First Published: The Call, Vol. 5, No. 32, December 13, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Understanding who are the friends and enemies of the working class is the most crucial question in making a revolution. Martin, Nicolaus, the revisionist who was recently expelled from the October League and its Central Committee, turned the answers to these questions upside down. Instead of placing faith in the struggles of the working class and oppressed nationalities, Nicolaus pinned his hopes on the liberal imperialists. Blurring the fundamentally antagonistic character of the contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie, Nicolaus preached alliance with and reliance on a section of the ruling class.
Nicolaus’ love for the bourgeoisie and his hatred of the working class made him an enemy agent in our ranks and necessitated his expulsion. But while Nicolaus has been purged, struggle against his revisionist line must continue. For this reason, we are bringing the lessons of this struggle to the attention of all our readers.
“In my opinion, we should and must form alliances (with the liberal leaders) but only on the condition that we maintain within the alliance our right to criticize,” said Nicolaus in one of his internal polemics against the OL’s line.
This general appeal for unity with the liberal wing of the ruling class provides a clear exposure of Nicolaus’ revisionism. He maintained that the liberals are not in the enemy’s camp, but rather, a group inside our movement that can be allied with as long as we keep our “right to criticize.”
Fleshing in this revisionist theory of the ruling class, Nicolaus argued that the contradiction between the liberals and conservatives is an indirect reserve of the working class “of special importance” in the first main period of party-building when the party possesses “few or no reserves of the direct kind.”
With a wave of his hand, Nicolaus thus dismissed the most important direct reserves of the proletariat –the Afro-American and other national movements. This chauvinist believed that the in-fighting among ruling circles over such things as Watergate or the Washington sex scandals should be of more concern to the communist movement than developing the alliance and merger of the class and national movements.
While Nicolaus fancied himself a great authority on Marxism, his statements about direct and indirect reserves fly in the face of the readings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tsetung. Lenin and Stalin elaborated on the question of reserves and allies while summing up the Russian revolution.
The great leaders of the Russian revolution acknowledged the critical role which “indirect reserves” (such as contradictions in the enemy’s camp) could play at a decisive moment. But they also showed that in the first period of party-building, the party was too weak and primitive to make much use of such indirect reserves. Far more crucial to revolutionary strategy in the first period of the Bolshevik party was strengthening the alliance between the working class and its main direct reserve, the peasantry.
While Nicolaus appeared as a dogmatist, he was a rightist in essence, quoting from Lenin only to oppose Leninism. On the question of the liberals, for example, he used Lenin’s writings from the period when the liberal bourgeoisie had a vacillating but progressive aspect in its fight against the Tsar.
Through this method, he tried to justify an alliance with the liberal imperialists in the U.S. today who have no progressive aspect to them at all. In this regard, Nicolaus’ line was just a repetition of the CPUSA and its “anti-monopoly coalition” which is based on a strategy of alliance with the liberal imperialists.
Another example of dogmatism covering up for revisionism was Nicolaus’ views on the question of the “main blow.” Stalin showed how during a certain period of the Russian revolution, the main ideological blow had to be directed at the liberals who were then the main spokesmen for compromise within the mass movement against the autocracy.
Nicolaus argued that today the main blow should also be directed at the liberals. In this argument, he took the form of Stalin’s thesis but not its essence. Today, the liberals are not part of the mass movement against the ruling class – they are a part of the ruling class itself which exercises its dictatorship over the masses. To say that the likes of Carter, Kennedy or Humphrey are “inside the workers’ movement” is to negate the class character of these reactionary imperialists.
The real purpose of Nicolaus’ appeal to “direct the main blow” at the liberal imperialists was to cover up for the revisionist and reformist trade union leaders who are actually the target of the main blow in our struggle.
With all his phony talk of directing the main blow at the liberals as a cover, Nicolaus’ practice was characterized by directing no blows at them at all. He argued that “the house of liberalism is being demolished,” making it seem as if the danger posed by liberalism and reformism of co-opting the revolutionary struggle by conceding partial reforms no longer existed. If the “house of liberalism“ would crumble of its own accord, it would not be necessary for us to strike out at it and expose it.
In form as well as content, Nicolaus’ line on the ruling class mirrored revisionist Communist Party leader Gus Hall’s famous statement that “the house of imperialism is crumbling.” Both Nicolaus and Gus Hall try to blunt the class struggle by underestimating the enemy tactically while overestimating them strategically.
On this question, too, Nicolaus stood strategy and tactics on its head. While Chairman Mao instructs communists to “despise the enemy strategically, but take him seriously tactically,” Nicolaus did just the opposite. He argued that the liberals and reformists were tactically weak and crumbling when, in fact, they pose a great danger to the workers’ movement.
On the other hand, Nicolaus glorified the liberals’ role strategically instead of despising it, arguing that the liberal imperialists are “less chauvinist” than the conservatives or “less aggressive” towards the third world.
Capping his revisionist view of the ruling class, Nicolaus went so far as to advocate an alliance not only with the liberals but with the entire U.S. ruling class in order to fight the Soviet Union. He said that this united front should be built, “if not today, then tomorrow.”
This line of reliance on one superpower to fight the other is aimed at liquidating the class struggle. It is an echo of the line of the revisionist Earl Browder, who led the CP in the ’40s into the pocket of the Roosevelt liberals.
Frantically trying to hide the class base of the liberal ideology, Nicolaus asserted that “there are all kinds of liberals-imperialist, petty-bourgeois, and working-class liberals.” With this analysis, he pretended that liberalism wasn’t stamped with the brand of the capitalist class. On this flimsy basis, he tried to prove his opportunist conclusion that, because communists sometimes make tactical alliances with reformist trade union leaders inside the workers’ movement, such alliances should also be made with the biggest imperialists themselves.
In summary, Nicolaus “solved” the problem of distinguishing friends and enemies in a manner no different from the modern revisionists. He saw “friends” among the imperialist enemies, while chauvinistically ignoring the real friends and allies of the workers’ struggle.
Although it is correct for communists to make use of contradictions within the enemy’s camp, we can never rely on such indirect reserves as Nicolaus preached. In fact, we can only fully utilize them to the extent that we have relied on the masses to build our party into a powerful force at the head of the revolutionary upsurge.
On this revisionist thesis, he built his theories on the trade union movement, agitation and propaganda, the world situation and other subjects future articles will cover.