by The Worker Editorial Board and Lorenzo D’Ettore, Emil McLeod, Vivek Bruzzhak, Jacob M., and Edgar
The article below was written by The Worker with the contributions of comrades belonging to other formations who NLP collectively refer to as “Daltonites”
New Labor Press has published another eight-legged essay, which ironically is called “In Defense of Marxist Principles”. Indeed, it raises sectarianism to the level of “principle.” Since NLP’s last series of accusations against us, we have waited patiently for it to release evidence to back up its claims. Yet still zero evidence has been provided of the coup plot about which NLP raised a scandal, let alone evidence of The Worker’s involvement in such an affair. NLP continues to sidestep the statement issued on Red Library written by comrade Daniel requesting that the article “On Renegades and Revolutionaries” be taken down. There was no evidence presented by NLP for their claims, and this was pointed out in the statement. It is very telling that NLP, and other organizations, continue to ignore the existence of this statement and have not responded to it, instead doubling-down on unsubstantiated claims of “Daltonites”, “putchists”, and “conspiracies”. They claim “damning evidence or reports” were received by them but find excuses not to share these or even selections of these with their readers.
In doing all this NLP refuses to name a lot of the people and organizations to whom they refer, and instead construct the arbitrary label “Daltonites” (a reference to the founder of Tribune of the People, who led its Editorial Board for the first year of its existence), which is actual obscurantism and ignores any differences among us. It is also an example of trickery; NLP attempts to cast us in the shadow of the mistakes which we energetically criticize and from which we seek to learn, mistakes that NLP represent today in even more vulgar forms. So which Dalton do we adhere to? The one who made sectarian mistakes or the one who founded work from which we still draw inspiration, who penned numerous good and useful articles? NLP clearly adheres to the mistakes while we hope to embody the good aspects. NLP further attempts to individualize the matter around a personality, making the attempted slur of “Daltonite” just another vapid and transparent specter meant to spook readers away from The Worker and our comrades in the trenches of reconstitution—it is nothing more.
An attempt is made (finally) by NLP to argue politics; the problem is that the politics they argue against are not ones we have concretely put forward. The “polemic” hinges on raising a straw-man, and arguing against that rather than contending with the principles and positions for which The Worker and others stand. Without indulging in every made-up accusation and self-contradictory claim, we respond only to clarify and solidify our positions.
NLP claims that our errors are “left-opportunist” and hard to pin down due to our “idealism” and “metaphysics”, and “a fundamental disconnect from the basic facts of reality.” Their argument is redundant; idealism and metaphysics already represent a disconnect from fact and reality. In order to sound superior, the writer slams down phrases of high sounding tautology, while choosing to issue completely damning condemnations, painting the targets of the piece completely black rather than separating the good from the bad. Everything us derelicts touch is riddled with idealism and metaphysics, and so the reader has no other choice than to be cast aside or to accept NLP’s demands with no alternative in between. No consideration is given toward the possibility that our contention could result in mutual improvement; this sectarian approach is indicative of something which actually aides dispersion and gives cover to liquidationism. NLP, in spite of what they claim, cannot move as far as they might like from the liquidationists.
Instead of quoting to express the entirety of a position, NLP quotes selectively only parts of documents which they deem good enough to bring to the chopping block, then they proceed to dissect those pieces and distort the argument by adding what is not there and leaving the chimera they have created devoid of context.
The method of argument utilized by NLP is as follows: the writer at NLP takes pieces of opinions of writers and even guest contributors published on the website and considers these the official political line of our organization. The writer cannot imagine anything else but monolithic opinion and instantaneous political line. The writer then accuses us of hypocrisy when contending or contradicting opinions are presented in our publication and other places. An opinion article does not represent the political line of a newspaper; contending opinions can and should be presented to readers, provided that they exist under a common ideological basis of unity. There can and should exist a variety of opinion, and our contributors (guests or regular volunteers) are not forbidden from having their own opinions because an opinion is not a political line. By taking these opinions expressed as such on our website and transforming them into political line, the writer goes on to ascribe positions and conclusions well outside of and sometimes opposed to the opinion itself. The writer takes one aspect for the whole, sees things one-sidedly, and argues against an imaginary line. This is a dishonest and counter-productive method of struggle rooted in subjectivism and manifesting in sectarian approaches to others.
A good example of the above method is the treatment of a few articles on our website written by R. Mars regarding the Women’s question. NLP claims that the opinion by R. Mars is what “The Worker says.” If this was not bad enough, the writer goes on to distort the opinion of Mars beyond recognition. Mars suggests that woman is a historically constituted subject, just like man is, meaning that woman is a social thing like man is, whereas female is a biological category found in nature; what is a woman faces different criteria per society and expectations, while what is a female faces unchanging criteria. The writer at NLP jumps to conclusions from this and argues that The Worker wants to abolish women: “…women would cease to exist following the abolition of those social relations and an end to systematic force against females….” Any attentive reader can see, contrary to NLP, that if Mars is arguing that woman is a historically determined social subject then what follows is not that they would cease to exist without oppression—after all, society will not cease to exist. This society we live in today will cease to exist along with the women and men it produces, and the new society will produce new women and new men; a given society arises from a given mode of production, and production will certainly continue existing long after class society is gone, hence so will women and men.
This is all that Mars is arguing, but with selective reading and a lot of foolishness passed off as logic, NLP has not only invented a wild position for comrade Mars but transplanted it onto The Worker and others, and then goes on to argue so bitterly against it. Luckily, NLP’s searing class analysis provides the solution: “Women acquire importance insofar as their place within political economy”. This is the conclusion that the great thinker behind NLP passes as “materialism”. It is like a bad magic trick that bores the audience but dazzles the magician.
The same can be found in the treatment of a guest article hosted on The Worker titled “The Workers Must Work to Destroy the Labor Aristocracy”: the writer at NLP cannot even distinguish between a headline and a slogan, claiming the title of a guest article on the NEA is a “slogan” of The Worker. It makes one wonder how someone who claims to run a press can know so very little about the differences between editorials, guest articles, titles, and slogans. NLP argues that:
“It must be noted that while The Worker put forward the slogan of ‘The Workers Must Work to Destroy the Labor Aristocracy’, they put this forward only as the rallying cry of the lower and mid-level bureaucrats against the executives. This is demonstrated in their writing on the NEA Staff Organization’s (NEASO) strike. The NEASO is an organization for defending the rights of the middle-level NEA bureaucrats against the NEA membership and the NEA executives. This is undeniable evidence both of The Worker’s petty bourgeois editorial line and their continued inability to grasp reality, to correctly differentiate a trade union from a guild or professional association (much less a state-produced bargaining unit).”
The article in question is not arguing what NLP pretends it is, but simply that the NEASO strike was justified. This “undeniable evidence” of The Worker’s political line, having been retrieved from a guest opinion article, is suspiciously missing the fact that comrade D’Ettore wrote, “the NEA… were either founded or politically transformed to counterweight the militancy of the New York Teachers Union. This union sought to upset the control of the opportunists in the labor movement but was ultimately politically suppressed by the bourgeoisie.” or: “The labor aristocracy has worked diligently to staff themselves well with soft-handed ‘pragmatists,’ slow-moving ‘reformists,’ and continues to eliminate dissent. This can be seen clearly in the current NEA.” And finally: “The NEASO is correct to criticize the NEA for refusing to ‘uphold union values;’ however, this does demonstrate their markedly idealist and fundamentally incorrect analysis of the situation. The NEASO strike is justified, but the situation demands a correct and materialist analysis of the class character of the NEA and all other ‘yellow’ unions, which are staffed by the lieutenants of the organized labor movement, again doing the political work of the bourgeoisie. The NEA has never upheld union values, for it was never a union of the workers in the revolutionary and militant sense.”
There you have it, in plain English. One has to wonder why NLP chose to omit D’Ettore’s critical remarks about the NEASO from their article. We hope it is not because they disrespect their readership so much as to assume they will not check the source material they are criticizing.
NLP attacks The Worker and others on the basis that we have identified the dispersal of forces in the US Maoist movement; we are accused of metaphysics for this. NLP writes that “According to them [the “Daltonites”] in the US there prevails a subjective situation in which there is a large mass of inactive and disillusioned former revolutionaries who have ‘sunken into private life.'”
Is this the position of “Daltonites” or a position held by almost everyone? Hear this from the Revolutionary Study Groups: “many comrades who were in various levels of organization in the movement are burnt out, pessimistic, and demoralized.”
NLP sees no issue with denying that forces were dispersed even after having written this:
“by fall 2021 (months prior to March 2022 right-liquidationist plot) quite literally every single campaign, generated organism, or structure of the CR-CPUSA was either moribund or outright liquidated. In an immense, unconscionable, and unprecedented failure of the line leadership, before the liquidation attempt was even made, Tribune of the People, its support committees, the United Neighborhood Defense Movement, Struggle Sessions, the Popular Women’s Movement, its labor work, its police brutality work, and the actual structures of the CR were all in a state of disintegration or free fall. Identifying this correctly as a direct result of the internal revisionist errors of the Daltonite leadership on all three levels (ideological, political, and organizational)….”
While we condemn the reckless efforts of NLP to link open work to clandestine work, the above, at least what is correct and not speculative about it, certainly indicates a dispersal of forces. NLP intentionally confuses a process of re-organization which made rightist deviations for a liquidation of “quite literally every single” organism in the movement. How then do they explain the remaining Tribune Support Committees which continued their planned events and saw success in these? And how about the fact that The Worker and others did not materialize from thin air with no past experience but maintained their posts in a re-organized way? The notion that every single thing flowing from the movement was liquidated or on its death bed is an accusation which NLP treats as not requiring any kind of proof; instead they hope that the trust of younger and newer members who weren’t there is enough to simply take them at their word. From claiming that “quite literally every single” organism was liquidated, NLP go on to say:
“… The picture painted of a generally inactive and demoralized US revolutionary movement without leadership is plainly false, a vision that could only confuse observers external to the national movement or the small few who largely by choice remain isolated locally or are terminally online.”
Please comrade writer, make up your mind, and keep the formulation of opportunism you posit by Lenin; stick to your formula, lest we may suspect you of a lack of definite and firm principles! These comrades are not the sum of a small putrid pile as you assert, nor are they inconsequential in numbers relative to the movement. Perhaps our friends are confused due to the thorough infiltration of the PDRL ideologically, politically, and organizationally, especially among younger comrades who know no better.
The forces of proletarian revolution have in fact been dispersed for a long time, just as they have been on the world scale. The point is not to deny it but to overcome it, to make Maoism the sole commander and guide of the US revolution and the World Proletarian Revolution. In regard to the US specifically, the dispersal of forces resulting from the liquidation of the Communist Party in 1944 has not been overcome; the recent sequence in the reconstitution effort from 2013 to now had a consolidation and a dispersal, resulting in increased complexity, which of course includes disillusion, inactivity, pessimism, and demoralization. There is no way of denying this. The Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationists even prove it in their own way, if they prove nothing else; it is that they, former comrades, have become pessimistic and demoralized beyond recognition. We, to use NLP’s phrase, “cannot imagine anything more metaphysical” than a process without advance and retreat, and so we do not ascribe to NLP’s claim that things are proceeding swimmingly in a straight line now that we “Daltonites” have been dealt a blow.
The process is long but we are patient people. A split in the movement resulted in its fragmentation and the current state of things in which revolutionaries attempt to overcome the dispersal, and this is not without advances and retreats. NLP attempts to combine two things into one via obscurantist insistence that what occurred was “not a clear split but rather a fragmentation”. However, splits are never immediately clear to onlookers, and great confusion occurs which can lead to a fragmentation (further splits, i.e., the process of one dividing into two unfolds and cascades). Only perception level knowledge which has not yet reached the rational stage can conceive of immediate fragmentation without the contention of principal sets, of opposites representing a principal contradiction. Can it be any other way? In terms of a timeline, the writers of this article take the same position the Communist International statement does: that a complex internal situation qualitatively developed in February/March of 2022.
We consider the document “Our Main Weaknesses in the Three Fields” to which NLP refers, to contain a typo regarding the year of the split; our investigation, actually asking people, instead of the NLP method of jumping to conclusions, has confirmed our view. However, this matter of an incorrect date is not as significant as the content of the errors being self-criticized for and the need to work at correcting these. Remarkably, a great many of the errors exposed in the self-criticism are still painfully apparent in NLP’s work; subjectivism leading to sectarianism, faulty conception of organizations and the relationships between them (concentric construction), striking a pose, postmodernism, etc. Leftists learn from their mistakes, and one makes rightist deviations when one refuses to learn anything and instead denies everything by foisting the blame on a few rather than examining their own role in the past sequence. No one can escape the judgment of the masses; this just takes time and struggle to reveal itself.
We have encountered no other self-criticism besides the one titled “Our Main Weaknesses in the Three Fields”; NLP claims self-criticisms exist but cannot cite even one of these alleged self-criticisms by name. Given this and the one-sided, or possibly phony, reports and evidence, we begin to wonder about the quality of investigation our friends at NLP can truly produce—they can never offer specific proof, and therefore their ability to disseminate truth from facts comes into question.
As far as “criticism” is concerned, there is this in abundance and there is also police work. It is good to look for correct criticism even when it is made by enemies, but it is not so good to stand by the vulgarization of criticism which degenerates into police work, such as what is found in the documents now deleted from the Red Library website. Those documents still exist, and you can find them without the use of archived websites: their fitting graveyard is the website Maoist Cult Exposed.
What sets our approach apart from the one taken in the only published document from Revolutionary Study Group, “Statement on the Opportunist Former Leadership of the US Maoist Movement”, is the demarcation between revolutionaries and reactionaries when approaching the questions of dispersal, confusion, disillusion, inactivity, or pessimism. There are plenty of honest comrades who have fallen to one degree or another into despair; we struggle against it in the ranks of all organizations. Likewise there are plenty of good comrades within and outside of organizations with whom we disagree on important questions but whom we still consider genuine revolutionaries. The jaded and bitter views of former revolutionaries turned police agents is another thing entirely; we condemn it, and we do not conceal it or apologize for it, nor do we justify it or pardon it due to past or current mistakes. Nothing redeems a scab, nothing offers absolution to a snitch, (pendito, or soplon); we mark them with fire—they have entered into the casket of reaction which will soon be sealed and buried by the World Proletarian Revolution. Understanding how they became enemies first requires an end to confusing them for friends.
It must be made clear to NLP again that splits are never immediately “clear”; there is always confusion, but one divides into two, and then it can divide again, but one does not divide into 5 or 6. It is two-line struggle which we are talking about. This is dialectics and not ultra-left dogma. NLP typically refers to “line struggle” and fails to understand how faulty this is; what we are talking about is two-line struggle and this is very precise and important. At the core of the matter is a contradiction between two main classes, a set of opposites. At the heart of every explosion is a split and this is true for everything from atoms to organizations.
We do not object to, but applaud, the case of “leaders stepping up”, as NLP puts it; this is good, but do these leaders of the various germinal mass organizations represent a centralized Communist leadership? No, and with all due respect—they have stepped up to maintain their posts with honor—they are leaders only of one type and capacity. It is we and not NLP who call for leadership to be recognized for what it is, and to be forged on a higher level in class struggle and two-line struggle. NLP has the old “good enough” approach to the question of leadership which they call fundamental. The masses, the class, and the revolutionary people broadly still lack leadership and they will lack it as long as they lack the Party—without the Party there is no class leadership and without a unified effort to reconstitute the militarized Communist Party there will be no reconstitution. Understand?
“On the international level, the CR-CPUSA continues to be the only recognized organization that represents the struggle for the reconstitution of the Communist Party in the United States”. Is this true or false? Is international recognition meaningful and important or inconsequential and worth denying? Do the comrades internationally blow empty slogans or do they represent valid positions taken carefully? Are they leaders or just misinformed speculators? We do not fake confusion on this; it is time to close the lid on pretending.
What does it mean to exist and continue to exist until one’s task is fulfilled? Nothing more than reproducing oneself in struggle so long as the form of the organization conforms to the circumstances. The sectarian at NLP suggests that “a more metaphysical formulation could not even be imagined.” Well, fellow, understand that this, the position taken by the comrades in the self-criticism, that “the Committee exists and will continue to exist until its tasks are fulfilled”, is a promise to the workers and a threat to self-serving sectarianism.
Does the above position on existence indicate that the Committee exists as it once did, and will always exist as it once did? No, there is no such inference in these words; you have to take them in the context in which they are given. Existence is a thing in motion, with stages and transformations. A thing can exist while advancing and retreating; this is dialectical materialism and not metaphysics. The latter holds that existence is static and that things can and do remain the same, denying their motion. What is conveyed is that the Committee still exists, perhaps a fragmented form, and it will continue to exist and in the future it will exist on a better unified basis. This is why the international comrades have given clear instructions which we will examine below. The traitors to the International Communist Movement are those who hold that a thing ceases to exist if its forces disperse or diminish, if it suffers a blow etc. It is the revolutionaries who proclaim it! How many forces were lost on the Long March to Yenan? The Communist Party of China re-organized and began rectification, maintaining its post and making a great ideological leap in the process. We have much to learn from their optimism.
This position on existing means that the comrades did not disband, will not disband, and should not disband, and this is affirmed by the international comrades:
“…the comrades in the United States who struggle for the reconstitution of the Communist Party in their country are facing a complicated internal situation resulting from an attempt to liquidate the Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party of the USA (CR-CPUSA) – the ongoing initiative to unify all the communist in the task of reconstituting the communist Party of the United States under Maoism.”
“A principled two-line-struggle through the correct internal channels must be conducted with the aim of firmly unifying on the basis of Marxism- Leninism-Maoism, the struggle against imperialism, revisionism, and the reaction, and to serve the development of revolution in the US as part of and in service of the world proletarian revolution.”
And, “Calls to ‘destroy the CR-CPUSA’ are only expression of liquidationism and is not the way Maoists struggle to impose the correct line.”
For you, NLP, we have highlighted a few operative words. Hear this:
“On the international level, the CR-CPUSA continues to be the only recognized organization that represents the struggle for the reconstitution of the Communist Party in the United States, and we urge all comrades to develop internal two-line-struggle, to apply unity-struggle-unity, and to firmly reject all snitching and police work.”
The above cannot be understood by sectarians who boast of consolidation of their small groups, but can only be appreciated by those who struggle to unite under Maoism. Finally, the comrades write this: “The International Communist movement fully supports the struggle of the comrades in the United States and will support the two-line-struggle to rectify mistakes and to achieve a higher unity in the path of unifying under Maoism; and reconstituting the Communist Party of US.” The conclusion to their statement is highly significant, and it guides the position we have taken: that in order for there to be greater unity around practical activity, in order to improve the practical activity, we must accomplish ideological unity as its basis. After all, we must unite under Maoism in order to apply it.
We hold the principle that even in dire situations we must not give in to despair, or simply generate many factions hostile to the existence of one another, but that we must struggle for unity on an ideological basis. Chairman Gonzalo teaches us that:
“The reactionaries aim to destroy the leadership, the Party, and crush the revolution, beyond separating the Party from the masses; to annihilate the Party is to crush a revolution, but not to finish it, because as long as there are communists and masses it can never be finished.”
The above still applies to the efforts to reconstitute the Communist Party. It is not enough to respond to every upset with the formation of “new” efforts at reconstitution nor to “build” “new” parties; there is continuity of struggle. Our process is comprised of many sequences for over a hundred years of Party history.
NLP suggests that Revolutionary Study Group “has carried out and accomplished many of the tasks of re-organization,” and while we do not take NLP’s word as the official position of these comrades, we do insist that re-organization has not been accomplished to any significant degree; this is not to disparage their work, about which we have no interest in speculating in the absence of an official publication or central organ which reports this work. We cannot even examine the results of study groups, discover their findings and what they have learned, let alone declare they have accomplished many of the tasks of re-organization without some form of statement, a newspaper or website which synthesizes their valuable experiences. This condition, comrades, reflects a state of disorganization, poor propaganda, and other understandable issues through which a young movement passes; it proves the existence of issues of re-organization which have yet to be carried out by these comrades.
No serious revolutionary can honestly maintain the position that many tasks of reorganization have been accomplished. It is a position of sectarianism, one which concludes that a small group is enough. We affirm our position that all revolutionaries must struggle for unity under Maoism and that the unity which is enjoyed today is insufficient. If today the different groups all together comprise two or three hundred individuals—and we are being generous—then it is not enough to accomplish many tasks of re-organization. Modesty and an honest assessment of the subjective forces of the revolutionaries are necessary. A few have come together here around The Worker, a few more together around the RSG networks and a few in other places under other names; all taken together this is still a few—there are many, many more unorganized revolutionaries and unorganized masses of advanced proletarians. The subjective forces are not only dispersed but germinal. Do not get dizzy with success, and even more, do not confuse the minor gains in a difficult start with success. It is not just a question of the number of forces, but the quality of forces; two or three hundred Bolsheviks would be quite a success, but our movement has yet to produce this level of iron discipline, yet to demonstrate it, and yet to master its methods. We recognize the process and are enthusiastic about it. Two-line struggle means a fight to ensure its successful development along revolutionary lines.
NLP writes: “Whether the left-opportunists agree or unite with this leadership or not, through the work done by the RSU, RSGs, and NLP in their respective sectors, the US revolutionary movement is larger and more active now than it has ever been, even when compared to the revolutionary collectives or CR period during which consistent revolutionary work was always limited to a handful of cities in a country of hundreds of major metropolitan areas”.
We have not been provided with an estimate of size and activity; we have seen no large red marches or read about it in the bourgeois news, nor the people’s news sources. All we have is NLP’s claim of being larger and more active than ever. It is utterly silly to suggest that “…the US revolutionary movement is larger and more active than it ever has been….” Boisterous and bold, but empty posturing. The US revolutionary movement goes very far back; the proletariat had realized its Party in 1919 and saw massive Communist-led movements especially in the 1930s. The largest since then under the banner of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is not found intact, let alone larger and more organized today. This is no secret—why keep pretending? We would enthusiastically applaud the existence of a larger and more active movement than ever, and this is what we fight for when we fight for unity, but you cannot just proclaim this in a theoretical labor journal. You have to prove it. Again, NLP is in denial of the process.
We are accused by the writer at NLP of denying connectivity and organization among students: “Much is written about the ‘students’ and ‘new generation of young revolutionaries’, but why are they presented as formless and organization-less when they objectively belong to a concrete national organization (the RSU) and have largely embraced the leadership of another revolutionary formation (the RSGs)?” We ask for a statement from either of these organizations which supports the claim of NLP and we ask why NLP is the one breaking the news of such an embrace.
Of course, we have quite often included these groups when discussing the situation, but they are not the only ones we are talking about, as hundreds of thousands of students and new revolutionaries take to the streets without any consolidated leadership, and lots of other organizations exist outside of the orbit of the ones NLP lists. We do not have a small view of the student movement. What is more, for all their prattle about “leadership”, NLP elides the fact that NLP, RSU, and RSG alike are organizations open to the masses, but they are not the Communist Party, which means that these groups and the masses alike do lack leadership in the strategic sense. This is why we harp on the question of the Party and raise its importance everywhere. The Party is not reconstituted by generating open organizations, but by uniting the revolutionaries under Maoism into a center of leadership which can direct all the movement’s mass work in the interests of the principal task of reconstitution of the Party. In NLP’s frantic defensiveness of their little oasis we find the argument of “mass organizations before communist formations” which we have called veiled liquidationism, here presented in a new form.
NLP writes that “leadership is fundamental to Marxism.” No, power is what is fundamental, and we all must keep saying it; there are not two or three things that are equally fundamental. One thing is fundamental: political power for the proletariat, and this is why leadership is so important in the first place. In our view, leadership emerges in class struggle and two-line struggle around those who can unite the revolutionaries and unite the masses with the revolutionaries; great leadership is built on this by the creative application of Maoism to the concrete conditions of one’s own country, producing a guiding thought. There is still so much work to be done. Modest administrators of small groups, no matter how good, cannot represent experienced leadership let alone great leadership; they cannot provide a guiding thought in the current subjective conditions. It is simply so, that small groups (and all the groups are still small) cannot think for the masses nor set the general political line from their limited experience and relative isolation. Those who think they can accomplish this have swallowed the worst poisons of Avakian by taking up his method and conception of how line is formed.
“Why is The Worker the advanced agent of The Daily Worker?” asks NLP. Because we struggle to become a daily newspaper, as The Worker originally stated in the 1920s; we go ahead in these conditions, in patient work to revive The Daily Worker, only after years of growth, and we will not do it on our own, and perhaps we will be replaced by new comrades who take up the task after we die. Perhaps NLP misunderstands what the word “advanced” means here; an advanced agent is one who goes before, charting a path toward a clear goal. Our clear goal is to become a daily newspaper, the central organ of the revolutionary movement in this country. This is our program and we will persist in it. Changes and adjustments will be made along the way; it is not a straight path.
NLP writes:
“Unfortunately for the Daltonites, Marxist principles exist as a coherent whole, and cannot be cherrypicked and highlighted in isolation from one another. Revolutionaries unite with all those who can be united with, ‘can’ being the operative word. No given individual or group is guaranteed or entitled to a place in any revolutionary process, much less a seemingly permanent place in leadership in that process. Leaders who in theory and practice demonstrate profound incompetence and a pattern of revisionism, who have harmed rather than strengthened our movement, are not owed an endless process of internal organizational rectification as if to them revolutionary work is some kind of hobby or affinity group to which they have an inalienable bourgeois right. This is not a ‘false, liberal, and anti-Marxist precondition’ but a basic principle of discipline, quality, and control anyone should be able to recognize.”
It’s true that not everyone can be united with, however a distinction needs to be drawn between those who have made errors and those who are revisionists, as the Statement on the Situation of the Maoists in the US expresses (from which we quoted above). As Mao states in “A Dialectical Approach to Inner-Party Unity”:
“The unity of opposites is the fundamental concept of dialectics. In accordance with this concept, what should we do with a comrade who has made mistakes? We should first wage a struggle to rid him of his wrong ideas. Second, we should also help him. Point one, struggle, and point two, help. We should proceed from good intentions to help him correct his mistakes so that he will have a way out. However, dealing with persons of another type is different. Towards persons like Trotsky and like Chen Tu-hsiu, Chang Kuo-tao and Kao Kang in China, it was impossible to adopt a helpful attitude, for they were incorrigible.”
For NLP, everyone who is not aligned with them, who does not swallow their eight-legged essays and seeks to struggle over Maoist principles, is an incorrigible “Daltonite” whose differences of opinion constitute revisionism. This label comes before two-line struggle in an attempt to derail it, to preserve the “line” of NLP as absolutely correct, and not in need of development, to deny the need to unite with those they disagree with under Maoism; it serves to form small factions, to divide the Maoists into separate and antagonistic formations. What is really happening here is that NLP fears being taken to account for their own mistakes and fears struggle with those who do not give up their positions easily.
NLP goes so far as to suggest that we cannot be united with because we have not swallowed the eight-legged essays on labor questions which they have thought up on the basis of limited social practice. They write:
“The revolutionaries which produced New Labor Press have been organizing line struggle for proletarian leadership in the labor movement since before its consummation as a public theoretical organ. Through the investigation, experience in class struggle, and collective social practice of ourselves and those we work with we have reached the view that the state unions do not represent the proletariat, they represent the imperialist bourgeoisie.”
NLP reveals a confused understanding of both two-line struggle (improperly referred to as simply “line struggle”) and the development of revolutionary theory. NLP states that its members have been organizing “line struggle” even “before its consummation as a public theoretical organ”. This begs a question: organizing two-line struggle as what? As isolated individuals? Each with their own individual “political lines”? Supposedly this two-line struggle began even before they generated a theoretical organ that speaks collectively with one voice. This reveals an anarchistic distortion of the concept of two-line struggle on NLP’s part.
The Worker and our comrades insist on first struggling over the most important questions of our ideology, originally outlined by the International Communist League. It is only a sectarian who would think that a small band or an individual, for that matter, even in connection to other small groups or individuals, can think up on their own a unifying labor strategy. This is used to create artificial division; one must be united ideologically before one can form the kind of organization that can establish the labor line, the kind of organization that can gather the ideas of the masses, synthesize them, and return them in propaganda on a country-wide scale. We indeed have very different ideas of leadership, very different ideas of epistemology, and very different ideas of principles. We do not discourage putting their theory to practice, we simply denounce using it to attack or divide others when their practice is so new, when it presents no concrete victories and grows from desperate little cook houses.
Ideology takes a back seat to nothing; ideological unity is a prerequisite, based upon ideological struggle. When there is a Basis of Unity, which is always ideological, then the struggle can unfold over this or that tactic. Even the question of a labor strategy rests upon unity around the most important questions: for example, there cannot be a unified understanding of contemporary unions and how to handle them if there is not a unified understanding of Maoism. Maoism (conception before application), is what must be struggled over first and foremost; there cannot be a bunch of different Maoisms (distinct conceptions) around one’s orientation toward bourgeois or “state” unions (applications); it is childish, but the intellectuals are stuck to their eight-legged essays, and they will defend them bitterly. NLP is not capable of setting the mass line for the entire movement, because even all together the entire movement lacks enough experience in hard class struggle alongside the proletariat. The movement’s fledgling attempts are mainly good and should be analyzed, but to spawn so many pages from such little experience is nothing but the petty posturing of arrogant little bubbles. Even if we were to agree in part or in whole with NLP’s positions on labor tactics, we would not treat this as the Basis of Maoist Unity.
We have already issued our agreement that the proletariat is the leading force and the base force of the revolution, that its struggles comprise the principle trench of combat, and a unified movement, not one of bitter sectarianism, is one which can grow to develop the mass line, to establish it through conferences and on the basis of the ideas of the masses where different applications can be discussed and divided in two. Who can claim to have accomplished all this? Is the ideology of the movement, as small as the movement is, really that consolidated, even among a given group? No, this is a ruse to deny the need to unite under Maoism. Maoism cannot mean one thing to one group and another thing to another, and it cannot consolidate itself on the basis of the social practice of a few small groups. The correct ideological footing, the glorious fruit of two-line struggle is necessary to settle practical questions.
The above position makes no denial of the need to answer the labor question, the women’s question, the youth question, etc., but simply argues that we must have unity in understanding of the ideology in order to do it, and that we do not use these questions to distract from the two-line struggle around Maoism, the ideology. What NLP refers to as “essential questions” are not presented as the line of demarcation between revisionism and Marxism, outlined in the five criteria of the ICL. Revolutionaries can and must find a Basis of Unity to earnestly begin struggling as comrades over differences in approach to labor organizing and other practical work. This is in fact a vital part of the process of growing.
However, to abuse one another over practical differences and not to desire to unite under one single ideology is a deviation; the big head at NLP cannot see this due to self-interest and sectarianism. There is a principle: if we can agree on Maoism, then we can grasp it better, we can use it better, and we can answer every question of practice better. For our part, we make no denial of the fact that The Worker, our comrades, and others would be better off working together with the RSGs, the RSU, NLP and others; likewise, they would be better off working with us. We will all be better off united under the single banner of Maoism, but this must be won through ideological two-line struggle.
Our argument is not to abandon practical struggle among the masses, to abandon one’s post in the fight, but to establish the correct line of demarcation between revolutionaries and revisionists, establish a basis of unity, and accomplish a leap in our practical work. What does the current situation in the World Proletarian Revolution require? Several hostile groups of “Maoists” who cannot work under the same flag? No, this is petty-bourgeois idiocy. The struggle in the US is in service to and part of the World Proletarian Revolution, which requires a single Communist Party to lead the struggles in each country; it requires that we impose Maoism as the commander and guide. We ask that instead of distorting the teachings of Chairman Gonzalo, the comrades at NLP take them seriously:
“What is unfolding in the world? What do we need? We need Maoism to be incarnated, and it is being incarnated, and by generating Communist Parties to drive and lead this new great wave of the world proletarian revolution that is coming.”
We need Maoism to be incarnated; this does not happen in the absence of Maoist unity, in the disparate practical empiricism and the lofty texts of small groups, but in generating the Communist Parties—in our situation, reconstituting our Party. This is what the World Proletarian Revolution, the International Communist Movement, and the International Communist League need us to do. This is what the proletariat of this country and the masses of the world need us to do and we will do it; we will overcome every cynic, every liquidationist, and every sectarian who denies our task.
We reiterate the points we have raised before, the ones NLP mainly refuse to struggle over, and this time we will quote these directly from the ICL. We affirm that this is what must must be struggled over to unite under Maoism:
“The current demarcation line between Marxism and revisionism consists in: 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 in each one’s own country; 3) acknowledging or not acknowledging the necessity to abolish 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.”
Why do we insist on struggling over these points before we struggle over whether or not the classification of “state union” is correct for our country? Because, without established unity on the ideological question, other questions will only be used to encourage splits, consolidate divisions, and weaken the entire movement. Without ideological unity, we cannot cherish our comrades and would end up in the NLP bog making splits over every disagreement. This is the path to revisionism.
Of the points listed, NLP has only just begun writing about point four, with their comments on reconstitution, which we think we should respond to. NLP claims our positions are contradictory; they are not. Take for example the NLP sorcery found on page 20 of their tirade against us:
“In one article they [The Worker] write that ‘the reconstitution effort must take place in the center of the concrete class struggles and not on their margins, specifically the places where proletarians are exploited, in the factories and warehouses, to consolidate around itself a core of class conscious workers who can be forged in struggle in order to carry out mass work’, that ‘labor struggles are the principal site of struggle for communists fighting for reconstitution and socialist revolution’, but in their criticism of us they write ‘the principle task is not bickering over the question of labor tactics but the reconstitution of the Communist Party’ and ‘the trade union question is not fundamental in the strategic sense.’”
Three things are conflated here by NLP’s quotations: the first is the principle of which class is the revolutionary class and the second is the main place in which they, the revolutionary class, struggle; Maoists should have an understanding of this. However this position is distorted when NLP counters it to a third thing: the question of orientation toward specific unions. We must unite on the first point in order to approach the second one. Orientation toward the existing unions is a practical question (application to the specific), while orientation toward the proletariat as the leading force is a question of principle (universal). We can struggle to unite on the question of the reconstitution of the Party of the proletariat, or we can struggle to divide over the question of tactics in labor struggles—two different questions combined by NLP into one.
Subject, site, and tactics are not all one homogeneous mass. It is dishonest to claim that because we hold the proletariat to be the revolutionary subject, and the proletarian workplace to be the principle theater of class struggle, that we are therefore contradicting ourselves when we insist that the trade union question is not the fundamental question in the strategic sense. What is fundamental in the strategic sense? Revolutionary violence, and it is the Party that leads the people’s war. By uniting under Maoism, in the process of fulfilling the principle task of reconstituting the Party, the Maoists can and will carry out two-line struggle over the trade union question and the Party itself will be able to develop (with two-line struggle) the correct line on this. NLP cannot establish the correct strategy and tactics for the complexity of the US as such a small group with only so much capability and experience, and to use disagreements with their long winded ill-formed positions as a demarcation of principles is as dishonest as the rest of their approach.
NLP further writes: “We wonder what Gonzalo would have said if told the agrarian question in Peru ‘is not fundamental in the strategic sense’ and defining a revolutionary position on it was ‘distracting’ from the process of reconstitution?” A flagrant and vile comparison here: the NLP lack even the most basic grasp of Chairman Gonzalo, and degenerate to a point where they refer to him so casually without the title of Chairman. The Worker is not denying, nor have we ever denied, that the proletariat as the revolutionary class is essential to the socialist revolution or that their struggles are the principal sites of class struggle, but we have insisted that, in the current subjective conditions, the question of labor tactics and assessment of the unions is not what matters the most right now—Maoism matters the most. This was at the core of establishing the agrarian question’s importance to Peru, and the Chairman organized the two-line struggle masterfully, not as a small group labor journal, but as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru and the leader of its Red Fraction. It was the Chairman who taught us to put the ideology first and we are following his teachings; NLP blatantly distorts him when it suits them, to hide erroneous positions behind something legitimate.
The poor reading comprehension of the polemicist shows itself again; read this:
“In one article they [The Worker] write: ‘The current stage of revolution in the US is the stage of reconstitution. Today this is characterized and specified as rectification, patient ideological struggle, and allowing revolutionary practice to speak. In this way, the leadership of the proletariat can emerge, consolidate, and become recognized’ but then elsewhere write ‘The principal task all through the stage of reconstitution, the task which guides all the other tasks, is the reconstitution of the Communist Party. We understand this as expressed now in two tasks: unite under Maoism and go to the deepest and most profound masses, the hardcore of the proletariat mainly.’”
Two positions taken over time which complement rather than contradict one another are highlighted by NLP as inconsistency from The Worker. What is required to rectify and demonstrate revolutionary practice among the masses? Maoism of course. What is meant by “patient ideological struggle”? Uniting under Maoism of course! It can be said a number of ways, but consistently; we hold that in order to take a step forward in the long difficult stage of reconstitution we must struggle to unite under Maoism, and all with the masses in class struggle. The Worker has been resolute and consistent in its position: stay among the masses, especially the proletariat, do not relent against the enemy (imperialism/revisionism/opportunism), and carry out ideological struggle and two-line struggle (unite under Maoism), all in the interests of reconstitution of the Communist Party.
The same trend continues on the next page of NLP’s eight-legged essay:
“Their longest article that serves an analysis of US society is entitled ‘Fundamentals of Communist Work in the Current Conditions’. In it we find the following contradiction regarding this ‘reserve force’ of intellectual workers: ‘Workers who do not create any value, those who work for Non Government Organizations [!], intellectual workers and so on, are not proletarians but as workers can find common ground and be united behind proletarian leadership’ while at the same time ‘The imperialist ruling class is the principal target of the socialist revolution, it is the true enemy of all other classes but nonetheless it converts some into its staunch allies, or handy tools in moments of crisis to secure its rule. This sector is often composed of intellectual laborers, academics, managers, expert professionals, religious officials, small-scale capitalists, the police apparatus, and agents of the old state, for example in the form of electioneering for one imperialist administrator or another’. So the intellectual workers are one of two key reserve forces of the proletarian revolution, but are also ‘staunch allies’ of the imperialist ruling class? In this same vein, their description of NGO workers as a key potential ally of the proletariat would be almost unbelievable if it wasn’t real: who do they think the ‘intellectual laborers, academics, managers, expert professionals’, ‘electioneers’ and ‘agents of the old state’ are? Are they blissfully unaware of fifty years of bourgeois governance in this country, where since the 1970s the administration and reach of the imperialist state has been modified and expanded through the vast domestic and international NGO-complex?”
To find hypocrisy and self-contradiction in The Worker, NLP has resorted to the denial of internal contradictions, unsurprisingly in the same manner with which they treat the union question. We understand that while the petty bourgeois as a class is an ally of the proletariat, it is a highly stratified class and sections of it can be turned into a staunch enemy of the proletariat. The students, intellectuals, and intellectual laborers are of the people, and mainly good; only with proletarian leadership (this means Party leadership, if NLP is still confused) can they consistently serve the revolution. As far as NGOs go, we do not blame the employees for their treachery, any more than we blame janitors in government buildings for the crimes of the old-state organized in those offices. A worker is not the board of directors of the NGO complex, which hires many honest intellectuals and distorts their work in imperialism’s interests. There is always an internal contradiction.
Revolutionaries must contend with reality, in rejection of Athusser-like revisionism which folds everything into the “Ideological State Apparatus” or “Repressive State Apparatus”; the reality that many employees of the demo-liberal apparatuses can and must be convinced of a better way—this applies to all those who entered on the basis of a genuine desire to help and they must be taught by the class to see things better. A university has the purpose of extending bourgeois rule, of justifying the mode of production with bourgeois ideology; however, plenty of professors (Chairman Gonzalo for instance) have correctly understood these as sites of class and ideological struggle. What is more, there are so many types of “Non Governmental Organizations” like clinics etc. which you find the masses and workers who have no material interest in defending imperialism. The NGOs, furthermore, were not provided as an example of class allies, but of workers who produce no value; we could have as well said non-profits but that is less precise. Specifying workers hired by NGOs which include office workers and various other employees as non-proletarians is equated to an alliance between revolutionaries and the directors of imperialist organizations by NLP in their dishonest tirade.
We have written on the topic of class allies and other topics in the depth that our social practice allows us to, not as the arbitrators of the correct line with connections to only a few, or even a few hundred, workplaces. Contrary to our approach is the NLP method of writing 30-page long documents on “labor strategy” based on the social practice and “line struggles” of small collectives; this is also applicable to their criticism of The Worker not providing a position on nationalities, etc. Again, the notion that such conclusions can be reached by small sects, boiling it down to a matter of whether we “recognize or not recognize the Black Belt thesis established by the Communist International’s Sixth Congress” is an idealist, rationalist error, similar to Avakianism. Furthermore, by framing it in this way, the way in which the criteria of the ICL are established to demarcate Marxism from revisionism, which are questions of universal truth, shows that NLP still does not grasp why the fundamental questions are fundamental. A position on nationalities or unions can only be correctly determined on the basis of applying Maoism to the US, and therefore unity around Maoism.
This is our central argument—the criteria demarcating revisionism and Marxism are fundamental and not disagreements within labor and national questions, because Maoism is the universal. It must serve as the basis for the particular.
The misconceptions of NLP become particularly apparent when they write: “Party reconstitution, people’s war, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, essential processes of scientific socialism like these cannot be applied in the abstract but must instead be defined in relation to the particular material problems and questions which affect a given particular national context.”
They are attempting to sound like a Marxist but fail—what does it mean that something “cannot be applied in the abstract?” This is total nonsense—application by definition means to take from the abstract to the concrete; they have taken arguing against a straw-man to the level of demagoguery. The Marxist theory of knowledge goes from particular (USA as imperialist country) to general (the basic criteria, i.e., what is universally true of imperialist countries today) to particular (application of the universal to the particular). And again, is it that we cease all practical work while carrying out two line struggle? No—as we mentioned above, where there is unity on these questions we can go deeper. The problem is that insofar as the unity around these questions is among relatively fewer people, our experience will be relatively shallower; insofar as we have unity on these questions with more people and revolutionaries of a higher quality, we can have relatively deeper experience. This is because the masses make history.
Unite Under Maoism is the central task, and at the same time we still carry out mass work (the dialectic that NLP cannot grasp when saying we are inconsistent about what the principal task is). Ironically, they say that we “remove the centrality of the masses and a concrete application of our universal ideology to a particular national context from the process of reconstitution” but in their sectarian emphasis of “concrete application” above unity under Maoism, they are the ones who are neglecting both the ideology and the role of the masses, believing that small groups of activists and little journals can do all sorts of things, like accomplishing “many tasks of re-organization” and answering the labor question of “absolute importance” through their narrow experiences.
We affirm that one must distinguish between Yenan and Sian, that is, one must clearly differentiate between the errors that take place in practical work (problems of application) from the errors of principle (problems of conception), separating Marxism from revisionism. This is what sectarianism generally and the sectarianism of NLP particularly cannot do; every one of their polemics against us and others fails to differentiate and confuses one for the other. No good comes of this bad method. The greatest problem with our movement’s historical development has been subjectivism, which is the root of sectarianism; we must correct this and boycott all its wares. The Worker and all honest comrades desire unity under Maoism with all revolutionary nuclei and intend to continue struggling for it.
Let us then struggle on the five points we have outlined here and elsewhere, not in the spirit of competition of rival capitalist bourgeoisie, but as siblings of the same class in its service, as part of and in service to the World Proletarian Revolution, carefully listening to the advice of our cherished comrades internationally, who know more than us due to their greater experience. This radical idea is the root of our differences with NLP, differences that result in different trajectories, in helping or hindering the process of reconstitution of the Communist Party.
