The Secretariat has given to the organization a proposal that fails to deal with Marxism-Leninism as a theory in any serious way. Neither does it advance any alternative perspective in any way that can be dignified with the term “theory”.
As a result the proposal falls time and again into basic errors as regards the history of socialism, the history of the League of Revolutionary Struggle, the current situation and the tasks of the organization. The proposal is in fact antithetical to Marxism-Leninism and will result not in some “distance” from M-L but in outright opposition to it. Adoption will bring the loss of the organization’s revolutionary character and the abandonment of the struggle for the oppressed.
It must be emphasized that the essence of the proposal is the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism. Certain objective difficulties of the organization are also addressed but these matters are of secondary importance. The actual resolution of any problem must always follow from the basis upon which it is attacked, and it is precisely the basis- of the organization, Marxism-Leninism, that is questioned by the proposal.
A number of points not addressed in the written proposal have been touched upon in verbal presentations of the leadership. Therefore it will be necessary from time to time to refer to these verbal presentations.
“Theoretically,” the Secretariat claims, “we have already adopted the view that changes in the U.S. will have to come about through a majority revolution. Socialism will be possible only if the majority of the people supports it, including through some form of verifiable electoral means.” (Secretariat of the LRS, Proposal for Congress, May 1990)
Capitalism has long since passed into the world system of Imperialism. “Majority revolution” is a term that can only have meaning if its relationship to the majority of people in the world – who do in fact need revolution and socialism – is explained. At no point does the Secretariat tell us what its proposal has to do with the struggle against imperialism.
The center advances a lot of reasons for its desire to abandon M-L. “We certainly do not agree with most of the practice carried out in Lenin’s name in the years since his death in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe which have demonstrably proven to be bankrupt in the past few years... We believe in a majority revolution... We need an organization where people can openly proclaim their affiliation and still pursue elected political and union office or any other profession... A critical point which we have summarized at this time is that it is not possible for the working class to lead the overall united front at this time...” {Proposal for Congress)
At the May district conference in New York the former leading comrade of the organization also said that we should “move away” from M-L because, “We do not want to be the only people in the world to be real M-L’s”, and also that, “Some things have taken place in that framework that are so horrible that we just cannot be associated with them.”
Et cetera, et cetera.
Leaving apart the vagueness, the abstraction, the unscientific character of these assertions, and granting for the sake of discussion the accuracy of the many factual assumptions – which is to grant a very great deal indeed – it remains that there is not a scrap of bearing on the question of the theoretical correctness of Marxism-Leninism in any of this.
The role of the class struggle in history, the state, the necessity and character of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the struggle against revisionism, the decay of imperialism: none of these basic questions of Marxism is discussed in any meaningful way whatever. The discussion offered is shallow and one-sided, in a word, eclectic.
It is Marxism-Leninism, and M-L alone, which has served as the basis of the organization’s remarkable achievements over the years. The dedication of comrades, the discipline, the principled relations, the sense of higher purpose that comes with Marxism-Leninism, have set the League apart. Now we are asked to do the most extraordinary thing: to take this unrivaled and truthful theoretical framework, which we have done so much to develop and to apply – and to abandon it on the basis of a complete theoretical vacuity!
As an example, consider the absolutely crucial question of the Marxist theory of the state. Lenin says, “The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when, where and to the extent that class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.” (State and Revolution)
Firstly, this is the teaching of Marxism on the state. Secondly, it is absolutely true. Thirdly, the Secretariat’s proposal avoids any reference at all to the class content of revolutionary struggle in relation to the state:
...we are not doing anything illegal.. We are not planning a seizure of state power in the Leninist sense of an armed minority seizing state power through armed insurrection regardless of any democratic process. In our view state power will come about through winning over the majority as expressed in an electoral mandate... (Proposal for Congress, PP. 4-5)
Such stuff is absurd beyond laughter, pathetic beyond tears.
As to the question of legality, revolution is against the law. That is the first reason that the ruling class has laws. This is the law of human beings, of a particular stage of social development. The law of social development by stages based upon the violent revolutionary overthrow of one class by another is a law of history, however, which we learn by means of study based upon scientific principles.
In the exceedingly unlikely circumstance that the ruling class should ever allow an “electoral mandate” for socialism to occur, comrades, they would then give you a most effective lesson in the minority armed seizure of power through the army, the FBI, the CIA, the KKK, and a whole lot of outfits that ain’t none of us ever even heard of. Since you have forgotten what you once knew of Marxism you must be reminded: the real content of the bourgeois democracy of which you have become infatuated is bourgeois dictatorship and it is based on force.
The problems faced by the LRS are scarcely unique among communist parties and organizations around the world today. The Secretariat proposal represents something objective that is happening worldwide in the class struggle, in the development of the capitalist/imperialist system on the one hand and in the development of socialism on the other. The proposal represents the negative, deteriorative aspect of development.
Some historical recollection is needed in order to see how our organization came to this condition.
At the May meeting in New York the former leading comrade spoke of the anti-revisionist communist movement of the 1970’s as if the League had not been part of it. She said that the organization “engaged in incredible amounts of struggle with the rest of the left and in the world.” She said that the “so-called ’anti-revisionist movement’ attacked us”, and that “eclecticism is how we formed”. She also claimed that the organization had “an eclectic point of view through the 80’s”.[1]
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The League of Revolutionary Struggle is a creation of the movements that sprang up in the 1960’s among the oppressed nationality peoples in the United States. This is the era of revolutionary struggle against imperialism. In this era the people’s movements of any one country are always intimately related to the struggle against imperialism worldwide.
The 1960’s were marked by the debacle of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia. The U.S. bourgeoisie well understood that it faced an irreversible defeat before the people of the developing countries and went to its fullest lengths to avoid the outcome. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole world was thrown into an uproar for years at the extreme brutality of U.S. imperialism. Vast numbers of people were drawn into the struggle against the war and moved to inquire as to its basic causes. Thus many people were drawn toward Marxism-Leninism.
In this worldwide upheaval very few people were influenced by the line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which once had been the leading communist party in the world. The CPSU had already shown its accommodationist tendencies toward U.S. imperialism, and in the years of the Vietnam War the fraudulence of its revisionist line of “peaceful transition to socialism” was exposed every day by events. As well its line was under intense attack by the Communist Party of China, which was then led by Mao Zedong.
That is to say, in the time of Lenin and Stalin the CPSU had been a world center of revolution but in the time of Khrushchev and Brezhnev it became the world center of revisionism.
There was no question at that time that genuine Marxist-Leninists of the older generation and people newly come to M-L would unite with Soviet revisionism. It was the Communist Party of China and Mao Zedong that inspired people to struggle for a correct ideological line. Thus it was that the new communist movement that arose was not only Marxist-Leninist, it was specifically anti-revisionist. It was a young movement that was prone to many mistakes and had a lot to learn, and it gave rise to the proud League of Revolutionary Struggle.
The League was formed in 1976 by the merger of the August Twenty-ninth Movement (ATM), which was based mainly in the Chicano movement, and I Wor Kuen (IWK), which was based in the Asian-nationality movements. Later the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), based in the African-American struggle, also merged with the League.
Here is the very first sentence of the 1978 Statement on the founding of the League:
“The anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist movement in the U.S. has its origins in the revolutionary mass movements of the 1960’s”. The Statement continues: “A number of revolutionary organizations... while battling the bourgeoisie, also fought against the danger of the revisionist Communist Party of the U.S.A., the Progressive Labor Party and other Trotskyite forces which attacked and tried to wreck the young revolutionary movement... through the struggle with opportunism, the genuine communist forces developed their understanding of Marxism-Leninism and began to integrate it with the concrete conditions for the U.S. revolution... both organizations [IWK and ATM] contributed to the development of a Marxist-Leninist line for the revolution; both had battled the revisionists, Trotskyites and other opportunists and won a number of advanced workers and activists to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought...”.
In self-criticism, the Statement adds, “For IWK, its main error had been narrowness in its work in which it belittled the struggle in the Marxist-Leninist movement.”[2]
The 1979 Announcement of the merger between the LRS and the Revolutionary Communist League likewise frequently mentions the struggle against revisionism as a primary point of unity and speaks of polemics and ongoing struggle against revisionism. Indeed, the adherence to M-L and to anti-revisionist principles (and opposition to eclecticism, i.e., a “bits and pieces patchwork” of thought without regard to the relations of things) was the very first and fundamental point of unity of the merger talks between RCL and the LRS.[3]
Hence there can be no confusion whatever as to the relationship of the League to the anti-revisionist communist movement at the time of the League’s formation: the LRS saw itself, and was, an integral part of the anti-revisionist communist movement. Through the late 70’s and early 80’s that relationship was reaffirmed over and over again, particularly in struggle against Soviet revisionism. That struggle was raised most frequently in the criticism of one of the most flagrant aspects of revisionism, Soviet social imperialism.
The usage traces to Lenin, who reviled the political bankruptcy of the social-democratic parties of the Second International for their sell-out to the bourgeoisie in World War I and after. He called their conduct, “Socialism in words but imperialism in deeds.” In the late 70’s and early 80’s the term applied even more to the international conduct of the Soviet Union.
When U.S. imperialism was reeling in disorder after its defeats in Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union took the opportunity to go on the offensive in Afghanistan and in many African countries, and to give Vietnam the military assistance it needed for its war of conquest in Kampuchea. The League correctly opposed these social-imperialist adventures, accurately predicted that they were doomed to failure, and traced the origins of these actions to revisionism.
In the last few years, however, the struggle against revisionism has been “eased out” of the line of the organization with a minimum of discussion and with virtually no analysis. There was an issue of The Communist a few years ago (around 1986 or 1987) that noted that certain aspects of the struggle against Soviet revisionism were overstated, that the organization had picked up much of its analysis from the line of the CPC rather than from its own study, and that we didn’t really know a whole lot about the Soviet Union.[4]
At about the same time it was stated at a New York district workshop by the organization’s former leading comrade that henceforth the organization would judge all parties, the CPSU and the CPC alike, “by their deeds”. By this was meant the degree of success of parties in power to feed, clothe, house, educate, and generally care for the people.
What this line ignores is that the organization’s stand against revisionism had been overwhelmingly correct and completely necessary. Also, the effect of this view is to remove the organization from ideological struggle against opportunism. Opportunism is the ideological influence within the communist movement of the backward classes. It is an elementary proposition of dialectics that such influence must always assert itself so long as classes and class antagonisms exist. Hence for genuine Marxist-Leninists there can be no thought of an end to the struggle against opportunism until the era of class society is ended.
On the strength of these few remarks, however, the struggle against revisionism did in fact disappear from the line of the organization. It is an unwanted return to life of the same error of belittlement of ideological struggle for which IWK once criticized itself. It has proved in practice to amount to an absolutely catastrophic error, the ideological root of the political collapse before the bourgeoisie of virtually the entire Central Committee of the organization.
The extent of the collapse of the Center of the organization is such as truly to give one pause. There are a number of distinct factors each of which seems to have played a major part.
Undoubtedly one major contributing factor has been the organization’s very success. The continued ability of the LRS to wage struggle in the backward period of the 80’s and its many significant practical achievements were genuinely remarkable. The Watsonville struggle, the part played by the organization in the Jackson campaign and in many local elections, and the steady growth of the-membership throughout the Reagan years, were striking testimony to the correctness of its line. But within this progress there was also the seed of regress.
The general tenor of the Proposal is concern with the impact that the renunciation of M-L would have on the careers of individuals, and petty-bourgeois persons at that: the characterization of M-L discipline as something based upon “an ultraleft sense of egalitarianism”, the aforementioned “need for an organization where people can openly proclaim their affiliation and still pursue elected political and union office or any other profession”, and so forth. It is impossible not to see the temptations of practical success, electoral and otherwise, in this.
During this period there have also been the dramatic and unexpected developments in Eastern Europe which have been met by the bourgeoisie with an air of triumphalism, and by our leading comrades with little comment and with no will to struggle. The bit of coverage that has appeared in UNITY has lacked Marxist character and analysis. Indeed, some of it could have appeared in the “Peoria News” without causing any fuss.
Also note that there has never been one word of criticism in the line of the organization for that trickster, that Trotsky sound-alike, that self-admitted, would-be if only he could-be restorationist of capital, the darling of the bourgeoisie, Mikhail Gorbachev. This in spite of the fact that he abjectly fails the Center’s own (abstractly put) standard of those who “meet the needs of the masses”.
It has been the practice of the Center to avoid any internal struggle over the political questions raised by these developments. Although the organization has been aboil for months with demands from the base that it take a Marxist-Leninist line, the Center has been entirely unresponsive. These comrades have preferred to remain aloof and to slide into demoralization rather than to open up and struggle for a correct Marxist-Leninist line. Instead cadre have been offered excuses that these matters, which are of great consequence to us, are not important: “we shouldn’t intervene in someone else’s affairs”, “it’s happening somewhere else and our work is here”, for instance.
Now the Secretariat has the Insufferable nerve to say to us that it wants to abandon Marxism because “most of the practice carried out in Lenin’s name in the years since his death in the Soviet Union or Europe... [has] demonstrably proven bankrupt”.
No, comrades, it is only your own philistine attempt to renounce struggle that has demonstrably proven bankrupt. The factors of petty bourgeois temptation and the pressure of bourgeois triumphalism still don’t get to the heart of things, though. These amount to the external conditions of the Secretariat’s collapse.
Mao points out that “Throughout the history of human knowledge, there have been two conceptions concerning the law of development of the universe, the metaphysical conception and the dialectical conception, which form two opposing world outlooks... The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided.” Concerning dialectics, he says that “The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within a thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development.” (On Contradiction)
Least of all do socialism and Marxism-Leninism lack internal contradiction. M-L is the utmost concentrated essence of the struggle for development and progress. It is the struggle between truth and error, backwardness and advancement, bourgeois thought and revolutionary ideology that drives Marxism forward. (The works of Lenin, for instance, consist almost entirely of polemic.) When the Center abandoned the struggle against revisionism it abandoned the dialectical view of Marxism itself, and the dialectical view of socialism. It could only do so at the cost of the adoption of the bourgeois view of revolution and socialism: a static, metaphysical, eclectic view.
Hence, when the turbulent events of 1989 in the socialist countries erupted in their various different circumstances and meanings the comrades of the Center proved unable to maintain their ideological bearings and surrendered their minds to the bourgeoisie. Neither, it goes without saying, did they protect the rest of the organization from the ideological onslaught of the bourgeoisie. Instead the Secretariat has given us this completely wrong proposal and has helped to spread all kinds of confusion in the ranks.
The attitude of the Secretariat toward socialism in its proposal and its presentations comes down to very little more than to blame socialism because it must exist in the real world with all of its concreteness, difficulties, and contradictions. The only positive thing that the Proposal can find to say about communism is a howling blunder: “That is not to say that many of us do not believe in ’communism’. By communism we believe in the utopian ideal which Marx speaks of...” (Proposal for Congress, p. 3)
The very first thing that any Marxist should know about Marx is that the great achievement of his life is that he, above all others, raised socialism from the domain of utopianism to that of science. To fob Marx off, even unwittingly, as some sort of Utopian socialist is to make an implicit confession of one’s complete disinterest in Marxism, and, for that matter, in socialism as any kind of a real proposition.
Today we find among our erstwhile ideological leadership on the one hand an airy dismissal of anything that smacks of theoretical knowledge, and, on the other, a typically petty-bourgeois estimation of the history and present condition of history have been put about, including the notorious anti-Stalin line that derives from the Soviet opportunists. Nor do we hear from the Center any Marxist viewpoint on current events in East Europe. Here then is some discussion in an attempt to further the Marxist view of these questions within our ranks.
How many damaging errors lurk in the depths of that benighted sentence, “We certainly do not agree with most of the practice carried out in Lenin’s name in the years since his death in the Soviet Union or Europe...”.
The main, really important things that have occurred in the Soviet Union and Europe since the death of Lenin, which constitute “most of the practice” of the CPSU since then in terms of anything lasting, are as follows: the consolidation of the first workers’ and peasants’ state in history under the dictatorship of the proletariat; the construction of the first socialist industry and collective agriculture in the world; the successful fulfillment of the central and decisive part in the World War II defeat of fascism. That victory secured the continued existence of the Soviet Union as a socialist country and laid the foundations for the postwar emergence of socialism in dozens of countries and the upsurge of the national liberation movement in dozens more.
All of these world-historic achievements were accomplished in the time of the leadership of Comrade Joseph Stalin. The post-Stalin Soviet leadership have nothing whatsoever to claim for their own leadership that even begins to compare. Until recently in its history the League upheld Stalin and criticized his successors for revisionism.
How truly remarkable it is that a group of people who once called themselves communists could ever say in this undifferentiated way that they “certainly do not agree” with the record of Soviet history. When it renounced Marxism the Secretariat lost its ability to get anything right. But, in wretched fact, the story gets worse.
At the May district conference in New York the former leading comrade said that she had given up all belief “...in the progressive role of the Soviet Union in World War II” when Mikhail Gorbachev said in April that the Soviet Union was responsible for the massacre of 4,500 Polish officers at a place called Katyn Forest during World War II. Leaving aside the charlatanish nature of Gorbachev’s claim, it is outright anti-communism of the most shocking kind to assert one’s indifference to the survival of the world’s first and, at the time, only socialist country, with its incalculable significance to the future of the world, in the face of Hitler fascism.[5]
This blundersomeness on questions of revolutionary history is no matter of scholastic dispute. It is fundamental to the Secretariat’s view of the developments of today in the socialist countries, a view that gets things exactly backwards. That is to say, the Secretariat sees in these events a justification for the abandonment of Marxist theory, whereas in fact there is no understanding of the situation in any depth except that which is drawn from Marxism-Leninism.
Thousands of years ago somebody wrote in the book of Ecciesiastes that there is “nothing new under the sun”. After all of this time it turns out that Ecciesiastes is wrong. The situation in many countries in East Europe is completely unprecedented in history. No one can say with any certainty just how things will go. This doesn’t prevent the bourgeoisie from claiming “victory over communism”, nor does it prevent some other people who should know better from swallowing the bourgeois line.
In several countries revisionist parties which for decades had failed to maintain a correct relationship to the masses have fallen from power. Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia are examples. Nonetheless, due to the victory over fascism in World War II which was led by the Soviet Union, there has been no bourgeoisie in these countries since that time. Therefore neither, for all of the fallings of some parties, have there been bourgeois police forces or armies in those countries.
It is in complete confirmation of the truth of Marxism to note that when the masses rose to demand the ouster of parties that had fallen under the domination of opportunism, the armed forces of the state would not protect the very communists who had created them against the demands of the masses.
The classics of Marxism always speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the rule of the masses themselves. Thus Stalin: “... the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to communism, must not be regarded as a fleeting period of ’super-revolutionary’ acts and decrees, but as an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organizational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats. This historical era is needed... to enable the proletariat, firstly, to educate itself and become steeled as a force capable of governing the country, and, secondly, to re-educate and remold the petty bourgeois strata along such lines as will assure the organization of socialist production.” (Foundations of Leninism, “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”)
By this is meant no utopian/romantic, anarchistic petty-bourgeois notion of the rule of the people.
It is Marxist-Leninist theory that, in order for the working class to overcome the bourgeoisie and for socialism to thrive, there must be the leadership of the communist party based upon a political line that espouses the interest of the working class in a scientific, objectively correct, way. History confirms both the world-changing impact of Marxism-Leninism when communist parties adhere correctly to the cause of the masses, and their failure when they fall into opportunism and the service of elites.
Today the situation in a number of countries is very contradictory and mixed up. Petty-bourgeois “reformers” have come to power in Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Already it can be seen that these persons have no way to move their societies forward. Gorbachev has been trying to find some kind of capitalist-oriented path to economic success for several years and he is in a mess. It was just few months ago Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki came to power in Poland. He moved with unprecedented speed to institute “market-oriented reforms”, i.e., the attempted return to capitalism. The results have been outright disaster for the people: widespread unemployment, a sharp drop in overall production, and plummeting living standards.
Already there is widespread resistance to the petty-bourgeois “reformers” among the masses, and just as Marxism predicts, the petty bourgeoisie have, in the absence of the bourgeois state, no armed force with which to repress the masses. In May a strike of rail workers in opposition to the reforms shut down much of Poland’s rail transport. The New York Times reported that:
Rail workers complained that while prices in the stores had soared to market levels, improvements within their state-owned enterprises that could eventually bring higher salaries seemed hopelessly bogged down in bureaucratic wrangling.
The strike also illustrated the new splits in this country’s trade union movement. During the last years of Communist rule in Poland, the leadership created a Government-controlled union, the O.P.2.2., to rival the then-outlawed Solidarity union.
Now, it is the O.P.Z.Z. that is a constant thorn in the side of the Solidarity-dominated Government, while the Solidarity union struggles to find a way of supporting policies that have created hardships for individual members. Alfred Miodowicz, head of the O.P.2.2. and a former senior Communist, has been a vocal supporter of the rail strike...
Mr. [Lech] Walensa said he saw the hand of Mr. Miodowicz of the O.P.Z.Z, who he contended had stirred the waters “because it is now allowed. Because Miodowicz is not afraid.” Referring to the Communist paramilitary riot police know as Zomos, Mr. Walesa said, ”If Miodowicz knew that there were Zomos and that Zomos were going to push him – these same Zomos that he controlled before – he wouldn’t do it.[6]
All of this is completely explicable, even predictable, from the point of view of Marxism. But the Secretariat, having forgotten all about Marxism, will not allow any Marxist coverage of the East European events in UNITY and in its proposal has only the meaningless abstractions of the metaphysical worldview to offer:
the evolution of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the party, the one party system and the resultant stifling of democracy and mass life in the name of Marxism-Leninism is not defensible. (Proposal p. 2)
The contrast to Lenin is instructive. Lenin says:
The mere presentation of the question, namely, “dictatorship of the party or dictatorship of the class, dictatorship (party) of the leaders or dictatorship (party) of the masses?” testifies to the most incredible and hopeless confusion of mind. These people are striving to invent something quite out of the ordinary, and in their effort to be clever make themselves ridiculous. Everyone knows that the masses are divided into classes; that masses can be contrasted to classes only by contrasting to the vast majority in general;... [that] classes are led by political parties; that political parties, as a general rule, are directed by more or less stable groups composed of the most authoritative, influential and experienced members, who are elected to the most responsible positions and are called leaders. All this is elementary. (Left-Wing Communism, “’Left-Wing’ Communism in Germany: Leaders-Party-Class-Masses”)
Therefore, according to Lenin, the party/class distinction is nonsense – the working class, like any class, has no other recourse except to form a party in order to rule. The essential thing in the development of socialism is not “the class or the party” (nor, for that matter, multi-party elections and parliamentary forms) but the correctness of the party’s political line as expressed in its relationship to the masses.
Our former ideological leaders once understood this very well. The point is not, however, that “Lenin says this and the Secretariat says that, therefore the Secretariat is wrong because Lenin is the Holy Bible”. The point is that, once again, upon the abandonment of Marxism, the Secretariat has fallen into a moldy cliche of petty-bourgeois ideology. It must do so because of the truth of the Marxist proposition that there are just two worldviews, dialectics and metaphysics, and to abandon the one is to fall under the domination of the other.
There is not one person in the world who is a Marxist who did not change from having been a non-Marxist. It also happens sometimes that a person who is a Marxist changes back into a non-Marxist. These things are normal, part of the dialectics of the material order of things.
The thing that is profoundly wrong with the proposal of the majority of the Secretariat is not that they wish to return to a more or less conventional way of life. The problem is that they wish to take the organization with them, thus to leave the working class and the oppressed without historically conscious leadership.
This is unforgiveable. They must stop their anti-Marxist talk and actions at once.
As for their absurd pretensions that they intend to “move beyond Lenin”, more than eighty years ago Lenin said:
We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the surrounding marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact we think that the marsh is the proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are “free” to go wherever we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but against those who are turning towards the marsh! (What Is to Be Done, “What Does ’Freedom of Criticism’ Mean?”)
We do not need this wrong proposal. What we do need is a campaign of Marxist-Leninist study and rectification to thoroughly criticize the errors of the Secretariat and to correct the shortcomings that led to them, and to re-establish the unity of the organization on the basis of Marxism-Leninism. A study proposal is attached as an example.
At this time is impossible to advance more of an overall program than this, for, as stated above, the first question must be that of the basis for the continued progress of the League. Practical problems can only be settled in the course of the process of rectification. As matters stand now in the organization it is impossible to solve problems in any principled way.
For instance it is said that a number of elected officials face the problem of red-baiting. The implication is that the only way to deal with the problem is to get rid of Marxism-Leninism. Once again a problem is raised in reverse.
If a communist becomes an elected official it is to use the office to further the revolutionary struggle – and for no other purpose. It is the precious office itself that is everything in the minds of the Secretariat, M-L and revolutionary struggle be damned.
Some years back in the course of their polemic with the Soviet revisionists the comrades of the Communist Party of China put forth the slogan, “The world is in great disorder” to counter the accomodationism to imperialism of the opportunists. That slogan is more appropriate than ever.
In the United States the bourgeoisie, a ruling class with literally centuries of experience behind it, has completely lost its head. It is beset with intractable problems that it is unable to resolve. Domestically, the maturation of capital has made it nearly Impossible to wring a satisfactory level of profit out of the working class. Internationally the power of the imperialists continues to decay. There is not the faintest sign of success for them in their struggle against communist revolutionaries in the developing countries.
In their scramble after wealth they have thrown aside all of their accumulated powers of judgement and done desparately foolish things that have undermined their immense economic strength. They ran up a trillion-dollar peacetime deficit for a military build-up that has availed them nothing. They turned loose every kind of criminal white-collar or otherwise, to loot hundreds of billions more from the savings and loan banks (Reagan’s organized crime connections probably played a large part In this.) They went off on an insensate riot of “leveraged buy-outs” to extract equity from their corporations in lieu of real profitability. This has burdened hundreds of large corporations with crushing levels of debt. The total extent of this debt is known to no one but it undoubtedly dwarfs all of the other debt problems of the U.S. economy. There are other burdens in the hundreds-of-billions range that are scarcely known (bad loans in developing countries, unfunded pension plans, etc.)
These conditions add up to the real root of the efforts at artistic censorship, the phony “flag-burning” Issue, the upsurge in racist violence, the attempts to set back women’s rights such as the anti-abortion campaign, and so forth. The bourgeoisie know how much trouble they’re in and, unlike our comrades of the Secretariat, they understand that bourgeois democracy is dependent upon conditions whereas they will never voluntarily surrender their powers of class dictatorship.
For their part, the Soviet opportunists are at the end of their rope. They are unable to move Soviet society forward - and they are in a country in which there are millions and millions of genuine communists who understand their backward nature very well. It may take a while to work out the restoration to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of a correct Marxist-Leninist line, but the revolutionary capacity of the Soviet people is unbounded and they will certainly resolve their problems.
In a time as turbulent as the present, even a party as experienced as the Communist Party of China, which continues to follow a generally correct line, has drifted into some serious problems in its relationship with the masses.
All over the world, things are in a confused, contradictory, mixed-up-in-the-middle-of-development stage. Imperialism continues to decay but it has still not been finished off. The development of socialism as a world system has still not reached a decisive stage of superiority. The problems of the two social systems are in no way comparable, however. The problems within socialism have to do with the failure of the program and political line of opportunism. These problems are completely solvable. The problems of imperialism are fundamental problems of the system itself and they can be solved only by its overthrow and elimination from history.
Our comrades of the Secretariat have likewise lost their heads. Perhaps this is not so surprising. Everyone else in the world has fallen into confusion; why should the Secretariat be different? They can see no virtue in it. They prefer to tumble head-over-heels in the ebb and surge of the tide, since that is what everyone else does.
But it is the unique quality of communists to keep their heads, to maintain the objective, the scientific, the revolutionary, historically conscious view. We are in the midst of an ebb in the course of revolution. This is unavoidable but transitory. The moment may seem difficult but there will come a turning. In the depth of the ebb is foretold the power of the gathering wave.
A. H. 6/90
[1] In recent years this same comrade has led district workshop discussions on topics such as, on one occasion, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the difference between social democracy and M-L, and on another, philosophical materialism and its bearing upon the standing of M-L as a science. There is no way to characterize the content of these discussions as anything but Marxist-Leninism!
[2] Statements on the Founding of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist). Getting Together Publications, 1978.
[3] For the authoritative Marxist discussion of eclecticism, see Lenin, “Politics and Economics. Dialectics and Eclecticism” and “Dialectics and Eclecticism. ’School’ and ’Apparatus’” from Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation and the Mistakes of Bukharin and Trotsky.
[4] Unfortunately it is impossible to document this portion of the account with specific written citations because for most of its existence the organization has followed the practice of printing only part of its theoretical work in any form that could be retained by cadres or contacts.
[5] From “Gorbachev Hands Over Katyn Papers”, by Esther B. Fein, The New York Times, April 14, 1990, p. 5.
President Mikhail S. Gorbachev today gave President Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland cartons of documents that the Soviet leader said “indirectly but convincingly” proved that the Soviet secret police killed thousands of Polish officers in Katyn forest in the spring of 19fo.
There was a joint Polish-Soviet commission that met for more than two years to investigate the Katyn forest question and to settle the question of responsibility. It adjourned its meetings in February of this year without having issued a report. The Times story quotes Valentina S. Porsadnova, a member of the commission who says that the commission’s conclusions on Katyn are to be published soon. It must be noted however that commissions normally issue reports and then adjourn, not the other way around.
At a minimum, Gorbachev and Jaruzelski flouted their own judicial procedure when they held their media event in advance of the publication of the commission’s report. Furthermore, rather than any sort of summarized evidence and conclusions, what they presented were “cartons of documents”: something impossible to assess except by such means as, for instance, the work of a commission. Given Gorbachev’s well-attested bent for political tricksterism one would have to be gullible Indeed to accept his unsupported word on this or any other matter.
As for the commission, there will be a report when it publishes its report. Until there is an official report of reliable character, exhibitions such as Gorbachev’s can be regarded as little more than extensions of Nazi wartime propaganda.
As of this writing (June 1990) there is still no published report from the Polish-Soviet commission.
[6] “Walensa Settles a Rail Strike, but the Workers Remain Discontented”, by Stephen Engleburg; The New York Times, May 29, 1990.
May 31, 1990
It is a vital task of the present that we reinstitute the practice of regular Marxist-Leninist study. Here is a proposed reading list.
It is not expected that comrades rush off and spend all of their time immersed in M-L study. Rather it is proposed that the readings be assigned and discussed in step-by-step fashion, perhaps ten or twelve pages at a time, and that a certain amount of discussion time, perhaps half an hour, be allocated at each meeting for discussion of readings.
This proposal is also made in the perspective of study as a protracted and ongoing aspect of practical work, an aspect which must always be maintained among those who would be communists.
1. Lenin, V.I.: “Politics and Economics. Dialectics and Eclecticism”, “Dialectics and Eclecticism. ’School and Apparatus’”, from Once Again on the Trade Unions (1921).
We hear the proposition put forth that the work of the organization for the past several years has been based upon eclecticism. Lenin’s profound analysis exposes the essence of eclecticism, its impotence and ineffectuality.
2. Mao Zedong: On Contradiction (1937).
Mao’s essay from the Yenan period is an exposition of the dialectical worldview. It contains a masterful discussion of the part that contradiction plays in the development of things and is essential to the communist worldview. This is particularly true at the present when we are bombarded««daily with even greater intensity than usual by the bourgeois worldview and by petty-bourgeois subjectivism.
Further reading:
3. Engels, Frederick: Anti-Duhring, Part I, “Philosophy”.
The first section of Engels’ polemic against Eugen Duhring, a petty-bourgeois socialist, is renowned as one of the most significant Marxist statements on the question of science, that is, what constitutes scientific the basis upon which historical study becomes socialism.
1. Lenin, V. I.: State and Revolution (1917)
This pamphlet is the most famous of all of Lenin’s writings. It covers many questions essential to the understanding of Marxism: the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, the development and nature of the state, democracy, the role of force and violence in history, and is a fundamentally Important text In the struggle against revisionism.
2. Lenin, V.I.: Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1919).
Lenin called the dictatorship of the proletariat the “revolutionary heart and soul of Marxism”. Here is a concise and penetrating exposition of the concept.
3. Stalin, J.V.: Foundations of Leninism; Chapter 4, “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”
The class enemy and opportunists of all types hate Stalin because he led the Soviet people in a world-historic period of the exercise of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here is his own theoretical account of it.
4. The Communist Party of China: On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World (1964)
This document dates from the outset of the open struggle against modern (Khrushchev) Soviet revisionism, a struggle without which our organization would never have adopted Marxism-Leninism.
Today the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union quite openly admit to their revisionism. It is more important than ever that we continue to wage the struggle against revisionism.
A. The struggle in South Africa
The Executive Committee of the Communist International: The South African Question – the Black Nation Thesis (1928), et. seg.
To this day, the sixty-two year old statement of the ECCI speaks to the revolutionary imperatives in South Africa in a way that is infinitely clearer, infinitely more to the point, than the line of the SACP then or now. Note also that at the time the Soviet Union was led by Joseph Stalin.
B. The Defense of Stalin
Every day we are inundated with the most appalling tide of filth on the topic of communism, sewersful of rotting and excremental substances of every description, from the bourgeoisie and their ideological allies, the “Marxist” opportunists. The primary tactic among all of these persons in their attempt to discredit Marxism-Leninism is to focus their attack upon the person of Joseph Stalin, a titan of communism.
1. Soviet Revolutionary Communists (Bolsheviks): Programmatic Proclamation (late 1960’s)
Those who would genuinely be communists must know the history of revolution and socialism from the point of view of those who actually made that history, and not adopt by default, on any old slipshod pretext, the viewpoint of the class enemy.
Here is an anti-revisionist document from the Soviet Union written from the point of view of the communists of that time. The heroism and dedication of the Soviet people is shown in correct perspective. It utterly refutes the line of the Soviet opportunists and exposes them for what they are: the “advanced detachment” of the bourgeois ideologists.
2. Andreyeva, Nina: I Cannot Waive Principles, (1988)
This is an article from a leading Soviet newspaper. It created an immense stir when it appeared in 1988. It offered a clear perspective of the opportunist trends of thought that long have been dominant in the CPSU, and which have run riot in the Gorbachev period. A couple of related press items are appended.
3. The Communist Party of China: On the Question of Stalin (1963)
It should never be forgotten that when the traitor Khrushchev denounced Stalin, the chief defender of Stalin that stepped forward was the Communist Party of China, led by Mao Zedong. Here is the main statement from the CPC in defense of Stalin.
This reading list is put forward with no pretensions to completeness. A great many vital topics and even whole subject areas are missing. The whole question of Marxist political economy is not present, for instance.
Still it is a start. The main tenet of this proposal is that Marxism-Leninism is a science; that the only way to gain knowledge of this or any science is to study its established base – scientific knowledge never arises spontaneously out of ignorance, as some would seem to have it; and that the only way to develop any science is to first grasp its established base of knowledge.