First Published:The Workers’ Advocate Vol. 7, No. 2, May 12, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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On May 12, 1969, the American Communist Workers Movement was founded. The ACWM(M-L) was the main predecessor organization to the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists and the first attempt to build a national Marxist-Leninist center to lead the process of reconstituting the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party since the degeneration of the Progressive Labor Party into neo-trotskyism and revisionism. The COUSML continues the best of the tradition of the ACWM(M-L). The ACWM(M-L) was an organization utterly hostile to the bourgeois state, revisionism and all opportunism. This was so much the case that the capitalists and their opportunist servants labelled the ACWM(M-L) "the Cleveland crazies", just as an Afro-American who uncompromisingly resists racist violence has customarily been labelled "crazy" by the authorities and their boot-licking lackeys. The COUSML of today feels it a high honor that its predecessor was regarded by the class enemies of the proletariat as "crazy". Chairman Mao teaches us that "It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work."
Why was the ACWM(M-L) regarded by opportunism as "crazy"? Principally because its cadres came from the mass struggles, it always had a revolutionary attitude of uncompromising resistance to the fascist attacks of the bourgeois state, and because it took up the crucial national tasks facing the American proletariat and advanced the struggle to build the Party and develop the revolution right in the teeth of the opportunists of all stripes who were trying to choke the revolutionary movement.
At the present time all the revolutionary activists are discussing how a revolutionary Party of the proletariat can be created in the U.S. A look at the origins of ACWM(M-L) shows that a revolutionary organization comes into existence and develops by solving the practical problems of revolution and in no other way.
The cadres who built the ACWM(M-L) emerged in the stormy mass movements of the 1960's. The group which formed the initial core of the ACWM(M-L) first came together as the Cleveland Draft Resistance Union in the Spring of 1967. It was composed of revolutionary youth who had had experience in the Afro-American people's struggle against racial discrimination and violent repression in the South and the North, in the struggle of students against the decadent bourgeois educational system, and other struggles. The Cleveland Draft Resistance Union followed a line of vigorous struggle and soon assumed leadership of the militant youth and students in Cleveland in the struggle against the draft and the U.S. imperialist war of aggression in Viet Nam. It was part of the especially powerful wave of youth and student struggle the struggle against the draft and the U.S. imperialist war of aggression in Viet Nam. It was part of the especially powerful wave of youth and student struggle which swept the U.S. in 1967, when the youth and student movement broke out of the confines of pacifism and bourgeois legality imposed on it by the opportunists and waged active mass resistance to the government and the war. The CDRU organized militant demonstrations at the Cleveland induction center to support youths who resisted the draft as well as those who entered the Army and organized resistance there. The CDRU practiced active resistance to the fascist attacks of the government-organized reactionary gangs and to the police themselves. In the course of helping youth resist or avoid the draft, the CDRU carried on political education among them on the nature of imperialism and the war and mobilized them to participate in struggle. The CDRU supported resistance to the draft and resistance inside the armed forces, giving active aid to both. The CDRU also strongly supported the local workers' struggles, most notably a successful 13-month organizing strike at St. Luke's Hospital, during which a CDRU member was arrested on the picket line and an attempt was made to frame the organization on terrorism charges. The CDRU aimed its work at the working-class youth. It attracted and had the support of all the most militant, active youth in the Cleveland area. It also built ties with the most militant activists in the anti-draft, anti-war struggle in local areas around the country, but did not participate in SDS, as SDS refused to lead the struggle against the draft and the war.
This activity of the CDRU aroused the extreme hatred of the local state machine and its opportunist agents, who attacked the organization viciously. CDRU members were hounded by the local police "red squad" and by the Immigration Department and attempts were made to infiltrate the organization with agents and to frame it on terrorism charges. The CDRU also came into sharp contradiction with the opportunists in the people's ranks, a holy alliance of trotskyites, revisionists and social-democrats, who served the bourgeois state by trying to stop the movement from taking the path of active mass resistance to the war of aggression. This struggle was sharpest with the trotskyites,who exposed themselves as the servile agents of the state, opposing active self-defense against the attacks of the police in two militant demonstrations at the Cleveland induction center in the Fall of 1967. The CDRU also waged struggles against the revisionists and social-democrats who supported the campaign of McCarthy for President and who worked to keep the struggle against the war in the narrow bounds of pacifism and bourgeois legality.
In the course of these struggles, the core of activists in the CDRU became conscious of the necessity of adopting the world outlook of Marxism and organizing the industrial proletariat for socialist revolution. They were inspired by the great liberation war of the Vietnamese people, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China led by Chairman Mao and by the Naxalbari uprising of Indian peasants led by the communist revolutionaries. In the Spring of 1968 they began to organize a Marxist study group and took a decision to go to the workers in the factories. At this time, a number of social-democratic bureaucrats in SDS, represented nationally by Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, crawled out of their holes and latched onto the youth and student movement in hopes of liquidating its militant spirit and preventing it from taking up Marxism and going to the workers. At the same time, preparations were being made in various circles in SDS for the wide-scale promotion of terrorism in the form of the Weathermen, with the same goal. In Cleveland, some of both of these elements came forward to join and try to disrupt the Marxist study group. Their behavior was instructive of the nature of opportunism. They advocated studying the bourgeois liberal Carl Oglesby rather than Marx. To avoid a split, the revolutionary cadres agreed temporarily to study a book by Oglesby before taking up Marx. At the next meeting, the revolutionary cadres arrived having read the assignment, while the SDS social-democrats and terrorists had not even read their own assignment! Thus these opportunists revealed that not only did they support opportunist theories but they also refused to take seriously the study of any theory at all! They were militantly thrown out and the study of Marxism was vigorously taken up.
The product of this struggle was the formation of the Cleveland Workers' Action Committee in the summer of 1968 on the basis of Marxism and going to the factory workers, along with a certain grasp of the necessity of a revolutionary party. The Workers' Action Committee drew in several militant workers and revolutionary activists from the youth and student movement in addition to its core. Its members bad or took jobs in the industrial proletariat, participated in the struggles of the workers and conducted regular study of Marxism. When the armed struggle of the Afro-Americans in Cleveland, led by Ahmed Evans, broke out in the summer of 1968, the Workers' Action Committee distributed leaflets in support of it to the National Guard and demonstrated in support of the struggle. The Workers' Action Committee also participated in the local movement to support the California farmworkers' strike, advocating and organizing militant demonstrations at the supermarkets. This line brought the organization into nose-to-nose confrontation with the top UAW labor bureaucrats in Cleveland, who tried to suppress all militant mass struggle. (One of them privately offered a WAC comrade the presidency of an un-named UAW local if only the comrade would "put his socialism in his back pocket". This anti-working class bribe was of course indignantly refused.)
The Workers' Action Committee, waged internal struggles against anarcho-syndicalism of the old type in defense of the Leninist line on state and revolution, and against the lumpen-proletarian line which originated with the Black Panthers and was spread by the National Organizing Committee, an SDS-ERAP offspring, among the white proletarian youth. According to the heroes of lumpenism, the working class was racist and sold-out and it was reformist to takeMarxism to the industrial proletariat. Two supporters of this line were purged from the Workers' Action Committee. At the same time, the local SDS social-democrats and terrorists viciously slandered the Workers' Action Committee as "dogmatist" for its devotion to Marxism. (The very same people who in 1967 were moaning that-the active resistance of the CDRU and revolutionary youth to state attacks was violating their social-democratic values of peace and love, in 1968 became raving terrorists wildly slandering the youth who supported Marxism as "conservative" and "dogmatic". This showed that terrorism and reformism are twin brothers and revealed their frenzy at their failure to stop the adoption of Marxism by the youth and its dissemination among the workers.)
The Workers' Action Committee firmly took the attitude that there is one Marxism and one proletariat and should be one Marxist-Leninist Party as the headquarters and general staff of the U.S. working class in its revolutionary struggle. Consequently it investigated all the existing groups which had not already been discredited (as had the trotskyites, revisionists and social-democrats) in earlier struggles. It supported the armed self-defense carried out by members of the Black Panther Party but opposed the line of lumpenism and recognized the necessity of a proletarian party. It also studied the line of the Progressive Labor Party, focusing on its Draft Trade Union Program, and came to the conclusion that the "left-center coalition" the PLP advocated had nothing whatsoever to do with mobilizing workers for revolution and concluded that the PLP was a fundamentally right opportunist organization. (PL had even contacted and planned to meet with the Workers' Action Committee, but when the Workers' Action Committee presented its particular criticism in a letter to PL's Trade Union Organizer there was no reply.) The Workers' Action Committee came to the conclusion that there existed no group or party giving leadership to the revolution and concluded that one must be built.
In early 1969, the Workers' Action Committee came into contact with a the Canadian Internationalists led by comrade Hardial Bains,who were then the Canadian Communist Movement (Marxist-Leninist). They were calling for a Conference of North American Anti-Imperialist Youth in Regina, Saskatchewan, in May. The Workers' Action Committee members immediately felt that these representatives of the Canadian proletariat were "just different" from all the opportunist sects in the U.S. The Cleveland comrades were inspired by the militant mass-democratic method and by the application of Mao Tsetung Thought to the field of culture as well as economics and politics, the lessons of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution brought to North America by the Internationalists. Taking up Mao Tsetung Thought and the mass-democratic method was an emancipation from the dictatorship of intellectualist pseudo-Marxism which had still hung over the Workers' Action Committee, preventing its cadres, who had a fundamentally correct line on major questions, from having the confidence to boldly and fully take up the national tasks of building the initial center of a Marxist-Leninist party for the U.S. Inspired and reinvigorated, the Workers' Action Committee (together with the Internationalists) contacted all the local activists and, on a national scale, the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, SDS (including Mike Klonsky), the Detroit Organizing Committee and others, to attend the Regina Conference. Only a small number of people, including none of the above organizations, responded, but this handful of people resolutely took up the tasks at hand and marched forward.
The Regina Conference brought to the U.S. the concrete application of Mao Tsetung Thought to the conditions of North America. The Regina Conference, in fact, was the First Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists. It promoted the building of revolutionary proletarian parties in Canada and the U.S. on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. Inspired by the Regina Conference, the Workers' Action Committee cadres whole-heartedly took up the national tasks of building the Party and organizing the U.S. proletarian revolution. They formed the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist) on May 12, 1969. It denounced both U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism and set forth the tasks of the American proletariat as building its own party, defeating opportunism, overthrowing its "own" bourgeoisie and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. The ACWM(M-L) set to work militantly to disseminate Mao Tsetung Thought and build the Party.
The ACWM(M-L) held the Marxist view that there should be a single Marxist-Leninist center in the U.S. in which all the Marxist-Leninists should unite to build the Party. Like its predecessor, the ACWM(M-L) was firmly opposed to the revisionist line of polycentrism. The ACWM(M-L) contacted all the main groups and individuals claiming to be Marxist-Leninist and anti-revisionist in 1969, including the California Communist League, the Bay Area Revolutionary Union and Mike Klonsky, with the aim of uniting to build a single party. All of them arrogantly rejected this attempt at unity. All of them were perfectly clear about the origins of ACWM(M-L) in the mass struggles in Cleveland and there even existed personal ties with each. Nor did these groups and individuals reject this attempt at unity by openly claiming that the political line of the ACWM(M-L) was wrong. Instead, they used subterfuge, "agreeing" with the general line of ACWM(M-L) but in fact opposing it and practicing revisionist polycentrism. Some of these organizations (including the CCL), who were led by more "experienced" "Marxists" than the ACWM(M-L), held that it was impossible to form a national center and issue a national paper at that time. They gave the anti-Marxist line of pre-party collectives, which meant that each local collective should "interpret" Marxism as it wished and that some day, by some mystical process, all the local collectives would come together at a "Congress" and form a "Party". Consequently, they could not unite with the ACWM(M-L), whose "inexperienced" cadres were already issuing a national communist paper, The Workers' Advocate. Meanwhile, these worthies were surreptitiously forming their own national links to build their own national organizations with a right-wing sectarian line behind the backs of the Marxist-Leninist movement. At the same time, Klonsky and his friends, conceding that the basic line of the ACWM (M-L) was correct, refused to unite with it. They imposed uninvestigated sectarian principles on the Afro-American question in order to avoid uniting on the basic questions of Marxism-Leninism, attitude to the state, to imperialism, the proletariat and party building. These groups and individuals which refused repeatedly to unite with the Marxist-Leninists developed into a distinct trend of neo-revisionism, revisionism flying the banner of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, the forerunner of present-day open social-chauvinism, a trend which never was able to unite even itself but remains hopelessly fragmented.
Undaunted by this refusal of the "official Maoists" to shoulder the national tasks of building a Party in the spirit of Marxism, the ACWM(M-L) marched forward with its work. Among its achievements were the wide-scale dissemination of Mao Tsetung Thought, wide-scale revolutionary propaganda on national, international and local questions among the proletariat and other oppressed sections of the people, a vigorous resistance movement to the fascist attacks of the police, the smashing of the fascist hard-hat movement in Cleveland in 1970, the development of analysis of growing fascism in the U.S., the attraction of many honest activists from the revolutionary mass movements, expansion to many cities and the creation of a central leading group of somewhat experienced cadres. In the Fall of 1972, together with the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and other organizations, the ACWM(M-L) issued the Call for a Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists. This call had a thoroughly revolutionary character and expressed, once again, the desire of the ACWM (M-L) to unite all the anti-revisionists in the struggle to build the Party. A large-scale campaign was organized around the revolutionary slogan: "Marxist-Leninists, Unite!" But the neo-revisionists once again rejected this appeal, while the "Communist" League infiltrated the Conference Committee in order to split from it and form its own opportunist party.
The campaign around the Call for a Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists led to the Conference of American Marxist-Leninists and the founding of the COUSML. (The Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists was postponed until conditions are created to hold it.) It was the campaign around the Call which defeated the open advocacy of pre-party collectives in the Marxist-Leninist Communist movement and made the question of Party- building the key question in the Marxist-Leninist movement. However, the opportunists are still up to their dirty work. The neo-revisionists now verbally uphold building the party, while in practice they still uphold the revisionist theory of "many centers", and the neo-revisionist trend is giving rise to "many parties". The latest "party" to declare itself is the social-chauvinist October League's soon-to-be- founded "Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)". The theory of "many centers", "many parties" is really the line of no proletarian center, no party.
The revolutionary activitiesof ACWM(M-L) and its predecessors brought it up sharply against the state. To suppress the ACWM(M-L) the state carried out over 100 arrests of its members and supporters. The ACWM(M-L) waged many heroic battles with the state-organized fascist gangs and police, most notably the smashing of the hard-hat movement in Cleveland in 1970 and the fight to defend the William Z. Foster Center in Buffalo in 1972. In addition to this method of forcible suppression, the state also intervened inside the Marxist-Leninist movement. The opportunists, through their own right-wing sectarianism, became the witting or unwitting tools to spread the gossips and slanders of the political police, in particular the slander that the ACWM(M-L) was a "CIA" organization. Where does this line come from? It comes from the political police themselves, from the CIA and the FBI. Their aim, as admitted by the FBI agent Joe Burton, was to split the Marxist-Leninists so as to prevent a genuine Marxist-Leninist Party from coming into existence. When did this slander first arise? It arose at the time of the campaign around the Call for a Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists. Its purpose was to prevent this campaign from leading towards the re-constitution of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the U.S. proletariat. No one should be so naive as to believe that such slanders against the Marxist-Leninists are "innocent" or "accidental". FBI-opportunist collaboration was repeated again in the Fall of 1976, when the Guardian, claiming you can learn lessons from known FBI agents, printed an interview with Joe Burton accusing the Association of Communist Workers, which had by then become the COUSML's Louisville Branch, of being an agent organization. This article came out just at the time when the Louisville Branch of COUSML was leading the struggle against the fascist anti-busing movement in Louisville and was aimed at undermining this struggle by attacking its leaders. Now the October League has again dusted off this same slander for the purpose of discrediting the Marxist-Leninists and "justifying" the formation of its social-chauvinist "party".
Several important lessons for today's situation can be drawn from these aspects of the history of ACWM (M-L). These lessons are:
1. Take up the national tasks of the proletariat. The ACWM(M-L) and its predecessors advanced the American revolution because they took up the crucial national tasks of the proletariat at the time. The revolutionary mass movements of the 1960's posed sharply the need for a Party. Coming from these struggles, these revolutionary activists shouldered the task of creating an initial center to lead the struggle for such a Party and succeeded in doing so. Today a major national task faces the Marxist-Leninists of waging war on open social-chauvinism, the bankrupt culmination of the neo-revisionist trend which arose to oppose ACWM(M-L), in order to unite all the genuine Marxist-Leninists on a firm basis of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism.
2. There is one Marxism and one Party of the proletariat in each country. Coming from the mass movements and recognizing, feeling, their need for a single revolutionary headquarters, the cadres who formed ACWM(M-L) were utterly hostile to the revisionist line of polycentrism, expressed in the line of the neo-revisionists for "pre-party collectives". Once it was ascertained that no leading national organization existed, one had immediately to be created. Once it was, all Marxist-Leninists should unite with it. This was the view and practice of ACWM(M-L), which was totally opposed to the egocentric, selfish clique-building of the neo-revisionists and served wholeheartedly the fundamental interests of the proletariat. For this "crime" of calling for Marxist-Leninist unity the opportunists have long slandered the ACWM(M-L) as "sectarian". How ironic -- the thief cries "Stop thief!". Today the OL social-chauvinists, who are real right-wing sectarians, are the latest to so consummate their clique-building efforts.
3. Take a revolutionary attitude towards the state. Our history shows that there is no way the interests of the masses can be defended, a revolutionary movement developed and a steeled Party built without uncompromising resistance to the fascist attacks of the bourgeois state. Active resistance to state attacks was a hallmark of ACWM(M-L) and its predecessors, from the draft resistance demonstrations to the fight against the hard-hats. But opportunism and particularly social-chauvinism kneel before and even glorify the bourgeois state and its main component, the police and armed forces. They oppose precisely the revolutionary methods of struggle practiced by the ACWM(M-L) and COUSML which allow the masses to break out of the confines of pacifism and bourgeois legality and get prepared for insurrection. Today the "quiet, respectable" social-chauvinists are the same people who called ACWM(M-L) "crazy" for fighting the hard-hats and the police. The flabby, philistine spirit of social-chauvinism is merely the outgrowth of the flabby, philistine spirit of "New Leftism" and neo-revisionism, while the militant revolutionary attitude to the state held by COUSML is a continuation of the traditions of CDRU, the WAC and ACWM(M-L).
4. Be totally hostile to opportunism. Through practice in mass struggle the revolutionary cadres who founded ACWM(M-L) became conscious of the consistent wrecking activities of various forms of opportunism. They saw that opportunism of all stripes is an obstacle blocking the revolutionary struggle and the building of the revolutionary Party. They rightly regarded the opportunists as agents of the bourgeois state in the ranks of the people. Consequently they adopted a totally hostile attitude to opportunist politics and the die-hard representatives of opportunism while attempting to win over and unite with all honest elements against the bourgeois state.
5. The chief enemy of the American proletariat is at home. All the activity of the ACWM(M-L) and its predecessors, as is reflected in the founding resolution of the ACWM(M-L) was permeated with a burning hatred for the U.S. government and burning desire to overthrow it and bum the monopoly capitalist system to ashes. Without such an attitude toward one's own bourgeoisie, the words "revolution" and "proletarian internationalism" are a sheer mockery. Yet it is precisely here where social-chauvinism has today cravenly betrayed the U.S. and international proletariat, advocating that the American working class unite with its "own" bourgeoisie to direct its "main blow" at Soviet social-imperialism.
6. Resolutely oppose social-chauvinism. The revolutionary cadres who founded ACWM(M-L) always sincerely tried to learn from the best experience of the revolutionary movement of other countries, while aiming all their activities at overthrowing their "own" bourgeoisie. They looked to the revolutionary people of Viet Nam, China, India and elsewhere for inspiration and guidance. When the Canadian Internationalists came to Cleveland in early 1969, the American comrades did not hesitate to learn from them and unite with them. This is a stark contrast to the arrogant social-chauvinist stance taken at every turn by the opportunists parading as "anti-revisionists", who viciously slandered the Canadian comrades, accused ACWM(M-L) of "sounding just like Peking Review", etc., etc. Today this social-chauvinism has reached the point of open defense of the U.S. imperialist state in its rivalry and war preparations with Soviet social-imperialism for world domination.
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These are some lessons which can be learned from a brief look at the origin and development of the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist- Leninist) on the occasion of the eighth anniversary of its founding. Let all genuine Marxist-Leninists unite in the struggle against social-chauvinism and all opportunism to build the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Communist Party!