First Published: Unite!, Vol. 6, No. 6, April 1, 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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With each passing month, new evidence of the completely counter-revolutionary, agent-provocateur activity of the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) mounts.
Consider three examples:
• On January 9, 1980, a special meeting of the Oakland, California City Council was convened to hear a proposal for a police review board, in response to a series of police shootings. Over 2,000 people crowded the Oakland Auditorium. Not involved in the day-to-day struggle for democratic rights and against police terror, the RCP nonetheless paraded into the meeting with a freshly slaughtered pig’s head on a stick, cursing through a bullhorn at the audience. The next day, the local press carried front page articles and pictures of the RCP provocations.
• In February, a dozen RCP members, clad in their classic caricature of the working class – filthy clothes and army jackets – descended on a commuter train stop on the predominantly Black south side of Chicago, ranting about May Day and pushing their newspaper in the faces of people about to board the trains for work. All of the RCP members were young and white – pushing their ravings on an all-Black crowd of several hundred people dressed for work in downtown offices. Among those headed for work, the first reaction was absolute disbelief, then visible antagonism to the activities of the RCP.
• In March, in Washington, D.C., members of the RCP invaded a high school cafeteria, carrying banners demanding that the students join their May Day parade and defend Bob Avakian. The students pelted the RCP with food and many students commented afterwards about the totally condescending attitude of the RCP. The next day, the Washington Post carried front page coverage of the incident.
These are only three of numerous recent provocations by the RCP against working people, students and other strata. Their chief result has been to fuel anti-communism and to promote the view of the capitalist class that communists are hysterical outcasts with no respect for the people. All three events reveal a common pattern. The actions of the RCP are imposed upon the masses. The main content of the activity, the main slogans, center on building their revisionist party, not on fighting for the concrete needs or demands of the people, Their concern is to “free Bob Avakian” or “Build May Day.”
The deterioration of the living standards of the masses or the denial of democratic rights are seldom concerns for these adventurists. There are still further indications of the RCP’s reliance on the tactics of the anarchist single-spark theory of Mao Tsetung which rejects the necessity for protracted organizing in the industrial centers of capital. All RCP cadre have recently resigned their jobs at U.S. Steel’s South Works plant in Chicago after seven years of fruitless efforts, presumably so they would not be restricted by normal working hours. Just what kind of activity they envision sparking a revolution in the U.S. is obvious.
On several occasions, the aim of the RCP has been to provoke the police into new attacks against the masses, following in the footsteps of such groups as the National Committee of Labor Caucuses, the Progressive Labor Party and others, their “mission” is to bring down the full fury of the state upon the backs of the workers – in the reactionary view that the more brutal the oppression of the people, the easier it is to organize!
But the most important mission of the RCP – the reason why it receives so much bourgeois media attention on television and in the press – is that its actions provide maximum assistance to the state and the reformists in their anti-communist crusade. It discredits and depicts all revolutionaries as self-interested agitators engaged in wild, hysterical antics which have no relation to the day-to-day needs of the masses.
The growth of the RCP in the last year, mainly among declassed students and the petty bourgeoisie, provides a strong basis for social-fascism in the U.S., for preaching “socialism in words”, but taking up fascist activity in deeds. Furthermore, this Maoist tendency, which entertains the illusion that the anarchist tactics of Mao Tsetung during the Cultural Revolution should be unleashed in the U.S., has recently achieved some international encouragement from opportunists in Canada, New Zealand and France.
The adventurist tactics of the RCP will not fade away, but will remain a danger to the working class movement for a long period of time, whether the organization involved is the RCP or someone else tomorrow. Such antics are not the errors of misguided individuals, but represent an opportunist political trend with a definite petty bourgeois class base and reactionary political ideology. It must be exposed and combatted actively, together with all tendencies and trends of opportunism which mislead and misguide the working class movement, and which attempt to threaten or intimidate the genuine revolutionary working class movement.
It is the working class itself, armed with Marxism-Leninism, which will surely rise up and teach the RCP a lesson in proletarian revolution – a lesson which will spell the end of the adventurism and opportunism of the RCP.