“Socialism, since it has become a science, demands that it be pursued as a science, i.e., that it be studied.” – Friedrich Engels, “Addendum to the Preface to ‘The Peasant War in Germany’”
Editor’s note: We ask that the reader pay attention to the footnotes. In them you will find direct references, elaborations, and practical definitions for the terms we are using.
Introduction
Election cycles in the US often coincide with an influx of Americans turning to Marxism. As was the case during this past cycle, a considerable number of students and activists, disillusioned by the election or the Gaza protest movement, have embraced Marxism as a potential solution. Meanwhile, as the labor movement continues to develop, a new generation of workers have also begun looking to socialism.1 Revolutionaries can’t comprehend this spontaneous development towards class consciousness in isolation. Only by studying the interrelation between the mass movement and Marxism can we develop a communist party in America capable of liberating ourselves from imperialism.2 With that said, how are we to understand this relationship? By applying Marxist analysis to our present conditions and evaluating the process of party construction historically. However, one must grasp Marxism sufficiently to apply it correctly. Gauging to what extent one needs to understand Marxism is where, unfortunately, many organizations continue to fall short.
America has uniquely struggled with theoretical rigor among its Marxists, often plagued with Empiricism3 and the anti-intellectual philosophy of Pragmatism4. Almost every cycle of wannabe Marxists have come in thinking that if they just throw themselves into the ‘work’ of political organizing, even if they commit avoidable mistakes, they’ll be able to self-correct and adjust. That is, according to the few introductory Marxist texts they may have read, common-sense activism, or the dogma they have gravitated toward. Often this takes the form of short-lived ‘red charities’5, shoddily constructed ‘mass’ organizations, or otherwise hopping-on political bandwagons (BLM, elections, healthcare reform, LGBTQ rights, tenant organizations, union drives, abortion rights, etc). However, what typically happens is after several iterations of this, most tire of the Sisyphean work and give up on Marxist organizing entirely (in one form or another). Some keep at it, for decades even (somehow expecting different results), and among them only a few figure out that Marxism is more than a vague guide or inspiration to action. In fact, Marxism is a scientific discipline whose principal contributors spent their whole lives developing theoretically. It is the task of serious revolutionaries to arm themselves with a thorough understanding of Marxism in order to satisfy the goal of developing a Marxist program and a communist party to execute that program. A thorough understanding refers not to the extent of an amateur–or to make an analogue with school, an undergraduate level of understanding–but that of a professional scientist. We must understand the complexities of Capital to independently conduct a class analysis of not just the United States itself, but also its links to the rest of the world on account of its imperialist character. We need to understand not just the position of the labor movement as it is now, but as it developed historically; why it’s one trade and not another that is more or less ripe for revolutionary propaganda. In order to succeed, we must know ourselves and our enemies as deeply as possible.
Failure to thoroughly study all of Marxism’s components and neglecting the example of Russian and Chinese Marxists condemns America’s revolutionaries into many divided circles that, at best, reinvent the wheel, only to find themselves dissatisfied with its condition, and later fall apart out of helplessness. This is not to mention the serious risk to the personal health of many comrades who naively end up in organizations whose membership often includes abusers and opportunists6 who take advantage of their lacking theoretical and practical knowledge. These are the stakes that provide the basis for our emphasis. With that said, let’s see how our historical forerunners attempted to address the theoretical needs of their day.
A Short History of Study Circles in the Russian Empire, Chinese ‘Republic’, and USA7
Russia
Marx rarely organized unions, though he often spoke at their meetings and interviewed workers. He spent most of his life critiquing English political economy, based on intensive critique of German philosophy which he then extended to critiquing French Socialism8. Dying before completing the culmination of his life’s work in Capital, it necessitated Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin to finalize the essential components of it9. Before founding the Bolsheviks (and ultimately leading them to state power in the October Revolution), Lenin gained European fame for his class analysis in “The Development of Capitalism in Russia”. He didn’t complete that work just by reflecting on his direct political organizing under the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class (circa 1895), but from years of compiling and analyzing the sparse economic statistical information on the Russian Empire. For him to even become qualified enough to conduct such an analysis, he spent over a decade in study circles and in correspondence with Russian Marxists debating Marxist Political Economy and Philosophy, translating Marx and Engels’ works into Russian and digging for every possible theoretical conclusion they had made.
Lenin wasn’t the first to do this either; he depended on the work already done by the Russian study circles (kruzhki) that emerged from the intellectual movement of the 1840s, which later culminated into the Narodism10 of the 1860s. It was the most organized contingent of the Narodniks, Narodnaya Volya (circa 1879), which committed their magnum opus of assassinating the Tsar in 1881. In the aftermath, Plekhanov and his Emancipation of Labor Group split from Narodnaya Volya in 1883, convinced of Marxist dialectical and historical materialism rather than Narodism’s utopianism. This initiated the struggle for Russian Marxists to fully distinguish themselves from the Narodniks during the 1880s and 1890s. Most of Lenin’s and other Russian Marxist publications from that time reflected the theoretical struggle against Narodism, only later transitioning to the struggle against ‘Legal Marxism’.
Despite the Narodniks’ insistence that Russia was uniquely situated to avoid capitalism, the 1870s coincided with its slow and painful introduction in Russia. With that, the labor movement also had its origin; strikes started in St. Petersburg by the end of the decade, which reached a high water mark in the Morozov Strike of 1885, after which some initial basic labor protections were passed. These protections were coupled with serious reprisals for the remaining strikers and those who were arrested (as is usual with repressive regimes using the velvet glove with one hand and the iron fist with the other). A lull in the movement followed until 1896 when Lenin’s League of Struggle led St. Petersburg’s workers in a new strike wave. This ephemeral unity between the Social-Democrats [read Marxists]11 and the proletariat (as most of the League was arrested including Lenin) was still a local exception to what broadly was a division between the labor movement and Marxism. It wasn’t until 1899 that the strike movement of 1896 had convinced the advanced section of the proletariat that the Marxists were to be their national representatives, and even then not in any proper sense until 1903 after the 2nd Party Congress. To review, the labor movement had developed independently of Marxism from its origin during the late 1870s until the Great Strike of 1896, and wasn’t properly ‘fused’ with the proletarian vanguard until 1903. Russian Marxism, founded as a split from utopian socialism in 1883, spent up to 10 years focusing on theoretical development before prioritizing active political work. Indeed, for Marxists like Plekhanov and Lenin, their priority of theoretical work continued until the foundation of the party where organizational matters took precedence.
What was the content of this theoretical work? Often, it involved thorough critiques of Narodist thought as it was the prevailing revolutionary outlook which continued its dominance in urban centers until the mid-late 1890s and in the countryside as late as 1918! These critiques were necessary because Narodism itself was an intellectual tradition, and included works ranging from utopian fantasies about the propaganda of the deed to some of the first sociological investigations into the Russian countryside in history (an investigative labor Lenin very much depended upon in his early study of Russian political economy). Lenin himself describes this best in one of his more underrated texts “A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social-Democracy”, aimed at the ‘Legal Marxists’ and economists12 who had been increasing in popularity:
“In the eighties and at the beginning of the nineties, when Social-Democrats initiated their practical work in Russia, they were confronted firstly with the Narodnaya Volya, which charged them with departing from the political struggle that had been inherited from the Russian revolutionary movement, and with which the Social-Democrats carried on a persistent polemic. Secondly, they were confronted with the Russian liberal circles, which were also dissatisfied with the turn taken by the revolutionary movement—from the Narodnaya Volya trend to Social-Democracy. The two fold polemic centred round the question of politics. In their struggle against the narrow conceptions of the Narodnaya Volya adherents, who reduced politics to conspiracy-making, the Social-Democrats could be led to, and did at times, declare themselves against politics in general (in view of the then prevailing narrow conception of politics). On the other hand, the Social-Democrats often heard, in the liberal and radical salons of bourgeois ‘society,’ regrets that the revolutionaries had abandoned terror; people who were mortally afraid for their own skins and at a decisive moment failed to give support to the heroes who struck blows at the autocracy, these people hypocritically accused the Social-Democrats of political indifferentism and yearned for the rebirth of a party that would pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them. Naturally, the Social-Democrats conceived a hatred for such people and their phrases, and they turned to the more mundane but more serious work of propaganda among the factory proletariat. At first it was inevitable that this work should have a narrow character and should be embodied in the narrow declarations of some Social-Democrats. This narrowness, however, did not frighten those Social-Democrats who had not in the least forgotten the broad historical aims of the Russian working-class movement. Why does it matter if the words of the Social-Democrats sometimes have a narrow meaning when their deeds cover a broad field. They do not give themselves up to useless conspiracies, they do not hob-nob with the Balalaikins13 of bourgeois liberalism, but they go to that class which alone is the real revolutionary class and assist in the development of its forces! They believed that this narrowness would disappear of its own accord with each step that broadened Social-Democratic propaganda. And this, to a considerable degree, is what has happened. From propaganda they began to go over to widespread agitation. Widespread agitation, naturally, brought to the forefront a growing number of class-conscious advanced workers; revolutionary organisations began to take form (the St. Petersburg, Kiev, and other Leagues of Struggle, the Jewish Workers’ Union). These organisations naturally tended to merge and, eventually, they succeeded: they united and laid the foundations of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. It would seem that the old narrowness would then have been left without any basis and that it would be completely cast aside. But things turned out differently: the spread of their agitation brought the Social-Democrats into contact with the lower, less developed strata of the proletariat; to attract these strata it was necessary for the agitator to be able to adapt himself to the lowest level of understanding, he was taught to put the “demands and interests of the given moment” in the foreground and to push back the broad ideals of socialism and the political struggle. The fragmentary, amateur nature of Social-Democratic work, the extremely weak connections between the study circles in the different cities, between the Russian Social-Democrats and their comrades abroad who possessed a profounder knowledge and a richer revolutionary experience, as well as a wider political horizon, naturally led to a gross exaggeration of this (absolutely essential) aspect of Social-Democratic activity, which could bring some individuals to lose sight of the other aspects, especially since with every reverse the most developed workers and intellectuals were wrenched from the ranks of the struggling army, so that sound revolutionary traditions and continuity could not as yet be evolved. It is in this extreme exaggeration of one aspect of Social-Democratic work that we see the chief cause of the sad retreat from the ideals of Russian Social-Democracy. Add to this enthusiasm over a fashionable book, ignorance of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, and a childish claim to originality, and you have all the elements that go to make up ‘the retrograde trend in Russian Social-Democracy’.”
Here, Lenin clearly describes the process in which early Social Democrats engaged with the working class. First, they started in study circles looking to understand the fundamentals of Marxism. Once qualified in preparing and conducting targeted propaganda in local factories (by the early 1890s), they did so. Once more class-conscious proletarians joined the ranks of Marxism, the range of propaganda broadened up to widespread agitation, leading to the formation of a variety of pre-party organizations across the Russian Empire. So much so, that it led to a trend of new ‘Marxists’ that only understood the demands of Marxism without understanding the basis behind those demands, the principles that Lenin refers to. Hopefully, the Russian experience clears up the role study plays in revolutionary activity, but to show that this process isn’t a fluke conditional to Russia alone, let’s proceed to China.
china
The Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded in 1921 after the failure of the first Chinese Democratic Revolution14. In this period, there were two critical events leading to the founding of the CPC: the October Revolution of 1917 and the May 4th Student Movement of 1919. The October Revolution was key to capturing the imagination and attention of the emerging Chinese radicals and intelligentsia. It showed the way toward a society which could address and solve China’s multitude of problems. It was this event more than any other that brought Marxism to China by both acting as a beacon to attract the best revolutionaries of China and as a base from which to teach and assist the Chinese. The second great historical event, the May 4th movement, was an occasion of mass struggle that gave the radicals and intellectuals a practical demonstration of the capacity of the Chinese working class to fight politically. The struggle brought many intellectuals, radicals, and workers together to provide fertile ground for the spread of Marxism. It is from this period, influenced by these two great historic events, that the founders of the CPC emerged.
What were the founders of the CPC doing between 1917 to 1921? For the first two years, they were primarily intellectuals involved in the New Culture Movement15. Leading up to the May 4th Movement and especially after, they formed various groups to study Marxist theory. At Peking University in 1919, Li Dazhao, with Chen Duxiu’s involvement, established the Society for the Study of Marxism, a group dedicated to the understanding and discussion of Marxism. A year later, Chen founded Communist circles in Shanghai and Guangzhou. In both cases, they were aided in their study through contact with the Bolshevik delegations and guidance by the Comintern representative Gregory Voitinsky. For Mao Zedong’s part, in 1918 he formed a socialist youth organization called the New People’s Study Society and helped transform it into an explicitly Marxist study organization16. Some other leading and important comrades in the early CPC that were members of the study society were Cai Hesen and Li Li San. From this they proceeded to party-building, as explained in A People’s History of Ideas podcast:
“In August, [members of the Shanghai study group] formed a cell of about ten members who saw their task as preparing for the foundation of the Party.”
“Members of the Shanghai nucleus and from the Soviet delegation helped to start communist cells in Wuhan and Jinan, and Mao Zedong met with both the Beijing and Shanghai groups before going back to Changsha in Hunan Province to start a group there. In every case, the new communist nuclei were based on pre-existing groups of activists who had been involved in the May 4th Movement.”
In China, the existing activists and intellectuals that founded and formed the backbone of the Comintern sponsored CPC went through a period of discussion and study of Marxism. This was imperative, as without an understanding of Marxism, they would continue on the path of democratic struggles or utopian/populist schemes like those that appeared in Russia. Essentially, as Mao pointed out in “On New Democracy”17, both the fusion of the democratic and working class movements, and the introduction of Marxism in China, changed the nature of the revolution. As Li Rui put it in “The Early Revolutionary Activities of Mao Tsetung”, “to disseminate Marxism-Leninism, to struggle for the establishment of a proletarian party—Communist Party—that was the most essential aspect of the revolutionary activities of comrade Mao Tsetung before the formal founding of the Chinese communist party.”
However, the founding of the Communist Party in China was not without its defects. From its very inception, its relationship with and especially reliance upon the Soviet Union and the Comintern was a double-edged sword. Without Soviet support, the founding of the party would likely have been delayed, and the sustainability of the party in the early years depended on Comintern funding and expertise. But this subordination to the Comintern had a tendency to stifle the native communist movement and encourage dogmatic application of Soviet practices without a proper study and analysis of Chinese conditions.
When founding the Communist Party, one of the critical elements the founders lacked was an advanced understanding of Marxism; although they possessed the rudiments, the prevailing belief was that the Comintern could more or less implant advanced Marxist thought without a strong local foundation. This is part of why many Comintern-founded parties struggled tremendously in their early years. In China, no one had conducted a thorough analysis of Chinese society. This led to the various blunders which inspired Mao to write his famous “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” five years after the party’s founding. During this early period, communists groped through practice, resulting in great confusion and heavy losses. These are historical mistakes we do not need to repeat.
USA
Speaking of historical mistakes, the American left has long struggled with Anti-Intellectualism, Empiricism, and especially the most popular expression of the two, American Pragmatism. Today, sentiments like ‘I don’t need to read a book by some dead white cis man to be a revolutionary’ remain overwhelmingly popular among most leftists. Even among Marxists, what theoretical interest remains is often one-sided and superficial. This bankruptcy of ideology is as old as American socialism itself, a tradition older than Marx. It finds its roots in American Puritanism (a key social institution of American society), which was principally a product of the English Revolution, and remnants from various European revolutionary trends ranging roughly between 1600-1900. This is best expressed by the various utopian communes that dotted the colonies as they developed. These range from the radical Quaker communes of the 1650s and 60s (reflecting the English Diggers/Levellers18) to the Amish settlements from 1693 (reflecting the Utopian Socialism of the earlier German Peasant Wars19) to the Owenites and Fourierists who used cheap American land to deliver their proof of concept of successful communism. These communes were rarely secular, and even those that were secular included members mostly driven by religious inclinations. Secular leaders tolerated this on account of their own pragmatism, simply seeing any motivation being viable where it attracts members.
Meanwhile, Marxism finds its origin in America at the conclusion of the 1848 revolutions, when German Marxist political refugees came there to continue their work. Between the language barrier and eclectic character of early Marxists at the time (often warranting many criticisms from Marx), the German-American Marxists struggled to build a foundation among the working class, with Joseph Weydemeyer playing a large role. He founded the first Marxist organization by the name of the American Workers League in 1852. Consisting of a few hundred German workers, it faded in relevance within a couple of years, motivating him to leave and later join the New York Communist Club, or NYCC (circa 1857). Although they grew enough for additional chapters in Cincinnati and Chicago, their political work between 1857-67 mostly focused on developing nation-wide trade union associations and struggling against slavery. Indeed, only after the Civil War did the labor movement (as Marx predicted in his contemporary writings) truly come into the forefront with some of the largest strike movements in history up to that point.
Unfortunately, beyond translating some of Marx’s writings into English (none of which became popular among American workers at the time), there is little evidence of ideological consolidation among the NYCC’s membership, outside of the Germans. The 1st International later absorbed the NYCC, coinciding with the struggle between Marxism and Lassalleanism20. This struggle concluded with the victory of Lassalleanism (led particularly by Freidrich Sorge) during the Unity Congress, founding the Socialist Labor Party of America (circa 1876). Riding on the high of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, they gained their largest ever electoral following, consisting of a few elected officials to state legislatures (particularly in Illinois). However, shortly after the economic crisis of 1878, the Party lost nearly all of its English-speaking support, once more becoming an effectively sectarian German-American party. The leading Marxists of the party soon left to focus mostly on trade union work. By the 1890s, Daniel De Leon (who would go on to found American syndicalism21 in the International Workers of the World or IWW), attempted to bring Marxism back as the main trend of the party and reestablish a presence among English speakers. De Leon’s success was mixed, as a split in 1899 with the reformist/trade unionist membership (which joined the newly founded Socialist Party of America (SPA)) and broader sectarianism led to him growing increasingly isolated from the broader labor movement.
The SPA22 on its face had relatively shallow origins, consisting of a merger from 3 broad trends, reflecting the eclectic composition of the party from the beginning. The first and largest group was composed of militant trade unionists from the American Railway Union (ARU). The state’s violent response to their 1894 strike had radicalized this group, with Eugene Debs as their representative. A motley assortment of radicals, populists, and utopians, all with various eclectic ideas, made up the second group. Their goal was generally to create Owenite-style communes, represented by utopian intellectuals and pastors. The third and smallest group consisted of the aforementioned semi-Lassallean splinter from the SLP. Their most prominent theoretician was Victor Berger, a former member of the SLP who won over Debs and consequently the ARU to socialism, and motivated the anti-DeLeonists to split at the founding of the SPA. His views were akin to that of the centrist Austrian Social-Democrats who Lenin criticized on a variety of issues (including on their social-pacifism, defined as socialist in words, pacifist in practice) and who Stalin famously criticized on the national question. He was also a racist who disapproved of Asian immigrants and included discriminatory anti-immigration demands into the SPA’s political platform (in opposition to Debs who struggled with him on this). He was truly a ‘model theoretician’. All this reflected in the party which, like most western Social-Democratic parties at the time, focused entirely on the legal parliamentary struggle and developing trade unions. Of course, with the added particularity of trying to create communes and workers cooperatives in its early years due to the insistence of the utopian faction.
It is our position that these three trends uniting into one party in the way they did best encapsulates the bankruptcy of classical American socialism, as all of them never properly broke with American anti-intellectual pragmatism. Nor did any spend any serious effort to study Marxist fundamentals and develop a proper class analysis of American political economy. The trade unionists basically saw their narrow struggle as the only struggle to care about, leaving the hashing out of principles and the political struggle to the party leaders financing election campaigns. This was textbook economism. The utopians at this stage were nothing but a remnant of old American Diggerism, eclectically justifying their ideas with both Owen’s and Fourier’s writings on the one hand and the King James Bible on the other, not unlike the Narodniks if it wasn’t for their social pacifism. The Lassalleans/pseudo-Marxists, meanwhile, were essentially reformists, the unfortunate consequence of lacking ideological consolidation among the militants, leaving the reformists to dominate party politics. Except for De Leon, who himself represented a dogmatic and sectarian trend which amounts to a revision of Marxism, not a single trend bothered to struggle against the others or develop their theories past the stage of vulgar impulses. The SPA merged the advanced sections of the American labor movement with socialism, but it did so poorly, and its leadership was just as ill prepared to lead the working class in any direction, let alone towards state power.
This is the legacy of American socialism that the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) inherited, itself a split from the SPA following the October Revolution, which provides the context necessary to explain why it became so dependent on the Comintern in general and the Soviet Union in particular throughout its existence. Many of the leaders in the early years were former anarchists and members of the syndicalist IWW, and what theoreticians existed were often mediocre (at best) and foreign, meaning they had little experience or time to study conditions in the United States. There was also a key difference from both Russian and Chinese experiences here. Namely, there was no period of theoretical development by the membership after the split took place in 1919. Rather, two concurrent crises took precedence over everything else. The first crisis was the international revolutionary crisis sparked by the October Revolution itself, which gave the American communists the incredible tasks of preventing the US government from intervening in the Russian civil war, and the grander responsibility of securing revolutionary power themselves (which as you may imagine made them a direct target of white terror, adding to the chaos23). The working class spontaneously accomplished the former despite the chaos among the communists, with allied forces in the IWW and others happy to coordinate around Soviet sovereignty. As far as the latter, well, right out the gate they were short-stopped by the chaotic nature of the split from the SPA in the first place, which brings us to our second crisis. In 1919 two oppositionary ‘Communist Parties’ split from the SPA24 due to their unpopular stance on World War I and towards the Bolsheviks: the mostly native-born Communist Labor Party of America represented by Alfred Wagenknecht and the mostly foreign-born Communist Party of America represented by Charles Ruthenburg. It wasn’t until 1922 that a single united CPUSA was formed, something forced by the Comintern and with more mergers and splits in between, by which point the revolutionary crisis was already over and the Soviet’s sovereignty secure.
As can be expected, the following years remained chaotic and lacked serious theoretical study. Inner-party feuding mired the 1920s and 30s, often involving struggles where both sides committed right (and less often left) opportunist errors. These usually culminated in a Comintern directive criticizing both sides and expelling the “more” wrong faction from leadership. Although the CPUSA established a party school in 1923, attracting up to 1,000 students annually, poor curriculum preparation resulted from directly imitating the Soviet Smolny Institute, and instructors possessed only a couple of years of education on their subject matter. While some party cadres were privileged to study in the Soviet Union—with a few, like Harry Haywood, even emerging as key party theoreticians—most struggled to keep pace with the rigorous demands of class analysis alongside the political work of the day. In fact, most cadres prioritized agitation and propaganda, neglecting theoretical work, reflecting Pragmatist philosophy. Of course, all the intrigue only complicated things. It therefore wasn’t a surprise when rightist Browderism became dominant in the party between 1934-45 and Foster’s continued capitulation to right opportunism set the stage for the CPUSA simply being a revisionist party that today just caucuses for the Democrats and plays a counter-revolutionary role in the mass movements25.
The Anti-revisionist movement in the US was born26 out of the CPUSA’s struggle against Browderism27 which was initiated by the May 1945 letter from Jacque Duclos of the French Communist Party criticizing Earl Browder, and ultimately leading to Browder’s expulsion in 1946. This process really began in 1944 with the dissolution of the CPUSA and its transformation into the Communist Political Association (CPA); however, there was also a prolonged period of attrition where genuine communists had left or otherwise been removed from the party in the preceding years. As Paul Costello observed in “Anti-Revisionist Communism in the United States, 1945-1950,” unfortunately, “many individuals were expelled who did not join an expelled group, while a number of expelled groups kept in touch with left oppositionists who remained Party members.” In this period those who were expelled failed to unite as they spent most of their time “polemicising against each other than in any other kind of activity” and “the lack of advanced theory and a correct general political line prevented these groups from working together and establishing any kind of principled unity”. Despite efforts between 1947-48, these groups were unable to reconcile their differences. The sectarianism, paranoia, cop-jacketing28, and a regular inability to work with the left opposition within the CPUSA doomed their efforts to failure. There were 3 main approaches to party-building in this period: immediately forming a new party, rectifying the old party, or forming a new party after a prolonged struggle for unity among CPUSA members and the new expelled forces. Unfortunately, the approach of most was to try to rectify the old party, and in this they were hampered by their refusal to conduct factional work, ideological limitations, and deference to the International Communist Movement (read: reliance on foreign parties). In summary, the trend suffered from its own theoretical deficiencies, inability to critically reassess the whole of party history (instead mostly focusing on Browderism), near exclusively focusing on criticism from without, sectarianism, and having no real understanding of how to build a new party29. Due to their failures, the only facade of continuity through the successive waves of anti-revisionism leading to the New Communist Movement was through the CPUSA.
We will give a short overview of the second wave of anti-revisionism, as it is the least significant of them. Between 1949-1957 revisionism was in full swing as peaceful transition was the party’s de facto stance on revolution. Because of the 20th congress of the CPSU (1956), and specifically Khruschev’s infamous “Secret Speech,” where he denounced Stalin and outlined the new revisionist turn the USSR was to take under his leadership, the CPUSA was again thrown into crisis (over how to appraise the approach towards peaceful transition, not over whether to stand by it). In 1958, as the crisis developed, the left-wing defenders of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership split and formed the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in the United States (POC). As stated in the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line introduction to this period, “unfortunately, soon after its founding the POC underwent a number of debilitating splits and, by 1962, it was a shell of its former self. In 1968, what remained of the POC renamed itself the American Workers’ Communist Party (AWCP)”30. It is, however, worth noting that individual members of the POC such as Harry Haywood, Theodore Allen, Nelson Peery, and Noel Ignatin, would take part or have influence in the succeeding anti-revisionist movements.
The third wave of the Anti-revisionist movement was once again kicked off by a split from the CPUSA. In 1962, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM), later Progressive Labor Party (PLP), formed from a group that left the CPUSA and brought with it much of the Fosterite baggage of the old party combined with an affinity for the ideology of the Communist Party of China (CPC). However, it stood out only by virtue of the depravity of its contemporaries. As Paul Costello notes, “organizationally it was extremely sectarian and bureaucratic. Theoretically its cadre were not well trained in creative Marxism, but rather in a vulgar and dogmatic cult of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao”31.
A parallel development to third wave anti-revisionism was the various national revolutionary parties, such as the Young Lords and the Black Panther Party. As attributed in Borimarxist’s Instagram post about the last birthday of Cha-Cha Jimenez, chairman of the Young Lords, “Cha-Cha told minister of education that it was important that all members carried Mao’s Little Red Book. He also mentioned that we should all read What is to be Done by Lenin”32. The founders of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale both took part in a political study group called the Afro-American Association at Merritt Junior College; their intellectual training in this study circle, combined with their participation in the struggles of their community, formed the basis for the formation of the Black Panther Party33. These organizations, whilst not founding communist parties, were guided by their aspirations for liberation, socialism, and self-determination. We note that their study of revolutionary thought and especially scientific socialism was critical to their early development and successes, but in that same vain their lack of theoretical rigor contributed to their failures once COINTELPRO came out in full force34.
The decline of PLP and their expulsion from SDS in 1969 marked the beginning of the fourth wave of anti-revisionism, known as the New Communist Movement (NCM). Earnest students and workers felt the absence of a communist nucleus and set out to build it35. However, throughout this movement, the would-be revolutionaries were plagued with what Marx famously remarks in “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”36. The same issues that plagued the prior history of the US NCM would continue to crop up in increasingly contradictory forms: Opportunism, Subjectivism37, and Nationalism38. There is an interesting observation in the history of many organizations where they or their preceding formations would criticize themselves or another organization in the most vitriolic fashion, only to repeat or later adopt those same practices and positions. As Costello explains, “the history of the new communist movement is not a chronology of its progressive elaboration of Marxist theory and its integration with the workers’ movement; that would have required the practice of Marxism as a living science, and its production in accordance with American reality and the political requirements of the workers’ movement.”39
Consistently, the groups with the most correct (on paper) approaches to party building adopted outdated and revisionist ideologies, or succumbed to liquidation either through confusion or as the conclusion of their revisionism. There are too many of these groups to name, but unfortunately, none amounted to anything exemplary40. In contrast, the groups who remained (for a time) anti-revisionist often had serious problems with organization, and an inconsistent application of their ideology; most significant of this tendency was the Revolutionary Communist Party USA (RCP). The RCP consistently defended Maoism and socialist China against groups that took the side of the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet Split and against those who proclaimed that China remained socialist after the end of the GPCR. However, the question of Chinese revisionism led to a split in the party where those that supported Chinese revisionism created the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, which would merge with other organizations to become the Freedom Road Socialist Organization41 in 1985. After this point, Bob Avakian consolidated his position as the chief leader in the party, and the ensuing decline of the party was borne out through his writings from that point forward. The RCP-USA never could right the ship and marched itself and the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM)42 into irrelevance.
- For clarity, we mean socialism as in the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e workers power over the state and through that the means of production. Lenin made this clear in “The State and Revolution” with Mao and his supporters reiterating the essence of socialism in many texts up to the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). See Raymond Lotta’s “And Mao Makes 5” for many of the essential works on this subject. ↩︎
- Imperialism refers to the final stage of capitalism dominated by monopolies, finance capital, the export of capital by finance capital, and the division and redivision of the world between conflicting economic and political interests as capitalism struggles to resolve its inherent contradictions. See “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” by Lenin for a clear elaboration on the subject. ↩︎
- Empiricism is a philosophy that treats truth as derived only from direct experience, dismissing theoretical or rational knowledge. As Mao pointed out in “On Practice”, “To think that knowledge can stop at the lower, perceptual stage and that perceptual knowledge alone is reliable while rational knowledge is not, would be to repeat the historical error of “empiricism”. This theory errs in failing to understand that, although the data of perception reflect certain realities in the objective world…, they are merely one-sided and superficial, reflecting things incompletely and not reflecting their essence.” ↩︎
- As defined in Lenin’s “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”: “The pragmatists consider that the central problem of philosophy is the attainment of true knowledge. However, they completely distort the very concept of truth… As the criterion of the “truth” (usefulness) of knowledge, the pragmatists take experience, understood not as human social practice but as the constant stream of individual experiences, of the subjective phenomena of consciousness; they regard this experience as the solo reality, declaring the concepts of matter and mind “obsolete”… In contrast to materialist monism, the pragmatists put forward the standpoint of “pluralism”, according to which there is no internal connection, no conformity to law, in the universe; it is like a mosaic which each person builds in his own way, out of his own individual experiences. Hence, starting out from the needs of the given moment, pragmatism considers it possible to give different, even contradictory, explanations of one and the same phenomenon. Consistency is declared to be unnecessary; if it is to a man’s advantage, he can be a determinist or an indeterminist, he can assert or deny the existence of God, and so on”. Very much like Postmodernism isn’t it? ↩︎
- As in, charity or ‘mutual-aid’ based organizations with red iconography. ↩︎
- Lenin defines opportunism best in “The Collapse of the Second International”: “Opportunism means sacrificing the fundamental interests of the masses to the temporary interests of an insignificant minority of the workers or, in other words, an alliance between a section of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat.” It is often distinguished between ‘right’ or ‘left’ opportunism, right referring to opportunism that underestimates the objective situation while left referring to overestimating the objective situation. ↩︎
- It’s important to note that the brief summaries of Russian, Chinese, and American revolutionary history must be so limited in depth in order to maintain the focus of the article in its main message, that of presenting our thesis for the task of study today. Giving due diligence to each movement would be a task encompassing volumes of work, and frankly none have complete exhaustive histories available in English (excluding maybe the Russian revolutionary movement, though even then there are gaps in analyzing what for us is the most important period, that of the various Kruzhki (study circles) of the 1840’s-1890’s). As such, this article by no means intends to be the last word on analyzing these periods, and to the extent possible within our humble means, we aim to eventually return to each movement in order to give it its due diligence in analysis. To that end we encourage our readers to challenge our presentation with sources that possibly contradict our statements, so as to refine our record of events and further substantiate our understanding of international revolutionary history. ↩︎
- We implore the reader to see for themselves how much theoretical material he spent gathering in order to put it together by reading Engels’ prefaces to the 2nd and 3rd Volumes of Capital. ↩︎
- In “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, Marx intended Capital to be just one part of his analysis of Capitalism. Landed property was elaborated upon in Volume III and Volume IV (all volumes after the first were based on Marx’s manuscripts and edited by Engels and Kautsky posthumously), with subsequent analyses of German and American agriculture conducted by Kautsky (and Lenin). Wage-labor was investigated by Marx, and largely comprised the latter portion of his first volume, though not studied on its own. The state was loosely touched upon in Volume III and briefly in other writings, but otherwise was never elaborated upon in full, and was to wait until Engels’s and Lenin’s writings on the topic (“Origins of the Family, the State, and Private Property” and “The State and Revolution” respectively). There is a point to be said on an analysis of State Capitalism that Lenin touched upon; however, Mao did it best in his economic writings. Foreign trade was elaborated upon in Volume II to substantiate an explanation on capital exchange; however, it wasn’t the focus of the volume and by extension its references to the world market. Future writings like Lenin’s “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism” references it, but the scale upon which the world market has developed hasn’t matched Marxists’ attempts to analyze and understand it, though its broad features are still consistent with how Marx and Lenin have described it. ↩︎
- As Lenin defined in “The Heritage We Renounce,” Narodism saw capitalism in Russia as a retrogression in society and instead advocated that the peasant village commune should be the main economic model. Further, they rejected the Marxist understanding of class struggle in general and the role of the intelligentsia and the state in particular. It was an idealist outlook with a petty-bourgeois character (as in, small proprietor). Practically, the Narodniks educated peasants in the countryside while at the same time seeing the only viable political action to be terrorism. ↩︎
- The tradition of Marxist parties being named ‘Social-Democratic’ is based on a compromise German socialists made with moderates in their early workers’ party. Lenin explains his reasoning to break with the convention in chapter 12 of his draft program leading up to the October Revolution called “The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution”, citing Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875) and Engel’s “Preface to Internationales aus dem Velkstaat (1871-1875)” (1894). ↩︎
- As Lenin briefly defined in “Socialism and War”: “‘Economism’ was an opportunist trend in Russian Social-Democracy. Its political essence was summed up in the programme: ‘for the workers – the economic struggle; for the liberals – the political struggle.’” ↩︎
- Balalaikin—a character from Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel “Modern Idyll”; a liberal windbag, adventurer, and liar. ↩︎
- Rather than rehash the many details of that period here, we recommend the podcast “A People’s History of Ideas” by Matthew Rothwell episodes 2-5, and 7-14 https://peopleshistoryofideas.com/ ↩︎
- The New Culture Movement was a progressive, and especially democratic, movement of students and intellectuals to adopt a new and modern culture in China. It criticized many traditions and aspects of China’s old feudal and imperial culture. It directed a lot of its attacks against Confucianism; its participants included anarchists, socialists, reformists, pragmatists, and other modern philosophical movements. ↩︎
- “Report on the Affairs of the New People’s Study Society (1 and 2)” in “Mao’s Road to Power: Volume 2” by Stuart Schram ↩︎
- “After the May 4th Movement, the political leader of China’s bourgeois-democratic revolution was no longer the bourgeoisie but the proletariat…The Chinese proletariat rapidly became an awakened and independent political force as a result of its maturing and of the influence of the Russian Revolution.” ↩︎
- The Quakers were one of the radical factions within the Levellers. The Levellers were seen by Marx and Engels as one of the first manifestations of a“truly active Communist Party [that] is contained in the bourgeois revolution,” from “Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality,” in this case, the English Revolution. Large sections of the Quakers, especially among those who migrated to America, organized utopian communes as part of the Digger movement (a radical subset of the Leveller movement). ↩︎
- The Amish were a radical splinter from the Mennonites, themselves a radical faction of Anabaptists which can be seen as the political equivalent to the Levellers for the German Reformation and Peasant Wars of the 16th-17th centuries (which historically included the Benelux region, Austria, Czechia, and Switzerland). ↩︎
- A utopian socialist ideology which had many ideas akin to later Revisionism and Reformism in particular. By Revisionism we mean revision of the key principles of Marxism. This originates from Eduard Bernstein, the founder of Reformism and leader of the right wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Lenin’s time. Reformism seeks to reform capitalism through peaceful and gradual means. Its essence can be summarized in Bernstein’s own words “For me the movement is everything and the final goal of socialism is nothing”. Lenin clearly elaborated the practical consequences of Lassalleanism in “August Bebel”: “Lassale and his followers, in view of the poor chances for the proletarian and democratic way, pursued unstable tactics and adapted themselves to the leadership of the [aristocrat] Bismarck [(contemporary leader of Germany and antagonist to the working class movement there)]. Their mistake lay in diverting the workers’ party on to the Bonapartist-state-socialist path.” ↩︎
- A petty-bourgeois semi-Anarchist trend: “The syndicalists saw no need for the working class to engage in political struggle, they repudiated the leading role of the Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. They believed that by organising a general strike of the workers the trade unions… could, without a revolution, overthrow capitalism and take over control of production.” From Lenin’s “Marxism and Revisionism”. ↩︎
- In this article we are only speaking of their successes and theoretical deficiencies. This is not meant as an overall evaluation of their policies, program, nor their poor handling of the national question, chauvinism, and oppressed peoples generally. ↩︎
- See the first Red Scare between 1917-1920. We recommend Theodore Draper’s “The Roots of American Communism” to get an idea of how these issues affected the nascent party’s development. ↩︎
- It’s important to note that this was years in the making as the SPA’s left-wing continued to gain influence among the rank and file in spite of efforts by the reformists, up to when they won over a majority of the party’s membership in months leading up to the split. A lot of the preparatory work for this was done by Kollontai and Trotsky at first, publishing and translating key articles by the Bolsheviks and other internationalists to English. (The internationalists were those opposed to the social-chauvinist or nationalist positions of the opportunist Social-Democrats during WW1. The social chauvinists support socialism in words, and support chauvinism (the superiority of one’s group, such as gender, race, nation, etc) in deeds). They also struggled to lead the left wing of the Second International (what was left of it that is) against both the social chauvinists and their enablers in the form of the social pacifists between 1912-1917. This work was soon taken up domestically by John Reed and Louis Fraina, who popularized the internationalist position. A key thing to extract from this is that the split was on very practical grounds based on the strategic tasks of the day rather than as a result of a protracted ideological struggle as had taken place between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks between 1903-1912. ↩︎
- For example, “the wholesale destruction of the trade union left, and the CPUSA’s inability to mount an effective fightback were identified as the fruits of the CP’s long standing policy of making deals with bureaucrats, rather than building a base in the rank and file.” (Paul Costello, “Anti-Revisionist Communism in the United States, 1945-1950”). ↩︎
- We recommend Paul Costello’s “Anti-Revisionist Communism in the United States, 1945-1950” for a more detailed overview of this process. ↩︎
- While we cannot give an exhaustive treatment of Browderism here, we highlight some of its prominent features: “a contempt for theory, class collaborationist practice, and the liquidation of the party’s vanguard role,” American exceptionalism (the belief that America is special, unique, or superior to the point that it negates established truths), social chauvinism, social-imperialism (support for socialism in words, but support for imperialism in deeds), economism, and reformism. ↩︎
- The practice of baselessly or carelessly accusing others of being police agents or informants. A form of bad-jacketing or character assassination that is especially dangerous. ↩︎
- Burt Sutta, despite his other errors made the following astute observation about the ‘actionists’ (the group who believed the general line of the CPUSA and ICM was correct, but CPUSA’s practice was deficient) vs. the ‘theoreticians’: “[The theoreticians] contend that this current bankrupt policy has its roots in the policy of the ’good old days.’ In the eyes of this group, it is necessary to reexamine the whole theory on which the activities of the Communist Party are based. This means going back to the classics of Marxism and testing them with real life to prove their validity. The position taken by the theoreticians is that without this, no amount of real struggle is worth anything. You cannot take a trip if you do not know where you are going and you cannot organize struggles correctly unless there is a correct line.” ↩︎
- https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1956-1960/index.htm ↩︎
- As quoted in Paul Costello’s, “A Critical History of the New Communist Movement, 1969-1979.” https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/theoretical-review/19791301.htm
For more on this, we recommend “The Anti-Marxist-Leninist Line of PL” (1972) by John Ericsson and Charles Loren. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1960-1970/loren-pl/index.htm ↩︎ - https://www.instagram.com/p/C-b4aX5ukeH ↩︎
- Attributed to Alondra Nelson’s “Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination” referenced in “The Black Panther Party and Study Groups.” https://www.culturalfront.org/2011/12/black-panther-party-and-study-groups.html ↩︎
- We recommend consulting “The Revolution Has Come” by Robyn C. Spencer for more on COINTELPRO in the BPP. (For those needing access, it can be found on Library Genesis.) ↩︎
- Many participants in the NCM had learned through their experiences in the mass struggles of the 60’s the limitations of mass action without party leadership. ↩︎
- “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.” ↩︎
- Subjectivism is another word for one-sided thinking, it is the opposite of dialectical (many-sided) thinking. One makes a subjectivist error when they fail to pay attention to critical information or a critical step in the process of struggle. For example, drawing conclusions based on superficial analysis, or refusing to analyze a situation at all and resting content on one’s preconceived ideas. ↩︎
- Nationalism is broadly the deference to the interest of one’s nation above others. Whereas internationalism opposes the prioritization of national interests and instead emphasizes the common class interests that go beyond national borders. Where the nationalist prioritizes their own nation’s interest, the internationalist prioritizes the interests of the whole class. At times, such as in a national liberation struggle of an oppressed people, these national and international interests coincide, and are one and the same. ↩︎
- As quoted in Paul Costello’s, “A Critical History of the New Communist Movement, 1969-1979.” https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/theoretical-review/19791301.htm ↩︎
- A few examples are the Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee, the Tucson Marxist Leninist Collective, and The New Voice. ↩︎
- An organization that in its 40 years of existence has failed to produce anything of significance for the working class, has failed to get any closer to ‘a party’ rather than a pre-party formation, and has held to the eclectic revisionist positions of Chinese and Soviet revisionism since its founding. ↩︎
- The RIM was an international organization of communist parties formed in the 80’s. Many of the world’s Maoist parties coalesced in this organization and it played a historic role in the popularization of Maoism. See the founding statement here https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/Docs/RIM-Declaration-1984-A.pdf
While the RCP initiated and worked to found the RIM in 1984, it also played a critical role in destroying the RIM from within with its revisionism. See the “Second resolution passed by the Special Meeting of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement for an International Conference of the MLM Parties and Organization of the world – May First 2012.” https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/Resurrection/2012/Reso2-120501.pdf
We also recommend “Against Avakianism” by Ajith for a fairly accurate, if somewhat incomplete treatment of Avakianism. https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/S09-Against-Avakianism-5th-Printing.pdf ↩︎
Mount Tai Study Circle 