The MLOC presents itself as super-principled on the question of the “unity” of the Marxist-Leninists. Why, it even names its political paper “Unite!” It constantly strikes a pose of injured innocence and goes so far as to do self-criticism that “overemphasis was placed on uniting Marxist-Leninists”.[73] But here we are afraid that the MLOC is really too harsh on itself. For the MLOC has never yet placed too much emphasis on unity. To the contrary, the MLOC has consistently played a disruptive role in opposition to the unity of the U. S. Marxist-Leninist movement.
Let us see how the MLOC uses its outcries for “unity” for the purpose of disruption. In the October 1977 issue of Unite! there is a major centerfold article entitled “Genuine Unity Rests On Principle”. This article endorses certain principles that the MLOC has allegedly been consistently following: “In April 1976, Unite! advanced four basic principles which must guide the struggle for Marxist-Leninist unity:
a. seek to unite, not split
b. the principle of equality
c. the principle of independence
d. to resolve contradictions on the basis of criticism and self-criticism.
Historically, these principles provided a correct basis upon which to build Marxist-Leninist unity. Where they were adhered to genuine unity has been built with small collectives. “The article further added, somewhat later: “The heart of this struggle has been the call for joint theoretical and practical work.”[74]
These alleged “principles of unity” do not include Marxism-Leninism, do not include opposition to revisionism and all hues of opportunism, and have nothing to do with uniting in the common struggle against the class enemy and against the opportunists. These “principles” are silent on unity to take up the decisive tasks needed to push forward the stage of revolution. These principles implicitly deny the existence of the decisive struggle between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism, a struggle sharply reflected in the U. S. Marxist-Leninist movement of the last decade through first the struggle against neo-revisionism and now the struggle against social-chauvinism and “three worlds-ism”. Instead, these principles are explicitly designed to regulate relations between “small collectives”, who are presumed to be independent of the struggles going on in the Marxist-Leninist movement as a whole. Here we must say that to be small is no sin, but to be small-minded like the MLOC is quite a different matter altogether. In brief, the MLOC’s “principles” amount to a series of moralistic platitudes to hide the question of political line, and first and foremost to disguise the MLOC’s own stand of infiltrating the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists with scholastic quotation-mongering while in fact pursuing a policy of conciliation of and even of outright attempts at unity with the social-chauvinists. And the platitudes are endless! In the original article in Unite! that gives these principles, one finds them amplified in an infinite number of sweet-sounding procedural rules, such as: “We must always adopt the attitude of being careful, cautious, just and never hasty.” “All preparations for such bilateral and multi-lateral meetings must always observe the principle of prior consultations, adequate notice always provided, response made to all communications and proposals without delay,...” “There is no room for offensive language,...” “There can be no element of scorn or looking down upon other comrades.” “Criticism must be presented at the proper time, in the proper manner, with the proper attitude. Criticism must not be confused with accusations and political acrobatics”, ad nauseum.[75] In this way the MLOC does its best to hide the fundamental question that unity grows in the struggle against the forces of disunity, in the struggle against revisionism and opportunism and in defense of the purity of Marxism-Leninism.
But let us take a closer look at MLOC’s “principles”. It turns out that behind all the tinsel and glitter about “unity”, the “principles” are nothing but a wordy formulation of the neo-revisionist thesis of the “pre-party collective”, of the idea that unity in a single Marxist-Leninist Party is allegedly premature and that instead the Marxist-Leninist movement should exist in the form of a scattered collection of “small collectives” that “unite” in the course of “joint theoretical and practical work”. What MLOC’s platitudes mean is that the MLOC takes disunity and factionalization of the U. S. Marxist-Leninist movement as a first principle, and then defines a whole series of prerequisites for “unity” in order to keep the movement divided. And it is very significant that one of the MLOC’s “basic principles” for unity is disunity, which it formulates under the demagogic slogan of “independence”. In April 1976, when the MLOC first brought forward this particular list of platitudes, it explicitly said that the U.S. was “in a pre-party situation”[76], thus denouncing the national Marxist-Leninist center as premature. The MLOC insisted that any unity whatsoever was premature, stating that “In the current situation, all organizations must maintain their own independence and initiative while at the same time consciously pursuing the course of unity” (emphasis added,[77]). What a gem! Let the phrase-mongers explain what kind of platonic unity is possible when it is absolutely necessary to maintain “independence”. What is valued most by the intellectualist disruptors of the Marxist-Leninist ranks, from the “independent radicals” of the revisionist rag The Guardian to the conciliators of social-chauvinism of the MLOC, is their cherished “independence” (from Marxism-Leninism), which they use to float their opportunist theories.
Thus right from the start the banner of MLOC’s petty moralisms was the banner of splittism and factionalization of the Marxist-Leninist movement. When, upon leaving the Black Workers Congress, the MLOC first came into open existence, it did not feel it necessary to explain why it refused to unite with the existing trends and what role it intended to play in the historical movement. The MLOC took refuge in idealism and solipsism and instead pretended to deny the existence of the external world. For them, all history previous to their founding was simply a sorry record of errors and mistakes, something hardly worth mentioning, which all could have been avoided if the “great one” had come earlier. The MLOC states that “At the time of our formation, there were dozens of little groups and collectives.”[78] On this grounds, of course, what is so bad about establishing another “little group or collective”? With what frivolous levity the MLOC dismisses the actual movement, a movement in which there were two definite trends claiming to fight revisionism, a movement in which there was both revolutionary Marxism-Leninism and neo-revisionism. And the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists were not a “little group or collective” but had had a national center ever since the formation of the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist), a predecessor of the COUSML, in May, 1969. Neo-revisionism too had a national center, several in fact, as befitted poly-centrists.
But the MLOC’s alleged “independence and initiative” with respect to the struggle between Marxism-Leninism and opportunism was just a sham. While there are many activists who have not had the opportunity to study the recent history of the U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement, the MLOC archive-keepers are and were very conscious of this history and, as part of a definite political attitude, pretended it didn’t exist. But the MLOC’s “independence” was also sham in a deeper sense. One can play a conscious role or an unconscious role, one can play an open honest role or a deceptive, dishonest role, but one can never be independent of the historical movement. In fact, as we have seen, the MLOC was not “independent” at all, but was an enthusiastic partisan of the neo-revisionist concept of the “pre-party collective” or, as the MLOC puts it, the “small collective” in the “pre-party situation”. The idea of the “pre-party” situation and “pre-party collectives” was an attempt to put a good face on and intensify the factionalization of the Marxist-Leninist movement. It was an attempt to detach the steel-like unity in a Marxist-Leninist Party from the Marxist-Leninist theory, so that the idea is floated that “Marxist-Leninist” individuals or groups can exist independent of a Party. This goes against the first principles of Marxism-Leninism. When activists take up Marxism-Leninism, the first principle must be to unite into one Party. When our predecessors in the Cleveland Draft Resistance Union took up Marxism-Leninism and founded the Cleveland Workers’ Action Committee in 1968, they immediately searched for the Marxist-Leninist Party or national center to unite with. As The Workers’ Advocate describes it: “The Workers’ Action Committee firmly took the attitude that there is one Marxism and one proletariat and should be one Marxist-Leninist Party... Consequently it investigated all the existing groups which had not already been discredited (as had the trotskyites, revisionists and social-democrats) in earlier struggles.”[79] The article then shows how, after the Workers’ Action Committee analyzed the Progressive Labor Party and the Black Panther Party, “The Workers’ Action Committee came to the conclusion that there existed no group or party giving leadership to the revolution and concluded that one must be built.” Under the stimulus of the Regina Conference, the First Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists in May 1969, which was organized by the Canadian Internationalists led by Comrade Hardial Bains, the Workers’ Action Committee resolutely decided to take up the national tasks of building the Party (not the “pre-Party”) and organizing the U. S. proletarian revolution. In this way, the ACWM(M-L) was founded as the single nation-wide center for all U.S. revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, and it contacted all the main groups and individuals claiming to be against revisionism in order to unite the Marxist-Leninists into one Party. Thus the ACWM(M-L) was not a “pre-party collective” but a center for the rebuilding of the Party, and it rapidly spread across the country. Meanwhile the neo-revisionists refused to unite on the pretext of (1) the theory of “pre-party collectives” and (2) imposing special sectarian principles (such as Klonsky’s socialist-segregationist opposition to the Afro-American people’s movement) as the price of unity. In the course of the struggle against neo-revisionism, the ACWM(M-L) gave rise to the COUSML. Thus the nucleus of the Marxist-Leninist Party arose and tempered itself in struggle against revisionism and neo-revisionism. Thus the assertion of a “pre-party” period is, at least for those who have had the opportunity to be conscious of the development of the Marxist-Leninist movement, not a description of a period but the banner of poly-centrist opposition to the Party.
But let us return to the MLOC’s “basic principles”. Let us see how the MLOC itself applies these principles to the Marxist-Leninist movement. The October 1977 article of Unite!, after re-asserting the four principles, goes on as follows: “But the organizations mentioned above (RCP, CP(M-L), WVO, IWK, RCL, ATM, WC(M-L) – ed.), each, in various ways, violated these principles after having agreed to follow them and have degenerated into the camp of opportunism or vacillation.
With a few exceptions, it has been the MLOC which has initiated efforts at joint work and sought a protracted, patient approach to building unity. Without exception, this program was rejected or ignored – meetings cancelled, work discarded, accusations raised publicly, without struggle, and dishonest and careerist maneuvers took place.”
What a display of injured innocence! But for our part, at least, we firmly state that the MLOC’s statement about how “without exception” the other groups broke off with MLOC is a lie, if not a downright “dishonest and careerist maneuver”. It was the MLOC which unilaterally and without notice to us broke off its discussions with us over two years ago. The MLOC explains the significance of breaking off discussions in its article in April 1976, putting forward the four “principles” of unity, namely, “There is only one basis to conclude that such a struggle for unity cannot be conducted, and that is that these differences represent antagonistic contradictions between the people and their enemies.” (emphasis as in the original,[80]) Indeed, the MLOC has for over two years been waging a war against the COUSML and the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, denouncing them as “counter-revolutionary”, “chauvinist” and “revisionist” and even going to the extent of blaming its vile opposition to the historic Internationalist Rally of April 30, 1978 in Montreal on the fact that the COUSML had the honor of speaking there on behalf of the U.S. proletariat.
However, besides MLOC’s dishonesty, there is a deeper and more sinister fault with its method of petty moralisms. The point is that the MLOC is trying to obscure any political evaluation of the situation in the U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement and to divert the principled struggle against revisionism and opportunism by resorting to constant petty squabbling and bickering. Thus the MLOC judges the various organizations by whether or not they smile at the MLOC, whether or not some petty frictions takes place, and not by what stand everyone takes in the historical movement. For the MLOC, it makes no difference to its analysis of why conflicts and frictions arose between them and other organizations if the MLOC, during the period in question, happened to believe in the “three worlds” theory and advocate that the Soviet Union was the “main danger”. The MLOC shouts that “Genuine Unity Rests on Principle”, but apparently the questions of the struggle against revisionism, the fight against social-chauvinism and the theory of “three worlds” are not considered by it to be “principles”. After all, the MLOC reasons, “Changes in line will occur. This is not the point.”[81] No, for MLOC “principle” means dragging the Marxist-Leninist movement into trivialities and squabbling. In practice, the MLOC discusses the Marxist-Leninist movement not in terms of the struggle between Marx-ism-Leninism and revisionism, but simply in terms of a jumble of accidental relations between a jumble of “small collectives and groups”. The struggle against revisionism is not “principle”, instead the MLOC promotes as far more important that ”... the CP(ML’s).. .failure to promote common work on the Gary Tyler struggle; the failure of the RCP (in Georgia) or the ATM or WC to take up work on the Dawson 5 campaign. “In fact, from the MLOC accounts it appears that the RCP and the OL didn’t degenerate until after the MLOC had a chance to test them out with the four basic “principles” of unity. All this shows the MLOC’s complete lack of any definite stable principles and its adventurist policy on the question of “unity”. A principled stand on “unity” is to strive to unite the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists against the opportunists and revisionists by taking up the decisive tasks of the revolution and to judge everybody by their objective role. If someone or some group is really taking up the decisive tasks of this stage of revolution, really putting up a fight against the class enemy and the opportunists, revisionists and “three worlders”, then, whether or not petty frictions or even major problems occur, the Marxist-Leninists will make repeated attempts to find a common language. The Marxist-Leninists will never stop trying to unite on the basis of real principles and never stop fighting the revisionist forces of disunity. But the MLOC puts forward small-mindedness and the squabble mentality as a “principle”. Someone hurt its feelings – therefore he is an opportunist or vacillator. The MLOC calls the OL Klonskyites a “social prop” of imperialism – but apparently not so much for OL’s social-chauvinism as for the far more important fact that OL failed to establish “mutual trust” with the MLOC.[82]
So behind MLOC’s cry of “unity” really lies a most sinister style of disruption of unity. The MLOC’s “principle” is: Let the whole Marxist-Leninist movement be immersed in sordid details about this or that triviality, details which it is impossible for anyone to get to the bottom of. Let the struggle against revisionism, neo-revisionism and social-chauvinism be forgotten or conciliated under a mass of secondary squabbles. In this way, the MLOC is performing a valuable service for the revisionists, social-chauvinists and “three worlders”. The MLOC is striving to protect them from the fiasco that it has suffered with the open debate on fundamental questions, on the theory of “three worlds”, on the thesis of “directing the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism”, on the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism, by giving a little lip-service to this debate while stressing “on principle” the petty, day-today squabbles on secondary points, by using a sea of moralisms and platitudes to confuse everything. This method is not something new, peculiar to the MLOC, but has a definite history. It is a method pioneered by the revisionists. The late infamous Italian arch-revisionist and renegade Togliatti, a founder of “Eurocommunism” and exponent of liberal bourgeois poly-centrism, advocated this method as a way to save revisionism from the fiasco of Khrushchov’s public polemics in favor of revisionism. Comrade Enver Hoxha pointed out in 1964:
The Togliatti revisionists are among the most cowardly, but, at the same time, the most consistent revisionists. Therefore they demand, as their dead leader (Togliatti–ed.) clearly states, that the open polemics against the Chinese and other ’dogmatists’ (read: against Marxist-Leninists) must be carried on unceasingly. . ..
On the other hand, however, P. Togliatti demands that the main direction of the polemics must be shifted. Faced with the bitter experience of the unfortunate results of the propaganda of the Khrushchev group, allegedly in defense of principles of ’creative Marxism-Leninism’, he demands that they refrain from theoretical polemics with Marxist-Leninist parties that touch on the vital problems of principle of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the activity of the communist movement, and that the discussion should be orientated completely towards the confused, unprincipled, and uncontrollable petty daily struggle around the current internal problems of the country, in which, according to Togliatti, the propaganda of the Chinese and Albanian ’dogmatists’ is ’completely disarmed and powerless’ and has ’no effect at all’.
With this proposal P. Togliatti is launching a very dangerous idea. In the polemics, with the Marxist-Leninists over major questions of principle, as P. Togliatti himself is forced to admit, the modern revisionists have suffered utter defeat, their demagogy has failed and they are not in a position to denigrate the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism. The polemics of principle is certain disaster for the revisionists, because it is demonstrating openly to the masses of communists and working people the revisionists’ flagrant deviation from the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism , is bringing to light their real features as renegades.
...P. Togliatti is afraid of this situation and perspective. Therefore, to avoid the complete exposure of revisionism, he demands that the polemics must be shifted from questions of principle and concentrated on discussion of second rate matters, on day-to-day problems. What Togliatti means by this is: let everybody stick to his own ideological views and let there be no polemics over these matters of principle; the communists should not concern themselves about the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism; the process of the creation of new revolutionary groups and parties should be hindered in every way: the revisionist renegades should be left in peace in their activity so that they will have fewer problems and headaches in putting into practice their opportunist line, the line of giving up revolutionary struggle, the line of the liquidation of revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, the line of alliances with the bourgeoisie and imperialism.
But for all the efforts of Togliatti and Co. to divert and quell it, the great polemics which is going on today between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism must never be stopped. This polemics, will cease only when modern revisionism has been totally destroyed. The Marxist-Leninists consider it their lofty internationalist duty to carry this ideological struggle, which has vital importance for the fate of the communist and revolutionary movement, through to the end.[83]
Thus the MLOC is following P. Togliatti’s bad example and taking a leaf from his modern revisionist and poly-centrist “Testament”, by diverting attention from the fundamental questions of the struggle against revisionism, “three worlds-ism” and social-chauvinism in favor of drowning everybody in a sea of moralisms, trivialities and secondary matters.
Another striking proof that MLOC’s moralisms are only designed to divert and disrupt the Marxist-Leninist movement occurs with MLOC’s founding of its “Party”. The MLOC’s “Party” was basically founded at MLOC’s First Congress in November 1977 without any prior consultation with the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists. But, as we pointed out above, the MLOC has ever since its formation concocted various arbitrary pre-conditions for the Party and for the existence of a “definite revolutionary trend” in order to: (1) support the neo-revisionist theses of a “pre-party situation” and that the Party is “premature”, (2) deny the existence of and distract attention from the struggle between revolutionary Marxism-Leninism and revisionism, there allegedly being only differing degrees of adherence to a thousand-and-one arbitrary standards, (3) discredit the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, and (4) forbid unity with the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists while constantly flirting with the opportunists, such as the OL. Now that the MLOC has declared itself the “organization that is going to form the party”[84], let us see how the MLOC measures up to the very pre-conditions that it has set. How does the MLOC make the miraculous transformation from the alleged “pre-party situation” to the situation where “It is Time to Build the Party”?[85]
In its First Congress, the MLOC explains the question as follows: “Now in order to form this party, the question of timing is often raised. When do we form a Marxist-Leninist communist party? Everyone that we have known (here the MLOC confesses that it has only “known” the neo-revisionists – ed.) has asked us this – when is it appropriate? And we have heard all kinds of variations of right and ’left’ opportunism pop up over this question. You ’have to have’ 859 advanced workers, or you ’have to have’ factory nuclei in ten of the major industries in the country. Or, only when you are in the ’forefront of the mass movement’ can you form a party. Or, as some boast, when it is a ’settled question’ you can form a party. We heard that a year ago, and these ’super’-revolutionaries do not yet have a program, much less a party.”[86]
What an air of injured innocence! With the usual dishonesty that is such a striking feature of MLOC’s disruptive activities, the MLOC accomplishes the transition out of the alleged “preparty situation” by simply “forgetting” what the MLOC itself enthusiastically advocated just yesterday. This shows MLOC’s complete lack of seriousness. Platitudes are expendable: the MLOC hopes to cover up yesterday’s platitudes and moralisms by blithely coming out with a whole new crop today. The MLOC goes on to say: “We do not think it is a difficult question to answer. On the one hand, it is not a question of rushing; on the other hand, it is not a question of tailing. It is a question of correctly assessing the subjective conditions.” And what is that assessment? A little further on, the MLOC gives it as follows: “Then what is the problem? There is no problem to form the party. We have prepared the subjective conditions...” And all this is supplemented by more moralisms about the “Draft Party Program”. So the MLOC huffs and puffs and says nothing! And how could it be otherwise, because MLOC’s alleged “pre-party situation” is a neo-revisionist abortion that never existed. After all, did anyone really expect the MLOC to admit the truth: that by giving up the theory of “pre-party situation” the MLOC was tacitly admitting the correctness of the struggle of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists against neo-revisionism? Of course not, the MLOC is still resolved to continue its war against the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists. So the MLOC shrugs its shoulders, hides the now discredited theory of “pre-party situation” in the closet, and continues and deepens its factionalization under the cover of “many Parties”.
The MLOC has one further argument. The MLOC’s Political Report gives a quotation from Comrade Lenin’s article “How Vera Zasulich Demolishes Liquidationism”. Lenin’s quotation is excellent. It goes: “... It is to enable the mass of a definite class to learn to understand its own interests and its position, to learn to conduct its own policy, that there must be an organization of the advanced elements of the class, immediately and at all costs, even though at first these elements constitute only a tiny fraction of the class. To do service to the masses and express their interests, having correctly conceived those interests, the advanced contingent, the organization, must carry on all its activity among the masses, drawing from the masses all the best forces without any exception, at every step verifying carefully and objectively whether contact with the masses is being maintained and whether it is a live contact.” (emphasis as in the original,[87])
We have always followed these excellent teachings of Comrade Lenin. These teachings abolish the revisionist idea of “pre-party situation”. We held that “immediately and at all costs” there had to be a single nation-wide center for the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, a center for the dissemination of Marxism-Leninism, and we founded the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist) in May 1969. The ACWM(M-L) was not a “pre-party collective”, but “an organization of the advanced elements of the class”. There is no “pre-Marxist-Leninist” stage, and as the nucleus of the Party we rigidly adhere to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. Due to the zig-zags in the struggle against revisionism and neo-revisionism and to consolidate a consistent Marxist-Leninist leadership, the re-constitution of the Party has taken a long time. But the struggle against social-chauvinism is irresistibly giving birth to the new Marxist-Leninist Party. The founding of that Party will not be the transition from a “pre-party situation” to a “party situation”, but will mark a further intensification and deepening of the always necessary work of Party-building.
Thus Comrade Lenin’s quotation does not help the MLOC out of its difficulties, but on the contrary deepens them. By using this quotation to justify its concoction that now is the time to convert a “pre-party organization” into a “Party”, the MLOC is confessing that right from its formation it was not “an organization of the advanced elements of the class” but something else, a disrupter of the organization of the advanced elements of the class. Thus the MLOC with its own hand passes stern judgment on its own treachery.
[73] Unite!, February 15, 1978, “Unite! for Still Greater Victories!”, p. 6, col. 1.
[74] Unite!, October, 1977, p. 10, col. 3-4.
[75] Unite!, vol. 2, #2, pp. 4-5.
[76] See (53).
[77] See (53).
[78] Weisberg, Political Report, p. 31.
[79] The Workers’ Advocate, May 12, 1977, “On the Occasion of the 8th Anniversary of the Founding of the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist)”, p. 4.
[80] Unite!, vol. 2, #2, p. 2.
[81] See (45).
[82] See (25).
[83] Enver Hoxha, Speeches and Articles (1963-4), “Togliatti’s Testament, The Crisis of Modern Revisionism and the Struggle of the Marxist-Leninists”, pp. 273-6.
[84] Weisberg, Political Report, p. 45.
[85] Weisberg, Political Report, p. 42.
[86] Weisberg, Political Report, pp. 43-4.
[87] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 19, “How Vera Zasulich Demolishes Liquidationism”, section V, p. 409.