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 Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2008 3:50 am Post subject: The 2008 Revolutionary Communist Party Manifesto: A Critici |
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The 2008 Revolutionary Communist Party Manifesto: A Criticism of
Fundamentals
By
Jay Rothermel
I
The RCP Manifesto is a program of defeatism and retreat from
engagement of communists in real world politics. Replacing communist
propaganda, agitation, and mass work with a purely ideological
campaign (in practice) to create a culture of appreciation, promotion,
and popularization of Bob Avakian’s role as a communist leader, as
concentrated in his body of work and method of approach, risks
shipwreck for the party.
II
The RCP is retreating from all-sided communist political work and from
building a Leninist party.
The Manifesto and the New Constitution enshrine a depoliticized role
for membership: using party press as a vehicle to launch Bob Avakian
into orbit as a leader and thinker of Marx/Lenin caliber.
Members’ employment is not seen as a political assignment. The
workplace where party members spend their days is not given any
attention in the Manifesto or Constitution as a primary or secondary
location for political work.
The political context for this retreat is a “trough in resistance” as
phrased by the party leadership. Lack of revolutionary advances (as
perceived by the RCP) has generated this pulling-back from mass work.
Ungeneralized extent and slow tempo of resistance to war and economic
crisis has also bolstered a retreat atmosphere in the party.
In addition, the party has not drawn an honest balance sheet of their
one foray into mass work in this decade: World Can’t Wait. Until they
understand mistakes made in the fundamental perspectives of this
organization, which alienated and leashed the best non-party militants
attracted to it, no further steps forward can be taken.
III
The attempt to limit party work to creating a culture of appreciation,
promotion, and popularization of Bob Avakian’s role as a communist
leader disarms and depoliticizes. The so-called "cultural revolution"
in the party, as described by the Manifesto, spells this out clearly
to anyone reading it carefully. It is a drive to herd party members
engaged in mass work into a closed propaganda sect. The admission in
the Manifesto that the party rank and file never realized Bob Avakian
had been working on a “new synthesis” for 25 years is a clear
indicator that Avakian’s contributions had less and less connection to
building a party around mass work. As part of the party’s “cultural
revolution,” members who rejected retreat from mass work were branded
as “revisionists” and their criticisms dismissed out-of-hand.
In the face of war and economic crisis, of US imperialism’s march
toward fascism and wars, of the ruling class offensive at home and
abroad, the RCP Manifesto abjures participation in any broader
organizations. This is viewed as being mired in, or retreating into,
models from the past.
Young and healthy forces attracted to radical solutions are not
currently making their way in large numbers toward communism, but
those that are find a party that rejects relating to or helping to
build concrete campus activities around war and economic crisis
today. They counterpose newspaper sales to this, instead of bringing
their paper into the broader activities.
The RCP rejects relating-to or helping to build any actions around war
and crisis today. It thus denies the young and politically hungry
forces attracted to these struggles the opportunity to see communists
in action; it also forgoes the all-important testing of line and
propaganda in mass work
The Manifesto sees these types of mass work as a dead-end for the
masses themselves, leading to ultimate accommodation with the present
system of oppression. Counterposed to communists helping build and
intervening in united front actions as communists to win the best
elements to the vanguard, the RCP simply counterposes apolitical and
empty formulations, like the “world arena is most decisive,” to
actual local work where they have the forces to carry it out.
IV
Those in the RCP opposed to retreating into the stultifying confines
of only “building a culture of appreciation, promotion, and
popularization of Avakian’s role as a communist leader, as
concentrated in his body of work and method of approach” failed to win
the party away from this disastrous course. Why?
The RCP is a completely undemocratic organization, as is spelling out
in its Constitution. A party congress to democratically decide
questions of line and orientation, of “what to do next” based on the
current historical conjuncture, is only mandated once every seven
years. In no way can a congress every seven years accurately reflect
the living condition of the party, develop cadre leadership, and
succeed in orienting the party to future opportunities. A congress
every seven years is a recipe for routinism, intermittent unrealistic
adventures, and episodic political work of the worst kind; it is also
the recipe for the worst kind of leadership fossilization.
There is also no constitutional provision for a large minority of the
party (1/3 or ¼) being able to call a convention of the entire party
when their counter-line has received sufficient numerical support. A
minority is thus forever excluded from trying to correct abuses or
simply correct mistakes in line revealed in practice in the mass
movement.
Instead of timely party congresses when dramatic changes in line are
proposed by the leadership, those opposed to the new line are told to
send their criticism “through channels” to the party leadership.
This way of dealing with opposition and mere disagreements or
misunderstandings leads to lack of debate, fear of victimization, and
a sense of hopelessness for cadre. This method of functioning also
fosters a swampy old-boys-network clique atmosphere for both the
majority and minority, where errors and wrong estimates are never
summed-up and methods of functioning and personal aggrandizement are
never called to account.
Ignoring the democratic side of the democratic-centralism method means
party members opposed to the leadership line are silenced, become
exhausted and resentful in the ideological barracks atmosphere, and
eventually just walk away.
Such a toll on cadre in an undemocratic party means the revolutionary
élan and fighting spirit of the members is broken, often for a
lifetime. This has been done more effectively than any police state
methods or fascist goon squad beatings ever could. Sadly, many
cadres, including the youngest, understand such methods of operation
to be Leninist. They are not.
V
The RCP Manifesto’s program cannot build a communist party in the
United States or any other country in the world.
The Manifesto is an airless echo chamber of “theorizing” and
“ideology” and “synthesizing” and ahistorical analysis; its analysis
of the Paris Commune, Bolshevik Revolution, and Chinese Revolution is
shallow and incomplete where it is not opening dishonest.
The Manifesto aspires to be a “Communist Manifesto of the 21st
Century.” In fact, it is completely uninspiring. World history is
treated as a “long darkness” filled only with “oppression,” “agony,”
“degradation,” and “violence,” a “dark veil.” While historically such
characterizations may have their place, human history for communists
is also, and primarily, a glorious record of resistance, revolution,
solidarity, and militancy, often in the face of impossible odds.
The 1848 Manifesto, the best guide for action our movement had until
the manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third
International, was a work of profound class confidence and unshakeable
optimism based on the foundation of scientific socialism.
The RCP Manifesto mentions no past or current struggles by our class
in the world other than the Paris Commune, Bolshevik Revolution, and
Chinese Revolutions.
From reading the Manifesto, a worker or student in an imperialist
country would never think their working class had done anything.
Likewise, the heroic history of anti-colonial struggles is ignored.
The reason? They did not achieve Avakian-defined “victory.”
Crucially, the true legacy of the Stalin leadership is ignored in the
Manifesto. It claims: “There were great achievements [in the USSR]
….but not surprisingly, also very real limitations, shortcomings, and
errors – some of them owing to the situation the Soviet Union found
itself in, as the world’s only socialist state for several years
(until after World War 2), and some of it owing to problems in the
outlook, approach, and methods of those leading the process, in
particular Stalin” (p. 6)
In reality, the workers of Britain 1926, China 1927, Germany 1933,
France 1934, Spain 1936-38, where contention for power by communist-
led mass workers movements was on the agenda, were intentionally led
to defeat by the Stalin leadership. Of these facts, the Manifesto
says nothing.
In the “third period” 1928-1935 the Stalin leadership forbade
communists to enter into united fronts with non-communist workers
organizations. In the Popular Front period post-1935 the Stalin
leadership led the shunting of revolutionary struggles onto non-
revolutionary courses of accommodation with “progressive” wings of the
capitalist ruling class in countries where the USSR was seeking
friendly diplomatic relations. This was the acme of opportunism, of
active and conscious counter-revolution in practice.
The effect of the Stalin leadership’s counterrevolutionary course in
the US was to lead the social movement that built the CIO (the
broadest social movement in the US since Radical Reconstruction) and
the increasingly militant Black rights movement into the fold of the
Democratic Party.
In World War 2 the Stalin leadership took social chauvinism, class
collaboration, and strike-breaking to new heights of perfidy.
The bitter fruits of “socialism in one country” and the Popular Front
were also reaped in attempts to derail the anti-colonial revolution.
The US war against Vietnam was prolonged; the slaughter of millions in
Indonesia and Bangladesh was made inevitable.
The true legacy of the Stalin leadership is not one of shortcomings or
mistakes, but of intentionally organizing defeat after bloody defeat
for our class. When the RCP Manifesto pretties-up this record, it
disarms everyone who looks to it.
VI
The RCP Manifesto does not propose any party-building axis for mass
work today. While endorsing “building on all that has gone before”
and “hastening while awaiting” we are told communists participating
with others in “fighting for reforms and solutions to immediate
problems of the masses” are in error, as these fights only lead to
“accommodation” (p 10).
The only living link communists of the RCP can forge with current
struggles is the culture of appreciation for the works of Bob Avakian.
Current actions around war and economic crisis are dismissed as
reformism and economism.
Vanguard ranks of popular struggles will not be recruited to
communism, the science of working class victory, using this
Manifesto. The Manifesto will only recruit those attracted to apple-
polishing and celebrating the genius of a leader; in other words, this
course is a complete abandonment and rejection of our revolutionary
party-building activities from 1848 to today.
VII
The RCP Manifesto’s party-building perspective is limited to carrying-
out a “campaign of building a culture of appreciation, promotion, and
popularization of Bob Avakian’s role as a communist leader, as
concentrated in his body of work and method of approach.” This is a
course toward sectarian isolation from direct communist participation
in and growing leadership of the mass movement.
Creating a “repolarization” or communist pole in US politics will be a
product of careful, consistent communist mass work, and not attempting
to recruit the anointed to the ideology of any leader. Rejection and
denigration of what the RCP dismisses as the “ABCs of communism”
prepares new defeats for our class.
Raising the class consciousness of workers and their oppressed allies
must be the starting point for mass work; it is not, as the Manifesto
insists, handed-down dogma. Our class has paid in blood for these
lessons.
Increasing the trust of workers in their own forces and schooling them
in the revolutionary heritage of our class is the foundation of
winning broader forces moving in a radical direction to communism.
Self-sacrificing readiness for struggle, as opposed to readiness for
sectarian coffee-house celebrations of a “new synthesis,” is how a
class struggle pole is planted in US politics. “By their actions you
shall know them.”
VIII
Super-theorizing of “new syntheses” is not a step forward for
communists. Many communists and parties claiming to be communist have
what we may term a “new synthesis” of their own. Sectarian isolation
or third-campism or Bernsteinism in one form or another is the typical
result of multitudes of “new syntheses” that have beset the workers
movement and its communist vanguard since 1848.
The communist movement is most particularly not a movement led by
stars or individual geniuses. Those who enter it for this purpose
always cost the workers dear.
New synthesizers of the past usually launch their “new revelations”
when taking the door marked “exit” from the living class struggle:
Kautsky, Nin, Pablo, Burnham, Shachtman, Althusser, Kowalewski,
Sartre, Camejo.
The RCP Manifesto places the party in opposition to any mass struggle
and rank and file leadership such struggles will produce. Avakian’s
line will be used to dismiss any organized resistance to fascism, war,
attacks on democratic rights, and depression as “not communist
enough.” The party will miss the chance to merge with new groupings
moving in a communist direction because “Avakianism” will be posed as
the foundation for unity in place of class struggle action following
the natural lines of resistance in the working class today.
IX
The RCP Manifesto is a rationalization for surrender, for going into
the “Bob Avakian business” of promoting and revering and selling his
writings and speeches to the exclusion of all else. Communists need
to be in the “Building Leninist parties” business!
Communist theory is not a commodity produced by some philosopher-
king. It is the living generalization of the line of march of a
class, of the strategic political lessons our class has learned
through bloody sacrifice and struggle. These lessons are the most
valuable asset of the communist movement. It is the study and
understanding of these lessons and their pivotal role in the day-by-
day, week-by-week political practice of an organized world communist
movement that makes it possible, when the crunch comes, for millions
of individual communists to think and act in a disciplined way to do
what is necessary.
X
Only communist cadres who are tried and tested in the working class
struggle today will have the necessary experience and will have earned
the respect of fellow fighters that will assure them and their
publications the kind of hearing without which layers of the workers
vanguard cannot be turned to a communist program and party.
While promoting unity of action, communists in the mass movement must
advance a communist political perspective.
We see progressive struggles and social protest movements not as
attempts to reach accommodation with the ruling class, but from the
perspective of the line of march of our class to political power.
Advances toward communist consciousness by people engaged in
progressive struggles and protests are the product of participation by
communist themselves in these struggles. Joining as communists with
co-fighters in common action is the material basis for recruitment and
growth of a communist party and any kind of “repolarization” for
revolution. There are no shortcuts!
A closed propaganda sect like the one envisioned by the RCP Manifesto
will not be able to carry out such a party-building perspective,
which has been at the center of communist work for 91 years in the
United States. There are no magic shortcuts around this; it cannot be
circumvented by recruiting individuals to the writings and speeches of
a particular leader.
XI
Resistance to Washington’s march toward fascism and war is spreading.
The immigrant rights struggle is at the center of US politics and the
US labor movement. Militancy must meet proletarian leadership to
carry this fight to a higher stage of struggle.
In the Americas a historic regrouping of revolutionary forces is
possible for the first time in 30 years. Workers and farmers’
resistance and demands for dignity stamp the mobilizations seen in
Venezuela and Bolivia, whatever the character of leadership in these
states.
The militant revolutionary vanguard formed in today’s struggles is
larger than any current party calling itself communist. Communists
today must seek out and fuse with this vanguard, bringing their
program with them and winning new forces to it.
Communists must keep their eyes on the ranks of the mass movement.
The current labor union leadership will shatter even further between
the ruling class offensive they support and the rank and file
resistance they seek to control.
At the same time, communists join with all historically progressive
struggles inside and outside the labor movement, not matter what the
current caliber of their leadership. As part of these struggles,
communists bring to bear their internationalist perspective and employ
the ABCs of communism to build living transitional links between
current and higher levels of struggle.
What are the ABCs of communism?
a. Seeking to raise the class consciousness of workers and their
oppressed allies.
b. Raising the level of trust workers have in their own independent
forces and their revolutionary class heritage.
c. Inspiring ever-higher levels of solidarity, militancy, and self-
sacrifice.
The communist party built in the United States has the greatest
contribution to make to the international workers movement and the
peoples of the entire world: to overthrow the US ruling class,
establish a government of workers and their exploited allies, and join
the world-wide struggle for socialism.
Let us work to speed that day.
_______________________________________________
Jay Rothermel is an independent communist living in Ohio. He has
never been a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. For
criticism of the RCP Manifesto he has relied strictly on the text of
the Manifesto itself, the new RCP Constitution, and articles in the
RCP’s Revolution Newspaper.
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Bill
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 3:16 am Post subject: Re: The 2008 Revolutionary Communist Party Manifesto: A Cri |
|
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You guys must be smoking Maui Wowie if you are so fucking stupid as to
still believe in communism......
Or is it Crack??????
"jayroth6" <jayroth6@cox.net> wrote in message
news:6297ef06-642e-4989-9930-1012cef8ba53@p59g2000hsd.googlegroups.com...
The 2008 Revolutionary Communist Party Manifesto: A Criticism of
Fundamentals
By
Jay Rothermel
I
The RCP Manifesto is a program of defeatism and retreat from
engagement of communists in real world politics. Replacing communist
propaganda, agitation, and mass work with a purely ideological
campaign (in practice) to create a culture of appreciation, promotion,
and popularization of Bob Avakian’s role as a communist leader, as
concentrated in his body of work and method of approach, risks
shipwreck for the party.
II
The RCP is retreating from all-sided communist political work and from
building a Leninist party.
The Manifesto and the New Constitution enshrine a depoliticized role
for membership: using party press as a vehicle to launch Bob Avakian
into orbit as a leader and thinker of Marx/Lenin caliber.
Members’ employment is not seen as a political assignment. The
workplace where party members spend their days is not given any
attention in the Manifesto or Constitution as a primary or secondary
location for political work.
The political context for this retreat is a “trough in resistance” as
phrased by the party leadership. Lack of revolutionary advances (as
perceived by the RCP) has generated this pulling-back from mass work.
Ungeneralized extent and slow tempo of resistance to war and economic
crisis has also bolstered a retreat atmosphere in the party.
In addition, the party has not drawn an honest balance sheet of their
one foray into mass work in this decade: World Can’t Wait. Until they
understand mistakes made in the fundamental perspectives of this
organization, which alienated and leashed the best non-party militants
attracted to it, no further steps forward can be taken.
III
The attempt to limit party work to creating a culture of appreciation,
promotion, and popularization of Bob Avakian’s role as a communist
leader disarms and depoliticizes. The so-called "cultural revolution"
in the party, as described by the Manifesto, spells this out clearly
to anyone reading it carefully. It is a drive to herd party members
engaged in mass work into a closed propaganda sect. The admission in
the Manifesto that the party rank and file never realized Bob Avakian
had been working on a “new synthesis” for 25 years is a clear
indicator that Avakian’s contributions had less and less connection to
building a party around mass work. As part of the party’s “cultural
revolution,” members who rejected retreat from mass work were branded
as “revisionists” and their criticisms dismissed out-of-hand.
In the face of war and economic crisis, of US imperialism’s march
toward fascism and wars, of the ruling class offensive at home and
abroad, the RCP Manifesto abjures participation in any broader
organizations. This is viewed as being mired in, or retreating into,
models from the past.
Young and healthy forces attracted to radical solutions are not
currently making their way in large numbers toward communism, but
those that are find a party that rejects relating to or helping to
build concrete campus activities around war and economic crisis
today. They counterpose newspaper sales to this, instead of bringing
their paper into the broader activities.
The RCP rejects relating-to or helping to build any actions around war
and crisis today. It thus denies the young and politically hungry
forces attracted to these struggles the opportunity to see communists
in action; it also forgoes the all-important testing of line and
propaganda in mass work
The Manifesto sees these types of mass work as a dead-end for the
masses themselves, leading to ultimate accommodation with the present
system of oppression. Counterposed to communists helping build and
intervening in united front actions as communists to win the best
elements to the vanguard, the RCP simply counterposes apolitical and
empty formulations, like the “world arena is most decisive,” to
actual local work where they have the forces to carry it out.
IV
Those in the RCP opposed to retreating into the stultifying confines
of only “building a culture of appreciation, promotion, and
popularization of Avakian’s role as a communist leader, as
concentrated in his body of work and method of approach” failed to win
the party away from this disastrous course. Why?
The RCP is a completely undemocratic organization, as is spelling out
in its Constitution. A party congress to democratically decide
questions of line and orientation, of “what to do next” based on the
current historical conjuncture, is only mandated once every seven
years. In no way can a congress every seven years accurately reflect
the living condition of the party, develop cadre leadership, and
succeed in orienting the party to future opportunities. A congress
every seven years is a recipe for routinism, intermittent unrealistic
adventures, and episodic political work of the worst kind; it is also
the recipe for the worst kind of leadership fossilization.
There is also no constitutional provision for a large minority of the
party (1/3 or ¼) being able to call a convention of the entire party
when their counter-line has received sufficient numerical support. A
minority is thus forever excluded from trying to correct abuses or
simply correct mistakes in line revealed in practice in the mass
movement.
Instead of timely party congresses when dramatic changes in line are
proposed by the leadership, those opposed to the new line are told to
send their criticism “through channels” to the party leadership.
This way of dealing with opposition and mere disagreements or
misunderstandings leads to lack of debate, fear of victimization, and
a sense of hopelessness for cadre. This method of functioning also
fosters a swampy old-boys-network clique atmosphere for both the
majority and minority, where errors and wrong estimates are never
summed-up and methods of functioning and personal aggrandizement are
never called to account.
Ignoring the democratic side of the democratic-centralism method means
party members opposed to the leadership line are silenced, become
exhausted and resentful in the ideological barracks atmosphere, and
eventually just walk away.
Such a toll on cadre in an undemocratic party means the revolutionary
élan and fighting spirit of the members is broken, often for a
lifetime. This has been done more effectively than any police state
methods or fascist goon squad beatings ever could. Sadly, many
cadres, including the youngest, understand such methods of operation
to be Leninist. They are not.
V
The RCP Manifesto’s program cannot build a communist party in the
United States or any other country in the world.
The Manifesto is an airless echo chamber of “theorizing” and
“ideology” and “synthesizing” and ahistorical analysis; its analysis
of the Paris Commune, Bolshevik Revolution, and Chinese Revolution is
shallow and incomplete where it is not opening dishonest.
The Manifesto aspires to be a “Communist Manifesto of the 21st
Century.” In fact, it is completely uninspiring. World history is
treated as a “long darkness” filled only with “oppression,” “agony,”
“degradation,” and “violence,” a “dark veil.” While historically such
characterizations may have their place, human history for communists
is also, and primarily, a glorious record of resistance, revolution,
solidarity, and militancy, often in the face of impossible odds.
The 1848 Manifesto, the best guide for action our movement had until
the manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third
International, was a work of profound class confidence and unshakeable
optimism based on the foundation of scientific socialism.
The RCP Manifesto mentions no past or current struggles by our class
in the world other than the Paris Commune, Bolshevik Revolution, and
Chinese Revolutions.
From reading the Manifesto, a worker or student in an imperialist
country would never think their working class had done anything.
Likewise, the heroic history of anti-colonial struggles is ignored.
The reason? They did not achieve Avakian-defined “victory.”
Crucially, the true legacy of the Stalin leadership is ignored in the
Manifesto. It claims: “There were great achievements [in the USSR]
….but not surprisingly, also very real limitations, shortcomings, and
errors – some of them owing to the situation the Soviet Union found
itself in, as the world’s only socialist state for several years
(until after World War 2), and some of it owing to problems in the
outlook, approach, and methods of those leading the process, in
particular Stalin” (p. 6)
In reality, the workers of Britain 1926, China 1927, Germany 1933,
France 1934, Spain 1936-38, where contention for power by communist-
led mass workers movements was on the agenda, were intentionally led
to defeat by the Stalin leadership. Of these facts, the Manifesto
says nothing.
In the “third period” 1928-1935 the Stalin leadership forbade
communists to enter into united fronts with non-communist workers
organizations. In the Popular Front period post-1935 the Stalin
leadership led the shunting of revolutionary struggles onto non-
revolutionary courses of accommodation with “progressive” wings of the
capitalist ruling class in countries where the USSR was seeking
friendly diplomatic relations. This was the acme of opportunism, of
active and conscious counter-revolution in practice.
The effect of the Stalin leadership’s counterrevolutionary course in
the US was to lead the social movement that built the CIO (the
broadest social movement in the US since Radical Reconstruction) and
the increasingly militant Black rights movement into the fold of the
Democratic Party.
In World War 2 the Stalin leadership took social chauvinism, class
collaboration, and strike-breaking to new heights of perfidy.
The bitter fruits of “socialism in one country” and the Popular Front
were also reaped in attempts to derail the anti-colonial revolution.
The US war against Vietnam was prolonged; the slaughter of millions in
Indonesia and Bangladesh was made inevitable.
The true legacy of the Stalin leadership is not one of shortcomings or
mistakes, but of intentionally organizing defeat after bloody defeat
for our class. When the RCP Manifesto pretties-up this record, it
disarms everyone who looks to it.
VI
The RCP Manifesto does not propose any party-building axis for mass
work today. While endorsing “building on all that has gone before”
and “hastening while awaiting” we are told communists participating
with others in “fighting for reforms and solutions to immediate
problems of the masses” are in error, as these fights only lead to
“accommodation” (p 10).
The only living link communists of the RCP can forge with current
struggles is the culture of appreciation for the works of Bob Avakian.
Current actions around war and economic crisis are dismissed as
reformism and economism.
Vanguard ranks of popular struggles will not be recruited to
communism, the science of working class victory, using this
Manifesto. The Manifesto will only recruit those attracted to apple-
polishing and celebrating the genius of a leader; in other words, this
course is a complete abandonment and rejection of our revolutionary
party-building activities from 1848 to today.
VII
The RCP Manifesto’s party-building perspective is limited to carrying-
out a “campaign of building a culture of appreciation, promotion, and
popularization of Bob Avakian’s role as a communist leader, as
concentrated in his body of work and method of approach.” This is a
course toward sectarian isolation from direct communist participation
in and growing leadership of the mass movement.
Creating a “repolarization” or communist pole in US politics will be a
product of careful, consistent communist mass work, and not attempting
to recruit the anointed to the ideology of any leader. Rejection and
denigration of what the RCP dismisses as the “ABCs of communism”
prepares new defeats for our class.
Raising the class consciousness of workers and their oppressed allies
must be the starting point for mass work; it is not, as the Manifesto
insists, handed-down dogma. Our class has paid in blood for these
lessons.
Increasing the trust of workers in their own forces and schooling them
in the revolutionary heritage of our class is the foundation of
winning broader forces moving in a radical direction to communism.
Self-sacrificing readiness for struggle, as opposed to readiness for
sectarian coffee-house celebrations of a “new synthesis,” is how a
class struggle pole is planted in US politics. “By their actions you
shall know them.”
VIII
Super-theorizing of “new syntheses” is not a step forward for
communists. Many communists and parties claiming to be communist have
what we may term a “new synthesis” of their own. Sectarian isolation
or third-campism or Bernsteinism in one form or another is the typical
result of multitudes of “new syntheses” that have beset the workers
movement and its communist vanguard since 1848.
The communist movement is most particularly not a movement led by
stars or individual geniuses. Those who enter it for this purpose
always cost the workers dear.
New synthesizers of the past usually launch their “new revelations”
when taking the door marked “exit” from the living class struggle:
Kautsky, Nin, Pablo, Burnham, Shachtman, Althusser, Kowalewski,
Sartre, Camejo.
The RCP Manifesto places the party in opposition to any mass struggle
and rank and file leadership such struggles will produce. Avakian’s
line will be used to dismiss any organized resistance to fascism, war,
attacks on democratic rights, and depression as “not communist
enough.” The party will miss the chance to merge with new groupings
moving in a communist direction because “Avakianism” will be posed as
the foundation for unity in place of class struggle action following
the natural lines of resistance in the working class today.
IX
The RCP Manifesto is a rationalization for surrender, for going into
the “Bob Avakian business” of promoting and revering and selling his
writings and speeches to the exclusion of all else. Communists need
to be in the “Building Leninist parties” business!
Communist theory is not a commodity produced by some philosopher-
king. It is the living generalization of the line of march of a
class, of the strategic political lessons our class has learned
through bloody sacrifice and struggle. These lessons are the most
valuable asset of the communist movement. It is the study and
understanding of these lessons and their pivotal role in the day-by-
day, week-by-week political practice of an organized world communist
movement that makes it possible, when the crunch comes, for millions
of individual communists to think and act in a disciplined way to do
what is necessary.
X
Only communist cadres who are tried and tested in the working class
struggle today will have the necessary experience and will have earned
the respect of fellow fighters that will assure them and their
publications the kind of hearing without which layers of the workers
vanguard cannot be turned to a communist program and party.
While promoting unity of action, communists in the mass movement must
advance a communist political perspective.
We see progressive struggles and social protest movements not as
attempts to reach accommodation with the ruling class, but from the
perspective of the line of march of our class to political power.
Advances toward communist consciousness by people engaged in
progressive struggles and protests are the product of participation by
communist themselves in these struggles. Joining as communists with
co-fighters in common action is the material basis for recruitment and
growth of a communist party and any kind of “repolarization” for
revolution. There are no shortcuts!
A closed propaganda sect like the one envisioned by the RCP Manifesto
will not be able to carry out such a party-building perspective,
which has been at the center of communist work for 91 years in the
United States. There are no magic shortcuts around this; it cannot be
circumvented by recruiting individuals to the writings and speeches of
a particular leader.
XI
Resistance to Washington’s march toward fascism and war is spreading.
The immigrant rights struggle is at the center of US politics and the
US labor movement. Militancy must meet proletarian leadership to
carry this fight to a higher stage of struggle.
In the Americas a historic regrouping of revolutionary forces is
possible for the first time in 30 years. Workers and farmers’
resistance and demands for dignity stamp the mobilizations seen in
Venezuela and Bolivia, whatever the character of leadership in these
states.
The militant revolutionary vanguard formed in today’s struggles is
larger than any current party calling itself communist. Communists
today must seek out and fuse with this vanguard, bringing their
program with them and winning new forces to it.
Communists must keep their eyes on the ranks of the mass movement.
The current labor union leadership will shatter even further between
the ruling class offensive they support and the rank and file
resistance they seek to control.
At the same time, communists join with all historically progressive
struggles inside and outside the labor movement, not matter what the
current caliber of their leadership. As part of these struggles,
communists bring to bear their internationalist perspective and employ
the ABCs of communism to build living transitional links between
current and higher levels of struggle.
What are the ABCs of communism?
a. Seeking to raise the class consciousness of workers and their
oppressed allies.
b. Raising the level of trust workers have in their own independent
forces and their revolutionary class heritage.
c. Inspiring ever-higher levels of solidarity, militancy, and self-
sacrifice.
The communist party built in the United States has the greatest
contribution to make to the international workers movement and the
peoples of the entire world: to overthrow the US ruling class,
establish a government of workers and their exploited allies, and join
the world-wide struggle for socialism.
Let us work to speed that day.
_______________________________________________
Jay Rothermel is an independent communist living in Ohio. He has
never been a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. For
criticism of the RCP Manifesto he has relied strictly on the text of
the Manifesto itself, the new RCP Constitution, and articles in the
RCP’s Revolution Newspaper.
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