Theoretical contradictions continue to be divisive among Trotskyist groups, though they have manifested themselves unevenly and in different ways across national contexts. The Nicaraguan issue, which cost the French Ligue several hundred members and destroyed attempts at unity between the Ligue and the Lambertists in France, has produced some problems for the SWP, but within the broader framework of the approach to be taken toward Third World revolutions in general and toward solidarity networks in the United States.
The differences between the SWP and the Spartacist League over revolution in the Third World continue to be apparent, but they are sometimes more subtle and always less consequential than the clash between the French Ligue and the Lambertists over Nicaragua. In part, this is due to the disparity in size and resources between the SWP and the Spartacist League. Moreover, the Spartacist position on Cuba was not received well within the Left in the United States. Given its meager recruitment and its general image on the Left, the Spartacist League is no longer in a position to use differences over movements or regimes in the Third World, and especially in Latin America, to pull people away from the SWP.
There are differences, but not strong polemics, over both Nicaragua and El Salvador. In regard to Nicaragua, the SWP is supportive of the Sandinista FSLN. It contends that the Sandinista victory has meant that workers and peasants now hold political power in Nicaragua.[30] The Spartacists, like the LO in France, are more critical. They accuse the Sandinista FSLN of following a path of petit-bourgeois nationalism by calling for nonalignment, a mixed economy, and political pluralism which would accommodate the business and professional communities. Nonetheless, the Spartacist League argues that the Nicaraguan revolution must be defended and completed, (the latter involving the elimination of the above petit-bourgeois elements of the program) and that this defense is key to defending both the USSR and Cuba against U.S. imperialism.[31] Given the Spartacist League's very harsh criticism of Cuba, over which it was expelled from the SWP, we have here a notion of interlinked but very deformed revolutions which must nevertheless be defended against the greater evil of U.S. imperialism. The celebratory optimism of the SWP's support is replaced by a critical scepticism and bowing to an imperative.
There are similar differences over El Salvador. The SWP supports the Democratic Revolutionary Front (the FDR) and its military counterpart the FMLN. It does so noncritically and it specifically supported the FDR's decision to call for an unconditional dialogue with the government of El Salvador.[32] The Spartacists rejected any negotiations and attacked "bourgeois politicians" in the FDR for trying to sell out the revolution through negotiations. The Spartacists called for a military victory for the FMLN.[33] Thus, in both the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran instances, the Spartacists indicated a scepticism toward the forces at work in these revolutions, while the SWP extended noncritical support.
Where the internal contradictions within Trotskyism over revolution in the Third World resulted in particularly strong polemics on the part of the Spartacists was in the case of Iran. Citing the attacks of Khomeini and others in the new regime on U.S. imperialism and the very negative reaction to the Iranian revolution in the West, the SWP initially portrayed the Iranian revolution as progressive. It argued that workers could organize an even more progressive movement under it more effectively than they could under the previous Western-supported regime. It rejected the argument that religion automatically renders a movement regressive because "history has shown that progressive political movements often take a religious form. Thus the anti-monarchical revolution in seventeenth-century England was fought out under the guise of the Protestant Reformation."[34] At the very beginning of the Iranian revolutionary process, the SWP emphasized what it saw as the crucial role played by the workers in the oil fields. It then shifted to an emphasis on workers' committees in the urban factories rather than the oil-field workers.[35] Unlike any other U.S. Trotskyist group, the SWP had an Iranian counterpart which was trying to be a force in the process.
The Spartacist League, on the other hand, saw nothing but a reactionary, nationalistic, and religiously fundamentalist regime which was not being challenged by any progressive party. It saw the position of the SWP on Iran as a complete sell-out of Trotskyism by the "ex-Trotskyists of the American Socialist Workers Party."[36] The Spartacists further chided the SWP: "When the SWP was faced with a mass-based opposition to the Shah which at times stoned women for not wearing the symbol of medieval oppression, the veil, even these veteran cynics have had to go through some gyrations to claim that black is white, that the ulema's Muslim fundamentalism is really 'a step forward.' But they have made the effort, nonetheless, for the mullahs have indeed achieved the SWP's one criterion for support: 'mass action in the streets'."[37] The Spartacists went on to argue that the "anti-imperialism" of Khomeini and his followers was only really an "obscurantist hatred for Western culture and modernization."[38] The SWP's position on Iran typified what the Spartacists regarded as the immediate impulse of the SWP to respond enthusiastically to "action" in the Third World, its formal theoretical commitments notwithstanding.
Aside from these Third World situations, the other major disagreement between and SWP and the Spartacists which arose in the 1980s was over the situation in Poland. The SWP supported the Solidarity movement just as it has many of the dissidents within the USSR. The SWP argued that Solidarity was standing up to "the privileged bureaucracy that governs Poland's economy [and] also exercises dictatorial rule over all other aspects of Polish society. For this reason, Solidarity found the struggle for economic democracy led directly to a fight for democracy in the rest of society."[39] It argued further that Solidarity's experience said a lot about "where the American labor movement should be headed."[40] The Spartacists, while also critical of the Polish regime, saw Solidarity as a counter-revolutionary movement, just as they viewed at least some of the Soviet dissidents defended by the SWP. The Spartacists, who resemble the French Lambertists in viewing religion as a particularly dangerous force capable of deceptively progressive social doctrines, pointed to Solidarity's support within the Church and referred derisively to its "clerical nationalist ferver."[41] Whether it be Islam or Catholicism, the Spartacists see religion as totally incompatible with socialism or any progressive movement toward it.
As the Sparticists were hammering away at the SWP for its stance toward the above movements, the SWP was beginning to face both internal dissension and isolation within the United Secretariat. The first major split involved a critique by a tendency led by the SWP's 1976 presidential candidate, Peter (now also known as Pedro) Camejo. Camejo argued that under the leadership of party chairman Jack Barnes, the turn-toward-industry strategy had become a mechanical "workerist" schema. That is, the party was seen as dissociating itself from both mass movements which were gaining strength around issues such as U.S. intervention in Central America and the nuclear freeze, and from work in unions other than industrial ones such as those of government employees, teachers, and service workers. Camejo argued that within the SWP there was a deep suspicion of the generation radicalized by the 1960s, a generation which was influential in both the rising mass movements and unions in the non-heavy industry areas. The workerist and economic determinist position of the SWP, Camejo argued, was cutting the SWP off from the most promising concrete movements in U.S. society. Camejo argued that, given its position, the SWP ought not to be surprised that it had dwindled to just over 1,000 members by 1983. He held up the Australian SWP, which had reached out to the social movements in that country and, he claimed, was experiencing growth, as a non-sectarian model for the U.S. party to emulate.[42]
In 1982, Camejo found himself outside of the SWP. He had gone to live for a while in Venezuela, switched his membership to the Venezuelan section of the United Secretariat, and was refused readmission into the U.S. section when he returned. He then led in the creation of the North Star Network, a California-based group which rejects the appropriateness of a Leninist vanguard party within the present U.S. context.[43] It argues that such a party must grow out of the variety of current oppositionist mass movements rather than attempt to impose itself on them. North Star thus networks with a wide range of groups, most intensively with those involved in Central American solidarity and with the Rainbow Coalition initiated by Jesse Jackson. It is also part of a movement which began in 1986 to form a National Committee for Independent Political Action.
The second split involved Les Evans, long-time activist and former editor of Intercontinental Press (the publication of which ceased in 1986) Evans was expelled in 1984. For Evans, the problem was that in the mid 1980s the SWP moved to a position of outright rejection of the theory of permament revolution. In the first article of the first issue of New International, a journal of Marxist politics and theory that the SWP launched with the Revolutionary Workers League of Canada, Jack Barnes explicitly declared Trotsky's skepticism toward the peasantry and his rejection of Lenin's formulation of a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" to have been an error. What convinced the SWP that Trotsky's thinking was erroneous were the "workers' and farmers' governments" in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada (the latter during the New Jewel Movement). The successes of these governments were now to serve the SWP as models for change on a worldwide basis and in the United States. Barnes credited the example of the above governments, along with the proletarianization of the SWP as a result of the turn-toward-industry strategy, with revealing to the SWP that Trotsky's conception of social change was only correct when he brought his thinking into conformity with that of Lenin and the longer Marxist tradition, i.e., during the decade between 1917 and 1927.[44]
Evans refused to reject the theory of permanent revolution as a tool by which to assess regimes and opposition movements.[45] The group he created after his expulsion, Socialist Action, worked actively in the broader Central American solidarity movement to which it attempted to contribute greater theoretical and critical rigor. Unlike Camejo's group, Socialist Action did not deny the present need for a vanguard party, and applied for recognition to the United Secretariat. It continued to support the SWP's 1984 candidates --it was still claiming to be legitimately within the SWP--Mel Mason for president and Andrea Gonzales for vice-president. Socialist Action has more recently split into two, with Evans moving over to the new group, Socialist Unity.
At the same time that the SWP was experiencing these internal splits, it was being isolated internationally. Camejo's positions found a sympathetic hearing in the Australian SWP, which attacked the U.S. party for being undemocratic. The Australian party also took on the United Secretariat, which it quit in 1985. It levied a particularly heavy attack on the majority of the United Secretariat, essentially the European sections, for ignoring the positive role being played by Cuba in aiding revolutionary regimes and movements.[46] On this point, however, it was in agreement with both Camejo and the majority within the U.S. SWP.
On the other hand, Evans' critique of the SWP found a sympathetic hearing among the European sections of the United Secretariat, which viewed the expulsions from the SWP as undemocratic. They also have criticized the "uncritical" support that the SWP has extended to Cuba, the Sandinistas, the FDR/FMLN in El Salvador, and the African National Congress in South Africa. For the European sections, there is a difference between "unconditional support" and "uncritical support." One can unconditionally support a movement or a regime but offer friendly criticism based on the insights of the theory of permanent revolution. Uncritical support logically precludes this and, from their point of view, undercuts the theoretical viability of Trotskyism. This writer must confess that he found not a little irony in listening to Alain Krivine criticize the SWP for exactly the same thing for which the LO and the Lambertists criticize the Ligue.[47] It is also ironic that the Ligue's criticism of the SWP in the 1980s so closely resembles the SWP's criticism of the Ligue for its position on the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1974 (a debate discussed at length in Chapter 4).
Clearly, revolution in the Third World is no easier a phenomenon for Trotskyists to deal with in the 1980s than it was in the 1960s or 1970s.
One new and interesting development within the realm of U.S. Trotskyism is the appearance at the national level of an organization that until 1979 was purely regional. The group is called the Freedom Socialist Party. It began as the Seattle branch of the SWP, but established itself as an autonomous party in 1966. Unlike the Spartacist League and the Workers League--which left the SWP over the Cuban Revolution--the Freedom Socialist Party did not break with the SWP because of a revolution in the Third World. Nor did it break with the SWP in order to adopt a different kind of organize tional pattern, as Spark had done when it decided to model itself after the French LO's rather unique pattern of organization. Rather, it left the SWP because of a position that the SWP took on a sensitive political issue in the United States.
This was the issue of race, and Blacks in particular. The Seattle branch of the SWP was part of a minority which rejected the party's position on Black nationalism, a position which went back to 1939. Although the SWP had not advocated the creation of a separate Black nation, it had committed itself to the support of Black national self-determination if Black people should decide that that was what they wanted. At its 1963 Congress, the party still contended that it neither advocated nor opposed a separate nation, but it did come out for the creation of an independent Black political party, and positive things were said about the nationalist Black Muslim movement led by Elijah Muhammed. The delegates of the Seattle branch argued that the party itself had to decide where it stood rather than wait for external signals. That branch had a very clear idea where the party should stand. It took the position that Blacks were an oppressed race within the United States, not a potential nation. Finally, the Seattle delegate who became the national secretary of the Freedom Socialist Party argued that it would be an irreparable error to extend any support to the Black Muslims, given Muhammed's "position on Black women, his red-baiting virulence, and anti-working class stance."[48] After the minority presented its alternative "Revolutionary Integrationist" position, it claimed to have been the victim of insults and vituperation on the part of the majority. Contending that this behavior revealed "the moral corruption, racism, and sexism" of the majority's "bureaucracy," the Seattle branch quit the SWP en masse approximately two years later.[49]
For the first ten years of its existence, the Freedom Socialist Party was confined to Seattle. About 1976, the group moved out a bit, but it restricted itself to the West Coast. It established branches in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In 1979, it established a branch in New York City, a creation of West Coast people who had moved to New York. They ran the organization out of their residences until 1983, when they opened an office in New York.[50]
This is an interesting organization for a number of reasons. First, as opposed to the SWP and every other organization discussed in this book, women have always predominated in the top leadership positions, including the national secretaryship. Much of its recent criticism of the SWP was directed at what it saw as male predominance in the SWP's leadership, and the SWP's refusal to permit the creation of women's caucuses. The Freedom Socialist Party maintained that even though the SWP was careful to balance sexually its electoral slates, actual power in the SWP remained in male hands. It was not the analyses of the SWP that it called into question; rather it was the internal power distribution, which it saw as incongruent with socialist-feminist analysis. The mast-head of the Freedom Socialist Party's paper announced, on the other hand, that it was the "Voice of Revolutionary Feminism."
Another interesting aspect of the Freedom Socialist Party was its openness and the way it was able to incorporate internally various aspects of what it saw as this larger emancipatory struggle. In regard to the latter, the organization was racially mixed and the problems of Black, Asian-Pacific, Chicano/Chicana and Native American peoples were given particular consideration and articulation. The organization is sexually mixed and is particularly concerned with the problems of lesbian women and the relationship between lesbian women and heterosexual women and men. Women from the party have attempted to create a broader women's organization called Radical Feminists. While the party is not even a truly national organization yet, it too has an Australian connection in the form of a sympathizing section in Australia.
Dramatic changes have occurred among U.S. Maoists in the 1980s as well. The Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), which had the official recognition of the Chinese Communist Party and was thus a fraternal party of the French PCML, no longer exists. The strains imposed by having to carry the banner of the Chinese regime at a time when the regime was both rejecting the heritage of Mao himself and following an anti-Soviet foreign policy that often coincided with U.S. foreign policy became enormous. The French PCML had managed to reinterpret Chinese foreign policy, to disavow China as a model for France, while criticizing the internal dynamics in China, and to reach out to other forces on the French Left, and finally to reject both democratic centralism and vanguardism. In France, it was the "mass line" leaning PCR(m-l) which was struck and wounded fatally by internal liquidationist currents. In the United States, the strains of the CP(ML)'s position brought out the contradiction inherent in Maoism over the party even within the very hierarchical structure which continued to be so supportive of the Chinese. A faction arose within the CP(ML) which questioned the appropriateness of continuing the hierarchical Marxist-Leninist vanguard form of organization. The anti-party faction was denounced as ultra-leftist, but it was strong enough to be fatal to the CP(ML). In January of 1981 Michael Klonsky quit as the chairman of the party and several months later the party was simply dissolved.[51]
One group which shed no tears over the passing from the scene of the CP(ML) was its arch-rival Maoist organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party. It will be recalled from Chapter 5 that the RCP experienced a serious split late in 1977, after the majority of the Central Committee supported the Gang of Four. The RCP lost control over most of the Revolutionary Student Brigades in the East and Midwest to the faction which split off. This break-away minority, referred to within the RCP as the Jarvis-Bergman clique, gave itself the name Revolutionary Workers Headquarters. This group, which sent a general letter of support to the post-Mao regime as it moved against the Gang of Four, never did merge with the CP(ML). It did, however, succeed in establishing a working relationship with the Chinese-recognized group, a relationship which it was deprived of when the CP(ML) folded. The 1977 split appeared to have resolved the RCP's internal tensions over loyalty to Mao and his associates during the Cultural Revolution, on the one hand, and supporting the Chinese regime regardless of that regime's assessment of the Cultural Revolution, on the other. The RCP remained internally hierarchical and dedicated to the Great Cultural Revolution
This is not to imply that the RCP has remained perfectly static. On the contrary, it has undergone significant changes. One of these changes has involved Chairman Bob Avakian. The same contradiction between the very personalized role of Mao as leader and the egalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution has been replicated in the RCP. Bob Avakian has attempted to adopt the very personalistic leadership style of Mao and his followers have accepted this. His charisma has been put to an even greater test than Mao's because the Chairman has been obliged to do his chairing from France.
As indicated in Chapter 5, members of the RCP were charged with misdemeanors after their January 1979 demonstration against the visit of Deng Xiaoping to Washington. The Department of Justice intervened, however, and the charges were changed to felonies. Seventeen members of the RCP were hit with charges that could have caused each of them to be sentenced to 242 years in prison. Ultimately, the government backed off of the felony charges in exchange for guilty pleas to some of the original misdemeanor charges. Avakian and other members of the party had been subjected to surveillance and the party had been infiltrated since the FBI's COINTELPO program was instituted. In August 1979, the Los Angeles Times printed what it claimed was an excerpt from a speech that Avakian had given in Los Angeles on August 5. The presentation in the Times led one to believe that Avakian had called upon the audience to murder President Carter as well as police officers and other heads of state. The newspaper partially corrected its quote at the insistence of Avakian's lawyer, and the Los Angeles District Attorney's office called off the investigation which it had begun. Nevertheless, according to the RCP, the Secret Service continued to harass Avakian. The RCP claims that threats were made against his life "directly by Secret Service and other government agents."[52] After a speaking tour of the United States in the summer and fall of 1979, during which his life was threatened on numerous occasions, according to the RCP, Avakian went underground and surfaced in France, where he requested political refugee status.[53]
Avakian arrived in France on December 21, 1980. Although the formal political refugee status was denied, he was able to remain in France a number of years. As the reader of the previous chapters knows, the RCP had not had any ties with Maoist organizations in France. By May 1981, however, the RCP had established contacts with twelve other organizations in foreign countries and had published the first edition of its International Marxist-Leninst Journal (entitled "A World to Win") with them. One of the groups was a French group called Pour l'laternationale Proletarienne. Avakian's presence in France, however, was not enough to hold this new grouping together. In the second number, published in May 1982, the French group explained that it was disbanding because it had "dissipated itself in concrete tasks, not knowing how to transform the general orientation into well-articulated activity corresponding to immediate reality."[54] It argued that the old tools of Marxism-Leninism did not permit it to deal adequately with the new crisis of the imperialist system, which had thrown the world into turmoil, and that the changes in the international Marxist-Leninist movement since the death of Mao demonstrated the weakness of revolutionaries today. It maintained that what was needed before there could be social revolutions in the present context were "ideological, theoretical, and philosophical revolutions which would educate revolutionaries and make them fit to face up to the objective situation. We must make such revolutions and rid ourselves of dead weight by resolutely entering the arena of the actual experience of the proletariat."[55] Thus the RCP's French affiliate was struck by the same kind of liquidationism which destroyed the pro-Cultural Revolution Gauche Proletarienne and the mass-line leaning PCR(m-l). Avakian was left in France without a fraternal party; but he was still the Chairman of the RCP back in the United States. His writings continued to hold a prominent if not predominant place in the RCP's numerous publications.
Aside from Avakian's physical absence for a considerable period, a number of other changes have taken place in the RCP. First, the party has reversed itself on the school busing issue which produced so much conflict between the RCP and virtually every other group on the Left in the United States. The party suggests that it was the revisionist Jarvis-Bergman clique within its ranks--the faction that split off in 1977 and founded the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters--that prevented the RCP from understanding the effect of its position. Its attack on busing was an attempt to avoid casting the White working-class Bostonians as bigots who needed to be controlled by the police, and at the same time to support the rights of Blacks. The RCP has come to admit that the effect of this position was to encourage the most regressive and reactionary elements of the U.S. working class.[56]
In fact, the general analysis of the class situation and the appropriate revolutionary strategy within the U.S. context has changed. The RCP's earlier "workerist" position, which led it to ally itself with segments of Boston's White working class that were opposed to busing, reflected an "economism" which the RCP now rejects. Though it invested much in the strike to organize the Farah workers, it has become convinced that the unionized elements of the U.S. working class have been bought off. Relying heavily on Lenin's analysis of the stratification of the proletariats within capitalist societies, the RCP has adopted the position that is the most disadvantaged segments of the working class that would be susceptible to revolutionary ideas and appeals. Taking a position completely contrary to that of the SWP and its basic-industries strategy, the RCP stated its intention of penetrating and establishing base areas in the most exploitative work contexts. It is in these contexts that immigrant and minorities are disproportionately concentrated.[57]
Consistent with this new turn and its reversal on the busing issue the RCP has admitted that its past relationship with the Black Workers Congress left much to be desired: "Often we go from sugar to shit in our approach to nationalist forces, from tailing them to attacking them for not being proletarian revolutionaries. The old polemics with the BWC are useful teachers in that regard."[58] It will be recalled that the RCP had even accused the Black Workers Congress of exhibiting Trotskyism or "Trotskyite features" when it dealt with the national question. A more cutting insult from one Maoist to another is difficult to imagine.
The RCP has remained opposed to both feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment. Its tone, however, is very different now. The 1975 program cried out, "Oppose the 'Equal Rights Amendment'--fight to defend protective legislation and extend it to men."[59] The new program did not mention the ERA, despite the fact that it came out approximately one year before the deadline for ERA ratification, when there was considerable mobilization and polarization over the issue. The RCP's polemical tone was softened somewhat, perhaps because its old adversary in polemics, the CP(ML), was dead or dying when the 1981 program was written. A self-critique within the party also convinced its members that behind the shrill tones was a contradiction. If ERA was rejected for being reformist, was it any the less reformist to call instead for the extension of protective legislation to men as well as women? While the attitude toward homosexuality or lesbianism within the party is far from supportive, it is very doubtful that today Avakian or any other member of the party would refer to the capitalists as "faggots." Even where it has not changed its basic positions, the party has "cleaned up" its language to make it more acceptable within the context in which the RCP must work.
Unlike the French PCML, which has reinterpreted the Theory of the Three Worlds, the RCP has decided to resolve the contradictions imposed by the theory by unequivocably rejecting it. It has done this even though Avakian assigns some of the responsibility for the development of the theory to Mao himself, a big admission, since Mao and his Cultural Revolution are the major source of inspiration for the RCP.[60] The admission, however, is limited to the contention that while elements of the theory can be traced back to some of Mao's earlier analysis, "Mao was not only not responsible for but fought relentlessly against the reactionary line of capitulating to imperialism and betraying revolution that has been embodied in the 'three-worlds' theory as put forward by the revisionists now ruling China, who have come to power precisely by overthrowing Mao's followers, and his line, after his death."[61]
A final change in the organization is the emphasis placed upon the role of its newspaper. A centrally-produced weekly edition of Revolutionary Worker has replaced the monthly Revolution, which used to be supplemented with different editions of The Worker produced in a number of cities. The RCP believes that the primary task of the party is "to systematically carry out revolutionary agitation and propaganda, with agitation the cutting edge and the Party's newspaper the main weapon now."[62] Since the United States is not now in a revolutionary condition, the RCP--probably more than any other Maoist group--stresses the ideological function of the newspaper. Its major slogan is, "Create Public Opinion...Seize Power!" It is through the paper that the RCP believes it can transform many local spontaneous eruptions occurring in the U. S. into conscious class struggle. Organizationally, this means that "besides the Party itself, the principal and ongoing forms of organization built are the networks of distribution of the newspaper."[63]
Since the liquidation of the CP(ML) in 1981, the organization closest to its positions has been the U.S. League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L), formed by the 1978 merger of the Chicana and Chicano August Twenty-Ninth Movement and the Asian-American I Wor Kuen. Subsequent to that formation, other groups and individuals, including the revolutionary Communist League led by Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and a few former members of the CP(ML), Carl Davidson among them, have joined it. Approximately 70 per cent of the members are people of Third World heritage.
Unlike the RCP, the League strongly supported the Theory of the Three Worlds through the early 1980s. Only in the mid-1980s, when the Chinese themselves somewhat softened their attitude toward the USSR, did the League soften its position on the USSR and Cuba. It persists in criticizing the USSR's intervention in Afghanistan, the Vietnamese intervention in Kampuchea., and Cuban support for the war effort in Eritrea.[64] Up until the mid-1980s, its journal Forward and its newspaper Unity contended that their articles were written "from the standpoint of Marxism Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought."[65] The publications were then formally separated from the League and designated simply as "socialist." While the League itself maintained its Marxist-Leninist initials, its self-conception as a vanguard party, and its democratic-centralist form of internal organization, the newspaper was to be used for broader external organizing and coalition work. Unlike the RCP, which it views as closed and sectarian, the League does indeed engage in broad networking, on the order of the PAC (or former PCML) in France and the less sectarian Trotskyists in the U.S. This includes support for the Rainbow Coalition and Jesse Jackson's primary campaigns. That continues the strain of Amiri Baraka's unique Maoist electoral thrust back in the 1970s although by the late 1980s the League preferred to leave the designation "Maoist" to the supporters of the Cultural Revolution and the "Gang of Four" in the RCP.
In the early 1980s, probably the most aggressive organization within the Maoist and/or pro-Chinese domain was the Communist Workers Party. This party, it will be recalled from Chapter 5, was an out-growth of a once exclusively Asian-American group formerly called Workers Viewpoint Organization, which was also for a time the name of the CWP's newspaper. The 1979 murder of five members of the CWP brought the organization considerable publicity. The five were murdered when they engaged in protests against the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina. Klan and American Nazi Party members, who killed the five and wounded seven others, were acquitted in 1980 of murder by an all-White jury in state court. In 1984, they were acquitted of violation of the victims' civil rights by an all-White jury in federal court in Winston-Salem. The party has been active in other areas of the South, and two of it members or ax-members won a large civil suit against government officials for violation of their civil rights when they worked in Kentucky.
The CWP adopted a position which is quite distinct from that of both the RCP and the League of Revolutionary Struggle. Like the RCP, it has always been positively oriented toward the Cultural Revolution in China. Unlike the RCP, however, the CWP has seen positive aspects in China's very recent foreign policy posture. Among the improvements which the CWP has noted on the part of the Chinese are: abandonment of the idea that world war is inevitable; cessation of attacks on the USSR for instigating the struggle in El Salvador, unconditional support for Namibian independence and refusal to side with U.S. insistence that this be tied to withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola; establishment of diplomatic ties with the government of Angola, which has good relations with the USSR; offers of material support to the front-line states in Southern Africa, and a public salute from the prime minister of China to the Soviet-influenced South West African People's Organization (SWAPO); receptions of both Libyan leader Qadaffi and French Communist Party leader Marchais in China despite the friendly relations of both with the USSR; and the threat to retaliate against the Reagan administration for the imposition of trade quotas.[66]
The CWP has also seen hope in internal dynamics of the USSR which escaped the RCP. It was particularly impressed with the direction taken by the USSR under the former General Secretary of the Soviet Party, Yuri Andropov. It likened Andopov's attempt to get rid of lazy and corrupt bureaucrats who held down productivity to Mao's Cultural Revolution, and suggested that perhaps Andropov learned something from that experience.[67] The RCP remained totally unimpressed by such thinking, and was so concerned that the "real nature" of the USSR was being forgotten in the Marxist-Leninist world that it called an open national meeting in New York devoted exclusively to the discussion of the precise nature of the USSR. The RCP saw the "accomodationist" position of the CWP as wishful thinking, and very dangerous wishful thinking at that. More recently, the CWP has changed its name to the New Democratic Movement.
One initiative at party building which was referred to in Chapter 3 but which has subsequently fallen flat is the 1977 attempt by the Guardian to stimulate the formation of a new Marxist-Leninist party. The former co-editor of the paper, Irwin Silber, left feeling that the staff had not really shaken off its infatuation with Mao's Cultural Revolution. Silber, who came to view the Cultural Revolution as being as great a disaster as the Theory of the Three Worlds, quit the Guardian and, with more like-minded comrades, formed a "Marxist-Leninist Journal of Rectification,'' Line of March. This journal has published an extensive critique of the whole Maoist and post-Maoist movements in other countries.[68] The editors of Line of March also published a bi-weekly paper called Frontline. Unlike the Guardian's attempt at party-building, Line of March succeeded in building an organizational base and engaging in activities that went beyond publishing. Line of March was much more favorably oriented toward the USSR and its international behavior than are the Maoist or pro-Chinese groups.
Silber's obituary for U.S. groups with a Maoist orientation may have been a bit too hasty. The RCP, the New Democratic Movement, and the League of Revolutionary Struggle continue actions and publication programs which reflect considerable commitment and discipline on the part of members and supporters. And they maintain themselves as national organizations.
The RCP may no longer have China as a model and the New Democratic Movement may be disappointed once again in its optimistic view of recent currents in both China and the Soviet Union. But the Trotskyists have demonstrated that Marxist-Leninist groups with a critical perspective can survive and can operate at a certain level of practice without having an ongoing regime as a reference model. The same may be true of Maoist groups.
Both Trotskyists and Maoists in the United States, however, will face two problems. The first is increased repression at the hands of governmental agencies. The Reagan administration granted the CIA free rein to operate inside the United States, and lifted restrictions that were imposed on the FBI after the COINTELPRO disclosures. The unleashing of both the CIA and the FBI posed serious problems for Maoists and Trotskyists.
The Reagan administration justified these actions on the grounds that the government needed greater latitude to deal with people engaged in illegal and violent activities. It contended that these agencies would not infringe on "legitimate" political activity in this country, even if it was oppositional. But, as has been pointed out in this book, much of the effort of the FBI in the past has been devoted to attempts to define groups as violent, and thus illegitimate in the eyes of the public. It is then free to disrupt any of their activities it chooses--including electoral activity. That the CIA in the 1980s was able to act against U.S. citizens operating within the United States was particularly ominous for groups with international linkages.
This, of course, is not a new problem for Trotskyists and Maoists --or for radicals generally--in the United States. The atypical period was the one of restraint, between the time that the COINTELPRO documents were made public and Ronald Reagan's first election. But it does raise the costs to people engaged in Trotskyist and Maoist movements in the United States well above those incurred by Trotskyists and Maoists in France.
A different problem which U.S. Trotskyists have not faced for many years, and which Maoists have never faced before, is how to relate to a wide array of non-Marxist-Leninist oppositional groups and movements. For most of the 1970s, Trotskyists and Maoists dominated left-wing campus politics, and the Guardian was the major newspaper read within that milieu. That situation has changed. By the early 1980s, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a non-Marxist-Leninist socialist group which works within the Democratic Party, replaced Trotskyists and Maoists as the major left-wing force on a number of U.S. campuses. DSA sometimes filled a void by the split in the Maoist RCP, which was the parent group of the Revolutionary Student Brigade, and by the industrial strategy of the SWP. Aside from its campus activities and work within the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialists are active in the labor movement and have some members in very high leadership positions. In addition, the Guardian is being given considerable competition by the weekly In These Times, which is close to, although not a formal organ of, the DSA.
Of even greater significance is the problem of adapting to the variety of groups which have no specific ideological orientation such as the DSA has. Included here (though the list is not exhaustive) would be the anti-interventionist and solidarity movements dealing with Central America and the Middle East, the anti-apartheid movement, racial groupings, feminist groups, peace groups, environmental groups, gay and lesbian rights groups, groups or locals of militant trade-unionists, and the Rainbow Coalition. These groups assumed increased importance in the U.S. political landscape by the mid-1980s, and neither Trotskyist nor Maoist groups have had an easy time relating to them. The SWP, which was in the forefront of the struggle against U.S. intervention in Vietnam, has been quite marginalized in the world of Central American solidarity. This is in contrast to the central position of the French Ligue in such solidarity work, as well as in the New Caledonian independence support movement. Indeed, both the Camejo and Evans factions were dissatisfied by the way that the SWP was attempting to balance the industrial strategy and networking with other groups which were not comprised strictly of industrial workers. If the SWP is uncritically supportive of the Nicaraguan government and the Salvadoran FDR/FMLN, it has been much more hesitant about its dealings with other U.S. groups which support them, too.
In sum, Trotskyists and Maoists in both France and the United States are now operating under contextual conditions different from those of the 1960s and 1970s, when Trotskyism was rejuvenated and when Maoism became a distinct current of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice. In France, they have had to contend with a Socialist government, which also included Communist ministers for a while, and which they viewed as a dismal failure resulting in renewed right-wing unity in that country. Under these conditions, Maoism almost disappeared from the scene, while Trotskyist organizations suffered serious but not devastating losses in membership.
In the United States, the SWP fragmented and lost substantial numbers of members, many of them important former members. It still has retained its predominance within the ranks of Trotskyism, although it will be interesting to see if the Freedom Socialist Party will be able to become a viable national organization in the future. Within the ranks of Maoism and post-Maoism, the CP(ML), with its Chinese recognition, passed from the scene, as have most of the nationally or ethnically specific Maoist groups which emerged in the 1970s. The RCP, the League of Revolutionary Struggle, and the New Democratic Movement continue the struggle begun by U.S. Maoists in the 1960s and 1970s. They have had to contend with the repressive implications of the shift to the right in the United States as well as with the existence of a new variety of oppositional social and political movements.
In conclusion, this updating survey of the evolution of Trotskyism and Maoism in France and the United States through most of the 1980s indicates that, regardless of the point in time at which one breaks into the evolution of these movements, the explanation of their dynamism remains the same. Group fragmentation is dictated by the combined effect of contradictions which inhere in the guiding theories and in the peculiar characteristics of the broader political contexts in which these groups must operate. Once this is understood, one can more easily interpret precise lines of development. What would otherwise be scattered and seemingly inexplicable pieces of descriptive information about such groups then become elements of an understandable, if not completely predictable, pattern of dynamics.
The process, of course, will not end with the present decade, or with the last words of this book. One can be sure that it will continue as Trotskyists and Maoists struggle, not only to survive over time while exercising intermittent influence--which I referred to as the "first level of practice" in the Introduction--but to go beyond that first level of practice to the second and third levels, building mass bases of support and instituting socialism.
NOTES
30. "Editorial," The Militant 47, no. 16 (May 6, 1983), p. 14.
31. "Defend Nicaragua, Complete the Revolution," Workers Vanguard, no. 329 (May 6, 1983), pp. 1, 6-8.
32. "Why the White House Fears Negotiations in El Salvador," The Militant 47, no. 7 (March 4, 1983), p. 10.
33. "Salvador Leftists on to Victory," Workers Vanguard, no. 330 (May 20, 1983), p. 1.
34. David Frankel, "Imperialism and the Khomeini Government," Intercontinental Press/lnprecor 19, no. 42 (November 16, 1981), p. 1120.
35. Ernest Harsch, "Iranian Workers Struggle to Rebuild Economy, Defend Democratic Rights," The Militant 47, no. 12 (April 8, 1983), pp. 10-11.
36. "SWP Bows to Holy Man Khomeini," Workers Vanguard, no. 219 (November 17, 1978), p. 10.
37. Ibid.
38. "Down with the Shah! Down with the Mullahs!," Workers Vanguard, no. 219 (November 17, 1978), p. 11.
39. Steve Bride, "What Poland's Workers Want," The Militant 45, no. 28 (July 24, 1981), p. 19.
40. Ibid.
41. "Reagan Weeps for Counterrevolutionary Solidarnosc," Workers Vanguard, no. 298 (February 5, 1982), p. 6.
42. Pedro Camejo, Against Sectarianism: The Evolution of the Socialist Workers Party, 1978-83 (Berkeley, 1983).
43. Peter Camejo, "Problems of Vanguardism: In Defense of Leninism," Discussion Articles #1, North Star Network Conference, San Francisco, December 7-8, 1984, pp. 3-7.
44. Jack Barnes, "Their Trotsky and Ours," New International, 1, no. 1, (Fall 1983), pp. 9-89.
45. Les Evans, "Lenin and the Theory of Democratic Dictatorship," Socialist Action Information Bulletin, 1, no. 5, (July 1984), pp. 1-12.
46. "Australian SWP Quits Fourth International," Intercontinental Press 23, no. 18 (September 23, 1985), pp. 569-70.
47. Interview with Alain Krivine, June 26, 1986.
48. Tom Boot, "Revolutionary Integration Yesterday and Today," The Freedom Socialist 8, no. 2 (Spri ng 1983), p. 14.
49. Ibid.
50. I am grateful to women of the Freedom Socialist Party who attended the conference on "Common Differences: Third World Women and Feminist Perspectives," held at the University of Illinois in Urbana from April 9 to 13, 1983, for their willingness to talk about their organization with this author.
51. An article on the split appeared in the party's newspaper right after Klonsky's resignation. See The Call 10, no. 2 (March 1981), p. 2.
52. "Battle Sharpens around Bob Avakian's Demand for Refugee Status," Revolutionary Worker, no. 157 (May 28, 1982), p. 12.
53. Avakian would have some reason to take death threats seriously. He, of course, knew Black Panther members Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, who were killed in their Chicago apartment by Illinois States Attorney's police. On November 3, 1979, close to the time that Avakian terminated his speaking tour, five members of the Maoist Communist Workers Party were shot to death at an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. Members of the Klan and the American Nazi Party were brought to trial and acquitted by a state and then a federal court. It was no secret to people on the Left that the FBI had infiltrators and paid informers in these right-wing organizations. The Liuzzo case has established for the public record that people in the pay of the FBI were not above participating in the literally murderous activities of the Klan.
54. A World to Win: International Marxist-Leninist Journal, no. 2 (May 1982), p. 18.
55. Ibid.
56. "Advance through Criticism of Past Errors: Busing and the Fight Against National Oppression and For Revolution," Revolution 4, no. 6 (June 1979), pp. 9-15.
57. See RCP, Charting the Uncharted Course (Chicago: RCP Publications, n.d.) and "Report from the Central Committee," Revolutionary Worker, no. 194 (February 25, 1983), p. 10.
58. "Report from the Central Committee," p. 8.
59. RCP, Programme and Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1975), p. 141.
60. Bob Avakian, Conquer the World?, special issue of Revolution, no. 50 (December 1981), pp. 30-34.
61. Ibid., p. 34.
62. "Report from the Central Committee," p. 9. See also RCP, Create Public Opinion . . . Seize Power! (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1979).
63. RCP, New Programme and New Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1981), p. 44.
64. For a succinct overview of the League's positions see "U.S. Foreign Policy and the World Today: Interview with Mae Ngai of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (ML)," Forward, no. 5 (Spring 1986), pp. 65-79.
65. Unity 6 no. 3 (February 25-March 10, 1983), p. 2.
66. Cynthia Lai, "China Charts Independent Course: Major Shift in Foreign Policy," Workers Viewpoint 8 no. 3 (February 9-15, 1983), p. 10.
67. William Nishimura, "Arousing a Socialist Giant," Workers Viewpoint 8 no. 4 (February 16-22, 1983), pp. 7,15.
68. Editorial Board, "The Trial of the Gang of Four and the Crisis of Maoism," Line of March 1, no. 6 (May-June 1981), pp. 7-65.