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5

Maoism in the United States

Up to this point our study of Trotskyism and Maoism in France and the United States has revealed three different movement configurations. In France there are three major Trotskyist groups with differing positions on organizational patterns, issues, and tactics. On the other hand, a single party has been and continues to be dominant in the world of U.S. Trotskyism, with no other Trotskyist group matching it in size or scope and level of activity.

Until the mid-1970s the French Maoist movement was split between those holding to an anti-hierarchical conception of Maoism and those holding to a hierarchical or more traditionally Leninist conception. By the late seventies, the anti-hierarchical Maoists had just about completely faded from the scene, leaving three dominant hierarchical Maoist groups. The following examination of the Maoist movement in the U.S. reveals that one group dominated in the 1960s but tied its fortunes too closely with those of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It suffered badly as a result of the struggles within SDS, and two new Maoist organizations emerged which, along with the Guardian newspaper, became the dominant forces of U.S. Maoism for most of the seventies. We will examine the changes for the 1980s in the Epilogue.

Let us then begin with an examination of the origin and evolution of the first Maoist group in the United States, the Progressive Labor Party.

PROGRESSIVE LABOR

Like the French Maoist movement, the U.S. Maoists can trace the origin of their movement to the early 1960s and the impact which the Sino-Soviet split had upon communist parties in Western capitalist countries.

On June 1, 1962, approximately fifty members and ex-members of the U.S. Communist Party who felt that the Chinese position was correct, and that the Moscow-oriented Communist Party leadership was wrong in supporting the Soviet position, met at the Hotel Diplomat in New York and founded the Progressive Labor Movement.[1]

In its first three years of life the Progressive Labor Movement invested its energies in several activities. It defied the State Department ban on travel to Cuba and sent plane-loads of young people there. Upon their return from Cuba these people defied the inquisitorial House Un-American Activities Committee. Progressive Labor attempted to organize Black workers in the ghettos. It also attempted to lend support to the miners' strike which broke out in Hazard, Kentucky in 1962 and to the defense of the Black associates of Robert F. Williams in the Monroe, North Carolina kidnapping trial. Finally, the Progressive Labor Movement dominated an anti-war, anti-imperialist group created in May 1964 called the May 2nd Movement (M2M). The M2M adopted the "Out Now!" slogan, which the Trotskyist-dominated Student Mobilization Committee (SMC) used, as opposed to the Communist Party's "Negotiate Now!"

But from the very beginning there were severe recriminations between the SWP and the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM). While both groups adopted the "Out Now!" slogan, the Progressive Labor Movement urged draft resistance while the SWP urged people to go into the armed forces and do political work. Moreover, in both the Hazard, Kentucky and the Monroe, North Carolina actions the SWP accused the PLM of placing its own organizational and publicity interests above the interests of those whom they claimed to be serving. Progressive Labor, on the other hand, lumped both the SWP and the Communist Party in the same "revisionist" camp. Only on the issue of Cuba were they all in agreement for a time. However, Progressive Labor was to completely reverse itself on that issue, as Castro's ties with the Soviet Union and hostility with China increased.[2]

The organization grew rapidly. By 1964 it was claiming six hundred members and in the spring of 1965 eight hundred. The decision was made to transform itself from a movement to a party and at the first party convention, held in the summer of 1965, one observer cites estimates of from one thousand to fourteen hundred members.[3] Almost immediately after the first convention, in February 1966, the tactical decision was made to dissolve the M2M, to tighten organizational discipline, and to enter the Students for a Democratic Society. This again represented a very different strategy from that of the SWP and YSA, which concentrated their attention on the Student Mobilization Committee and remained outside SDS, while criticizing it for insufficient attention to the anti-war effort.

The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) differed from almost every other tendency within SDS in that it was a child of the Old Left and very anti-counter-culture. It was attached to a fixed version of Marxist thought. It felt that if one wished to relate to the workers one had to be like the workers. Counter-cultural generational differences were viewed as middle class phenomena with no relevance to the world of workers. Progressive Labor militants therefore adopted styles and patterns of social behavior which would not appear strange to workers. The men had short haircuts and both men and women dressed "neatly." They refused to use dope, not because of a fear for police action against them--which was the SWP's usually stated reason--but because workers would not respond positively to people who did that kind of thing. Needless to say, they were conspicuous among the more counter-culturally inclined delegates at SDS meetings.

The first political thrust which the PLP attempted within the SDS was a position paper presented in the spring of 1966 advocating a "Student Power" which would connect the efforts to gain student control over universities with those to put an end to war in Vietnam. The presentation of a program by a group with a fixed ideological analysis and program obliged others in SDS, most of whom were still very "anti-ideological," to come up with some kind of coherent statement of where SDS should go. It was at this time that Carl Davidson, an SDS "old-timer" who was later to become a Maoist himself, presented his alternative text "Toward a Student Syndicalist Movement, or University Reform Revisited."

Kirkpatrick Sale stresses the indigenous influence upon Davidson's thinking, "the original syndicalists, the Wobblies--and his own experiences at Penn State and Nebraska."[4] As one who heard Davidson present and discuss the position at a meeting on student power in May 1967, I was struck and continue to be struck by the similarities between the concept of student syndicalism as it was developed by militants within the national student union in France (UNEF) and the proposals of Davidson.[5]

The difference between Davidson's position and that of the PLP was clear. Davidson seemed convinced that (1) the university was the key institution for social change, and (2) students could gain control of the university. The PLP on the other hand felt that one could join the issues of university control, the war, and capitalism but that Davidson's formulation was not supported by any solid theory and would amount to students sticking their heads in the sand of the university. To take over the university (even if one developed a strategy whereby one could do that) is simply not equivalent to taking over the world, the PLP argued.

Shortly after it formed, in March 1963, the Progressive Labor Movement had issued a text of its program entitled "Road to Revolution--I."[6] In December of 1966, approximately eight months after it had offered its "student power" proposals to SDS, the Progressive Labor Party issued a revised "Road to Revolution--II." While the party did not yet completely turn against the NLF in Vietnam, it warned of the dangers incurred by the NLF's acceptance of Soviet assistance and clearly suggested that the Vietnamese refuse to accept the assistance. One of the effects of the new statement was to split the PLP itself. Kirkpatrick Sale contends that most of the people lost to the movement were West Coast and Canadian militants who also comprised the bulk of the non-students in the PLP.[7] I have no data to substantiate the latter assertion, but it is clear that after the 1966 split PLP strength was concentrated on the East Coast and in Chicago.

In any case, by its own admission the PLP was not recruiting well among workers, and if Sale is correct in asserting that it lost most of the non-students it had in 1966, this self-proclaimed vanguard of the working class was in serious trouble. In a summary of a PLP National Committee Meeting in January 1969, one reads the following:

But because our party may have 50% or 60% or even 90% of its members working in trade unions does not necessarily mean that we will have become a proletarianized or working class party. While we have concluded that the objective conditions are certainly ripe and full of class struggle out of which workers can be recruited to our party, whom have we been recruiting? It is mainly teachers, welfare workers and students, independent radicals and professionals. This is good, and should increase. But whom have we NOT been recruiting? Industrial workers (except in rare instances).[8]

This was particularly serious since the propagated strategy of the PLP at that time was that the revolution would have to be built upon the organization of union caucuses among industrial workers, and that it was particularly the super-exploited Black workers who were the "key revolutionary force."[9] Given the surplus of students and the scarcity of workers in the party, the PLP decided to conduct a "work-in" in the summer of 1967. This was simply an attempt on the part of members of the PLP to secure summer employment in factories and militate among the workers on the order of some of the summer projects of the ex-GP in France.

This project was not much of a success either. In a reassessment of their past strategy, in August of 1969 the party wrote:

One of the big mistakes we made was to perpetuate the old C.P. notion of sending students to work in industry. We thought it was only their revisionist politics that made a shambles of the "colonization" plan, and that since PL's line was correct our students in industry were guaranteed success. But we had made only a superficial analysis of the problem.[10]

 

If the actual attempt to send students to work in the factories was not a success, the PLP claimed a very impressive reception extended to its new newspaper, Challenge-Desafio. The party reported that the fortnightly paper, printed in both English and Spanish, had reached a circulation of 100,000 by 1970 and that over half of the purchasers of the paper were "workers on the job."[11]

But selling newspapers and mobilizing workers are two different things. The PLP had tried to shift from a "student power" to a "worker-student alliance" strategy. Its strength, however, was still in the universities, and particularly in the eastern SDS chapters.

Over half of the Harvard SDS chapter was PLP in 1967, and of the approximately two hundred voting delegates at the SDS National Convention in the summer of 1967 approximately forty or fifty were disciplined PLP members.[12] By the fall of 1967, Sale estimates that the party had one thousand members.[13] In terms of a group with a fixed ideology, they were without rivals in SDS.

In that fall of 1967 there was a curious rearrangement of positions. Davidson and the dominant SDS leadership was turning away from the exclusive reliance upon students and gaining control of the universities (students were seen as the "new working class" in the student syndicalist approach of Davidson) and going toward a program of resistance against imperialism on all fronts.

The PLP, however, began assuming a position which some characterized as "right-wing opportunism." It urged students to stick to the question of university complicity, to confine their activities to the campuses, and to avoid confrontations which might alienate both the student body and the community. This was justified by the lesson learned in the summer of 1967, i.e., the necessary groundwork had not been laid for joint student-worker "resistance" to U.S. imperialism, and workers were not prepared to follow students who marched into the factories. The PLP turned its attention to two separate strategies of base-building, one focusing on the campuses and the other on the worker milieu. It advocated the first of these strategies within SDS.[14]

A new configuration of forces within SDS began to emerge. The PLP was forcing prominent people within SDS to develop firmer organizational bonds even if they had no really firm ideological commitments. In the summer of 1968, before the Chicago confrontations, the PLP delivered a stunning defeat to those in control of the National Office (NO) of SDS. With no more than 25 per cent of those attending the convention actually PLP members, the party led the way in defeating both the vague program offered by the NO and attempts of the NO to get a more centralized structure accepted by the convention so that the NO could more effectively combat the PLP.

Frustrated in their attempts, the NO made a very drastic move. One of the problems which the League for Industrial Democracy had with the SDS (while the latter was still the former's youth affiliate) was the non-exclusionist policy of SDS. And this became a cardinal principle for SDS--no one was to be excluded from the organization. At this convention, however, the national officers attempted to convince the delegates that the PLP was an external organization which was attempting to frustrate the SDS's revolutionary efforts. It was clear that the majority of delegates was not agreeable to a move for expulsion, and the national officers did not force the issue to a vote.[15]

Although the PLP was not capturing control of SDS its actions were having very definite effects. It had at least contributed to pushing the whole organization to the left. By the spring of 1968 virtually all of the national leaders considered themselves "revolutionaries." Bernardine Dohrn, elected Inter-Organization Secretary in the spring of 1968, had declared herself to be a "revolutionary communist.''[16] She and almost all of the other members of the NO sincerely believed that the PLP's "right-wing opportunism" was obstructing the revolutionary work of SDS.

Virtually all of the NO people, who a couple years before had been ideologically vacuous, were evolving toward either the Weatherman position, as Dohrn was, or toward some non-PLP variant of Maoist ideology.

The other effect was to force the hand of the NO people into taking organizational measures which would be viewed by the non-committed delegates as undemocratic or somehow improper. The first move was the declaration that the PLP was an external group and the seeking of approval by the delegates for greater organizational control. As we have seen, the NO suffered a defeat. The second move of the NO was to advance a slate of candidates for the top three offices in SDS. Again, this violated the norms of the organization. The PLP knew that this would be viewed negatively by the delegates and tactically refused to present a slate of its own. The NO slate won the offices, but only by virtue of lack of competition and at the cost of further offending the sensibilities of the uncommitted delegates.[17]

The confrontations in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention late in the summer drove a further wedge between Progressive Labor and the National Office. At first, the approach of the National Office was to make an appeal to the supporters of Senator Eugene McCarthy to recognize that electoral politics within the two-party system would not result in fundamental change. But when the NO leaders actually saw the turnouts in the streets and in Lincoln Park, they shifted their appeal from the McCarthy supporters to the masses of young people who were there to protest the whole affair. The National Officers became involved in the confrontation politics of the streets. The PLP, on the other hand, reacted to the August confrontation in Chicago in a fashion similar to the reaction of both the Maoist UJCML and the Lambertist Trotskyist OCI to the French uprising earlier in the summer. The PLP claimed, as had the above French groups faced with the barricades of Paris, that the revolution could not be made by students facing off against police but only with the participation of the working class. But the confrontations in Chicago were not followed by anything like the massive workers' strikes in France which then led the French Maoists to go out on "Long Marches" to support the workers occupying their factories.

In 1968 confrontation politics was at its height in most of the Western industrialized countries, and youth groups which opposed it tended to be viewed as traitors to the revolution and to their generation. The verbal, physical, and litigational attacks from the establishment (and in France this included the Communist Party) were becoming very serious, and the tolerance of opposition from young people in "Old Left" groups was diminishing rapidly.

And in the eyes of the NO and many of the rank-and-file SDSers the anti-confrontation, anti-drug, short-haired, highly disciplined PLP people were just as "Old Left" as the Communist Party of which they were originally a dissident faction.

Moreover, the PLP was coming apart at the seams. On the East Coast, and particularly in New York and Philadelphia, some PLP people were quitting and/or being expelled for developing a separate analysis of the working class. At the June 1968 SDS national convention, some of these people from the SDS chapter at Columbia University, who had come under the growing influence of an older former Trotskyist and SWP member named Lyndon LaRouche (alias Lynn Marcus), formed the Labor Committee.[18] While the Labor Committee group was expelled from the Columbia SDS chapter later in the year, its influence spread geographically and it was to evolve into one of the most bizarre formations ever to appear in American politics. The name was changed to the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC).

On the West Coast the PLP's fortunes were also declining. While the organization took over the Berkeley SDS chapter after the former leaders of the chapter led a sit-in to gain university credit which the university was refusing for the course being taught by Eldridge Cleaver--a sit-in which did not accomplish its goal and which resulted in numerous arrests--the PLP found that it had taken over little more than itself. The non-PLP militants in the chapter walked out and formed the Radical Student Union, the first step in the creation of an organization which would replace the PLP as the largest and most vital Maoist group in the United States.

Thus, while the PLP was able to embarrass the National Office at earlier SDS meetings, its proposals at the October 1968 National Council meeting (450 people attended) went down to a resounding two-to-one defeat.[19]

By the National Council meeting of December 1968, the opposition to the PLP had coalesced under the name Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM). By this time the PLP had reversed itself on a number of positions which drove the wedge in even further. After first supporting the cause of Black nationalism as espoused by the Black Muslims, distinguishing between "revolutionary" nationalism and "reactionary" nationalism, the PLP adopted the position that all nationalism was reactionary. It continued to see Black industrial workers as a key revolutionary force, but it opposed all separatist Black movements. It opposed busing as a Southern plot to drive a wedge against Black and White workers. And it denounced confrontations designed to gain university open admissions, the institution of Black studies programs, and affirmative action programs for the hiring of Black or minority teachers. Its own pet projects at the universities were an anti-ROTC program and the curtailment of university expansion into urban communities, the latter being a particular favorite of its important contingent at Columbia University.

Its position on women was similar to that on Blacks. Women were terribly exploited within the capitalist economy, but it would be a serious mistake to separate the struggle of women from that of the working class as a whole. The object of a revolutionary group should be to hold the working class together, not to separate it into subcategories. The positions of the SWP were thus seen to be completely opportunistic. If there was a separatist movement to be found, be it among Blacks, Latinos, women, or people of homosexual preference, the PLP viewed the SWP as always willing to jump on the bandwagon without any theoretical analysis of how this division of the working class was going to maximize the chances for a successful revolution.

In the international arena, the PLP turned completely against the Cubans and the Vietnamese revolutionary movement. As the Cubans moved closer to the Soviets and as relations with China deteriorated for that reason, the PLP--the first group to send young people down to Cuba in defiance of the State Department ban (the Venceremos Brigade was only created in 1969, seven years after the PLP had sent its first group to Cuba)--designated the regime in Cuba as "bourgeois." On the issues of minorities, women, and Cuba the PLP moved to the positions which had been taken even earlier by the Trotskyist Spartacist and Workers Leagues, which had separated themselves from the SWP. But whereas these Trotskyists had written off the Cuban Castro regime in 1962, the shift in the position of the PLP began about 1966.

Even more difficult for the SDSers to accept was the position on the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. As we have seen, the PLP created an anti-war group, the M2M, which it abolished when the party entered SDS. This abolition was tactical and in no way indicated a negative attitude toward the Vietnamese NLF. As late as March 1969, the Opening Report of the PLP Pre-Convention contained the following passages:

People's War in Vietnam has proven its invincibility. The Vietnamese people are giving a profound demonstration in revolutionary action. We cannot say too many times how this revolution has inspired and encouraged anti-imperialist and revolutionary developments the world over. We have been in the forefront of compelling the U.S. to get out of Vietnam now, despite all obstacles, and this has shown our class consciousness. Internationalism, the support of the revolutionary process everywhere and the subordination of the local struggle to the over-all class struggle, is a sign of growing maturity. In the final analysis internationalism, the knowledge of the fact that the working class and the oppressed people are united in a common cause and against a common international enemy, gives the working class a great deal of leverage. It enables the revolutionary forces on a world scale to concentrate their strength against a common enemy as well as to vigorously develop the revolutionary process at home. Obviously our complete support of the people in Vietnam has helped our struggle at home. This struggle has not only raised our own consciousness but also raised the understanding of millions of our people.

We would be foolish to overlook setbacks in the international movement that took place in this period and not try to summarize what they mean. Counter-revolution has scored several significant temporary victories: Indonesia, Algeria, Cuba and the complete transformation of class power in the Soviet Union and in all the eastern European countries except Albania. Additionally, U.S. imperialism has launched attacks in the Mid-East, Latin America and Africa.

Generally speaking, we should view the international revolutionary movement in this way. Because of the importance of the Cultural Revolution in China, and the overwhelming significance of Vietnam, the international movement is strategically stronger. Marxism-Leninism is stronger because it is more thoroughly developed than ever before. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been clarified and strengthened. People's War has been proven to be a vital contribution to the arsenal of Marxism-Leninism. The understanding of how to fight revisionism in a revolutionary party by clarifying the relationship of the party to the people is invaluable. Three little words--"Serve the people"-if properly understood and applied, are a weapon for the working class of incalculable force. So, in fact, if the international movement is smaller in numbers than before, its development is higher than ever. Newly emerging revolutionary forces all over the world can benefit enormously from the Thought of Mao Tse-tung. They can avoid the mistakes of Indonesia, the Algerians, and the Arab world, to mention a few.[20]

The statement, of course, reflects the disenchantment of the PLP with Cuba. The rejection of "the Algerians" and the "mistakes of Indonesia" also represent reversals of past support for both the Ben Bella and Boumedienne regimes in Algeria and the Sukarno regime in Indonesia. At this point, all the PLP had left in the international arena were the Vietnamese revolutionaries, China, and China's Eastern European ally, Albania. Of course this was still more than anything that the Trotskyists could offer as models in terms of actual regimes.

However, almost immediately after this statement was issued, the PLP began to turn away from the Vietnamese. In "Program for Black Liberation" in February 1969--not even a year after the above statement praising the Vietnamese was issued--the PLP drew an analogy between its willingness to support Black separatist movements if the ruling class moved to destroy them physically, even though it thought that they were not revolutionary, and its support for the Vietnamese:

This is our attitude in regard to Vietnam. Though we no longer believe that the Vietnamese leadership is fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat, we support the efforts of the people against imperialism and demand that the U.S. get out now regardless of what type government the Vietnamese wish to set up. We also call upon the Vietnamese workers and peasants to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only way they can determine their own destiny.[21]

Six months later the party took a much harder line toward the Vietnamese. In a document entitled "Revolutionaries Must Fight Nationalism," published in August 1969, the PLP contended:

The Vietnamese leadership, at least in large measure, became enmeshed in Soviet "aid." They were passively on the side of the Soviets in the China-Soviet struggle. The Vietnamese enthusiastically supported Soviet and other revisionist parties' policies that didn't directly involve China. As you recall, the Vietnamese were the first to hail Soviet aggression against the Czechs. We have always been puzzled by never reading about or seeing any statement from the South Vietnamese communists. What was the communist role in the NLF? We did see the ten-point program which was hailed by the Soviets. This program didn't speak of socialism. It proclaimed "neutrality" as the aim of the NLF. The program was typical nationalist propaganda: vaguely anti-imperialist, neutralist, and advocating a vague coalition government when the U.S. was out of Vietnam.... The ten-point program is a variant of the Dimitrov "popular front" theme of the 7th world Congress of the Communist International. It envisions the peaceful transition to socialism. The theory is first to win the victory of the popular front and then move somehow to socialism. The line of peaceful step by step reunification of South and North Vietnam through means of negotiations is also variant [sic] of the peaceful-transition-to-socialist theme. Is it any wonder that the ten-point NLF program is everywhere hailed and supported by the revisionists? How is it possible for revisionists and Marxist-Leninists to unite behind the same program? Only by sacrificing the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is the very heart of Marxism-Leninism.[22]

Further along in the document a scathing analogy is drawn between the NLF strategy and that pursued by the communists in Indonesia:

As Stalin once mentioned, in regard to other national leaders, they run to the imperialist camp when they are threatened by their own people. In other words, when the Indonesian people were getting too close for bourgeois comfort, Sukarno, like other nationalists, betrayed workers to the imperialists. At the moment, Indonesia is tied to the U.S. and Russia. The people are in dire straits. Millions are dead or dying. The masses are learning the hard way the results of "revolutionary" nationalism. When the Indonesian people fight their way back to political power it won't be by relying on the nationalists, no matter how big they talk or even seem to act sometimes. And no fake national program will lead to their rise to political preeminence. NLF-type liberation programs will take radicals right to the graveyard. They will be next to the heroes of Indonesia who have paid a stiff price so others won't make the same mistake.[23]

The previously-referred-to December National Council meeting was extremely bitter, and victories were won by very narrow margins. The PLP's position that racism should be seen as a device at the disposal of the ruling class to divide workers won over the RYM's objection that racism also infected the working class and that Blacks were in the revolutionary vanguard. On the other two issues, RYM won the day. Michael Klonsky, SDS's National Secretary for 1968-69, successfully defended the RYM proposal (whence the name RYM) that SDS try to move out of the student milieu into the larger youth milieu. This offended the PLP's "workerist" orientation. And the RYM position on women, which contended that the oppression of women under male supremacy was even greater than the oppression of working people in general, but which stopped short of urging separatist organizational attempts to combat that supremacy, won over the PLP's contention that the sexual contradiction was secondary to the class contradiction.[24]

The PLP suspected that there would be a move to expel them. Klonsky assured them that that was not the case and indeed no such move was made at the December meeting. But between that meeting and the SDS convention the following June, the PLP attacked the Vietnamese NLF, the Black Panther Party, and the Black student movement.

1969 CONVENTION AND BIRTH OF POST-PLP MAOISM

The convention sealed the fate of both SDS and the PLP. Prior to the convention the anti-PLP forces which had gone under the name RYM split into two groups, RYM I and RYM II. RYM I was what was to become known as Weatherman. RYM II was dominated by people who were more conventionally Marxist-Leninist. In the early days of the convention, however, they remained in an alliance to defeat the PLP. As the ground rules of the convention were being laid, the alliance was defeated by the PLP on two purely procedural points.

The PLP did not have anywhere near a majority of the delegates on the floor. Their victories were a result of their ability to convince uncommitted delegates that their positions were better than those of their adversaries. Nevertheless, the NO panicked and sought assistance from outside the ranks of SDS. The strategy backfired in their faces.[25]

Members of the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Chicano Brown Berets, and the Black Panthers were all invited to address the convention. The leaders of all of these organizations, as one would expect, attacked the contention of the PLP that all nationalism is reactionary. And things went very well for the NO until Rufus Walls, Minister of Information for the Illinois Black Panther Party, decided to address himself to the question of woman's liberation. He asserted that Panthers believed in having women in the movement; they believed in "pussy power." He also informed the delegates--and the NO people were, of course, quite beside themselves--that "Superman was a punk because he never even tried to fuck Lois Lane." Walls was followed by Panther Jewel Cook who, after hitting at the PLP for not leading any fights on the campus, declared that he too was in favor of "pussy power." And then he repeated a line which Sale attributes first to Stokely Carmichael during the old SNCC days, namely that the position of women in the revolutionary struggle is "prone."[26]

The entire meeting was thrown up for grabs with PLP and the uncommitted delegates shouting "fight male chauvinism" and the NO people huddling, trying to figure out what to do in the face of this disaster. Jared Israel of the PLP took over the microphone and told the delegates that this fiasco illustrated the contrast between the PLP's principled positions and the completely unprincipled and untheoretical politics of the NO. The NO managed to squelch a proposal that there be a full-scale discussion of what had occurred and of the problem of sexism.

The next day the PLP presented their proposal "Less Talk, More Action--Fight Racism" and it was attacked by both RYM factions. That evening Jewel Cook of the Panthers reappeared to read a statement which the Panthers, the Brown Berets, and the Young Lords had all signed and which had the personal approval of Panther Chairman Bobby Seale. Agreement was secured from the floor to turn the microphone over to Cook to read the following statement:

After a long study and investigation of Students for a Democratic Society and the Progressive Labor Party in particular, we have come to the conclusion that the Progressive Labor Party has deviated from Marxist-Leninist ideology on the National Question and the right of self-determination of all oppressed people.

We demand that by the conclusion of the National Convention of Students for a Democratic Society that the Progressive Labor Party change its position on the right to self-determination and stand in concert with the oppressed peoples of the world and begin to follow a true Marxist-Leninist ideology...

If the Progressive Labor Party continues its egocentric policies and revisionist behavior, they will be considered as counter-revolutionary traitors and will be dealt with as such.

Students for a Democratic Society will be judged by the company they keep and the efficiency and effectiveness with which they deal with bourgeois factions in their organization.[27]

Cook then attempted to go into an extemporaneous attack on the PLP. The PLP delegation, however, took up their cries of "Smash redbaiting! Smash redbaiting!", "Read Mao!", and "Bull-shit! Bull-shit!" The NO supporters retorted with the Panther slogan "Power to the people!" to which the PLP responded "Power to the workers!" Unable to continue, Cook and his Panther cohorts walked out of the hall. Jeff Gordon of PLP then marched to the rostrum with a group of PLPers and announced to the convention that the PLP had no intention of being intimidated out of SDS.[28]

At this point, Bernardine Dohrn, of the RYM I faction, took the microphone--apparently without prior agreement by other NO people--and announced that a decision on whether or not coexistence with the PLP within SDS was possible had to be made. She invited all delegates who wished to discuss the problem to gather in a room adjacent to the main hall. The PLP attempted to get the people to stay in the hall. Sale estimates that of the fifteen hundred delegates, perhaps two hundred gradually filed into the other room while the PLP chanted "Sit down!", "Stay and fight!", and "No split!"[29] Nothing was decided on that Friday. On Saturday the RYM leaders met with their supporters again. It was apparent to the uncommitted delegates that they had to make a choice of meeting with the PLP--which was now busy carrying out business and passing motions in the absence of the RYM people--or meeting with the RYM group. At this point the organization was de facto split. By this time the RYM group had about six hundred supporters while some of the uncommitted and Old Left groups, such as the Spartacist League and International Socialists,[30] stayed with the PLP in the main hall. By an approximately five-to-one majority the RYM group decided to violate both the principle of non-exclusion and the SDS constitution, which stated that expulsions would require a two-thirds vote of the National Council. They then and there voted to expel the Progressive Labor Party.[31]

Dorhn, who was the driving force in the schism, and several other RYM leaders were charged or charged themselves with drawing up the bill of particulars against the PLP.[32] It read as follows:

The Progressive Labor Party has attacked every revolutionary nationalist struggle of the black and Latin people in the U.S. as being racist and reactionary. For example, they have attacked open admissions, black studies, community control of police and schools, the Black Panther Party and their "breakfast for children" program, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

Progressive Labor Party has attacked Ho Chi Minh, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, the revolutionary government of Cuba--all leaders of the people's struggle for freedom against U.S. imperialism.

Progressive Labor Party, because of its positions and practices is objectively racist, anti-communist, and reactionary. PLP has also in principle and practice refused to join the struggle against male supremacy. It has no place in SDS, an organization of revolutionary youth.

For all these reasons, which have manifested themselves in practice all over the country, as well as at this convention, and because the groups we look to around the world for leadership in the fight against U.S. imperialism, including the Black Panther Party and the Brown Berets, urge us to do so, SDS feels it is now necessary to rid ourselves of the burden of allowing the politics of the Progressive Labor Party to exist within our organization.[33]

That Saturday night the PLP agreed to suspend its meetings to hear what the RYM had decided. With the security forces of both groups poised to prevent physical attack, Klonsky, Rudd, and Dohrn mounted the platform and Dohrn took the microphone to recount the misbehavior of the PLP and to inform its members and those who sided with them that they were out of the SDS. She then led the RYM followers out of the Chicago Coliseum where the convention was being held. The next day the PLP continued to hold its convention--which it claimed was the real SDS convention--in the Coliseum, while the RYM people held their convention--which they claimed was the real SDS convention--in a church not far from the Coliseum.

The Progressive Labor Party continued to claim for a while that their "Worker-Student Alliance" group was the real SDS. But the organization was effectively isolated from other groups. Moreover, it was unable to accept the shift of the Chinese from an uncompromisingly hostile posture toward the United States to a much more flexible and friendlier policy. In 1971, the PLP decided that China was, in fact, a capitalist country ruled by a "red bourgeoisie."[34] The party continued to operate with a very small membership, in the same position as the Trotskyists in that it had no models in the real world of political regimes.

The demise of the PLP as a force to be reckoned with in the American radical youth movements in no way spelled the end of Maoism in the United States. The irony of the situation is that several Maoist organizations were born out of the attempt to contain the PLP within SDS. Thus what began as a fight against an Old Left Marxist-Leninist group by an amorphous and ideologically vacuous ensemble of New Left forces within SDS ended as a fight between the still-Maoist PLP and a coalition including anti-PLP Maoists and Weathermen.

RYM II, Weatherman's partner in the battle against the PLP, was not completely Maoist. But most of the major figures in it were or were well on their way to becoming Maoist. Michael Klonsky had sharpened his political perspective during his 1968-69 leadership position in SDS and would work within the Maoist Los Angeles Marxist-Leninist Collective after leaving office. RYM II slated Bob Avakian, who had already formed the Maoist Bay Area Radical Union, to replace Klonsky as SDS National Secretary. RYM II's candidate for Educational Secretary was Lynn Wells, a close associate of Klonsky who had worked with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Students Organizing Committee, who would lead the Maoist Georgia Communist League after she and Avakian were defeated by Weatherman candidates Mark Rudd and Bill Ayers. Former SDS national officers Clark Kissinger (National Secretary 1964-65) and Carl Davidson (Inter-organizational Secretary 1967-68) also supported RYM II and went on to become important figures in later U.S. Maoism. After his SDS days, Kissinger went on to become a major figure in the U.S.-China People's Friendship Association and a very close associate of Avakian if not actually a member of his party. After his SDS days, Davidson immediately became an editor of the Guardian, until 1975, when he joined the group headed by Klonsky. Thus, while having little impact on Trotskyists, the SDS experience was crucial in the development of U.S. Maoism.

OVERVIEW OF U.S. MAOISM IN THE 1970s

After the 1969 confrontation with SDS and the departure of the PLP from the ranks of Maoism, the forces headed by Avakian and Klonsky provided the major organizational thrust of U.S. Maoism. Avakian and Klonsky have been at the helm of the two largest Maoist organizations in the United States, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) and the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), or CP (ML) respectively.

While there has not been the fundamental distinction between hierarchical and anti-hierarchical Maoism that we have seen in France, the larger picture of U.S. Maoism has been in some senses even more complex. The three major reasons for the complexity have been the impact of the racial and ethnic issues in the United States, the abstention of the Chinese from taking sides in the conflicts among Maoist groups in the United States until the summer of 1977, and the emphasis upon decentralized city-wide or community political organization that is largely lacking in France but is an important heritage of the 1960s in the United States.

The result was many more groups than found in France. These include the RCP and the CP (ML), which will occupy our attention in the next section, the numerous small groups and collectives spread out all over the country,[35] the U.S.-China People's Friendship Association, and China Books and Periodicals, Inc., with book and literature distribution centers in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. But the most important Maoist structures in the United States which have no counterparts in France were the racially or ethnically specific groupings and the Guardian weekly newspaper.

(1) Racially or Ethnically Specific Groupings

The Third World orientation of Maoism has had as one effect the fortification of Third World identities among Maoists of Third World heritage in the United States. As we shall see in the next section, Maoists attempt to deal with Third World heritage under the rubric of "nationality" rather than that of race or ethnicity. One organizational manifestation of this was the presence of ethnically or racially specific separate organizations, as well as various attempts to group these organizations under umbrella coalitions.

While Klonsky and Avakian found themselves on the same side as the Black Panthers in combatting the PLP in 1969, the Panthers did not claim to be a Maoist organization. And, while the California Communist League (later to become the Communist Labor Party or CLP) was founded in 1968 largely by Black and Puerto Rican former Communist Party members, it was not a completely separatist organization. Rather the origin of Black Maoist organizations was based upon the political evolution of militants in other Black organizations. Among these were the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Workers Caucus movement, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers which had created the Revolutionary Union Movements. The best known of these movements was the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) which attempted to organize Black workers within the Dodge automobile factories.[36]

In 1970, former SNCC militants, other radicalized students and former students, and a lesser number of workers formed the Black Workers Congress (BWC), the first clearly Maoist Black political organization in the United States. For two years the League of Revolutionary Black Workers maintained a direct organizational relationship with the BWC. In 1972, a split occurred between the two but some of the League's members transferred affiliation to the Maoist BWC.[37] Approximately two years after that, the BWC itself split apart in four different directions.

Another Black Maoist organization was created in the mid-1970s. This was an outgrowth of the Congress of Afrikan People (CAP), headed by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Baraka had begun community organizing in Newark in the mid-1960s. At that time he was a Black cultural nationalist. He was active in the 1970 election campaign of Mayor Kenneth Gibson in Newark. After falling out with Gibson prior to the mayor's 1974 reelection, Baraka moved away from cultural nationalism and over to a Maoist position. Baraka carried over his unique (for American Maoists) electoral orientation by calling for a very broad united front anti-capitalist "national people's convention" to be held in the spring of 1976, a convention which was supposed to select a presidential candidate.[38] Not long after Baraka issued his convention call, the CAP became the Revolutionary Communist League (Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought).

Still another Black Maoist organization was the Revolutionary Workers' League (RWL), which grew our of the earlier African Liberation Support Committee. It was part of an umbrella group of "nationally" specific Maoist organizations called the Revolutionary Wing. The Wing was created in 1975 and lasted for about two years. Joining the Black RWL in the Wing were Puerto Rican, Asian-American, and Mexican-American groups.

The Puerto Rican group within the Revolutionary Wing was the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers' Organization (PRRWO). Unlike the Black RWL, the PRRWO traced its lineage back to a group which was active in the anti-PLP campaign within the SDS, the Young Lords Party. Before aligning with the RWL in the Revolutionary Wing, the PRRWO had been very close to the Black Workers' Congress. Their shared perspectives included a commitment to the proposition that there are two kinds of nationalism, revolutionary and reactionary, and that the kind that they were advocating respectively for Puerto Rico and the Black Belt South was indeed revolutionary. They also had similar views concerning school busing; it was seen as an integrationist and reformist plot. Finally, they agreed that none of the multinational Maoist groups in the United States gave sufficient recognition to the fact that non-White workers and workers of Third World heritage, who are the victims of both national and class oppression, showed the greatest revolutionary potential. Despite this critical distance from the multinational Maoist groups, the PRRWO and the BWC together had gone through a phase of working relationships, first (in 1972-73), with the RCP's predecessor organization, the Revolutionary Union, and then with the Communist League.[39]

The Chicano and Chicana organization, the August Twenty-Ninth Movement (ATM), participated briefly in the Revolutionary Wing. But on two concrete issues, it parted company with the Black and Puerto Rican affiliates of the Wing. First, it favored compulsory busing in Boston while reserving the right of individual Blacks to choose if they wish to be bused. Second, it supported the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment while the other affiliates opposed ERA. While the ATM was in the Wing, these differences led critics to argue that it was not a principled coalition. "Instead of ideological struggle, a liberal 'detente' prevail [sic] among them."[40]

Two Asian-American organizations did participate in the Wing. One was the San Francisco-based Wei Min She (WMS). It was very close to Avakian's RCP. But WMS did not seem to last much longer than the Wing itself, two years at most. At least some of its militants then went directly into the RCP. Another largely Asian-American group participating in the Wing for only a brief period was the Workers Viewpoint Organization. Led by a former PLP member, it originally was called the Asian Study group.

An Asian-American Maoist group that rejected all ties with the Wing was the New York and San Francisco-based I Wor Kuen (IWK). It had participated in the 1972-73 relationship with the Revolutionary Union, the PRRWO, and the BWC which was called the National Liaison Committee. But it became quite alienated from these groups and thus avoided the Wing, which included some of the same groups. Along with the Chicano and Chicana ATM, which had partcipated in the Wing for a short period. IWK created the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L) in 1978. This latter organization was very close to Klonsky's Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), the great multinational rival of Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party. IWK thus had been very critical of its Asian-American rival, Wei Min She, for its close ties to Avakian's party. After the demise of Wei Min She, the IWK began to focus its attacks on the Workers Viewpoint Organization, the only one of the Asian-American groups that was truly a national organization.[41]

French Maoists have not had to deal with anything like this terribly complex network of racially or ethnically specific Maoist organizations. Immigrant workers in France have clear national identities and the confusion between race, ethnicity, and nationality is certainly less of a problem, although racism is not. Moreover, although the Trotskyist SWP calls for the creation of a separate Black political party, it is within Maoism and not Trotskyism that such separatist organizations have actually manifested themselves. Neither the RCP nor the CP(ML) wanted these structures or would think of advocating them like the SWP has. For these "multinational" Maoist parties, such separatist organizations muddied the waters and had a debilitating effect upon their own organizations.

(2) The Guardian

The Guardian is a weekly newspaper which played an important role in the development of U.S. Maoism. It differs from the French paper l'Humanite Rouge in that until the late 1970s the Guardian did not attempt to establish any organizational base, whereas l'Humanité served as a cover for the PCMLF during its nine years of clandestine activity. Moreover, there is no newspaper without an organizational base which has performed the same quasi-clearinghouse function for Trotskyists as has the Guardian for Maoists.

The Guardian was originally created to support the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1945. In the 1950s it condemned the prosecution and conviction of the Rosenbergs and denounced the U.S. role in Korea. In the 1960s the paper opposed U.S. policy on Cuba, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic. It also supported the national claims of the Palestinians.

In 1968 executive editor Irwin Silber succeeded in attracting SDS national leader Carl Davidson to the Guardian. Under the leadership of Silber and Davidson, the Guardian moved still closer to the Chinese interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and away from what they regarded as the revisionism of the Soviet Union and the various national parties which support it.

In the early 1970s, after the Progressive Labor Party had denounced Mao and before any of the present Maoist parties had declared themselves to be parties, the Guardian called for the creation of a "non-revisionist Marxist-Leninist" party in the U.S. While the pages of the Guardian had always been open to a multitude of different groups which wished to express themselves on various subjects, in 1973 the editors turned over its pages to various currents and groups for a discussion of the specific question of party-building.

But the paper itself did not become involved in the actual dynamics of party-building at this time. In its masthead the Guardian described itself as an "independent radical news weekly." It announced that it would continue to remain independent of "one or another tendency in the movements."[42] The editors summed up what they saw as the paper's role at that point in time:

Seeing the creation of such a party as the historic task of our time is not to suggest that the Guardian proposes to organize such a party in the near future. We do not think that a news paper, by itself, can organize a revolutionary party. Such a party must, of necessity, be rooted in the working class, be multinational in composition and can only come into being out of the collective experience of those directly engaged in mass struggle.

But the Guardian can play an important role in providing the information and analysis that will help to develop revolutionary consciousness towards the objective of bringing a party to birth.[43]

Approximately two years after this was written, however, the differences within Maoism were crystallizing and they manifested themselves within the Guardian. Initially there were charges that some of Avakian's people had "infiltrated" the paper, charges denied by Avakian.[44] More importantly, the relationship between Silber and Davidson was severed. The immediate catalysts for the split between these two people--who had worked together for eight years--were the positions which Silber took in the editorial pages of the Guardian on Black nationalism and on Soviet and Cuban support of the MPLA in Angola. Because both of these issues will be dealt with in greater depth further on, suffice it to say here that Silber's positions amounted to (1) a rejection of the idea that the racial question in the United States could be dealt with in terms of nationality and (2) a defense of Soviet and Cuban assistance to the Angolan MPLA as a counter to long-standing U.S. involvement there and the more recent South African involvement. This was, of necessity, coupled with severe criticism of the Chinese position on Angola which, in Silber's eyes, placed the Chinese in a position of de facto ally of the U.S. and South African governments. Davidson, on the other hand, saw Silber's defense of the Soviet and Cuban intervention in favor of the MPLA as encouraging political fragmentation along tribal lines, rather than unity in Angola. To Davidson, this demonstrated a chauvinistic presumption vis-a-vis a Third World country. Because Silber was backed by a majority of the Guardian staff, Davidson resigned and went into Klonsky's group.

Since Silber's position on the racial issue, particularly his rejection of Black Belt nationalism,[45] was closer to that of the Communist Party than other Maoist groups, and since his position on the international situation portrayed the Soviet Union more favorably than do the Chinese or Albanian positions, the Guardian was viewed by the other Maoist groups as moving toward a "revisionist" position, but not yet quite there. That word was reserved for the Communist Party itself, which has a positive view of Soviet socialism. The Guardian does not go that far. It was thus "centrist."

Nevertheless, this "centrist" position meant isolation from the Maoist groups with which the Guardian once had close contacts. This isolation moved the Guardian closer to its own independent initiative at party-building, a complete reversal of its 1973 role. In a supplement to the June 1, 1977 issue, the Guardian enumerated twenty-nine "principles of unity for a new party" and announced that it was going to establish a national network of "Guardian Clubs" which would help sustain the paper, engage in local political action, and become a vehicle for party-building.[46]

But, from the perspective of most of the other self-designated Maoists, such an organization would represent, at best, a current of "ex-Maoism." If this was an appropriate designation for the Guardian in the late 1970s, it was not alone in the ranks of ex-Maoism. The Progressive Labor Party, while much smaller and less active than it once was, still continued to exist after its repudiation of Mao. Another such grouping was the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, which had decided that China was on the road to capitalism and that Albania was the last hope for really-existing regimes as role models in the contemporary world.[47] And finally there was the Communist Labor Party which, in one observer's eyes, "floundered ideologically after its founding congress in 1974, and now exists in the general orbit of Communist Party politics, a polite but unwanted left-opposition to the CP."[48]

The Guardian's attempt to serve as a vehicle for party building was a failure. But the most impressive aspect of the Guardian has always been its performance as a newspaper. Despite the internal conflict to which it was subjected in the 1970s, and its isolation from other Maoist movements with which it formerly had contacts, the Guardian in October 1977 had virtually the same circulation that it had in November 1973.[49] It had a wider circulation than the papers of any of the other Maoist organizations and it certainly did a better job of reaching out beyond the ranks of the already committed Maoists or even Marxist-Leninists. It has become an institution on the Left and was read, respected, and relied upon throughout the 1980s as a news source by many who still might not not have accepted its theoretical stance or its specific positions.

RCP AND CP(M-L)

As pointed out in the last section, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) continue to be the two largest "multinational" Maoist parties or groups to have been founded in the history of the United States. They both go back to the late 1960s, and their founders were involved in the effort to prevent a PLP takeover of SDS. Only the CP(M-L) really had deep roots in SDS, however. The RCP founders intervened in the 1969 convention merely to block the PLP.

The RCP began as the Bay Area Radical Union, centered in the San Francisco Bay area. The group was formed in 1968, intervened in the SDS situation and published the first of its Red Papers in 1969, and changed its name to Revolutionary Union (RU) approximately a year later. In 1972 it made two important organizational moves. It came together with the Black Workers Congress and the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers oganization in an umbrella group called the National Liaison Committee. This attempt was short-lived. The Committee collapsed in 1973.[50]

More enduring was the creation of a student affiliate called the Attica Brigade, named after the prisoners who had risen up at New York's Attica Prison and many of whom died when Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave the order to quell the rebellion with arms. Together RU and the Attica Brigade engaged in a number of activities, including: uncritical support for the peace proposals of the Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government (as opposed to the SWP's unconditional support for their struggle against American intervention but severe criticism of the PRO's programs and proposals), support for a number of labor strikes and boycotts (including those of the Farah Workers and the United Farm Workers), entrance into work settings to agitate and discredit the union leadership,[51] prisoner support work, a campaign against appearances by Professor William Shockly who propagates a theory of the intellectual inferiority of the Black race, and a "Throw the Bum Out" Nixon impeachment campaign which was careful to tie Nixon in with the capitalist class as a whole and to leave no illusions that Congress or the liberals could be relied upon to do what was necessary.[52]

The most dramatic exploit of the Attica Brigade was the seizure of the Statue of Liberty by twenty of its members on the evening of April 19 1974. They held it overnight to dramatize the demand that Nixon be impeached and "to expose the fact that Nixon represents the monopoly capitalist ruling class."[53] The Statue was selected because it "represents the patriotic facade which tries to cover the oppressive and exploitative nature of the society in which we live."[54]

The Attica Brigade was heavily concentrated on the East Coast. Two months after the seizure of the Statue of Liberty, in June of 1974, a convention was held in Iowa City to form a new student group which would be spread throughout the country. Approximately four hundred and fifty students from some eighty colleges and universities across the country then launched the Revolutionary Student Brigade (RSB), perhaps the most militant and action-oriented national grouping on U.S. campuses in the 1970s. Among its more notable actions were the organization of the "Off Our Backs" demonstration in Philadelphia in the spring of 1976, participation in the conflict to prevent the destruction of the International Hotel (the I-Hotel, the home of many aged Asian people in San Francisco's Chinatown), and the 1977 confrontations over the decision of the administration of Kent State University to construct a gym on the site of the killing and wounding of anti-war demonstrators by the Ohio National Guard during the Vietnam War.

In 1975, RU became a party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP). It expanded its organizational network further. During the spring 1976 Philadelphia action, it created a web of youth--as opposed to student-- organizations, called Youth in Action in most places but Youth United in certain localities. The first major action of this group, as distinct from the Revolutionary Student Brigade, was an August 1977 demonstration for jobs, on Wall Street. In the fall of 1977, 1,428 people were assembled for the founding of a workers' organization, United Workers Organization. A little later, in November of 1977, approximately 650 people from Youth in Action, the Revolutionary Student Brigade, and some who had not been previously affiliated came together in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois to form a new youth organization combining both students and non-students, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade.[55] Aside from these organizations of its own creation, the RCP played an important but divisive role which resulted in a split in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

The Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) or CP(ML) had its origins in RYM II within SDS. Two years after the defeat of the PLP and the demise of SDS, the Los Angeles Marxist-Leninist Collective, in which national officer of SDS Michael Klonsky was an activist, the Georgia Communist League, and a number of Black, Chicano, and Middle-Eastern groups came together at a conference in Texas. The result of that meeting in May 1971 was the creation of the October League.

The October League was a late bloomer. It was clearly smaller than the RU/RCP, and it was not very visible. It did not have a student affiliate. In late 1975 the organization began to stir with the addition of Carl Davidson to its ranks, and with the creation of a small press, Liberator Press, to publish pamphlets and books. In 1976, it created two other major structures, the Communist Youth Organization and the National Fight Back Organization, which was its "mass organization," i.e., one which people could join if they simply agreed with its general goals. It was deliberately not a workers' organization like the RCP's United Workers Organization. In fact, the CP(ML) attacked the RCP for committing the joint sins of "dual unionism and syndicalism" by setting up an organization designed to pull the most militant workers away from the unions into a workers' organization distinct from the vanguard party.[56]

There were two spin-offs from the National Fight Back Organization. Both were created in 1977. One, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, was simply a southern branch of the National Fight Back Organization. Secondly, there was the Jobs or Income Now Coalition (JOIN), which was initiated by the National Fight Back Organization.

In the summer of 1977, two major events occurred in the life of this organization. Michael Klonsky went on his fourth trip to China. And the October League became the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), with Michael Klonsky as chairman of the party, just as Avakian was chairman of the RCP. The trip and the party constitution were not unrelated. For while the Chinese had never shown an open preference for any American Maoist group over another up to that point, the Chinese regime clearly indicated such a preference for Klonsky's group this time, and welcomed it into the network of parties and groups, including the PCMLF in France, to which it gives such recognition.

As will be seen, there were political reasons for the Chinese action but even the SWP's paper, The Militant, could not restrain itself from expressing surprise, given the disparity of level of activity and almost certainly of size of the two organizations. However, the CP(ML) undoubtedly tried to use the recognition itself as a resource to keep up the momentum it had developed in 1976 and 1977. It immediately began planning for the establishment of Marxist-Leninist Unity Committees to pull together those unaffiliated Marxist-Leninist collectives and groups which were scattered over the country. The CP(ML) also turned its attention to organization on the campuses which, up to this point, had been relatively ignored by the party, to the advantage of the RCP's Revolutionary Student Brigade.

The fact that the CP(ML)'s predecessor organization, the October League, was smaller than its counterpart, the Revolutionary Union which became the Revolutionary Communist Party, and that it did not form the organizational network and the liaisons with other groups that the RU and RCP did, does not imply that the organization was totally inactive. In fact, it engaged in some of the same campaigns that the RU/RCP did, but with fewer resources. It was active in the campaign to impeach Nixon, it supported the Farah and United Farm Workers labor actions, it gave its uncritical support to the peace proposals of the Provisional Revolutionary Government in Vietnam. And like the RU it gave at least verbal support to efforts at change within the United Mine Workers Union and the United Steelworkers of America, although it was attacked by the RU for giving such "reformers" as Arnold Miller and Ed Sadlowski "full support" while the RU gave them "critical support."[57] Similarly, it participated in the campaign to prevent the gym from being built on the site of the Kent State shootings. But it did not act in concert with the RSB. As one CP(ML) militant expressed it to me: "We were at the same place." But in at least one action to which the October League made a major commitment, they were not at the same place. That was in Boston, and the campaign in favor of busing, which the RCP rejected. Later both the CP(ML) and the RCP, as well as virtually every other organization on the Left, turned their attention toward and organized around the high rate of unemployment.

In historical retrospect, Jim O'Brien sees the high point in activity of the RU/RSB as its sustained support for the Farah strike, while that of the October League was its leadership in a less nationally publicized strike in Atlanta, Georgia. This was the 1972 wildcat strike of mainly Black workers who were protesting racial discrimination at the Mead Packaging Corporation. Black OL members initiated the strike, and the elected chairman of the strike committee was an OL member. O'Brien sees this strike as giving the OL the necessary confidence to work in industrial settings. However, the very limited gains won and the lack of support of most of the White workers convinced the OL of the need to work through the unions as well as on the shop floor.[58] The CP(ML)'s attack on the RCP for "dual" unionist" tactics was a logical extension of this commitment.

Internally, there was a moralistic tone to both organizations which is absent in the case of French Maoist organizations or Trotskyist organizations. They seemed to be trying to emulate the natural simplicity, or the asceticism--depending on one's point of view--of the Chinese. The constitution of the RCP required its members to "uphold proletarian morality," while the constitution of the CP(ML) required members to "live a modest and exemplary life, governing private life by the principles of communist morality."[59] The strictest interpretation of this has been applied by the Revolutionary Communist Party. Both people practicing homosexuality and men and women living together outside of legal marriage have been seen as violators of "proletarian morality." The RCP has viewed homosexuality as "bourgeois decadence," and leaders of the RCP have been known to refer to the capitalists as "faggots." In the case of non-marital cohabitation, a member of the RCP explained to me that the tactical question of relating to those outside the party was secondary. Primary were the RCP's opposition to frivolous or exploitative relations among people, and the legal rights and need for a family of children. The RCP position on this was thus the exact opposite of the French Trotskyist Lutte Ouvriere's position against marriage.

The CP(ML) objected to "decadent 'counter-cultural' lifestyles."[60] It too was a defender of the family. The attack on such lifestyles on the part of the CP(ML) was particularly interesting because of this group's roots in the initially very counter-cultural SDS. Its evolution has thus been in the exactly opposite direction of the VLR and GP currents of French Maoism. When this writer pressed some militants in the CP(ML) for a more precise definition of "decadent 'counter-cultural' lifestyles," the response was "homosexuality, free love, rural communes and other forms of escapism." When asked if people who were homosexuals or living together without being married would be barred from membership, the response was was that people would not be asked if they were homosexuals--that would be their business--and that some people live together without being married because of the welfare system. They claimed that they just did not want their members living in a "promiscuous" or "decadent" way. And here the problem of offending working class people, which was so pressing on the minds of the members of the anti-counter-cultural Progressive Labor Party in the late 1960s, was mentioned as a major concern. And they certainly would not tolerate any of their party members engaging in campaigns in defense of the rights of gays and lesbians on the order of those of the SWP.

Finally, "feminism," aside from being "a petty-bourgeois ideology that serves the interests of imperialism," that directs women's energies toward trying to get a larger slice of the pie for a minority among their ranks, and that attacks men (rather than the capitalists) as a major enemy of women, was also seen as advocating "decadent 'counter-cultural' lifestyles."[61] There was no disagreement between the two American Maoist Parties on this score and, once again, they are differentiated from the Trotskyist SWP and from the French Maoist VLR. Given this definition of "feminism," one could not be a "feminist" and a member of either of these organizations.

Nevertheless, both organizations did claim important contingents of women. Precise membership figures are organizational secrets. The larger organization, the RCP, probably never had over 1,000 members, while the CP(ML) probably had a membership between one-third and one-half that of the RCP.[62] Approximately 50 per cent of CP(ML) was female, and just under 50 per cent of its Central Committee in the late 1970s was female. Eileen Klehr, the Vice-Chairman of the party--and they insisted upon the traditional terminology, arguing that substance is more important than words--is a woman. In the RCP, a bit over 25 per cent of the members were women.

The issue of the role of the women has been a sore point between the two organizations, and this goes back to the CP(ML)'s roots in RYM II within SDS. In 1974, the RCP's predecessor organization attacked the October League, or rather counter-attacked.

Further, then as now, these opportunists [the leaders of the October League] screamed that the RU was "male chauvinist," because we sharply criticized RYM-2's mechanical policy that its leadership bodies must have at least 50 percent women, and we opposed RYM-2's mockery of the united front which reduced it to a gimmick, with positions like "women are part of the united front and men must repudiate their male privilege in order to join women in the united front."[63]

In 1975 and 1977, this writer attended meetings sponsored by RU and RSB which involved panels of speakers. No woman was a participant on either panel, although at the 1975 meeting the people who distributed leaflets and attended to the literature table were almost all females. The women enthusiastically applauded after the men finished their speeches. It is inconceivable that either the SWP or the CP(ML) would have permitted this. On the other hand, of the ten people on the presiding committee of the convention to found the Revolutionary Communist Youth Organization in November 1977, three were women.[64]

As might be surmised from their history, both parties drew from the same age group. Most members of the parties--as distinct from their youth and student groups--were in the 25 to 35 age group. The most prominent leaders in the late 1970s were in their mid-thirties and in the CP(ML) were SDS veterans. But the CP(ML) was very proud of at least three older activists who had been in the battles of the thirties and who ranged in age from sixty to eighty, the latter being the former Black militant within the Communist Party, Harry Haywood, author of the book Black Bolshevik.

Finally, something should be said about the physical location and the publications of the organizations. Both parties were headquartered in Chicago, although they both had initial roots in California. The RCP has its roots in the Bay Area Radical Union in the San Francisco Berkeley area, and the October League was based in the Los Angeles area in its early years. Although both parties rented space for their party activities, the addresses were not public information. People who wished to contact these parties outside of their public meetings or events were obliged to do so either through the post office box numbers of their publications or, in the case of the RCP, through the campus offices of the Revolutionary Student Brigade.

Aside from public meetings and events such as demonstrations, it is precisely those publications which were the parties' major communication link within the parties and with those outside. There were internal documents which were secret to those outside but there was also quite an array of publications for public consumption which was distributed at events, through China Books and Periodicals, Inc., through more general radical bookstores, or through subscription.[65]

Both parties published theoretical journals. The CP(ML) published Class Struggle. It was begun in 1975. The RCP started its journal, The Communist, in October 1976. However, prior to the appearance of The Communist, the RCP (and the RU before it) had issued its theoretical positions in the form of a series of Red Papers which go back to 1969.

The CP(ML) also published a newspaper called The Call. It was originally a monthly paper, but it became a weekly in 1976, about a year before the formation of the party. The major newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party is Revolution, a monthly. However, in approximately twenty cities cells of the RCP put out a separate newspaper called The Worker. This was an impressive and rather unique enterprise, because the edition was different in each of the cities. It was heavily oriented toward labor problems in the particular area. Certain editions contained special national supplements. And, like virtually all of the Maoist newspapers (the Guardian is an exception), each issue contained an English and a Spanish section. Finally, there were two papers geared to students and youth which were associated with the RCP. One was Fight Back, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Student Brigade. Prior to 1977 it appeared regularly but by 1977 its appearance was sporadic. In 1977 a paper called Young Red also made its appearance. It too was sporadic, appearing four times in 1977.

Curiously, Young Red seemed to be a paper which was initiated by people in or around some of the Youth in Action groups and over which the party leadership had virtually no control.

The nature of the CP(ML) publications has thus been very different from that of the RCP. The CP(ML) put out fewer publications, but on a more regular basis. Moreover, just as the CP(ML) criticized the RCP for the creation of the United Workers Organization (the charge was dual unionism, syndicalism, and general economism), so the CP(ML) was critical of the RCP for publishing one paper for party cadres and intellectuals and a watered-down trade unionist paper for workers, which is what the CP(ML) considered The Worker to be. The CP(ML) was proud that it published the same theoretical journal and weekly paper for everyone.

While neither the RCP nor the CP(ML) had a publishing operation anywhere approaching the SWP's Pathfinder Press, they did have much more modest publishing operations. RCP Publications published a small number of pamphlets. The CP(ML)'s Liberator Press also published a small number of pamphlets, but in addition tried its hand at longer, book-length manuscripts written by party members.

MAJOR DIFFERENCES AMONG U.S. MAOISTS

In the previous section, one major difference between the RCP and the CP(ML) was noted. This was the more negative attitude toward union work and reformist union leaders on the part of the RCP, and its attempt to create a separate workers' organization and a separate network of newspapers aimed specifically at workers. It was because of this that the CP(ML) accused the RCP of dual unionism, syndicalism, and economism. The RCP responded with charges of opportunism for what it regarded as the CP(ML)'s uncritical support of basically reformist leaders within the unions. It will be recalled that despite the difference in context (i.e., influence of the Communist Party and unity or fragmentation of the labor movement), in France both Maoists and Trotskyists differ among themselves on how to relate to the unions. The Maoist UCFML has refused to work within any of the unions, and Lutte Ouvriere has engaged in outright attempts to form a competitive union within Renault. The other groups differ over which unions to work within and how much emphasis to place on union work.

In the absence of the anti-hierarchical as opposed to hierarchical division between Maoists which manifested itself in France, there were three other theoretical and/or issue areas over which the RCP and the CP(ML) had serious differences. They were: (1) the international situation, (2) the "national" question, and (3) the Equal Rights Amendment. While the focus of the following discussion of these questions will be on the adversary positions of the RCP and the CP(ML), the positions of others will be included where they round out the variety of Maoist perspectives.

(1) The International Situation

For a considerable length of time now, the international positions of China have not made life easy for Maoists in either France or the United States. Particularly difficult to deal with and justify--both internally and vis-a-vis others on the Left--were such Chinese measures as support for the crushing of rebels in Sri Lanka, the reception of President Nixon in China while bombs were still falling on the Vietnamese, support of the Pakistanis during the war over Bangladesh, the refusal to sever ties with the Pinochet regime after the coup in Chile, and support for French and U.S. intervention in Africa. Even back in the mid 1960s, one French Maoist group thought that it was practicing good Maoism by supporting the Gaullists. While this group disgraced itself among the Left by jumping the gun and going a bit too far, there was an element of prophecy in its move.

Prior to the clear articulation of the Theory of the Three Worlds, based upon Lenin's concept of the law of uneven development, Maoist organizations had to choose to follow or not to follow Chinese diplomatic positions and moves. But it was a question of loyalty to the Chinese regime for what it had accomplished in China, and supporters were hard put to find adequate theoretical justification.

The Theory of the Three Worlds was an attempt to provide that justification. While it may not have been much of a positive factor conducive to unity among French Maoists, at least it was not very divisive.

Few French Maoists accepted the Albanian criticism of the theory. While the PCR(m-1) could not accept Chinese support for French involvement in Zaire, it granted the theoretical points and attacked the Albanian position. This was a virtual precondition to its negotiations for reunification with the PCML. In the United States, on the other hand, the explicitness of the Theory confronted some people who were capable of overlooking some of China's diplomatic positions, or even rationalizing them, but who simply could not accept the Theory of the Three Worlds. In this case, the Albanian rejection of the Theory greatly encouraged the U.S. opponents.

The most severe criticism of the theory came from Irwin Silber of the Guardian. In 1975, Silber had severely criticized the behavior of the Chinese in Angola, where he felt that they had engaged in an "objective" alliance with the United States and South Africa to thwart Soviet and Cuban initiatives. Silber saw these latter initiatives as counters to pre-existing and longstanding U.S. initiatives in Angola. This was the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of the relationship between Silber and Carl Davidson, the latter terminating eight years of work on the Guardian and going into the CP(ML)'s predecessor organization, the October League.

In July of 1977, the Guardian, under Silber's editorship, took a very clear position on the Theory of the Three Worlds. It rejected the thesis that the Soviet Union and Soviet "social-imperialism" was the main danger to the world.[66] Seven months later Silber attempted to explain the Chinese position, which he continued to reject, on the basis of the conclusions drawn by the Chinese from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the defeat of the United States military in Vietnam.[67] The first demonstrated the willingness of the USSR to invade a country on its borders. The second demonstrated that there was now a country on its Asian border which, with Soviet assistance, was strong enough to resist even the massive U.S. military might. For the Chinese, the defeat of U.S. imperialism came at the price of an additional presence of Soviet social-imperialism on its very borders. Worse, from the Chinese perspective, this time there was a battle-trained Asian army to back it up. While understanding and attempting to explain the Chinese fear, Silber thought that it was exaggerated, driving the Chinese to untenable positions.

In the July article, the Guardian also rejected the Albanian position that both superpowers, the USA and the USSR, were equally enemies of the oppressed peoples of the world and that "it is impermissible to join with one superpower (the US) against the other."[68] The Guardian summarized its position:

We hold that US imperialism is the main enemy of oppressed peoples and nations of the world, not both superpowers equally. We also believe the Albanian statement underestimates the progressive character of the nonaligned movement. At the same time, as we have been saying for the past two years, we are particularly aware of the danger of class-collaboration of our own movement stemming from the thesis of "striking the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism."[69]

However, while criticizing the Albanian position on the equally dangerous nature of the two superpowers and its underestimation of the progressive character of the nonaligned movement, Silber did see the positive aspect to the Albanian opposition to the Chinese position:

The importance of the Albanian position is that it is a dramatic step in opposition to the class-collaborationist consequences of the "three worlds" theory. And the Albanians have been unrelenting in their opposition to NATO, the European Common Market and the neocolonialist strategy of the US and its West European allies. Objectively, therefore, Albania's attack on the "three worlds" theory represents a move that will ultimately strengthen those who see US imperialism as the main enemy.[70]

The Revolutionary Communist Party's reading of the law of uneven development told it that the Albanian position was correct, that the two superpowers were equally dangerous. Moreover, on one point the Albanian party, the RCP, and the Guardian seemed to be in agreement. This was their position that while the competition between the two superpowers posed the threat and the danger of a third world war, such a war was not inevitable.[71] The CP(ML) accepted the Chinese position that such a war was inevitable.[72] It will be recalled that this latter position was one put forward by the Trotskyist Pablo as part of his "war-revolution" concept developed during the early period of the "Cold War" between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The RCP added insult to injury to the Chinese by contending that their view of the Soviet Union as the superpower more dangerous to China itself was correct because of "geographical proximity, the defeats inflicted on US imperialism in Asia, China's exposure by propaganda and by example of the New Czar's socialist cover, the USSR's overall position of being on the offensive, etc."[73] In other words China, because of its particular position, was more menaced by the USSR, but this did not justify a universal interpretation of the law of uneven development which, by comparison, downplays the menacing nature of U.S. imperialism.

The CP(ML) completely accepted the Chinese position on the theory, and this was largely responsible for the Chinese recognition of the CP(ML) as a fraternal party. This left two areas of agreement between the CP(ML) and the RCP on the international situation. First, there was agreement that the Soviet Union is a state capitalist system (not just a degenerated workers state a la Trotskyism) practicing social imperialism. Second, there was agreement that the revolutionary vocation had passed to the Third World, and that Maoists were thus placed in a position of doing "revolutionary work in a non-revolutionary situation." The latter position is the exact contrary of that taken by the Trotskyist Spartacist and Workers Leagues, as well as by the Trotskyist SWP since its adoption of the Long Detour analysis. It will be recalled that that analysis--advanced as a minority position which was rejected by the French Ligue and the rest of the international majority of the United Secretariat in 1974--contended that there had not been a successful revolutionary movement in the Third World since those of China, Cuba, and Vietnam, and that the revolutionary vocation had come home to the capitalist industrialized societies where the "objective conditions" resided. The estimate of U.S. power by the SWP was also greater than that of the Maoists. And the Third World orientation of the Ligue in France helps explain why that section of the United Secretariat could have some relations with Maoists of the GP or even PCR(m-l) variety, while both the RCP and the CP(ML) have had nothing but contempt for the American SWP.

Nevertheless, two very concrete differences emerged out of the different assessments of the superpowers put forward by the RCP and the CP(ML).

These regard the attitude to take toward Third World revolutionary struggle and the attitude to take toward alliances in the Second World, specifically NATO. The CP(ML) refused to call for the overthrow of any regime in the Third World. It accepted the Chinese premise that the Third World countries regardless of the nature of their present leadership, are being victimized by both U.S. and Soviet imperialism. That is an "objective" situation in which they find themselves. Neither pro-Soviet nor pro-U.S. leaders can will themselves out of this situation. Ultimately these countries will be forced to unify with each other in an assault against imperialism. By definition, such an assault will be progressive. The moves of the OPEC countries to extract better oil prices from the industrialized countries were seen as part of this inevitable evolution. The CP(ML) held that its responsibility was to call for the overthrow of only one regime in the world and that was the capitalist regime in the United States. It was up to the working people in each of the Third World countries to decide the proper course of action for their own country during the struggle against the two superpowers.

The RCP rejected this position. It, like the Guardian, argued that distinctions must be made within the Third World and that revolutionary movements against clearly reactionary regimes should be supported. Even before the Theory of the Three World had been clearly articulated and the two American groups had become parties, this issue had been a sore point between their predecessor organizations, Revolutionary Union and October League. All along, RU/RCP had been a strong supporter of the struggle against the Shah of Iran. When the Shah visited the United States in July of 1973, RU demonstrated opposition in solidarity with anti-Shah Iranian students. The October League (or CP(ML)-to-be) refused to express itself. It saw the Shah as an anti-Soviet force in the Middle East.

The nub of the difficulty to come, once the Theory of the Three Worlds was completely articulated, can be seen in the RU's response to the October League back in 1974:

Thus, while it is necessary and correct for the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party to make certain agreements and compromises with imperialist and reactionary states, primarily to make use of contradictions between the two superpowers and in that way strengthen the overall united front and the people's struggle for liberation and socialism, it is not correct for communists in other countries, including the US, to do the same thing.

While the Chinese make certain agreements with the Shah of Iran, it does not follow that the revolutionaries in Iran should let up even in the slightest bit in their efforts to mobilize the people to overthrow the Shah. And revolutionaries everywhere should not let up the slightest bit in explaining to the workers and oppressed people in their countries who the Shah is, what he represents, why the Iranian people are rising up to overthrow him, and why the exploited and oppressed people of all countries should support the Iranian people's just struggle.

Finally, we want to say categorically that the rightist line OL is beginning to push forward on the international united front is certainly no service to the People's Republic of China. In fact, by using China as a cover for their rightist line, OL is aiding the Trotskyites and revisionists (i.e., the USSR and the supportive Communist Parties) who are vehemently attacking the Chinese and the international and revolutionary united front line the Chinese have been instrumental in developing.[74]

The CP(ML) also took a position on the Second World that the RCP was unable to accept. Like its French counterpart, which took its cues from the Chinese regime, the CP(ML) viewed NATO as a positive anti-Soviet force in Europe and emphasized the "objective" contradiction which exists between the Second World countries and the United States. The Second World countries in Western Europe have this dual character of being at once imperialistic themselves but threatened by the hegemonic United States. Since even that hegemonic power is less dangerous than the Soviet Union, and since the Second World countries in it have a dual character which renders them potential allies of the Third World, the CP(ML) was supportive of the existence of NATO, and adamantly against any attempt to dismantle it unilaterally.

As might be expected, the RCP, which saw both the U.S. and USSR as equally menacing, opposed both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. While the RCP was prepared to admit that there are certain contradictions in the relations between the Western European countries and the United States, it still contended that the Western European members of NATO "are basically in the camp of US imperialism,"[75]--a position taken with even less qualification by the Guardian. To make its point that it would not choose sides in any war between what it views as the two equally imperialistic superpowers and their alliance partners, the RCP adopted the slogan "We Won't Fight Another Rich Man's War."[76] This was a slogan of the Second International before World War I, one which was not completely adhered to.

The CP(ML) tried very carefully to accept and follow the foreign policy line in both Maoist and post-Mao China. Its refusal to declare its support for revolutionary struggles elsewhere, which was characterized as rightist by the RU/RCP, had been sanctioned by the Chinese party. This had given the CP(ML) the courage to hurl the charge of "revisionist and Trotskyite political line" back in the teeth of the RCP. In fact, its attacks on the RCP bore a striking resemblance to the attacks of the Chinese leadership against the "Gang of Four":

The RCP would do well to compare its line today with that of the Trotskyites in the late 1930's. They too, claimed to "defend" the socialist Soviet Union in spite of its "nationalist" errors. They too, declared all imperialist powers "equal enemies" and opposed the concept of the main blow. They, too, falsely set "class struggle" in opposition to the national liberation struggles in the colonies. They, too, ranted and railed at the parties of the Communist International as "social-chauvinists" and "class collaborators."

But as long as the RCP continues to pursue its revisionist and Trotskyite political line, it will continue to isolate itself from the genuine Marxist-Leninists worldwide and oppose the actual anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggles of the world's people.[77]

The RCP long remained silent on the fate of the "Gang of Four," while the CP(ML) joyously celebrated their public humiliation. The RCP would only concede that it had been "studying the matter."

(2) The "National" Question

As we have seen, the two largest French Maoist organizations have not done battle with each other over the Theory of the Three Worlds in the same way that the major U.S. Maoist formations have. And, while regional national sentiments have been difficult for the French Maoists of the GP variety to conceptualize, the "national" question in France has had nothing like the divisive impact upon Maoism that it has had in the United States.

There are two reasons for this. First, racism and the conflict which it engenders permeate to the very core of American society in a way that French regional sentiments do not. Secondly, there is the heritage of Comintern intervention on the "national question" in the United States, an intervention that came about because of the unique importance of this question in the United States.

In 1928 and 1930, the Comintern adopted resolutions which contended that U.S. Blacks, then referred to as Negroes, constituted an oppressed nation with their territorial home in the Black Belt South. There was by no means unanimity on the question within the U.S. Communist Party. But this was a period during which Stalin was conducting a purge of the Lovestone leadership and other dissidents. Stalin favored the Black Belt position and was in no mood to tolerate further opposition from the Americans. The Communist Party itself subsequently repudiated the position, but those who followed Stalin's theoretical guidance, like the Maoists, have found it impossible to avoid dealing with the Black Belt Nation thesis.

Without going into detail on Stalin's work on nationality, several points must be made to indicate the origin of much of the present difficulty which Maoists face on this question, to the point that it has been the most serious divisive issue among U.S. Maoists over the longest period of time. It divided Maoists well before the Theory of the Three Worlds entered the scene.

First, Stalin's writings on the national question, particularly Marxism and the National Question and The National Question and Leninism, are among his most important contributions to the larger body of Marxist-Leninist thought. He engaged in this endeavor largely because of the practical necessity of coming to terms with separatist claims which were being directed to the Soviet party by Jews and Armenians. He specifically rejected the claims of the Jewish Bund for recognition of a "national cultural autonomy" for Jews who were not territorially concentrated.[78] Stalin's definition of a nation was "a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community culture."[79] A deficit of one of these attributes would mean that the people concerned could not qualify as a nation. Since Garveyism was striking a responsive chord with its nationalistic appeal, the Comintern and the CP/USA attempted to offer U.S. Blacks what seemed to them to be a less escapist national option than Garvey's "Back to Africa" national solution. This was the consideration of the states making up the Black Belt, where approximately half of the U.S. Black population was concentrated in 1930, as a Black Nation.

Second, Stalin drew two distinctions which might make sense but which certainly complicate the application of any definition or theory of nationalism. The first is the distinction between nationalism and the more concrete form which it might take. Thus the distinction between "autonomy, federation, or separation" cannot be determined outside of the "concrete historical conditions in which the given nation finds itself."[80] Secondly, there is the distinction between the right of a particular claim to national determination and the interests of the proletariat within the national grouping.[81] One can have a right but be ill-advised to exercise it under certain conditions.

Third, Stalin's theory of nationality became an integral part of two other Stalinist conceptions which were very important for Mao. The first is the conception of revolution in stages, a conception rejected by Trotskyists. The two major stages were socialism in one country, and socialism, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, on a world scale. The second conception was that of "cultural revolution."[82] By the latter he meant a program of education and literacy in peoples' native languages. During the stage of socialism in one country and during the initial period of the stage of socialism on a world scale, national traditions would be taught and equality among nations recognized. Over time, however, and concomitant with the development of a world socialist economy, Stalin foresaw individual national differences and languages giving way to a common language and international amalgamation.[83] Stalin's theory of nationalism therefore contained important distinctions at each stage of the revolutionary process, as well as distinctions over time. Nationalism which advances the interests of the working class is important at the early stages, but ultimately the universalistic vocation of Marxism-Leninism will render such nationalistic distinctions obsolete.

U.S. Maoists have been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. They are not yet even at the stage of socialism in one country. So they have a good period of recognition of national distinctions ahead of them. Moreover, despite the fact that the Black population has shown a heavy pattern of outmigration from the