The Right Opportunist Headquarters (Liquidationist and Revisionist) in the US: a Nest of Snitches and Their Collaborators

Editorial Board

I. Introduction

The sullen babblers of the opportunist camp which we address in the following pages have been giving vent to emotion against us for some time. They rely on demagoguery in the place of theory and pornography in the place of politics; they seek to validate all slanders against us. They wail and moan and denounce us in the strictest terms as ultra-left Daltonites—slanders we take from them with pride. Today all the bluster of all their polemics rot like little word carcasses in their filthy graveyard mouths. We have watched quietly for a long time. We have waited for the situation to develop to more carefully analyze it. This stage has concluded, as the right-sectarian deviationists have plummeted headlong into their errors and converged to a single bleak point: they have completed their circling of the drain and entered the vile sewers of revisionism. We mark this moment with shame and brand them henceforth as the RIGHT OPPORTUNIST HEADQUARTERS IN THE US.

APPLY DECAPITATION TO THE RIGHT: SMASH THEM WITH A SINGLE FIST!

Introduction to the errors

The rightist line presented by the various organizations (PDC, RSU, NLOC) supporting the websites Class Partisan, The-Masses, New Labor Press, and others in this network represents the most advanced form of revisionism in the US today. It is the most advanced because it shamefacedly hides behind Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and traffics with the thought of Chairman Gonzalo.

All things have a process, and the process of this rat network is a process of circling the drain for quite a long time before finally and inevitably entering the sewers of revisionism. Revisionism is not an epithet which we cast at any object of disapproval, but a charge of claiming new conditions to revise the basic principles of Marxism—a charge which must be proven. It is as much an error to investigate and not to speak as it is to speak without investigation, and it is worse still to refuse to investigate just so one does not have to speak.

For over a year we have chosen to remain publicly restrained, to allow things to develop, and for three years have exhausted every avenue by which we could attempt to struggle for unity with those whom at first we insisted were comrades who had simply made increasingly extreme sectarian deviations. It is now time to make a thorough presentation of how their right opportunist line is structured and why we call them liquidationists and revisionists.

After the split in the Maoist movement in the US in 2022, a degenerative fragmenting took place; in short, the splitters split among themselves. This is due to the fact that the agents provocateurs and snitches which engineered the split managed at first to recruit a few sincere elements. It is the latter who would begin to take a left wing role as the former degenerated into open liquidationists and anti-communists. Their agenda and plan should have been clear for all to see, but there was still the influence of the historic rightists who refused then and now to formally denounce Maoism. Things had to develop, and, as they always do, divide into two.

The various splitters and groups caught in the middle could not manage the split in the interests of their factions because the purpose was ultimately fragmentation. No faction maintained the consistent class perspective required to unite the forces under a single just and correct leadership and political line. There is complexity here and our purpose is to only admonish the right, so it goes beyond this to parse the nuance; nonetheless, this is the tempest in which the rightist line is structured, in which its process of development unfolds in material social practice. It is this practice and history which is the departure point instead of simple abstraction of their political views.

To understand the basic features of any liquidationists, be they inside-out or politically degenerate, one must start with the operations of the ruling class upon revolutionary movements. It has been documented enough elsewhere, blue leaks, Tribune of the People, local bourgeois newspapers etc., that the Maoist movement was receiving a considerable degree of state repression spanning from 2016-2020. This repression included the open use of reactionary violence and legal pressure, but the underpinnings and main day to day operations of class enemy was psychological.

The central aim of the old-state’s psychological operations is to discredit leadership, to separate and isolate them; this is the same things its prisons are designed to do physically. Reaction always seeks to divide the leaders from the militants and the militants from the masses, and mainly to annihilate leadership. This should be understood as the natural response to any effective organizing under revolutionary or even truly progressive banners and its fury is most concentrated against communists in formation.

Thus, lies and hoaxes are rigged up as part of the campaign. These start most often with the police departments on the local and federal level, and it looks like some riot cop whispering information into the ear of a yellow journalist, one so willing to be the mouthpiece of reaction. From here the various revisionists chime in to confirm the bourgeois slanders and libels. This makes it look better when the revolutionary is dragged into court, and the prosecution can weave together a more fantastical tail of terror and “high control groups”, and portray anyone they like as a fanatical worshiper of Chairman Mao and existential threat to their community. This is the pageantry around the military campaigns to get the Maoists uprooted from the trenches that had been established.

In this process one begins to see the machinations at work: how revisionism, liquidation, and reaction form joint action to oppose reconstitution of the Communist Party. There are, of course, those careerist elements in our own movement who will take any opportunity to advance themselves and their small section of the work at the expense of the class and its attempts to regenerate a vanguard. These opportunists become the willing accomplices of the old-state. First they make excuses for snitching, they justify it with stupid rhetoric, get a few snitch collaborators to attack the left, then struggle to form a head. They maneuver, double deal, dazzle with 8 legged essays, and generate a dozen or more websites to make their small pond appear an ocean. But we know them. We know what they are about and we intend to prove it.

The rightists have now had two or three years to fully elaborate and structure their opportunist line. They have demonstrated a gross impotence in action coupled with counter-revolutionary activity guided by their backward political line; on top of all this, guiding it, is their twisting of theory, their complex and developed rationalizations for Liquidationism, turning Maoism into its opposite. They represent not a deviation, but a consolidation of right wing elements whose main purpose is to unite against the still dispersed Left, using snitching to gain a foothold in mass movements.

The snitches and their collaborators are at the center of the right opportunists, who now have formed a right opportunist line; they rely on sectionalism, that is, small group thinking, and a false unity which is not sustained on principles. These two conditions are rife due to the historical problems of the communist movement in the US and they need to be understood as the basic issues of subjectivism in study and pragmatism in practice, which can both lead to deviations and ultimately to opportunism and revisionism.

What is a right opportunist line? A right opportunist line is a revisionist line. It never comes about fully formed, but begins as isolated rightist attitudes, ideas, approaches, and even some isolated rightist positions. By the correct handling of two-line struggle, an organization can apply the policy of decapitation and prevent the emergence of a right opportunist line. One must see revisionism as the main danger and guard against it. The utmost importance has to be placed on the ideological question. Those who deny and debase the ideological question and the ideological struggle are the first line of defense for the forming revisionism; those who seek to hide the ideology from the masses are already making an attack. This is how it goes.

It is not enough to look at the rightists within a social movement; one must also look at the tendency toward an increase in right-wing bourgeois ideas in this society generally, and the way in which they are expressed as traditional Christian family values on the one hand and the extreme individualism of postmodernism, and its false progression on the other. These external conditions activate internal contradictions, and the ideological struggle must be developed. We must consider the role of revisionism itself in this country and how it partners with the state repression. We must understand that this country is the world’s sole-hegemonic imperialist superpower, and that in the process of securing and maintaining its hegemony it has produced the prototypes of both modern revisionism (Browder) and new revisionism (Avakian). Beyond all this there is the role of revisionism on the world scale, and its ability to bribe elements here to carry out its objectives. Only a lot of experience in the class struggle can form the kind of organizations which can raise our guard against these massive influences.

The right opportunist line requires its own headquarters, its own organs, and its own programs. It is a revisionist center, which promotes liquidationism and snitching in concealed forms; it is the development of subjectivism to an extreme degree and the most developed comprehensive revisionism. So we insist that it is not the same thing as the deviations and mistakes in practice which take place from mistaken understandings in the process of any movement, but a consolidation of the worst mistakes, with revisionists at the helm. In this regard, the Liquidationists Inside Out (LIO) are far worse than the Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationists of 2022 who formally abandoned Marxism for liberalism and postmodernism. The LIO, which has generated a head for itself, has become the worst sort of traitors, a right opportunist line that is both revisionist and liquidationist.

There are two main types of liquidationists in the United States: the first which portrays communism as so utterly evil that they put Orwell to shame, and the second which seeks to affirm everything which the first says as long as its against one of their enemies. The first wants to negate communism by eliminating its discipline and the second wants to negate leadership to the benefit of their own. Both are anti-communist, both lack a consistent proletarian stand, both are right liquidationist and reactionary, and both are enemies of the World Proletarian Revolution.

The basic pattern of mistakes in our movement’s history have been developed by these traitors and raised to an ideological principle. It is rooted in the development of two-line struggle and the mistakes in handling it, mistakes which allowed this very real enemy of Maoism to fester and grow, to intrigue and maneuver, and to expel its best and recruit the worst. It is not our position that every recruit is bad, but rather that any organization with revisionism in command is a revisionist organization.

Subjectivism in study and sectarianism in organizational approach are the main features of the new right opportunism, but the specific political ascendancy is also rooted in a right deviation going back at least a decade. It is forged from the charity and pamphlet programs of the right which reject confronting class enemies, in the pacifist, legalist line of accumulating forces, the line which posits that identity is determined by communication and desire, the line that fascism is ascending in the US, the line which insists that every ethnic minority is a “nation,” the backward and Avakianite understanding of the constant applicability of cultural revolution regardless of conditions, the incorrect appraisals of history and general rejection of dialectics.

Most of these erroneous positions are developed from the trends in bourgeois academia and the cultural ideological decomposition of postmodernism. The left which struggled against these in the movement falsely believed them to be overcome, proving that if the two-line struggle is not handled correctly the right will maneuver. It must be decapitated.

The arguments for being clandestine ideologically, that is, to hide the ideology from the masses, are declarations of their own empty heads bereft of thought. Exposing the revisionism requires examining their main texts and main ideas and exposing its class character, however concealed. After all, the snitches and their collaborators attempt to dazzle inexperienced readers while bombarding them with an 8 legged essay; they make up for in quantity what they lack in quality. Revisionism is often like this. To make matters worse, many of the long-winded texts are full of pseudo-erudite quackery and invented terms, giving the essays the appearance that someone was prompting Artificial Intelligence then sprucing up the excrement it created.

Their writing style is full of filler phrases, formulaic and repetitive structures, over-explanations, lacking personality and nuance, not to mention the factual hallucinations found in articles written by AI. This is also evident when they cite an article to support one of their deranged positions and the cited article has nothing in it which supports said claim. A careful study of their works indicates that the writers are clueless, creating an absolute trash heap of documents, making it a daunting task to find their core arguments.

We should likewise be upfront with the purpose of this document. It is not our intention to unite with these enemies, these snitches or their collaborators, but to deliver a blow and make a demarcation against a headquarters of right opportunism.

The opportunists will cry foul; this much is to be expected. They will shout to the heavens that they are not a communist formation, not a “pre-party” organization or “cadre organization” as they have protested in the past. This denial is proof of their opportunism, because they issue it only to escape accountability and ideological struggle, to avoid being taken to task and exposed as the bourgeois political tricksters they are.

Opportunists are all alike—they have no consistent principles and they maneuver on what is most suitable to them at the moment. Hence they are elusive, often vague, aloof or amorphous, and will always try to conceal their revisionism of Marxism as a misunderstanding. Underneath this is the issue of liquidationism, the denial of the successes and victories in history, an attempt to make splits permanent, a rejection of struggles for unity and ideological struggle, the use of expulsion rather than the two-line struggle, etc. The right opportunists, again with their creative mania, invent slurs, and then recklessly label everyone a “Daltonite” (Maoist), and even those with sharp ideological disagreements who run afoul of the right get this label. The use of this term, which has never been clearly defined, is only to promote splits, justify expulsions, and strangle two line struggle—all lacking an ideological justification.

They do snitching and police work, they claim to be the victims of intrigue when it is they who operate by plot. They found new organizations without principled ideological demarcation with those they split from; they rely on gossip, slanders, and dirty fighting. The right opportunists seek to be recognized as legitimate organizations yet have no clear process, no ascendancy. To conceal this they strike a pose, in some instances claiming to be great veterans of the struggle, when, in fact, most of their camp were the liquidators of and defectors from Tribune of the People Support Committees. Wanting such immediate recognition as the only “left” is opportunism; it is also un-serious. They fail to clearly demarcate the ideology and prove why a single unified movement is unacceptable to them; this is a splittist, bourgeois political, ideological, and organizational line. In a word, it is revisionist.

They cannot offer proof that their actions are justified or necessary because no proof exists. Everything they do is an effort to supplant and replace, not to unite and develop, and to replace they will first fail miserably in their work, and second attack anyone they can to assure their work fails too. This is closely related to the extreme arrogance in their writing, presentations, and oral arguments in debate. Their conception of a political line is that the line is absolute and that it is born in the brain of clever individuals, that a small group of self-styled geniuses can ponder and on their computers in the US answer all major problems of the revolution not only here but in the world, for example with their call for a Red International of Labor Unions, separated from the process of the reconstitution of the Communist International under Maoism. This is why they do not need to struggle with others to produce the “left” line; they can simply articulate it. This is something they have learned from Bob Avakian.

Consistently they fail to prove their merit, yet speak with self assured and arrogant authority. They present themselves as legitimate revolutionary organizations and they are not. They undermine the struggle for reconstitution by 1) splitting, 2) preserving splits, and, worst of all, 3) denying the role of the working masses in reconstitution of their own Party, promoting it as a “closed process.”

In the spirit of sectarianism they make a “united front” among the dubious and sinister journals they generate and numerous “organizations.” After having accused The Worker of “linking” their organizations to cry victim of a sinister plot, they cannot stop “linking” themselves in a contrived “united front.” In reality they reject joint actions and attempt to oppose even parallel actions with the rest of the movement; this opposition is at times so extreme that they lash out at others for supporting their activity, for example, crying that support for students facing state repression is chauvinist and, demanding that coverage of their events be taken down from news websites! Their only idea for overcoming the dispersal of forces is to strike a pose that they are the only force, that they are a force at all, and hope to scare everyone else into inaction. It is the same end goal as the liquidationists of 2022.

Internally, and on the internet via direct messages and on Signal they distribute the mugshots of activists they do not like, while their agents actively distribute anti-communist ravings and confirm and preserve all the slander and libel of the Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationists, not because they have proof that it is true, but because it suits their organizational agenda. This is their intrigue within the mass movement. Their activists in multiple cities have carried out a snitch campaign to red-tag activists, they have made attempts to get workers fired for labor organizing and students expelled for anti-imperialist organizing; in every case, the impotence of the right opportunists results in them pandering to the boss, the university administration, or the old-state for help; this is the essence of their approach to combating their enemies among left-wing activism generally. All that the concealed liquidators do is an improved version of the activity of the open liquidators, all the while the former remains in close contact with the latter.

It is not simply a question, then, of trying to conceal reconstitution from the masses or to deny their role in carrying it out, but of making use of a condition of liberalism to use active elements among the masses to make attacks on reconstitution. They want to turn the masses on the Maoists, like every vile revisionist before them. They do not want to be guided by Maoism or teach it to the masses; they want to simply come up with their own distinct brand of New Revisionism.

In this task, which they treat as the main one, it is necessary to put off ideological struggle because this is where they are the most exposed. They can traffic with quotations but cannot present a deep understanding; at best they can trick some others who are not well read into being impressed, and in place of ideological struggle they must develop vulgarized criticism. The profanity of the PDRL is baked into their line and Basis of Unity. After all, these freaks insist that there was no split in the movement, and that the “majority” simply left to form “better” organizations. This is right opportunism.

They seek to preserve all the major rightist deviations of the past and consolidate them into an ideological, political, and organizational line. They oppose dialectics for idealism and view line as contrived rather than the result of process. Their main beliefs, “state unions” and “the national question,” are not honest positions based in an understanding of dialectical materialism, but a subjectivist idealist perspective, and these “theses” are used specifically to sow as much division as possible. These positions are poorly articulated and seldom make any sense, because they are not designed to be rigorous or consistent; rather, they are designed for sectarian purposes of splitting the reconstitution effort.

Every line produced by the right opportunists is a reversal. It dons a revolutionary-looking mask to hide a deeply reactionary face. They are right liquidation because everything they do is against Maoist unity and hence against reconstitution of the Communist Party under the sole command and guide of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism with the contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo.

Introduction to the root of the errors by providing some preliminary background information

The current Right Opportunist Headquarters grows from the split; everything which serves to preserve the split is reactionary and everything which owes its existence to the split must correct itself and rectify through the struggle for Maoist unity upholding the slogan Learn from Chairman Gonzalo, Unite under Maoism!

The antecedents of the Right Opportunist Headquarters emerge before the split in the US Maoist movement of 2022. They are found in the charity without confronting class enemies line presented by Serve The People in 2015, in the Butlerite line represented by Stonewall Militant Front’s New Years Statement of 2018, the entirety of the renegade “Jiminy Krix” blog, and the Red Guards Austin “Proletarian Feminism” speech of early 2018. Elements of these deviations are preserved in the current formations which, impulsed by the split, circled the drain for a long time before entering the sewers of revisionism.

The role of the right in the split can be divided into two: those who provoked it, and those who sought to seize the opportunity it provided them. These two types worked, and still work, in close contact. The first type sought to make maximum chaos and sow distrust by spreading falsehoods and partial truths through gossip outside of meetings to blow everything up. The second type smelled a profit. While the initial instigators dissipated from public and political life, their closest conspirators took over. At first, they all still formally claimed “Maoism.” This is to deepen and spread their wreckerism more thoroughly.

From this spawned the poorly named “Dazibao” Mega fileshare dump, a snitch campaign which labeled mainly state targeted and repressed activists, including political prisoners, as clandestine communist leaders. This was spread far and wide, even to activists who started within days or weeks of the split, and to other unknown people. The attempt was to liquidate the work with a Menshevik criteria of merging the levels, and this was argued most viciously by the right who said it was necessary. In this, honest and decent comrades were sucked in, the right conducted blackmail and threats to force people along when necessary, just the same as right opportunists elsewhere in the world.

From this liquidationist initiative formed the “National Working Group” which merged levels, merged organizations, and rejected compartmentalizing and other security precautions, preferring to use Signal and Jitsi for meetings, which are methods placing comrades at real risk. The deviations of postmodernism and a low ideological level especially among newer activists was directly useful to serving the agenda of the liquidationists because they were more readily dazzled and overwhelmed by the slanders, scandal-mongering, and the general tide of Menshevism.

Anarchism and disorganization reigned within the “National Working Group”. The first liquidationists were already handing things over to their pupils, even though they had supposedly succeeded in isolating the revolutionaries—who they labeled a “clique”—they still decided to liquidate every organism they now controlled; this is because they could not run them, because they stole passwords, money and etc., but were not actually responsible. The goal was to liquidate everything anyway.

Still, among the “National Working Group” there were genuine activists, people who love the masses, the workers, and revolution. These argued to continue the work among the people and to rectify the problems of the movement through study and practice. On the other hand, there was the do nothing, end everything, everything is bad line. These two opposing views determined the outcome and emerge again and again later.

Despite its posture, “National Working Group” could not make a real appraisal of the past, a task they set themselves. It was not an investigative body based in Marxism, but a catch-all for gossip and rumor, much of which was invented in the office of state and federal prosecutors, which lacked legal or factual merit and proved unable to secure convictions.

What is more, the parts of the movement attacked by liquidationists were never once struggled with, and no hearings or anything similar had been given them. This is counter to Marxism and can do nothing but produce opportunism and the suppression of and avoidance of two-line struggle. It can only lead to general decay and splits. Even if your opponents are as bad as you say, completely evil without virtue, you have to prove it; you have to call them to face an organizational verdict. Anything else will fail.

Instead, the anarchist and liberal methods of call-out culture went up against those who just wanted to continue fighting in the trenches they were in. While the first is obviously reactionary liquidationist, the second is also a deviation, because it favors local forces above all else and goes in for the mistake of sectionalism, which is rooted in the problem of subjectivism.

By April 26, 2022, the problems were already arising, the “acting facilitator of NWG” Earnest/Wyatt/Austin/Temperance (who would later go on to found the snitch website “Maoist Cult Exposed”) was already trying to snuff out attempts at organizing emanating from a few different cities. The complaints were typical of this liberal, and due to “workload.”

Within the “National Working Group” there developed several positions: the first was to not continue organizing among the masses, while beyond this there were those who wished to continue on a better theoretical basis. Those in collusion with the first, particularly the head of “Austin Working Group,” began to promote a position we can call practicalism, which characterized the need to understand the basic theories as “(frankly) detached, overly intellectual meanderings.” This is situated in the usual defeatist slop complaining that, “The slow pace which we (the NWG) has [sic] been proceeding nationally has been demoralizing to virtually all comrades I represent.” The “Austin Working Group” was comprised of the most right-wing elements in that city and headed by a well known right deviationist. This individual would spew nonsense as the head of “Austin Revolutionary Study Group” and now leads food distributions, public study groups, and all public activities of “People’s Defense Austin,” part of the “People’s Defense Committee.”

The bad ideas from this head were already well established and he saw an opening to take some control, malcontent with work among the local Tribune of the People Support Committee and having been kept from leading due to a track record of opportunism. Such opportunism is clear in the letter from Austin to the “NWG” quoted above, as well as in their meeting notes. Read this:

“[We] will now humbly proceed to begin mass work. we now wish for all comrades who are interested in this organizing to join us, regardless of their class position.”

The pleonastic wording deployed to pander, coupled with false confessions of humility, is the trade mark of this right opportunist, more, the open negation of class position as a criterion for organizing is what this character has always been about. The document continues, opposing the use of democratic centralism and raising the old social democratic promotion of legalist International Workers Day events to take place as domesticated picnics in a park.

After opposing democratic centralism, it is proposed that “those who want to coordinate, will coordinate. Those who don’t want to coordinate won’t.” While on the surface this seems like a rather milquetoast truism, lurking below it is another ruse to circumvent ideological struggle and prevent the two-line struggle from developing. The right was well aware that, even then, if people began investigating and struggling over Maoism, their opportunism would be exposed.

The right in “NWG” promoted a voluntaristic coordination for “mass work” among the willing without ideological demarcation and two-line struggle, and raised the question “what mass work will we take up nationally” calling this “the single most important question.” Keep in mind the level of amateurism promoted here: there has been no class analysis made, and in fact these are the same people who insist on disregarding class position entirely and only uniting around a willingness to organize. In essence this is another way of promoting doing nothing, or doing anything without regard to which class it serves, without regard for the proletariat, Maoism, or strategic importance.

Having denied the movement the opportunity to conduct ideological struggle and form a basis of unity, the right opportunists then raised the lack of unity as the reason to avoid democratic centralism: “most comrades in Austin would refuse to be bound by it [democratic centralism], and I suspect that is true for many comrades around the country. The fact is, as Ernest has said, we are not even receiving *responses* from all quarters shows how limited our potential is for national unity in action.”

It is obvious that the future founders of “Maoist Cult Exposed” and the right opportunists generally are carrying out the same war on two fronts. Throughout all the documents we have obtained and examined, the opportunist head in Austin has been running water for the Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationists, specifically the heads of the anti-communist website “Maoist Cult Exposed,” “Eve” and “Earnest,” which means a development in the private police work and launching the plan to do it publicly. As the latter became associated with postmodernism and open anti-communism, the former continues his work in one side of the Maoist movement; their collaboration never stops.

From here meetings notes all indicate that the “NWG” was losing members; in Austin alone they complained of being reduced to less than half of their consistent attendees. The “NWG” is falling apart under the very contradictions that gave birth to it. Splitting, fracturing, and maneuvering.

What would come next was the website “Maoist Cult Exposed” which was initiated by those who were ready to denounce communism publicly. The website is based on unverified and unverifiable testimony, taking a mix of second or third hand information and combining it with fiction to produce a dirty police work cache of anti-communism. Much of the information is derived from the oral and written arguments of the old state, already documented revisionist arguments, etc. Beyond this, it is libel gathered from the first police work effort of the “NWG” called “Dazibao Project” which collected personal information and photos of activists for circulation. All of this is police work, yet the opportunists in question peddled it as “a great flourishing of democracy.”

According to the “NWG” documents we have examined, there were no more than 25 actual members of this group, mainly based in Austin, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. It is clear that among these there was no agreements reached on either the private or public use of police work, let alone agreement on who was a “revisionist” or what even constituted “revisionism.” Those wanting to define and identify revisionism based on Marxist criteria and who also were not on board with the police work would either leave the “NWG” or later be expelled from shared work by the right opportunists.

Enter the Revolutionary Study Groups

No official document exists which details the founding of the so-called Revolutionary Study Groups except for the work of fiction produced by the PDRL. Based on document research and interviews with former members, we understand them to be the result of the degeneration of the “NWG” splitting into two basic camps: those who wanted to fight under the banner of Maoism in some form or fashion, or at least who claimed to, and those who sought to oppose it outright. So it had a positive and negative aspect, while baked into the formation of the RSGs was an incomplete and incorrect understanding of liquidationism.

It is important here to understand that a left would emerge in RSG and that some of the right opportunists from “NWG” already existed in its inception, and, furthermore, that the right maintained contact with the elements who became open anti-communists, contributing to their police work website several times. The police work was not ended by the RSGs, nor was it ever formally denounced; in fact, it continued within them due to the incorrect understanding of liquidationism and the inability to have a unified leadership. The right opportunist head in Austin contributed to releasing information on Palestine solidarity activists to “Maoist Cult Exposed”, and eventually the right in RSG would leak its internal documents to the same police work website and they would be made public.

It is not our purpose here to present a detailed account of RSG; for one thing, we would need to overcome the fragmentation of information caused by dispersal, and, for another, the organization itself was eclectic and fairly decentralized. It is important for us however to account for the maneuvers of the right and understand the general outline of the process in which today’s right opportunist headquarters centralized. Due to the fact that the RSGs, which no longer exist, will be incapable of analyzing their internal process, one must learn about the two-line struggle within it by studying whatever documents are available. This has been our method.

RSG produced and published publicly only one unified statement; most of its articles were internal (this does not mean much since there was little unity to begin with). This public statement is titled “Statement on the Opportunist Former Leadership of the US Maoist Movement” and it is a liquidationist document which was a concession between the emerging left and the established right of the RSG. This document was contentious and failed to unify any aspects of the dispersed movement.

The manner in which the document was released and the place online where it was released already expose a lot of opportunism. Arguments over the difficulties of releasing statements extended back to the immediate aftermath of the split, with some raising concerns about how such statements direct people away from the work but not toward anything because they lacked ideological unity. For lack of their own website, the RSG hijacked the old and defunct website of Red Guards Austin. This work was carried out by the only one capable of doing it, the head of right opportunism in Austin, who is by now in charge of Austin RSG and still publishing ignorant and revisionist positions from other blogs and social media websites.

“Statement on the Opportunist Former Leadership,” on one hand, attempted to identify some real errors in the interest of resuming work among the people on a better foundation, to learn from past mistakes to avoid making them; this is the only positive aspect. On the other hand, the majority of the document presents liquidationist and anti-communist views from the right without any self-criticism on the part of the RSG. So while particularly there was a right and an emerging left in contention with it in the RSG, more generally the RSG statement indicates a feeble unity between centrists and rightists against the left which opposed the statement or was attacked by it. To learn from this miserable polemic, and because the right opportunists today are the development of what was wrong with this polemic, it must be at least briefly examined.

By early 2023, RSG rushes out its sole unified statement which begins with a dishonest disclaimer suggesting they have no affiliation with Red Guards Austin; it just so happens that they have the passwords to its website which stopped functioning about five years before this. This opportunism indicates that there was not real unity—RSG had not developed its own website because it lacked centralism and unity to do so.

The statement proceeds to play stupid, pretending to be unable to understand a statement titled “Statement on the Situation of the Maoists in the USA” published on the website Communist International, then proceeds to polemicize this statement. They refer to the very clear statement on Communist International as “vague,” and write: “unfortunately a plausible interpretation is that it directly endorses opportunists…”

This is what they are referring to in the “Statement On the Situation of the Maoists in the USA”: “On the international level, the CR-CPUSA continues to be the only recognized organization that represents the struggle for reconstitution of the Communist Party in the United States.” This is extremely clear; there is no other “plausible interpretation.”

In the RSG statement, however, every problem is thrown at the feet of the only internationally recognized organization, and it is cast as “opportunist former leadership,” yet opportunism is not defined, nor is it substantiated other than with more baseless individual testimony. The RSG writes a check they will not live long enough to cash when they promise their readers that “A full evaluation of and synthesis of the problems of opportunism and revisionism is a pending task.” This repulsive statement has been sitting around for three years at this point and they have still not got around to their pending task. Why? because they lack the theoretical foundation to produce it, because their allegations are mainly baseless, and because they still lack ideological unity and solidity.

“For the sake of brevity,” they write, “we will call them opportunists.” This is nothing but opportunism itself; to label anyone an opportunist to save time is opportunism. To call someone an opportunist, one must take the time first to define opportunism and second to prove it, as this polemic is sure to teach the authors of this statement, or at least the half that still believes in it.

The statement makes a great many claims but does not back them up with citation of documents, concrete positions, or anything other than the postmodern criterion of lived experience. Among these are completely fabricated stories going back to the PDRL about “leaving a vocally loyal cadre in a position of leadership” without a shred of evidence that the individual in question was a cadre, or that he was left in any position. This is opportunism because to refute it, one would need to go one the record with internal information of a clandestine organization. The very construction of the allegation is a combination well designed entrapment and is believing gossip without investigation. The burden of proof is on the accuser, not the accused, and the RSG made no effort to prove anything.

The statement wraps up with a hilarious rejection of established Maoist positions on rectification and transformation when they write, “for the foreseeable future, the only unity possible with them is based on their complete withdrawal from political life…” To be clear, unity is always based on struggle, never political self-liquidation. Learning from past mistakes to avoid making new ones, self-criticism, and rectification takes place only within in political life, and never in withdrawal from it. The very idea of “unity” presented by the RSG was a rejection of basic Maoism, was thinly veiled liquidationism.

The main thing about this opportunist and liquidationist statement is that it failed to defend the main victories of the past ten years, the recognition of reconstitution as the principal task. Contrary to this, they write “reconstitution of the communist party of the USA is an important task,” then call for unity under “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” when in the US the ideological Basis of Unity is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism with the contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo.

It would be easy enough if our job were nothing more than eviscerating this foolhardy statement, but the fact is the RSG was only briefly in agreement with it; there were some, the right, who really do believe the nonsense about “complete withdrawal from political life”—as if anyone will agree to something that has not been confirmed in battle—but an increasing number, who would come to comprise the left, really never believed this at all. How could they? The RSG would divide soon enough around several fault lines, areas where ideological unity was weak, where basic communist norms were not established, and around all practical questions of orientation to the masses, and not least of all on the question of uniting under Maoism, an increasingly pressing question. As the smoke began to clear on the split, the question of what to make of the split began splitting the forces impulsed by the split.

The fact that this statement has not been repudiated and no self-criticism has been produced regarding it only establishes clearly that the RSGs were born and died ideologically anemic, with weak leadership and deficient in principles; this is the result of the opportunism of their founding, the exact type of opportunism that allows organizations to form without a clear ideological critique, exist for a while, pass attacks, dissolve, and reform without ever managing the ideological demarcations necessary to justify their existence in the first place. This holds true both for the left and the right of the RSGs. All descendant organizations should be held accountable, because it is still opportunism to change one’s clothes from bloody and dirty ones to clean ones if one pretends to be a new person with no past experience.

Machinations and observations pertaining to the right of RSG

Due to the incomplete and incorrect understanding of liquidationism, to the fact that the RSGs were born from splittism and with opportunism baked into it, and to the right’s previous establishment, new right-wing forms would develop and converge. Ostensibly, the basis of unity was “Maoists” who wished to continue “serving reconstitution” and so there was the overwhelmingly positive aspect of keeping forces together and attempts to develop the two-line struggle, and of course the negative aspect of having no coherent definition of Maoism, the opportunism of trying to start fresh free of the actual process leading to the existence of Maoism in this country. The RSGs did not understand or unite on Maoism. They did not have a rational understanding of reconstitution or its process, let alone the process of the previous sequence.

As far as the history of the previous sequence was concerned, the period between 2013-2022, from the beginning the right opportunists, and mainly the rightist head in Austin, told bedtime stories to the youth inexperienced enough to believe them. They could not tell the difference between revisionists and revolutionaries; they had “good faith” in the accounts of revisionists and refused to hear the perspective of the revolutionaries at all.

The right of RSG, at least early on, was desperate to hold onto its position in the re-outfitted movement, especially as it was becoming clear that the personalities and line for which he had been the loyal servant for over a year was unraveling to expose the nastiest and most cynical anti-communism. Thus, this character had no other option but to formally switch sides while maintaining his alliance with the PDRL, becoming their agent in the RSGs. From this seed sprouts the weed of pure negationism, that is, those who want to continue “Maoist” activity but negate the previous sequence. This does not emerge fully formed; to form this line they had to begin with defending parts of the previous sequence and make it a vulgar matter of personality instead of struggling ideologically. This is how the right opportunists developed their line and consolidated their forces in the RSGs.

New rightists meet the old

The publication of the “Statement on the Situation of the Maoists in the USA” sparked quite the debate among the RSGs and the new right would at first present itself as the left defending the statement. This position is particularly defined in the article “Our Friends the Liquidators” written by the head of the RSG in Washington DC. This document is confusing—it does not use quotation marks when quoting from other documents, and it reads almost manic, in the exact style of the blog “Weight of the Masses,” a style which appears all over the right opportunist organs today, including the penchant for quoting Brecht.

“Our Friends” is likely intended to be a sarcastic title, but like the “Opportunist Former Leadership” statement it confuses the question of friends and enemies in the same manner. It is aimed at the open liquidationists who retaliated with furious polemic against the “Statement on the Situation of the Maoists in the USA”, a just and correct statement.

“Our Friends” takes the accounts of liquidationists regarding the Committee as more or less correct, even taking them at their word that they were former “members.” This blind trust in liars completely damages anything good in the effort to combat them. But the opportunism is developed here: confirm the slander where it suits you personally and oppose the slanderer to seem saintly! This has become the basis for the right opportunist line which is, essentially, “everything the anti-communists say about the crimes of the cult is true, and we are the real communists!” This treats liquidationism as a matter of personality and does not get into the essence of the ideology. How could the claims of the anti-communists be so correct, when nothing they have done or said elsewhere is correct? No one could believe this, and only an opportunist would peddle it!

“Our Friends” begins promoting the false narrative of the PDRL, that liquidationism is complete, that there is nothing left, a line later unfurled in “On Renegades and Revolutionaries” by the so-called “New Labor Press,” a major architect of the new right opportunism. The author correctly challenges the absurd idea that the “abusers” were “expelled,” which is claimed in the document he is confronting; however, he takes this in the wrong direction: “the clique still holds onto the name of the CR.” The label “the clique” was unfurled without qualification by the PDRL and the head of right opportunism in Austin. It was and is used to attack any concept of centralism; this was already made clear in the “NWG.” It is preserved by this opportunist because it is useful to him, not because it is correct.

The document contains several correct positions and shows some insight but even these are very mechanical. It would require too many words to parse out the many ideological mistakes, so we must only focus on proving our main point about this document being a seed of right opportunism. Affirming the lies of those who formed into the PDRL, the new opportunism writes: “there were no structures which two-line struggles can be waged through, which should exist in a genuine embryo of the headquarters of the class; on the other hand, … members of the CR had no faith in the ideology, in the political organization of the class, and perhaps in the proletariat itself.”

One could only come up with such nonsense if one believed the liquidationists at face-value, that their account of their enemies are accurate. In fact, within a short time from this, the document “Our Main Weaknesses in the Three Fields,” the self-criticism of the CPUSA(CR), would become public, throwing the narrative which the new opportunism was constructing into question, and of course these same rightists would produce increasingly unhinged polemics as a result.

At this time the budding opportunists still formally opposed police work, and “Our Friends” does exactly that; this would not change until further consolidation among dispersed right opportunists within the RSGs was accomplished. The author of “Our Friends” still trafficked at this time with the prestige earned by the Maoists of the previous sequence, blending the liquidationist narratives with the sentiment that things had actually been accomplished: “… the CR was an organization with its own internal organizational life, and more importantly it continued the movement, which would go on and popularize the ideology of the class and serve as the basis for the formation of the majority of the new wave of genuine progressives and revolutionaries.”

These words are true enough. However, the author of this document uses it to transition to what we consider essential to the new right opportunist position: “but this is not the case anymore, because the movement as a whole was liquidated, and the country is at the critical juncture is [sic] of whether it would lose all its conscious forces.”

This is almost exactly the stupid position of “NLP” and their “Renegades and Revolutionaries” and we recall that while saying this out of one side of their mouth, the other side of their mouth was denying the dispersal of forces and claiming RSG represented the most unified movement ever. Liars. We will conclude our examination of this rightist line in formation with the following illustrative quotation from “Our Friends”:

“…the reality is that the ‘Committee to Liquidate,’ the National Working Group our friends had set up after they dissolved the distinction between the embryo of the organized headquarters and the mass organizations, was liquidated by them, and it produced no fruit: no statements, no summation, nor regional meetings.”

We can conclude that while the title “Our Friends” is meant to be ironic, the dirty work of the liquidationists and their actual liquidation is seen by the new right opportunists as a great opening for them to move into the “vacancy” and hence they are from the inception indebted to their comrades, the Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationists.

From here on, this camp will continue relying on the PDRL as a resource to do their dirty work, and as they consolidate they will apply improved tactics of the PDRL to make more vacancies they can fill; this is how they become the snitches they are today.

More background on how the new and old right came together can be found in the March 2024 newsletter of the RSGs; we will not directly quote from these but will simply indicate that the perspective on liquidationism from the DC-RSG is the same as what we have examined above. This same issue contains a lengthy piece in which the right opportunism radiating from the head of rightism in Austin is elaborated—basically an effort to preserve the main forms of liquidationism and deviations of the “NWG” inside of the RSGs.

In this context, the head of RSG-DC was instrumental in fomenting splits and pitting comrades against one another around the country. It was this agent who revived unsubstantiated claims made by the PDRL, embellishing them further, who directed lackeys in carrying out police work, red tagging, and provoking drama. This individual has been active since about 2016, not in any high level of work but on the margins and inconsistently. He has a penchant for bragging and intrigue.

It was this individual who participated in planning of casual study of the “Three Fields” with non-RSG organizations, only to proclaim that this study—which never even took place—was a plot to split the RSGs. Not only was this individual included in the discussion and planning of the study, but he was also part of using this innocent study as fodder for the NLP’s baseless attacks. It is duplicitous and splittist opportunism all down the line. More and more the right deviationist in DC would unite with the right opportunist head in Austin. The outline of the right opportunist headquarters develops. It must also be said that any time a person asks for proof of the PDRL claims, the head of the new opportunism in DC sends them to talk to the head of old opportunism in Austin.

The RSGs suffered from the main problem of reverse construction, that is, a local-heavy focus and a lack of central planning. This instills a form of sectionalism in the life of any organization. Sectionalism is a harmful deviation; it can provide a lot of maneuverability for the right. This problem can be seen in the earliest RSG reports from Austin which push for a polemic against the historic left, in conditions which there is no central leadership and no basis of organizational unity or shared definition of Maoism uniting the RSGs.

RSG reversed the question of construction because it was opportune to do so. Its positive aspect of keeping at their posts and involved with the masses also had this negative aspect, its seeing construction of the front as principal. “RSG is a principally above-ground mass organization. While RSG serves the movement for the reconstitution of the Communist Party USA, it is not a pre-party formation.” So what is it articulated to do? “RSG will train organizers in Maoism and class struggle and synthesize lessons of mass work through summations and reports. We can use RSG to develop fraternal relations with other mass organizations, work inside other mass organizations, or form new mass organizations.”

As we can see, even the left of the RSG had a right wing conception of the construction of the front, one which puts “mass work” before the question of the Party and is not constructed concentrically from the center out; in other words, they do not consider that the Party constructs the front, but the reverse, that the front generates the Party. To be clear, a mainly decentralized form of organization, with a low bar for entry, cannot be comprised of professional revolutionaries (Menshevism) and this type of organization being tasked with generating organisms leads to furtherance of the consolidation of a right wing, a right wing which has the trait of allowing others to create an opening for them to wiggle into.

Having no real centralism and struggling to get it in reverse can only foment more splitting, more expulsion, and more maneuvers from the right. A basic dividing line is formed between those who can start to see and correct the mistakes and those who want to let them play out for position. In brief, the organizations could only develop an identity crisis, the contention between those who sought to preserve and deepen the guidance of Maoism and those who saw Maoism as a hindrance or danger inappropriate for a “mass organization.” The development of a correct understanding of the need for red organizations among the masses takes place, but still not on firm ideological footing.

Meanwhile, the right in Austin liquidates itself into “fractional” work among the social democrat organization DSA and into identarian activism at city hall, per the PDRL-leaked RSG newsletters. More blatant is their call for the formation of a “united front” with the open anti-communists of the PDRL.

Issue 6 of the RSG Newsletter includes some good illustrations of opportunism. When providing sources for some completely unfounded statements, the website of the snitches and Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationists is labeled “an anti-communist source, however very comprehensive resource on the everything the CR-CPUSA did.” Only idiots or Trotskyites can think like this, because anti-communists cannot provide honest, let alone comprehensive, resources on any attempts at Party reconstitution. This is the entire essence of anti-communism: it is a system of ideas and actions designed to undermine proletarian struggles. Imagine arguing, “a racist source but a comprehensive resource on what (insert ethnic group here) have done.”

A few pages later there is a proposal from one of the rightists which is no less ludicrous. It reads “I think it’s necessary that we publicly announce our line on the liquidationists, and how we’re different from them. We need to show the world that the rebellion against the old leadership was justified, and that the liquidationist people don’t represent the red line that made that rebellion possible.”

First, it is basic knowledge of anyone, even the liquidationists in question, that they began the so-called “rebellion,” that is, the misinformation, black mail, and slander campaigns that provoked splits in the movement. It is well understood that all information on the so-called “crimes” has only one source: their camp. This is why the RSG newsletter was unable to cite other sources; there are not any. Specifically, these attacks emanated from a clique of postmodernists in Pittsburgh, people the RSG split from in “NWG.”

Second, a “red line” cannot simply be proclaimed, and the right opportunists, no matter where they reside, cannot actually ideologically demarcate between the so-called “red line” and the so-called line of the “opportunist former leadership”; all these things remain unqualified slurs tossed around like wedding rice. They are empty and only used to cow untrained and undisciplined young activists while confirming the preexisting bias serving as the basis of unity among the broader opportunist camp. On the contrary, personal attack and pathetic complaints about basic organizing expectations are abundant from these people; they have all the time in the world to devote to this and that is really all they have come up with years latter. Over and over they talked of the pending task of exposing our revisionism but have never managed it! This is opportunism.

The proposal goes on to expose that they cannot define or defend the so-called “red line” because there is not one, at least not one that unites anyone in the RSGs: “for this to happen… we need unity on a couple things… how we view the liquidationists… how we feel about the specifics of the collapse.” This perfectly expresses the backward logic and reversed arguments of the right opportunists: do not seek truth from the facts, but propose a position then gather up fragments which might convince others of it. This is not how one arrives at the truth. It is a backwards bourgeois method. Postmodernists consider that there is no “totalizing truth,” that truth is a diffused narrative constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed through discourse, with each “experience” as valid as the next. Ultimate subjectivism. This is how the right opportunists have always operated because they do not have Maoist ideology to clear the muck.

It is a postmodern criterion that one must believe anyone claiming “abuse” regardless of their circumstances or motive or class position. This is a sacred principle for them, and to actually investigate would be to show suspicion, i.e., to disbelieve the “survivors” of “abuse;” therefore the position is taken, arbitrarily, that the communists who have served the movement for ten years are actually a cultic pack of psychotic abusive slavers, and we have to argue backward from here, even though the people who raised these slanders have stopped pretending to be communists and have openly denounced the ideology and embraced snitching!

While the old-state and most of the new opportunists are well aware that postmodern criteria are useful tools to dismantle social movements and formations in the class struggle, there are enough activists anywhere who still think like postmodernists. This is part of the problem emanating from the universities of the imperialist countries and mainly the US. Basing themselves on postmodern criteria, the right is able to maneuver, because the emergent left is still too amateur, still suffering from an ideological, political, and organizational hypoplasia. This is especially worsened and compounded by the rejection of not only the movement’s alleged leaders, but the principles of leadership along with them.

The opportunist arguments, always based on common ground or unity with liquidationists, is essentially the construction of a false dichotomy between “abusers” and “liquidators.” Remarkably, the understanding of both is mired with such intellectual poverty and a lazy rejection of Maoism that it never manages to raise the basic principles of seeking truth from the facts, of taking up the duty to speak only upon completing investigation, of synthesis following analysis, etc. The heavy lifting on these things is always pushed off to an ever-escaping horizon which the liquidationists of all stripes keep indicating, going on four years, but never arrive at.

On the one hand, there has been no real investigation, let alone a hearing of any of the so-called “abusers,” “cultists,” or “clique.” There have been invented stories pushed second or third hand and the people behind it have exposed themselves as class enemies. On the other hand the prospects of actually investigating such a landfill of accusations far surpasses the frail organizational ability and discipline or commitment of any of the many dispersed nuclei which have already split several times over less rigorous demands. Hence it is daunting; it is always easier to be an opportunist than a sincere worker for the proletarian cause.

The right opportunists in the RSGs were coalescing, developing a line. After acknowledging that the agents of the PDRL conducted police work against revolutionaries internationally, the right opportunist proposal asks “but does this mean they are enemies who should be combated, or confused members of the masses we should ignore? And how do we feel about working with them in keeping an eye on and exposing the abusers?” In other words, how do we unite with snitches and rats and become snitches and rats ourselves?

It is no wonder that “The Masses” would later run police work articles against comrades in India, while these same right opportunists would leak RSG information to the PDRL. The attempts to unite the movement with snitch work in NWG failed, so some snitches stuck around to try to unite RSG to snitch work. They did not fail in this; they simply expelled their left, united with some other rats, and changed their name to “People’s Defense Committee.”

The Campaign to Unite under Maoism develops, making the right panic and dive headlong into sectarianism

Subjectivism in study and sectarianism in organizational relations are two ill winds from which the Maoist movement in the US and the struggle to reconstitute the CP have always suffered. We will argue that this is the root of a deviation among the right which, when they nourished it long enough, led to revisionism.

The Campaign Learn from Chairman Gonzalo, Unite Under Maoism began accomplishing its goals, bite by bite, and this thrust the Right into a panic. They felt threatened and knew they were guilty of police work or collaboration with snitches. To secure their own position they had to double down on the rumors affirming the slanders invented by the PDRL. In their upside-down world view, arguments are made from the conclusion backward, and hence logic is destroyed for opportunism. It is therefore the fault of “the abusers” that the “liquidators” hate Maoism so much; it has nothing to do with class position. Thus a false contradiction has to be raised.

Anyone committed enough to a conclusion can find premises if they lack logic, scruples, or principles. This is not what is meant by seeking truth from the facts; it is a kind of sectarian subjectivism found all over the documents of revisionism from Khrushchev’s attacks on comrade Stalin to Avakian’s “critiques” of third world struggles of the Comintern. Argument which assume what they intend to prove, in terms of politics, are nothing but subjectivism and sectarianism. Conclusions must not be the premise; since the opportunist method is to treat them as such, they end up spewing useless tautology. We are “abusers” because we are “abusers.” No serious political organization with more than ten people, even bourgeois ones, can remain intact for long on this basis, and their attempts to feed on the remains of their own comrades will see their new recruits eat them alive sooner or later. This is what happens when one injects postmodernism.

The subjectivism in study leads quickly to sectarianism, when one can only see one side of the problem one succumbs rather easily to argument from incredulity and a situation develops in which conclusions are based on an inability to imagine any other scenario. They must be guilty because I cannot imagine them being innocent. On the other hand, the centrists who, albeit often accidentally, help the right opportunists in every way fall for another type of one-sidedness, one in which moderation invariably provides the answer, in which a compromise between the two perspectives, the two classes, etc. is always the most just and correct outcome. This is not how dialectics work and dialectical materialism is the only thing one can apply to understand and solve a problem.

When it was revolutionary, even bourgeois democracy forwarded the principle of innocents until proven guilty. Postmodernism reverses this in the most reactionary way possible, the burden of proof is placed upon the accused to spare the accuser of scrutiny and “emotional labor.” This is dressed up in progressive drag but beneath it is old feudal ideas that crop up once again as the bourgeois ideology decomposes and turns on itself out of desperation, negating its liberal virtues with either fascism or its junk sibling postmodernism.

Ancient Roman legal codes, biblical traditions, etc. which first placed the burden of proof on the accuser were revolutionary in their times, and these were overturned and brought back again. In the 13^th century the Pope and of course the Magna Carta of 1215 all represented development spurred forward by contradictions between the classes and within the ruling class. To reverse the question of who has the burden of proof is to negate this historic process, this material process of human knowledge and class struggle for an abstract idealist criteria, one which corresponds to the most primitive and reactionary individualism. In the decomposed imperialist society formal rights are guaranteed to all, but in reality these rights are never extended to accused communists, like the class they represent and the lowest strata of this class particularly. Here the postmodernists simply formalize the essence of the imperialist legal system against their political opponents: we are guilty unless we can prove ourselves innocent, and trying to defend oneself at all is more indication of the guilt. This is what all allegations of “abusers” and “harboring abusers” are based on, and this backwardness serves reaction, revisionism, and imperialism.

Maoist unity requires seeking truth from the facts; it requires ideological two-line struggle, and in this opportunists and revisionists are exposed, so it is in their best (class) interests to prevent them from taking place, to censure and expel. Marxism is like a light which, when switched on, causes the roaches to scatter.

II. The Question of Clandestine and Legal Work

How the Right Opportunist Headquarters uses false clandestinity to hide Maoism from the masses

On May 1^st of 2018, the right opportunist head in Austin, Texas, decimated that year’s march by declaring that state repression was so severe that the members of “mass organizations” generated in service of the reconstitution effort of the class could not be notified about the march—even those who had worked under red banners for years. Instead, for “safety,” only his trusted immediate network could be told. Meeting notes indicate that about 70 people participated in the planning of the march under other leaders, but only about 30 came to the march under this one right opportunist head.

This is a practical example of the content of the right opportunist view in gestation. Today it has grown into the official political line of “Class Partisan” and others. It is expressed in the idea that “reconstitution is a closed process.”

On the surface, the new Right Opportunist HQ appears to promote Leninist Party principles and they hide behind proclamations intending to do just that, but the reality is that their principles are those diametrically opposed to Lenin’s, the ones Lenin himself dubbed aptly “Liquidationism inside out.” Keeping in mind the center of their splinter movement seeks to exist absent from the actual movement, defending police work, etc. LIO therefore only fully expressed their organizational line. The organizational line is the clearest example of their right opportunism so we start here and we get a picture of the ideological and political line from understanding it.

Their organic line is almost identical to the God Seekers and God Builders of Lenin’s time. They serve liquidation essentially and deny it formally; they call revolutionaries reactionaries; they call reactionaries revolutionaries; they have embodied and in fact taken further our movement’s worst mistakes. The main problem is their position that they alone determine what is left and what is right, not accepting any disagreement, while at the same time arguing that Maoism cannot guide mass organizations and that reconstitution cannot involve the masses. At the same time, and quite fittingly, their organisms promote Castroism in public. Their organs carry out extreme sectarianism and police work. All of this is predicated on the bankrupt notion that, since the Communist Party is a clandestine organization, the entire process of its reconstitution—and not simply its leading core—must be “a closed process.”

People’s war, insurrection, and even riots or manifestations of proletarian violence (which are rich in this country’s history of strikes, etc.) are all also illegal, yet without exception involve the masses directly. The very concept of people’s war is one in which the Party leads but the masses carry it out. Mass work, if it is to be given a materialist definition, is not simple abstract work among the masses by anyone, but specifically the mobilization of the masses to carry out the Party’s revolutionary program. This is all negated by the broken backward logic of the Right Opportunist HQ through their posing of the “closed process”.

We, in the struggle for reconstitution, are the most resolute supporters of those who have raised the three flags: reconstitution of the CP, people’s war, and the role of Chairman Gonzalo. It has been an established norm that reconstitution requires an organization built for this purpose explicitly and that this must be clandestine; this is the general staff of the reconstitution effort comprised of its most professional vanguard elements, but it is not without connection to the masses nor can it be.

The clandestine work always is strengthened by the legal work, and mass work itself cannot be placed in a pigeon hole of above ground legalism. In short, the clandestine forces of the most advanced section must mobilize the proletarian masses to carry out the revolutionary program of reconstitution. This is what we think and what the Right Opportunists deny—and they deny in order to liquidate.

In an article titled “Basics for Revolutionaries in Formation: Reconstitution,” which appears on “Partisan,” the rightists articulate their revisionism pretty clearly. In this they explicitly state that “reconstitution must be a closed process,” and of course, “If you say your organization is ‘closed’, but its… leadership, membership, and structures are known by non-members, you are not calling for or participating in a Party reconstitution process.”

Remember these are the same people who defended the merging of levels, the police work against those labeled as leaders by the Feds and liquidationists, etc. This is not a coincidence; their method is to support the release of private and personal information then use this exposure to deem the exposed nullified. The ideological problem is that they cannot understand how an organization relates to an entire process, and hence they have nothing left but to present the organization as the fruit of intellect and to deny that the Party is in reality generated by the class.

The opportunist method here is to invent categories, to make up labels to slap on their counterparts which they do not study or understand. With this kind of reckless labeling they can dismiss all efforts and organizations without dividing them into two. Through taking this one dimensional approach they essentially dismiss reconstitution. This extends to treating bi-lateral meetings and ideological struggle between distinct organizations as a “honey pot” for the state.

“Why don’t as many revolutionary activists as possible get in the same room and hammer things out?” the opportunists rhetorically ask. They answer their own question: “The immediate problem with this approach is that it is based on an unacceptable hypothesis. Specifically, that the State’s security forces and [!] repressive apparatus are simply not paying attention to the revolutionary movement, and are either not capable of or are not willing to actively [!] infiltrate, suppress, compromise or surveil US revolutionaries-in-formation [!]”

This passage is indicative of their maneuvering. Their odd wordiness meant to conceal utterly bankrupt ideas—ideas based on finding evidence from the conclusion rather than the conclusion from the evidence.

First, revolutionaries in history have always come together to hammer out their differences; they have had to accomplish this in all conditions, even those far more repressive than the US today. A clandestine conference or even a Party Congress is precisely as many revolutionaries as possible coming together to hammer out their differences. These are conducted best under harsh conditions, where they mark indelible victories.

Second, what is possible is a question of quantity, and under some conditions it is possible to assemble many and under other conditions fewer. Nothing here assumes the state is disinterested in preventing it.

What are security forces if not a repressive apparatus? “Partisan” simply has to be wordy to strike a pose; there is no such thing as passive state infiltration. By raising the state here as a real tiger, one which will tear us all apart, the “Partisan” puts forward an ultimately right opportunist position: do not hammer out your differences because it is impossible to plan doing this securely; do not hold conventions and do not unite forces; the state is all-powerful. They want to scare people away.

The opportunists are not even consistent with the labels they use or create. They go from addressing what they qualify as “revolutionary activists” to what they specify “revolutionaries-in-formation.” They misuse both terms. If someone is a revolutionary, they likely have gained some experience in secrecy; this is all utterly meaningless to “Partisan” because they consider identity not the expression of a contradiction, but the result of self-identification—because they are idealists. Their logic goes: one is a revolutionary activist because one identifies as such; their narrative must not be questioned. Of course, quality is not examined.

“Partisan” and the rest of those comprising the right opportunist camp and Right Opportunist HQ have so much subjectivism hardwired into their thinking that, with almost perfect record, they cannot help but deny that things turn into their opposites. Read this: “closed bodies can never be formed correctly out of open bodies.” This metaphysical denial of transformation is also historically illiterate. It denies the dialectic between open work and closed work, between legal work and illegal work, between above ground work and below ground work and so on and so on.

To confront this vulgar claim we simply need to express that reality is not mechanical, that open bodies can form closed bodies, that the united front provides a support base for the army of a new type. Whether a body is open or not depends on its concrete conditions. In some conditions there should be legal, open, loose organizations; “mass organizations” of this kind are sometimes needed. In other conditions the mass organizations are clandestine out of necessity. In all cases these organizations gather the masses, who can be developed for the more strict organizations, and it is universally true that this is how mass organizations turn into non-mass organizations. Everything turns into its opposite. Again the opportunists invent a label, invent a false argument for their opponents and then make a mess of solving it. All this to avoid talking to others, to preserve their sect and liquidate the efforts to reconstitute the Party.

The opportunists again maneuver from discussing “revolutionary activists” to discussing “random spontaneous sects.” Somehow the “revolutionary activists” got demoted; no quality was discussed, no question of their ideological line or process or anything material. They are simply now going to declare them “spontaneous sects” without bothering to define what that is. They are still hoping their audience is too stupid to imagine that a real convention of revolutionaries could be held with careful planning, and that they will swallow the heavy dose of spy mania. This is Liquidationism Inside-out.

If the argument were simply: do not hold conventions with politically unreliable people who are not proven revolutionaries, and do not hold conventions in public, then we would agree. There is certainly plenty of Menshevik thinking among the active elements in this country. There is no shortage of legalist types, and right opportunism is far more common than errors of adventurism. This, however, is not the argument of “Partisan” and co.

Subjectivism asserts itself once more when the opportunists attempt to traffic with the established criticisms of “building” the Party through “base building.” They do so in a superficial manner with the same kind of negation; it lacks an understanding of how the universal transforms into the particular and into the singular and back again. To keep it simple, while the front should be constructed from the center out, there cannot exist anything at all in the center unless it came from some pre-existing front in class struggle. This unintentionally exposes one of the problems of the Right Opportunists we are examining: the false idea that they come from nowhere, that they can construct correct political lines from nowhere, without ideologically justifying their distinct existence from the rest, and that they can become an arbitrary center and from this construct a movement. Their approach and rationalization alike are liquidationist.

Perhaps their opportunism and distortions are clearest when they accuse others of treating “study as primary.” The opportunists invent a straw-man: “The study is primary trend thinks that when approaching the question of reconstitution of a new [!] Communist Party in the current period, reading the works of historic communist leaders is more important than leading and organizing the struggles of our class.” This argument is shit.

We must assert that one simply cannot “lead” or organize proletarian struggles without grasping the ideology of the proletariat, or else the ideology of another class, mainly the bourgeoisie, is the basis for this “leadership” and organization. So yes, we must be clear, the Right Opportunist HQ does not understand Marxism and its foray into “leading and organizing the struggles of the class” are a sham and bad joke, precisely because it practices revisionism and not Marxism. While studying and learning the classics will certainly help the untrained learn Marxism in order to apply it and not something else, it will not help the Right Opportunist HQ. This is because it can read Marxism and memorize it, but if it does not eliminate its revisionism it can never apprehend Marxism without distortion and it certainly cannot apply it. If you do not know Marxism, if you have never read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Gonzalo, it is more important for you to get some understanding than it is for you to try to lead the class.

There is a dialectic, however. There is the existing class struggle which proletarians are forced into; we organize out of necessity, and there we lead, but this cannot get beyond trade union consciousness unless we prioritize reading the “works of historic communist leaders.” Since the opportunists consider this a negation of principle, and since we read some Lenin before attempting to lead, let us quote:

“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.”

“The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e, the conviction that it is necessary to combine into unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation etc.”

In certain conditions, then, without relinquishing ones place among the masses in class struggle, reading the works of historic communist leaders really is more important than organizing the masses. Without this, you will not even approach the basic principles of socialism, and your leadership and organizing is not going to contribute to reconstitution. It should not be controversial to assert that those who lack an understanding of Marxism should read Marxism, so they apply it, and this is where they will really learn it, and where they will once again be compelled to read the classics. This repeats in a dialectical spiral.

Contrary to this, the Right Opportunists raise phony empiricist criteria. They assert that practice and theory are not a unity of opposites transforming into one another, with one turning from the principal to the secondary aspect. They are petty subjectivists who only see the side of things they want to look at, whichever little part of the contradiction suits them at that moment. Hence they assume for now that practice is always and invariably the principal aspect, and therefore it is more important to do something than to know something. Just go out and organize and worry about learning Marxism later. This kind of argument is only made by those who do not want anyone to learn Marxism.

The subjectivism of “Partisan” and company here and elsewhere is not a matter of ignorance, it is a conscious act, a choice to break the basic relationship between theory and practice in order to preserve their small group and offer a pretense of support for their decision to split and remain separated.

Lenin gave three reasons why theory can take on utmost importance, and chief among these is when the party is only in the process of forming. This is not to suggest that theory is the main thing for all people at all times, but to compel the confused followers of the opportunist trend to read some classics and see what is wrong with their formations. The subjectivism is a choice, a matter of line. It is a rejection of Marxist philosophy that leads them into a sectarian position organizationally.

The same one sided view is constructed on the question of “failure.” They write: “the study is primary trend is most prominent in those who have failed in their own practice in class struggle.” As it should be! If you have made practical failures, this precisely the time when you should learn why through studying the problems of your practice with Marxism. This is the only way in which failure turns into success. Once you have made some mistakes and returned to study, once again practice will take on the main aspect. Then you fight, and when you fail theory becomes the main thing, then you learn more from what you did and you fight again. This way, what you do, your practice, is based on a better understanding and you are not groping in the dark.

When we talk of theory and the need for theoretical foundations to turn practical failures into success we are of course talking about the three component parts of Marxism, Marxist philosophy, Marxist political economy, and scientific socialism, and how the development of all these gives rise to a leap of Marxism as a whole, as a unity on a higher level, and how theory and practice give rise to this. Without theory you cannot understand the importance of practice.

This is in accordance with the Marxist theory of knowledge and how Chairman Mao developed it with a profound dialectical understanding.

The Marxist theory of knowledge has two leaps at its center that make up a law: from practice to knowledge and from knowledge to practice, with knowledge to practice being its main one. This is what the Right Opportunists deny, and how they distort the relationship between the two and attack the ideology. It is the ideology that demarcates; that allows one to see their antics for the revisionism it is, and they must prevent this revelation.

From their revisionist distortions they issue three verdicts. These must be exposed one by one.

“1. In contrast to the conventionist trend, the process to reconstitute the Communist Party must either be closed, or it is not a true reconstitution process.”

This verdict is liquidationism inside-out. It is why we call them LIO. It distorts the question of process and confuses it for the question of the most strict organization; these things are related, but distinct.

The entire process of reconstitution is inextricably linked to the process of the class. The proletariat is generated by capitalism, and it is forced to generate for itself a political party distinct from and opposed to the political parties of the other classes. This is a basic principle of Marx and Engels. This process has transpired; the proletariat of the US generated its Party, and the observed date for this is May 1, 1919. The Communist Party was liquidated in 1944, making the principal task for all revolutionaries—that is, all who serve the class interests of the proletariat—the reconstitution of the Communist Party.

This means the class process continues and the process of reconstitution begins. In this, the masses of workers have to be mobilized; they carry it out, because they are the force of history. The leaders of this must emerge and construct the correct instruments corresponding to the stages within this process. And this is the question of organization, the organization may lead the process but it is not, we repeat, it is not the process.

The claims of a “closed process” are nothing but ugly, revisionist denials of the role of the class in the reconstitution, a breaking of the dialectic between the class and its organizations—and its most strict organization at the center. The proletariat, and starting with at least a number of proletarians, must be made conscious of the need for the Party; the need to reconstitute the Communist Party must be raised. This flag has been raised, and the opportunists try to lower it with their “closed process.” The opportunism is clear to see in the fact that the champions of “closed process” are in fact publishing on a public website their own views on reconstitution rather than talking about it with only their select few.

“2. In contrast to the base-building trend, the process to reconstitute the Communist Party must be lead from a national center outward, not from the local circles or mass organizations inward.”

This verdict is opportunist; it seeks to conceal their own process and to break the dialectic between the universal and particular. It denies the fact that, for a center to form, it has to form from practical dispersed activity which already happened. Remember, these are the very cretins who attempt to help anti-communists liquidate the center so they can propose a counterfeit one. The front must be constructed from the center, but that center itself has antecedents in the spontaneous class struggle. This verdict is to deny that their own hand in liquidationism has led to dispersal, it is designed to deny two-line struggle through correct channels to overcome this dispersal and repair the damages of dispersal. It is a slipshod effort to justify their position that they are the only “Left,” a position which undermines history and strikes a pose, a position which pretends it is based on correct ideological demarcations when it is not. It is a sectarian verdict, a liquidationist verdict.

“3. In contrast to the study-is-primary trend, the process to reconstitute the Communist Party must take revolutionary practice among the US multinational proletariat and its allies as its primary criteria for truth and verification, and not the study of Marxist classics, which is an important but secondary criteria.”

This is an economist verdict.

First, if the entire process is closed, if it does not include the masses but only the Maoists, then it is not a process of reconstitution but an organization for reconstitution.

Second, it cannot make sense of whether its practice is acceptable or not without first grasping theory; it cannot become a Maoist organization without studying Maoism in the first place. Hence while practice proves the correctness of a theory, it is impossible without applying a theory, and when this theory is applied and transformed into practice it must be transformed into theory again to adjust and correct itself. At the First Military School of the Communist Party of Peru there were not guns and marching drills; there were books. This is depicted masterfully in the painting produced to commemorate it. This verdict is opportunist because it breaks the dialectic between knowledge and practice, because it denies that the leap from knowledge to practice is the main one.

Paraphrasing Lenin, when a proletarian organization, or even movement, is facing times of crisis, disintegration, and collapse, the opportunist wing will become out-and-out liquidationist, or become ridden with liquidationists. It is bound to have a lot of petty bourgeois followers who cannot apprehend revolutionary theory and tactics and are least capable of holding to principles in times of crisis. These elements are the most likely to carry opportunism to its extreme. From here the liquidationists make the same argument from different directions. There are also those who have no will to fight the liquidators and those with no strength to win against them if they tried. Over time, the latter migrate toward revolutionary reconstitution struggles, and the former two continue deepening their approach to liquidation.

Liquidators are a type of revisionist, who, regardless of the variety, tend to reject ideological struggle over principle and allow differences to block common efforts. Lenin assures us that there is nothing wrong with the intake of petty bourgeois elements, provided they can be controlled by the proletarian elements. Petty bourgeois elements will eventually struggle to wrest control of the organisms. In times of advance they seldom accomplish this, but in times of retreat, times where petty bourgeois ideology advances pessimism, they are far more potent in their work to split and liquidate the organisms.

One can promote liquidationism by insisting that the state is so good we can work within it, embrace all its legal institutions as our own, embrace legalism and so on. One can promote liquidationism by insisting that the objective conditions do not exist for a Party and that mass work is the key, and that the principal task is to constitute the united front which will generate the Party some day. One can promote liquidationism by insisting that the military must be constructed and the Party comes after the war. And, of course, one can promote liquidationism by insisting that the state is so brutal that one must hide communism entirely, not only in the sense of the organic composition of the strictest part of its movement, but ideologically and in politics as well, and this is liquidationism inside out.

Let it be recalled that it was these comrades who split from the movement at every opportunity while the movement did everything possible to persuade against this. This went on for two or three years after the split of 2022. It is no longer appropriate to waste time trying to convince the opportunists that unity under Maoism is necessary to accomplish our goals. The movement for reconstitution can only progress if it defeats liquidationism, and this must be done bite by bite. Liquidationism does not only mean the direct liquidationism of the PDRL, but also the liquidationism from the other direction represented by the Right Opportunist HQ.

Our accusations of opportunism, liquidationism, and revisionism against this rotten network are not based on personal disagreements, or the question of application, that is to say, a question of practical mistakes. It is based on their rejection of the ideology of the international proletariat, on their well-established rejections of principle, on their efforts to distort and revise the revolutionary content of Maoism by claiming new conditions. It is an indictment of their efforts to conduct or benefit from police work, to liquidate the center, to replace it with a fake one, to deny the role of the masses in carrying out the revolutionary program for reconstitution, and to provoke and preserve splits. This is why we insist that today they represent the most developed form of revisionism, the more dangerous type of revisionism, because they do all this by trafficking with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Revisionism is the main danger; it must be combated implacably and inseparably from reaction and imperialism.

Practice Marxism, not revisionism; be honest and above board, do not conspire or intrigue; unite, do not split. Do not put short term small group interests above those of the class. Learn from Chairman Gonzalo, unite under Maoism, make Maoism incarnate, and liquidate the liquidators. This is what we think.

How the right panders and acts like little Avakians

“We use the term ‘revolutionaries-in-formation’ in our title for the series because of the reality that most comrades nationally are not yet fully formed revolutionaries of our class, but still must be forged as such through education, collective action, and class struggle.”

What exactly is a “fully formed revolutionary”? And where have they ever existed in the world? Is there a time, can there be a point, where a revolutionary is done forming? Tempering and forging, at least in the revolutionary sense, are actually unending processes, reiterative in nature. Here our poor rightists pander while striking a pose. They issue useless formula to make sleight of hand. Since they are not “fully formed,” they need not be held to established norms nor established levels of revolutionary discipline. But to further “form.” To be clear, all revolutionaries are revolutionaries in formation, just as all Communists are communists in formation; we do not and cannot stop developing. This is the dialectical principle which must be expressed—it is not to indicate that you must become “fully formed” and no longer be “in formation.”

It might first seem pedantic to point this out, but since it is how our Right Opportunists begin their Basics on “Materialism and Dialectics,” and since it negates a proper dialectical understanding, we would be mistaken not to point it out.

“Proletarian philosophy,” the flunkies assure us, “is not bourgeois philosophy, it is not supposed to be overly abstract, and does not exist just to make people feel smart about themselves.” If this is truly what these bastards think about bourgeois philosophy or any philosophical system before it, then they cannot begin to understand Marxist philosophy either. Philosophy is always and invariably a weapon, a weapon for one class against the others. Its purpose is the first thing one must learn, and never has it been an overly abstract method of self-assurance. What self assurance there certainly is in bourgeois philosophy, all that affirms its miserable existence, is and can only be constructed around preserving exploitation. This is very important. Without understanding this, one cannot study philosophy: studying philosophy is a form of combat.

With the Right Opportunist HQ, philosophy is met with snark. While pretending to proclaim philosophy’s importance, its role is undermined—first by assuming that the philosophy of the exploiters is intended to make them feel smart and not to justify and facilitate exploitation by furnishing its general world view, and then by indicating that “we encourage readers, newer and older comrades alike, to place a special importance on studying and grasping Marxist philosophy, in particular the two-concepts of materialism and dialectics.” Marxist philosophy is dialectical materialism, so they are saying study Marxist philosophy, in particular Marxist philosophy. Tautology.

Dialectical materialism is not just of “special importance;” it is the foundation of Marxism. In other words, its application to the other two component parts make Marxism, so it is foundational. After having demoted the foundation of Marxism to “special importance”, the next step for our little deviants is to deny definitions and peddle confusion.

“Materialism, on the basic level,” they write, “is the recognition that the world is real and our concepts are reflections of this objectively existing world.” In fact, this is not at odds with many schools of idealist philosophy, which also hold the world and matter to be real and our ideas to be reflective of it. However, idealism, unlike materialism posits that the world was invented by the idea of god, that all mater comes from idea and not the inverse. The correct way to express materialism is that matter comes first, and all ideas are nothing more than the reflection of matter, not simply our ideas as human beings. The lukewarm definitions of the right are bigger than the eye of a needle—camels and rich men have no problem passing though them.

Objective existence is part of materialism, but it is not the main part; the main part is the primacy of matter, and of course the understanding of its intrinsic movement.

The Right Opportunists come up with an equally anemic definition of idealism: “the view that ideas are the engine of history and that our concepts exist independently of the world…” Whether or not “our” ideas exist independently is debated among idealist philosophers, and historiography has little to nothing to do with it. Idealism is based on the notion that the idea, that is, not necessarily the idea of an individual or “our ideas” as a species or people, etc. come before, are independent of and actually determine matter and its process. The right, embarking upon its “basics,” cannot do so as materialists, because this requires actually considering the process of development of materialism and idealism, and how they form antagonistic opposites in the historic gun, knife, and poison practice of philosophy.

We could not expect a correct elaboration of “mechanical materialism” from these hacks either. Here is what they give us: “bourgeois scientists who ignore the social and dialectical aspects of our world and the role of practice…” The materialism of the ancients was advanced greatly by the bourgeoisie, in fact in Diderot it came close to approaching dialectics, and so mechanistic materialism should not be so easily dismissed. Due to the limit of the mode of production, and the fact that science is superstructure, the bourgeois could only go so far; they still had to preserve exploitation after all. Further, mechanical materialism in no way ignores the social aspect. This is a distraction which ironically conceals the bourgeois thinking in the so-called “Partisan.” Mechanical materialism also does not deny the tole of practice in shaping the world; this would be a total negation of materialism itself. Rather, mechanical materialism is the crude materialism of the bourgeoisie. It is under-developed and cannot consider philosophy itself as practical, nor can it furnish acceptable answers to the historic process of the development of man and society. In short, mechanical materialism denies or fails to discover the dialectic; it seeks to understand material development free of the law of contradiction, and precisely the expression of this law in which a thing turns into its opposite.

The rightists provide no definition of dialectics, just superficial and mistaken examples of its potential application. They have a disclaimer for this: “Mistakes are inevitable in our work,” they plead, “what generations of revolutionaries have learned the hard way is that if you do not really grasp things like materialism or dialectics, as well as other essential works of revolutionary theory, little mistakes snowball into major errors and can quite quickly become fully formed opportunism and revisionism, especially in an imperialist country like the US.”

This is truly indicative of their method: make a pandering statement to excuse their sloppiness as inevitable mistakes, and then appeal to a false authority “generations of revolutionaries” as proof. Framing it as “materialism or dialects” assumes that the two can be separated within Marxism or exist independently as options.

Worse, the revisionists have subtly invoked a defense of revisionism as accidental, as if it comes about all of a sudden due to well meaning mistakes snowballing rather than being caused by internal bourgeois ideology, by the line of exploiters overcoming the proletarian line. Revisionism is the result of bourgeois ideas and not the result of honest practical mistakes, but the willful rejection of and opposition to Marxist principles. Deviations can lead to a revisionist—that is, a bourgeois—line taking command by creating an opening; usually the mistakes in practice can give the right a chance to attack the left. The point is that revisionism happens when the right, invoking new conditions, negates the basic principles of Marxism. Those like “Partisan” who promote misunderstandings are doing little more than sheltering their own revisionism. Revisionism is the qualitative negation of principles in the interests of the exploiting classes, not quantitative accumulation of practical mistakes in proletarian revolution.

While the “Basics” article pretends to express what is fundamental in Marxist philosophy, it hides behind “accessibility” and ultimately says nothing more than: small mistakes lead to major errors and quickly fully developed opportunism and revisionism, therefore we must study philosophy. The problem is that a study of philosophy was not made in order to solve it by applying philosophy to this problem. We recall that the revisionists have consistently denounced the idea that theory can and does take become the principal aspect in given conditions, before giving way to another stage in which practice again becomes the main aspect.

The argument they make for philosophy is philosophical deviation, or rather it illustrates the philosophical revisionism of the opportunists in question: they have elevated subjectivism to a matter of principle, no longer simply a mistake in study. Rather, their deviation of subjectivism developed into an opportunism, seeking out only the aspect of a problem which supports their predetermined conclusion, then making all sorts of rationalization for it. This is why they only define one aspect of revisionism, one aspect of dialectics, and one aspect of materialism, and cannot view the ideology, or the philosophy at its core, as a unity of opposites, a contradiction. As one reads the article there is a hopefulness that they will develop the argument, but they cannot.

So what is left out? Even if one studies their suggested reading material, the law of contradiction as the only fundamental law is not fully expressed, nor do these opportunists assert it anywhere in their basic educational material. This understanding was and is based not only on Chairman Mao’s talks and articles, but on a comprehensive and complete study. What is more, it is the most important part of the revolutionary program that the law of contradiction is the sole fundamental law of the incessant transformation of all eternal matter. Understanding this will clear away the bullshit of the opportunists; it will clarify how practice turns into theory and theory into practice and how, at any given time, provided certain conditions, one aspect of the contradiction becomes principal and determining.

We can now turn to their article “Our Principles: Dialectics and Contradiction” to see more subjectivism masked as support for dialectical materialism. In this article they get more into transformations of opposites; they do not deny it, but they traffic with it, and so still cannot escape their subjectivism. After asserting that the principal aspect of a contradiction determines its outcome, “the principal aspect is the aspect that plays the leading role,” they write: “today the primary aspect in society is the bourgeoisie.”

While it is true that the bourgeoisie lead society, they are not the ones determining the social outcome, because that falls to the proletariat. So the leading force in society leads it only to ruin at the end of its rule, and the dominated force is compelled to make revolution and overcome the limit imposed upon it by leap. The proletariat here does not transform into its opposite by becoming the bourgeoisie, but by becoming the ruling class. The bourgeoisie produce their own grave diggers; they do not dig their own graves.

Having established that the internal contradictions are principal and determinant, our opportunists are not so sure: “Antagonistic contradictions can only resolved [sic] with external conflicts.” It is more correct to say that without violence the antagonism will not be transformed. The internal contradiction however is only activated by this, and still determines the outcome. The bourgeoisie itself cannot remain in power when faced with armed struggle and revolution because it is at odds with itself, it has to compete for profits among itself, while the proletariat can unite with itself; thus the bourgeoisie is forced to great lengths when threatened, including developing fascism, which is unstable because of the internal contradictions among this class. For the proletariat as a class its internal contradiction is mainly ideological: it has both its ideology, in the form of Maoism, and it has bourgeois ideology. This manifests politically as the contradiction between Marxism and revisionism. The point is that the proletariat is not at odds with itself; it shares the same long-term interests and there are not rival interests in the strategic sense; it no longer needs exploitation and competition.

What is more, while antagonistic contradictions require violent actions to activate the internal contradictions (this is true for all dictatorships too), it is only possible to apply this in given conditions. In other words, good political leadership knows how to deal with antagonistic contradictions based on circumstance, how to by all means develop to a stage where violence is able to be utilized with success. Sometimes a battle is won by confronting antagonistic contradictions without antagonism or violence, and sometimes this is necessary. The trick of “Partisan” is to confuse terms and use the wrong ones subtly to draw their followers into greater confusion.

“… the history of the United States can be divided into stages, each with their own primary and secondary contradictions; however, the fundamental contradiction between the proletariat and bourgeoisie not only remained the same, but grows more and more sharper [sic] every day.”

The opportunists can be seen here making false conclusions from a correct argument. The history of the US can indeed be divided into different stages, and, because it can be, not all of these are capitalist stages, and the contradiction bourgeois-proletariat was not always principal—let alone fundamental.

The bourgeois proletariat contradiction corresponds to the mode of production, which develops concretely and is not born fully formed. Capitalism in the US was not established as secure in this country until the bourgeoisie were able to complete a democratic revolution in two parts, first with the defeat of England in the revolutionary war, and second with the defeat of the Confederacy. Within these stages the proletariat played its role; it compelled the revolutionaries, even in its most primitive state, to accept public education and basic democratic rights, and it compelled them again toward abolition. This second part is very important because it would not have been possible if not for another class, the class of Black slaves who became peasants then proletarians. In this case branded labor in the form of enslaved Black people withdrew their labor and took up arms in both revolt and in joining the union army, and proletarian labor in the north did the same.

Had the proletariat here rejected the Union Army and refused to fight, had the myths and propaganda of the copper heads been true, it is quite possible that the aims of the Confederacy would have been accomplished and it would have prolonged its miserable existence. In this stage, the main contradiction was not between the proletariat and bourgeoisie but between the bourgeoisie and the slavers. One represented the incoming mode of production and the other represented the anachronistic one, the ossified and dead system of slavery. It was said numerous times by Marx and is true that labor struggles for the proletariat in the US, which existed always in some form, could not truly develop until slavery was abolished, and then, when it was, the fight for the 8 hour day (arising from the fight for the 10 hour work day) took on greater magnitude. US history is a particular weak point for the opportunists, because it erodes the basis of their political identity.

Subjectivism, taking a part of the contradiction and constructing this to make the argument without all around consideration is how the Right Opportunist HQ pushes its nonsense over and over. For instance their anti-intellectual pose, in the claim that practice is always principal, is a cover for the negation of ideological struggle, which brings their existence into question. What is more, it is coupled with their creative mania. The Right Opportunists themselves generate a new website on which to publish with alarming frequency, and abandon them to gather dust just as quickly. On these they produce mountains of theory, yet as they always do, denounce the need to consolidate around theory before embarking on practical ventures. They lament:

“There are many ‘study groups’ around the country which push for study of Marxist texts before organizing can take place. Revolutionaries-in-formation cannot sit idly by and simply ‘analyze’ contradictions from afar, but rather must participate in their development to shape them.”

Such grandstanding operates on the assumption that because it is important to study a problem then attempt to solve it, there must therefore be absolutely no activity. This argument is a figment of their imagination. In reality a dispersed movement must come together if it hopes to gain momentum, and coming together means uniting, and uniting means two-line struggle. To conduct two-line struggle, the participants must study the problems; they must consult the classics to make their criticisms have political sense. The right here is just rationalizing their impotence in two-line struggle, their evasion of ideology and their opportunist formation of a rightist headquarters, made without actual comprehensive and rigorous demarcation. Before organizing can take place, an organization must be formed on the basis of struggle; it must have an ideological basis for unity which provides political and organizational unity. All this process is practical, and it requires theory to guide it. Instead, our pseudo-erudite-anti-intellectuals consider the need for theoretical training to be “metaphysical materialism.”

So, it is not long-winded diatribes and 8 legged essays which the Right opposes; this kind of theory is fine by them. What they oppose is the need to consult with the doctrine of the proletariat, because this would reveal that there are major problems with both the practice and theory promoted by them—specifically, that it is not proletarian practice or theory, is not Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

The understanding of epistemology is very skewed by the opportunists. It is their habit to appeal to made up authority, even unverifiable claims based on empiricist argument. Their anti-intellectualism comes in the form of pseudo-intellectuals pretending to be hardened proletarians. In their “Self-reliance” article they write:

“…those with a solid proletarian class stand often very easily assimilate and understand this principle [of self-reliance], while those with a bourgeois or petty bourgeois class stand often struggle to comprehend even the simplest application. To the activist who comes to our movement via books and online discourse rather than class struggle, the principles of proletarian self-reliance stand in contrast to the petty bourgeois ‘networking’ style of united front work learned in capitalist universities and bourgeois political spaces. To the activists who comes to our movement via class struggle, the principle of self-reliance is a self-evident truth expressed embryonically in the spontaneous consciousness of our class, and expressed consciously in the political movement.” There is a lot of false dichotomy here to unpack.

First, proletarians themselves forced to fight for their daily demands only develop trade union consciousness, which is a form of bourgeois consciousness. Revolutionary consciousness comes from without; this is what Lenin held.

Second, the fact that an activist comes to a movement via books in no way proves that this activist has somehow decided to read these books without any contact to the class struggle.

Third, there is nothing here to define “self-reliance,” but any understanding of this would indicate that it cannot exist without reliance. In fact, the individualist ideology of the bourgeoisie runs rampant among proletarians, who can be convinced that as long as they increase the pace they will be rewarded, that they must rely on themselves as individuals and not the union. In our trade union work one cannot help but encounter this type of worker, the one who instead of wage increases across the board seeks individual promotion.

So there is a dual aspect to the so-called “self-evident” truth. It is not innate for workers within the capitalist superstructure to automatically assess the value of collective action correctly, and this has to be fought for by the most class conscious among us; the material basis of the relationship to production has to be painstakingly pointed out, and consistently fought for, especially in the lower wage manual labor professions.

Instead of reality, the opportunists just create a narrative, and to hell with dialectics. The same maneuver is used elsewhere; it is their experience that workers agree with their lengthy positions papers, and of course that petty bourgeoisie disagree with them. The whole thing is farcical identity politics to take the place of class politics.

In reality their rambling about self-reliance did not come about from practical necessity to assert class independence in a united front, but because there has been international support for those they are the most sectarian against. Instead of acknowledging that this support was earned over a decade of modest struggle and will not wash away easily, the opportunists suggest that their political enemies are simply not “self-reliant.”

While it is correct that the class cannot rely on bourgeois democratic law or the state which enforces it, and that it must rely on its own forces, the opportunists take this aspect to justify their exclusion from the actual masses of proletarians who understand that they must also utilize the law whenever it is in their favor.

For the opportunist, self-reliance means refusal to seek legal union recognition, resulting in the termination of an entire staff at one of their organized locations. This is not self-reliance; it is just stupid. Basic legal protections were denied to the workers in the name of the opportunists railing against the NLRB. All laws under capitalism are not neutral tools for justice; they are mechanisms to maintain power, and by understanding the contradictions inherent to bourgeois democracy revolutionary workers can and must use existing laws to fight for immediate improvements—without relenting in using these struggles to expose the laws and the state that backs them up. This is what Lenin held.

Should the opportunists argue that the stronger workers’ independence becomes, the less the class is deceived and bribed by the liberals, we would applaud in agreement, but this is not what they are doing. They are instead using a false “self-reliance” to oppose the workers’ legal struggles. In our view, the legal struggle must be used to strengthen the illegal struggle. In words the opportunists reject reformism and legalism but in essence they follow it and nothing else. They make their attacks on practical use of reforms and abandon use themselves only to strike a pose, to make themselves seem revolutionary while in fact they are actually refusing to talk about Maoism in the interests of protecting their “legal” so-called “mass organizations.”

Maoists, on the other hand, not only fight for reforms but do not miss any opportunity to use them, and by bringing Maoism to the workers in these struggles, by educating them in the principal task, Party reconstitution, the working people can and will be painstakingly developed step by step past reformism and all the other expressions which are within the limit of bourgeois acceptability. The opportunists are liquidationists inside out on this question as well.

In form they look revolutionary denouncing the fight for and the use of reforms, and in the name of protecting their work, they deny the role of the masses in the reconstitution of the party, and hence do not bring the masses any further than the day to day demands to begin with; they lead anyone they can into a trap, and snitch on those they cannot lead. They argue for self-reliance, then utilize the PDRL and the state to clear ground for them to set up shop. This is how the opportunists really are.

How the Right Opportunists promote reactionary Identity Politics in the name of proletarian politics

The main feature of rightism and revisionism in this country, particularly when it drapes itself in a counterfeit Maoism, is the preservation of Avakianism and the raising of postmodern criteria. Both of these amount to a revisionist trend which assumes the principles of Identity Politics and imposes these as “Marxism.” Identity Politics is not only the furthest from Marxist principles, but it runs counter to them; it serves imperialism’s attacks on the working class. The Right, filled to the brim with bourgeois ideology, makes “common sense” excuses for their failure to rid themselves of the most glaring examples of the imperialist, reactionary, and liberal bourgeois intellectuals.

Since the 60s-70s of the last century, a well-organized attack has been made against communism. This mounted with the liquidation of the Communist Party in 1944; it was incubated in the fetid chambers of the revisionist William Z. Foster’s fake Party and false reconstitution, but nothing gave more impulse to the reactionary attacks on Marxism than the emergence of the so-called “New Left.” It is from this excrement that Avakian and the postmodernists alike really come to the forefront and successfully promote liquidationism as a common sense principle.

Identity Politics purports to solve problems Marxism cannot or is unwilling to. It raises in the opportune moment of the Party’s rejection of principles and the revisionist victory which preserves the abandonment of the proletariat. The educated flunkies of the bourgeoisie, the elitist strata of the highest paid intellectuals, with the support of the CIA, see an opening, particularly among the most prestigious universities.

Identity Politics come from postmodern criteria, namely that bourgeois enlightenment has to be negated, that it contains too much materialism, and this is what must be abolished, that the truth is completely subjective and importantly that power is diffused. So, according to them, and to put it very simply, a person’s lived experience is their own truth. So that this take hold among the world of reactionary liberals, it has to peddle “social justice”, not class justice. Therefore it has to deal with oppression, abuse, and trauma of the lived experience and deny exploitation.

Identity Politics exist to attack Marxism and protect capitalism. That is all it is. It relies on competition for victimization and weaves a complex and dogmatic culture of performance. It values trauma as a form of currency to validate individuals and no longer uses it as a medical term. It is like the old monks flagellating, like a passion play. Only it goes further, it projects trauma as indifferent to class, as something in the lived experience of being human; it is a tool to promote the sole-hegemony of US imperialism as the most humane and progressive society when in fact it is the most backward.

Identity Politics has been exported, and its principles of trauma and abuse have been sent around the world. Traumatic experience becomes highly valuable content, a currency in the current culture. To become a published poet, one needs to sell a certain kind of trauma, to be validated as a Democratic Party mafioso politician, one should flaunt one’s trauma and the interpersonal discrimination one experiences. This validates the individual; it authenticates them intellectually.

This culture coincides with “End of History” mythology, and in this myth it replaces economic analysis since communism is dead. Hence, sexuality, and sexual exploitation replace political economy and economic exploitation; society becomes a sex-driven and sex-identifying rhizome. All of this bourgeois ideological slop is perfect for the destruction of political organizations, and it is inescapable.

The positive aspect is that the broad masses are sickened with Identity Politics, and the “left” is starting to realize this. Even among the younger generations of activists today, a rejection of what was sacred ten years ago is palpable. Nonetheless, the capitalist superstructure is the most effective in the world at reproducing the imperialist relationships to production; it is the most sophisticated at creating consumers of types suitable to maximize profits for the ruling class, the best at reproducing the class relationships and it does so in a way in which consciousness of class itself is suffocated.

This is because the US imperialism is the only hegemonic one; it is by extension the most decomposed society on earth. Its understanding of trauma-sharing performances, performances of empathy, and sexual openness are all utterly reactionary and decadent because they serve US imperialism; they arise from its economic base. This is ultimately a banal Marxist analysis, nothing new or groundbreaking, the affirmation of norms established in the class struggle by the International Communist Movement, yet, to the postmodernist or those who still have not rid themselves of identity politics, it is a confession of reactionary hatred for the people.

All the culture of land recognition, pronoun announcements, all the religious aspects of Identity Politics, the confessions and penance, the artificial hierarchies of personal experience regardless of class, are the subjective conditions in which our rightists were nursed. This is why their camp is responsible for the most shamefaced postmodern positions with articles titled things like “Breaking with our men” and why it is born from insubstantiality in empty allegations of abuse, which are checks to be cashed in the banks of bourgeois conceptions of trauma.

It is simple: if one identifies as traumatized, one is. The term no longer has any medical meaning whatsoever, and any individual experience can be traumatic. This kind of subjectivism is a Sacred Liturgy for them. And most often it is all designed to confront the ideas of discipline, struggle, and self sacrificial hard living that comes with communist activity. As has been detailed elsewhere, the idea that we should integrate into hard work, be highly active, fight without fear of fatigue, the idea that we should defend, uphold, and apply Marxist theory, is all taken as commandist abuse, whether they call us cultists or not.

Postmodernism is a frenzy, a collective bloodletting. It will tend to destroy every attempt at organizing within a few years unless it is meaningfully challenged. We have all seen the cycles: an issue arises, people come together to confront it, and their messy personal lives cause a fissure and dissolve the effort. This happens because the contradictions cannot be understood; antagonistic, non-antagonistic, principal, secondary, internal and external, are never considered, and instead abstract principles of postmodernism are reified onto organic structures. Its criteria are used in the interests of the ruling class to justify the closing of trenches of struggle. The logical solution to this marsh is to refuse to step into it, to raise a principled rejection of it, to stop legitimizing it organizationally, and to reject all who use it as a basis to do the state’s dirty work.

However, such a rejection is impossible for our liquidationists inside-out, as their birth was from these methods. If it took the Maoists 7 or 8 years to really confront postmodernism, their right, who essentially reject Maoism while formally laying claim to its mantle, are necessarily going to embody the most negative aspects of the previous sequence, the Avakianism and postmodernism. This is why they must be smashed.

As we have seen in the writings of “Partisan”, “New Labor Press”, etc. etc., appeals to the authority of individual workers are made as a way of validating their positions. This is not a scientific method, because their empirical or “lived” experience of a relatively small number of workers accepting this or that “line” does not provide enough data to analyze whether or not it is effective. The fact is the class is thirsty for Marxism, and they do not have the class consciousness to know the real from the false. This is also why revisionism makes a mess in the working class movement; it is why the DSA social fascists have some small base among the workers, and it is why the Trotskyite-led Party for Socialism and Liberation has exploded in popularity since 2022. Workers they encounter also like their line, and this does not validate it as correct.

The Right Opportunist identity politics is always a tune being played in the back of their heads anytime they try to analyze anything, and it is discernible in all of their writing. Today, the “Partisan” promotes the three with’s, living with, working with, and struggling with the masses; however when our side of the split was accused of abusing people by “forcing” them to move, to get jobs in industry and logistics, and organize the direct confrontation of class enemies, all of which are the practical expression of the three with’s, we were denounced as abusive, “opportunist former leaders,” and so on. Of course the LIO confirm these charges, validating the trauma-sharing of the PDRL and using this to justify their existence as a political counter-poll, without being able, in the span of almost half a decade, of making a qualitative ideological demarcation.

Instead, the revival of secondary questions is raised, the national question, the elevation of sexuality, and so on, all the things the LIO are banking on being Liturgical for the identity politics crowds which still comprise their shallow support-base. It is the most damaged and confused masses they wish to consolidate against the communists.

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