First Published: The Militant Vol. 22, No. 38, September 22, 1958
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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A newly formed Provisional Organizing Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party presented its ideas publicly last week in the first edition of a monthly newspaper, The Marxist-Leninist Vanguard.
Vanguard reports the Aug. 16-17 conference of the new group which began as the Marxist-Leninist caucus of the Communist Party. The CP leadership’s suppression of documents embodying the views of this caucus is the reason given for calling the conference.
The Communist Party’s National Executive Committee answered the action of the caucus by expelling all those who attended the conference. The Aug. 17 Worker declares that the call to the caucus’s conference “…climaxes a long period of factional, anti-party activity…” “Those who are responsible for the organization of this factional conference have by this act placed themselves outside the Party and merit expulsion from its ranks.”
Thus, under threat of expulsion, 83 delegates attended the conference representing an estimated 300 people from local caucuses throughout the country. Lucille Bethancourt, former Smith Act defendant and one of the leaders of the movement in Chicago, chaired the first session.
Vanguard reports that the composition of the conference was outstanding because of the high number of workers, Negroes and Puerto Ricans in attendance. The average age of the delegates was thirty-six.
The main line of the conferences programmatic declaration, which is printed in Vanguard, is the need to reconstitute a party capable of leading the struggle for socialism in the United States.
Among the many points raised in the programmatic declaration are the following:
(1) Opposition to the notion that “peaceful, parliamentary, constitutional transition to socialism” is possible “in the United States through the evolution of the people’s front.” The vanguard group ascribes this view to William Z. Foster among other Party leaders.
(2) Dissociation “once and for all from the opportunist trade union policy which would isolate us from the rank and file workers in order to combat ’isolation’ from the labor lieutenants of capital.”
(3) Opposition to “the liquidation of the Marxist-Leninist youth movement – at a time when the imperialist bourgeoisie has developed its most concentrated attack on the interests of American youth.”
Armando Roman, veteran leader of the CP’s Puerto Rican section, presented the political report. He declared that the main task of the Communist Party was the struggle for peace. Most important to this struggle is the working class. “But how,” he demanded, “can the leadership of the CPUSA help to generate a peace movement within the ranks of labor if its labor policy is based on the tactic of tailing the trade union bureaucrats?”
On the Negro struggle Roman taxes the CP leadership with opportunism, but does so from a “Negro nationalist” line. He claims that the CP aims to destroy the theoretical base of the question by casting aside the tenet that the Negro question essentially involves “the existence of a nation and people oppressed by American imperialism within the boundaries of the United States.” Harry Haywood, one of the earliest expounders of this theory, which was first advanced by the CP in 1928, is now a member of the Marxist-Leninist Committee.
The organization report was given by A, Marino, Waterfront section organizer of the CP. He pointed out that the two-year struggle in the CP has had a devastating effect. He claimed that of the estimated 17,000 membership at the time of the convention in February 1957, only 3,000 remain.
The Vanguard group further accuses the Communist Party leadership of being out of line with the international communist movement which, it contends, does adhere to revolutionary principles. Instances cited are the Party leadership’s alleged failure to repudiate the 1957 CP convention stand on the Hungarian rising. The convention voted to neither condemn nor condone the crushing of the revolution. Vanguard considers the Hungarian events to have been a counter-revolution and the crushing of it a revolutionary act.
Another example cited by Vanguard of the American CP’s being out of line with the international movement is the alleged rejection of the 12-party declaration signed in Moscow last November when Khrushchev was consolidating his authority over the Communist parties the world over. Vanguard characterizes the American CP leadership as “Titoite” because Tito opposed the 12-party declaration and refused to sign it.
Vanguard holds that since 1928, the CP leadership in the U.S. has been developing an opportunist course at variance with the Communist Parties in the rest of the world. However, the history of the international communist movement does not bear Vanguard out. Transformation fo the CPUSA from a revolutionary socialist party into an opportunist organization parallels a similar transformation throughout all other Communist Parties. And this process is tied to the development of bureaucratic rule in the Soviet Union since 1923.
The Vanguard conference made plans for the “Provisional Organizing Committee” to function nationally and to publish a monthly newspaper. It also elected a 19-man steering committee. Vanguard and four other documents that were suppressed in the CP can be obtained by writing to Harry Haywood, 1649 Lincoln Pl., Brooklyn, N.Y., or to Armando Roman, 162 Second St., N.Y., N.Y.