First Published: Resistence, Vol. 7, No. 9, October 26, 1976
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.
EROL Note: The following text is excerpted from a longer document, WVO’s “Unite to Expose” A policy of class collaboration. The title here was supplied by EROL.
For International Working Women’s Day, WVO united with the “CP”USA, PSP, the Troskyites, Bella Abzurg, Gloria Steinman, lesbian collectives and even the Girl Scouts. According to them the masses would be at this activity. This was in March 1975. After the supposed forums in which WVO allegedly exposed PSP. As criticisms; for their opportunism pour, WVO sees fit to reconstruct the facts surrounding certain events. Let us see how.
First Version:
The IWD Coalition had the full spectrum of left center and right forces within it. Over 40 organizations including PSP, El Comite, CLUW, District 1199, Coalition of Asian Women’s, the Third World Women’s Alliance, New York Women’s Union, Women’s Caucus of New York Taxi Rank and File, LEMPA and many other anti-imperialist and Marxist-Leninist organizations were in it... In the March 8th rally, anti-imperialist speakers directly attacked US imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. Workers Viewpoint Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 page 24. (emphasis LPR)
If you will note, PSP is listed among organizations characterized as Marxist-Leninists or anti-imperialist. But didn’t WVO denounce PSP 5 months earlier for their revisionist and reformist line? March 8, 1975 happened after Oct. 27, 1974. There are 2 possible explanations: either WV0 is lying about the forums and exposure of PSP and really considers PSP Marxist-Leninists as anti-imperialist until March1975, or WVO opportunistically includes PSP among the Marxist-Leninists in order to justify their participation in said activity. Furthermore which of those organizations made all these exposures? Comrades, this is all pure fabrication. VVO is caught in their own lie. For example, how could PSP expose Soviet social-imperialism if they are one of its lackeys? How could El Comite denounce Soviet social imperialism when they don’t even believe it exists and even support the armed intervention of its armed Cuban mercenaries in Angola? In the same issue of their magazine they state:
First, instead of fighting for leadership of the broad coalition around the N. Y. Union Square Rally, which represented all the right and left positions within the women’s movement, the OL dismissed this coalition as “revisionist” and went off to have a pure “anti-imperialist” rally. It rejected the Leninist premise of going wherever the masses are to be found. It liquidated the Communist responsibility to provide and build proletarian leadership in the mass movement against women’s oppression. Ibid, page 24.
Notice how they limit the criticism to only OL as if the OL had demonstrated alone in this activity.
Second version: March 1976:
With more than 40 organizations participating and 4000 people at the March 8 demonstration, the IWD coalition was definitely a mass event. It had the full spectrum of left, center and right forces, many forces from the national and working class movements, anti-imperialist organizations and Marxist-Leninists, as well as the revisionist “C”P and their friends. Workers Viewpoint, Vol. 1, No. 1 Supplement – page 4. (newspaper)
Here we have a “slight” change. The list of anti-imperialist and Marxist-Leninist organizations does not appear. Why WVO? Come on, give us at least 2. They’re caught in their own lie. In criticising the 0L they said that many Marxist-Leninists took part in their coalition (they brought in PSP, El Comite, and a host of others). The task of really exposing these revisionists (PSP) and centrists (El Comite) has been carried out by organizations like ourselves. And WVO can’t hide behind their names now. They have to speak of “Marxist-Leninist organizations” without mentioning them. In the same paper they speak of all the exposures they supposedly carried out and how at the meeting many speakers publically attacked the Yankee imperialists and the Soviet social-imperialists. False WVO, false. We were there. Not “uniting to expose” but exposing without uniting.
Their article continues:
And what did the OL do? They refused to work in this and instead set up their own “pure” “anti-imperialist coalition, under their calls for a “break with revisionism”. What was this but a total failure to expose the revisionists in front of the masses and win the masses to our side? Ibid, page 4.
Once again WVO identifies only OL as part of the other coalition.
Third version (2 months later, May 1976):
In last year’s IWD event, PRRWO joined the opportunist OL forces and marched themselves down to the U. N. where they just agitated among themselves. They totally abandoned their duty as communists to provide and build proletarian leadership in the mass movement against women’s oppression. WVJ #4, p. 26 May 1976
My, my, how quiet they kept it...WVO waited exactly one year and 2 months to tell the communist movement that PRRWO had united with OL in the IWWD march which they’ve criticized so much in their paper and journal. What is this if not out and out opportunism? Let’s go back a little. From November, 1975 to March 1976, WVO and PRRWO were ’“comrades in the genuine wing”. At the time, WVO attacked OL over what OL had done in 1975 but said nothing of PRRWO uniting with OL at the time. No sooner do PRRWO-RWL throw WVO out of the “genuine wing”, than WVO reveals their secret. ”Friends in crime – when they fall out, one rats on the other. That proves once more the unprincipled unity which WVO promotes.
Comrades, both WVO with their unprincipled unity with revisionists, lesbians, trotskyites, etc. as well as PRRWO with their unity with the right opportunists of OL were wrong on this question. As we didn’t unite with either of the coalitions, then according to PRRWO and WVO, we are centrists. This stems from their incorrect idea that the struggle between PRRWO-RWL and WVO is a “two line struggle”. That is wrong. The three of them represent the same line, the bourgeois incorrect line.
In order to celebrate IWWD in 1976, WVO organized a coalition to which it invited precisely those forces which it allegedly had “exposed” in 1975 – revisionists, opportunists, Trotskyites, lesbians, etc. (Our sum-up and analysis of these events appeared in RESISTANCE, Vol. 7, Nos. 3 and 4). In that analysis we must point out, we wrongly made the generalization that opportunist organizations only attract elements of the lower strata. This was a “left” error which led us to conclude that organizations like OL were incapable of winning advanced and intermediate elements to their organizations – this was “wishful thinking” – contrary to objective reality, and an overestimation of the capacity of the advanced, as if they could always determine what is the correct line and never unite with right opportunists. We muddled the difference between the consolidated opportunist and bankrupt leaderships and the base of those organizations which do have honest elements in them. This is a serious error that comrades should learn from, since, by failing to divide one into two; by lumping together leadership and base, we can only achieve to isolate ourselves from honest elements and help to consolidate them around the opportunist line of those organizations.
The IWWD coalition is one more concrete example of WVO’s policy of class collaboration. It’s true that communists must find ways of speaking to the masses, not to be isolated from them. Lenin teaches us that to speak to the workers we often must pay a “price of admission” – and “bargain” (struggle for our line) to bring down the price as low as possible (make the least compromise possible). But Lenin doesn’t tell us to make donations!!! Let’s see what Lenin says:
Imagine that a communist has to enter premises in which agents of the bourgeoisie are carrying on their propaganda at a fairly large meeting of workers. Imagine also that the bourgeoisie demands from us a high price for admission to these premises. If the price has not been agreed to beforehand we must bargain, of course, in order not to impose too heavy a burden upon our Party funds. If we pay too much for admission to these premises we shall undoubtedly commit an error. But it is better to pay a high price – at all events until we have learned to bargain properly – than to reject an opportunity of speaking to workers who hitherto have been in the exclusive “possession”, so to speak, of the reformists, i. e., of the most loyal friends of the bourgeoisie. We Have Paid Too Much, Lenin, LCW Vol. 33 p. 330.)
It’s clear that the price to which Lenin refers is concessions, tactical compromises. To enter into an activity controlled by revisionists and reformists, some “payment” must be made, which if it is not previously determined may be too high, if we have not learned to bargain well. Note comrades that Lenin qualifies entry into a place on that (l) there be “a considerable number” of workers (2) we have the opportunity to speak to them”, (develop propaganda and agitation, ed. LPR). In addition, we should try to fix the price beforehand and bargain to pay the least possible. One thing that is plain for all Marxist-Leninists is that, in so far as compromises and concessions are concerned – the price to which Lenin refers – is that we can never make concessions of principles. That is a price we can never pay to enter any place.