Evaluating Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Revolution
in 1969: The International United Front and the
Impact on U.$. party-building
by MC5, February, 1998
We consider ourselves lucky in the United $tates to
have had two important communist-led mass
movements of Euro-Amerikans to study in the last two
generations. We believe they also hold important
lessons for the comrades in the European imperialist
countries. In one experience, the CP-USA achieved
100,000 members and at the time it did so it was
catering to industrial worker demands. It soon lost
those members, because they had succeeded in
achieving their economic demands. Just as it reached
its height, the CP-USA also dissolved itself once
before passing into permanent Browderism. MIM has
addressed this already in MT#10. We believe that what
the CP-USA did had to be tried, but we also believe
it proves beyond doubt that already by that time it
was not possible to root a Communist Party in the
industrial workers of imperialism, because those
workers were already bought off.
Even more relevant to our experience today is the
history of the 1960s. Once again, a correct party
emerged, gathered some momentum and threw itself
headlong into the industrial workers. The result is
there for all to see: the crypto-Trotskyism and sub-
reformist New Age "politics" of the Progressive Labor
Party. We call this New Age sub-reformism on PLP's
part, because PLP attacked 90% of the 16 million
member communist party under Mao as "capitalist
class." With such a large and dispersed enemy, the
only prescription the ultraleft ended up making was
ideological remoulding for anyone. Such an approach
de-emphasizes those who hold power. As we showed
elsewhere in a review of their magazine Road to
Revolution 4.5, this continues to this day in PLP's
practice: the PLP now openly announces that changing
one's mind is all that is necessary to make a break
for communism and that "communism lives" inside the
PLP.
Before the worker-student alliance, the PLP upheld
Mao and was its fraternal party. After the worker-
student alliance went into application, PLP went down
the drain, least of all numerically, but most
importantly from an angle of political line.
Reading the communist literature of the U.$.A. in the
1960s, it is important to remember how little
communist culture existed following the McCarthy
period. Much of the literature is dogmatic and devoid
of factual substance or alternatively, watery in a
right opportunist direction.
The 1960s changed all that, for good. Although we are
in a weak position in the 1990s as a communist
movement, there is no shortage of ideological and
theoretical thinking. In fact, we have now passed
into the direction of having too many "sects."
According to Mao, a sectarian is someone who puts his
or her narrow organizational interest above that of
the international proletariat. In the imperialist
countries, most sect variety is on account of
idealism. It is not much different than the reason
the United States has so much Protestant sect
variety. Religion is just one example of idealism's
infinite possibilities of division.
The Progressive Labor Party took the wrong turn in
the 1968 to 1971 period. That wrong turn was caused
by some difficulties and newness in the anti-
revisionist movement and it was solidified and
amplified by the PLP's "worker-student" alliance in
which the PLP performed the magic act of making the
petty-bourgeoisie disappear. In contrast, MIM has not
gotten involved in serving the labor aristocracy, and
MIM has managed to stay on the Maoist road for more
than 15 years, compared with the 7 years for PLP.
MIM upholds rooting oneself in the people. It is
only by repeated exposure to the same line and people
that the masses come to understand it. It does not
follow that it is necessary to put forward the class
demands of parasites to be rooted in the people.
Progressive Labor Party is the proof of Lenin's
dictum that no right opportunist error goes
unpunished by another ultraleft error. By studying
the documents below and above all by applying the
materialist method consistently, MIM seeks to avoid
PLP's revisionist outcome. Many who have not read
Lenin's work very carefully will call MIM "ultraleft"
and not much different than PLP. Indeed, where there
is no large mass movement exerting pressure on the
party, this must indeed be a suspicion. On the other
hand, the question of demarcation here is not one
principally related to the U.$.A. The whole question
started with Vietnam.
On this question, we invite the participation of the
whole international communist movement.
retyped by MC5
September 4, 1969
Central Committee of Communist Party of China Sends
Message of Condolences to Central Committee of
Viet Nam Workers' Party on Passing Away of President
Ho Chi Minh
"The Central Committee of the Viet Nam Workers'
Party:
"The Central Committee of the Communist Party of
China, on behalf of all the members of the Party and
the entire Chinese people, expresses, with boundless
grief, condolences on the passing away of President
Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Viet Nam Workers'
Party, the great leader of the Vietnamese people and
the close comrade-in-arms of the Chinese people.
"President Ho Chi Minh was an outstanding proletarian
revolutionary. He applied the universal truth of
Marxism-Leninism to the concrete practice of the
Vietnamese revolution. He dedicated his whole life to
the national-liberation struggle of Viet Nam and the
cause of communism. Under the leadership of President
Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Nam Workers' Party and the
heroic Vietnamese people waged protracted and
unyielding struggles against the French colonialists
and the Japanese fascists, won great victories,
founded the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam and
embarked on the road of socialism. After U.S.
imperialism unleashed its war of aggression against
Viet Nam, President Ho Chi Minh, by giving full play
to the might of people's war, led the entire
Vietnamese people in fighting U.S. imperialism, which
is the most ferocious of all, with the result that
U.S. imperialism was severely battered, driven into
an impasse and confronted with inevitable
destruction. He thus made important contributions to
the cause of the anti-imperialist
struggle of the oppressed people and oppressed
nations the world over.
"Upholding proletarian internationalism, President Ho
Chi Minh actively supported the revolutionary
struggles of the proletariat of all countries and of
all the oppressed people and oppressed nations. He
came to China several times in the years when the
Chinese people were waging the national-democratic
revolutionary struggle. He shared weal and woe with
the Chinese people and fought shoulder to shoulder
with them, and built up profound proletarian feelings
with the Chinese Communist Party. After the victory
of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, he worked
untiringly for strengthening and developing the
fraternal friendship and militant solidarity between
the Chinese and Vietnamese peoples. Forged through
protracted fighting, this friendship and solidarity
between our two peoples can stand any test.
"It is unfortunate that President Ho Chi Minh passed
away at the crucial moment when the Vietnamese
people's war against U.S. aggression and for national
salvation is about to win final victory. This is a
great loss for the Viet Nam Workers' Party and the
Vietnamese people and also a great loss for the cause
of the anti-U.S. struggle of the Chinese people and
all the people of the world. President Ho Chi Minh
has died, but his noble revolutionary qualities and
fighting spirit of defying brute force will live for
ever in the hearts of the Vietnamese people, in the
hearts of the Chinese people and in the hearts of the
revolutionary people of the world.
"We profoundly understand and sympathize with the
feelings of the broad masses of the Vietnamese people
at this moment. We sincerely hope that you will turn
grief into strength and deal U.S. imperialism still
heavier blows. We are deeply convinced that following
President Ho Chi Minh's teaching 'fearless of
sacrifices and hardships. . . .determined to carry on
and vigorously step up the resistance war, with the
firm resolve to fight and win,' the Vietnamese
people, who have a tradition of heroic revolutionary
struggle, will certainly overcome every difficulty on
their road of advance, small all schemes to undermine
their war of liberation, drive the U.S. imperialists
off the territory of Vietnam lock stock and barrel,
liberate the south, defend the north and [lost text
here, MC5] maintaining independence and keeping the
initiative in their own hands and persevering in
self-reliance.
"'The 700 million Chinese people provide powerful
backing for the Vietnamese people; the vast expanse
of China's territory is their reliable rear area.'
Following this teaching by Chairman Mao Tsetung, the
Communist Party of China and the Chinese people will,
as always, resolutely support the Vietnamese
people in carrying through to national salvation.
"U.S. imperialism is sure to be defeated! Viet Nam is
sure to win!
"Eternal glory to President Ho Chi Minh, the great
leader of the Vietnamese people!"
Peking Review, September 7 1969, pp. 3-4.
MC5 comments: What is important to notice is that in
the obituary from Mao's communist party, there is no
mention of Ho Chi Minh's contributions to the
struggle against revisionism or in support of the
Cultural Revolution. Yet, Vietnam was appearing to
uphold People's War. That much Vietnam did not share
with the Soviet Union.
From this obituary and many similar articles
celebrating the People's War in Vietnam, we should
gather that Mao considered Vietnam a part of the
united front against imperialism. There were some
agreements and some disagreements, but the
disagreements with the Vietnamese comrades were not
public.
In contrast, the Progressive Labor Party in the U$A
considered itself Maoist, but it criticized
Vietnamese revisionism in public as early as May,
1968. It is clear that PLP benefited from the
political training of the Chinese comrades. However,
PLP became impatient about the struggle against
revisionism.
Starting with "Road to Revolution III" in 1971, PLP
took an ultra-Trotskyist simpleton view of united
fronts. Aping the fair-weather friends of the
proletariat who abandoned Stalin in the hour of the
Soviet Union's greatest need -- just because Stalin
shook hands with the Nazis and signed the Non-
Aggression Pact in 1939 -- PLP took up the Christian
ultraleft purist stance of opposing Mao for shaking
hands with Nixon. The road to that decision started
with Vietnam.
Progressive Labor: Boston News "Revisionism:
Lea(r?)ning the Hard Way"
Historic reprint, May, 1968
retyped by MC5
"But why would the Vietnamese sell-out?
"The answer to this question is difficult to give in
a short space. It lies in the nature of what
Communists call 'revisionism' and the meaning of
opposing it.
"What is revisionism?
"Some strikes are broken by the boss because he can
hold out longer than the workers. Some are broken by
the government, when the boss can't do the job. But
most strikes are in fact never mainly defeated from
without. They are basically sold out from within, by
the trade union 'leaders' themselves.
"These are often men who got power in their unions by
appearing or actually being quite militant.
Sometimes they were phonies from the start. But a
trade union leader can make a lot of money. If he
never learns the necessity of sharp class struggle
leading, in the long run, to the total destruction of
the government which runs things for the boss, if he
gives in to the constant enticement of bribes from
the boss, even a militant can become a sell-out. This
can only be prevented if revolutionaries lead workers
to grasp the political realities of imperialism so
those workers become themselves the guarantee against
sell-outs by leaders who have gone over to the enemy.
"Revisionism is the theory and practice of selling-
out the people covered over with communist
phraseology. As such, it represents the interests of
exploiters against the oppressed. The history of the
revolutionary movement demonstrates that, as long as
there are exploited and exploiting classes, the
revolutionary leaders of the oppressed can become
revisionists, can betray the interests of the working
people, can take the side of imperialists. Thus in
the early 20th century, many leaders of the once-
revolutionary European socialist parties became pro-
imperialist. In European parliaments, most
representatives of the old socialist parties voted
for the First World War. It had long been agreed
among revolutionaries that the coming war was a war
among imperialists, a war for the division of the
world's working people and resources among
themselves. The socialist parties had agreed that the
workers had to use the situation of Imperialist war
to launch revolutions against their 'own' capitalist
class. And after World War I, when workers began to
take sharp revolutionary action in Germany, it was
these revisionists who sided with the most
reactionary forces in Germany to completely smash the
working people.
"Revisionism is presented by the American press as a
swear word used by rigid Marxist-Leninists top
smear their more 'creative' brothers. Thus to oppose
revisionism is to be an ideological fanatic. In fact,
revisionism is not marxist creativity. It opposes, in
the particular context of a given struggle, the
fundamental notions of marxism which make it
revolutionary. Against class struggle, revisionism
upholds peace between oppressors and oppressed.
Despite the constantly repeated historical lesson
that no class gives up power without revolution, the
revisionists hold that reform can bring the working
people to power.
Against the Marxist-Leninist notion that people,
people oppressed by imperialism and not technique or
weaponry, can defeat imperialism, the revisionists
uphold the motion that weapons are the main thing and
the political awareness of the people is of minor
significance. (In practice, this means that
revisionism wants to keep the people politically
'innocent' so they can be misled.) When such people
'lead' the revolutionary movement, they can hurt it
more than imperialism. When the imperialists attack
the people, the latter can learn lessons from such
attacks and fight back harder. But when revisionists
establish a strong following among the people, they
can use their position to prevent key lessons from
being learned, to get the people to follow their
wrong ideas, and thereby demoralize and sell out the
revolution. Misprepared and demoralized by
revisionist leadership, the people can be smashed by
imperialists' tactics of violence and
bribery. Thus, (CP), arguing that since the war was a
just war against fascism (which was true, no class
struggle in the U.S. was acceptable (false),
dissolved sharecroppers' groups all over the south.
The sharecroppers, left in the lurch, unprepared for
a sharp fight, were literally slaughtered by police
and vigilante forces.
"In recent years, revisionism has become the dominant
force in most old communist parties -- including
most of those in power. The result has been
tremendous setbacks for the movement. Thus the
willingness of the European and Soviet revisionists
to ease up the struggle in Europe meant that the U.S.
could move huge numbers of Europe-based troops to
Vietnam. Thus Russia gave large-scale aid too the
Indonesian fascists, after they had slaughtered half
a million reds and their followers, discussed
earlier. Thus the deals between
southern American communist parties and the military
dictatorship in their countries. Thus the support of
the revisionist American CP for Kennedy and McCarthy,
and its attempt to swing the anti-war movement
behind these imperialists. Thus the tremendous
pressure the Soviets applied to get the Vietnamese to
back down from their original four point stand for
immediate withdrawal, to their present one-point,
sell-out position.
"Revisionism, therefore, is not an abstraction, an
ideological heresy from which purists draw back in
horror. It is the organized, systematic attempt by
those who have sold-out to imperialism to betray the
revolution from within. It can be seen, by
observation, that revisionism develops in all
revolutionary movements. To let it take the lead is
to let the theory and practice of counter-revolution,
of imperialism, lead the anti-imperialist movement.
"In this stage in the development of the communist
movement, more than at any time, to fight revisionism
is crucial. Unless one defeats its ideological
influence in and practical leadership of the
movement, the movement must be reversed, must be
turned from anti- to pro-imperialist.
"It is clear, more and more, that revisionism is very
strong in Vietnam. There are a number of ways we can
see this.
"First, the fact that the
North Vietnamese leaders do not struggle against
revisionism. There is no way of conducting this
struggle secretly. The intensity of the fight in the
world communist movement between the revolutionary
and the opportunist, the revisionist position, is
tremendous. Therefore, the thing that most clearly
marks the revolutionary forces within that movement
today is that they wage a sharp struggle, both
theoretically and in day to day practice, against
revisionism.
This means criticizing a revisionist approach as it
develops out of the mistakes of basically solid
revolutionaries, as well as sharply opposing the
theory and practice of the world-wide revisionist
movement. But the Vietnamese have been notable for
their abstention from that struggle. Their stand has
been (somewhat favorably) presented in the Western
press as a 'third' socialist path. There can be no
such third path. In America, for example, Progressive
Labor opposes the class privelege (sic.) of 2S as
unjust and a thing which divides students and
workers. The revisionist Communist Party supports 2S.
What is the third path here? Similarly, revolutionary
force call for the total elimination of U.S.
influence in Vietnam.
The revisionists argue that this is too extreme, that
it is unreasonable, that a deal maintaining U.S.
presence is the only way. Where is the third path
here?
"Secondly, the
Vietnamese go further. Not only don't they attack
revisionism internationally -- they
support it, although this support is
somewhat veiled. Thus Ho Chi Minh sent a telegram
wishing success to the recent Soviet sponsored
congress of revisionist parties, call to attack the
revolutionary part of the communist movement,
especially China.
Again, the DRV consistently invites the worst sell-
outs, revisionists from all over the world, to visit
Vietnam. Then they can return, their influence
greatly enhanced by the prestige of the Vietnamese
struggle.
"Thirdly, the
Vietnamese don't fight revisionism in their own
country.
There are two ways we can tell this. One way is by
reading their literature. A struggle against
revisionism cannot be waged in private. Its absence
from Vietnamese publications means its absence from
the efforts of the Vietnamese leaders. A second way
is by considering what it means to accept Soviet aid.
Nobody gives aid without strings. Even if the Soviet
aid were without explicit strings (and Burchett's
statement, quoted earlier by Theodore Draper),
indicates this is hardly the case)(sic.), there is
the unspoken 'string': do something against me or
what I represent, and I'll remove aid. You can't
expect a man to lend you money if
you spit in his face. The Soviets would never give
aid to those who fight revisionism -- that was
precisely why they cut off aid to China in 1960.
"And this acceptance of Soviet aid, in turn, gives
the revisionists a tremendous boost around the world.
'Don't tell me the USSR's leadership is counter-
revolutionary! Don't they help the Vietnamese?' This
involves, of course, a fundamental misestimate of why
the Russians give that aid. As the U.S. knows, that
Russian aid enables the Vietnamese to shoot down a
few planes is secondary. For it also allows Russian
(revisionist) influence to become much stronger in
Vietnam; it builds the prestige of sell-outs all over
the world; it confuses people about revisionism, so
they see it as less militant communism instead of as
disguised counter-revolution; it prevents the
Vietnamese from fighting revisionism within their own
country, for if they fight, they lose aid. The more
aid accepted, the stronger it shows that revisionism
has become, the harder it is for wavering forces to
accept the hardships of rejecting the aid, the
greater the influence of revisionism in Vietnam can
become. The circle is vicious: the end result is the
defeat of the Vietnamese.
"'But why not unite with revisionism?' some people
argue. 'After all, does someone have to agree
completely for you Maoists to unite with him?'"
"Of course not. Revolutions develop in stages. To
make revolutions, communists must unite groups of
people whose needs may dictate very different long-
term goals, but who, within that stage, can unite in
a common struggle against a common enemy. Thus, in
Vietnam, workers and peasants unite with various
elements like small shop keepers and anti-U.S.
businessmen against imperialism. That's one thing.
But uniting with revisionism is another. Revisionism
means selling out the struggle on whatever level.
Revisionism isn't a class; rather, its leadership
rests on the opportunism present in all classes. It
acts to get various groups to function in the least
revolutionary way. To unite with revisionism is as
bad as uniting with imperialism.
"If the Vietnamese leaders opposed revisionism,
denounced it, fought it internally and externally,
and refused aid from it, the absence of that aid
would probably mean a slightly more difficult
situation in the 'purely military' sense. (Of course,
the weakness of the U.S. is not 'purely military'
anyway; the few planes that the SAM's (sic. for
surface-to-air missiles (plural) --ed. ) shoot down
can easily be replaced.) But the
struggle against revisionism would greatly strengthen
the Vietnamese politically. It would strengthen
people all over the world politically. And that,
after all, is how you win a people's war in the first
place.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN? WHAT SHOULD WE
DO?
"The situation that will emerge in Vietnam as a
result of negotiations for a U.S. presence will
undoubtedly be very complex. Although the
revisionists have the upper hand in the Vietnamese
communist party (north
and south), and therefore tremendous influence, most
Vietnamese communists are against revisionism. The
revisionists will be able to set the struggle back.
But we have n doubt that -- in the long run -- the
struggle will fully reassert itself, as the
Vietnamese learn to see through revisionists among
their leaders. . . ."
(end of excerpt)
MC5 comments: We have to agree with most of what PLP
says about the vanguard party in Vietnam. In
particular, the point that the Vietnamese party does
not fight revisionism in its own country is crucial.
From our limited factual knowledge of the time, there
were some Maoists in Vietnam upholding the
Cultural Revolution and the fight against
revisionism. However, let us assume that PLP got its
facts right here and that Vietnam has been on a
downhill slide which ended up in its copying Deng
Xiaoping revisionism after Liberation from U.S.
imperialism and siding with Soviet social-imperialism
even before that. Let's also ignore what PLP said
about unions in the U$A and use it as a correct
example where there are exploited workers in the
majority. If we grant these smaller points to the
PLP, then the larger issue remains what is the
relationship between the international united front
and the fight against revisionism?
This is the crucial question where PLP took the wrong
turn. Could the Vietnamese accept aid or was it
automatically out of the question? On this question,
we have to admit that the RCP-USA understanding is
theoretically superior to PLP's. According to the
RCP-USA, the contention of imperialist rivals is
fundamental to the economic system of imperialism.
Hence, whether the Soviet social-imperialists wanted
to or not, whether they had intentions of spreading
revisionism or not, they were bound to get involved
somehow in the Vietnam War. This flows from the
correct understanding of the imperialist anarchy of
production. Cooperation amongst capitalists or
imperialists is only relative, while contention is
absolute. To hold otherwise is a fundamental revision
of Marxism-Leninism tantamount to saying that
imperialism is a peaceful system. Lenin handled this
question in attacking Kautsky's theory of "super-
imperialism." Mao also dealt with it in attacking
Khruschev's "three peacefuls" including the ballot
box road to power.
Hence, PLP's ultraleft stance against Soviet aid to
Vietnam and the united front merges with right
opportunism in whitewashing the imperialist system,
Soviet social-imperialism especially. Soviet social-
imperialism got involved, because it was not a
peaceful system and because it sought redivision of
the world. Pursuing its own interests, it could
nonetheless seek to undermine U.$. interests.
The RCP-USA line is such a hodgepodge that we can see
by reading the PLP of the late 1960s things that
RCP-USA Avakian would say later in the 1970s. Thus,
while the RCP-USA may understand dog-eat-dog
capitalist competition, it did not draw the correct
conclusions with regard to the united front.
From the above document we should not be surprised
with the document that came later in 1969 from the
PLP.
retyped by MC5
"Greetings from M. Rosen, Chairman of National
Committee of U.S. Progressive Labor Party"
"Comrade Mao Tsetung, Chairman of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of China, and
Comrade Lin Piao, Vice-Chairman of the Party Central
Committee, have received from Comrade Milton
Rosen, Chairman of the National Committee of the
Progressive Labor Party in the United States, a
message of greetings on the occasion of the 20th
anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic
of China.
"The message said: On the occasion of the 20th
anniversary of the People's Republic of China, the
National Committee of the Progressive Labor Party
extends deep comradely greetings to the people of
China and to their proletarian vanguard, the
Communist Party of China. The great revolutionary
victory over imperialism and the Kuomintang bourgeois
reactionaries established the dictatorship of the
proletariat in China.
Together with the October Revolution, which has been
betrayed by the new Russian tsars, the Chinese
revolution is a milestone of the proletarian
socialist revolution. The timely launching of the
proletarian cultural revolution consolidated the
socialist state and brought the great Marxist-
Leninist thought of Mao Tsetung to the masses of
China and revolutionaries throughout the world. Above
all, the teachings of Comrade Mao instruct
revolutionaries to wholeheartedly serve the people.
This means that in order to win and secure socialism
we must defeat revisionism, racism and nationalism,
which are based on the reactionary bourgeois outlook
of self-profit. The U.S. and Soviet imperialists
conspire to encircle and destroy socialist China. The
focal point of their counter-revolutionary strategy
is to liquidate the people's war in Viet Nam by
obtaining a political deal in Paris which will
protect the U.S. imperialist economic and
military interests in Southeast Asia. Temporary
reversals caused by revisionist-nationalist betrayals
will ultimately be swept away by the continuing
revolutionary upsurge of the oppressed masses led by
genuine Marxist-Leninists. This upsurge also gains
momentum here in the United States. With militant
Black workers in the lead, a broad worker-student
alliance is being forged against the U.S. ruling
class. Increasing numbers of revolutionary youth
study Marxism-Leninism and the teachings of Comrade
Mao to guide the class struggle for a new society.
All revolutionaries are inspired by the great
achievements of the People's Republic of China under
the leadership of Chairman Mao Tsetung."
Source: Peking Review 24 October 1969.
MC5 comments:
The document above may seem like other communiques
supporting Mao at the time, but it actually
contains a number of rare items. First, it says "we
must defeat, revisionism, racism and nationalism,"
without qualifying that the nationalism of oppressed
nations is applied internationalism and hence
progressive.
Secondly, the document mentions "temporary reversals
caused by revisionist-nationalist betrayals." This
was a veiled reference to the Communist Party of
Vietnam.
Finally, the document is excellent evidence that it
was at that time that Progressive Labor Party was
reaching out to workers to forge the "worker-student
alliance." We believe the Workers Party of Belgium
(PTB) and the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany
(MLPD) should look at the experience of the PLP as
foreshadowing their own experience. Magazines from
PLP at the time criticized Soviet revisionism in a
way particularly reminiscent of the MLPD. Like MLPD
today, PLP wrote at length about the "petty-
bourgeois mentality" that infected the Soviet Union's
Communist Party.
Unlike the PTB or MLPD though, the PLP took the
stance above all else that all nationalism is bad. In
their muddled explanation of their difference with
Trotskyism, PLP claimed that Trotsky was too much for
nationalism!
In reality, PLP is for imperialist country
nationalism -- perfuming of the imperialist country
petty-bourgeoisie in particular. The PLP excels in
rooting out the evil interests of the oppressed
nation bourgeoisie, but it carried out one hell of a
magic trick by making the imperialist country petty-
bourgeoisie disappear. These combined efforts of the
PLP are designed to cause the proletariat to lose in
class struggle.
Where the proletariat does set up a pole as in China,
PLP opposes the united front and wishes defeat on the
proletarian camp. Where there is no proletarian pole
set up yet, PLP sabotages its creation from within by
smuggling in the labor aristocracy and other elements
of the petty-bourgeoisie. In the next document we see
the PLP magic trick, a disappearing act for the
imperialist country petty-bourgeoisie, one to be
palely imitated by the RCP-USA later.
Progressive Labor Boston News, May, 1968, page 50
"Progressive Labor: Building a Revolutionary Party of
the Working Class"
by a trade union club
retyped by MC5
"The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is trying to build
a revolutionary working class-led movement. The
kind of movement we are trying to build and the way
in which we fight is determined by our long range
goal-- the establishment of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
Only Two Classes: Capitalists and
Workers
"The two most important and powerful classes in the
world today are the working class and the owning
class (capitalists, the bourgeoisie, the ruling class
of the U=S= (sic.) and other capitalist countries).
These two classes are defined by their relationship
to the means of production (machinery, mines,
buildings, land, etc.). The capitalist class owns the
means of production and needs workers to operate the
machines and produce the goods. The working class,
which is the over-whelming majority, is that class of
people who, because they don't own the means of
production are forced to sell their ability to work
(labor power in order
to survive."
MC5 comments: What they leave out talking about "the
world today" is that the overwhelming majority in
the U$A is petty-bourgeoisie.
In response to this kind of blunder in the estimation
of revisionism, some comrades became the precursors
for post-modernism, which is the trendy way of being
subjectivist and relativist. Writers like Sakai,
Tani, Sera, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and
the Sojourner Truth Organization and others
associated with the RYM (Revolutionary Youth
Movement) saw supporting oppressed nation nationalism
as a carte blanche for revisionism.
The errors of the Vietnamese and Korean comrades were
taken up and reinforced by these right
opportunists and precursors to post-modernism. If Mao
said there needed to be Cultural Revolution, then
these right opportunists and post-modernists said the
attack on the bourgeoisie in the party was only
necessary in China. If PLP attacked revisionism,
these comrades said it was only because PLP was white
or in a white-dominated party.
Even in a situation as we have today where the
principal contradiction is between imperialism and
oppressed nations, Marxist-Leninist-Maoists have an
obligation to scientific truth first and foremost.
The distinctiveness of each nation is not a goal
higher than the repudiation of revisionism. Putting
nationalism above repudiating revisionism in the
communist party is insecure nationalism and
Liberalism combined.
The logical conclusion to such a line of reasoning as
putting nationalism first is post-modernism. It's not
much farther to saying what is correct or not depends
on one's identity. That is why Marx stressed that a
communist differs from other socialists and working-
class activists in that communists are scientific and
internationalist.
Either the Soviet Union had a bourgeoisie in the
party like Khruschev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin that
restored capitalism, or it did not. The answer is not
different depending on whether one is a Korean,
Vietnamese or Chinese comrade.
In this regard, we share our unity with PLP. The
Vietnamese party did fall into revisionism. PLP was
also right about Zhou Enlai and Hua Guofeng, even
while it attacked too many other targets.
Where MIM will not buy what PLP says concerns
idealism. It is ultraleft idealism for PLP to split
the way it has in the international communist
movement. There is as yet no successful PLPist
revolution, except in the minds and souls of PLP
comrades led by their New Age gurus. We cannot have
organizations splitting away every time they come up
with a new line. The communist movement must be
improved from within through unity and centralism.