In November 1977, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, the youth organization of the Revolutionary Communist Party, was founded. But this victory was not achieved without struggle–not only mass struggle, but also struggle within the Revolutionary Communist Party between two sharply opposed lines.
The struggle focused on the name of this organization, with a number of leading comrades in youth and student work, together with some others, opposing the Party’s line of having the word “Communist” in the name of the organization. As has now become clear, these comrades had been organized as part of a revisionist headquarters within the RCP, headed by former members of the old CP, who, while joining the RCP (and the Revolutionary Union before it) and playing a positive role to an extent and on that basis becoming leading members, never made a thorough-going rupture with revisionism. This headquarters engaged in factional opposition to the central leadership of the Party on the question of the communist youth organization as well as many other questions. Of course not everyone who took this position was part of this revisionist headquarters and many have since repudiated this line.
The struggle over the name for the youth organization was actually over far more than that: it represented two lines over the character and purpose of this organization. The correct line of the Party is based on the basic view of the Party’s Programme that “there is only one path that offers youth a genuine opportunity to put to use its enthusiasm, its innovativeness, its daring and its determination to change the world–proletarian revolution.”
To chart this path requires the leadership of the Party of the working class, its line and outlook of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought, and an organization that carries out all three tasks with regard to the masses of youth as laid out by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Central Committee of the RCP, in his speech to the founding convention of the RCYB: first, leading the masses of youth in struggling against the attacks and abuses they face; second, fighting at the side of the working class under the leadership of its Party in the overall struggle against the imperialists and for revolution; and third, broadly and boldly propagating communism among the masses, and especially youth.
The opposing line, while opposing “Communist” in the name, opposed far more. It watered down and narrowed the nature and tasks of the youth organization. The result would have been a reformist, if sometimes militant, youth group–not the communist youth organization of the RCP. This is hardly the bold step needed today by the broad masses of youth and by the revolutionary proletariat. This line was reformist, revisionist–not communist–in that, among other things, it negated the real revolutionary potential of youth, the need to exert a steady communist influence on the masses of youth and train youth in Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought while leading them in struggle on many fronts. It is revisionist in that it negated the necessary leadership of the working class and its Party to fully develop this tremendous potential of youth into a powerful force in the struggle for proletarian revolution.
This line was defeated within the Party in the period leading up to the founding convention. Based on this, the advances of the founding convention were achieved. But since that time, a number of those who held this line, rather than building off these advances and changing their views, have persisted in their revisionism and gone still further. A small but arrogant little clique of these people have made a futile effort to use their leading positions in the RCYB to turn this organization into a pawn in a struggle against the Party and its line–marching further into the swamp of opposing communism and opposing the Party, and trying to impose their revisionist line on the RCYB and drag it along with them.
Such reactionary puffed-up but puny efforts are being clearly repudiated by the Party and by the masses of members of the RCYB around the country, and the RCYB is growing far stronger in the process. To assist the Brigade members and others in developing the struggle–strengthening their understanding of the two lines and deepening their grasp of Marxism in opposition to revisionism, the RCP is publishing these two documents, representing the two lines on this question. One (printed second) is an appeal written to the Party Center by some leading people in the youth and student work. The other is the line of the Party, written in opposition to this, which was circulated to the whole Party just before the founding convention. Based on this line, the founding of the RCYB as the communist youth organization of the RCP was achieved, and based on this line the RCYB can and will move forward in today’s struggles and in the struggle for proletarian revolution and the ultimate goal of communism.