First Published: The Call, Vol. 5, No. 30, November 29, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
Anti-Repression Day is a time to intensify our struggle against both the capitalist system and modern revisionism, particularly the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). It is the capitalist system that stands behind the growing fascist attacks against the working class and minorities and is responsible for the barbaric crimes committed in the name of “democracy.” Posing as communists, the CPUSA revisionists actually aid the ruling class in carrying out its repression.
Anti-Repression Day commemorates the life of Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was murdered by the Chicago Police Department seven years ago this week.
It is important to remember the reasons for the state’s murderous assault on Hampton and the Panther Party at that time. Not only did Hampton stand in the forefront of the struggle against the capitalist system of racism and exploitation, but he was also a leading fighter for a new revolutionary party and opposed the revisionism and betrayal of the Communist Party USA.
Although the Black Panther Party has now renounced its revolutionary ideals and has taken the road of reformism and electoral struggle, the murder of Hampton was, at the time, part of the state’s desperate efforts to prevent such a revolutionary party from being organized. Our Anti-Repression Day activities this year link the continuing party-building efforts with the mass struggles of the people against fascist-like repression and expose the bankrupt line of the CPUSA in these struggles.
The revisionist Communist Party USA is nothing but an agent and prop of the imperialist system. Its line of “peaceful transition to socialism,” which is meant to disarm the working class, is the very thing against which Hampton spoke out most clearly.
He also opposed their opportunist line on repression. This line blames the fascist threat on the people who the CP claims bring it on themselves by taking up arms against the system.
Nowhere are the traitorous activities of the CPUSA more evident than in its work in the anti-repression movement, where it has directed its money and efforts through the opportunist National Alliance Against Racism and Repression. Posing as the benevolent friend of the oppressed, the revisionist party is working overtime to destroy the defense efforts of dozens of political prisoners and to divert these mass movements from their real target, the capitalist state.
In many cases, such as the defense of Ruchell Magee, Joann Little, Ronnie Long and others, the revisionists have been exposed and the CP driven out or isolated. But in many more defense movements, the revisionists, while pretending to be communists, are carrying out their work, preaching reliance on the courts and on the liberals within the ruling class itself.
The revisionists blame the wave of repression against Black people on the “conservative” Nixon and his “Southern Strategy.” This sets the groundwork for their praise of the liberals, who have now replaced Nixon in the White House.
Where the revisionists can’t dominate a defense movement, their tactic is to wreck it. This was the case in the defense of Joan Little, the Black woman who was tried for murder after defending herself against a sexual assault by a racist prison guard.
The same splitting tactics were used to separate the cases of CP “superstar” Angela Davis from Ruchell Magee. The split left Magee in prison for life while Davis walked free, to be wined and dined around the revisionist world for her betrayal of the Black liberation struggle.
In the case of Ronnie Long, a Black youth from Concord, North Carolina, framed on a charge of raping a white woman, the CP to liquidate the Defense Committee and submerge it into their own Alliance. But this was rejected by the members of the Defense Committee. Then the CP tried to direct all the defense work into building their opportunist Labor Day march in Raleigh, N.C., but this also failed.
The bankruptcy of the Labor Day march itself was clearly exposed by CP spokes-person Angela Davis, who singled out North Carolina as an exception to the otherwise “democratic” rule of U.S. capitalism and advocated a “tourist boycott” of that state instead of mobilizing the masses in opposition to the rule of capitalism.
The real differences between North Carolina, other Black Belt states and the rest of the country are handily covered up in the CP’s liquidation of the national question and the right of self-determination. The real differences stem from the history of slavery and the plantation system which dominated the region for several hundred years. It is this history which gives the struggle of Black people its national character, not just in North Carolina, but throughout the Black Belt South.
The CP’s propaganda around the case of Rev. Ben Chavis again shows their opportunism. Chavis was framed because he defended a church in the Black community against racist attacks. Yet in the Nov. 6 Daily World, the CP says of Chavis: “It is hard to believe that this man, withhis slight build, soft eyes and shy smile, is the same man the Wilmington newspapers referred to as ’Big Bad Ben,’ in their attempt to stir up racist violence.”
The CP engages in this type of absurd nonsense in order to blur over the real issues in the case – the question of Afro-American freedom and the right of self-defense.
The CP long ago abandoned the revolutionary struggle of Black people, who stand today as a central target of the state’s increasing fascist attacks. They dropped their support for the right of the Afro-American people to self-determination at the same time they openly abandoned the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Today, when tens of thousands of people of all nationalities in the U.S. and around the world have rallied to the defense of Gary Tyler, the CP refuses to speak out in his defense.
The reason is that the defense of Gary Tyler has been closely linked to the question of Afro-American self-determination. This is a right that all oppressed nations have to determine their own destiny and includes even the right to secede if the people of those nations so choose.
The liquidation by the CP of the right of self-determination for oppressed nations was a real gift to the forces of imperialism. It went along with the abandonment of the revolutionary struggle by the modern revisionists and with their defense of Soviet social-imperialism today. It is for these and countless other reasons that a new Marxist-Leninist party must be built.
Within the anti-repression movements, the CP prettifies the capitalist system, claiming that repression comes only from the extreme “right wing” of the ruling class while the liberals are “allies” in the fight. Through such movements as the present struggle against capital punishment, the CP spokesmen push their social-pacifism and never show the class character of the death penalty.
The main lesson to be learned from the savage, fascist-like repression of the capitalist ruling class and from their use of the courts and police against the workers and minorities, is that these parasites will never give up their power “peacefully.”
No amount of “structural reforms” as advocated by the revisionists can end the repressive character of the state. But the revisionists like Davis, Gus Hall, etc., all claim that the problem lies in the fact that the wrong politicians are on top of the machinery.
The CP’s response to the mass jailings and assassinations of Black freedom fighters has been to attack them as “ultra-leftists” rather than attack the state. They advocate that the masses throw themselves on the mercy of the courts and rely on the CP’s collection of liberal lawyers.
The murders of Malcolm X and Fred Hampton drew no militant response from the CP because they were both looked upon by the revisionists as “trouble-makers” who refused to bow before the pressure from the liberal politicians and the pacifists.
Another indication of the CP’s bankrupt line on repression is their defense of fascism in the USSR. Even while many of their fellow revisionist parties in France and Italy have condemned the use of torture and mental hospitals for Soviet dissidents, the CPUSA continues to make the most blatant defense of fascism dressed up as “socialism.”
All this shows that the CPUSA is not the party of the working class, but the party of imperialism and social-imperialism. It is not the “natural ally” of the people against repression, as it claims, but rather, the agent of the very forces behind the growing fascist menace.
Can there be “united action” with these revisionists around the defense campaigns of the various political prisoners? Can we work within the revisionist Alliance Against Racism and Repression? Absolutely not. “United action” with the revisionists is a dead-end street that will only strengthen the hand of the capitalists themselves.
Of course, the revisionists will try and sneak into the people’s mass movements to spread their opportunist poison and to disarm and misdirect the people who are righteously outraged by the rising wave of repression. In these instances, they must be uncovered and isolated as they have been in dozens of cases across the country and driven from the ranks of the movement with the brand of “traitor” stamped on them.