First Published: The Call, Vol. 5, No. 29, November 22, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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As part of an internal campaign to study Marxism-Leninism and deepen the struggle against rightism in preparation for the founding of the new party, the October League recently held its third cadre school.
The school lasted 5 days and drew together a core of leading cadres from around the country. Its purpose was to analyze communist tasks in this period of party building, organized around an in-depth study of Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.
Using the main lessons of One Step, the school set out to formulate clearly a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the link between political line and organization and of the particular importance at this time of forging the organizational unity of Marxist-Leninists in the U.S.
The students summed up that, in the present (first) period of the party, the chief form of work must be the revolutionary education of the working class through systematic agitation and propaganda, carried out in the course of mass struggles. Our aim is to win the advanced workers to a scientific understanding of communism and to bring them organizationally into the new party.
To train a leading detachment of Marxist-Leninist fighters, special emphasis must be placed in this period on propaganda work. Only this kind of intensive training in Marxism today will enable the party to successfully lead the working class and oppressed people in the period of mass action that lies ahead, It was this general understanding of communist tasks and periods of party building which guided the work of the school.
One Step Forward was selected to orient the school’s discussion because, in this work, Lenin clearly and comprehensively sets out his views on party organization: what kind of organization the proletariat needs to wage class war and the importance of organization itself. “In its struggle for power, the proletariat has no other weapon but organization,” Lenin wrote, summing up the struggle that came out of the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. “Disunited by the rule of anarchic competition in the bourgeois world, ground down by forced labor to capital. . .the proletariat can, and inevitably will, become an invincible force only through its ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organization.”
In summing up our struggle to rebuild a vanguard party in this country since the degeneration of the revisionist Communist Party (CPUSA), the school pointed to the clear gains already made in drawing lines of demarcation between Marxism and revisionism on main political questions. These ideological gains, the school stressed, now need to be transformed into organizational gains. To develop our political line, program and tactics further, we must break with the primitiveness of small circles and forge a higher form of organization.
The school targeted our modern-day, Mensheviks like the Wing, MLOC, and Workers Viewpoint, who plead for more time to debate questions of line but do little more than squabble among themselves.
They oppose Political line to organization in order to preserve the backward small circles of the past. It is their fear of proletarian organization, which they try to hide with schemes such as Workers Viewpoint’s plan for building the party “on an ideological plane,” and MLOC’s “joint program-writing” proposal.
The school further linked the line of the anti-party forces to their methods of struggle, criticizing them as Lenin did the Mensheviks in One Step. A correct orientation to ideological struggle is essential in order to unite the vast majority in opposition to revisionism.
The Mensheviks, Lenin indicated, resorted to unprincipled blocking to oppose the correct views of the Bolsheviks, relying on anarchistic and splittist methods. These are the methods of today’s Mensheviks, who scream “political line is decisive,” but unite with anyone to oppose the growing Marxist-Leninist unity trend and refuse to layout clearly their own line.
The school put great emphasis on the correct methods of practicing Marxism, seeking unity and not splits, and being bold in both presenting self-criticism and concrete plans to rectify errors.
They united on the need to mobilize a broad campaign within the October League and among the masses to study and apply Marxist-Leninist principles on party-building, to practice the mass line and boldly advance to the founding of the new party next year.
Summing up the experience of the school, all the cadres stressed that it was a great step forward in deepening their grasp, of Marxism and the burning questions of today.