Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Letter of Resignation, Baltimore/Washington OCIC


Issued: January 4, 1981.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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January 4, 1981

To: Steering Committee of the Baltimore/Washington local Center and National Steering Committee of the OCIC

We, the undersigned, hereby resign from the OCIC effective immediately.

We all were drawn to the OCIC because of its potential contributions to the development of revolutionary theory that is critical in this party building period. However this assessment of the OCIC is no longer accurate. The struggles in the recent history of the OCIC have shown that the OCIC is not moving the party building movement forward, but backward, and has become a retrograde trend.

When trying to break new ground in party building, errors are to be expected. But unfortunately the errors emanating from the NSC are not isolated nor a result of inexperience, but flow from a consolidated perspective that is taking the OCIC rapidly down the path of opportunism.

While our primary focus this past year has been on critiquing the Campaign Against White Chauvinism and its underlying incorrect political lines on racism and sexism, we now think that these errors are closely linked to a incorrect party building perspective. Presently we do not have a collective analysis of the nature and relationship of these party building errors. However we do unite in our rejection of many of the manifestations of this line as we have seen it unfold thus far.

The NSC claims that the primary task in this period is “sweeping away” our bourgeois ideology as the precondition for taking up theoretical work. This is an idealistic and mechanical formulation; it precludes us from using dialectical and historical materialism to transform ourselves and establishes a linear, stagist method as opposed to a dialectical one.

Ideological struggle has been bastardized to the point of being almost unrecognizable. Ideological struggle has come to mean class stand divorced from political line struggle or from commitment to serious theoretical work, leaving correct class stand to be defined by those leading the organization.

The Campaign Against White Chauvinism actually perpetuates racism and consolidates members by psychological manipulation, not through principled theoretical and ideological development. In the Campaign, criticism/self criticism has been profoundly abused. Instead of using this communist tool to examine and rectify errors, OCIC leadership has upheld a moralistic approach to criticism devoid of theoretical and political underpinnings. Principled ideological consolidation cannot occur separate from a scientific analysis where communists examine questions in an all-sided manner. Without utilizing this dialectical method, ideological consolidation is premature and opportunistic!

Criticism/self-criticism, mainly in the Campaign, has also been used to pre-empt political line struggle by labeling “racist” those with political differences. Campaign “leaders” have obscured these differences on key questions by treating all objections by their critics as ideological weaknesses. This again is opportunism.

A related error is the NSC’s sectarianism of incorrectly perceiving the CCIC as the center of the party-building movement and readily branding honest forces standing outside as opportunists.

We have seen these cumulative and interrelated errors being made, and the consolidation of the CCIC leadership around them. We have put forth our criticisms and alternatives, and through the course of the debates, fundamental disunity has developed making our further participation in the OCIC untenable. Collectively we shall continue to elaborate our critique of the CCIC. We look forward to pursuing this work and are committed to doing so in a principled and non-sectarian manner.

In Struggle,
Adam
Adrian
Al
Amil
Ann (moved to N.E. region)
Becky
Bill
Bob (moved to N.E. region)
Emma
Flor
Fred
Gerry
Greg
Harry
Johnny
Moriah
Rose
Sam
Veronica
George V. (applicant)