First Published: Frontline, Vol. 4, No. 5, August 18, 1986.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Every serious force in the progressive movement today is grappling with two paramount questions: how to unite the working class and all popular sectors in a more powerful fightback against Reaganism; and how to build greater cooperation and unity on the left. Frontline has advanced its views on these topics in numerous articles over the last few years, directing comment especially toward that political force on the left with which we share the most unity, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
In this spirit, I commented in a “Looking Left” column (Frontline, July 7) on the launching of the People’s Daily World, arguing that the CPUSA’s new paper would playa generally positive role in the fightback against Reaganism, but that its full potential would be unrealized due to shortcomings in the CPUSA’s political line and strategy. Specifically, I noted that the new paper, for all its attributes, continues to reflect the CPUSA’s longstanding pattern of underestimating the obstacles to workers’ unity and overestimating the existing level of the popular fightback, thus leaving activists without adequate analytic and tactical tools to combat the highly sophisticated manner in which the U.S. bourgeoisie is orchestrating its global counter-offensive and its assault on the working class at home.
Apparently this criticism touched a raw nerve in the CPUSA center, which responded with a two-part series in the People’s Daily World (July 25 and August 1) written by Associate Editor Carl Bloice. The series offers itself as a comprehensive indictment of the politics and fundamental class standpoint of Frontline and the Line of March. Our “basic problem,” according to Bloice, “is a failure to understand the nature of social classes, the relationship between them and their respective roles in the current economic and political process.”
Despite Bloice’s pretensions to a definitive statement, his articles are quite disappointing in substance and style and are hard to take seriously as a political and theoretical critique. Bloice examines no issue in depth and ignores every single one of the major theoretical and analytic articles produced by Frontline and Line of March on the matters he does address. Instead, he bases his argument on a grab-bag of out-of-context quotations, and when these don’t do much for his case, he resorts to citing a letter written to (not by) Frontline and his version of informal conversations held with two members of the Line of March Editorial Board “a couple of years ago.” Where political logic gives way altogether, personal innuendo (“the Burnham-Silber duet”; “The person who wrote these two sentences must think he’s slick”) fills in. It’s a sad and petty performance, designed more to head off debate than engage in it. And it presents us with the task not only of clarifying the substance of this political controversy, but of sorting out the factors which have led the CPUSA to such a subjective diatribe. (Readers can evaluate Bloice’s polemic for themselves. It appears in full – along with my original column and this reply –in a special reprint packet.)
As to the substance of this debate, one of the indispensable foundations for an effective fightback strategy is an accurate and precise assessment of the U.S. working class’ spontaneous response to Reaganism’s continuing attacks. These attacks impact the working class unevenly (especially across the color line); consequently it is no surprise that the working class response has been uneven. There are stirrings of more active resistance and gravitation toward progressive positions by some sectors: new militance in sections of the labor movement and among farmers, a reactivation of student protest, and – most developed at this time – a growing struggle for empowerment by the Black community. The most advanced, though not the only, expression of this new progressive motion was the Jesse Jackson campaign of 1984 and its subsequent organizational coalescence in the National Rainbow Coalition.
On the other hand, other sectors – especially from the better-off and whiter- strata of the working class – have come under the influence of Reaganism’s jingoistic and racist propaganda offensive. This can be seen in broad voting patterns (especially for the nation’s most powerful office) and in the defection of many white workers (especially in areas of sharp racial polarization) to the Republican Party.
The tension between these opposing pulls shapes numerous battles within the labor movement and other social movements, as well as within the cross-class constellation of forces that is presently fighting over the political direction of the Democratic Party.
Yet Bloice would have us walk into this contention with blinders on, dismissing as insignificant the backward trends in the workers’ movement and insisting on the superficial and one-sided assessment that “we are in the early stages of a rapidly maturing upsurge of progressive popular resistance.” Bloice provides little evidence for his pat formula, and to be frank, his argument is hardly strengthened by the fact that the CPUSA has been offering up the same platitude virtually every month since Reagan first took office. As early as January 1981, CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall spoke of “the beginnings of a broad mass upsurge” (People’s Daily World, January 1981); by 1983, Hall declared that “the economic crisis has propelled the mass upsurge to new levels” (People’s Daily World, March 1983); the upsurge’s progress was supposedly not interrupted by Reagan’s 1984 electoral victory, and now the CPUSA proclaims that the upsurge is “rapidly maturing.”
Perhaps Bloice and his party think that repetition and hype are the best weapons for building the workers’ movement, but for activists in need of precise and rigorous assessments of the actual balance of forces in the trade unions, upcoming electoral battles and other arenas, this endlessly repeated “official optimism” is worse than useless. If anything, it leads to damaging mis-assessments, such as the CPUSA’s one-sided argument that Reaganism was set back by the 1984 elections and its complacent view that Reaganism today is already in decline.
The theoretical basis for Bloice’s “optimism” is the CPUSA’s pronounced tendency to underestimate opportunism’s danger and strength within the working class – and therefore to conciliate it. The U.S. working class’ contradictory response to Reaganism only highlights the achilles heel of the workers’ movement in the susceptibility of some of its contingents to the backward appeals of flag-waving chauvinism and racism. What’s needed in the face of this sobering reality is a hard-nosed explanation of opportunism’s material base (for example, in the relative advantages U.S. workers have over workers in other countries or white workers have over Black). Without such an analysis, the left will be unable to develop an effective strategy to maximize the influence of the most advanced sections of the class, while steadily winning over or neutralizing the more backward sectors whose racial or national blind- spots continually lead them to lose sight of their true class interests. Frontline has hardly created the stratified material – and hence political and ideological – condition of the U.S. working class; but what is true is that we refuse to close our eyes to this reality and insist on the most forthright and thoroughgoing theoretical analysis of it in order to be equipped for the difficult battles ahead.
But for Bloice and the CPUSA, the idea that opportunism among workers could be deeply entrenched, or that various political and organizational splits with opportunist forces are inevitably part of the U.S. proletariat’s political maturation, is nothing but heretical “anti-working class” slander. In fact, says Bloice – attempting to prove guilt by association – the views held by Line of March on this matter originate with Maoism. Now Bloice and the CPUSA may not like this theoretical framework, but then their argument is not with Mao but with Lenin. After all, it was Lenin, not Mao, who argued that “in the epoch of imperialism, owing to objective causes, the proletariat has been split ... ”; that an opportunist trend in labor was “inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries”; and that those who evade the fact that certain workers will side with the bourgeoisie advocate nothing but “optimism which serves to conceal opportunism.” In fact, the concept that the struggle with materially-based opportunism had to be central to revolutionary strategy and tactics was fundamental to what Lenin termed an “inevitable split” with “social chauvinism” and the formation of the communist movement.
Lenin had nothing but disdain for those “official optimists” who insisted on exaggerating the strengths and covering up the weaknesses of the working class movement. But Bloice says without a blush of embarrassment that this should be communist policy, especially “in a paper which seeks to influence mass opinion.” And here is precisely where the political and theoretical errors of the CPUSA have congealed into an official party policy mandating that even if the communists don’t believe things are all that rosy, they should not say so openly because the workers may become discouraged and disquieted if they are subject to such “bad news.” The fact that Bloice flaunts such a condescending view as the acid test of working class partisanship only underscores how deep the ideological corrosion within the CPUSA has gone.
But what is the reason for publishing such a defensive polemic, so lacking in good judgment and even intellectual integrity? There can be little doubt that what Bloice has delivered is a calculated message from the very center of the CPUSA. That message is that the CPUSA considers serious discussion of the internal weaknesses afflicting the workers’ movement to be an illegitimate area for communist debate, and that any force attempting to pursue it is, by definition, “anti-working class.”
What has pushed the CPUSA into such an untenable position? Here it is necessary to speak quite bluntly about the changing shape of the U.S. left today and the CPUSA’s role within it.
It is safe to say that among the more serious forces on the U.S. left, the CPUSA is unmatched in its efforts to avoid explicit debate with other organizations. And ironically – in view of its constant pleas for “unity” – the CPUSA is also most averse to seeking or even being open to self-conscious unity in action with other left groups in the struggle against Reaganism. Quite simply, the CPUSA views itself as the only legitimate political party of the working class, all other organized tendencies constituting the “phony left” who should not be lent any legitimacy by exchange of views or agreed-upon common campaigns.
Moreover, within a certain orbit, the CPUSA is used to its view holding easy sway. This is partially because – up until recently – the main organized left forces outside the CPUSA have been widely off the mark in their views of international politics and the world correlation of forces. During the 1960s and for some years afterwards, for example, the CPUSA was pretty much the only organized left tendency advocating a positive view of the socialist camp and a constant emphasis on the centrality of the struggle for disarmament and peace. Consequently, within broad circles of progressives who shared this correct orientation on such cardinal matters, the CPUSA was the only force to the left of social democracy that could be taken seriously – even if its insights about the class struggle internal to the U.S. were limited to platitudes about the need for workers’ unity and its practice was marked by a consistent tailing of the trade union officialdom and “respectable” civil rights organizations. (Conversely, many people just awakening to political consciousness were repelled by the CPUSA’s rightist errors and incorrectly associated them with the party’s international line, as a result of which some of the most promising revolutionary currents emerging from the 1960s developed without any serious contact with the CPUSA, and with tremendous suspicion of – if not hostility to – the socialist camp.)
In the last ten years, however, the contours of the left have altered dramatically. Anti-Sovietism is in decline in progressive circles generally, and almost all on the left are giving greater attention to the demand for peace. The ultra-left remnants of Maoism, Trotskyism and New Left ideology are in retreat and disarray.
The emergence of Frontline and Line of March is, in many ways, both a reflection of and a catalyst for this maturation process. As an organized and coherent force, we represent that offshoot from the broader U.S. left of the 1960s and ’70s which – little thanks to the CPUSA – has taken up the most rigorous criticism (and self-criticism) of Maoist influences and become consolidated on Marxism-Leninism and identification with the socialist camp and the international communist movement. We are thus closer to the CPUSA in politics and worldview than any other force on the left – something everyone else in the progressive movement has come to recognize well before the CPUSA itself.
Taken as a whole, this maturation process on the U.S. left has included a more thoughtful level of theoretical and political discussion concerning the very question deemed out of bounds by the CPUSA – how to account for (and develop an effective strategy to alter) the political underdevelopment of the U.S. working class. This question is very much on the minds of a whole layer of working class activists and it is being broadly taken up without the overlay of anti-Soviet and infantile left prejudices of the recent past. As a result, this discussion is beginning to seize the attention of forces who have operated in what the CPUSA has considered its “exclusive” orbit – but the CPUSA itself is reluctant to participate in, much less lead, this vital, debate.
Trapped in the most narrow-minded sectarianism and having apparently lost the ability to get beyond shallow generalizations or vacuous cheerleading when it comes to analyzing the workers’ movement in the concrete, the CPUSA sees only danger at hand. Bloice’s column is only the latest example of the party center desperately trying to circle its wagons and rally the faithful on the most demagogic of platforms.
But facts are stubborn things. Distortions of opposing views can temporarily be promoted in an attempt to wall them out. But sooner or later they force themselves on those who trivialize the difficulties in forging working class unity and hope to circumvent the real debates that mature the left. Unfortunately, if Bloice’s latest effort is any indication, the CPUSA’s awakening may come later rather than sooner. As a result, the struggle for principled unity on the left – as well as the CPUSA itself – can only suffer.