First Published: Frontline, Vol. 3, No. 10, November 11, 1985.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The tenth anniversary of Angola’s national independence this November 11 has a special significance to the political trend for which this newspaper speaks. It was events in Angola in 1975-76 that irreversibly shattered the political prestige of U.S. Maoism and first galvanized the activists who were to forge this trend into a distinct and self-conscious political current. Consequently this is an appropriate time to look back and take stock, not only of the controversy around Angola a decade ago, but of the progress made in developing as a Marxist-Leninist force on the U.S. left since that time. This review also provides an opportunity to share with Frontline’s broad readership some of the history of the organization – Line of March – which takes political responsibility for this newspaper’s publication.
Ten years ago the contours of the U.S. left, the communist movement in particular, were quite different than they are today. At that time the most dynamic current was the Maoist “new communist movement.” That movement’s driving force was the raw revolutionary energy of the generation of activists radicalized by the mass upheavals of the1960s; it defined itself as Marxist-Leninist and saw its task as constructing a new vanguard party to replace the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) which was rejected as “revisionist.” But despite its dynamism and revolutionary intentions, the movement’s underlying outlook – reflecting its youth, inexperience, lack of grounding in Marxist theory, and disproportionately non-working class social composition – was petit bourgeois revolutionism. Given this, it is hardly surprising that the movement’s dominant forces aligned themselves with the idealist outlook of “Mao Zedong Thought” and the Communist Party of China (CPC), then at the height of its bid for ideological leadership of the world communist movement.
Even during the period of the new communist movement’s growth – 1970 through 1975 – mounting qualms were expressed about its course. Anxieties surfaced over the ultra-left approach to mass democratic and reform struggles that pervaded the movement, the movement’s backward attitude toward the rising women’s liberation and lesbian/gay movements, the endemic sectarianism which the main Maoist organizations displayed not only toward other trends on the left but toward one another. Most importantly, there was growing unease about the tendency of the CPC and its closest supporters to echo the arguments of U. S. imperialism when analyzing international events and the role of the Soviet Union.
In retrospect, these concerns can be understood as the initial awareness that Maoism’s infantile leftism and anti-Sovietism were completely at odds with Marxism-Leninism. All that would be needed was a spark to crystallize this contradiction and bring Maoism’s fundamental departures from scientific socialism fully into the open.
Angola provided that spark. As the Angolan people’s final victory over Portuguese colonialism approached, China sided with South Africa, the U.S. and their puppet armies (the CIA-funded Front for the National Liberation of Angola – FNLA – and the Union for the Total Independence of Angola – UNITA – against the liberation organization which had led the armed independence struggle for 14 years, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Those who followed China’s line slandered the popularly-based MPLA as an “ agent of Soviet social imperialism” and the “main threat” to genuine Angolan independence because it received assistance from the socialist community; they vilified as “mercenaries” the internationalist Cuban troops who provided decisive aid in throwing back South Africa’s full-scale invasion of the country.
In taking this position, China and its supporters went beyond dubious ideological positions and crossed the barricades to overt class collaboration with U.S. imperialism and South African fascism. Shaken by this betrayal, the internationalists in the new communist movement were able to focus their previously scattered criticisms and target Maoism’s general political line for the world revolution – the Theory of the Three Worlds – as the root cause of that movement’s failings. In the process these forces – who included the Guardian newspaper, numerous local collectives and hundreds of individual activists – were able to identify one another. Before 1976 was over they began to consider themselves a new and distinct political trend.
This trend carried over from the new communist movement the belief that the spontaneous mass movements could not mature into a durable revolutionary force on their own, and therefore set as the trend’s task the reconstruction of an effective Leninist party in the U.S.. But unlike its Maoist parent, this new trend was determined to reject collaboration with U.S. imperialism under the guise of criticizing the real or imagined shortcomings of the Soviet Union.
In attempting to mature this embryonic trend, its activists faced ’the challenge of replacing Maoism’s backward notions of revolutionary politics with a scientific and comprehensive political line and strategy. But continuing a long and unfortunate tradition of pragmatism on the U.S. left, there were strong impulses to circumvent this political and theoretical challenge. Some of the new trend’s initially most influential forces, in particular the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC), argued that giving priority to involvement in mass workers’ struggles was the antidote to ultra-leftism and would solve the problem of developing a consistent revolutionary line. The predictable failure of this anti-theoretical approach led to massive frustration among the 20-odd local Marxist collectives grouped together in the PWOC-initiated Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center. In 1979-80 this frustration culminated in a disastrous “Campaign Against White Chauvinism” which was at bottom an effort to scapegoat its cadre’s “attitudes” for the failures of PWOC’s undeveloped political line.
Opposed to PWOC’s perspective was a grouping of activists who emphasized the decisive role of theoretical work and line development in putting the new trend on a firm Marxist-Leninist foundation. To implement this strategy, a number of the more experienced of these activists launched the theoretical journal Line of March in the spring of 1980.
This journal rapidly became a forum for trend activists to re-examine the assumptions carried over from the new communist movement. The ensuing process of analyzing Maoism inexorably led toward a reappraisal of long held prejudices about the character and role of the Soviet Union and its communist party. Examined without Maoist blinders on, the CPSU’s general political line – stressing the centrality of the struggle for peace, the decisive role of the socialist camp in checking imperialist aggression and aiding the national liberation movements, the importance of developing a country’s productive forces for socialist construction – no longer looked “revisionist,” much less “social imperialist.” The commitment to maintain a consistent anti-imperialist stance as the class battle lines sharpened in numerous areas of the world (Vietnam’s ouster of the genocidal Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea, Soviet assistance to the revolutionary government in Afghanistan) also underscored for many trend activists the need for active defense of the socialist community and alignment with the mainstream of the international communist movement.
Not all the forces who initially came together around the 1975-76 Angola controversy pursued this political logic. Besides the many who became demoralized after the debacle of the OCIC, a significant number got politically stuck somewhere short of a thoroughgoing break with Maoism. The Guardian newspaper epitomized this tendency, which rejected the Three Worlds Theory and the blatant class collaboration of the CPC but refused to identify Maoism as the underlying cause of the new communist movement’s failures.
This mis-assessment had two consequences. First, it meant that these activists retained many of Maoism’s idealist and anarchist notions about socialism. Thus they maintained a degree of anti- Sovietism, albeit more subtle than previously, and an adversarial posture toward the most significant parties in the international communist movement.
Second, the failure to target Maoism led directly to an incorrect summation of the errors of the new communist movement. These errors were attributed to the task of party building itself, with the Guardian and similar forces beginning to discuss the alleged “outdatedness” or “inapplicability” of fundamental Leninist principles to contemporary U.S. conditions. Not surprisingly, the activists who held this view gradually stepped back from party building work.
This sorting out process did not halt the trend’s forward motion, however. Trend activists who hewed to a Marxist-Leninist course only deepened the critique of Maoism and reaffirmed the trend’s party building task.
This necessarily meant a reappraisal of the trend’s unities and differences with the CPUSA. With the rejection of Maoism’s “anti-revisionism,” a scientific critique of the CPUSA’s only too real shortcomings became possible. This required in particular an analysis of the CPUSA’s consistent tendency to tail the trade union leadership and conciliate opportunism generally within the working class. The Line of March journal devoted significant effort to this task, honing in on the right opportunist errors of the CPUSA’s Anti-Monopoly Coalition strategy, in particular the class analysis behind that strategy which qualitatively downplays the divisions within the working class and the material basis for racism and national chauvinism in the workers’ ranks.
As an alternative to the CPUSA’s Anti-Monopoly Coalition perspective, the Line of March put forward the strategy of the United Front Against War and Racism in 1981. This political line, which targets opposition to war and racism as central both to resisting the bourgeoisie and uniting the working class on an anti-capitalist basis, quickly became the basis for a range of practical organizing initiatives on the part of trend forces most in agreement with the Line of March. These included initiatives in the trade union movement, the Black liberation and other minority community movements, the peace and solidarity movement (here launching the Peace and Solidarity Alliance) and the women’s movement (developing the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression). By 1982, what had once been a trend defined mainly by opposition to class collaboration and a vaguely-defined intention to build a revolutionary party had now acquired clear political delineation and could accurately be termed an emerging Marxist-Leninist force.
This advance laid the basis for the publication of a national political newspaper, and in the spring of 1983 Frontline was launched as a biweekly directed to a broad audience of progressives and working class activists. With Frontline as its most visible public expression, the trend has significantly expanded its mass base and its ties in the broad popular movement. And as numerous polemics in these columns have shown, the trend’s critique of the CPUSA’s political outlook has begun to spark an active (if reluctant on the CPUSA’s part) dialogue among U.S. communists. Organizationally, this progress was reflected in the formal consolidation of the Line of March as a nationwide Marxist-Leninist organization within this last year. The Line of March’s work is guided by the United Front Against War and Racism strategy, and the organization takes as its central objective the task first identified by the initiators of this trend a decade ago: forging a Leninist party in the U.S. But because of the maturation process the trend has undergone since 1976, this task is no longer defined as “replacing” the “revisionist” CPUSA, but upholding unity with the CPUSA as part of a single U.S. communist movement while taking up the polemic with the Anti-Monopoly Coalition perspective in order to reunite U.S. communists on the basis of a thoroughgoing revolutionary line.
All this has not only affected activists in the developing Marxist-Leninist trend and its immediate periphery; it is part of a broader dynamic and realignment that has occurred on the U. S. left. Over the last ten years the influence of infantile leftism and anti-Sovietism generally has declined in progressive circles. The most dramatic example is the near-total collapse of Maoism: most of the organizations that made up the new communist movement have disintegrated, and those few activists who still support the Three Worlds Theory are busier trying to hide its actual content than popularizing it. For example, the one remaining national Maoist formation, the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), is reduced to trying to hide the fact that it ardently backed the South Africa-sponsored UNITA in 1975-76 (and has never issued a self-criticism) as it desperately seeks legitimacy in today’s anti-apartheid movement.
But the tenth anniversary of Angolan independence brings this history right to the fore. The November 11 date is primarily an occasion to celebrate a momentous victory for the Angolan people as well as a major step forward in the liberation of all of southern Africa. But, as we have tried to do here, it is also a useful moment to mark Angola’s special significance for a sector of U.S. communists, and measure the degree to which our work is meeting the responsibility this trend assumed ten years ago.