First Published: Revolution, Vol. 2, No. 4, February 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Over the past year the October League has repeatedly displayed the depth of its commitment to policies of social chauvinism and collaboration with the U.S. ruling class. Its early formulations, like “it is only by aiming the main blow against the revisionists and their Soviet social-imperialist masters that the fight to overthrow U.S. imperialism can be brought to successful conclusion,” drew sharp criticism for their blatant betrayal of the task of making revolution in this country.
Rather than ditch this logically nonsensical and politically poisonous approach, the OL has chosen to make a veritable fetish of the concept of “the main blow.” Having dipped briefly into Stalin’s writings to bolster their own theoretical efforts, the October League now not only insists that the American working class (like the proletariat worldwide) must direct its main blow “internationally” at the USSR, but has adopted the “main blow” theory as the “fundamental concept” governing their recipe for the class struggle in the U.S.
The OL’s initial use of the main blow formulation had nothing to do with Stalin’s use of the term. Instead it made its appearance as one of a group of phrases – also including “main danger,” “main source of war” and so on – which the OL uses to sabotage the Marxist-Leninist understanding that on a world scale the people face two main enemies today, U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, All the OL’s “main” this and “main” that is an attempt to peddle the view that the real main enemy is the USSR.
OL leader M. Klonsky summed up their crude early position in an “interview” in the Call on May 31 of last year (now reprinted in a pamphlet) in which he says – attributing his views to the Chinese – that it is necessary to “direct the main blow against the Soviet Union because it is the most dangerous [superpower] and the main source of a new war.” He explains that it is the most dangerous because 1) it is on the rise and more aggressive, 2) it has more guns, and 3) it has a socialist cover.
What this main blow meant in practice was dire warnings about and superficial potshots at the New Czars cluttering the pages of the em>Call, while time and again the U.S. imperialists were let off the hook. One of the best examples appeared in the April 1976 em>Call, whose title, “Soviet Guns Killed 150,000 Angolans,” aptly summed up its content. lf the article is to be believed, all the arms the U.S, supplied must have lacked firing pins and all the mercenaries and South African troops it financed must have been very poor shots, because only the Soviet Union is blamed for all the deaths in the civil war!
While this position was pretty clear, it was also pretty clear that it was wrong and, as pointed out in Revolution more than once, a social-chauvinist effort to prettify U.S. imperialism by directing everything against its Soviet rival. Quickly switching the terms of the struggle, the OL’s chefs created a new improved version in a “theoretical” article in the Nov. 22 em>Call, by stirring in a dash of Stalin in an attempt to come up with a more palatable sauce for the rotten meat they are serving.
All this provides an unusual opportunity to further expose the OL’s ragged line, and at the same time to learn some things about-revolutionary strategy from these pitiful but pompous teachers’ by negative example. However, it is helpful before attempting to penetrate their confused formulations, multiple definitions and a priori dogmatism, to first investigate the background of the concept “main blow.”
The most significant use of “main blow,” in the sense the OL has tried to adopt it appears in two articles written in 1924 by Joseph Stalin, the great leader of the international proletariat. In both these pieces, “Foundations of Leninism” and “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists” (both in Collected Works, Volume 6), Stalin was summing up the practice of the Bolshevik Party in making the Russian revolution. In both he laid great stress on the importance of isolating certain political parties along with the classes they represent because they had a following among the masses and compromised first with Czarism and after its fall in February 1917 with the bourgeoisie. He describes the Bolsheviks as having aimed their main blow in the period from the Russo-Japanese war to the February 1917 revolution at the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie, represented by the Cadet Party, and in the period from February through October of 1917 at the petty-bourgeois democrats of the Socialist Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties.
The special danger posed by these compromising parties, Stalin wrote, was their hold on the masses of peasantry, the main ally of the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle. The whole thing is summed up in a passage in “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists,” in which Stalin asks the question, “What is the fundamental strategic rule of Leninism?,” and answers it:
“It is the recognition of the following:
“1) The compromising parties are the most dangerous social support of the enemies of the revolution in the period of the approaching revolutionary outbreak;
“2) It is impossible to overthrow the enemy (tsarism or the bourgeoisie) unless these parties are isolated;
“3) The main weapons in the period of preparation for the revolution must therefore be directed....towards isolating these parties, towards winning the broad masses of the working people away from them.” (pp. 401-2)
In its one “theoretical” article to date on this subject, “The Direction of the Main Blow” (em>Call, Nov. 22, 1976), the October Leaguers quote this and associate themselves as closely as possible with Stalin’s arguments. The article denounces “opportunists” like the RCP who either “misunderstand” or “blur over” this “fundamental concept.”
The RCP cannot plead guilty to either of these charges. In fact, the RCP does not agree with the formulation in these articles by Stalin, let alone the mindless dogma that groups like the OL are attempting to create from it. Nor does the RCP feel that it is the basis of Lenin’s line on revolutionary strategy or central to Stalin’s great contributions. The RCP has put forward its views on revolutionary strategy many times, most recently in last month’s Revolution:
“The correct stand of Marxist-Leninists is to unite all who can be united against the main enemy – which in this country can only be the U.S. bourgeoisie and which is the two superpowers internationally – to win over as much of the middle forces as possible and to isolate and expose enemy agents in the course of aiming the main blow at the main enemy.” (p. 14)
Before the OL or anyone else leaps upon a soapbox to flail at the RCP for its heresy, its purposeful failure to embrace “the fundamental strategic rule of Leninism” itself, permit us to interject a few notes of caution. First, a minor one on the dangers of adhering too closely to the two words “main blow.” For instance, Stalin himself in an article, “Concerning the Question of the Strategy and Tactics of the Russian Communists” (written one year earlier, in 1923) writes “The Bolshevik strategy ... planned the revolution’s main blow at tsarism along the line of a coalition between the proletariat and the peasantry, while the liberal bourgeoisie was to be neutralised.” (Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 178, italics ours)
The question of the main blow, however, is not merely a semantic one. The question is whether or not the workers and revolutionaries of every country direct their fire against the main enemies they face and unite all possible social forces, even wavering ones, against that enemy. A study of history has important lessons to offer.
In summing up the history of the Chinese Revolution, Mao Tsetung and the Chinese Communist Party do not uphold Stalin’s “main blow” theory, which was in fact implemented in the early 1930s when the Party was in the hands of Wang Ming. One aspect of Wang Ming’s “ultra-left” line at this time was to reject the middle forces in society and even condemn them as “the most dangerous enemy” of the revolution. This had the effect not of isolating them but of isolating the Communist Party instead! Wang Ming was defeated in inner-Party struggle in 1935, ending the implementation of the main blow theory of Stalin.
The Chinese summed up that Stalin’s “main blow” formulation, especially as it was dogmatically applied, came down to a policy of isolating the middle-of-the-road social and political forces in any given revolutionary period. To this is counterposed the practice of the Chinese revolution – directing the main blow at the chief enemy to isolate it, while for the middle forces, a policy is recommended of both uniting with them and struggling against them so they are at least neutralized – and a basis provided for efforts to win them from neutrality to alliance with the revolutionary forces.
China was not the only place the “main blow” line was implemented. In the advanced capitalist countries around the same time as Wang Ming’s domination of the Chinese Communist Party it took the form of the theory of “social fascism.” This declared that the Social Democratic parties of Europe and North America were the main danger to the proletariat, not only serving as a cover for fascism but themselves being in essence fascist parties. It was certainly true that in several European nations the Social Democratic leadership was the main “social prop” for the rule of capital and in some cases even governed on behalf of their bourgeois masters. Such a situation did indeed call for particular effort to be spent exposing the Social Democratic leaders and winning the masses away from them.
Unfortunately, this task was frequently taken up in the same subjective and dogmatist way that the OL has seized onto the “main blow.” In Germany the results were disastrous. By the early 1930s the bourgeoisie in Germany had clearly decided that the Social Democrats were not adequate to grind down the masses and defend the rule of capital, and had as a result chosen Hitler and the Nazi Party to do away with the democratic form of bourgeois dictatorship and replace it with fascism. Blinded by its dogmatic efforts to strike its main blow at the admittedly “compromising” Social Democrats, the Communist Party of Germany did not grasp the situation and even after Hitler’s accession as Chancellor in January of 1933 attempted to follow a Comintern directive which said that the “task of the Communist Party remains, as before – to direct the chief blow, at the present stage, against Social Democracy.”
What was tragic in Germany was farcical in the United States. For instance, in summing up the CP’s participation in the 1928 elections Party leaders self-criticized that the Party “had failed to direct our chief struggle against the most dangerous enemy of the workers, Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party.” This of an organization in such rapid decline it could only pull one quarter of the vote it had won only eight years earlier! In a long-established bourgeois “democracy” like the U.S. the bourgeoisie has a wide variety of social props and supports and the Socialist Party was at best marginally more key to the continued existence of bourgeois rule at that time than the revisionist CPUSA is today.
In grasping the flaws in Stalin’s theory of the main blow, it is important not to heave the baby out with the bath water. His call for resolute struggle against forces which are working to tie the masses to the ruling class delineates a most important task for communists. As Lenin put it, “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, FLP, Peking, p. 153)
Without grasping this the proletariat will in fact be unable to split middle forces away from misleaders and the enemy camp, unable to strengthen the iron unity of the class arid unable to develop Marxism in the struggle with opportunists. In seeking to neutralize or win over middle forces to the united front against imperialism, the proletariat’s strategy for making revolution in the U.S., it will be necessary to unite at various times with many who compromise with the bourgeoisie, After all, only the working class has no interests whatsoever in common with the ruling class and only those armed with the science of Marxism-Leninism are capable of guiding its struggle through the twists and turns revolution takes.
In this process the proletariat combines unity and struggle, always attempting to win over or at least neutralize vacillating classes, groupings, etc., while exposing enemy agents, many of whom will be found leading or trying to lead the middle forces and even sections of the proletariat.
The whole question of neutralizing and winning over middle forces as well as of exposing and isolating enemy agents requires summing up and making clear to the broad masses and particularly to the workers the class nature and origins of the vacillation or treachery they face. The main way all this is done is in the course of the overall class struggle and in particular battles where correct Marxist tactics can help the workers to direct their fire against the main enemy and to understand and influence the responses and motion of other forces in society.
In addition, communists have the particular task of waging polemics and carrying out propaganda and agitation specifically aimed at revealing the social role of the middle forces and exposing enemy agents even in times when it is not a major question in the battles the class is waging at that point. This arms the workers to understand who it is possible to unite with strategically, who it is not, and why.
Thus, a little study reveals some of the flaws and dangers that characterize the “main blow” formulation. Could it be that the leaders of the October League have grasped, rectified and guarded against these? Alas, this is hardly the case. In fact, even if Stalin’s arguments are accepted in their entirety, the OL has made a sorry hash of his line. A combination of venal opportunism and mindless dogmatism has left the OL buried in paradoxes and uprooted from the real world. Worse still, once the confusion is dispelled, beneath it will be found the same old social-chauvinism and class collaboration, the same old lack of faith in the masses and attempt to misdirect their struggle. In this shift of gears, Klonsky’s earlier explanation of why the main blow must be aimed at the Soviet Union has had to be revised. The OL’s think tank has replaced it with a formulation too weird to summarize, so it is quoted verbatim:
“While opposing both superpowers as the main enemies, the main blow internationally must be directed at the Soviet social-imperialists. Soviet social-imperialism today is the greatest danger because in addition to being one of the main enemies it is also the main prop of imperialism. As long as the Soviet revisionists are able to portray the USSR as a ’socialist’ country and the ’natural ally’ of the world’s people, the defeat of imperialism is impossible.
“In the case of the USSR, the ideological danger posed by modern revisionism has been augmented greatly by the fact that the social-imperialists are the more aggressive of the two superpowers.” (em>Call, Nov. 22, p. 6)
Now, Soviet aggressiveness is only a secondary factor and what earns the USSR the main blow is the fact that, by virtue of its socialist cover, it is the “main prop of imperialism.” This is just double-talk disguised as Marxist analysis and if it is squeezed a little to extract whatever actual meaning it may contain, it turns out to be worse than their earlier formulation.
What can it mean that Soviet social-imperialism is the “main prop of imperialism?” Let’s consider the idea, using the key points in Stalin’s definition.
Is it that the Soviet Union is “compromising” with U.S. imperialism? This was in fact its major aspect for a time in the 1960s, but now as a fully consolidated imperialist power cut out of the previous division of the world, the USSR is driven by the laws of capitalism itself to challenge ever more fiercely the U.S. ruling class for its empire. In fact, this is the very drive which led the OL to award the Soviets their “main blow” in the first place! Come, gentlemen, you cannot have it both ways – what is the essential feature of U.S.-Soviet relations? Is it compromise or contention?
Or is the Soviet Union not itself imperialist but only “compromising” with imperialism? The unfortunate OL has indirectly indicated this may be what it means. In an article in the December 13 em>Call denouncing their former central committee member Martin Nicolaus, they say he put forward the line that the main blow should be directed at bourgeois liberals, a line the OL says is wrong because “the liberals are not part of the mass movement against the ruling class – they are a part of the ruling class itself.”(p. 6) If the liberals can’t be the main prop in the U.S. because they are part of the bourgeoisie, then logically, the Soviet Union can’t be the main prop internationally because it is part of the world-wide system of imperialism. But the OL insists that it is! Here is another cake you cannot both have and eat, gentlemen.
Is it the case that U.S. imperialism – or other imperialist countries – is “impossible to overthrow” unless the USSR is “isolated?” This is just their old argument again, in even cruder form – set aside the struggle against the U.S. bourgeoisie and concentrate on the New Czars, and somehow that is supposed to make revolution in the U.S.
Does the OL wish to admit that the ruling classes in individual imperialist countries can be overthrown without the complete “isolation” of the USSR, and argue instead that it is only the international system of imperialism that is “impossible to overthrow” without it? This is nothing but hot air. The international system of imperialism is not an abstract concept existing only in the minds of Marxists. There is a real imperialist system in the real world and it is made up of real imperialist countries. If it is granted that the U.S. ruling class – and those of its allies like Japan and West Germany – can be overthrown without the USSR being completely “isolated,” what is left? The USSR. So Soviet social-imperialism is the main prop of Soviet social-imperialism? A masterful contribution to Marxist thought!
Moreover, the OL, by insisting that as long as the Soviets can still pose as socialists “the defeat of imperialism is impossible,” assigns that defeat to the realm of the unattainable. To try and make this kind of complete exposure a precondition is sheer idealism.
Exposing the class nature of the New Czars is a very important task at the present time and will remain such right up to and even after their overthrow. The more that people in the USSR and worldwide grasp the true nature of the Soviet Union, the more resolutely they will struggle against it and the sooner it will be overthrown; but more and more people will be drawn into struggle against the Soviet rulers even before they grasp its capitalist and imperialist character and even at the point of its overthrow there will still be people who don’t have a scientific understanding of social-imperialism. The same is true of U.S. imperialism. What the OL has done is to embrace idealism completely and place the struggle primarily in the realm of ideas.
Thus the OL’s adoption and “creative” application of Stalin’s line on the main blow has not provided the hoped-for protection for their line but sent them tumbling pell-mell into a realm of fantasy and gibberish. The only defense of the OL’s opportunism this formulation provides is a thin mist of confusion.
Even this is absent in much of their other commentary on the main blow, where no pseudo-Marxist puffery is offered to cover what’s going on. Take one of the OL’s several attempts to hit at the successful conference in November 1976 on the international situation. With their usual disregard for facts – not to mention willingness to concoct them – the article asserts that it was “the RCP’s line that the international movement should direct its main blow at the U.S. rather than at the Soviet social-imperialists.” (em>Call, Dec. 20, 1976, p. 7)
First of all the OL knows perfectly well that the RCP says no such thing, but that on a world scale there are two main enemies and, since revolution is made country by country, in the U.S. our main blow should be struck at our own imperialists. Second, the OL’s own formulation here is very revealing. They seem unable to comprehend that the international communist movement is actually not limited to working to direct its main blow at one superpower, and its theoretical tasks are not limited to choosing which one should be the target. Rather, the international communist movement has the responsibility of combatting and exposing both the main enemies of the proletariat and peoples of the world, while working to make revolution in each country; which can even involve communists directing their blows at the overthrow of other enemies than the rulers of the two superpowers!
The new version of the “main blow” theory has not resulted in any real changes in the OL’s practice around the international situation. This continues to consist in the main of endless superficial tirades against the evil Soviets, while the U.S. imperialists receive a slap on the wrist, if that. The OL’s propaganda on the USSR, formerly limited to a thoroughly revisionist “analysis” of the restoration of capital ism in the USSR, has, since Nicolaus’ departure, been nonexistent. And, of course, the fact that its new verbiage has not altered the OL’s social-chauvinist position is made clear by its frequent fretting about U.S. imperialism’s inability to stand up to the Soviet Union. In Klonsky’s interview, he says that for American communists, the main blow means more than just exposing the USSR and the CPUSA:
“It also means we must firmly oppose those in the U.S. who appease or conciliate to Soviet social-imperialism and who thereby bring on the war that much sooner.”
It seems the OL shares the analysis of the revisionist CPUSA that the U.S. ruling class is split into pro-detente and anti-detente wings. They merely disagree on which imperialists are wearing the white hats and which are “especially dangerous.” (em>Call, Nov. 1, 1976) The OL has embraced the gangster logic of imperialism itself and is in mortal danger of following it all the way to its logical conclusion – calling for increased U.S. armaments and national unity behind a strong anti-Soviet government as a way to “postpone war.” In fact they have already taken some big steps in this direction such as refusing to condemn U.S. arms shipments to such anti-Soviet fighters as the Shah of Iran.
Along with the OL’s turn to Stalin’s “main blow” to justify their treacherous line on the international situation has come its adoption as the “fundamental concept“ guiding their approach to the trade union struggle and the class struggle in the U.S. (for the OL the two are synonymous).
It is less than a year since the October League jettisoned its old trade union line, which it tried to popularize under the slogan of “moving the trade unions to the left.” What this amounted to was shameless tailing of any union official or candidate for union office who talked militant about union democracy, getting more from the bosses, ending discrimination or the need for social change. These were supposedly “left” or “liberal” union leaders as opposed to the “fascist labor front” of the old-line AFL-CIO hacks.
Those the OL presented to the workers as saviours above reproach ranged from established officials like Cesar Chavez of the farmworkers through candidates for union office like Arnold Miller in the United Mineworkers (UMW), all the way down to leading figures in various plant level caucuses. Sadly for the October League, not only did these “heroes” prove uninterested in moving their unions to the left, but they failed to reward the OL for its loyal work on their behalf with significant union posts or even public recognition.
Bitter and disgruntled, the OL now shuns as lepers the very people they embraced so passionately not long ago. In fact, it is “the revisionist and reformist trade union leaders who are actually the target of the main blow in our struggle.” (em>Call, Dec. 13, 1976; p. 6) “They are the main props of imperialism, advocating compromise with the system rather than all-out struggle against it. The reformists are those forces who say they are fighting for the workers, but whose aim is limited to reforming the system in order to preserve it.” (em>Call, Nov. 22, 1976, p. 6)
Now, the OL plays a little shell game on just who these trade union reformists are. In some articles they blandly assert that “the trade union leadership as a whole; including Meany as well as Sadlowski, are reformists.” (“Communist View of Trade Unions,” em>Call, August 2, 1976, p. 7) In practice, however, the main blow seems to fall most heavily on what the OL calls “new-style reformists” like Ed Sadlowski in the United Steelworkers (USWA), presumably because they pay homage to the actual struggles of the rank and file and are thus better able to compromise with the bourgeoisie.
As the alternative to these mortal enemies the OL offers another set of heroes – themselves. Only genuine communist leaders, leaders like them, it seems, can wrest the trade unions from the hands of the hacks and make them into revolutionary organizations, or, to put it in the OL’s old terms, move them all the way to the left.
This shows how much the OL’s old and new lines have in common. Both make the key question in the class struggle in the U.S. who runs the trade unions. Both ignore the real key – building the struggle, class consciousness and revolutionary unity of the working class and developing its leadership of a broad united front against the U.S. imperialists. The trade unions are both a vehicle for and an arena of class struggle – and will continue to be at least until capitalism is overthrown – but the interests of the workers are not limited to or confined by the trade unions and the struggle to control them.
Like their old approach of holding halos over the heads of militant-talking officials, the OL’s new “left” tactics, combined with their essentially rightist attempt to restrict the working class struggle to the battle for control of the unions, could do nothing but set the proletariat up for defeat. What they are peddling is a version of the simpleminded view of revolution that Lenin ridicules – “So one army lines up and says, ’We are for socialism: and another, somewhere else, says, ’We are for imperialism’: and that will be a social revolution!” Lenin calls this “a ridiculously pedantic view.” (“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” Vol. 22, pp. 355-56)
In OL’s version of this “ridiculously pedantic view” the struggle in the trade unions is seen as those for revolution versus the reformists. This shows how isolated the OL really is from the crass struggle if they have not yet understood that opportunists can and increasingly will claim to be for revolution if they think it will advance their careers. At the same time, many of even the best fighters in the workers’ ranks, and many men and women who hold lower level union office and can be won to stand with the rank and file, do not presently espouse the idea of revolution and have plenty of illusions about the possibility and desirability of reforming the system.
The OL’s path can breed nothing but demoralization among whatever workers they succeed in dragging onto it. For one thing, it says in essence that no real advances in the proletariat’s struggle are possible until at least some top labor traitors have been replaced by communists. Anyone waiting for OLers to successfully storm the top levels of the big union internationals obviously faces endless years of disappointment.
Furthermore, the main blow strategy not only lets the main enemy off the hook by concentrating the fire elsewhere; but it won’t even damage its target. All but the stupidest of opportunists, reformists and revisionists will be able to duck the OL’s mighty “main blow” and even turn it back against it. They will be aided in their efforts to act as if they are the ones leading the fight against the main enemy and to challenge the would-be deliverers of the main blow in front of the masses, “How come you spend all your time firing on us, who are fighting the bosses (or the sellouts, or the rich or whatever), instead of our real common enemy? Who’s paying you guys, anyhow?”
True communist tactics must be aimed first and foremost at uniting with the workers around the main questions that confront them and assisting them to wage these battles more effectively and in a more class conscious way. In the course of such battles communists must seek to accomplish three things – win real victories and concessions while weakening the enemy, develop the unity, class consciousness and sense of organization of the workers and win the advanced to communism and train them as revolutionary leaders.
In the course of repeated battles, undertaken under various conditions, the workers will be won to see the truth that communism reveals about reformism, and in particular in the form of trade unionism. Trade unionism, which argues that the workers can continually better their situation by restricting their fight to trying to better their pay and working conditions, will be exposed as chaining the workers to the capitalists’ treadmill and preventing them from moving to wipe out the system that exploits and oppresses them.
Various tactics will be necessary at different points in the class struggle and can be determined only by making a concrete analysis of concrete conditions. In the course of developing and applying these tactics the workers must be involved and trained to understand from a class conscious point of view how and why different tactics are used in their struggle.
A look at some practice around the question of union elections is helpful to understanding not only the difference between correct tactics and dogma, but also the essential unity of the OL’s old and new lines commented on earlier.
When Arnold Miller was running for UMW president in 1972 (and for a long time after his victory), the October League not only backed him 100% but attacked the Revolutionary Union, the organization that initiated the formation of the RCP, USA, for its critical support of Miller, claiming that “the RU line of ’critical support’ meant No Support At All!” (em>Call, Aug., 1973, p. 12, italics, capitals and exclamation point in original)
The RU backed the Miller campaign because it had to some extent arisen from and in some respects reflected the great upsurge of struggle that was taking place in the coalfields – for union democracy against the stranglehold of the Tony Boyle machine, for Black lung compensation and decent pensions and for better and safer working conditions, pay and job security. The campaign provided an opportunity to break the stranglehold of the Boyle machine and maximize the freedom and initiative of the rank and file.
Because the RU presented the issues this way in its literature and in mass organizations where it had a presence and warned that Arnold Miller was no saviour and might betray the workers’ interests, it came as no surprise to genuine communists or workers who had been influenced by the RU’s line that Arnold Miller did take the side of the coal bosses and the whole bourgeoisie.
To the OL, however, it came as an ugly shock indeed. Today they scold themselves (the term self-criticism implies a certain amount of political understanding and probing for the roots of errors: both are entirely absent from the OL’s efforts) for ever having backed Miller in the first place. In fact, they say, Miller’s victory was a big setback for the miners: “When the exposed leadership of Boyle was replaced by a more ’liberal’ reformist like Miller, the hold of the reformist labor aristocracy as a whole over the union and the workers was strengthened.” (“Present Tasks in the Unions,” em>Call, July 19, 1976, p. 7) Here is a priorism run amuck! So firmly does OL clutch its dogma that it has dragged them out of the real world entirely into some fantasy world where the titanic strike struggles of the miners against the operators, their pets in union office and the bourgeois state evidently didn’t even take place!
Likewise the OL has now, like various Trotskyite outfits, issued a forlorn call for a boycott of the election in the USWA, where the campaign of Ed Sadlowski, once another of M. Klonsky’s fair haired boys, provides a similar opportunity to develop the struggle of the steel workers and the whole class. By the same token the RCP is not supporting Arnold Miller’s bid for reelection or the campaigns of his opponents this year because in the present situation they do not offer this kind of opportunity to the miners.
Like support for his campaign four years ago and Sadlowski’s now, non-support for Miller is not a question of “aiming the main blow” or any other dogmatically applied “principle.” It is a tactical question of taking those steps that best enable the workers to develop their struggle, organization and consciousness and of treating the question of union elections as one possible tactic in this process. The OL failed to do this in the mines by fawning on Miller and now they are failing to do it in the mills from the opposite direction, by failing to utilize, for the benefit of the rank and file, the opportunity that the Sadlowski campaign offers.
A brief point should also be made on the question of the CPUSA, identified by the OL as the “more dangerous” of the “twin enemies” of reformism and revisionism. Here is another dogmatically inspired flight of fancy. The OL can’t even decide what role the CP plays – Klonsky in his interview calls them “nothing but a reactionary ’fifth column’ of the Soviet Union” while several subsequent articles deal with them primarily in their role as servants of U.S. imperialism. While the CP is indeed a force the working class and its Party must expose and smash, to attribute to them, as the OL does, a good 50% of the role of main prop of U.S. imperialism is such a gross exaggeration as to indicate a less than adequate grasp of the real world.
Perhaps the most pathetic testimony to the bankruptcy of the OL’s new line appears in a letter written by an OL sympathizer organizing in a shop in the state of Washington and published in the December 13, 1976 em>Call without comment. This sorry note begins by enthusing over the “theoretical” article on the main blow. Before reading the article, it continues, “we always aimed the main blow at the company in our leaflets. This tactic let the trade union bureaucrats off the hook or we made the error of attacking them in isolation from the capitalists and not as conscious agents for the ruling class.” Presumably because of the influence of the OL’s old line, they were never clear before, they report, what “role the trade union bureaucrats play in defending the capitalists.”
Alas, the “cure“ may prove worse than the disease. An OLer in the shop was fired and the “main blow” in the battle to get him rehired is, of course, being aimed at the local hacks, who have been red-baiting. “In all of this the factory owners have been able to maintain a ’liberal, fair and reasonable’ face.” We do not know the particulars of this struggle, and there are sometimes cases when the workers have to direct their struggle primarily against the traitors in their unions, but the letter writer makes this a question of principle, not particulars. In fact, it seems more than likely that the bosses, who are after all the ones who fired the person and the ones who can be forced to rehire him or her, are able to play “liberal, fair and reasonable” without meeting the workers’ demands precisely because the “main blow” is being directed away from them, at their servants in union office.
This naive letter demonstrates in microcosm the dangerous and futile course of action the OL would force the entire working class onto, were it in any position to do so.
Even though there hasn’t been the fanfare there was on the international and trade union fronts, the effects of the “main blow” line are showing up around the national question as well. Back in the days of “moving the trade unions to the left” the OL also called for a “Black United Front” to be composed in large part of leaders of various non-proletarian strata in the Black community. Today, however, the Black United Front has disappeared from the pages of the em>Call. Could it be that Hosea Williams, Julian Bond, Ron Dellums and others with whom the OL has tried to play patty cake in the past have been discovered to be “reformists,” interested not in revolution but only in reforms that will increase the life span of the capitalist system? Chances are good.
Perhaps we will be treated to the sight of the OL repeating their trade union flip-flop on this front by becoming the best and only true revolutionary nationalists. This tendency, like the Black United Front before it, would represent nothing more than an opportunist attempt to merge, two into one, Marxism and nationalism. The earlier line amounted to pulling the Black masses away from the multinational proletariat into “their own” united front, which was supposed to be one component of a grand coalition, a united front against imperialism made up of other united fronts, rather than a strategic realignment of class forces.
If the OL now goes the route of substituting themselves for the discarded “reformists” as the real nationalist heroes, they will still be in the position of diluting Marxism with nationalism and undercutting the alliance of the working class with the movements of the oppressed nationalities which makes up the core of the real united front against imperialism. Not only does it push nationalism instead of proletarian ideology, but part and parcel of such an approach is sectarianism, the refusal to unite in struggle with actual nationalists and-middle forces.
A real Marxist-Leninist approach to the national question in the United States must be based on mobilizing both the oppressed nationalities and the working class as a whole against national oppression, bringing forward the proletarian stand of fighting exploitation and all oppression, and forging a revolutionary alliance of the national movements with the multinational working class movement as the solid core of the strategic united front against imperialism that aims its blows at the monopoly capitalist class and will enable the working class to lead the masses of people in finally overthrowing bourgeois rule and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The adoption of the “main blow” line by the October League was based on opportunism, the need to find a theoretical cover for reactionary lines they had no intention of giving up. They seized on an incorrect theory and in “enriching” and applying it have only gone from bad to worse. At best, they have managed to weave a faint mist of confusion around their social-chauvinism, but the treacherous nature of their practice is too flaring to remain hidden long from even the dullest gaze.
In some instances, their dogmatism has forced them to deny reality flat out lest their a priori picture of the world be shattered. In general, they have steered themselves down a dead-end street, where their “main blows” will leave the principal enemy of the American people, the U.S. ruling class, unscathed and simultaneously drive away many with whom unity is possible. To top it off, far from crushing opportunists, revisionists and other enemy agents, this line in actuality lets these vermin off the hook by assisting their efforts to pose as the flag bearers in the struggle against the main enemy.
In striving to unite with all possible allies, the working class must take care not to concede leadership in the struggle to forces that will conciliate with the enemy. To move the struggle ahead will in fact involve political and ideological combat with such forces and the exposure of their class interests to the masses, but if they are made the main target of struggle through rigid adherence to some dogmatic formulation, it will result in nothing but setbacks for the cause of the working class.