Our work, like most work in the country concentrated on building bonds and ties with the working class. We were pretty successful in a short period of time and brought a number of workers to RU events, worked closely with rank and file workers on plant issues and brought a number out to marches or picket lines that we sponsored.

We, like most, published a local paper that was popular among workers and had a circulation of 25,000 at one point. There were student collectives (Attica Brigade) and an “intellectual” collective.

Most of this work had rightist tendencies but the correction for this was to essentially abandon this work in favor of party building and for about two years we engaged in line struggle over issues. But that’s not really how it works. We weren’t applying any theory to practice. There was also a dark side to democratic centralism.

One comrade heading up our student work disagreed with some of the issues and policies (Boston Busing, policy on gays). He also disagreed that party building was the main task at that time. He was isolated from the rest of the organization and eventually expelled, despite the fact that he never engaged in any factional activities–at least to my knowledge.

To my own shame, I did not put up a rigorous defense of the comrade. These ultra-left tendencies of divorcing theory from practice and using democratic centralism to expel those who disagreed with us were a disaster and eventually cost the organization nearly every cadre that was a member or close to the organization. For those of us who continued to do work among the working class, we inevitably degenerated into rightist errors, often turning into careerist union leaders.

We missed the guidance of a revolutionary party while the RCP essentially abandoned all work among the masses. An incredible series of blunders on all our part. A lot of good work went to waste. I don’t think the whole experience was bad, but we better learn from it or the same stupid stuff will be repeated–that was a lot of the history of the CPUSA as well.

“There’s something to be said about failing, making big mistakes and not folding up shop and quitting.”

I think this is very important. And that is one of the things this history brings to my mind.

Some people write around the history of the New Communist Movement (NCM) as one big misconception and mistake, as a bramble of misguided sectarianism etc.

On the contrary, I think this was one of the most important attempts at serious revolutinary thinking and preparation in U.S. history — and a great deal of respect (and dialectics) is needed.

It is also not true that the ultimate failure to create an ongoing revolutionary movement is simply the result of “wrong ideas” in its conception. (Failure is not simply the result of incorrect ideas or even proof that the guiding ideas were incorrect, just like “correct ideas” don’t guarantee victory and success.) That is itself a mistaken view of the relationship of ideas and revolution, and between ideas and success.

On the so-called “National question” (i.e. the discussion of how to end racist oppression in the U.S.): I think that the RCP made both errors and contributions, but it is also worth pointing out that no one “got it right” — and what we are sifting through is a complex field of theories, organizing attempts, misconceptions, etc.

More significant: we need to evaluate efforts like the RU in the context of objective conditions: i.e. that there was a huge upsurge of revoltuionary thinking and organizing from 1968-1973 — and that after that, there was a need to consolidate and push forward under clearly non-revolutionary conditions.

So, it might have been overblown for various groupings to call themselves “vanguard parties” — but it WAS important to consolidate vanguard forces organizationally, and together seek to uncover how to advance under adverse conditions (“hastening and awaiting” new upsurges and possible revolutionary situations).

I have quite a bit to say about this RU experience (having been through it, and thinking about it for a long time).

And I will try to find the time to pull those thoughts together in a coherent way.

I think we need to consider what that experience says about the question of “sinking roots among the people” — and how to do that on a revolutionary basis.

In some ways, the upsurge of the 1960s produced tens of thousands of pretty serious young revolutionary cadre, but a situation where they were not generally (as a movement) deeply connected to currents among oppressed people. there was always an intense and urgent task of converting networks of revolutionary activists into revolutionary organization among the people. And a lot of the theoretical discussion has to be about why that did not happen (especially after the upsurge “broke” in 1973)…. was it objective? what it because of theoretical mistakes? Or?

The “fusion” line said that you couldn’t consider yourself (seriously) to be a party until you had those kinds of organic connection (had begun to fuse revolutionary ideas with the people — i.e. until you and objective events had started to forge a revolutionary people.) The line that led to the RCP’s self-declaration (and the formation of other parties) held that a party was essentially a program — and that once you had demarcated and “united all who could be united” around that program, you were essentially “the vanguard party of the proletariat.”

History has not been kind to that second thesis, and I suspect that we should take a serious look at the implications of a “fusion” approach (including for our conditions).

At the same time, I don’t think that we failed to build a larger, stable multinational communist party in the mid-1970s because “the RCP made big errors on the national question.” I think that the Black, Puerto Rican and Chicano elements of the communist movement were also highly ambivolent about forming a multinational party (because of the real-world history of the 1960s, the influence of revolutionary nationalist ideas and assumptions, the experience of SNCC expelling white activists, etc.) And, perhaps more significant, the collapse of the Black liberation movement in 1973 had a huge impact on the communists emerging at that time, and led to a great deal of confusion and capitulation that took many forms. The often extreme fascination with the most orthodox and religious approaches to Marxism Leninism seized many of the groups who became “the Revolutionary wing” (i.e. the BWC, the PRRWO/YoungLords, IWK etc.) — including in the form of “Stalin over Mao” — and they retreated into a book worship that believed purifying their ideology might reverse the decline of the revolutionary mass movement. Under those conditions, many of those forces were in a spiral that made them unreceptive to a multinational communist formation that was determined to do revolutionary mass work and creative strategic thinking.

this is not to say the RCP didn’t make significant mistakes. And certainly, I plan to write about my view of those mistakes. But the idea that the RU was “the problem” is very far from the truth… and as CR suggests, some forces pressed ahead out of this crisis of 1973-75 and some were not able to.

One part of the complexity here is that the RCP was founded in 1975, but it was really formed (as a distinct political current) in 1978-97. And the basis it was formed (in 1975) — with its very economist assumptions about revolutionary work etc — were not sustainable. And the party-building efforts made on that bases were riddled with those problems. I.e. the RU’s approach to other forces — including Black, Puerto Rican, Chicano and Asian-American communist forces — was not just “errors on the national questions,” but were part and parcel of a larger package of assumption that were rooted in a mistaken view of how the working class became conscious and made revolution. (Specifically the theory of “the fundamental contradiction becomes the principal contradiction” — and an assumption that the class-against-class conflict had to, somehow, overshadow and absorb the struggle against racist oppression. Mao had written that revolution in the U.S. would be the merger of the movement against racist oppression with the working class struggle for socialism — and understanding THAT merger is a questions that still needs to be more deeply understood (and then acted on).

more to come.

one last thought altho the RCP made big errors on the national question and elsewhere I want to say something positive about there attempts and bold and original thinking in an Maoist framework. There’s something to be said about failing, making big mistakes and not folding up shop and quitting. Building a revolutionary party in the US is one of THEE questions.

I have no doubt that the other organizations in the Liaison Committee had profound deficiencies as well, but the campaign against “Bundism” stands out for me as one of the most examples of a revolutionary movement wrecked on the rocks of white chauvinism. In the popular litany of the RCPs crimes, the Boston busing fiasco tends to get pride of place, probably because it requires no specialized knowledge to understand what was wrong, but in my view it was the icing on the cake that was the campaign against “Bundism.”

It is true that “From Ike to Mao” will give you a useful picture of the line struggles. It is also true that as a memoir it is unbearably self-important to anyone not yet saturated in Bob appreciation. Hamilton’s piece no doubt elides certain questions in ways that support his conclusions, but it has the virtue of a modesty proportionate to the accomplishments of the organization.

Well of course, Bob Avakian is “one of the people who stuck with the RCP”, and I have recently read “From Ike to Mao and Beyond”, which does in fact have a very thorough account of that whole scenario, in which he played a fairly significant role, no? (pp.273-287). I would recommend it to anyone who is interested, and not just on the matter of the Liaison Committee, but on any and all of the territory covered by Steve Hamilton.

But, Ka Frank thinks this should be dismissed as a “self-serving auto-bio”, and he prefers Steve Hamilton’s insights, as “an honest attempt to sum up this experience and to acknowledge his own errors as well as contributions”. Bob Avakian’s summations are by extension, dishonest, and bereft of “acknowledging his own errors…”

This is nonsense on the face of it. There is serious acknowledgement by Avakian of his own errors throughout. It’s all about line struggle. Hamilton does make an honest attempt, and he is self-critical as well. The two just have different aims, different lines. Isn’t that what should frame the discussion?

The main problem–which comes with the “Independent Trend” he helped form after he left the RU–is his identification of “ultra-leftism” as the main problem in the RU after 1973. Thus, he doesn’t understand the deeply rooted economism that was the foundation for the RU’s utterly wrong and reactionary position that the Boston busing plan had to be opposed because it “divided the working class.” This economism was also the foundation for the RU’s refusal to build oppressed nationality mass organizations at a time when they had enormous potential among Blacks, Chicanos/Mexicanos, Puerto Ricans and other oppressed nationalities. The sole exception was
Wei Min She in SF Chinatown, which the newly formed RCP proceeded to dismantle after it recruited much of the WMS leadership and send most of them around the country.

He also doesn’t identify the economist line of the East Coast/Midwest half of the RCP that left to form the RWH, and the convergence of that rightism with their support for the revisionist coup in China. He describes the RCP as moving towards “a kind of left adventurism” in 1979, but the “Create Public Opinion, Seize Power” line that came out of the 1978 CC meeting was new and difficult to assess. Its ramifications only became clear in the politically disastrous campaigns for May 1980 and raise the circulation of the Revolutionary Worker from 10,000 to 100,000. Hamilton makes a useful contribution to understanding the consolidation of subjective idealism both ideologically and practically in the RCP when he points to the tendency in the new communist movement of the 1970s towards the

“petty bourgeois impulse (given poorly understood theory and limited experience) of impatience and a desire for and tendency to be impressed with quick and overly simplified solutions. Such solutions come about, of course, in the realm of ideas, not much connected to the realm of actual experience which might make some elements (workers, for example) suspect of such solutions, but not radicalized intellectuals who can get quite carried away in the realm of ideas. A kind of subjectivity is the result that often leads to a partial or complete inability to recognize and respond appropriately to the real requirements of building a political movement.”

I would have liked to see more analysis of how democratic centralism was transformed into bureaucratic centralism e.g., the development of the practice of “democratic consultation” (the appointment of members of leadership bodies by the Center instead of their election from below) and how that affected the internal life of the RU and early RCP. I also would have liked some discussion of the period of party-building, including to what degree it was driven by competition with OL and CL instead of the needs of the communist movement and mass movements. In particular, I have had some thought-provoking conversations with other ex-members of the RCP about whether the RCP was formed prematurely and with insufficient unity (as indicated by a major split only two years later).

“I also find it interesting now that I have become involved in mental health work that the Left in general does not feel comfortable addressing ”psychological” oppression, except in the most simplistic, ineffective manner; in fact, not addressing it. It seems to me to represent an extension into politics of the typically male attitude that feelings and internal effects of outward circumstances are somehow not as real as the things one is expected to do outside, such as maintaining a job, building a house, etc. The effect is that women continue to carry the emotional burden of family and relationships and the particular experience and skills of women are invalidated as necessary but of second-rate importance. I suspect that men pay just as high a price for maintaining this sort of dichotomy in terms of superficiality of relationships and self-understanding but objectively this unwillingness to consider “internal oppression” is sexist and has not only characterized the RU’s thinking but continues to permeate the Left. My bias is that such thinking also contributes indirectly to the tendency towards simplistic, rigid abstractness that we will sum up in the RU’s later development and characterize as “left subjectivity” or “left idealism.””

I think this is very astute. There is a highly gendered quality to a certain dogmatic style on the left in which (apparent) mastery of theory is alienated from the day to day work (often womens work) of building human relationships that real living movements depend on. This tends to only drive most people further away from engaging revolutionary theory leaving the field to guys who resemble nothing so much as stereotypical hypercerebral science fiction fans completely clueless to basic conversation dynamics, much less the art of leading mass movements.