Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
Encyclopedia
The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP, USA), known originally as the Revolutionary Union, is a Maoist Communist party
formed in 1975 in the United States. The RCP states that U.S. imperialism will never peacefully end, and that the only way for people to liberate themselves is through Communist revolution
.
The Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) and other collectives had been rooted in the Revolutionary Youth Movement
II (RYM II) faction of the Students for a Democratic Society
after the latter fell apart in 1969. There were also discussions with several other Marxist-Leninist groups - I Wor Kuen
, Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, and Black Workers Congress
- in the short-lived National Liaison Committee. This formation ultimately split between RU accusing the other organizations of Bundism with others rejecting the perceived national chauvinism of the RU. The party is led by its elected National Chairman and primary theoretical spokesperson, Bob Avakian
. It is one of the few surviving direct descendants of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s.
Part of its influence can be seen in the numbers of groups it has spawned in recent decades. RCP members and supporters have founded organizations such as Refuse and Resist
, founded by C. Clark Kissinger
; October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation; La Résistencia; No Business As Usual; the anti-war
groups Not in Our Name
and World Can't Wait; affiliated youth groups the Attica Brigade, Revolutionary Student Brigade and the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade
; and its network of "Revolution Clubs". The RCP also runs Revolution Books, a bookstore and publishing house based in New York City.Revolution Books
Historically, one of the group's most notable actions was raising the Red Flag
over the Alamo Mission in San Antonio
on March 20, 1980. This was done by Damian Garcia, who was killed a month later, April 22, 1980, in a Los Angeles housing project. The RCP claims his murder was a result of his actions at the Alamo, and alleges LAPD
involvement. Another notable action was when a member, Joey Johnson, of the RCP's youth organization, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade
, burned a United States flag at the Republican National Convention
in 1984, leading to the Supreme Court case known as Texas v. Johnson
.
The RCP enthusiastically supported the 1992 violent Los Angeles social unrest in the aftermath of the Rodney King
verdicts as a "rebellion", and then-LAPD chief Daryl Gates
went so far as to allege that the RCP was explicitly involved in the riots, something that actually echoed the NYPD's similar conviction about the Progressive Labor Party's involvement in the 1960s Harlem riots. Los Angeles has long been one of the RCP's larger and more active branches, given the party's California roots. William "Mobile" Shaw was until recently its leader.
As a result of criminal indictments stemming from a protest against Deng Xiaoping
at the White House
in 1979, Bob Avakian fled the United States. Due primarily to this, the RCP is active in both the United States and Western Europe
. The protest, known colloquially as the Deng Demo, was part of an attempt to "realign" the international communist movement so that it recognized that socialism had been defeated in China, and that a capitalist-oriented leadership had seized power.
The RCP helped found the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
, an association of revolutionary communist parties and organizations from Afghanistan to Italy. The RCP has both defended and criticized fellow RIM participants leading People's War, including the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path)
and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The RIM is a significant fraction of the international communist movement that sees the socialist period as one of continuing class struggle, with the role of a vanguard party in government to bring the lower classes increasingly into the administration of society as a whole.
Major RIM parties, including the RCP and the CPN-M, argue that while the Soviet Union was essentially genuinely socialist under Stalin's government, power-induced "absolutism" nevertheless hindered the ability of the masses
to rule, and to replenish the truly revolutionary CPSU ranks over time.
Avakian in particular says that communists must acknowledge the real history, with its victories as well as its mistakes, and "do better next time". Advocates for Avakian's "new synthesis" of communism contend that his work has advanced the communist project in three areas: philosophy, politics and the strategic conception of how one would actually make revolution in a country like this.
was one of many activists in The Sixties who turned to communist ideas and began organizing in the Bay Area
of California. H. Bruce Franklin
, Stephen Charles Hamilton, and Bob Avakian together formed the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, or BARU, which was subsequently able to absorb a series of similar local collective
s which had developed out of Students for a Democratic Society
. The new nationwide structure allowed BARU to change its name to simply the Revolutionary Union.
The RCP claims that of the various groups coming out of SDS, it was the first to seriously attempt to develop itself both at the theoretical level, with the publication of "Red Papers 1", and at the practical level, by sinking roots into working class
communities and struggles. Notable was Avakian's organizing work at a Chevron
plant in the Bay Area as an organizing model to link the insurgent student movements with working people in struggle. This turn to 1970s "point of production" organizing was a broader phenomenon which was expanded throughout the Midwest and into the Appalachian coal fields during the wildcat upsurges through 1980.
Such rapid expansion was not without its problems, however, and in 1971 H. Bruce and Jane Franklin led a section of the RU to fuse with the Venceremos Organization
, advocating immediate urban guerrilla warfare and then dissolving shortly thereafter.
After a series of unsuccessful unity meetings with nationality-based communist organizations called the National Liaison Committee, including the Black Workers Congress and Maoist-inspired Young Lords Party, the RU formed the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975. The new organization stated its goal was the building of a "party of a new type," inducing some other Maoists to criticize it for revisionism. The organization had a strong "workerist" orientation concentrated upon mass line, and many members became engaged in point of production organizing and trade union struggle.
Tensions over this "workerist" tendency came to a head within the RCP in 1977 around whether China remained a communist country after the death of Mao Zedong
and subsequent leadership struggles in the People's Republic of China between the Gang of Four
and Hua Guofeng
. Bob Avakian developed the analysis and led the forces within the RCP that declared that there had been a coup in China following Mao’s death and the new Chinese leadership was taking China on a capitalist road. The RCP's Vice Chairman, Mickey Jarvis, along with an estimated 30–40% of the membership and most of the Revolutionary Student Brigade formally left the RCP to form the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters
(RWHq). In subsequent polemics, the RCP has dubbed the RWHq faction "Mensheviks" after Lenin's opponents in the RSDLP.
Among older members of the RCP, there is a high proportion of Vietnam War-era veterans, including participants in the VVAW-AI. Joe Veale, the spokesperson for the Los Angeles area branch, was a former member of the Black Panther Party
. C. Clark Kissinger, a writer for Revolution and prominent activist associated with the RCP, was a national secretary of SDS.
The RCP was controversial for being one of the few groups in the American Left
that held a position that homosexuality constituted a conscious "ideological statement" and was a byproduct of capitalism. Within the last decade, with the publication of the New Draft Program of the RCP USA, they have repudiated that position, criticizing it as incorrect, unscientific and not "thoroughly Marxist". The RCP now holds that all sexual and intimate relations in bourgeois society are largely dominated by the ideology of male supremacy and exist within a framework of social relations where the oppression of women is an integral and fundamental part.
, the RCP released a statement called "The Battle for the Future". It calls Bush a Christian Fascist
and calls on the masses to resist. The document also puts forward Bob Avakian
as the party's leader. Several supporters of the RCP initiated a campaign entitled World Can't Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime to facilitate a political "re-polarization" around the current right-wing shift in U.S. government. Hundreds of protests and rallies, as well as disruption of prominent governmental speakers has ensued. Most recently, World Can't Wait organized a series of nationwide protests on October 5, 2006 and has been at the forefront of efforts to impeach Bush and Vice President Cheney for "war crimes and other crimes against humanity".
In 2005, the RCP changed the name of its newspaper from Revolutionary Worker to Revolution. According to their website, the May 1, 2005 issue of RW newspaper signaled the end of 25 years of Revolutionary Worker/Obrero Revolucionario and the beginning of Revolution/Revolución. "[W]e believe that the new name more fully reflects our revolutionary communist ideology and politics, and the enriched vision of a tribune of the people that has been pioneered by RCP Chairman Bob Avakian."
In late 2005 and early 2006 the RCP launched the Revolutionary Communist Speaking Tour (RC4) of Black leaders intended to "build a Communist movement among the people locked on the bottom of society in the current era of Bushite Christian-Fascism." The RC4 tour ended quietly with the disassociation of one of the lead speakers, Akil Bomani, due to disagreements about lyrics in one of his songs produced independently.
Revolution Books distributes materials related to the RCP, and the revolutionary movement in general. They operate stores nationally, with a large store in New York City and a Spanish-language store, Libros Revolucion, in Los Angeles.
After many years of self-imposed exile, Bob Avakian released a four-disk DVD set of speeches called Revolution given on the East Coast and the West Coast, presumably within the United States, although Avakian had not been seen in the country for over 20 years. Aside from continuing his advocacy of Communism, Avakian critiqued what he called dogmatism within the movement, and emphasized the role of thinking and learning in political struggle.
The RCP had recently undergone a split in its ranks, concentrated around the role of revolutionary leadership. In published documents, the RCP has characterized this split as ultimately a struggle over the character of the party, between forces dedicated to revolution and those that have given up on making revolution in a country like the US. In late December 2007, Mike Ely, the former editor of the Revolution newspaper, put out a polemic known as the "9 letters" which in the main accused RCP for being forced by the political line of Bob Avakian to push all work into promotion of his thought, which the 9 Letters went on to criticize. RCP has characterized Ely as "capitulating, and promoting capitulation to imperialism and its horrors, while maintaining a threadbare camouflage of communism and in fact pandering to and cohering all kinds of anti-communist prejudices – in the name of 'communism'".
Ely went on to form the Kasama Project
.
The RCP has had an often stormy relationship with the broader political Left. From the initial publication of the Red Papers that formed the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, and their controversial inclusion of Joseph Stalin
as a historical leader, the RCP has cut against the dominant Anti-Communist political discourse in the United States. Because the RCP is highly critical of the Soviet Union
, which it views as state capitalist and social-imperialist, the RCP has often traded polemical criticisms with the pro-Soviet CPUSA, as well as Trotskyist groups that have rejected the view of the Soviet bloc as state capitalists to be decried in favor of "deformed workers states" to be defended.
As the RCP evolved as an organization, they came to reject electoral politics, a position they continue to uphold. According to Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air they contrasted themselves with other self-identified Marxist-Leninst parties
in the 1980s who advocated working within or alongside Jesse Jackson
's Rainbow Coalition, with the RCP summarizing their position in the slogan, "The right to vote has been won ... Now we need the political awareness and sophistication not to use it." In the years of the Jackson presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 the RCP's Carl Dix
ran as an "anti-candidate [...]running against the notion that oppressed people could rely on the election arena to accomplish positive change."
The RCP holds that its line against electoral politics has been vindicated by the dissolution of several of the Marxist-Leninist groups in the Jackson Campaigns, and others' perceived shifts of line away from open advocacy of revolution with "ultra-leftism." The RCP's critique of what they call the "voting trap" has led many other socialist groups to label them "sectarian" and "abstentionist".
Other critics have claimed its organization of mass rallies amounts to engaging in lesser-evil politics, particularly with their World Can't Wait campaign. The RCP rejects these criticisms, its partisans pointing out that while it has shared stages with Democratic Party office-holders, it has never once, anywhere, endorsed Democratic Party candidates in elections or bourgeois democracy in general. The RCP sees the social base of the Democratic Party as distinct and in contradiction.
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
formed in 1975 in the United States. The RCP states that U.S. imperialism will never peacefully end, and that the only way for people to liberate themselves is through Communist revolution
Communist revolution
A communist revolution is a proletarian revolution inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism, typically with socialism as an intermediate stage...
.
The Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) and other collectives had been rooted in the Revolutionary Youth Movement
Revolutionary Youth Movement
The Revolutionary Youth Movement was the section of Students for a Democratic Society that opposed the Worker Student Alliance of the Progressive Labor Party...
II (RYM II) faction of the Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
after the latter fell apart in 1969. There were also discussions with several other Marxist-Leninist groups - I Wor Kuen
I Wor Kuen
The I Wor Kuen were a radical Asian American group originally based in New York City named after the Boxers and influenced by the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party...
, Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, and Black Workers Congress
Black Workers Congress
The Black Worker’s Congress was created in 1971 in response to a manifesto written by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers . The BWC would be a separate organization that would be used to expand the League across the United States...
- in the short-lived National Liaison Committee. This formation ultimately split between RU accusing the other organizations of Bundism with others rejecting the perceived national chauvinism of the RU. The party is led by its elected National Chairman and primary theoretical spokesperson, Bob Avakian
Bob Avakian
Bob Avakian is Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA , which he has led since its formation in 1975. He is a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and the Left of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was closely associated with the Black Panther Party. He has published writings on Marxism and...
. It is one of the few surviving direct descendants of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s.
Part of its influence can be seen in the numbers of groups it has spawned in recent decades. RCP members and supporters have founded organizations such as Refuse and Resist
Refuse and Resist
Refuse & Resist! was a human rights activist group founded in New York City in 1987 by Emile de Antonio, Dore Ashton, Dennis Brutus, John Gerassi, Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, C. Clark Kissinger, Conrad Lynn, Sonia Sanchez, Rev. Fernando Santillana, and other activists who were concerned...
, founded by C. Clark Kissinger
C. Clark Kissinger
C. Clark Kissinger was the National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society in 1964-65. He visited the People's Republic of China twice during the Cultural Revolution, and is a devoted Maoist. His writings frequently appear in Revolution, journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA...
; October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation; La Résistencia; No Business As Usual; the anti-war
Anti-war
An anti-war movement is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many...
groups Not in Our Name
Not in Our Name
Not in Our Name was a United States organization founded on March 23, 2002 to protest the U.S. government's course in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks; it disbanded on March 31, 2008.-Two key documents:...
and World Can't Wait; affiliated youth groups the Attica Brigade, Revolutionary Student Brigade and the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade
Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade
The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade is the former youth group of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Founded originally as the Attica Brigade, it became the Revolutionary Student Brigade. The RCYB uniform included a t-shirts with a large red star superimposed with the silhouette of a...
; and its network of "Revolution Clubs". The RCP also runs Revolution Books, a bookstore and publishing house based in New York City.Revolution Books
Historically, one of the group's most notable actions was raising the Red Flag
Red flag
In politics, a red flag is a symbol of Socialism, or Communism, or sometimes left-wing politics in general. It has been associated with left-wing politics since the French Revolution. Socialists adopted the symbol during the Revolutions of 1848 and it became a symbol of communism as a result of its...
over the Alamo Mission in San Antonio
Alamo Mission in San Antonio
The Alamo, originally known as Mission San Antonio de Valero, is a former Roman Catholic mission and fortress compound, site of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, and now a museum, in San Antonio, Texas....
on March 20, 1980. This was done by Damian Garcia, who was killed a month later, April 22, 1980, in a Los Angeles housing project. The RCP claims his murder was a result of his actions at the Alamo, and alleges LAPD
Los Angeles Police Department
The Los Angeles Police Department is the police department of the city of Los Angeles, California. With just under 10,000 officers and more than 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of with a population of more than 4.1 million people, it is the third largest local law enforcement agency in...
involvement. Another notable action was when a member, Joey Johnson, of the RCP's youth organization, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade
Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade
The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade is the former youth group of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Founded originally as the Attica Brigade, it became the Revolutionary Student Brigade. The RCYB uniform included a t-shirts with a large red star superimposed with the silhouette of a...
, burned a United States flag at the Republican National Convention
Republican National Convention
The Republican National Convention is the presidential nominating convention of the Republican Party of the United States. Convened by the Republican National Committee, the stated purpose of the convocation is to nominate an official candidate in an upcoming U.S...
in 1984, leading to the Supreme Court case known as Texas v. Johnson
Texas v. Johnson
Texas v. Johnson, , was an important decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that invalidated prohibitions on desecrating the American flag enforced in 48 of the 50 states. Justice William Brennan wrote for a five-justice majority in holding that the defendant's act of flag burning was...
.
The RCP enthusiastically supported the 1992 violent Los Angeles social unrest in the aftermath of the Rodney King
Rodney King
Rodney Glen King is an American best known for his involvement in a police brutality case involving the Los Angeles Police Department on March 3, 1991...
verdicts as a "rebellion", and then-LAPD chief Daryl Gates
Daryl Gates
Daryl Gates was the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from 1978 to 1992.-Early life:...
went so far as to allege that the RCP was explicitly involved in the riots, something that actually echoed the NYPD's similar conviction about the Progressive Labor Party's involvement in the 1960s Harlem riots. Los Angeles has long been one of the RCP's larger and more active branches, given the party's California roots. William "Mobile" Shaw was until recently its leader.
As a result of criminal indictments stemming from a protest against Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese politician, statesman, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng was a reformer who led China towards a market economy...
at the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
in 1979, Bob Avakian fled the United States. Due primarily to this, the RCP is active in both the United States and Western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
. The protest, known colloquially as the Deng Demo, was part of an attempt to "realign" the international communist movement so that it recognized that socialism had been defeated in China, and that a capitalist-oriented leadership had seized power.
The RCP helped found the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
The defunct Revolutionary Internationalist Movement was an international Communist organization which upheld a version of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism founded in 1984 sought to "struggle for the formation of a Communist International of a new type, based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism"...
, an association of revolutionary communist parties and organizations from Afghanistan to Italy. The RCP has both defended and criticized fellow RIM participants leading People's War, including the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path)
Shining Path
Shining Path is a Maoist guerrilla terrorist organization in Peru. The group never refers to itself as "Shining Path", and as several other Peruvian groups, prefers to be called the "Communist Party of Peru" or "PCP-SL" in short...
and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The RIM is a significant fraction of the international communist movement that sees the socialist period as one of continuing class struggle, with the role of a vanguard party in government to bring the lower classes increasingly into the administration of society as a whole.
Major RIM parties, including the RCP and the CPN-M, argue that while the Soviet Union was essentially genuinely socialist under Stalin's government, power-induced "absolutism" nevertheless hindered the ability of the masses
Common People
"Common People" is a song by English alternative rock band Pulp. It was released as a single in 1995, reaching number two on the UK singles chart. It also appears on the band's 1995 album Different Class. The song is about those who were perceived by the songwriter as wanting to be "like common...
to rule, and to replenish the truly revolutionary CPSU ranks over time.
Avakian in particular says that communists must acknowledge the real history, with its victories as well as its mistakes, and "do better next time". Advocates for Avakian's "new synthesis" of communism contend that his work has advanced the communist project in three areas: philosophy, politics and the strategic conception of how one would actually make revolution in a country like this.
Origins
Bob AvakianBob Avakian
Bob Avakian is Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA , which he has led since its formation in 1975. He is a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and the Left of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was closely associated with the Black Panther Party. He has published writings on Marxism and...
was one of many activists in The Sixties who turned to communist ideas and began organizing in the Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
of California. H. Bruce Franklin
H. Bruce Franklin
Howard Bruce Franklin is an American cultural historian who has authored or edited nineteen books on a range of subjects. As of 2011, he is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He first attained prominence as a Melville scholar...
, Stephen Charles Hamilton, and Bob Avakian together formed the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, or BARU, which was subsequently able to absorb a series of similar local collective
Collective
A collective is a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest, or work together on a specific project to achieve a common objective...
s which had developed out of Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
. The new nationwide structure allowed BARU to change its name to simply the Revolutionary Union.
The RCP claims that of the various groups coming out of SDS, it was the first to seriously attempt to develop itself both at the theoretical level, with the publication of "Red Papers 1", and at the practical level, by sinking roots into working class
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...
communities and struggles. Notable was Avakian's organizing work at a Chevron
Chevron Corporation
Chevron Corporation is an American multinational energy corporation headquartered in San Ramon, California, United States and active in more than 180 countries. It is engaged in every aspect of the oil, gas, and geothermal energy industries, including exploration and production; refining,...
plant in the Bay Area as an organizing model to link the insurgent student movements with working people in struggle. This turn to 1970s "point of production" organizing was a broader phenomenon which was expanded throughout the Midwest and into the Appalachian coal fields during the wildcat upsurges through 1980.
Such rapid expansion was not without its problems, however, and in 1971 H. Bruce and Jane Franklin led a section of the RU to fuse with the Venceremos Organization
Venceremos Organization
Venceremos, Spanish for "We Will Overcome", or "We Will Prevail", was a radical left political group which took its name from the battle cry of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, a revolutionary communist leader from Argentina and high ranking member of Fidel Castro's communist government in Cuba.Venceremos...
, advocating immediate urban guerrilla warfare and then dissolving shortly thereafter.
After a series of unsuccessful unity meetings with nationality-based communist organizations called the National Liaison Committee, including the Black Workers Congress and Maoist-inspired Young Lords Party, the RU formed the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975. The new organization stated its goal was the building of a "party of a new type," inducing some other Maoists to criticize it for revisionism. The organization had a strong "workerist" orientation concentrated upon mass line, and many members became engaged in point of production organizing and trade union struggle.
Tensions over this "workerist" tendency came to a head within the RCP in 1977 around whether China remained a communist country after the death of Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
and subsequent leadership struggles in the People's Republic of China between the Gang of Four
Gang of Four
The Gang of Four was the name given to a political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party officials. They came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution and were subsequently charged with a series of treasonous crimes...
and Hua Guofeng
Hua Guofeng
Su Zhu, better known by the nom de guerre Hua Guofeng , was Mao Zedong's designated successor as the Paramount Leader of the Communist Party of China and the People's Republic of China. Upon Zhou Enlai's death in 1976, he succeeded Zhou as the second Premier of the People's Republic of China...
. Bob Avakian developed the analysis and led the forces within the RCP that declared that there had been a coup in China following Mao’s death and the new Chinese leadership was taking China on a capitalist road. The RCP's Vice Chairman, Mickey Jarvis, along with an estimated 30–40% of the membership and most of the Revolutionary Student Brigade formally left the RCP to form the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters
Revolutionary Workers Headquarters
Revolutionary Workers Headquarters was a U.S. Marxist-Leninist organization that formed out of a split from the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1977...
(RWHq). In subsequent polemics, the RCP has dubbed the RWHq faction "Mensheviks" after Lenin's opponents in the RSDLP.
Among older members of the RCP, there is a high proportion of Vietnam War-era veterans, including participants in the VVAW-AI. Joe Veale, the spokesperson for the Los Angeles area branch, was a former member of the Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....
. C. Clark Kissinger, a writer for Revolution and prominent activist associated with the RCP, was a national secretary of SDS.
The RCP was controversial for being one of the few groups in the American Left
American Left
The American Left consists of individuals and groups, including socialists, communists and anarchists, that have sought fundamental change in the economic, political and cultural institutions of the United States. Although left-wing ideologies came to the United States in the 19th century, there...
that held a position that homosexuality constituted a conscious "ideological statement" and was a byproduct of capitalism. Within the last decade, with the publication of the New Draft Program of the RCP USA, they have repudiated that position, criticizing it as incorrect, unscientific and not "thoroughly Marxist". The RCP now holds that all sexual and intimate relations in bourgeois society are largely dominated by the ideology of male supremacy and exist within a framework of social relations where the oppression of women is an integral and fundamental part.
Views on the United States
The RCP has written that the United States "is a country founded on genocide and slavery" and that the RCP has a "special challenge and responsibility to make revolution, at the earliest possible time, right within the belly of this most powerful imperialist beast." The RCP has also stated that "the development of capitalism in the U.S. is a history of the most savage oppression of the Black, Native American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, Asian, and other oppressed peoples" and that "the proletariat must overthrow and thoroughly smash and dismantle the bourgeois state. And that requires war."RCP today
Following the re-election of George W. BushGeorge W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
, the RCP released a statement called "The Battle for the Future". It calls Bush a Christian Fascist
Christofascism
Christofascism is a concept in Christian theology first mentioned by Dorothee Sölle, a Christian theologian and writer, in her book Beyond Mere Obedience: Reflections on a Christian Ethic for the Future in 1970. To Sölle, Christofascism was caused by the embracing of authoritarian theology by the...
and calls on the masses to resist. The document also puts forward Bob Avakian
Bob Avakian
Bob Avakian is Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA , which he has led since its formation in 1975. He is a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and the Left of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was closely associated with the Black Panther Party. He has published writings on Marxism and...
as the party's leader. Several supporters of the RCP initiated a campaign entitled World Can't Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime to facilitate a political "re-polarization" around the current right-wing shift in U.S. government. Hundreds of protests and rallies, as well as disruption of prominent governmental speakers has ensued. Most recently, World Can't Wait organized a series of nationwide protests on October 5, 2006 and has been at the forefront of efforts to impeach Bush and Vice President Cheney for "war crimes and other crimes against humanity".
In 2005, the RCP changed the name of its newspaper from Revolutionary Worker to Revolution. According to their website, the May 1, 2005 issue of RW newspaper signaled the end of 25 years of Revolutionary Worker/Obrero Revolucionario and the beginning of Revolution/Revolución. "[W]e believe that the new name more fully reflects our revolutionary communist ideology and politics, and the enriched vision of a tribune of the people that has been pioneered by RCP Chairman Bob Avakian."
In late 2005 and early 2006 the RCP launched the Revolutionary Communist Speaking Tour (RC4) of Black leaders intended to "build a Communist movement among the people locked on the bottom of society in the current era of Bushite Christian-Fascism." The RC4 tour ended quietly with the disassociation of one of the lead speakers, Akil Bomani, due to disagreements about lyrics in one of his songs produced independently.
Revolution Books distributes materials related to the RCP, and the revolutionary movement in general. They operate stores nationally, with a large store in New York City and a Spanish-language store, Libros Revolucion, in Los Angeles.
After many years of self-imposed exile, Bob Avakian released a four-disk DVD set of speeches called Revolution given on the East Coast and the West Coast, presumably within the United States, although Avakian had not been seen in the country for over 20 years. Aside from continuing his advocacy of Communism, Avakian critiqued what he called dogmatism within the movement, and emphasized the role of thinking and learning in political struggle.
The RCP had recently undergone a split in its ranks, concentrated around the role of revolutionary leadership. In published documents, the RCP has characterized this split as ultimately a struggle over the character of the party, between forces dedicated to revolution and those that have given up on making revolution in a country like the US. In late December 2007, Mike Ely, the former editor of the Revolution newspaper, put out a polemic known as the "9 letters" which in the main accused RCP for being forced by the political line of Bob Avakian to push all work into promotion of his thought, which the 9 Letters went on to criticize. RCP has characterized Ely as "capitulating, and promoting capitulation to imperialism and its horrors, while maintaining a threadbare camouflage of communism and in fact pandering to and cohering all kinds of anti-communist prejudices – in the name of 'communism'".
Ely went on to form the Kasama Project
Kasama Project
The Kasama Project is a United States-based network of people organized to support a communist project for the overthrow and transformation of all oppressive social conditions....
.
Avakian's "promotion and popularization"
The RCP has said that there are two mainstays of its work: the role of the party press and building a culture of "appreciation, promotion and popularization" of Bob Avakian and his body of work, method, and approach, "along with a whole ensemble of Communist work which is necessary to the bringing forward of a revolutionary people—including building “massive political resistance to the main ways in which, at any given time, the exploitative and oppressive nature of this system is concentrated in the policies and actions of the ruling class and its institutions and agencies” and solving the problems of how to involve the masses in “meaningful revolutionary work”". Others have charged that the RCP has created a cult of personality around Avakian, with dissenting voices driven from the organization. The RCP has countered that over the period of the 1980s and 1990s two parties developed within the organization, representing two fundamentally opposed roads. One, represeted by the “official” line of the Party and concentrated in the new synthesis Bob Avakian was championing, and expressed in the Party’s newspaper (the Revolutionary Worker, now Revolution). The other, opposed the new synthesis and revolutionary-communist line, was becoming predominant on all levels of the Party, and "objectively, [this] amounted to abandoning the outlook and aims of the communist revolution, accommodating to the system of imperialism and settling for, at most, reforms within this horrific system." ”".Activities
The RCP does not generally attempt to work inside leftist coalitions, preferring to launch independent mass organizations to "repolarize" political movements on a more radical basis. The RCP explicitly states its expectation that members uphold their organization's positions, abstain from illegal drugs and habits, and maintain exceptional standards of "revolutionary morality."The RCP has had an often stormy relationship with the broader political Left. From the initial publication of the Red Papers that formed the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, and their controversial inclusion of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
as a historical leader, the RCP has cut against the dominant Anti-Communist political discourse in the United States. Because the RCP is highly critical of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, which it views as state capitalist and social-imperialist, the RCP has often traded polemical criticisms with the pro-Soviet CPUSA, as well as Trotskyist groups that have rejected the view of the Soviet bloc as state capitalists to be decried in favor of "deformed workers states" to be defended.
As the RCP evolved as an organization, they came to reject electoral politics, a position they continue to uphold. According to Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air they contrasted themselves with other self-identified Marxist-Leninst parties
New Communist Movement
The New Communist Movement ' was a Marxist-Leninist political movement of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. The term refers to a specific trend in the U.S. New Left which sought inspiration in the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution, and the Cuban...
in the 1980s who advocated working within or alongside Jesse Jackson
Jesse Jackson
Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. is an African-American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to...
's Rainbow Coalition, with the RCP summarizing their position in the slogan, "The right to vote has been won ... Now we need the political awareness and sophistication not to use it." In the years of the Jackson presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 the RCP's Carl Dix
Carl Dix
Carl Dix is the national spokesman for the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. He is a close friend of Bob Avakian. Carl Dix was a member of the United States Army, but when he was called to go to Vietnam he refused. He served two years in prison as a result of this action. He then joined the Black...
ran as an "anti-candidate [...]running against the notion that oppressed people could rely on the election arena to accomplish positive change."
The RCP holds that its line against electoral politics has been vindicated by the dissolution of several of the Marxist-Leninist groups in the Jackson Campaigns, and others' perceived shifts of line away from open advocacy of revolution with "ultra-leftism." The RCP's critique of what they call the "voting trap" has led many other socialist groups to label them "sectarian" and "abstentionist".
Other critics have claimed its organization of mass rallies amounts to engaging in lesser-evil politics, particularly with their World Can't Wait campaign. The RCP rejects these criticisms, its partisans pointing out that while it has shared stages with Democratic Party office-holders, it has never once, anywhere, endorsed Democratic Party candidates in elections or bourgeois democracy in general. The RCP sees the social base of the Democratic Party as distinct and in contradiction.
Related links
International theoretical journal inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.RCP publications
Separate editions published weekly in English and Spanish. Formerly known as Revolutionary Worker/Obrero Revolucionario.- Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (2008)
- Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage, a Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (2008)
- Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy by Bob Avakian (2008)
Critical opinions
- Ely, Mike. 9 Letters to Our Comrades: Getting Beyond Avakian's New Synthesis. December 2007. (RCP response)
- Wright, Liam On the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA: Criticizing a Residue of the Past November 2010.