First Published: Frontline, Vol. 3, No. 9, October 28, 1985.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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U.S. Maoism has produced some bizarre spectacles in the course of its decline into political irrelevancy, but none has been more outlandish than the farce now being played out by the Communist Workers Party (CWP).
As recently as five years ago, the CWP was perched on Maoism’s far left wing proclaiming that the U.S. was in the midst of a revolutionary situation. The shots which killed five CWP members and supporters in Greensboro in 1979 were considered only the opening rounds of a mass upheaval in which “the 1980s would make the 1930s look like a picnic.” Under the guidance of CWP founder and “great teacher” Jerry Tung, the organization’s members mobilized for the imminent seizure of power by covering the walls of abandoned buildings with the red-painted call to “Prepare for workers rule.”
Today, the CWP argues that being elected to positions in city and state governments must be the organization’s top priority. Toward that end, the group is frantically trying to sink its cadre deep into the official Democratic Party apparatus. The CWP has also decided that its one-time emphasis on Marxism-Leninism is out of date and must be dropped in favor of becoming“ American Revolutionaries” who hail the virtues of the Founding Fathers. The organization is now committed to “upholding the U.S. Constitution thoroughly” and to a “peaceful transition to socialism”; it believes that the principle of standing for the interests of the working class must be replaced with the notion of representing the “whole people.”
Not surprisingly, the CWP has come to regard the word communist in its name as a distinct liability. So with a long-suppressed gasp of relief, the organization held a Congress last May and renamed itself the New Democratic Movement (NOM). The “transitional program” of this new “mass organization,” in turn, centers on a scheme to acquire control of state government and international union treasuries, use these funds to take over the American Express company, manage this capitalist financial giant more efficiently so it can lower the interest rates it charges its customers, and then use these lower interest rates to drive other firms out of business or take them over, too. Finally, all this is put forward with the utmost seriousness, accompanied by a new round of hosannahs to glorious leader Jerry Tung and fervent insistence that the CWP/NDM has always been the most advanced formation on the U.S. left and continues to be the vanguard of revolutionary struggle today.
Given the startling quality of this political burlesque, we would-not dream of asking our readers to rely solely on our description of the CWP’s “transformation.” So here is general secretary Jerry Tung himself describing his strategy for “pacesetting the capitalists’ technical restructuring and thus pave the way for socialism” :
The question of American Express is really a substitute for the demand for nationalization of banks .... In answer to the question of how we could purchase one of these huge institutions, it depends on our having power in state government and in some international unions. It is definitely do-able because the real assets of these institutions are very small. They are very vulnerable to takeovers .... Once you take one of these institutions over, you can lower, for example, the rates they charge on credit cards, or car loans, or mortgage rates. And gradually if you take over the largest ones, you can even force the others out of business .... We’ll still pay the top managers salaries of two or three’ million dollars. Skilled managers are not necessarily our enemies .... We don’t mind paying an American Express president to beat out VISA or Mastercard and take them over for us. (New Democratic Movement, National Bulletin; issue # 1.)
Besides some profound things Tung has just discovered about the U.S. economy (“a takeover does not mean you have to have 51% of the stock”; “pension funds make up one of the largest sources of capital the society has”), the theoretical rationale – such as it is – for this Walt Disney-style exercise in imagination was unfolded some months before the May Congress. In a September report to his central committee, Tung wrote:
Marxism-Leninism should not be the exclusive theory guiding our day-to-day practice. Marxism-Leninism, at best, can be described as the political orientation for our implementation. It should be combined with American know-how. This is a basic change in our identity – that we are American revolutionaries, and not a party which imitates foreign experiences ....
In a manner reminiscent of Earl Browder’s American’ Exceptionalist revisionism, Tung emphasizes the “unique features” of contemporary U.S. society which allegedly make this fundamental shift necessary. And he does not hesitate at all in spelling out its implications: “We have to be able to embrace the concept of the ’entire people’ and not a partisan class orientation ... internally, we must replace concepts (and the identities associated with them) such as ’democratic centralism’ with ’accountability system,’ ’working class’ with ’American people’ or ’men and women,’ and ’socialist revolution’ with ’revolution’.” (CWP National Bulletin, Nov. 1984.)
If these changes are made, Tung insists the transformed CWP/NDM will quickly demonstrate its vanguard quality, gain thousands of new members, raise millions of dollars, and rapidly move “center-stage” in U.S. political life. According to Tung, “The main substance of preparation for socialism in this country” remains “the growth in strength of the CWP.”
The CWP /NDM’s current fantasies, of course, have no more chance of coming true than the organization’s earlier delusions about leading millions in the armed seizure of state power before 1989. The real practical question confronting the CWP /NDM is not whether it can capture American Express in two years or ten years, but whether it can survive at all.
Because of this, the issue facing those of us observing the CWP/NDM’s contortion is less how to deal with this sect in the future than what lessons can be learned from its demise. Most specifically, the CWP/NDM debacle serves as another sharp reminder of the ideological affinity between Maoism and social democracy and of the disastrous effect a cult of personality has on a political organization.
Regarding the first point, the CWP/NDM’s convulsions spotlight once again the instability of Maoism’s ideological moorings. Like the other formations of the 1960sand ’70s that looked to the Chinese Communist Party for inspiration, the CWP then shouted to the skies about the revolutionary purity of “Mao ZeDong Thought” and engaged in a ceaseless helter-skelter of super-revolutionary posturing. Mass democratic struggles such as the fight for integrated schools in Boston or for the Equal Rights Amendment were vilified as hopelessly reformist – if not outright ruling class plots to sabotage the mass movement. All other left organizations were denounced as dangerously “revisionist,” with the CPUSA especially castigated as a “fifth column” for the “social fascist” Soviet Union.
For all its militant phrasemongering, however, the CWP – like the rest of the Maoist trend – was never consolidated around the most basic elements of a revolutionary outlook: the leading role of the working class, the indispensable role of Marxist-Leninist theory, the materialist interconnection between existing socialism, the national liberation movements and the workers’ movements in the advanced capitalist countries. Indeed, neither the CWP nor its Maoist bedfellows were built on a proletarian world outlook, but on a thoroughgoing petit-bourgeois revolutionism.
And now that petit-bourgeois revolutionism’s fantasies of revolution in the 1980s have proven so patently absurd, the CWP/NDM’s ideological underpinnings are simply coming out in crude, rightist form rather than ultra-left disguise. The entrenched petit-bourgeois striving for immediate and tangible results – prestige , influence, numbers, money – remains the order of the day; and if even lip service to working class partisanship, Marxist theory or proletarian internationalism are no longer convenient to attain these things, then they will be shed as fast as an out-of-style suit.
Other remnants of the Maoist trend – as organizations or individual activists – have trod this path before. Having based their political activism in the 1960s and ’70s on petit-bourgeois impatience, moral outrage and hostility to the Soviet Union, these forces have been sitting ducks for a rightward drift once the Maoist bubble burst with China’s repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and naked collaboration with U.S. imperialism in Angola, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.
For the bulk of these forces, this rightward trajectory led straight into the arms of U.S. social democracy and, in particular, to membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). After all, social democracy is a “respectable” and serious force on the U.S. left, with a relatively stable social base in the most privileged strata of the working class and the radicalized wing of the petit bourgeoisie. Its ideology is thoroughly pervaded by anti-Sovietism and patriotic allegiance to America’s “unique” conditions and “democratic traditions.” Orthodox Marxist theory isn’t taken very seriously in social democratic circles, and certainly the notion of a working class-led social transformation has become fuzzy at best. Finally – and no small matter to many ex-Maoists – social democracy/DSA offers a comfortable milieu to those fleeing their “youthful” commitment to factories and sweatshops to become lawyers, doctors and university professors.
What better home for ex-Maoists with some remnant of a social conscience but burnt out on revolutionary politics?
In the broadest sense, the CWP/NDM is fitting into this same pattern. The politics espoused by these born-again American patriots are completely compatible with social democracy’s gradualist and reformist vision, as are the CWP/NDM’s increasingly overt anti-Leninist prejudices and its petit-bourgeois ideological foundation. But virtually unique among the Maoist remnants joining the social democratic fold, the CWP /NDM is trying to maintain a distinct organizational identity instead of melding into the DSA. Obviously something more than political logic is operating here.
That something more is the CWP/NDM’s deeply entrenched cult of personality around its leader Jerry Tung. For years, CWP cadre have been trained to believe that Tung’s thoughts are infallible truths, the fount of all revolutionary wisdom. With such a towering figure at the helm, there has been no need for the CWP membership to engage in serious study of Marxist-Leninist theory or consolidate the practice of inner-party struggle and debate. As a result, the political development of CWP cadre has been shamelessly distorted, and the organization has been left vulnerable to Jerry Tung’s merest whim or idiosyncrasy. The latest result is seen in the ludicrous American Express scheme, which reveals both the perils of this whole approach as well as the degree to which Tung himself never understood Marxism.
And now this paragon of wisdom intends to bring socialism closer by proving that “American revolutionaries” can excel at running capitalist corporations. Tung wrote in 1984 that “we must now make adjustments in ’marketing’ ourselves to the American people,” and we can just imagine the general secretary’s fantasies about his first serious campaign to do so: “The new and improved American Express Card; it’s the quickest road to heaven since Mao’s Little Red Book.”
But we’ll leave home without it.