First Published: In the pamphlet, Why Did the “RCP,USA” Split? March 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
COUSML Note: This is an excerpt from a speech delivered at an internal conference of the COUSML in the latter half of 1977. The speech has been edited for publication and the section on the fascist anti-busing movement has been added.
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Comrades, I would like to make a few remarks concerning the RCP,...
The comrades speaking before pointed out that social-chauvinism has come from the swamp of neo-revisionism. It should be pointed out that the RCP, or its predecessor the Revolutionary Union, was actually the formulator or theoretician of neo-revisionism. It was the RU that actually formulated and elaborated the line of “pre-party collectives” or “pre-Marxist-Leninist collectives”.
I would like to restrict myself to only one major theme, that is: what stand does the RCP take on the growing polarization between Marxism-Leninism and open social-chauvinism.
The issue of social-chauvinism has become the pivotal issue in the Marxist-Leninist movement today. The opportunists are coming out into the open as chauvinist defenders of the bourgeoisie, thus openly revealing what has always been their essence. The opportunists have always been social-chauvinists, but now they are revealing it. And these opportunists direct their main blow at the Marxist-Leninists. The role of the RCP in this is to prevent the Marxist-Leninists from splitting with social-chauvinism, to try to stop this polarization by allegedly “opposing” the most blatant social-chauvinist slogans while in fact supporting all the main social-chauvinist theses and preparing conditions to totally capitulate to the social-chauvinists in the future. Thus the RCP claims to oppose the theory of “directing the main blow at the Soviet Union”, this slogan which is open social-chauvinism and which is fully equivalent to defending the U.S. imperialist fatherland in an imperialist war. By this means the RCP claims to be leading the struggle against social-chauvinism. But at the same time the RCP does the most extensive ideological work in favor of all the main social-chauvinist theories. The RCP not only supports the social-chauvinist theories, but in any concrete situation, in a number of concrete political situations, it gives the same or similar line as the open social-chauvinists. We will deal with the question of the theories later on. Let us start by showing how in actual practice the RCP, despite their whole false front, end up giving the same line as the social-chauvinists.
One example of this is the issue of the Shah of Iran. The Shah of Iran is a bloodstained puppet of U. S. imperialism. He not only oppresses and butchers the people of his own country in the most barbaric fashion, but he also, on behalf of U.S. imperialism, sends troops into other countries to oppress them also, such as into Oman to suppress the revolutionary movement there. The RCP gave the facade of a big, militant criticism of OL on the issue of OL’s support for the Shah of Iran, how the OL was capitulating, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of all this, it turns out that at the present time the RCP asserts that the Shah of Iran does in fact fight U.S. imperialism, and actually asks for the American proletariat to support the Shah of Iran to the extent that he allegedly fights U.S. imperialism. The RCP says: “But for the U.S. proletariat to support, for instance, the Shah of Iran to the extent that, as a member of OPEC, Iran struggles against imperialist plunder, does not mean putting such support above support for the revolutionary struggles of the Iranian people to defeat imperialism and overthrow the Shah. ” (Revolution, July 1977, “On the Three Worlds and the International Situation”, p. 18, column 2) So at the same time that the RCP puts up its big propaganda front about how it supports the Iranian people’s struggle and how it opposes OL’s social-chauvinist stand in support of the Shah of Iran, it turns out that the RCP creates illusions about the role of the Shah of Iran and ends up giving the same social-chauvinist line that the Shah of Iran does fight U. S. imperialism to a certain “extent”.
A similar example concerns the issue of the traitor Mobutu in the Congo-Kinshasa (“Zaire”). When a band of former Katanganese mercenaries, egged on by the Cuban-MPLA- Soviet neocolonial regime in Angola, invaded the U. S. imperialist neo-colony of the Congo-K, the social-chauvinists jumped up and down, saying that the main question was to oppose the Soviet Union and to support Mobutu. In this way the social-chauvinists support the vast U.S. colonial empire against both “theft” by the Soviet social-imperialists and against true liberation by, for example, the revolutionary forces in the Congo-K led by the Marxist Revolutionary Party of the Congo-K. This is undoubtedly an example of what the comrade referred to earlier when he pointed out that the social-chauvinists say the main threat to the “independence” of such countries is the Soviet Union, negating the fact that these countries aren’t independent to start with, but are simply neo-colonies. And the RCP came directly out in chorus with the social-chauvinists in supporting Mobutu. The May issue of Revolution carried a front page article entitled “Soviet Backed Mercenaries Invade Zaire”. This article “militantly” declares that Mobutu is not only “pro-U.S.” but even ”the main pro-U. S. black government in Africa”, that “Mobutu has been a servant of U.S. imperialism and the people of Zaire will undoubtedly overthrow their oppressors” and that “The U.S. is also trying to shore up the Zaire government against the invaders, not out of any concern for Zaire’s independence but rather for the $1 billion in U.S. investments and U.S. imperialism’s more general interests in Zaire.” Thus RCP holds that both the Mobutu government and the invaders are servants of imperialism. But according to this article you should decide which servant of imperialism gives the best situation for the country! Naturally the RCP thinks that when all is said and done the situation would really deteriorate if the Soviet servants win, so from this point of view they support Mobutu and their own” U.S. imperialists against the invader. Of course, this is only because they are very concerned for revolution in the Congo-K, and they even say so: “If such an armed invasion succeeds in imposing a new regime, the conditions for revolution will not be advanced, but set back.” The RCP even uses the exact same sophistry of the OL of trying to turn Comrade Stalin into a social-chauvinist. The RCP concludes its article with the following passage, which could have been copied from OL’s “dialectician” Eileen Klehr: “The lesson of all this reaffirms the Marxist position summed up by Stalin in appraising the maneuvers of the imperialists in the oppressed countries half a century ago. These situations, he said, have to be seen ’from the point of view of the actual results, as shown by the general balance sheet of the struggle against imperialism, that is to say, ’not in isolation, but on a world scale’.”
“The Soviets are on the move in Africa, trying to use the armed liberation struggles as an opening for their own intervention, and as Angola proved, the meddling of the USSR, like the meddling of the U.S. (suddenly the U.S. is no longer “meddling” in the Congo-K, just the Soviet Union – ed.) brings only setbacks for the revolutionary struggle. In the context of the situation in Africa as a whole and the imperialists’ aims there, the invasion of Zaire is a dangerous threat to the overall struggle and a dangerous precedent for more of the same. The trampling on the independence of countries which have long been victimized by imperialism (the “independence” of the Congo-K is only being trampled on by the Soviet Union, according to RCP – ed.) is a foul crime no matter what banner it is cloaked in.
“From the point of view of the situation within Zaire itself, if the current reactionary regime is replaced by another pro-imperialist regime whose power is established through force of invasion, this too would be a setback in the conditions for the revolutionary struggle in Zaire, a struggle which is sure to end in the overthrow of all of imperialism’s servants, including the present regime.
“From this point of view – from the question of whether it actually advances or goes against the struggle of the people of Zaire, Africa and the whole world against the imperialist system and the two superpowers who head it up, this invasion of Zaire is completely reactionary and must be opposed.” This stand by the RCP really flustered the OL, which had to try very hard to concoct some difference with RCP on the question of Mobutu. All the OL could say is that the RCP doesn’t explain clearly enough why it takes the social-chauvinist position! The Call wrote: “Trying to cover themselves, they (the RCP, expressing itself by way of an article in The Veteran – ed.) tack on a remark that ’this little war must end with one side or the other as the victor’, and that therefore it would be better if the mercenaries were defeated. But with their distorted logic, portraying the struggle simply as a fight between the superpowers, they cannot explain why it would be better.” (The Call, “RCP Tells People of Zaire Don’t Fight’”, June 20, 1977, p. 12, column 4). Thus there is no actual difference of political line between the RCP and the OL on this question. Both support U.S. imperialist aggression on the plea of opposing an allegedly even worse Soviet social-imperialist aggression.
Another example concerns Ethiopia. All sorts of groups have suddenly become excited about the Ethiopian question... just as soon as they could use this to emphasize the question of Soviet domination. Until recently the social-chauvinists had little interest in the Ethiopian revolution. After all, the fascist Derg is a “third world government” and thus part of the “main force” moving forward world history – and the Derg itself was more than happy to go along with such a farce and made all sorts of demagogical “anti-imperialist” pronouncements. But as soon as the Derg expelled some U.S. imperialist personnel and Cuban troops started to come in, the social-chauvinists certainly became interested in the Ethiopian revolution because they could say that this was part of directing the “main blow” at the Soviet social-imperialists. The RCP had been interested in subverting the Ethiopian revolution for some time. But the RCP too began to use the Soviet aggression in Ethiopia to whitewash U. S. imperialist aggression in Ethiopia. The RCP says that U.S. imperialism was thrown out by the Derg when it expelled some U.S. imperialist personnel and U.S. bases. Therefore they say that U.S. imperialism is still contending for Ethiopia but only through such forces as the Ethiopian Democratic Union. They completely negate the fact that the U.S. imperialists have strong positions in the Ethiopian state-machine as well as in the economy, and the Derg simply expelled a few personnel and did not dismantle the state-machine or transform the economy. So U. S. imperialism still has its grasp on Ethiopia, and not just through the Ethiopian Democratic Union. Thus the RCP puts all the crimes of the Derg on the back of the Soviet New Tsars. While the Soviet Union does indeed deserve denunciation for backing the Derg, the RCP whitewashes U.S. imperialism’s crimes in Ethiopia and its support of the Derg’s crimes against the people.
Another example is the RCP’s stand on the fascist anti-busing movement. The OL and RCP have different forms of the same line of opposition to the movement against racial discrimination and violent repression. At the end of a long period of debate, both settled down to the view that the question was that each individual busing plan had to be examined on its own merits. What incredible wisdom! The RCP wrote in a reply to a letter that: “We also agree that one has to look at the particularities of each busing plan to see whether it is good or bad... ” (Revolution, April, 1977, p. 6, col. 2) Thus the RCP made the issue into “whether or not we support busing in a particular case” (same article, p. 6, col. 3) while shamefacedly denying that it is doing so. The RCP way of not making busing itself into the issue is to promote slogans like “Smash the Boston Busing Plan!” and more recently “Plan Should Be Upheld Reaction Erupts Over Chicago Busing” (Revolution, October, 1977, p. 2) Revolution explains this as follows: “But we have also said that the issue is not busing in itself and stressed that the particularities of each busing plan have to be analyzed, because in some cases busing can and should be supported”. (Revolution, October, 1977, p. 17, col. 1) In brief, “busing in itself” isn’t the issue – the individual busing plans are. The OL was hard pressed to explain how this differed from their own position. In the April 11, 1977 issue of The Call they whine that “... they (the. RCP – ed.) now call for an ’examination’ of each plan to see if it is real or not. But while it is important to expose fraudulent busing schemes as The Call has done around ’one-way’ busing in Milwaukee and rural Alabama, this ’examination’ is the totality of RCP’s program for integration. (Remember that OL believes that integration is revisionist, which is why they use what they consider the “ironical” expression of “program for integration” – ed.) The slogan ’examine each plan’ (The Call has just pointed out one sentence earlier that it follows this same slogan in practice – ed.) is hardly a rallying point for the fight against school segregation”.
What does this position of examining each plan on its own merits hide?
1) Both the RCP and the OL oppose active resistance to fascism and deny that the main task of the progressive people is to smash the fascist anti-busing movement and the issue is not “busing”, nor is it to devise better “concrete, positive demands” (Revolution, April, 1977, p.6, col.3), but the issue is the racial discrimination and violent repression that is organized by the state apparatus against the Afro-American people. Both the RCP and OL are so mired in the neo-revisionist reformism and parliamentary cretinism that they make the question of whether the plans are good or bad the main issue. The OL has such faith in the allegedly “democratic” U.S. imperialists that it even makes the issue whether the plans are “real” or “fraudulent”, while the RCP is dreaming of better “concrete, positive demands” and of “quality education”.
2) In this way both the RCP and the OL present the U. S. state apparatus, including courts, government and police, as having two aspects, a pro-people aspect and an anti-people aspect. Each busing plan is to be examined to see whether it is pro-people or anti-people or, in OL’s classic words, “real” or “fraudulent”. This is the most vulgar form of bourgeois democratic illusion and revisionist reformism. In fact the U.S. government is seeking to organize fascist mass movements against the oppressed nationalities as the cutting edge of growing fascism. In order for the U.S. state apparatus to organize a fascist anti-busing movement, the open fascists have to collaborate with the concealed fascists, called liberals, and present some busing plans. These plans are presented in a mutilated and distorted fashion in order to mobilize sentiment against integration. Naturally any democrat, to say nothing of communist, is in support of any integration that may occur because of the busing plans. But any such integration that does occur is against the will of the state apparatus, which is systematically increasing segregation and the oppression of the nationalities. It is the masses, not the criminal fascist U.S. “authorities”, who are enthusiastic for integration. It is downright political deception on behalf of the state to present the matter as if the government had any other aim but increased racist and fascist attacks on the people.
3) Both the OL and the RCP deny that the fascist anti-busing movement is state-organized. The RCP is so blind and has such love for action without analysis that it missed the fascist nature of the anti-busing movement and actually helped the government to organize it in Boston and some other places. The RCP jumped into bed with the fascists and complained that the Klan was “bogarting (hogging – ed.) the leadership”. Meanwhile the OL, not to be outdone, took fright at the sight of the fascist mass movement in Boston and called on its mentor, the U. S. federal government, to disperse the fascists – thus helping to give a democratic facade to the U.S. government’s repressive armed apparatus and propagating the suicidal tactics of telling the Afro-American people to look to “federal protection” (The Call, Nov. 1974, p. 12, col. 1) as a savior against the racist attacks organized by that very same state. The Call admitted that “The role of the cops has been mainly (only mainly ???–ed.) to suppress the efforts of the Black community to defend itself and to occupy the community while nothing is done to protect it.” Thus the debate between the RCP and the OL boiled down to: who could best suppress the movement against racial discrimination and violent repression – the unofficial, irregular thugs of the fascist anti-busing movement or the armed, uniformed, “liberal” thugs of the state’s official apparatus of terror and repression.
4) It should be pointed out that the self-righteous OL vacillates on whether or not busing violates OL’s version of the “right to self-determination” of the Afro-American people. Both in theory and shamefacedly in practice, the OL holds the line that “integration is revisionist”. In OL’s articles on the Boston busing plan, they echoed the Wallaceite and segregationist cries of the open fascists with talk of “forced busing”, “integrationist schemes” and racist dribble like “They (the liberals – ed.) have continually added fuel to the racist fire by saying that only by rubbing elbows with white kids can Black and other minority kids learn”. (The Call, same reference as above) To give this racist rot about “rubbing elbows” a “democratic” tinge, the OL reverses the verdict against “separate but equal” and adds the most amazing lawyer’s double-talk about “Their whole integrationist scheme is based upon white supremacist assumptions about education”. Thus, OL denounced the liberals in order to hide OL’s endorsement of the “liberal” Ford Foundation schemes of “community control”. OL is against “integrationist schemes” in order to promote segregationist schemes under the guise of the “right to self-determination”. So, all OL’s demagogy aside, the OL differed with the fascist anti-busing movement only on the question of method, not on the ultimate goal. In fact both OL and the RCP deny or are embarrassed by the strong democratic sentiment of the masses, which includes enthusiasm for integration.
5) The RCP sets the question of school integration up against the question of “quality education” and cut-backs in education. This is the view of a case-hardened capitalist bookkeeper, blinded by routine, who balances the expenditures needed for “busing”, against the expenditures needed for interest payments to the blood-sucking banks, etc., ... mindful that he must keep within the limits imposed by the capitalist authorities in order to maximize profits for the capitalists and shift the burden of the economic crisis onto the backs of the oppressed masses. This is the exact same imperialist economism as the OL exhibits, only the OL also sets “integration” against “community control”. The OL denounced the Chicago busing plan in a front page headline “Chicago: Fighting Racist Schemes to Divide and Rule” (The Call, September 12, 1977). The OL sets the struggle against cut-backs against the struggle against racial ’discrimination as follows: “The crisis in education goes hand-in-hand with school segregation, (here OL is referring to the busing plan – ed.) which leads to whites fighting Blacks and parents fighting parents, rather than a joint and unified struggle for quality housing and education”. This is the exact same argument, in even about the same words, as the RU used to support the fascist anti-busing movement in Boston.
Just as the U.S. state needs both “liberals” and open reactionaries to float the fascist anti-busing movement, so the positions of the RCP and the OL on this issue are simply two sides of the same coin, minted by the state. On this issue, the OL tends to hide its segregationism by inclining to the imperialist liberals and concealed fascists, while the RCP is mesmerized by the “militancy” of the open fascists. This difference, however, is itself often reversed both on this and on other questions where the OL inclines to the open fascists and chauvinists and the RCP prefers the liberals. The basic political line of the two organizations is the same – opposition to active resistance to fascism, opposition to the mass revolutionary struggle against the state-organized fascist and racist movement and opposition to the struggle against racial discrimination and violent repression, an opposition hidden behind the concoction of sectarian or even reactionary demands which are to be imposed on and counterposed to the mass movement.
These shameful social-chauvinist positions of the RCP show the sham nature of the RCP’s struggle against social-chauvinism. Nevertheless it should be born in mind that some people may not see clearly through RCP’s facade, through the RCP’s pages and pages of intellectualism, and they may have the impression that the RCP does oppose social-chauvinism. This false impression that the RCP does oppose social-chauvinism has to be taken very seriously tactically.
Now let us go into the RCP lines that give the ideological grounds for social-chauvinism. And there are a number of them.
The first point which should be taken very seriously is that the RCP is against the struggle against opportunism, even in theory as well as in practice. By this means they are preparing the grounds for uniting in the future with the social-chauvinists under the hoax of allegedly uniting all who can be united against the main enemy. This is openly expressed by them in their attack on Comrade Stalin’s wise teachings on the question of the “main blow” (See Revolution, Feb. 1977, “OL Bloodies Own Nose With Its ’Main Blow’”). You can find these teachings in, for example, Stalin’s classic Marxist-Leninist work, The Foundations of Leninism. These teachings are the direct opposite of OL’s social-chauvinist ravings about “directing the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism” and in fact show the necessity of directing the “main blow” at the OL social-chauvinists and all types of revisionism, social-democracy and opportunism. Comrade Stalin’s teachings on directing the main blow at the opportunists are equivalent to Comrade Lenin’s teachings that “The most dangerous of all in this respect are those who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and a humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.” (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Ch. X). Comrade Stalin’s teachings on the “main blow” are equivalent to Comrade Lenin’s statement at the Second Congress of the Communist International that “Opportunism is our principal enemy...it has been shown in practice that the working-class activists who follow the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie themselves. Without their leadership of the workers, the bourgeoisie could not remain in power.” (“Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International”, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 231) The RCP opposes the struggle against opportunism and comes out in print against it, saying that it is the same as Wang Ming’s ultra-left line in early 1930’s and that it was responsible for Hitler’s being able to seize power in Germany! The RCP opposes the struggle against opportunism on the grounds that revolutionaries should unite all who can be united, direct the main blow at the main enemy, and win over the middle elements. The RCP claims that if this is done, it is somehow in contradiction to Comrade Stalin’s teachings. But no one knows how. The RCP has no conception of the necessity to fight opportunism in the course of fighting the main enemy and the RCP relies on an absurd quibble about the purely verbal contradiction between directing the “main blow” at the main enemy and directing the “main blow” at the opportunists. For those who reduce Marxism to a wretched set of “left”-sounding formulae and dogmas to cover their opportunism, this is indeed an insolvable contradiction. What the RCP really means is that instead of winning the people over to hit the main enemy, which means winning them away form the influence of revisionism and opportunism, in place of that RCP wants to win over the opportunists and unite with them with the hoax that opportunism is a middle phenomenon. In this way they want to direct the main blow at the Marxist-Leninists. This is fully verified by RCP’s history, which is that right from the start the RU opportunistically united with one set of bad elements after another, whether it was the Guardian, the cultural nationalists, or any other bad element, in order to keep directing the main blow at the Marxist-Leninists. So that is the first point. The RCP is against the struggle against opportunism.
The second point is that the RCP’s line essentially is that you should count missiles to see if the superpowers are equal. The RCP says that today both superpowers are ̴to the same degree and the same extent the main enemies of the world’s people”. This is an absolutely correct formulation. But the RCP distorts the meaning of this correct formulation so that they can repudiate it tomorrow. Thus let us examine how they reach this conclusion. They reach it through elaborate comparisons of the political, economic and military strength of the two superpowers. They count the missiles, count the tons of steel produced, compare the Cruise missile to the Backfire bomber, compare the economies, etc., and then say that there is roughly a balance. They say that this occurred because yesterday Soviet social-imperialism was behind, but Soviet social-imperialism is rapidly gaining on U.S. imperialism, so today they are roughly equal. The implication is that tomorrow Soviet social-imperialism will be ahead. So they are creating conditions so that tomorrow they will be able to say that the October League is right, and we should direct the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism. This whole theory that you can tell the two superpowers are the main enemy by the counting of missiles is wrong. The two superpowers are both the main enemy of socialism, the world proletariat and the national liberation movement because they are both imperialist powers, imperialist powers which have divided the imperialist world into two large blocs. And it is this nature of imperialism which is why they are the main enemy, not the question of whether one has a few more missiles or a few less, a somewhat stronger economy or not, etc. By deriving the question of their “rough parity”, as the RCP call it, from their respective military and economic strengths, the RCP is preparing to capitulate on this question.
The third point is that RCP denies the basic Marxist-Leninist teachings on war, namely, that war is the continuation of politics by other, i.e. violent, means. (There are many references to this, for example, Lenin’s Socialism and War, Chapter I has a section with that as the title, or again Lenin’s “Collapse of the Second International”, Collected Works, vol. 21, pp. 219-221) Thus Marxism-Leninism teaches that to see the character of a war one should look at what politics led up to the war, what classes are waging the war. Lenin ridiculed “the theoretical premises in Kautsky’s reasoning. .. that when war breaks out, all historically created political relations between nations and classes cease and that a totally new situation arises!” (Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 220)„ But this is just the way the RCP reasons. First there is peace, and then there is war and the whole situation changes. In this way the RCP creates conditions for capitulating to U.S. imperialism at the outbreak of a world war.
In just the same way, with the exception of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, all the official parties of the Second International became social-chauvinist, but they all said before the war all sorts of bold things about “war against war”. The anarcho-syndicalists shouted about how they would have a general strike at the outbreak of World War I. They were all so very bold before World War I, but when the war came they voted for war credits. And this criminal collapse of the Second International was also not merely an overnight accident, but was the continuation and culmination of a long period of opportunist politics from before the outbreak of World War I. The social-chauvinism was prepared for by the long corrosion of opportunism inside the Second International. In just this way the RCP is announcing in advance that when the war actually comes, the situation changes – and this means that RCP will then take the side of U. S. imperialism. This is the reason why the RCP continually stresses that the character of war can change overnight. The RCP says that the character of the inter-imperialist war will change immediately if, say, China is invaded (but they never say if Albania is invaded). They use World War II as an example. This whole theory is wrong. It is true that any world war has sharp zigs and zags, that tactics and various things can change suddenly, but these changes that take place allegedly overnight are prepared for, the possibility of them taking place is determined, by the whole previous development. The example of World War II goes against the RCP. The RCP says that the character of World War II changed when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. It is true that this changed the character of the war, but why? The RCP neglects the fact that throughout the entire period of the ’30’s the whole question of the anti-fascist united front was being developed, the whole question of fighting the capitalist offensive which was eventually concentrated for a time in the fascist countries. And the socialist country of that time, the base of world revolution, the great Soviet Union openly called for collective security before the war and tried to develop that method of utilizing the contradictions between the imperialist powers. When collective security didn’t work, because the imperialists were dedicated to strangling the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union used other tactics. Furthermore, World War II started before Sept. 1, 1939, the date on which Nazi Germany attacked fascist Poland and the unjust inter-imperialist war between the Anglo-French imperialists and the fascist Axis began. The resistance of the Chinese, Ethiopian, Spanish and other peoples to fascist aggression was a just war from the very start. It was only because of this whole development leading up to World War II that the possibility existed that the character of the war could be changed overnight and the temporary Anglo-American-Soviet anti-fascist alliance could come into existence. But the RCP negates the whole history of the 30’s, the history of the anti-fascist united front (the RCP is always embarrassed by the question of opposing fascism and by the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International), the history of collective security, the history of the start of just liberation wars of various peoples against the unjust imperialist wars of fascist aggression. Thus RCP gives the theory that anything can happen overnight, which is not true. And this is the same theory that the OL gives, but from the other direction, when the OL tries to sugar-coat its social-chauvinism and class treason by claiming that it is possible to faithfully serve U. S. imperialism as a class traitor before the threatened world war, while suddenly overnight becoming a great opponent of U.S. imperialism and partisan of civil war if the world war actually breaks out. This question should be taken quite seriously.
The fourth point is that the RCP is doing a tremendous amount of ideological work on the theme that we are not presently in a revolutionary situation. This concretely shows RCP’s similarity to the New Left, the fact that RCP comes from the New Left and that neo-revisionism is just the adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to the most backward aspects of New Leftism. If you think back to the days of the 60’s, you can recall how the New Left existed right in the middle of the revolutionary upsurge of the 60’s. And exactly at that time the New Left denied that there was a revolutionary upsurge, that revolution was advancing. The New Left took up the Khrushchovite revisionist position that the material conditions were not ripe for revolution. The New Left leaders sat around, while tens of thousands of students were revolting, the Afro-Americans rising up and burning down various cities, the tanks rolling in Detroit and the National Guard marching into Detroit, Watts, Newark, etc. And the New Left sighed, “Where’s the revolution? I can’t see the revolution. Wow, the masses are really backward.” The RCP does the same thing in the midst of the upsurge of the workers’ movement in the 70’s. As a matter of fact, as a sidepoint, the RCP denies that revolution was taking place in the 60’s, which further shows their origin in New Leftism. We will show this by a quotation from an article referred to earlier by another comrade, “Revolutionary Work in a Non-Revolutionary Situation”. In an editor’s note, Revolution says that this article consists of excerpts from a report to the RCP Central Committee and it is being published because of “the importance of the analysis”. In this article, more properly titled by the other comrade as “Counter-revolutionary Work in a Revolutionary Situation”, the RCP says: “This is a difficult period – for the masses and for the Party. It is not a period like the ’60’s and early ’70’s, a period of high tide of struggle, mainly based among non-proletarian forces and mainly based on expectations of some vague notion of ’radical change’ (sometimes even posed as ’liberation’ or ’revolution’) which, ultimately, would leave the foundations of imperialism unaltered and which, therefore, proved in the end illusory.” (Revolution, June 1977, page 3) The RCP is saying that the sentiment of the people rising up in revolutionary struggle was actually for some type of radical change which ultimately would leave the foundations of imperialism unaltered and which therefore would prove illusory. So using the fact that the fighters might not give clear formulations, they deny the revolutionary character of the movement against the U. S. imperialist war of aggression in Viet Nam, of the Afro-American people’s movement against racial discrimination and violent repression and of the youth and student movement.
The RCP’s line that this is a “non-revolutionary situation” is absolutely identical to the line of the OL social-chauvinists that “a revolutionary situation does not presently exist in the U.S. and the consciousness of the broad masses does not yet center on the need for revolution and socialism...” (Documents from the Founding Congress of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), Klonsky’s Political Report, p. 30) The purpose of this propaganda that it is not a revolutionary situation is to justify social-chauvinism. If there is no revolution, if revolution flies out the window, then all one can do is to decide to support one or the other imperialist power on the alleged basis of the victory of which one would aid the revolution most. This is for example what the RCP did with the example of the invasion of the Congo-K referred to earlier. They say it is only a question of the forces of the Soviet-backed invaders versus the U.S.-backed central government. They totally ignore the question of the revolutionary forces, of the Marxist Revolutionary Party of the Congo-K, of the forces fighting Mobutu arms in hand for liberation, which the RCP never mentions. So the RCP reduces it to the question of deciding which counter-revolutionary force they like best. And this force is labelled, by the social-chauvinists, “objectively” revolutionary. (Of course, RCP does not use this “objective” criterion when evaluating the mass movement of the 60’s, which is denounced as not only not objectively revolutionary but as in the end illusory. Both the RCP and the OL reserve the criterion of “objectively” being revolutionary for imperialist lackeys and hangmen, while slandering the revolutionary mass movements of the oppressed masses because they do not have perfect consciousness and thus, by the way, also negating the fact that it is the Marxist-Leninist Party that brings consciousness to the masses.)
This question of denying revolution to justify social-chauvinism has a history. In World War I the social-chauvinists insisted that to say that there was a revolutionary situation was to be “ultra-left”, to be an “anarchist”, “Blanquist”, etc. Nowadays, the social-chauvinists would say “dogmatic”, “Trotskyite”, “Lin Piaoist”, “supporter of the gang of four” or “opponent of Teng Hsiao-ping”. But back then it was “anarchist”, “ultra-left” or “Blanquist”. (By the way, these dreadful words were used despite the fact that the real anarchists overwhelmingly became social-chauvinists, or “anarcho-trenchists” as one disgusted anarchist put it.) It is very significant that prior to World War I, the entire Second International, including the social-chauvinist parties, all recognized the nature of the impending World War I and wrote various resolutions such as the Basle resolution which threatened the governments with revolution if war broke out. The entire Second International, including Kautsky, admitted that the impending inter-imperialist war would bring about the prospects of revolution and an analogy was made to the Paris Commune. So it was quite obvious that the Second International was referring to proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. But when World War I broke out, the social-chauvinists ate their own words and said that revolution was premature. On this ground they aided “their own” bourgeoisies. The social-chauvinists used all kinds of sophistry. From the fact that you couldn’t give a call to go to the barricades right at the beginning of the war, the moment it broke out, the social-chauvinists concluded that there was not a revolutionary situation which could be utilized to lead up to the barricades.
In order to say that this is a “non-revolutionary situation”, the RCP denies the nature of this epoch and actually compares the present period with the pre-revolutionary period before the rise of imperialism. And when the RCP makes this comparison, it says that the conditions are similar with one exception, and that exception is that the present period is less revolutionary than the earlier one. The RCP says: “The similarity is in the objective development of things. Lenin showed how in the period really since the 1870s, with the development of this system into its highest stage, there was again a period of relatively peaceful development – development of monopolies, the grabbing of colonies, etc. It was a period in which the struggle between classes was not eliminated, in fact it was sometimes sharp – but nevertheless, it was another one of those non-revolutionary situations as opposed to a ripened situation, and one that was a protracted non-revolutionary situation, characterized by the growing strength of the monopolies and of the ruling classes in those countries.
“So the similarity lies in the question of the relatively protracted period of a non-revolutionary situation and a growing strength, relatively, of the ruling classes. However what is different between that period and this is that at that time the groups that belonged to the Second International, the Social-Democrats, in most cases... had established themselves as leaders of large unions, had won positions in Parliament and so on...
“The difference though, between that situation and ours today is that it has not been the case with the development of the struggle in the imperialist countries over the last period that the newly emerged Marxist-Leninist forces... are in the position where they have a large base in the working class, have developed leadership over a large section of it in the form of trade unions, have positions in parliament, what have you. ” (Revolution, July 1977, p. 22, column 2) So according to the RCP the situation is less revolutionary now than before the rise of imperialism, and that is because the RCP doesn’t have enough trade union positions or any seats in Congress. This also shows you what is on the mind of the neo-revisionists, where they are going, with their “revolutionary” “rank and file” and “class struggle” trade unionism, in this way the RCP completely denies the distinction between the pre-monopoly capitalist period and the present epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution. (That is, aside from the fact that their descriptions of both periods are wrong.) The RCP does in fact deny that imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. Yet, as Comrade Enver Hoxha has pointed out, “The fundamental features of our epoch, as the epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism of the struggle of two opposing social systems, as the epoch of the proletarian and national-liberation revolutions, of the collapse of imperialism and the liquidation of the colonial system, as the epoch of the triumph of socialism and communism on a world scale, are becoming more pronounced and more clearly obvious each day. (Report at the 5th Congress of the Party of Labor of Albania, p. 5)
The fact is that the objective conditions for revolution are ripe. The revolutionary workers movement is rising, and the all-round crisis is driving millions upon millions of people into motion. The problem lies not in the objective conditions but in the subjective conditions, the degree of organization of the proletariat. We must build the Marxist-Leninist Party in the midst of the revolutionary mass movement in order that the proletariat will be able to merge all the revolutionary movements into one storm of anti-fascist proletarian socialist revolution and to seize the correct moment for overthrowing the old system and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
There is one further aspect to the RCP’s belief that this is a “non-revolutionary situation”. Anyone who reads Revolution, if it is possible to read it, will find that they have many articles giving in detail the weapons used by the U.S. imperialists and Soviet social-imperialists and speculating on them and comparing them. They are thrilled by these things. This shows their world outlook, which is that weapons are all-important, the imperialists are powerful, but the masses are backward.
The fifth point is that the RCP claims that we are living in a classical bourgeois democracy and denies the question of fascization. The RCP actually polemicized allegedly “against” the October League on the grounds that the OL once said that there was fascism or a “fascist tide”, while the RCP prettifies growing fascism as “bourgeois democracy” or “sham democracy”. What a militant struggle against social-chauvinism! The RCP denies the general fascization under imperialism, the Leninist teachings that “Political reaction all along the line is a characteristic feature of imperialism” and that “The difference between the democratic-republican and the reactionary-monarchist bourgeoisie is obliterated precisely because they are both rotting alive...” (Collected Works, Vol. 23, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”, p. 106) And naturally at the same time the RCP closes its eyes to the actual situation in the U.S. and embellishes U.S. imperialism with its fairy-tales of democracy embellished with dogmatic, scholastic “Marxist” lectures about “bourgeois democracy”. The RCP closes its eyes to the huge bureaucratic-military machine of the U.S. state, to the monstrous military and police forces, the unprecedented growth of the system of prisons, jails, courts and lawyers, the numerous secret police and espionage agencies, including FBI, CIA, DIA, Secret Service, etc., and the over-bloated bureaucracy that pushes its tentacles into every aspect of U. S. society. The RCP does not note that today the capitalists are on a fascist offensive against the workers, that one fascist law after another is being prepared and implemented. One glaring example of this is the way the RCP denies that the U.S. state is behind the open racist and fascist terrorist groups. In an article on the Ku Klux Klan and the nazis, the RCP denied the state-organized character of the open fascist groups and even denied that the monopoly capitalist class organizes them. (See Revolution, August, 1977, “Angry Actions Rip Fascist Grouplets”, front page.) According to the RCP,
So while the ruling class is probably not funding them (although wealthy reactionaries here and there whip their checkbooks out) nor do they need to at this time, groups like the Klan and Nazis provide a valuable service to the bourgeoisie. With the help of capitalist publicity, ’after all, they are news’, these scum do raise up the banner of extreme reaction, of vicious racism and national chauvinism.
In the short run, too, these reactionary grouplets are useful to capital, such as in Chicago’s Marquette Park... All this has made united struggle by Marquette Park and neighboring Englewood, a Black community, against the real enemy much more difficult.
In publicizing the Nazis and Klan, the media have been very careful to steer clear of any open endorsements of their political line.
So these groups are not organized by the state, they are not organized by the ruling class, only maybe occasionally some rich capitalist may give some money. But you really wouldn’t say they are based on the monopoly capitalist class, they just provide an unsolicited “valuable service to the bourgeoisie”. And these newsmen who are publicizing them, they are just after a little bit of sensational news, have a few too many bourgeois democratic illusions about “freedom of speech” and almost unwittingly are also providing a service for the bourgeoisie. This is an example of RCP’s flimsy attitude towards the state. RCP is giving the ordinary revisionist line of an “ultra-right fringe”. And this attitude to the state is extremely useful to the social-chauvinists. The social-chauvinists give the line that the Soviet Union is a Hitlerite fascist state, and the Soviet Union is indeed fascist, but they deny the growing Hitlerite fascism in the U.S. and say that U.S. imperialism is just a “bourgeois democracy”. The implication is that the threatened third world war will be an anti-fascist war, in which the world’s people should support “democratic” U.S. imperialism against the Soviet social-imperialists.
The sixth point is the RCP’s support of the “theory of three worlds.” In the July 1977 issue of Revolution, the RCP came out in support of the theory of ”three worlds”. The RCP’s timing is very interesting. At the time of RCP’s article, the struggle between the OL social-chauvinists and ourselves on the question of “three worlds” had become very hot, and in fact it still is. The RCP did not speak on this question until the struggle really heated up and OL was taking very heavy blows. Then the RCP comes up to pull OL’s chestnuts from the fire for them. One very significant thing is that the RCP is not only a “three worlder”, but they are the primeval “three worlders”, the original “three worlders”. They were “three worlders” from before the time that this anti-Leninist line was being spread in the international Marxist-Leninist communist movement. Right from their formation, right back to 1968, they were “three worlders” to the extent that they held that the main contradiction inside the U.S. was the contradiction between the oppressed nations inside the U.S. and U.S. imperialism, and not the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It took them till around 1974, I think, to start to reconsider this line. Around 1974 or 1975 they were finally able to figure out that the main contradiction in the U. S. was between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
Let us consider certain aspects of RCP’s defense of the theory of “three worlds”. The first thing to note is that they descend into the same gutter politics as the OL, the same political blackmail, and they always hasten to state that this line is the line of the Communist Party of China. The implication is that if you oppose the theory of “three worlds”, you are opposing the Communist Party of China. Of course, in their article in the August 1977 issue of Revolution on “Two Superpowers: Equally Enemies of World’s People”, they refer to Comrade Enver Hoxha. So the implication is that if you oppose them on any front you are some type of a revisionist who is opposing China and opposing Albania.
The way the RCP supports the theory of “three worlds” and tries to cleanse it of the more blatant social-chauvinism is by using the most revolutionary-sounding phrases that cost them nothing – and at the end of all these revolutionary phrases they end up with the same line as the OL. If you examine their article in the July Revolution you will find a lot of phrases like “in the final analysis”, which they put in bold italics, or “although the fundamental conflict characterizing our era is the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie”, and this and that.. .but for the mean time, right now, you have something else. With this method the RCP says various things about how in the final analysis the neo-colonial lackeys are exploiters, etc., etc. But in the mean time the RCP praises these neo-colonialists under the most extravagant phrases. For example, they give the line that the more reactionary a government is, the greater the contradiction it has with imperialism. Here it is: “But even governments of the Third World which are completely reactionary in relation to their own people and which are dependent on imperialism also have contradictions to one degree or another with imperialism, exactly because they are dependent. ” (Revolution, July 1977, p. 18, column 2) So the fact that a bloodstained lackey is dependent on imperialism is the proof that he has a contradiction with imperialism. The more of a traitor some lackey is, presumably the more contradiction he has with imperialism and the more he should be supported. The RCP constantly describe the comprador bourgeoisie and the feudalists in glowing terms – terms which sometimes apply to certain actions of the national bourgeoisie but which, when used to describe the imperialist lackeys, cannot be called anything but glowing terms and extravagant praise. For example, the RCP says: “Conflicts between bourgeois Third World governments (the feudalists have disappeared, just like with the OL – ed.) and the imperialists, though significant, do not change the fact that these governments cannot and will not fight for complete independence from imperialism, and that the backbone of the struggle for national independence is the workers and peasants of these countries.” (Ibid) Very nice, until you realize that the RCP is talking about the Shah of Iran and Mobutu, who will not fight for the complete independence of their countries but who have thus been described in glowing, liberation colors as people who will allegedly fight for some independence for their countries. This praise of neo-colonial lackeys is coupled with something which is rather common among the opportunists today and shows where certain so-called Marxist-Leninists are heading – and that is the most extravagant praise for Chiang Kai-shek, the hangman of the Chinese people. The political blackmailers, the self-proclaimed great supporters of China, are coming out in defense of Chiang Kai-shek. The RCP babbles about “.. .when Chiang Kai-shek, a lackey of U.S. imperialism, was at least partly fighting Japanese imperialism, which was the Chinese people’s main oppressor for a certain stage in the struggle.” Chairman Mao’s assessment of Chiang Kai-shek’s role is quite different. He wrote in August 1945: “What about the Kuomintang? Look at its past, and you can tell its present; look at its past and present, and you can tell its future. In the past, this party carried on a counter-revolutionary civil war for ten whole years. During the War of Resistance it launched three largescale anti-Communist campaigns, in 1940, 1941 and 1943, each time attempting to develop the attack into a countrywide civil war. It was only because of the correct policy adopted by our Party and the cooperation of the people of the whole country that its attempts failed. As everyone knows, Chiang Kai-shek, the political representative of China’s big landlords and big bourgeoisie, is a most brutal and treacherous fellow. His policy has been to look on with folded arms, wait for victory, conserve his forces and prepare for civil war.” He added: “As for Chiang Kai-shek, he was passive in resisting Japan but active in anti-communism. He was a stumbling-block in the People’s War of Resistance. ” (Selected Works, Vol. IV, “The Situation and Our Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan.”, pp. 11 and 12) The only reason that Chiang Kai-shek could be restrained from destroying the united front was the extremely wise, far-sighted policy of the Communist Party of China, which also happened to have an army to back up this policy and also the sympathy of the masses. It had nothing to do with any desire on the part of Chiang Kai-shek, who in fact wanted to plunge China into all-out civil war right in the face of Japanese aggression. Chairman Mao pointed out in 1946 that when Chiang Kai-shek left the united front and became one of the full-fledged enemies of the revolution, that this was not narrowing the united front but broadening the united front. “On the surface our revolutionary national united front appears to have narrowed in the present period as compared with the period of the War of Resistance. As a matter of fact, it is precisely in the present period, after Chiang Kai-shek sold out the nation’s interests to U.S. imperialism and launched the country-wide civil war against the people and after the crimes of U.S. imperialism and the reactionary Chiang Kai-shek clique were completely exposed before the Chinese people, that our national united front has really broadened.” (Selected Works, Vol. IV, “The Present Situation and Our Tasks”, Section VII, pp. 169-170. A few sentences further on, Chairman Mao denounces the “so-called third road”.) This whole campaign in support of Chiang Kai-shek is extremely sinister. It is the opportunist version of what is called the “China Lobby” in Congress, a campaign of lobbying in support of Chiang Kai-shek.
When everything is said and done, the RCP’s only difference with the OL on the question of “three worlds” is the following: the OL says that the theory of “three worlds” is the “great strategic concept” of world revolution, while the RCP asserts that “This three worlds analysis gives, in our view, a correct appraisal of the general role that countries, or groupings of countries, are playing today on the world scale. As such it is one important part of the more general world-wide united front line.” (emphasis as in the original, Revolution, July 1977, p. 5) So one says it is the whole strategy, while the other asserts that it is an important part of the whole strategy. That is the difference. The RCP does this by detaching the question of the struggle of countries or states from anything else in the world, they try to demagogically separate the international struggle from the struggle inside each country. Thus they give a schizophrenic line that, applied to Iran, goes as follows: since the Shah of Iran is struggling as part of the “third world” against imperialism, since as a country Iran is struggling against imperialism, you must support that struggle of the Shah of Iran, presumably on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But internally, inside the country, you must base yourself on the workers and peasants and overthrow the Shah of Iran, presumably on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. On Sunday you may be allowed a day of rest from this glaring contradiction. RCP’s line is: you overthrow the Shah of Iran and you support the Shah of Iran simultaneously. Furthermore even this distinction breaks down because the RCP asserts that you have to wage domestic struggle, against the Shah of Iran, and in the context of the international struggle, in favor of the Shah of Iran. The RCP asserts things such as that “.. .the Marxist-Leninists in each country” must “correctly combine their tasks in the broad world context with what is overall their main task – waging the revolutionary struggle in their own country...” (Revolution, July 1977, p. 19, column 3). So even this whole distinction that the proletariat and peasantry inside the country is allowed to fight at least part of the time against the neo-colonial lackeys is destroyed by the rest of the argument. Now it was pointed out by a former speaker, and he was absolutely correct, that no government will say that you are supporting them in the international struggle if you are engaged in overthrowing them. No government in the world will take that view, whether it is a socialist government or a capitalist government or any government. Every government has a certain view, and quite correctly, that when you overthrow them you are weakening them. This exposes the eclecticism of simultaneous overthrowing and supporting the neo-colonial lackeys.
The seventh point is that the RCP has actually comes out to directly cover for OL’s lines and to deny that OL gives various social-chauvinist positions. Consider the article “Two Superpowers: Equally Enemies of World’s People” in the August 1977 issue of Revolution. The RCP actually says that The Call’s shameful editorial of July 11 “leaves unclear whether the CP (ML) in fact opposes the building of the B-1 or favors it as a way to delay the onslaught of war. “According to the RCP, the OL’s editorial was “schizophrenic”. But in fact the OL’s position was crystal-clear. Everyone who wanted to, understood what the OL was saying. The OL quite clearly said that by not building the B-1 bomber, war was hastened, and this was bad. And The Call said that the revisionists are opposed to the B-1 bomber. Now if you know the way OL “fights” revisionism, you know that when OL points out that the revisionists oppose the B-l bomber, that means that the OL is in favor of the B-1 bomber. So there was nothing “schizophrenic” about OL’s editorial, it was very consistent. If anything, it is RCP’s position that is schizophrenic, in that it is trying to reconcile social-chauvinism with the appearance of leading a fight against social-chauvinism. The RCP is actually covering up for OL’s social-chauvinism. The RCP does the same thing with OL’s “appeasement” slogan. The RCP discusses World War II and the real appeasement of the fascists in the late 1930’s. Then the RCP states that “The CP(ML) does not make clear what they think the parallel with the present situation is.” Thus the RCP denies what everyone knows, that the CP(M-L) is calling for an alliance with U.S. imperialism against Soviet social-imperialism, for joining U.S. imperialism’s “anti-Soviet social-imperialist front”. This is not clear to the RCP, which claims that ”... even the CP(ML) does not have the nerve to try and ’fight appeasement’ in the name of protecting China”. But Klonsky has been giving the line of fighting “appeasement” for a long time.
Thus the RCP is constantly covering up for the October League.
The eighth point is RCP’s method in giving the ideological grounds for social-chauvinism. Their method is to use the line that “everything is so complex, wow” and anyone who clarifies something must be a “dogmatist”. Of course, RCP holds that Marxism-Leninism applies “in the final analysis”, but “wow, it’s much too much”. Let us take an example of the RCP’s intellectualism. It is this type of example that gave rise to an RCP supporter saying in a forum that RCP has made the most contributions to Marxist-Leninist theory of any group in the movement, and someone else retorting “measured in pounds or measured in inches?” For this example, I wish I had a blackboard, because it is a little confusing. It is RCP describing the present situation, and this is again from “Counter-revolutionary Work in a Revolutionary Situation”. So here goes: “or to break it down more, between the kind of situation that we have now (non-revolutionary situation) and the kind where you can naturally do the dog (revolutionary situation) is a qualitative leap.” (Revolution, July, p. 3, column 2) What they really mean of course is that between the revolutionary upsurge and liquidating the revolutionary movement, which they are trying to do, is a qualitative leap. At any rate, here you have the qualitative leap between two stages of development. The article continues: “Viewed from the overall sense of the kind of things we’re talking about, this is the big change from quantity to quality. But within that and leading up to that are a series of quantitative changes.” OK? So the RCP is saying that in order to do their counter-revolutionary work, liquidate the movement and have the big qualitative change, they have to do a large amount of quantitative work and it keeps quantifying until it reaches a qualitative change. So this almost sounds reasonable. But then the next sentence. “And within that series of quantitative changes there are also qualitative changes.” Now you have qualitative changes in the quantitative changes leading to the qualitative changes. And this is just totally incomprehensible. Why does the RCP have to talk about qualitative changes in the quantitative changes leading to the qualitative changes ? The whole point of this is to support RCP’s action group mentality, that was referred to earlier in a previous talk. The whole point for this discussion of quality and quantity, and they go on and on with this, the whole point of this great “dialectics”, is to prove that “the battle of the bi-centennial” was a qualitative change, that “the July 4th demonstration was a qualitative change”. Of course, the RCP warns that “Philadelphia, 1976, was not the same as Russia, 1905, and we must be careful not to exaggerate its importance – while taking note of and building off the real advances it did represent. ” (Revolution, July, p. 25, column 3) So all this “dialectics” is to prove that Philadelphia was a qualitative advance. Now why are they so interested in saying Philadelphia was a qualitative advance ? As the comrade who spoke about the action group mentality in SDS and RCP pointed out: first you have your action, and then you go into deep depression until the next action. And this is exactly what RCP describes as happening to their cadre. The article states: “There isn’t going to be a July 4th demonstration every week or every month or even every year. There was a certain sentiment, not only among our own ranks, but among the workers, kind of like ’well, Jesus, what do we do now? That was a great thing, I wish we could have another one of those things. Now I’ve got to confront the problem in my shop where 98% of the people didn’t go and 75% aren’t that interested in what happened there, or 50% or whatever it is.’” (Revolution, July, p. 22, column 1) The whole issue is that the RCP itself describes how the RCP cadre got demoralized after the event. So, to prop their own cadre back up, to convince them that the action group mentality is right, the RCP says that this action was a qualitative advance. Of course, he can’t say it is a qualitative jump between non-revolution and revolution, or between monopoly capitalism and socialism, so it’s only a qualitative advance in a quantitative advance towards the qualitative advance. And I assure you, you may think that we are very tired, having gone without much sleep and it’s hard to understand the RCP’s “dialectics”, but you can read these passages from this RCP speech at any other time and you still can’t make any sense of it. Everything is made so complex that no one can figure anything out.
The ninth point is that the RCP is opposed to revolutionary authority. And the RCP, which is part of the political blackmailers, which keeps implying that you are against the Communist Party of China if you oppose their line, has always been among the worst anti-communists. The line the RCP circulates now, not openly in the paper, is that China is a little bit rightist and Albania is a little bit dogmatist, so of course RCP is the golden mean, the independent Marxist-Leninists. This shows that the RCP has complete contempt for the entire international Marxist-Leninist communist movement. The RCP goes out of its way to attack the great Marxist-Leninist, Comrade Stalin. They attack him in certain articles for no reason at all, except to attack him and through him Marxism-Leninism. I have already mentioned that the RCP couldn’t oppose OL on the question of the “main blow” without dragging in an attack on Comrade Stalin. Let us take another example. Right in the middle of the RCP’s discourse on “dialectics”, on quality and quantity, the RCP says: “Also summing up from the role of Stalin, we can see an erroneous tendency of sometimes being undialectical about the relationship between the objective and the subjective, in terms of making them absolutes and not seeing them interpenetrate, as if there’s the objective and there’s the subjective and it’s not like they react upon each other and that the one can change the other – sometimes this view comes through in Stalin, for example.” (Revolution, July, p. 3, column 3) The RCP adds the last phrase just in case you missed it before. Now if you read the rest of the article, you will see that there’s nothing else whatsoever about Stalin, there’s no other reference to Stalin. So the RCP has gone out of its way to attack Comrade Stalin. This is serious. There’s a definite line in the left, and it is the same line that was used to split the international communist movement, which is against Comrade Stalin. A comrade speaking earlier pointed out that OL gives the Titoite revisionist line, and Tito’s line is in fact against Stalin. There are those opportunists who are trying to convert Chairman Mao into a Titoite, who are outrageously slandering Chairman Mao, and trying to prove that he opposed Stalin. This whole opportunist, anti-communist wave is coming up, and the RCP is taking an active part in this slander campaign.
So those are some points about how RCP is preparing the ideological basis for social-chauvinism. Its role is to wage mock struggle against social-chauvinism in order to keep the revolutionary activists under the influence of social-chauvinism. Lenin pointed out during World War I how the bourgeoisie in Germany actually came out in articles and wrote that it would be a mistake, it would be a bad thing for the bourgeoisie, for the social-chauvinist parties to go more to the right and give more rightist slogans, because if the social-chauvinist parties did that the masses would desert those parties and create a truly independent party, a true Marxist-Leninist Party to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Lenin wrote: “In its issue of April 1915, Preussische Jahrbucher, a conservative German journal, published an article by a Social-Democrat, a member of the Social-Democratic Party.... The Social-Democratic Party’s behavior, Monitor says to (and in essence in the name of) the bourgeoisie, is ’irreprochable’ in the present war (i.e., it is irreproachably serving the bourgeoisie against the proletariat). ’The process of the transformation’ of the Social-Democratic Party into a national liberal-labor party is proceeding excellently. It would, however, be dangerous to the bourgeoisie, Monitor adds, if the party were to turn to the right; ’it must retain the character of a workers’ party with socialist ideals. On the day it gives that up, a new party will arise to take up the rejected program, giving it a still more radical formulation!...
“These words openly express that which the bourgeoisie has always and everywhere done covertly. ’Radical’ words are needed for the masses to believe in. The opportunists are prepared to reiterate them hypocritically.” (Collected Works, Vol. 21, “Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International”, pp. 444-445, emphasis as in the original). And this is the same service which the RCP plays for the bourgeoisie. The RCP tries to have some slogans which sound a little more to the left than the OL slogan in order to keep the masses from deserting the social-chauvinist groups by having one which sounds a little bit more to the left. But all these tricks will be in vain, because the struggle against social-chauvinism is invincible. By vigorously advancing the struggle against social-chauvinism on an objective basis, the Marxist-Leninists will force the sham groups to find themselves sitting on the sharp edge of a razor blade. By vigorously pushing forward the decisive tasks for the American revolution, we will definitely unite the Marxist-Leninists in opposition to the social-chauvinists, and push forward the anti-fascist proletarian socialist revolution.