the students, the NLP hinders the ability of working class revolutionaries to lead them; they do not help. Had the comrades proceeded with principles and flexibility, their polemic could offer a lot of correction to the student comrades, because hidden behind the snotty tone and reckless labeling, the NLP is correct on a lot of its points. Their usefulness is undermined by their lack of patience and lack of tact, which we consider a right deviation that is “left” in form.
Reconstitution
Our strongest point of agreement with the comrades of NLP is the necessity of the Communist Party, followed by our shared view that the proletariat is both the base force and the leading force. In fact the comrades are some of the only others to be openly stressing this and we find their contributions to the matter valuable, mature, and sincere, making them worth struggling over instead of denunciation. They are entirely correct to confront the students over the question of the Party but entirely incorrect to abandon the principles of two-line struggle by not offering the students the ability to change their views before being slapped with the label of revisionism. For our part, all those who exchange with us know that we patiently state our disagreements and agreements in order to reach better agreements.
Liquidationism does in fact hide behind the political line of the Revolutionary Maoist Coalition in the form of their arguments that put national “mass organizations” before the question of reconstitution. This is a major mistaken idea, which NLP have led struggles to correct; we only insist that they correct their methods of struggle to better defeat the concealed liquidationism by convincing those comrades who go in for it to change their ideas through the right kind of struggle. Simply put, there will be no unifying force of the entire revolutionary movement, the revolutionary masses, and the fighters unless there is the Communist Party; if one expects a stand-in for this Party in the form of open democratic organizations, they make a big mistake. The Party is necessary for strong unified organisms; the Party will generate these—these will not generate the Party. This holds true for all stages in a dialectical contention, a unity of opposites. This is why communists in formation must consolidate among themselves before making big progress in the diverse non-communist organizations in any trench.
The comrades only seem to approximate our position when they write, “The task of facilitating the movement of the working class, of promoting, advancing, and acting like a leading force for the workers, belongs exclusively to the vanguard organization of the revolutionary workers and intellectuals, the Communist Party, and its generated organisms.” But it is confused!
How can something belong exclusively to Communists and non-Communist organizations? It cannot—the leading role belongs exclusively to the Communist Party, period, and no one else. We are not talking here about “acting like a leading force,” we are talking about becoming the recognized, actual vanguard, the leading force, with Maoism its sole command and guide, the Party where the few converge that is the axis of everything, everything! Act like whatever you want, but however you act you must learn to lead. You undermine and soften the importance of the Party while calling others revisionists because they are not fully aware of its necessity yet.
NLP essentially argues that leadership of the proletarian struggles does not belong to the Party alone, but is shared with non-communists. The Worker holds that the leadership of the Party is precisely over everything, and that this leadership is carried out through many other non-Party organizations and that the Party itself is the total convergence of the best elements of many organizations. The Party alone leads the Red Army and the United Front/New State, which are constructed by it and concentrically around it. The organisms are not in command; the Party commands the gun, the gun never commands the Party.
The comrades criticize the youth like this:
“Thus in one fell swoop the following key tasks of the Communist Party, or in its absence the ‘earliest rudiments’ of the Communist Party (the ‘circle’-type organizations of the conscious element of proletarian movement), are either ignored, or assigned fully/partially to the spontaneously organized revolutionary college students:
“1. The task of facilitating ‘the revolutionary movement of the working class’ 2. The task of developing the seeds of internationalist class solidarity among the workers 3. The task of leading the revolutionary student movement 4. The task of forging non-proletarian individuals into proletarian revolutionaries 5. The task of creating agitation-propaganda teams that intervene in the ‘factories and warehouses’ 6. The task of leading first contact and early offensives against the capitalists and their state”
None of these tasks are exclusive to the Communist Party (or its so-called rudiments), but are in fact tasks of all conscious revolutionary elements in society. Spontaneously organized revolutionary students, some of which are still from proletarian families or even working to maintain their schooling, are not relieved of the day-to-day tasks described above. NLP falls into a commandist deviation in their appraisal of the Party, forgetting that the people alone make history.
Now, forging individuals into proletarian revolutionaries is not the same thing as making Communist militants and cadres. It is quite necessary that our young comrades forge ahead in this development so that they are prepared by the class struggle to become Communists inside of the Party, or any pre-formations leading up to its reconstitution, where they become Communists in formation.
Chairman Gonzalo did not and could not have left every form of work to the Communists who were but a few. He said this:
“It starts with how each of the future cadre is forged in the class struggle before joining the Party. Each one participates in the class struggle, advances, and begins to work more closely with us until the time comes when that person on their own makes the big decision of asking to join the Party. The Party analyzes the person’s situation, their strengths and weaknesses—because we all have them—and if worthy, accepts them into the Party. Once in the Party, systematic ideological training begins. It is in the Party that we transform ourselves into communists. It is the Party that makes us into communists.”
While the Party is the leadership of the united front and the axis of everything, the people’s war itself is a war of the masses, the masses carry it out, a fact that when examined helps those willing to listen to understand that the revolutionary tasks are not exclusive to the Party, but tasks of the revolutionary masses, led by the Party. So much confusion is pushed forward by the comrades at NLP and they push it with the conviction of true sectarians. This is itself a common mistake of amateurism on which the comrades must take their own advice and rectify. If NLP fancies themselves as communist rudiments, the least they could do is to start to “act like” communists in formation, providing the kind of real leadership that is desperately needed. Their approach and their refusal to engage in two-line struggle via direct exchange indicates that they are not yet qualified or ready for the task at hand.
The comrades of NLP have this to say: “The absence of a reconstituted Communist Party does not change that these tasks belong to the organized conscious elements of the proletarian movement as part of the basic principles of our ideology. Nor does this absence somehow shift these responsibilities onto the university student movement.” Where and in what world do the students at universities stop being part of the proletarian movement? Are they excluded? The student comrades for their part want to make revolution and want to forge links with our class, this is a good thing. They have responsibility to make revolution, they are aware that exploitation, oppression and injustice destroy and corrode life. They are not absolved of these tasks by the lack of the Party; however, it is the lack of leadership which explains their mistakes and deviations. The tasks do belong to the proletarian revolutionary movement, which is global and not the exclusive property of the working class; the proletarian revolutionary movement includes all who share the class stand and goals of the communists past, present, and future.
It is enough to recall that the Communist Parties of Russia, China, and Peru were constituted and led by individuals with a non-proletarian background alongside individuals with proletarian backgrounds, this is because the ideology is more important than what one has done for a living. The Chairmen, Mao and Gonzalo, were students once and professional teachers later. Should the “university student movement,” and specifically its best and most active youth, really be forbidden from being part of the “organized conscious proletarian movement”? Plenty of the very best in the still nascent “university student movement” decisively do belong, and have responsibility as active revolutionary elements to participate fully in reconstituting the Communist Party and becoming communists themselves. This is part of the process of reconstitution that is ongoing since 1945 in this country.
The Party is the Party of the proletariat but it is not a party that excludes the peasants, the petty bourgeois, or the intellectuals from joining it. The Communist Party of the USA likewise was at no point only open to members native to the USA: one denotes its class character, proletarian, and the other its location, the USA. We find cheap identity politics in the place of dialectical materialism in the arguments of the NLP comrades.
Nowhere do the student comrades indicate that these tasks are exclusive to the revolutionary student movement; with enthusiasm and a bit of youthful inexperience the comrades simply want to share in our necessary work. The Worker applauds this, and the NLP who shows so much promise should do the same because we are faced with such an important task, an immediate one that must be worked at until it is finished: the task of uniting under Maoism. By uniting under Maoism the revolutionary student movement, especially its proletarian elements wherever they come from, can and do come under correct leadership and take an important role in the reconstitution effort. Comrades, there are so few of us today, too few; we must struggle hard to unite under Maoism, to hold our posts and generate more comrades in the real struggles wherever they take place, factory or university.
The masked identity politics of the NLP are as harmful as the negligence of the student comrades’ omitting the question of reconstituting the Communist Party. The NLP comrades write:
“We no longer live in the early capitalism of the 1800s, where bourgeois intellectuals and university students like Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Li Da etc. had to originally found and introduce Marxism into their respective national proletarian movements. Now that this original brief [!] historical moment of early capitalism has past, the task of disseminating Marxism and leading/initiating revolutionary activity among the workers, and indeed among all of the masses, now falls instead to the so-called ‘conscious element of the proletarian movement’, as it is concretely expressed in Marxist theory through the cadre and militants of the Communist Party, and when that Party has not yet been constituted/reconstituted, its earliest rudiments, the revolutionary proletarian organizations/circles in the process of unity/reconstitution. It is the task of the conscious element of the proletarian movement, as expressed through its vanguard organizations [!], to lead the proletariat and its auxiliaries like the students and youth at all stages and steps of the revolutionary process, including our current stage.”
Let us unpack all these ugly slanders. First, comrades, the founder Karl Marx and his closest comrade in arms Frederick Engels were not, we repeat, were not “bourgeois intellectuals”; they were proletarian intellectuals who came from petty bourgeois and bourgeois backgrounds. Their class background did not define their class consciousness or limit them—they founded Marxism, the first stage of the ideology of the international proletariat, all powerful because it is true. To be a bourgeois intellectual means to hold onto a bourgeois intellect. Please do not insult the founders, comrades; this kind of “criticism” never ends well. Second, the comrades at NLP pose the idea that only and exclusively those with an immediate proletarian relationship to production can and should spread the ideology of the proletariat. Somehow they think that since it is not the 1800s and it is also not the 1980s and also not yesterday, for some unknown variable, those who accept and even advance the proletarian ideology, but who do not hold factory-type jobs now have no place. This eradicates the concept of professional revolutionaries who Lenin said we must pull out of the factories.
We are surprised. Have these comrades ever studied a revolution? Nowhere has the task of disseminating Marxism ever been successful if it is carried out exclusively by individuals with an exclusive proletarian relationship to production. No new conditions are given that indicate that this has changed since yesterday, or today where all over the world the opposite is true.* Third, there are no “vanguard organizations”, comrades; vanguard is a precise position, the front position. There is one front position, only one. Not others. The many organizations led by the Communist Party comprise a larger force, and these are not vanguards, but themselves follow the vanguard. In the absence of such a Party, the task is to reconstitute it. That means the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the USA as a militarized Maoist Party. It means nothing else. It does not mean that every little Maoist club or press (including us) is the vanguard in formation, especially in such severe dispersion and discohesion. No comrades, these small groups of ours need to stay connected to the masses, learn to lead them, develop their class consciousness, and mainly, most importantly, to struggle to unite under Maoism. You have rejected this necessary two-line struggle.
Problems with Focusing on the Tactic Instead of the Strategy
Despite the ease with which the comrades at NLP attack the mistakes of the students and call them revisionists, despite the bombast with which they project their own confusion about the Party, they themselves began by making the Party and its reconstitution a secondary thought. Anyone following NLP knows well that their main focus is and has been on their so-called “State Unionism”** thesis and has not clarified that the principle task is not bickering over the question of labor tactics but the reconstitution of the Communist Party.
In fact, in the “Who We Are” section on their website the comrades say nothing about the task of reconstitution, about communism or about Maoism. In describing themselves, they describe militant economism, not talking about politics or the Party. It stands to reason that such a description and understanding of themselves is followed by a kind of concealed economistic deviation in their other works. This deviation is precisely what allows them to keep taking tactical discussions over strategic ones. It is like this, the Communist Party comes first, it is everything and from it flows leadership over the violence needed to conquer and defend political power in the socialist revolution. The trade union question is not fundamental in the strategic sense and must be established only in the context of the effort to reconstitute the party, in the interests of this task, serving the strategy of conquering political power.
In our letter to the comrades we stated this:
“Our focus as a project is to create the foundations for a class conscious and revolutionary proletarian newspaper, and we place a great deal of importance on the type of work you are doing. We consider the following to be our main focus: 1) defining the type of revolution which must be accomplished in imperialist countries like the US as the socialist revolution, explicitly winning support around the socialist revolution; 2) defining the stage in which this revolution proceeds, specifically the stage of reconstituting the Communist Party of the USA; and 3) considering the level of development in this stage on the basis of the subjective and objective conditions, this is to specify that the relative dispersal of forces, the level of class consciousness among the workers and the crisis of imperialism all amount to highlighting the necessity of uniting under Maoism, which will define the coming years.
“This makes our task as follows: first, we must learn and teach among the proletariat to carry out agitation and propaganda among them and extend it to the masses of all progressive classes; second, we must struggle for unity among all revolutionary forces on the basis of the ideology of the international proletariat. These are large tasks which require a lot of patience and care. We address you comrades on the basis of promoting these tasks and establishing communication which will deepen the two-line struggle and accomplish long term results favorable to our class.”
We stand by this today and reissue it before our readers. We take the comrades at NLP seriously, and because of this we are persistent. We indicate now that they are on the wrong track, going in the wrong direction with polemical conduct that is dangerous to the principal task and how it manifests itself in the task at hand. Due to the fact that the comrades failed to engage with us, our objections and agreements had nowhere else to go. We consider them to be a part of the Left and as such put more importance on criticism, because it is the Left that shapes the future of our movement. It is NLP, and us, as well as others on the Left who share the responsibility to unite under Maoism. So, to NLP, we issue the following:
1. You have relegated the principal task to secondary focus in your published works. You have failed to fully and correctly indicate the three points we have raised to you clearly and upfront.
2. By placing labor tactics as the main point on which to conduct two-line struggle you have slipped into a form of economism, and this form is succinctly defined by what your “Who We Are” section says—and what it does not say.
3. By polemicizing the newer and younger organizations in the US and labeling them revisionists you have failed to offer them the correct guidance. You hinder the struggle to unite under Maoism with your sectarian approach. The good positions which you take are undermined by your methods of conduct. You must realize that splitting over tactical disagreements when there is a basis for strategic agreements is subjective and short-sided.
4. The struggle for unity under Maoism means standing against liquidation and is the principle struggle of the communists; no other struggles must take place before this one, it must proceed on the following points of demarcation: 1. acknowledging or not acknowledging Maoism as the third, new and higher stage of Marxism and the necessity to combat revisionism and all opportunism; 2. acknowledging or not acknowledging the omnipotence of revolutionary violence in order to make revolution; 3. acknowledging or not acknowledging the necessity to demolish the old state apparatus and replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the dictatorship of the proletariat; 4. acknowledging or not acknowledging the necessity of the revolutionary party of the proletariat; 5. acknowledging or not acknowledging the necessity of proletarian internationalism, and finally; 6. acknowledging or not acknowledging the specific type of revolution applicable to imperialist countries such as the US as the socialist revolution.
We hold that it is the responsibility of revolutionaries to struggle over these points, over our understandings of them etc. and that it is detrimental to label people revisionists for their understandable mistakes—in concrete conditions of liquidationism which have robbed them of leadership—instead of patient and dedicated exchange. Commitment to revisionism on these questions makes one a revisionist, but mistakes in formulation do not, especially when a group is politically inexperienced and lacks experience in life which time allows.
UNITE UNDER MAOISM
RECONSTITUTE THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE USA
*The CPUSA was founded by a Columbia Law student Named Charles E. Ruthenburg who came from a proletarian immigrant family. Lenin was a law student, Chairman Mao a librarian, Chairman Gonzalo a professor, Charu Mazumdar came from the All Bengal Student Association, etc. etc.
**We have informed the comrades that we disagree with this label. While they correctly identify the role of bourgeois trade unions, they fall into a mechanical importation of countries undergoing corporativization, a process not taking place in the USA. The bourgeois unions are not part of the state apparatus—the comrades lapse into an Althusserite deviation by way of accident. While NLP exemplifies the creative application of the problem of the “left” abandonment of the proletariat as the base and leading force, their use of the term is a problem.
