The essay "Some Lessons from the Family Tree of the New Communist Movement" makes several good points. But in the end it is disappointing. The main problem is that it doesn't grapple with the specific ideological outlook that defined the new communist movement.
Such a complex family tree poses obvious questions: Why are some left groups included and others not? Why was the movement divided into so many different organizations and why were there so many splits? These questions—as well as more analytic ones about “lessons”—can’t be answered without addressing the movement’s underlying framework. After all, this wasn’t a movement that simply defined itself as generally Marxist and revolutionary. It based itself on a very particular viewpoint. The movement considered “anti-revisionist” Marxism-Leninism to be the only genuine revolutionary framework. It insisted upon a controversial interpretation of communist history which considered the Soviet CP (and allied parties) revolutionary under Stalin but “revisionist” since the time of Khrushchev. It embraced an “orthodox” model of the “party of a new type” in which there could be only a single vanguard in any given country and the writings of Stalin and Mao were looked to for guidance about how to practice democratic centralism, handle inner-party differences, determine relations with “non-party” groups and individuals, etc. A significant section of the movement (including all of FRSO’s predecessor organizations) adopted even more specific views: They equated anti-revisionism with “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought,” lauded China’s “Cultural Revolution,” and argued that the post-Stalin USSR had restored capitalism and become a “social imperialist” superpower.
These were not secondary matters. They were cornerstone positions central to the movement’s self-definition, to the way its mass work and unity-building efforts unfolded, and to its differentiation from the rest of the left. Other Marxists criticized these positions as potentially leading a promising movement into a dead end. And on the basis of the last 25 years experience, the vast majority of revolutionaries—including the majority of new communist movement veterans still active on the left—have concluded that these premises were irretrievably flawed. Yet the essay doesn’t address or even mention them. This omission means it never directly tackles the key issue of which parts of the movement’s basic worldview should be retained, which should be modified, and which should be thrown out.
(The Black Panther Party, it should be noted, did not share this theoretical framework. For that reason as well as others, the Panthers did not consider themselves part of the “new communist movement,” and the self-defined “new communist movement” groups didn’t consider the Panthers part of it either. That’s also the view of PUL’s Two, Three, Many Parties… to which you refer, and of the “Left Refoundation” paper posted elsewhere on FRSO’s website. The Panthers were absolutely central to the development of the entire revolutionary wave in the late 1960s, and drawing lessons from their experience is crucial. But it lends more confusion than clarity to blur the distinction between the Panthers and the groups whose self-proclaimed goal was to build a “single multinational anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist Party.” And in fact except for mentioning the Panthers in its opening paragraph, little or nothing in the “Lessons” essay refers to the Panthers’ particular experience.)
Because the essay doesn’t address the new communist movement’s basic framework, the various specific points it makes are weakened. For instance, the movement’s homophobia is put under the heading of “over-reliance on historical models and foreign mentors.” This is historically inaccurate, and what’s worse it lets the movement’s home-grown homophobia off the hook. While a few groups rationalized their anti-gay positions by referring to the policies of foreign CP’s, the driving force of the movement’s backward line was deep-rooted, made-in-the-U.S.A. homophobia, complicated by the opportunist position that defending lesbian and gay rights would isolate Marxist-Leninists from the “real” working class. (For a valuable discussion of this, see the article by RU co-founder Steve Hamilton in Theoretical Review #14, January-February 1980).
Rather than dealing with homophobia under this category, it would be much more useful to target some of the positions that were in fact imported whole hog from “foreign mentors.” There are a host of examples, from the movement’s embrace of the one-party state as the only genuine form of working class rule to its adoption of the Chinese CP’s line that though Stalin made some errors, he was a “great Marxist-Leninist.” Perhaps the most obvious issue to tackle would be the one pioneer anti-revisionist and author of Black Bolshevik Harry Haywood targeted as the fundamental cause of the movement’s demise. Haywood wrote: “While many problems contributed to the crisis of the new communist movement, the underlying cause of its collapse was the incorrect strategic line of the Three Worlds Theory which our part of the party building movement uncritically adopted from the Chinese. This view that the Soviet Union is a social-imperialist country in which capitalism has been restored marked, for the Chinese, a fundamental change in the international balance of forces. It portrayed the Soviet Union not only as an enemy but the ‘main enemy’ of the world’s people… For the new communist movement in the U.S. that looked toward China, these strategic aspects created serious problems in political line…There was a logic inherent in the Three Worlds theory which pushed it in the direction of class collaboration and an underestimation of U.S. imperialism…. the belief that capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union essentially comes from an idealistic concept of socialism…” (Guardian, April 11, 1984)
Similarly: Point 4—which says that ultra-leftism was the main cause of the movement’s failures—comes closest to getting to the root of things. But again, crucial questions go begging. For instance: wasn’t there a strong connection between the stubborn influence of ultra-leftism and looking to the Cultural Revolution for inspiration? For years movement groups quoted Mao’s Cultural Revolution slogan that “the correctness or incorrectness of the ideological and political line decides everything”—but that approach completely ignores objective conditions and the balance of forces, and is on its face a break from Marxist materialism. And perhaps there was something awry with the movement’s self-definition as “anti-revisionist”? It is at least worth noting that this particular framework was rejected by the bulk of movements in the forefront of the worldwide fight against U.S. imperialism in the late 1960s and ’70s (including the Vietnamese and Korean CP’s, Amilcar Cabral and the main liberation organizations in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola and South Africa, Cuba and the bulk of armed organizations in Latin America, the Palestinian left, etc.), and that within the new communist movement “anti-revisionism” was the justification for dogmatic copying of the past, sectarianism, and more-revolutionary-than-thou posturing.
This problem also shows up in the section on unity. I wholeheartedly agree that there was a powerful trend for unity in the new communist movement. But the big question is, why did this trend lose out to splitting and fragmentation? It certainly wasn’t because movement activists didn’t try hard enough to unite. Rather, it had everything to do with the movement being trapped in a rigid and purist organizational model which fostered the development of efficiently-functioning sects but not of a mass-based and democratic revolutionary party. But instead of offering any evaluation of the movement’s model, the essay simply attributes problems to organizational arrogance and goes on to assert the standard formula that your own organization, in contrast, has been more successful because it pursues a “principled” approach. This is terribly inadequate. And in light of the recent split in FRSO, it is downright embarrassing.
As for arguing that “the most crucial lesson of all” is the need to for a “disciplined organization that uses Marxist theory,” this is not only a “cheat” as you acknowledge. It is an unhelpful fudge. By “disciplined” do you mean we should resurrect the new communist movement organizational model? Or by choosing terminology that 1970s movement groups would never have used (they would have said “democratic centralist Marxist-Leninist”) do you mean something different? This is no minor point—it goes right to the heart of what lessons ought to be learned from the movement’s experience. But the essay doesn’t even indicate that there is a major debate to be had here.
Let me suggest an alternative approach to identifying what we might try to carry over and what we would do well to discard from the movement’s experience: The key struggles that produced a new generation of U.S. revolutionaries during the 1960s were the sustained nationwide fights against racism and imperialist war. The new communist movement attracted a plurality of ’60s-forged revolutionaries because more than any other socialist trend it put anti-racism and anti-imperialism at the forefront of its politics, and it most closely identified itself with the Third World national liberation movements that were “shaking the empire.” The movement’s sense of urgency tapped the enthusiasm of young revolutionaries and their capacity for hard work and self-sacrifice, producing a corps of extremely dedicated cadre. These positive qualities were all reinforced by the movement’s looking to the Leninist tradition for guidance. The movement also took from Leninism a strong orientation to build tightly-knit activist organizations, to sink roots in the working class, and to give priority to developing multi-racial organizations and strong people of color and working class leadership. Based mainly upon these strengths, the new communist movement enjoyed considerable initiative for a few years during the 1970s. But a set of fundamental problems in the movement’s underlying outlook and organizational model prevented it from realizing its potential. The movement was afflicted with a serious dose of ultra-leftism; in part this came from its youthfulness and the fact that its core cadre came out of a period of great upsurge, but these “spontaneous” characteristics were reinforced and consolidated by the ultra-left dogmas of “anti-revisionism” and especially the deep-rooted idealism and voluntarism of Cultural Revolution Maoism. Meanwhile the movement’s anti-imperialist stance was compromised by the fact that major sections of it followed China into conciliation of U.S. imperialism based on the notion that the USSR was capitalist and the “main enemy” of the peoples of the world. Further, the movement’s capacity to analyze rapidly changing economic, political, demographic, technological and cultural realities in the U.S. was constrained by its view that all fundamental theoretical questions had been solved by a supposedly pure, orthodox Marxism-Leninism, and what remained was merely to “apply” already-existing theory to U.S. conditions. Over and above all that, every section of the movement embraced a narrow, inflexible and cut-corners-on-democracy model of revolutionary organization which corrupted relations within and between left organizations and between movement organizations and the masses. As a result the movement failed in its goal of building a viable revolutionary party and instead produced only a proliferation of radical sects.
The challenge facing those who would learn from this experience today is how to carry over (and update) the movement’s insistence on the centrality of anti-racism and anti-imperialism and its stress on the importance of cadre development and multiracial revolutionary organization, while developing alternative theoretical perspectives and organizational models that avoid the fatal problems of ultra-leftism, dogmatism and sectarianism. In my view, there is much that can still be drawn from the contributions of Marx, Lenin and other communists in searching for such models. But some of the key premises long associated with Marxism-Leninism —among them insistence on a one-party state under socialism or the premise that there can only be a single vanguard party in a given country—must be discarded. And so must the idea that somewhere there exists a single true and all-correct Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy with an unbroken revolutionary heritage (whether Stalinist, “anti-revisionist,” traditional Soviet, Maoist or otherwise), and that allegiance to such an orthodoxy must be the foundation-stone for constructing revolutionary organization.
Clearly, this view can and should be challenged. But that is the level on which discussion and debate over the lessons of the new communist movement has to be pitched. Anything less treats both new and veteran generation revolutionaries tactically rather than strategically; and at this somewhat more promising but still very fragile time for the left, this is something we can ill afford.
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