First Published: Workers Viewpoint, Vol. 4, No. 18, November 5, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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October 1979 – A glorious date for the U.S. working class! With the founding of the Communist Workers Party, U.S.A. (CWP), U.S. workers once again have their headquarters. They have their vanguard political Party to lead them in overthrowing and destroying the criminal system of monopoly capitalism and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. The great teacher and revolutionary leader, Lenin, taught how the forging of the Party is the first step in increasing tenfold the preparation for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Comrades and friends, this single greatest step has been taken! It is the result of the determined struggle waged by the Workers Viewpoint Organization in the past five and a half years. Today, the CWP proudly and confidently is assuming leadership in the historic mission of the proletariat, guided by the revolutionary theory of the working class, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, and adding on the solid foundation laid by the Workers Viewpoint Organization – its fighting tradition, staunch character and correct line.
The founding of the CWP is most timely.
Imperialism is the era where capitalism has reached its highest and last stage. As it wreaks havoc worldwide and in the workers’ lives, it brings all the contradictions already present under capitalism to a head. The only promise it holds to the people of the U.S. and the world is criminal wars, plunder of the world’s resources, crisis after crisis throwing workers on the streets, wrecking workers’ families, destroying any hopes of a future. It turns the most advanced technology into instruments of death and intensified robbery.
Imperialism is rotten ripe for revolution. During the era of imperialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat is an immediate and practical question, as the whole economic and political situation is most inflammable and abounds in sudden flare-ups. The contradictions under imperialism periodically come to a head resulting in revolutionary situations where the bourgeoisie is no longer able to rule in the old way and the masses no longer willing to live in the old way, willing to die for revolution.
The first such revolutionary situation swept through Europe during and right after World War I. The imperialists were entangled among themselves and the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in imperialist countries was pushed to the ultimate. It was here that the Russian Revolution took place in 1917, and the workers in Germany, Hungary and other European countries made heroic attempts to seize state power. Several of these attempts succeeded temporarily. But even though the situation for the working class was excellent, the workers movement was weakened from within by the treachery of the revisionists of the workers’ parties at that time.
The second such opportunity came after World War II. Imperialism worldwide was devastated by the war, while communist parties came to power in numerous countries around the world, and the Soviet Union won the respect of the world’s peoples because of its leadership and heroic sacrifice in the fight against the Nazis. The U.S. imperialists, the only imperialists to gain from the war, faced overwhelming odds.
They faced 13 socialist countries, a powerful rising storm of national liberation wars in the third world, and daily growing resistance from the U.S. workers (the largest strike wave in U.S. history) and other oppressed U.S. peoples. The imperialists were staring in horror at their graves!
In this excellent situation, the Communist Party (USA) and communist parties throughout Europe lost their nerve. They saw the bourgeoisie’s weaknesses, its desperate lashing out, as its strength. They were sunk in a swamp of illusions about the brutal system of imperialism. These parties bowed down before the imperialists. What was one of the best opportunities for proletarian revolution in the U.S., these revisionists now speak of as the “horrors of the McCarthy era.”
The betrayal of the CPUSA, and that of Khrushchev and other communist parties around the world, allowed the bourgeoisie to delay their inevitable fall and temporarily stabilize their rule.
Today this temporary stabilization is ending, politically and economically. It’s the third time around.
The bourgeoisie increasingly cannot rule in the same way. The economic crisis is deeper than ever before. Second world countries are resisting the U.S. attempt to pass on inflation to them, threatening to go over to the Soviet Union. The third world countries are demanding equal exchange for their resources. The U.S. imperialists are no longer able to pass the crisis along to other countries like they used to. They are entangled among each other, fighting over which monopolist will have to be cut. Old tricks of Keynesian economics won’t get over any more. They are stuck! It took Franklin Roosevelt four years to unite the bourgeoisie around the New Deal state monopoly capitalism to get the capitalists out of crisis, and the crisis today is a lot deeper. There’s no way the monopoly capitalists can get themselves together in less than five years.
The masses are increasingly not willing to live in the same way. The powerful lever of economic crisis is pushing forward the awakening of the proletariat. The U.S. defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, and all the rest has broken through illusions about capitalist “democracy.” The “American Dream” is an American Nightmare. As workers are kicking out union hacks across the country, the bourgeoisie does not have the influential social-democrats, revisionists, or the trade union bureaucrats’ stranglehold to shackle the rapidly growing anger. There is great confusion and disorientation, but under the confusion there is a volcano ready to roar, to pour its burning lava burying this rotten system with its fire. With the masses oppressed more in every part of their lives and deeper than ever before, when their pent-up anger bursts out it will be that much more powerful.
But most important of all, the proletariat now has its Party, the Communist Workers Party, to organize it, make it conscious and lead it in such a way that U.S. imperialism will never find a way out of this crisis!
The betrayal of the Communist Party (USA) in the 40’s and 50’s robbed U.S. workers of precisely this necessary revolutionary leadership. But the CPUSA’s sell-out to the U.S. monopoly capitalists did not one bit lessen the daily hell of life under imperialism. And likewise, it did not extinguish the fires of resistance against this hell. Where there is oppression there is resistance. This is an irrefutable law of history. A law that the U.S. workers and oppressed peoples once again showed to be true.
During the 60’s millions of people fought for their rights and their lives: in the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles, Oakland, New York and Chicago, blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans rose up summer after summer, setting cities on fire fighting for their rights; in auto plants, young workers walked out, refusing to submit to forced overtime, racism and the torture of the line; in Vietnam, servicemen fragged their officers and refused to fight; on hundreds of college campuses, students took over buildings, shut down schools and some laid down their lives to stop the war.
But what all these movements lacked was that single, revolutionary and recognized vanguard party based in the working class that gives them theoretical, political and organizational orientation so they could devote their whole lives to the revolution. Even the most militant and revolutionary mass leaders of the time, due to historical limitations of his or her time, didn’t understand the need for this vanguard party. For example, Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party didn’t see that the revolution in this country has to be a socialist revolution led by the working class and its political party.
Out of the millions who took part in one way or another, a handful of them, the most conscious and advanced continued to struggle, seeking out the connection between all the different struggles, searching for the root to this exploitation and oppression and how it was to be ended.
The powerful national liberation struggles throughout the world at the time, guided by Marxism-Leninism, became a powerful influence to revolutionaries in the U.S. seeking direction. And most significant of all was the leadership of Chairman Mao and the Communist Party of China, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution led by Mao, which was a call to revolutionaries worldwide to dare to struggle and dare to win.
In the first period of the struggle for the Party (late 60’s, early 70’s) the most advanced among these fighters stepped forth and took up the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. They mounted a struggle to affirm the working class as the leading class in opposition to all kinds of eclectic theories like Fanon, Guevaraism, Marcuse, etc. that were affecting the spontaneous movements.
These advanced elements organized into hundreds of communist circles around the country. And among these circles a major struggle broke out over what the principal task facing communists was – whether the principal task was building the Party or the “united front against imperialism.” The main proponent of the correct line of Party building as the central task was the Workers Viewpoint Organization, founded by Jerry Tung, the General Secretary of the CWP.
From the start, the WVO fought an uphill battle against the scab opportunists who downgraded building the Party as the most important part of preparing for proletarian revolution. These traitors pretended to uphold Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, but never understood it nor applied the science to U.S. conditions.
One such group was the Revolutionary “Communist” Party (RCP, formerly the Revolutionary Union). The whole line of the die-hard pragmatists in the RCP amounted to one thing: that the proletariat should continue to fight as it had, without revolutionary theory, and therefore without a vanguard party, that it should continue to suffer losses of its forces and should not prepare for socialist revolution.
Thoroughly smashing this treacherous view, the WVO went on with confidence in its correct line to build its fighting tradition and forge its staunch character. The WVO took on the “Communist” Party-ML (then the October League), the most dangerous revisionist trend at the time. These scum were (and are) well known for their total spinelessness. In 1974 at the Puerto Rican Solidarity Day event at Madison Square Garden, Jerry Tung and the WVO went against the tide, polemicizing against the revisionists who sponsored the event of 20,000, and exposing how Soviet social-imperialism was no ally of third world people’s but one of the world’s two main enemies. The gutless worms in the “C”PML bowed to the revisionists and complained about the WVO being “sectarian.” In New York City, the WVO went into the October League’s own forum and whipped these petty bourgeois revisionists for their bone-deep faith in bourgeois democracy (like their blind support of the capitalists’ Boston Busing Plan, their speculation about liberal and fascist bourgeoisie, etc.) All over the country these scum were routed. The second period in the development of the Party, the struggle for party building being the central task and the leading role of theory, was a tremendous success.
Communists then went into the third period, the struggle over the political line to guide the Party in preparing for the dictatorship of the proletariat in the U.S. And when the circle kings and queens of the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization and the Revolutionary Workers League began spouting their careerist, anarchist garbage, the WVO again went against the tide. May Day 1976, WVO courageously battled cops, charging mounted police with bare fists. These opportunists were so shaken by the sight they didn’t dare show their faces on the streets after that. A WVO delegation, led by comrades Jerry Tung and Phil Thompson, boldly took the struggle for the correct line right into the scab’s strongholds. In forum after forum, their bankrupt line was stripped to its reactionary essence and many genuine communists were won over.
Through the course of these blow-for-blow battles, the WVO was able to unite the genuine communists and the best class fighters produced by the mass movements of the 60’s and 70’s under the banner of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. The question of the leadership of the Party of the U.S. proletariat and the Party’s line was settled–the party’s foundation had been laid. As the demonstrators at May Day 1977 militantly shouted. “Workers Viewpoint is the Party, the Party is WV!”
In October of 1976 Chairman Mao, the great helmsman of the Communist Party of China and of the international communist movement, died. Immediately following his death the revisionists in China jumped out, arresting Chairman Mao’s close comrades and pulled a coup d’etat, seizing power from the working class in China. These renegades proceeded to launch an all out attack on Chairman Mao’s line, bringing confusion among the ranks of communists around the world. Soon thereafter the disorder went further when the slimy scum Enver Hoxha of Albania jumped out with full-blown Trotskyism.
The great helmsman had died. And this became the most significant test for communists in present time. It became a question of who had taken to heart the great lessons of Chairman Mao’s struggle against revisionism and to continue on the road of proletarian revolution, and who were those counterfeit “communists” who know not the meaning of principle who never believed in the proletarian revolution nor in Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.
Once again, the leadership of the WVO immediately took a clear position defending Mao and the historic lessons of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and consolidated the whole Party on the correct position. It has been going against the tide and ruthlessly fighting those opportunists who wasted no time in marching to the beat of the revisionist drummers in China and Albania. All this was in sharp contrast to these scum and those, like the RCP, who sat on the fence for over a year, and even after their organization split in half on the question, did not take a clear stand for months. The necessity and correctness of the struggle against these opportunists in the previous 4 years proved correct beyond our imagination.
In the midst of this great disorder, the WVO maintained its bearings, drew and fought for the correct conclusions on the coup in China, and boldly continued to shoulder the task of making immediate and systematic preparations for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Having in the main united all the genuine circles of Marxist-Leninists around the country, the WVO declared the third period over and pushed on to concentrate on winning over advanced workers.
The WVO always recognized that the first step in preparing for the dictatorship of the proletariat principally consists of winning and training advanced workers to build up the Party. An aspect of this was to root the Party deep in the midst of the struggles of the masses and to learn the particular laws governing the development of these struggles. For almost two years, the WVO stressed biting into the spontaneous struggles of the masses – joining our class brothers and sisters in their day to day struggles resisting the attacks of the capitalists, and in the course of these struggles, bringing communism to the working class, winning the advanced workers and training them to be professional revolutionaries. In order to do this, the WVO focused on systematizing and concentrating our understanding of the different movements of U.S. people, particularly the trade union movement, the movement of oppressed nationalities and national minorities, and youth/student movements.
The WVO’s first publication of its Journal was in January 1974. In the five years since its inception, the WVO outstripped all the opportunists, some who had been around for over ten years. This was possible because of the comprehensiveness and depth of the WVO’s scope and work – based on its correct line and pushed forward by its boldness.
It has been in these past five years that the firm, granite foundation of the Party was laid. The WVO has taken to heart the precious lessons paid for in blood by our class brothers and sisters who have fought against capitalism and imperialism over the past hundred and more years. And guided by these lessons in skirmishes against the bourgeoisie and opportunists, the Party character, its fighting spirit, staunch character and correct line, have been and continues be forged.
Comrades and friends, the situation is excellent indeed! The bourgeoisie and the stinking system of imperialism is sinking deeper into crisis. They are tangled, fighting over who will get cut out. They have run out of temporary solutions. The only solutions they know of, even by their own admission, only further deepens the crisis. We must seize the time! Under the leadership CWP and its General Secretary, Jerry Tung, we must boldly seize the excellent situation to build up the Party and prepare for the dictatorship proletariat! We have the opportunity to ready our class, the working class, in this crisis and awakening so that the U.S. imperialists will never again find a way out! We must seize the time so that there’s no turning back, so that they’ll never again be able to lull us to sleep and continue to suck our blood and sweat!
SEIZE THE TIME – BUILD THE CWP TO PREPARE FOR THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT