First Published: Workers Viewpoint newspaper, Vol. 1, No. 6, September-October 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
The OL has always shown a philistine attitude towards polemics. They use slander, character assassination, and can only slip and slide when confronted. They allow at most ten minutes for polemics and questions from each organization, and when challenged, they say “this is our forum.” We challenge the OL to defend your opportunist line and struggle, tit for tat, in front of the whole communist and workers’ movement tonight! Stop wriggling like a spineless snake as you have done historically.
We don’t think that the OL will allow open polemics; they will again try to cover their opportunist tracks. OL’s opportunist and wriggling approach in polemics is identical to their “party principle.”
OL, the only party you will build will be a revisionist party! The OL claims today to have been “consistent and clear” in upholding party building as the principal task of the communist movement, but their entire history is full of opportunist about-faces and slipping and sliding.
From 1973 to 1975, they practiced building the party through the mass struggle and united front; they upheld the R.U.’s pragmatic practice-freak line of belittling the importance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-Tung Thought and denounced those that uphold the correct line as ultra-leftists, and held left opportunism as the main danger in the communist movement instead of right opportunism. Today they are forced to try to cover over and hide their rotten, right opportunist history.’
The Organizing Committee (OC) for a ML Party, initiated by the OL, is the epitome of their “get rich quick”, bottom up, lowest common denominator approach to party building. The OL says that the OC will “publish the first draft of the Party Program ” (July 5, 1976, Call). But Lenin said, “that the organizing committee was mainly a commission set up to convene the Congress, a commission deliberately composed of representatives of different shades, including even the Bundists; while the real work of creating the organized unity of the party was done entirely by the Iskra organization.” (Vol. 7, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” p. 279.)
The OL is not open and above-board, does not dare to openly uphold their own line, as the line of demarcation, and they do not push themselves as the leading line and leading circle. The OL, instead of developing a program out of line struggle based on the highest level of ideological and political unity, bases the OC on 8 general “principles of unity” which do not draw lines with any opportunist trends in the communist movement. Their promise that every group in the OC will have 1 vote in the OC amounts to deciding line by “pure democratic” methods, and is a bourgeois democratic trick to lure people in. This is all intended to hide their line, and unite with people not based on the line struggle and demarcation drawn in 8 years of struggle in the U.S. communist movement!
WE CHALLENGE the OL and OC to expose themselves on the following positions:
–whether United Front is a tactic or a strategy
–their position on Shah of Iran and recent massacre in Tell Zatar
–their liberal-bourgeois line on Busing Plan.
We call on all comrades to struggle against and expose this most dangerous and opportunist revisionist trend in the communist movement.
BUILD THE PARTY ON THE IDEOLOGICAL PLANE,
GRASP THE KEY LINK OF POLITICAL LINE!
WORKERS VIEWPOINT ORGANIZATION
August 29, 1976.