Celebrating the Vanguard:
Revolution is the Hope of the Hopeless!A Talk by Carl Dix
Revolutionary Worker #1085, January 7, 2001, posted at http://rwor.org
October 2000 marked the 25th anniversary of the RCP,USA. As the year ended, celebrations were held around the country, and, in this issue, the RW shares some of the statements and greetings we have received.
In New York City, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade hosted the Party, greeting the full house at Revolution Books with: "Live for the people! Die for the people! Fight for the people! Power to the people." Following is an excerpt from a talk given by RCP spokesperson Carl Dix at the anniversary celebration in New York.
When our Party was formed, we made a solemn pledge that it would be the last time a vanguard will have to be formed in this country. Under the farsighted and thorough leadership of our Chairman, Bob Avakian, we have kept our promise to the people of the world.
Having a Party like ours makes a crucial difference now, not just somewhere down the line. The Party has played an important role in the struggles of the people, such as the struggle against police brutality, for women's right to abortion, for Mumia and other struggles. A lot of people see how hard Party members and supporters fight in the battles against the enemy's attacks. I'm going to tell you why we are such determined, persistent and militant fighters. It's because of our Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line.
This line allows us to sum up the experience of the masses in struggle here and worldwide. With it we can determine what obstacles and questions people are up against and we can draw sharp lines of demarcation between friends and enemies. On the basis of this we can develop policies and initiatives that can unite all who can be united to battle back the attacks coming down today and as part of preparing minds and organizing forces for the showdown.
Based on this line we were able to forge a strategy for making revolution in a country like this one--the United Front under the Leadership of the Proletariat. In places like China or Peru you make revolution by carrying out protracted people's war and surrounding the cities from the countryside. But in a country like this one with its advanced communications you would need to launch coordinated armed insurrections centered in the major urban areas. Then you would need to move out from the areas where the insurrections succeeded to carry out a civil war to defeat the enemy's military forces.
Our preparations for revolution build up to the time when such armed insurrections could be launched. This means basing the revolutionary movement on the people who got nothing to lose--the proletariat. It means rallying people to fight back against the system's attacks. It means building organization that can carry our resistance today and go from defense to offense when the time comes. It means building the places where we live and work into strongholds of revolutionary resistance. It means forging alliances between different sections of people, alliances that would be crucial to being able to launch an armed insurrection in a country like this that has a real chance of success.
In a sense, the revolution is being made right now in the work the Party and the masses under its leadership are carrying out. Our programme speaks to how all this could be done. And our new draft programme will speak to it even more sharply. If you want to get down on how our work today contributes to hastening the day when revolution would be possible, you need to dig into our new draft programme.
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Where did this Party that has developed this strategy and provided this leadership come from? Its roots are in the 1960s upsurge here and internationally. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China was especially important because it provided a vision of the kind of world we were fighting for.
As we worked to form this Party in 1975, the struggles that had rocked the system back on its heels were ebbing and there were sharp questions about how to go forward. Some revolutionary forces of that time such as the BPP had folded. Others wanted to fight along narrow lines, arguing that each oppressed group had to fight for itself. There was a need for a vanguard to chart the way forward to revolution and to carry out work to get ready and in position for revolution even as the high tide of resistance died down. The Revolutionary Union, led by Bob Avakian, took the lead in forming this necessary vanguard.
Youth often ask me "how did you get involved?" I'm a founding member of the RCP in 1975 but, in a deeper sense, the RCP and Chairman Avakian are why I've been able to stay on the revolutionary road. I was one of the people having trouble finding my bearings as the struggles of the '60s died down. I was in a group called the Black Workers' Congress. This group worked with the Revolutionary Union to form the new Party. But its leaders backed out of this effort.
They retreated to an approach of "my nationality first." They argued that the head of the new communist party and a certain number of its leaders had to be Black. They felt this was the only way it could be relied on to wage a determined fight against the oppression of Black people. Some of what they said appealed to me, but I knew that the proletariat needed a multinational vanguard to lead it in fighting to end all oppression.
As I was grappling with all this, I just happened to be in N.Y. one night, needing a place to stay. I stopped over at the house of someone from the Revolutionary Union. What I didn't expect was that Bob Avakian was staying there too. We started discussing the questions that were up in the revolutionary movement. At first we were arguing, but as we talked, what he said made sense. When I said the leader of the party had to be Black for it to represent the interests of Black people, he came back with a question. "If only a Black leader can represent the interests of Black people, does that mean he or she couldn't represent the interests of Puerto Ricans or Chicanos? If it's a man does that mean the interests of women won't be represented? Isn't the key question the line and practice of the vanguard, and not the nationality of its chair?"
This was a dividing line question for our movement then, and now. What outlook do we have to be based on, nationalism or internationalism? National liberation struggles, like in Vietnam then or Palestine today, are key allies of the proletariat. Along with proletarian revolution, they are one of the two streams of revolutionary struggle in the world. But if you're out to end all exploitation and oppression, a nationalist outlook won't cut it. You gotta be based on internationalism.
Nationalism doesn't enable you to identify different class interests, who should lead in the struggle, and how the working class relates to other classes. Revolutionary nationalism often identifies with struggles internationally, but it cannot give a full picture of the struggle as a fight to move humanity to a whole new stage of history. And nationalism cannot provide liberating solutions to some of the pressing and profound problems in society and in the world...like how to end the oppression of women!
Communist ideology doesn't have allegiance to any nation but to the cause of total emancipation. Communism is internationalism. The communist revolution not only aims to abolish the division of society into classes and overcome the inequalities and oppressive relations between different nations and peoples; it aims ultimately to move beyond the division of the earth's people into separate nations and to replace it with a genuine community of world humanity.
Bob Avakian and I continued our discussion throughout the night, but no longer arguing. More we were digging into what was the road forward. I didn't get any sleep that night, but I was more refreshed the next morning then if I had gotten 8 hours of Z's. I learned much about how we needed to go about our mission--taking down this imperialist system. The way Avakian helped me see the road forward that night is just a little taste of the role he played in leading the fight to form a proletarian vanguard party based on a correct MLM line here in the belly of the beast.
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Once our Party was formed, staying on the revolutionary road was no straight line or smooth process but full of twists and turns. When Mao Tsetung died, the capitalist dogs in China staged a coup, sold out the revolution there, and called on the people of the world to follow suit. They raised the white flag while fronting it off as the red flag. Today we can see that their counter-revolutionary coup has brought back to China many of the evils that the revolution had ended, like unemployment, drug addiction, the killing of girl babies, mass starvation and imperialist penetration.
This momentous change brought about a split in our Party. A section of our Party fought to take us down the tubes following the new emperors in China. This went along with their view that the goal of revolution, whether in China or the U.S., was just to fight to change some things. The goal of communist revolution is to sweep capitalism off the face of the globe! Communism means that we are fighting for a world that is no longer divided into oppressor and oppressed nations, no longer with obscene riches on one end and dire poverty on the other, no longer domination of Black and other oppressed nationalities by whites, no longer the women-hating laws and values, no longer an oppressive division of labor based on mental versus manual work, differences in age or big city versus rural areas. We had to get clear on all this to keep our Party on the road to revolution.
Fighting through on this two line struggle sharpened our understanding of "charting the uncharted course" of making revolution in an advanced imperialist country. We learned that we couldn't make revolution in the U.S. by focusing the workers' attention on struggling for better conditions under capitalism. Instead we had to build a revolutionary movement and train the workers and oppressed people in proletarian internationalism. We made a deeper class analysis of the forces for revolution in this country, including the different tiers in the working class here. Doing this was the foundation of our current programme. Deepening this class analysis, taking into account developments like the massive increase in immigrants coming to the U.S. and joining the proletariat here, will be a key part of developing the new draft programme we will issue this coming spring.
This struggle also deepened our grasp of the importance of proletarian internationalism. In its wake we increased our efforts to unite with other Maoist forces around the world. These and others' efforts came to fruition with the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement in 1984, uniting Maoist parties and organizations from around the world.
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Let me highlight what we have to celebrate on this 25th anniversary. We have an MLM vanguard right here in the belly of the beast that bends every effort to prepare itself and the masses to make revolution. We have a Party that has the line, leadership, strategy and tactical sense to do what's needed today and to get ready for the storms the future will undoubtedly bring. We have a Party that has three magic weapons to wield in bringing forward proletarians and others to the revolutionary cause. I'm talking about our fearless fighting stance, our stand for the complete emancipation of women and our internationalist approach to the struggle against the imperialist enemy.
We can celebrate the fact that this vanguard is in the midst of producing a new battle plan for revolution right here in the belly of the beast. This new Party programme will, like the one it will replace, speak to how we could unite all who can be united to make revolution and how we could unleash the masses to completely transform society after the seizure of power. It will address how after the revolution we would have to smash the capitalists' government structure and create new organs of power representing and serving the proletariat in ruling and transforming society.
If you seriously grapple with the need for revolution, you come up against a BIG question: what is it going to take to do away with this monstrous system and put a new and completely different system in its place? Once you confront this question, you can't get around the need for a vanguard party to accomplish this.
In the RCP we have that necessary vanguard. It combines the experience of veteran cadre with the impatience of the new generation of fighters. Our Party represents the continuation and further development of the best of the '60s, politically, ideologically and organizationally. And we will continue to learn and make greater strides. We are forging organizational ties among the broad masses--based on our ideology and politics--that could carry out the highest form of struggle and have a real chance of winning.
I want to close by paraphrasing what Bob Avakian said in his recent message to the youth. He said in the immediate period ahead, the new Party programme is the key task and plays a key role in our ability to hasten and prepare for revolution. The new programme represents putting before the revolutionary people and ultimately before the broad masses, our basic goals, strategic plan and methods: the vision of the society we are struggling for and our understanding of how to do this through our revolutionary struggle and our MLM vanguard--how to fight to bring that dream into reality, and what it means for the people, not just in the U.S. but globally. This programme will be our overall guide to action. It will provide the basic guidelines in carrying out all the different aspects of revolutionary work and struggle and have all this serve our revolutionary goal.
Are you someone who's sick of this foul system and its murdering ways? Do you refuse to accept this as the "best of all possible worlds"? Are you like so many others searching for a better world--even if you're not sure yet that proletarian revolution is the solution or if it can be won? If you fit this rebel profile, then we invite you to get down with the RCP, to take up the Party's new draft programme, and take it to the people.
Long live proletarian internationalism! Long live revolution!
Long live the RCP,USA!
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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