In the rest of this reply we will go into some detail on the MLOC’s stand in the struggle against social-chauvinism and its role in (or rather: in disrupting) the Marxist-Leninist movement. The real significance of the MLOC is that it is a concentrated expression of the idealist method, the “last word” so to speak in idealism and metaphysics, it represents idealism trying to dress itself up as “anti-three worlds”. Regarded in itself, the MLOC is just an intellectualist sect, one of many, with neither stable principles nor roots in the masses, but somewhat more interested than most others in the arts of public relations and of international intrigue. But the vice of idealist anti-revisionism is a serious disruption to the ranks of those wishing to oppose Klonskyite social-chauvinism. A close examination of the MLOC’s role in disrupting the struggle against social-chauvinism will be of value in exposing the features of this idealism.
What is idealist anti-revisionism? In our article entitled “How to Advance the Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism” we describe it as a road-block in the struggle against social-chauvinism, a road-block that “boil(s) down to conciliation with opportunism and social-chauvinism”. The article states:
One of the roadblocks carried over from opportunism is the method of idealist anti-revisionism. This is the method of making the ’repudiation’ of revisionism hang on abstract phrases and formulations, dragged out of context from the classics or the history of the international communist movement, and emptied of all revolutionary content and mobilizing force. This method is the same as the method of the Klonskyite OL and that of the ’Communist League’ (now calling itself the ’Communist Labor’ Party of the USNA).
We call this method idealist anti-revisionism. On one hand, the idealist anti-revisionists like to present themselves as the staunchest fighters against revisionism, as the truest upholders of Marxism-Leninism, as the faithful keepers of the archives. Some of them get quite arrogant and puffed up about this. But their method is totally idealist. They invent thousands of dividing lines, all having nothing to do with revolutionary practice, to separate the groups in the Marxist-Leninist movement, to throw some out and cover up the hideous features of others. In this way they divorce themselves from the Party concept and instead fall prey to a wild factionalism. They believe that theory comes out of debates between groups and have no idea of the materialist conception of the relation between theory and practice.
In actual fact, these idealist anti-revisionists are upholding the methods of thinking and of work of the Mensheviks and the opportunists.[8]
This idealist method has repeatedly proved itself to be a cover for fanatical right-wing dogmatism. Its method of unity – unity on a “perfect” document of principles covering everything under the sun – has proved to be a method of raising to a principle the use of differences to divide the masses, a method of negating Marxism-Leninism and negating the struggle against opportunism, a method of promoting sectarian disunity rather than the unity that comes from consciously representing the interests of a definite class, the proletariat. But the idealists never learn from history. That would go against their principles. They separate themselves from history and deny any responsibility for the results of their method by rationalizing that all the other idealists were a little off on this formulation or that one.
In this reply we will deal with the MLOC mainly on questions of Party-building. It is precisely here where the idealist anti-revisionists have concentrated their main fire. The idealist anti-revisionists especially deny the Party concept and that the Party is the Party of a class. For them there is neither history, nor a historical movement, nor the possibility of reflecting the interests of a class. All that exists are the “perfect ideas”, the great Platonic ideas, the abstract and eternal principles. And behind their high-sounding but meaningless principles, we will find the same polycentrist, revisionist rot that we have heard before from the neo-revisionists.
[8] “How To Advance the Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism” in The Workers’ Advocate, February 10, 1978, p. 12, or in the pamphlet edition, pp. 30-31.