First Published: The Organizer, Vol. 6, No. 5, May 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Dear Organizer,
In general, your report of the recent February 2 National Mobilization Against Klan/Nazi Terror in Greensboro was politically accurate. Unfortunately, however, you chose to continue your sectarian policy toward the National Anti-Racist Organizing Committee (NAROC) by completely ignoring the important role we played in that action. You mentioned the participation of such forces as the Southern Conference Education Fund (led by the Communist Party-ML), the SCLC, and many other forces, but completely excluded mention of genuine revolutionary forces such as the NAROC (and OCIC groups such as the Louisville Workers’ Collective and Atlanta Labor Group).
The NAROC won many friends in the course of the Feb. 2 Mobilization, and forged strategic working relations with revolutionary forces, including the southern OCIC groups. The PWOC is well aware of these facts, yet reports the event as if neither we nor the OCIC groups were involved at all! Having prematurely predicted the NAROC’s doom in the Organizer (10/9/79), it seems that PWOC wishes to fulfill its prediction by ignoring our political efforts and hoping that others do, too.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time PWOC has adopted a sectarian policy toward us. We invited PWOC (and many other OCIC forces) to participate in shaping, then founding, the NAROC as early as March 1979. PWOC refused, instead launching a manipulative effort to ensure that no OCIC groups would participate. It circulated a criticism of our efforts to OCIC groups only, belatedly offering copies to a few of the other forces involved; launched unprincipled public attacks on the effort to form a revolutionary anti-racist organization; and offhandedly criticized us in the Organizer. In that article it advertized its critique of our proposal to found an anti-racist organization but failed to make our response to that critique available. All this before NAROC was even formed!
Why does PWOC report the role of reformists, left opportunists, and revisionists in February 2, but ignore us? Unfortunately it seems that PWOC has done so simply because many of the NAROC’s leading activists hold the rectification line on party-building. Indeed the Organizer’s October 9 attack on us occurred in the course of an article criticizing the rectification line, and did not even bother to address NAROC’s real basis of unity: our revolutionary line on racism. PWOC’s policy toward us is all too reminiscent of similar unprincipled practices among ’new communist’ groups within the mass movement in the early 1970’s.
Politically the NAROC and PWOC have far more unity than differences. Both hold that US imperialism is the main enemy of the world’s people, and that the struggle against racism is central to the working class struggle in this country. Although NAROC rejects PWOC’s notion that the key to the anti-racist struggle is to ’win the white workers over to the struggle against racism’, we believe that there is a firm basis for strategic unity between our two organizations and will continue to struggle to attain it. We therefore hope that PWOC reverses its negative policy toward us, and leads around the need for genuine revolutionary forces to unite in order to push the anti-racist movement forward.
In unity,
National Staff
National Anti Racist Organizing Committee (NAROC)
NAROC apparently believes the Organizer consciously neglected to highlight their role in the Greensboro anti-Klan action, and further, that this is part of a larger pattern of sectarianism towards them initiated by the PWOC. We think both charges are false.
The article in question made no attempt to analyse the role of different forces within the coalition, excepting the CWP. We mentioned a number of distinct organizations (SCLC, the Machinists Union etc.) in order to give some sense of the breadth of the activity. As NAROC points out we did not even mention any OCIC forces, even though a number of groups played an active role, a rather strange manifestation of “sectarianism.” Indeed we did not even mention the role of the PWOC, which was active in the local coalition and mobilized for the march. Nor did we discuss the role of the CPUSA, the CP-ML or any number of others. NAROC is simply wrong when they assert we mentioned SCEF in the article. Apparently in their rush to judgment they did not even bother to read it very carefully. Given all this, there is no significance to the omission of NAROC. Had the article set out to assess the contributions of different organizations, it would be a different matter.
NAROC suggests we have some interest in liquidating their role in the anti-racist movement. “NAROC won many friends...forged strategic working relations with revolutionary forces...” etc. We’re told “the PWOC is well aware of these facts.” The truth of the matter is the PWOC has made no assessment of NAROC’s role, nor are we in a position to do so. We don’t know how NAROC is so sure the “facts” are otherwise. Since we did not participate in the Greensboro coalition on a national level we have no basis for such an assessment.
The only area of joint work we have had since the founding of NAROC was in relation to the Conference in Youngstown which created the Coalition for a People’s Alternative (see last month’s Organizer). Both NAROC and PWOC participated in this conference. While we shared important unity in relation to the question of the centrality of the struggle against racism, NAROC also made some “left” errors – errors that tend to confirm our original critique of the organization’s line.
We deliberately did not mention this in the article on Youngstown because to do so in that context would have been sectarian, given that we did not associate the far more profound errors of others with particular organizations. Significantly, NAROC raises no objections to our omission of their role in Youngstown. Omissions of NAROC’s errors are apparently permissable.
The letter also misrepresents the history of the PWOC’s relations with NAROC. We did not “refuse” to participate in the founding of NAROC nor did we “launch a manipulative effort to insure that no OCIC groups participate.” We forth rightly circulated our criticism of the original NAROC proposal, put these same criticisms forward in a meeting with NAROC representatives, and decided not to attend the founding convention when it became clear that those coming were consolidated around the proposal, a decision that NAROC’s representatives agreed with at the time.
We do not deny that NAROC and PWOC have significant areas of unity. We have not nor do we now oppose efforts to build unity of action. NAROC’s attempt to suggest otherwise will not wash. These criticisms of the PWOC’s “sectarianism”, coming on the heels of similar letters in relation to the organization of national trade union fractions, indicate a shift on the of the rectification forces tactics. Having failed in their efforts to tar the OCIC with the brush of sectarianism, the rectifiers now apparently have shifted their attack to the PWOC in an attempt to drive a wedge between the PWOC and the OCIC.