First Published: The Call, Vol. 5, No. 24, October 18, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Absent but not missed from the nationwide and international campaign to Free Gary Tyler is the voice of the revisionist Communist Party (CPUSA). During the many months that the drive to build a broad mass movement to Free Gary Tyler has been advancing, the revisionist CPUSA has not once taken notice of the injustices inflicted on this young Black student, nor lifted a finger in his defense .
Why the revisionists’ boycott of the Gary Tyler defense? The reasons go back to this once-revolutionary party’s chauvinist liquidation, in the mid-1950s, of the Afro-American people’s right to self-determination in the Black Belt South, the historic homeland where the Afro-American nation was forged. The chauvinist elements within the party wrecked its mass organizing base in the South and abandoned the fight against white supremacy. Today these same elements completely dominate this party and have sold themselves to the Soviet social-imperialists. These revisionists today refuse even to admit the existence of any mass movement that raises the slogan of self- determination, as does the Gary Tyler defense.
More recently, the revisionist party has been attempting a comeback in the South. Through front organizations such as the “National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression,” “Southern Organizing Committee,” and various ad-hoc committees, the revisionists have tried to seize control of a number of defense cases, Their intent is to deflect the masses’ anger away from the capitalist system, turn the defense committees into sounding boards for their reformist, rely-on-the-liberals approach, and promote the Hall-Tyner election campaign with its big lie of “detente.”
These attempts at revisionist takeover have been and will continue to be exposed, defeated, and sometimes openly repudiated by the defendants themselves, as in the cases of Joan Little and Ruchell Magee. A party that betrayed and opposes the struggle for the right of self-determination, and that upholds today’s Soviet revisionist prison-house of nations as a “model,” is like poison in the veins of any genuine defense campaign. That is why the revisionist party, while absent, is not missed from the Gary Tyler defense. On the contrary, the struggle within this campaign against the treachery of revisionism is one of the main-springs and guarantees of the growth and development of the Free Gary Tyler movement.