This pamphlet contains the text of both the introduction and lead article from the March 10, 1977 issue of The Workers’ Advocate (vol. 7, no. 1). This was a special issue on the situation in the U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement. This issue is still available in its entirety.
Today a section of the U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement has openly deserted to the side of the imperialist war-mongers and is arrogantly shouting its treason from the roof-tops. The social-chauvinists (socialists in words but U.S. superpower chauvinists in deeds) have joined hands with the U.S. monopoly capitalist class. They are arrogant because they are backed both by international opportunism and also by the U. S. bourgeoisie, which has even begun in the last few months to intensify its promotion of the OL social-chauvinists as the genuine “American-based” communists through the imperialist press. The social-chauvinists are ultra-right fanatics. They are urging the U.S. imperialists to drop their alleged “appeasement” and to fight harder against the foreign imperialist rivals. They have denounced U.S. imperialist chieftain Carter for not producing more B-l bombers (The Call editorial, July 11). Each bourgeois faction always accuses its competitors of being “soft” on the Russians, and Klonsky’s OL is no exception. They are trying to get the working-class movement to divert its “main blow” at the Soviet social-imperialists, to fight the foreign enemy, to fall victim to war hysteria, to revel in the prospect of a future mass world slaughter of millions upon millions of toilers and oppressed peoples and to forget the proletarian revolution. This pamphlet is being printed to unite the Marxist-Leninists in struggle against these chauvinist class-traitors.
How can we unite? How should we build the Party? These articles reprinted in the pamphlet answer these questions in bold terms: Unite for and in the struggle against social-chauvinism! Unite through the repudiation of revisionism and all opportunism! The articles expose the link between opportunism and social-chauvinism. They show that the emergence of open social-chauvinism (the opportunist leaders were always social-chauvinists to the core but they tried to conceal this) in the form of “directing the main blow” at the foreign threat is the beginning of the bankruptcy of neo-revisionism. Neo-revisionism is revisionism falsely parading under the banner of Mao Tsetung Thought. It came from New Leftism adapting itself to Marxism-Leninism and continuing its struggle against Mao Tsetung Thought in a more dishonest, treacherous form, by sham support for certain classical formulations of Marxism-Leninism which are distorted, deformed and turned into their opposite and by use of historical parallels and analogies. Now the open advocacy of social-chauvinism and the tears shed over the B-l bomber reveal the rotten bourgeois essence behind the neo-revisionist fallacies of “the Party emerges from the mass movement”, “the main danger is the ultra-left”, “this is not a revolutionary period” and behind the neo-revisionist denial of the role of consciousness and their “left” “revolutionary” and even “class struggle” trade unionism and economism. In order to fight social-chauvinism through to the end, its historical roots must be exposed and fought. To fight the new Browderites, the Marxist-Leninists must take up the historical task of a thorough repudiation of Browderism and all brands of opportunism.
The articles are reprinted as in the original with the following exception. Certain changes have been made in the section entitled “The Road Forward for Party-Building in 1977” in order to sharpen the formulations and stress the sham nature of the social-chauvinist “organization consolidation”. The Party should be consolidated on all fronts—including organizationally, politically, theoretically and especially consolidated in its hatred for social-chauvinism and the class enemy and in steeling itself through actual experience in the resistance movement against the class enemy and the attacks of the capitalist state. The loose social-chauvinist Browderite educational associations such as the OL (now absurdly calling itself the “Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)”) are not “organizationally consolidated” at all, but they use the banner of “organizational consolidation” and bourgeois ideas of organization in order to try to stop the struggle between Marxism-Leninism and social-chauvinism and to try to stop discussion and clarification of political line. They are doing this by building sects which use the dirty methods of splitting into many pieces and factionalizing the Marxist-Leninist movement, the workers’ movement, mass demonstrations and all mass organizations. This amounts to building “many parties”. This is the reality behind their “organizational consolidation” and polemics allegedly against “united action with revisionism”. Well, goodbye and good riddance to the social-chauvinist “theoreticians” and big-wigs! We are stronger without ultra-rightists in our midst! Let them not complain if the Marxist-Leninists in turn unite the proletariat by repudiating the class traitors, a denunciation conducted openly and on principled political grounds and not with the political blackmail, slander and fascist methods of the ultra-rights. This will be a protracted, difficult process but it will be well worth-while, for it will cleanse and revolutionize the Marxist-Leninist ranks preparing us for the revolutionary upsurge that is already seething in the workers’ movement. Let all Marxist-Leninists unite in the struggle against social-chauvinism!