First Published: Revolution, Vol. 3, No. 7-8, April-May 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Second Congress of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA was recently convened and successfully completed its work. The Congress represented a great victory for Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought and the line of the Party and a decisive defeat for a counter-revolutionary, revisionist headquarters formerly existing within the Party.
The Congress was held in the wake of serious wrecking and splitting activities by this revisionist headquarters, led by Mickey Jarvis and Leibel Bergman. The Congress enthusiastically endorsed the expulsion of these two counter-revolutionary ringleaders from the Party, and vowed to even more thoroughly eradicate the influence of their revisionist line from the Party.
The Congress reflected and concentrated the excellent situation in the Party, a situation in which the members are militantly repudiating the revisionist line which had tended to fuse with spontaneous tendencies to the right and which was stifling the revolutionary will and practice of the Party. In contrast to the petty, short-sighted, incredibly narrow and thoroughly revisionist viewpoint of the Jarvis-Bergman headquarters, Party members are making great strides in approaching every question from the high plane of two-line struggle and with the revolutionary goal firmly in mind.
The Congress began with Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Party Central Committee and the Presidium of the Congress, leading the delegates in a one-minute standing silent tribute to the memory of the late Comrade Mao Tsetung, the greatest Marxist of our time. Comrade Avakian proceeded to make an important opening address centering on Mao Tsetung’s contributions and their implications for the struggle in this country and the Revolutionary Communist Party.
The Congress adopted an agenda consisting of four major parts: the Party’s rectification campaign aimed at the eclecticism, pragmatism and factionalism promoted by the Jarvis-Bergman headquarters; important international developments which vitally affect the international communist movement; discussion and adoption of the Main Political Report submitted to the Congress by Comrade Avakian on behalf of the Central Committee; and the election of the Second Central Committee.
The discussion at the Congress was marked by lively and vigorous struggle, within the context of unity with the revolutionary line of the Party as it has developed in the two-line struggle with the revisionist headquarters. The high political level of the discussions reflected both the advances made throughout the Party generally in the three years since its formation and, most especially, the excellent atmosphere of study and criticism and repudiation of revisionism that has developed in the course of the current two line struggle.
At appropriate times during the Congress votes were taken on various resolutions on the floor. All resolutions were approved by unanimous vote, as was the election of the Second Central Committee. This unity was achieved not on the basis of sliding over differences or shortcircuiting struggle but precisely through the vigorous struggle that marked the entire Congress. In the course of the discussion and struggle at the Congress, amendments were made to various resolutions and changes were incorporated into the Main Political Report based on the deepening of the Party’s correct line achieved at the Congress.
Absent entirely from the Second Congress was the type of cliquishness and arrogance that marred the overall victory of the Founding Congress, behavior that was promoted by those who were to head up the revisionist headquarters and which grew to characterize their line and method. The Second Congress was a model of creating what the Party’s Constitution calls “a political situation in which there is both centralism and democracy, both unified line and broad initiative, both discipline and freedom, both unity of will and action and personal ease of mind and liveliness.”
The revisionist headquarters developed in opposition to the Party’s correct line adopted at its Founding Congress in 1975. Since that time the Party’s line has been deepened and its work has advanced. Jarvis and Bergman, however, consistently clung to every backward tendency that the pull of spontaneity and these opportunists had encouraged, stubbornly opposed every advance and undermined the collective life and unity of will of the Party.
Jarvis and Bergman, the two revisionist ringleaders, were former members of the Communist Party, USA, and while breaking with the revisionist CP organizationally, they refused to fully break with a revisionist ideological and political line. They tried to eliminate Mao Tsetung Thought from our ranks. They negated the significance and lessons of the Cultural Revolution. They attempted to poison the RCP with revisionism that has historical and international roots.
Awestruck by the remaining strength and some temporary gains of the bourgeoisie in this country and internationally, Jarvis and Bergman were emboldened and staged a desperate attempt to seize leadership of the Party or provoke a split at the Third Plenary of the First Central Committee. When this attack met with ignominious defeat, this Menshevik headquarters feigned overall unity with the Party, voted to repudiate their line on the path forward to revolution in this country as revisionist, pledged themselves to study more and vowed to uphold Party discipline, but then turned around and launched an open, public assault on the Party and its Central Committee. Through these wrecking and splitting activities, Jarvis and Bergman were able to hoodwink somewhat less than one third of Party members to leave its ranks, almost all from one or two areas long under the domination of the revisionist headquarters.
The two-line struggle with the revisionist headquarters has tempered the Party ideologically, politically and organizationally. The Party has shown that it can stand firm in the face of a revisionist wind and not be dragged down the road of betrayal.
The Second Central Committee met in its First Plenary Session and unanimously elected its standing bodies and officers. Comrade Avakian was unanimously reelected Chairman. Under the leadership of the Party Central Committee the whole Party is resolved to root out the influence of the Jarvis-Bergman clique, more thoroughly dig at the roots of this revisionism, and to make the Party’s line into an even more powerful material force, in our own hands and those of ever broader ranks of the masses, to “transform the world through class struggle,” as the Programme of the Party sets forth.