First Published: The Worker, for Hawaii, Vol. 3, No. 4, May 6, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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(WPS) Recently a very important struggle has taken place within the ranks of the Revolutionary Communist Party, whose stand and viewpoint the Worker puts forward. This struggle was not only a life and death matter for the RCP, but in fact has importance for the very direction the workers’ struggle will take This is because the RCP is the organized advanced detachment of the working class and has undertaken the responsibility of leading the workers in this country to working class revolution. So any thing that would steer the Party away from its revolutionary course will clearly effect the course of the workers movement.
At the heart of the conflict in the Party was exactly the question of whether or not the Party would continue to orient all of its activities toward the goal of making revolution and continuing the revolution forward until the elimination of classes altogether. Today, only a small minority of the workers in this country are consciously fighting for this goal, while the great bulk of the workers’ fight as workers is centered around the battles for their vital needs–against wage cuts, speedup, layoffs and so forth. For this reason, the revisionists (called this because they revise the revolutionary heart out of Marxism-Leninism, the science of working class revolution) in the RCP sought to liquidate the Party’s revolutionary tasks and have the Party simply tail behind the level of struggle the workers are presently waging.
Of course, the RCP has always been involved in the daily battles of the workers. The Party attaches much importance to these fights and helps to lead them forward. But this has always been from the perspective of how to transform the movement of today–essentially a defensive battle to keep from being driven into the dirt–into the class conscious fight of the workers against all of the injustices and oppression in society and that is aimed at their cause–the capitalist system of wage slavery.
The revisionists formerly in the RCP fell into pragmatism, the ruling class philosophy that holds the only thing important is immediate results. From this point of view it is unnecessary to seek the reasons for doing anything, instead one should do whatever seems to work at the time. This is not the first time revisionism and pragmatism has infected the revolutionary ranks–either in this country or worldwide. Indeed, it is the same politics and outlook that turned the Soviet Union, the first state ruled by the working class, into a capitalist, imperialist superpower and which turned the old Communist Party, USA from a powerful revolutionary vanguard to a decrepit reformist sect.
The old CPUSA played an overall revolutionary role in the years between its formation following the First World War and its utter betrayal in the mid ’50s. But even in its genuinely revolutionary period, the CPUSA was seriously hampered by the pragmatism and revisionism described earlier. For example, the CPUSA fought heroically and in the forefront of the key battles of the 1930s–the fight to win unemployment insurance, the San Francisco General Strike, the struggle to organize workers into the industrial unions of the CIO.
However, as these battles progressed the CPUSA increasingly lost sight of its revolutionary goal and conducted these fights as ends in themselves. As a result, the workers were politically disarmed and, when the ruling class launched a full scale attack on the working class following World War 2, many of the victories won by the workerswere corrupted or snatched back.
When Khruschev and the newly arisen capitalist elements he represented seized power in the USSR, they tried to push their revisionism on communist parties around the world. The leaders of the CPUSA were quick to fall in line, openly abandoning the fight for revolution and socialism. The betrayal of the CPUSA was a tremendous loss, leaving the working class without a revolutionary vanguard for two decades.
But the lack of a revolutionary Party could not prevent the people from struggling, and the ’50s and ’60s saw the development of powerful upsurges among the American people. Out of these struggles activists came forward who once again took up the fight for working class revolution and saw Marxism-Leninism as the guide for advancing that fight. Through this process the Revolutionary Communist Party was formed in 1975, which vowed not to fall into the same pit that destroyed the old CPUSA.
The leaders of the revisionist headquarters in the RCP were Mickey Jarvis and Leibel Bergman, who had been members of the CPUSA previously and who broke with it organizationally, but were never able to root out the influence of the old CP’s outlook. Both Jarvis and Bergman had joined the RCP at its formation and were assigned leading responsibility in light of some contributions they had made in the past. But Jarvis and Bergman remained stuck in the past and as the Party’s work developed and its understanding of Marxism-Leninism deepened, the pragmatism and revisionism of the Jarvis-Bergman group came under attack. Rather than try to change their way of looking at things and their actions, Jarvis and Bergman organized a faction inside the Party that more and more openly opposed the Party’s revolutionary politics.
Of course the Party welcomes struggle within its ranks to determine the correct road forward, but it is organized in such a way as to insure that the collective knowledge of the whole Party can be brought to bear in correctly settling differences. But for Jarvis and Bergman, the main thing became promoting their own revisionist line and protecting their own careers. So they trampled on the Party’s organizational principles and went about trying to set up little kingdoms loyal to themselves.
Finally, when a crucial question brought the differences between Jarvis and Bergman and the Party fully to the surface, the revisionists resorted to trying to blackmail the Party’s leadership, and when that failed, made a desperate gamble and tried to split the Party.
Jarvis and Bergman were able to drag less than one third of Party members out of the Party, and almost all of these from one or two areas of the country long under their domination. They’ve now formed a little band called the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters. Members of their faction also tried to use positions in some organizations in which the Party works, such as the National United Workers Organization, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee, as well as the Party’s youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, as bargaining chips. They even put out a phony issue of the Worker labelled volume one, number one but with the same name, clearly aimed at confusing the Worker readership.
In the organizations where these revisionists entrenched themselves they tried to stifle political discussion, rob these groups of their internal life and turn them from fighting organizations against oppression into narrow interest groups–into the personal property of revisionist leaders to find careers in.
We are happy to report that these wrecking activities have resulted in a miserable defeat for the revisionists. The Second Party Congress of the RCP was recently held which succeeded in uniting the Party firmly around its correct line and dealt the revisionists a further defeat. The Congress voted unanimously to uphold the expulsion of Jarvis and Bergman from the Party and decided that their anti-revolutionary political stand should be exposed to the public. Steps have been taken to safeguard the organizations where the revisionists tried to seize leadership, and they have suffered one blow after another.
As we have shown, Jarvis and Bergman were able to do some damage to the Party and introduce turmoil into some sections of it. But for Marxists it is neither a surprise nor a calamity that people emerge within the ranks of the Party who try to turn it from its revolutionary path, or that sharp struggle periodically breaks out within the ranks of the Party.
Because the Party exists amidst class society it is inevitable that the viewpoints of different classes will be reflected within the Party. Further, struggles in the Party usually reflect big questions facing the working class struggle as a whole, with which the Party is closely bound.
So the Party does not fear the development of contradictions within it. Rather it seeks to arm the whole membership so that when sharp differences emerge they can be resolved on the basis of Marxism and the needs of the working class struggle.
As such conflicts arise and as they are resolved on the correct basis the Party grows stronger. People who have made mistakes can be won over, opportunists who refuse to change are driven from the Party’s ranks–making the Party better able to carry out its revolutionary responsibilities. In fact, in the early history of the Revolutionary Union, the group that did the most to lay the basis for the formation of the RCP, an internal struggle resulted in as much as 40% of the membership leaving it. The result of that struggle was not to hamper the struggle but to prepare the very conditions necessary for the RU to develop and grow in strength.
The differences between the RCP and the Jarvis-Bergman clique in many ways reflect the contradictory nature of today’s workers movement. On the one hand, the conflict between the working class and the capitalists is at the center stage in society, it is this battle which shapes the development of struggle in the U.S. today and which carries within it the seeds of revolution. At the same time, it is not so evident that the current situation is, in fact, an advance over the previous period of the ’50s and ’60s. While resulting in big upsurges among the masses, this period was not overall determined by the conflict between the workers and the capitalists and thus could not lead to revolution.
Communists have complete confidence in the eventual triumph of the workers’ cause, not because of some sort of religious faith but because the science of Marxism-Leninism reveals the laws operating in society. These laws dictate that capitalism can only grow more decrepit, intensify the suffering of the people, and plunge society into crisis and war. All of this will propel millions of .workers into struggle against the abuses of capitalism. In taking up today’s battles, communists seek to prepare the ranks of the workers for the revolutionary situation that will develop, when the system is wracked by crisis or war and the masses of people can take up arms against it and win.
But the Jarvis-Bergman revisionists did not see things this way. They did not see that the situation could and eventually will undergo a decisive change. Thus they could not see the tasks of communists today in preparing for the revolutionary situation of tomorrow. The revisionists are content with the present character of the workers movement, acting as if by simply “plugging away” or coming up with gimmicks to produce flashy but empty “results” everything would be fine. In essence this was the viewpoint revisionists have always held historically: “the movement is everything, the final goal nothing.” Such a viewpoint would condemn the masses to the perpetual torment of capitalist wage slavery.
History has shown that the path of making revolution is arduous and complex. And history has also shown a well-worn rut down which many once-revolutionary parties have travelled–losing sight of questions of principle, concerning themselves only with what immediately stares them in the face and, eventually, abandoning the masses altogether. That the Revolutionary Communist Party refused to take this easy, low road of revisionism is evidence that those who start out fighting for the working class need not betray it.
The defeat of the Jarvis-Bergman faction is a most important victory. Not only have those who would make their peace with capitalism been booted from the Party, but in the process the whole Party has united more firmly than before and strengthened its understanding of its revolutionary tasks. In the months to come, the Worker will be going further into many of the important questions that this struggle has posed and over which it took shape.