First Published: In Struggle No. 105, January 4, 1978
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
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Red Star Collective’s response arrived in the form of a public document available soon at our bookstore, entitled, Statement on the Marxist-Leninist Movement: On the proposed Fourth Conference by IN STRUGGLE! This ten-page document attempts to demonstrate how the conferences organized by IN STRUGGLE! serve only to build IN STRUGGLE!’s “hegemony” over the movement. And to get there, IN STRUGGLE! is, according to the RSC, refusing to reply to its just criticisms, and deforming its positions, and limiting itself to pitting its own political line on display, and treating any concrete analysis of the concrete situation in Canada with contempt and rallying other groups on an opportunist basis, and refusing to take the RSC’s stance on the organization of the conferences into consideration, thus preventing the RSC from defending its positions. In short it all goes to prove that IN STRUGGLE! is just not interested in debating. So the RSC has refused to come and put forward and defend its positions at the Fourth Conference.
The RSC charges against IN STRUGGLE! are false.
Take the question of the conferences themselves. The RSC complains of not being able to present its positions at them. In fact the conferences organized by IN STRUGGLE! gave them a platform for reaching hundreds of Marxist-Leninists and vanguard workers whom they would have never been able to reach otherwise. Basically, what the RSC reproaches us for is having defended our own positions at the conferences. They reproach us because members and sympathizers of IN STRUGGLE! questioned their line. What underlies the RSC criticisms, and what RSC is with great difficulty trying to hide, is its anger at the fact that its positions marked by bourgeois nationalism and economism are increasingly discredited, even in Vancouver, where most of its work is concentrated.
Its actions confirm the analysis we advanced recently: it is moving further and further away from the firm defence of Marxism-Leninism and from the central task of party-building.
In spite of the final statement in its latest document where it insists that:
Our refusal to attend the upcoming conference does not mean that we will not continue to wage the ideological struggle within the Marxist-Leninist movement and within the working class in particular.
The RSC is doing what the League has already done before it – abandoning the public ideological struggle for fear of seeing its opportunism completely exposed. and taking refuge in small-groupism.