First Published: Revolution, Vol. 3, No. 7-8, April-May 1978.
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.
Editors Note: In the coming months Revolution will be going thoroughly into the counter-revolutionary line, criminal features and history of the Jarvis-Bergman headquarters. The revisionist headquarters provides an excellent teacher by negative example– by repudiating their line of eclecticism, pragmatism and factionalism the Party is strengthened and its understanding of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought is deepened. In this first installment of the series, we concentrate on the question of the high road of waging revolutionary struggle in today’s non-revolutionary situation in the U.S.
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The roots of the Jarvis-Bergman headquarters and the influence of the line and outlook they championed go back to the Founding Congress of the RCP and to the Revolutionary Union before it, which played the central role in forming the Party. The conclusion to the Programme of the RCP adopted at the Founding Congress reads in part:
This programme is both a declaration of war on the ruling class and a battle plan for the working class of this country.
The proletariat in the United States and throughout the world faces a protracted and complicated task, for the objective of its struggle is nothing less than the complete transformation of all society and involves the complete break with all previous forms of society and all past traditions. But its triumph is inevitable, because the whole of human history and the development of society itself has prepared the conditions for it and only proletarian revolution can continue to move society forward in this era.
It was in this spirit and with this orientation that the Revolutionary Communist Party was formed. The formation of the Party marked a qualitative advance in the class struggle in this country in that it represented the consolidation of a correct line capable of leading the masses in revolution in contrast to the other trends in the then-existing communist movement which had consolidated into erroneous, opportunist lines.
But for Mickey Jarvis and Leibel Bergman, the formation of the RCP was no real advance at all. Blinded by pragmatism, Jarvis and Bergman were unable to understand the decisive importance of line and instead were only able to see the organizational aspects of building the Party. They were only capable of viewing the process of forming the Party from the narrow blinders of “immediate results”–specifically, how many people could be united to form the Party. So, even though some new forces did come forward in the process of forming the Party, when it became apparent that it would not be possible to unite a qualitatively larger number of forces beyond those already centered around the Revolutionary Union, they lost their enthusiasm for forming the Party and in fact regarded the process as a failure.
This view was closely connected with their concept of what a “revolutionary party” should be in the first place. Both Jarvis and Bergman had been members of the Communist Party, USA and had never thoroughly broken with it politically or ideologically. Their “ideal party” was none other than the old CPUSA of the ’30s and of the ’40s, minus the most blatant extremes of CP leader Earl Browder’s revisionism.
What inspired them about the old CP was not its genuine revolutionary qualities, that at that time it saw its goal as revolution and communism, but the fact that the old CP was relatively large and relatively influential over the masses of people. What they failed or refused to grasp was how even during its overall revolutionary period the CPUSA increasingly fell into pragmatism, seeing only the immediate results and the current struggles, and increasingly lost sight of its revolutionary goal, its very reason for existence. They could not recognize the essence of this fatal flaw in the old CP because it was exactly their own outlook.
Although Jarvis and Bergman did not see the RCP as the revolutionary vanguard capable of leading the masses to revolution (for such a vision was completely beyond their horizons) they saw in the RCP the largest organization in the U.S. declaring that it stood on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought, and they tried to capture it.
At the time of the Founding Congress and since, Jarvis and Bergman had sought to substitute their own political line for the revolutionary line of the Party. The essence of their line was aptly summed up by their ideological forebear, Eduard Bernstein, when he said, “The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing.” As Lenin commented, “this catchphrase of Bernstein expresses the substance of revisionism better than many long arguments.”
Jarvis and Bergman had broken with the revisionist CP organizationally and with some aspects of its line, but neither had made a radical rupture with revisionism. Even during the period when they made, overall, some contributions to the revolutionary cause, the influence of revisionism caused them to vacillate at key junctures and often take incorrect stands. As the revolutionary movement and the Party advanced, requiring Party members to advance also, Jarvis and Bergman remained weighed down by the revisionist baggage of the old CP. Their revisionist tendencies finally took a qualitative leap and Jarvis and Bergman reverted fully to the revisionist outlook with which they had never fully broken.
Jarvis remained in the CP, in which he was a “rising star” until 1969, when it was not only thoroughly revisionist but had placed itself in direct opposition to the crest of revolutionary struggle then shaking the country. Memorable indeed was Jarvis’ performance at the 1969 Austin, Texas Students for a Democratic Society convention when, wearing a jacket emblazoned with an American flag, he mounted a table holding aloft the CP’s Program and blustered about, denouncing SOS members as “petty bourgeois creeps” and calling on them to read “a working class program!” It is no wonder Jarvis harbored a lasting grudge against the revolutionary movements of the ’60s. While it would be wrong not to see the limitations of that earlier movement or to fail to see the need to go beyond it, it is downright reactionary to set oneself in opposition to its overall revolutionary thrust.
All along, Jarvis revealed his infatuation with the old (pre-Khrushchev) CP and his total inability to sum up any of its errors. While he never took up the task of arming himself and others with the overall stand, viewpoint and method of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought, he was fond of uncritically promoting bits and pieces of old CP documents as “recipes” for how to conduct communist work. Many of these gimmicks were things long since summed up by Marxist-Leninists. A case in point was Jarvis’ promotion of an organizational manual of the old CP which he had reprinted and distributed in the name of the Revolutionary Union without any discussion in the leadership of the RU. This manual put organization above political line and promoted an economist view toward the workers struggle.
From the beginning Jarvis was infected with a heavy dose of careerism which was coupled with his inability to take a firm stand on questions of principle, instead always seeking to find some kind of accommodation with opportunism. During the struggle in the Revolutionary Union against the opportunist line of Bruce Franklin, a leader within the RU, in 1970 – a struggle which involved two completely antagonistic lines, Marxism and adventurism–Jarvis sat on the sidelines until it was clear who was going to win out. Later, when the struggle against narrow nationalism and Bundism (adapting socialism to nationalism) was first breaking out inside the RU and with the Black Workers Congress and the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, he was initially unconvinced of the central importance of this struggle. This was partly because of his own empirical and careerist outlook (at the time he was waging a struggle, in the main correctly, against a tendency toward bureaucracy and self-cultivation in his local area, which to him therefore had to be the main problem facing the RU overall) but also because he was trying to cook up deals with PRRWO and the BWC, who championed the Bundist tendencies. During the period of the Liaison Committee between the RU, PRRWO and the BWC Jarvis told leading members of the RU from other areas, “What is wrong with you guys. In New York we have already merged with PRRWO.” Actually, nothing of the kind was the case, although setting up of joint work in several parts of the country was an advance. What was happening was that Jarvis was going outside of the RU to conduct negotiations on his own with certain leaders of PRRWO, including going so far as to sneak around and encourage them to oppose certain positions of the RU.
Since the formation of the Party, Jarvis’ careerism and doubledealing stepped up. He perfected a method of encouraging forces under his command to leap out and attack the Party’s line while he lurked behind in the shadows and tried to present himself as a conciliator and follower of a “third line.” To facilitate this he carefully avoided putting anything down on paper for which he could later be held accountable.
Given Jarvis’ whole method it is impossible to identify him with any consistent political principles. He is a living example of Lenin’s point in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, where he wrote: ”An opportunist, by his very nature, will always evade formulating an issue clearly and decisively, he will always seek a middle course, he will always wriggle like a snake between two mutually exclusive points of view and try to ’agree’ with both and to reduce his differences of opinion to petty amendments, doubts, good and pious suggestions, and so on and so forth.”
Despite its snake-like character, under today’s circumstances such opportunism is generally manifested as a right opportunist and economist line. This was the case with Mickey Jarvis.
Leibel Bergman left the CP around the time of its complete betrayal, but had clung to the world outlook that had led to its demise. Bergman’s history is characterized by clinging to the revisionism he picked up in the old CP, a stubborn unwillingness to change, a constant tendency to try to reconcile Marxism with revisionism and rampant-individualism.
Although Bergman played a positive role in helping to found the Revolutionary Union in 1968, even in that period he was incapable of giving any leadership to the necessary process of separating out Marxism from the general petty bourgeois radicalism of the time. He tried to play a mediating and conciliating role in the struggle against Bruce Franklin’s adventurism in 1970. In fact, while now joining those deriding the militant, revolutionary thrust of the ’60s, Bergman has always expressed a fondness for petty bourgeois adventurism–as long, of course, as others besides himself were actually involved.
During the 1972 elections, Bergman tried to set up a “McGovern for President” headquarters within the RU, in a clear throwback to the old CP’s line on Roosevelt and seeking the “lesser of two evils.” He even tried to mask this opportunism as internationalism and play on emotionalism by saying it was a sacred duty to the Vietnamese people to support McGovern!
During the struggle against Bundism, which played an important part in laying the basis for founding the Party, Bergman not only vacillated, but even tried at a key point to reverse the RU’s line and capitulate, spouting a lot of CP-style “white-liberal” reformism in the process.
During his years in the RU and the RCP, Bergman played little or no role in collective life. He saw himself as a “great mind” floating free while his body wandered about the country in his role as a Condescending Savior or a Confucian Sage. He preferred to lurk in the background and engage in Machiavellian maneuvering in hopes of getting his revisionist line across.
Bergman had learned some Marxist-Leninist theory in the CP and was able to play a somewhat useful role in the early period of the new communist movement. But as the revolutionary movement grew and developed Bergman refused to keep apace. Instead of studying Marxism-Lenin ism he boycotted study groups in the Party, preferring instead to coast along with his mishmash of Marxism, revisionism and the “wisdom” of openly bourgeois “authorities.” Instead of playing an active role in helping the Party to grapple with new and difficult questions, he simply doled out “advice,” and increasingly wrong advice at that. When the objective development of the class struggle, in this country and internationally, made it impossible for Bergman to straddle the fence between Marxism and revisionism any longer, Bergman, experiencing a slight revival and feeling a new lease on life, lurched to embrace the latter.
Today Jarvis and Bergman are thoroughly on the path of revisionism, determined to sink into the same rut pioneered for them by the old CP. Having repudiated the line of the Revolutionary Communist Party, they are venturing about to create a conglomerate, most likely with the CP(ML) and others. We will suggest an appropriate name for their “party”–the New Old Communist Party, or NO Communist Party for short.
The Jarvis-Bergman headquarters within the RCP would have limited the Party’s work to simply worshipping the present level of the workers movement. This was not out of any consistent commitment to economist principles but because those revisionists are only capable of seeing what is going on this morning and what they might be able to lead this afternoon. In the context of the U.S. class struggle today this could only mean a narrow, economist and philistine line–smug in its narrowness and contemptuous of real revolutionary theory guiding consistent revolutionary practice. Jarvis and Bergman took advantage of the fact that the Party was correctly paying particular attention to linking up with and leading the economic struggles of the workers as well as certain erroneous tendencies adopted at the Founding Congress to see the “center of gravity of the Party’s work” in the economic struggle. However, for the great majority of members of the Party these were errors in the course of following a generally correct line established at the Congress, and the Party leadership was summing up these errors and providing guidance for correcting them.
But for the Jarvis-Bergman headquarters this economist tendency was not an error at all, but exactly the direction they were trying to push the whole Party. In Jarvis and Bergman’s view of the class struggle, all that was necessary was for “the troops” to work hard, plug along and try to establish themselves as leaders of the economic struggle and somehow everything would be fine. Marxist theory was belittled, the Party’s political and ideological tasks were derided as a diversion and a “retreat” from the “center of gravity” and any effort to educate the workers in the lofty goal of communism was called “left idealism.”
A fine example of their rapid progress in revisionism since leaving the RCP is their decision to drop the slogan “Workers Unite to Lead the Fight Against All Oppression” from their May Day events this year. Even more revealing are the reasons they give for abandoning it. In an internal document of theirs from early this year they say the following:
(1) It is an abstract call to fight all oppression divorces [sic] from the actual struggles that the workers are already waging and becomes a hollow exhortation to fight everything.
(2) The unity of the working class is built through struggles and by fighting on the fronts of struggle as they exist, at any time the proletariat and its Party has the task of taking on the bourgeoisie on all three fronts and on this basis making the links to the need to fight the capitalist class and its system!
(3) The goal of the struggle is not the ’fight against all oppression’ but the overthrow of the ruling class and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the slogan is nothing but a reflection of the desires of the petty bourgeoisie to get the working class to fights [sic] its battles, short of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and the system of exploitation.
Under the cover of the “actual struggles” and of upholding the working class against the petty bourgeoisie, these revisionists have given us a present day shining example of the line of the economist reformers of Lenin’s time who, as he put it, were gazing with awe on the posterior of the proletarian movement. It is another example of their thorough tailing after spontaneity and restricting the working class movement to the most narrow horizons and failing completely to raise the sights of the workers and broaden their viewpoint and their actual struggles.
They conclude this point with an inspiring appeal to democracy. “We think the struggle over using this slogan must be waged and the opinion of all brought to bear on the question. We encourage those who agree or disagree to ’let it rip’.. .“For our part we hope that anyone with a shred of revolutionary thinking left in them will not only “rip” this little gem, but the whole revisionist line of this gang.
Jarvis’ and Bergman’s line followed the rut well worn by the CP before them: the Party should put aside its revolutionary sweep, only using Marxism-Leninism as a “cookbook” to dish up gimmicks in relation to any immediate problem; dissolve its leading political role and instead be content with submerging itself beneath the level of the spontaneous struggle; allow the Party and its members to become so bogged down in and dulled by the current non-revolutionary situation that the Party would be completely unprepared for a rapid change in events and, given the proper external conditions, would lapse completely into revisionism. Their line was for non-revolutionary work in every situation and would be sure to lead to capitulation in the case of a world war and/or a revolutionary situation.
It was exactly in opposition to this tried and true method of going revisionist, which has tremendously strong spontaneous pull in an advanced imperialist country, that the Party further deepened its understanding of the tasks of revolutionary work in today’s non-revolutionary situation. It was the further development of this line at the Second Plenary of the First Central Committee in 1976 that was the first major test of strength with the developing Jarvis-Bergman headquarters.
That Central Committee meeting warned specifically of the growing danger of rightist tendencies in the Party. It pointed to the importance of waging all three forms of the working class struggle–economic, political and theoretical–and not simply the first. It summed up errors arising in connection with the “center of gravity” formulation (though not criticizing the formulation itself at that time). The report of that Central Committee meeting gave further emphasis and more substance to the importance of work among all strata, in all social movements, and developing the working class movement into an all-around struggle against the ruling class as the leading force in a broad revolutionary united front.
Above all, the ’76 Central Committee Report reaffirmed the principle set forth at the Founding Congress and went more deeply into its significance for all of our work:
Even in ordinary times [non-revolutionary situations], when it is leading the masses in the day to day struggle, the proletarian party should ideologically, politically and organizationally prepare its own ranks and the masses for revolution and promote revolutionary struggles [mass struggles that attack and expose the system], so that it will not miss the opportunity to overthrow the reactionary regime and establish a new state power when conditions for revolution are ripe. Otherwise, when the objective conditions are ripe, the proletarian party will simply throw away the opportunity of seizing victory. (quote from the Chinese Communist Party polemic on the general line of the international communist movement, 1963.)
Clearly this political line was like a hated curse to the revisionist headquarters within the Party. It flew in the face of the pragmatism, economism and general revisionism of their line, especially their view that it is adequate to concentrate, and in the most narrow way, on the current spontaneous (economic) struggle of the workers. Because of this the revisionist clique jumped out in opposition to the ’76 Central Committee Report at the Central Committee meeting itself. A number of them did so openly. Others, especially the top leaders of this gang, remained quiet or even mildly feigned agreement with the Report while sniping at it or raising secondary aspects to oppose its revolutionary thrust, still pretending to uphold and carry out the collective wisdom and will of the Party and its leading bodies.
The revisionist opposition to the ’76 Central Committee Report was defeated and what came to be known as the “high road” Report was adopted. In the Party as a whole these advances in understanding were greeted enthusiastically, as the Report addressed the crucial question of how work that is done today relates to the revolutionary goal, and on that basis gave guidance for improving the Party’s work in all spheres.
But the revisionists never reconciled themselves to the defeat they suffered at the ’76 CC meeting and the adoption of what they considered a “left idealist” Report. Not only did they not unite in implementing the Report, they tried to undermine and sabotage it at every turn.
In opposing the Party’s correct line, they relied heavily on eclecticism, one of the hallmarks of the Jarvis-Bergman headquarters. This method, again, was to seize upon a clearly secondary aspect of a thing and put it on a par (and in reality, above) the principal aspect. In place of the dialectical method of dividing one into two, they applied the revisionist method combining two into one. On the one hand this, and on the other hand that, became a convenient way for the Jarvis-Bergman headquarters to oppose the line of the Party under the guise of being “all-sided.”
For example the ’76 Central Committee Report put great emphasis on the fact that the non-revolutionary situation of today is a period of quantitative buildup for the qualitative change that takes place with the development of a revolutionary situation. At the same time the Report noted that there was quality within quantity and that, relative to the whole period of quantitative buildup, it is possible to make qualitative advances. This latter point was, of course, secondary to the main point made in the Report–that our work today must be done with the orientation of preparing for a qualitatively different situation, a revolutionary situation, developing in the future. And the whole Report was completely opposed to the revisionist view of a simple straight line development without disorder or qualitative leaps. The Jarvis-Bergman headquarters emphasized, predictably, simply the point of making qualitative advances in today’s situation to negate the whole point of conducting revolutionary work in a non-revolutionary situation. For example, they seized upon the correct formulation in the CC Report of the importance of “leading big battles with small forces” and tried to make this the most essential task put forward for today’s period. Even this they distorted so it had nothing to do with the “single spark” strategy put forward in the Party Programme, but was simply a recipe for staging occasional public relations fanfares plus being involved in and narrowly promoting trade union struggles.
They tried to derail and sabotage the study of the CC Report by starting, in parts of the Party under their control, their own campaign of the “general resides in the particular.” This was, once again, an example of seizing on a correct point and distorting and perverting it to defeat the correct line. They promoted the empiricist view that since the “universal resides in the particular” the whole universal truth of Marxism could be drawn out of any one (or a few) single particulars.
Actually, they made no efforts to draw any Marxism whatsoever out of particular contradictions. Instead, they were using this formulation to oppose the correct emphasis the Party was giving to the importance of arming the workers with an understanding of the laws of capitalism and class struggle underlying every event in society. They were completely incapable of understanding Lenin’s admonition that the communist ideal is to be “tribunes of the people” and not trade union secretaries.
Since they opposed the Party taking up its political tasks among the masses, they saw no reason to train the Party members in Marxism-Leninism to be able to carry out the kind of “strictly Marxist work” the Party was calling for. They opposed making education in the Party’s general line the lifeblood of Party branches and instead sought to turn them into clubs for working out tactics for common reforms.
Increasingly the revisionist opposition to the Party’s correct line grew further organized into a tight-knit faction opposed to the Party’s principles of democratic centralism and its organized structure. While only sometimes bringing their disagreements with the Party’s line out openly in leadership meetings, and then backing down and pretending agreement where they could not get over, the revisionist leaders tried to consolidate those sections of the Party under their command around their own anti-Party line. This was coupled with flagrant factional activity such as secret faction meetings before official Party bodies met, going around Party channels constantly and launching vicious rumor campaigns directed at leading comrades the revisionists felt stood in their way.
All of this type of activity goes to illustrate the truth that of Mao Tsetung’s instructions–“Practice Marxism, not revisionism. Unite, don’t split. Be open and above-board, don’t intrigue and conspire.” – the first is the key principle on which the others depend. Since they do not have a Marxist line, Jarvis and Bergman were unable to have any hope of winning the Party to it through open and aboveboard struggle. Since they put their own careers and their own “stake” as “big-shots” above the interests of the masses and the revolution, they did not seek unity but took a splitting course.
The opportunist opposition became a consolidated revisionist line and headquarters and could no longer exist in the same organization with the Party’s revolutionary line and its further deepening of that line. The Party faced a crossroads: either continue and deepen the victory won with the founding of the Party, as represented by the unity around its correct line; or be dragged down, degenerate and die in infancy as a revolutionary party, split into impotent factions or transformed into a lifeless reformist plaything.
All of this came to a head at the Third Plenary of the First Central Committee in late 1977. The Central Committee met to discuss vitally important developments which served to concentrate the two lines within the Party. And the resolution of this at the Central Committee was that the revisionist line and splitting and wrecking activities of these opportunists were rejected and repudiated and a revolutionary line was upheld in firm opposition to revisionism. In future issues of Revolution we will further explore and analyze some of these questions.
In the face of their crushing defeat at the CC, the Jarvis and Bergman headquarters voted for a Party rectification campaign aimed at eclecticism, pragmatism and factionalism. The CC voted unanimously that there had been an attempt to institute a revisionist line and, failing that, to split the Party. Organizational changes were made and these, too, were approved by unanimous vote, with a few scattered abstentions on some votes. At the same time the CC left open the door to Jarvis, Bergman and others of their clique to unite around the Party’s line and remould their outlook in the course of carrying out revolutionary work, in almost all cases in leading positions in the Party, as members of the revisionist headquarters had pledged to do.
However, no sooner had the CC been adjourned than the Jarvis and Bergman clique embarked on a desperate last ditch assault on the Party. They realized that the thorough carrying out of the rectification campaign would mean the end of their factional apparatus and that comrades who had previously been under their influence would overwhelmingly be won to unity around the correct line of the Party. Therefore they made a desperate gamble to pull as many people out of the Party as possible before the questions could be addressed.
They also used some leading positions in various mass organizations including the National United Workers Organization, Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee and Vietnam Veterans Against the War in an attempt to drive a wedge between these groups and the Party, which works in them. They also tried to break off the Party’s youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB).
The revisionist headquarters made a mad scramble to usurp Party resources. Leibel Bergman, especially, was to cap his history in the Party by degenerating into a common criminal. Up to that time he had increasingly pimped off the Party to lead a dissolute lifestyle and, like his revisionism generally, his crimes went from quantity to quality. He ended up grabbing for himself what never belonged to him. This has met with and continues to arouse deep indignation and class hatred throughout the Party toward Bergman and others who committed similar despicable acts.
The result of all this was that they dragged out somewhat less than one third of the membership of the Party according to an actual count based on official Party records before and after their exit. This is of course far less than they had hoped and less than the inflated claims that they have spread through their own publications as well as the Call and other means. The only places they achieved any real “success” were in those areas long under their command and where their factional apparatus was well entrenched. In other areas of the country where they lacked a factional apparatus the overwhelming majority united around the Party’s Central Committee and was won to even firmer unity as papers were circulated and the terms of the struggle became clear to all.
In the mass organizations the Jarvis-Bergman clique also fared badly. One after another these groups denounced the attempts of a handful of careerists trying to use them as factional weapons against the Party and divert these groups from their tasks in the class struggle. The attempt to seize the RCYB also met with a humiliating and crushing defeat for the revisionists who were forced to retreat and call their student organization the Revolutionary Student Brigade (an organization which had played an important role prior to and in laying the basis for the formation of the RCYB, but had gone out of existence with the formation of the latter).
Of course the Jarvis-Bergman headquarters did cause considerable harm to the Party’s work, both in the period when they were still in the Party and were trying to poison it through revisionism and in their frantic splitting and wrecking efforts. Their defeat is an excellent thing indeed and provides the basis for further advances in the Party’s revolutionary work and the class struggle overall.
To those whom these revisionists did manage to drag off from the Party with their huffed up whirlwind, it should be obvious, now that the dust has cleared, where these opportunist “rebels” are leading you. The bankruptcy of their line both in regard to this country and internationally should be daily demonstrated in an ever deeper way to all for whom revolutionary spirit and understanding has not been entirely extinguished. One after another in rapid succession, the basic principles upon which the Revolutionary Communist Party was founded are being repudiated by these Menshevik leaders and replaced with deadening revisionism. We call on those misled by these opportunists but who still want to make revolution to wake up, reclaim the revolutionary vigor that moved them to join the Party in the first place and reunite themselves with the forward motion of the proletariat and its Revolutionary Communist Party.
Because the Party is the vanguard of the working class in its revolutionary struggle, it is inevitable that major questions of the class struggle will be concentrated in its ranks. It is as these contradictions emerge and the Party resolves them in the favor of the proletariat and the revolution that the Party makes its greatest advances.
In 1970 a major split occurred in the Revolutionary Union in which a greater section of that organization left under the influence of Bruce Franklin than left the Party in the current two line struggle. Despite those who at the time declared the RU dead as a result, it was precisely the advance made in rupturing with the petty bourgeois infantile “left” line of the Franklins that laid the basis for the RU to grow ideologically, politically and organizationally and play a leading role in the class struggle.
Similarly, in 1974 a major split took place between the RU and forces inside and outside of its ranks over the question of Bundism, the adaptation of Marxism to nationalism. This struggle, too, caused significant temporary losses but resulted in great advances; in fact, it provided an important part of the basis for the formation of the RCP shortly afterwards.
The demise of the Jarvis-Bergman clique is indeed a great victory for the Party and the working class, a victory capped by the Second Congress. On the basis of repudiating the eclecticism, pragmatism and factionalism of the Jarvis-Bergman headquarters the whole Party will grow stronger and be better able to fulfill its revolutionary responsibilities to the masses in this country and worldwide.