First Published: The Call, Vol. 8, No. 32, August 27, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Submitted by Lee Chen, New York City
The Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO) and its mass organization, Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), have been thoroughly discredited in New York’s Chinatown. After openly attacking China and beating up patriotic Chinese and progressive Asian-Americans, WVO and AAFE have lost their mass base and become totally isolated.
For the benefit of Call readers, I will recount some of the history behind these developments. Last May 27, about 15 WVO and AAFE members stormed the headquarters of the Chinese Democratic Rights Association (CADRA), an organization formed earlier this year by ex-AAFE members (including some ex-WVO members). Their office was ransacked, and three persons, including one woman, were beaten with iron bars and had to be hospitalized.
This story was reported by several newspapers in Chinatown, including China Daily News.
Then, on June 2, about 30 WVO and AAFE members demonstrated in front of China Daily News.
It was singled out because of its support for China. Several of the demonstrators tried to break into the office, but they were stopped before gaining access.
After this incident, WVO and AAFE members instigated a series of smaller violent confrontations in Chinatown.
All these events cap AAFE’s long down-hill course which started soon after WVO seized the leadership of AAFE in the early 1970s. AAFE had been committed to taking up the struggle for the welfare of the Chinese community. But under WVO leadership, AAFE separated itself from the community.
During 1975 and 1976, many AAFE activists disassociated themselves from the organization. They joined other community organizations and participated in the patriotic movement among the Chinese.
Earlier this year, the latest group of activists left AAFE. They, along with other individuals, established CADRA, an organization dedicated to defending the Chinese minority’s democratic rights.
Basically, two factors led the masses and some WVO cadre to leave AAFE.
One is that WVO downplayed the national question and tried to push AAFE into exclusively organizing Asian workers, especially restaurant workers in Chinatown.
WVO’s line of turning AAFE into an Asian workers’ organization meant abandoning the broader democratic struggles of the Chinese minority. As a result, AAFE could not build the broad united front in Chinatown. This united front of workers, patriotic Chinese and other strata is essential to fight the corrupt and reactionary forces, mainly represented by the KMT.
Aside from ignoring the national question, WVO’s organizing went against the desires of many AAFE activists and promoted dual unionism. Essentially, AAFE was to substitute itself for a union, a strategy which downplayed the importance of working within the established unions to revitalize them as fighting organizations of the workers.
Dissatisfaction within AAFE heightened when WVO blindly ordered its cadres to launch an organizing drive in Chinatown, disregarding the current economic and organizational realities of Chinatown’s restaurant industry.
In midtown Manhattan, where Chinese restaurants are larger, unionization has become a viable issue. But Chinatown restaurants are small and family-run, thus making organizing very difficult. WVO ignored the situation and pushed to organize Chinatown.
The second factor was WVO’s anti-China position. After the downfall of the gang of four, WVO kept silent on the China issue for more than two years. During this time, their press never mentioned the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party headed by Hua Guofeng. An intensive debate was going on within the organization.
Finally, earlier this year, WVO formally adopted an anti-China resolution and made public its support for the gang of four.
WVO’s bankrupt and reactionary political line drove the masses out of AAFE and many honest Marxist-Leninists out of WVO. The remaining handful of WVO members have learned well from their mentors, the gang of four. They now use gangster tactics against the masses.
After the May-June incidents, WVO proclaimed themselves to be the “real communists” in Chinatown and slandered progressive Asian-Americans and patriotic Chinese as being the “new KMT.”
Despised and denounced by Asian-Americans and other community people, WVO is virtually dead among the Chinese minority in New York. Its “mass” organization, AAFE, is a group of people rejected totally by the masses.
WVO has never had any direct access to the Chinese community because it relied exclusively upon AAFE. Now that AAFE is gone from the Chinese community, so is WVO.