Issued: As a typewritten document, August 29, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The draft plan for an Ideological Center is before us to debate and vote on. We feel it is sorely lacking in many respects.
Firstly, it is not exact or concrete enough as to the first question to be taken up. Does “examining ultra-leftism” mean taking up the question of “dogmatism vs. semi-anarchism”? Or does it mean taking up a smorgasboard of ultra-left political lines and examining them? Or does it mean taking up the analysis of the Guardian’s party-building line vs. PWOC’s fusion line? In discussions about what “examining ultra-leftism” means all of these outlooks were put forward, or some variant to them. Nowhere in the draft plan is it clearly stated.
It would hardly be fruitful to vote on a plan, when we really don’t know what we are voting for. Is the argument about “dogmatism vs. semi-anarchism” really a burning issue? Not really. Or which of the ultra-“left’s” political lines is primary to take up? Is it the “left’s” errors around party-building? or the question of reform and revolution? or the denial of democratic demands for women and minorities? or how about the liquidation of the trade union question? or hostility to electoral and legal work? or adventurism in regards to fighting fascism? All of these questions have a vital importance to our movement – but which one is primary. Or are they all primary? A critique of ultra-leftism could start at any one of these places. However, because of their limited scope, we wouldn’t uncover the basis and historical roots of left-wing communism.
We should start where the point 18 debate left off, and that is with an attempt at discovering the class character of the Soviet Union. We quote from “The Struggle Over Point 18 Summed Up:”
“Earlier, we pointed out the dogmatist error of not proceeding from the shallower to the deeper, from the concrete to the abstract. But we must not make the empiricist error of failing to deepen the criticism of “left” internationalism and the theory of the three worlds.” Further on, “In particular, the exaggeration of the revisionist danger and the thesis of capitalist restoration which the theory of three worlds is based on must be examined.” And, “An international line which remains at the level of an identification of the main enemy of the world’s people does not fully meet the needs of communist work, even in the present period.”
We couldn’t agree more! Further, “The anti-“left” tendency now faces the task of deepening its international line and building principled unity around it.”
Time and time again throughout the Point 18 struggle, as documented in the summation, the class character of the Soviet Union was brought up. Indeed, examining the class character of the SU is the next dialectical step after Point 18. This point is only the initial break with ultra-leftism on the international sphere. In order to put the tendency on a firm basis, we have to go “deeper.” A tendency which can decide that the U.S. is the main danger – but doesn’t know what the SU is – is less of a genuine ideological current and more like an unprincipled “unity” swamp! Is this what we want?
Comrades will object and say that Point 18 was only the preliminary to the Ideological Center – but in practice the IC already exists, as witnessed by the struggle around point 18. There is no “Chinese wall” separating the two. If we are to firmly anchor the IC, and deeply define it – contrasting with the ultra-left’s positions on the SU, then we must analyse the Soviet Union.
Parties develop by going deeper. They develop on the one hand by practice and on the other by developing as genuine ideological currents within the revolutionary movement. The Bolsheviks were a faction of the larger Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) before they ever were the Bolshevik Party. The RSDLP was itself born out of a ferocious battle between Narodnism, which was peasant oriented and tied to terrorism, and the proletarian ideology of Marxism. Plekanov attacked all of Narodnism and showed how it was a petit-bourgeois and anarchistic trend which could not lead a revolution. There are some similarities between the Narodnism of yesterday and the Maoism of today. Maoism is also peasant oriented and there are many “radical” Maoists – like the RCP and PLP – who love nothing better than a small scale military operation against the enemy , i.e., fascist ilk like the KKK and the Nazis. This is nothing but a more advanced form terrorism by leftists instead of the Narodniks’ terrorism against individuals. What is interesting is that Plekanov attacked not just one line here and one there – as the Draft Plan proposes to do, but Narodnism itself. As they developed, the Bolsheviks attacked economism which at that time took the shape of the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP. Once again it was a fight, not against one line here and there, but a body of thought – Menshevism.
In our own conditions, the precise historical form which ultra-leftism takes is Maoism. We should attack the point that all the Maoist have unity on: that is the thesis of the capitalist nature of the SU. The more Mao than Mao of the PLP, the more Mao than thou of the RCP, the less Mao is better Mao of the CP (ML) and RWH, the closet Maoists of the pro-Albanian CPUSA(ML) and COUSML – all can agree on one thing; that the Soviet Union is a capitalist country, a vicious social imperialist, ruled by a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, etc. This is the benefit of studying the Russian question. You get them where they live.
Historically, this has always been so. The question of the SU has been at the center of every major split in the communist movement. Our own movement was born ideologically in a particular split between Khruchev and Mao Ze Dong. Point 18 and Angola seem to have initially defined the OC. Trotskyism developed out of a certain analysis of the Soviet Union under Stalin. The three main trends of present day anti-revisionism, i.e. Trotskyism, Stalinism, and Maoism, are all based on a certain attitude toward the SU. Yet, the OC has no position, and – judging by the Draft Plan – doesn’t want one. Is this not the practice of the “shallower to the shallower?”
This problem presents itself in the “real world” as a political one in relation to the slow development to war. Do we tell our fellow workers in our political agitation that the SU should be unconditionally defended against imperialist attack? This is not an idle or insignificant question, as one night’s TV viewing shows. For there and in the newspapers we see U.S. imperialism trying to rearm itself after its defeat in Vietnam. This is not so much a military as a moral re-armament. For elaboration of this policy just look at the campaigns around the “boat people” and Carter’s “human rights” or the kidnapping of 54 Soviet citizens by the U.S. “terrorist” government last week. World developments have made the question of the SU uppermost in many progressive minds. By ignoring it, we ignore the international movement. Thus we become great nation chauvinists.
Part of the argument against taking up the question of the SU is that it is so “complex,” that our poor little minds “aren’t ready” for such a question, that we must take up something “shallow.” If this is true (which we doubt), then the best way to advance the tendency and the IC is to take up something which we can recite in our heads ad nauseum. As is, the Draft Plan does little to raise the level of ideological struggle. However, with the question of the SU made primary, many forces will be drawn into the battle – so to speak – and into the OC. Finally, this question has never really been taken up by the movement in a broad way before, its time has come.
What are the positions on the SU? There are basically four. (1) The SU is a capitalist country. (2) It is state-capitalist. (3) It is between capitalism and socialism, still having a dictatorship of the proletariat in economic affairs. (4) The SU is a socialist state.
The draft plan maintains that revisionism was restored in “1956” the year of Kurushchev’s speech attacking Stalin. The Tucson ML Collective maintains that revisionism had penetrated the CP much earlier. Some give dates like 1925, the years of “industrialization at a snail’s pace” and the admonition to the peasants by Bukharin to “enrich themselves.” or 1930, during the so-called “revolution from above,” or 1936, the year of the USSR labor constitution which tied peasants legally to their village, draconian laws against “undisciplined workers,” establishment of wide ranging piece work, imprisonment for changing jobs without permission, firings for one day unexcused abscence, six months corrective labor at 75% pay for being 20 minutes late, or the development of a privileged Stakonovite strata, or the re-establishment of the officer corps in the army. Or perhaps revisionism came to the Soviet Union in 1936 with the Dimitrov line, thus changing from an ultra-left line (e.g. dual unionism and “no unity with social democrats/social fascists” which led to the German CP actually uniting with Nazis during a Berlin garbage strike and against social democrats during elections) to the line of the popular front. This line led to an alliance with “anti-fascist” bourgeoisie, and in the U.S. it led to Browderism and the liquidation of the Communist Party. The part of the Draft Plan about “revisionism in ’56” should be dropped, because there is so little agreement on this point.
Clearly, any analysis of the USSR’s class character is bound to expose a pandora’s box of questions. The Draft Plan insists on leaving the lid shut by not advocating this study of the Soviet Union. Yet, if we are a genuine tendency, these questions must be asked now. It is the method of right opportunists to have a position on the USSR as a danger (the heart of revisionism), but avoids taking up its nature. The way to develop deeper unity, not shallower unity, is to continue where Point 18 left off. This will answer the complaints around that that struggle did not go far enough. It will put the tendency on a firm basis!