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[FONT=Times New Roman]The 2008 Revolutionary Communist Party Manifesto: A Criticism of Fundamentals[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]By[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]Jay Rothermel[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]I[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]II[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]The RCP is retreating from all-sided communist political work and from building a Leninist party.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]Ungeneralized extent and slow tempo of resistance to war and economic crisis has also bolstered a retreat atmosphere in the party.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]III[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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. [/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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 [/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]IV[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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?[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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. [/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]V[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]The RCP Manifesto’s program cannot build a communist party in the United States or any other country in the world.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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. [/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.”[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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)[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]In World War 2 the Stalin leadership took social chauvinism, class collaboration, and strike-breaking to new heights of perfidy. [/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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. [/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]VI[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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).[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]VII[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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. [/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.”[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]VIII[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]IX[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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![/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]X[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]While promoting unity of action, communists in the mass movement must advance a communist political perspective.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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![/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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. [/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]XI[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]Resistance to Washington’s march toward fascism and war is spreading.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]What are the ABCs of communism?[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]a. Seeking to raise the class consciousness of workers and their oppressed allies.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]b. Raising the level of trust workers have in their own independent forces and their revolutionary class heritage.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]c. Inspiring ever-higher levels of solidarity, militancy, and self-sacrifice.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]Let us work to speed that day.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]_______________________________________________[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]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.[/FONT]
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