The following summarizes the presentation of the Boston District Collective at a forum on Period and Tasks held in March in the Boston area. Other presentations at the forum were by the LRS, the RWH and the PUL. The Boston District Collective is the former Boston district organization of the CPML. It established its independence last year in order to further line development, recruitment and the party building process. It maintains ties with the CPML for the purpose of furthering unity and ultimate merger on a multi-lateral basis. The presentation represents the BDC and not necessarily the CPML as a whole.)
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The BDC perceives its role in the current debate as having three components: clarifying what is the unity represented by “our trend,” determining what are the bottom-line differences which prevent us from uniting, and making a modest start at filling in some of the most important voids in our movement’s analysis. In its presentation, the BDC emphasized that we cannot go about building a working class party without an analysis of the working class and especially of the contradictions within it. This task, then, of analyzing the U.S. working class, the BDC believes is a serious void. In presenting their views the spokesperson emphasized that their analysis was “a beginning” that they are “open to criticism.”
Summarizing the essential points of the class analysis presented in a paper circulated before the forum, the BDC characterized the U.S. working class by three sectors: the highly unionized, monopoly sector; the state and service sector; and the non-monopolized, smaller firm, mostly unorganized sector sometimes called the “dual economy.” Each sector is characterized by particular material conditions of work and social relations, which provide particular distortions of the total reality of U.S. society. Each also has its internal contradictions. These give rise to different consciousness. The BDC proposes that the basis and source of line differences in the M-L movement can be best understood through this class analysis. Different views represent, in part, different material experiences in the working class. A synthesis is needed for a total correct view.
As an example, the primary sector, being involved in large-scale social production with a tradition of militant unionism and especially where high skill levels are involved, readily develops a concrete conception of worker control and point-of-production socialism. But, at the same time, under Imperialism there is a material basis for chauvinism. Only this kind of experience could lead to downplaying the national question and giving uncritical overemphasis to trade union struggles.
How does the BDC characterize the period and the tasks required of it? First, it is necessary to understand that a revolutionary upsurge is qualitatively different from the many upsurges that occur in the class struggle from time to time. The present situation is not revolutionary, neither are the working class and the oppressed nationalities of the U.S. self-conscious, coherently organized social forces to any substantial extent.
The tasks of communists are therefore not in this immediate period that of constituting a “general staff” to lead the working class and national liberation struggles. The tasks are rather those of asserting “moral authority” and raising the level of consciousness.
Of course, there is always, for communists, what the BDC calls the background tasks of being leaders, being in the thick of things. It is from among the leaders of the people’s daily struggles that the ranks of a socialist organization come.
Having given proper attention to these background tasks, communists will need to focus, for a long time to come, on two fundamental tasks: first, developing the authority of Marxist-Leninists. For example, if the Marxist-Leninists had successfully predicted the broad lines of development of Reagan’s election, the emergence of the new right, etc., they would have increased their authority. So we need to improve our analysis and, over time, come to be recognized as those who understand, those who can explain what is happening, and what is likely to come.
This has got to be done by synthesizing the best contributions of all Marxist-Leninists and others, and producing a coherent view in the popular language of our people. Part of this view must be a vision, a conception of what it is we want to build. We must give people hope, and the possibility of something radically better.
Second is the task of raising consciousness. In this period, new leaders are coming forward in the ranks of labor, in the student movement, in the anti-war movement, in the national liberation movement. These leaders soon become disillusioned and frustrated, or cynical or coopted, because reforms can never really satisfy their expectations. Communists have the specific responsibility, as they struggle alongside these leaders, to respond to the frustration, by raising their consciousness to an overall class view, to an historical view, to a long term view of struggle, to a revolutionary perspective. The BDC is critical of downplaying these tasks, relegating them to the category of “red tasks.” This signifies abandonment of revolution, not just now, but forever.
As for exploring the unity in the M-L movement, the BDC restricted itself in the presentation to calling on Marxist-Leninists to be more substantive and less sloganeering in the areas of the Theory of Three Worlds, what it means to be a Marxist-Leninist, what it means to be anti-revisionist, and the support for National Liberation. The BDC’s own contribution is in their paper.
Organizations should be judged by their deeds more so than their words. From this perspective the BDC expressed a reluctance to go into criticisms of the LRS pending the development of some common work. However, having worked considerably alongside the RWH and the PUL, the BDC presented criticisms. The BDC finds the RWH to be imbued with workerism, a tendency to unite with workers in the primary section based on the workers’ current consciousness. This readily leads to tail-ism, reformism and uncritical trade unionism. In particular, they do not adequately accept the special responsibility to raise the question of national oppression with white workers. The BDC also questioned the political soundness of the internal unity of the RWH, referring to their practice of relating to one another more on the basis of long association and friendship as “Old Boyism.”
The BDC’s experience with PUL led them to criticize “reductionism,” which is a particular form of dogmatism. It reduces all complex questions requiring genuine analysis to boxing them into descriptive categories. The primary example is PUL’s dogma of pretending to solve the lessons of our history and the internal dynamic of our movement’s-development by shouting “ultraleftism.” This explains nothing, nor does it tell us what to do or not to do. Furthermore, as experience with PUL shows, it disarms people to the danger of Sovietism, Soviet revisionism. PUL is so intent on going after Marxist-Leninists whom it considers “ultraleft,” yet it does little to expose and isolate the principal source of American antipathy to socialism, Soviet revisionism.