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The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today: Summing up a century of communist leadership, organization, strategy, and practice in the United States so that we can rise to the challenges before us.

By the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries

The Sixties: A Revolutionary Decade without a Vanguard

Ontologically speaking, decades are not demarcated by definite decimals, but by the spirit, and, for our purposes, political struggles that marked them. “The Sixties” connotes a period in US history of growing revolt against the established order that culminated in a revolutionary movement by the decade’s end. It opened with an increasingly militant Civil Rights Movement against the oppression of Black people in the South, an oppression that was enforced by outright, legally sanctioned segregation and legal and extra-legal white supremacist violence and terror. Students were among the most militant fighters in the Civil Rights struggle, and brought the spirit of resistance back to their campuses, with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964–5 marking a growing refusal of the Sixties generation to accept the status quo. Simultaneous with the rise of the student movements was a growing revolutionary mood among Black proletarians, palpable in the widespread popularity of Malcolm X in the mid-1960s.

By the late 1960s, cities across the country were rocked by rebellions by Black proletarians and universities were shut down in student strikes against the US imperialist war of aggression in Indochina, with many ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) buildings burned to the ground. Rebellions and protest movements generated a new generation of revolutionaries, convinced that “the system,” however they understood it, needed to be overthrown. This new generation of revolutionaries, numbering in the tens of thousands and swimming in a rebellious sea of millions, then took up the task of figuring out how to make revolution in the belly of the beast.

The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today: Summing up a century of communist leadership, organization, strategy, and practice in the United States so that we can rise to the challenges before us.

By The Organization of Communist Revolutionaries

The Communist Party

Antecedents

Mao succinctly summed up that “Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated.”¹ Before there were Marxists, before there was an attempt to organize a communist party, there was, of course, class struggle on the North American continent. The oppressed and dispossessed waged courageous revolts against their oppressors for centuries: the Indigenous peoples against colonizers, slaves against slave masters.

Marxism began to spread and proletarian organization began to develop in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1851, Joseph Wedemeyer, a comrade of Marx and Engels, arrived in the US after the failed 1848 revolutionary uprising in Germany (and all over Europe) and carried out socialist propaganda among German proletarian immigrants and fought on the Union side in the Civil War as a staunch abolitionist. Various efforts at organizing proletarians included the early Knights of Labor, while the strictly craft union approach of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was geared more towards the emerging labor aristocracy. The first attempt at building an organization in the US based on Marxist principles was the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). Founded in 1876, the SLP was the US affiliate of the First International, a collection of mostly European organizations, with Marx and Engels playing a leading role in the International. The SLP played an important early role in spreading Marxist propaganda in the US. Under the leadership of Daniel De Leon, the SLP hinged its entire strategy on the idea of building socialist “dual unions” (staying out of established unions such as the AFL and attempting to build its own instead) as a path to socialism in the US, dooming itself to early irrelevancy.²

The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today: Summing up a century of communist leadership, organization, strategy, and practice in the United States so that we can rise to the challenges before us.

By the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries

Introduction

In this document, we present our summations of the politics and practice of the two communist vanguard parties that have existed in the United States—the Communist Party, USA (hereafter CP) and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (hereafter RCP)—as well as briefer summations of the revolutionary movement that emerged in the late 1960s and the decade of revolutionary potential diverted, the 2010s. It is our intention, through this document, to give the CP and the RCP a proper funeral by celebrating their accomplishments, acknowledging the difficult challenges they faced, coming to terms with their shortcomings and errors, and grieving their loss all so we can move forward. In life and in politics, giving the literal and political deceased proper funerals is necessary so that we are not haunted by the past or doomed to repeat its mistakes and instead can form a healthy relationship with our ancestors.

Some Orientation to Our Readers on the Continued Struggle Against Police Killings

by the kites Editorial Committee

Published February 2023

2023 opened with three high-profile murders by police across the US. In Los Angeles, Keenan Anderson was tasered six times and died of cardiac arrest due to the brutality of the police. In Atlanta, Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán was shot dead by police while taking part in a protest occupation to prevent Atlanta forestland from being bulldozed to make way for the construction of “Cop City,” a massive police training facility. In Memphis, Tyre Nichols was brutally beaten and pepper sprayed by at least five cops and died three days later from his injuries. These three police murders that made national news are the tip of the iceberg: a study by the Mapping Police Violence project shows that in 2022, police in the US killed around 100 people per month, the highest number ever recorded.¹

The sheer quantity and the vicious brutality of police killings proves the communist understanding that the role of the police is to serve and protect the ruling class, and in the US, that means harassing, brutalizing, locking in jail, and lynching the most oppressed and potentially rebellious sections of the population, especially Black proletarians. After a decade of large protests and a series of rebellions culminating nationwide in Summer 2020, the question of “why hasn’t anything changed?” is on the minds of the broad masses. As communists, our responsibility is to give answers to this question that go beyond the spontaneous, often righteous, understanding of the masses and that contend with liberal, postmodernist, abolitionist, and Leftist answers that all ultimately obfuscate the class interests behind the perpetuation of police brutality and the oppression of Black people.

VIDEO: An Interview with Jose Maria Sison, “On ‘Foreign Monsters’ and the People’s War that Persists”

This is the interview given by Jose Maria Sison in September 2022 to kites, which was published in transcript form in October 2022 as “On ‘Foreign Monsters’ and the People’s War that Persists.” A version of this video with subtitles is immediately forthcoming.

“The Guerrilla Is Like a Poet”

Jose Maria Sison, 1939-2022

An Obituary by the kites Editorial Committee

Comrade Jose Maria Sison has passed away at the age of 83 after two weeks of hospitalization in his place of forced exile in Utrecht, Netherlands. He lived his whole life in struggle and service to the Filipino people, to the international proletariat, and to the oppressed and struggling peoples of the whole world. Joma, as he was affectionately known, modeled the communist principles of sacrifice, resilience in the face of torture, and an unwillingness to rest content with past accomplishments. From the classroom to the streets, from the countryside to revolutionary diplomacy, wherever he found himself Joma Sison found a way to make his life about advancing the Philippine revolution forward through whatever means he had at his disposal.

As a political leader, comrade Joma’s achievements are remarkable: after being the most influential leader of the radical Philippine student movement in the 1960s, he led a struggle against the revisionists who had made the old Philippine Communist Party (PKP) useless, and re-founded the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in 1968. Established by Joma and his comrades on a revolutionary basis, the CPP firmly placed itself in the camp of Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution in opposing Soviet revisionism and the lie of peaceful co-existence between capitalism and socialism; and Joma put those principles into practice in founding the New People’s Army (NPA) in 1969. He served as the leader of the CPP as it expanded the reach of the revolution throughout the Philippine archipelago editing the CPP newspaper, and giving guidance to the mass movement in Manila and other cities that were confronting the US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who had declared martial law in 1972 to combat the growth of the Philippine revolution.

On “foreign monsters” and the people’s war that persists

An Interview with Jose Maria Sison, Founding Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines

Commissioned by the kites Editorial Committee

Original Release: October 2022 / Re-Edited: Late December 2022

For a printable PDF of this article, click the cover image above.

Editorial Introduction

In September 2022, kites had the pleasure of interviewing Jose Maria Sison, the Founding Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), just over three months before he passed away on December 16, 2022. The CPP was founded in December 1968, and went on to found and lead the New People’s Army in the people’s war that was launched in March 1969. In 1974, Sison was captured by the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and faced years of torture and solitary confinement before being released in 1986 after the overthrow of Marcos. In 1988, Sison was forced to seek asylum in the Netherlands after the Philippine reactionary government canceled his passport while he was abroad on a speaking tour.

Sison obtained recognition as a political refugee from the Dutch Council of State in 1992. Since then, he was protected under international law by the principle of non-refoulement under the Geneva Refugee Convention and Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, thus preventing his deportation to the Philippines or any third country.

While the people’s war continued and its underlying causes worsened, Sison faced repeated attempts at legal harassment and repression during his forced exile: he battled and defeated in the Dutch court system trumped up charges of multiple murders that were filed against him in 2007—charges that were instigated by the US-Arroyo regime in the Philippines. Sison later won a separate case before the European Court of Justice to have his name removed from the EU terrorist list, where it was placed in 2009.

As Sison told kites in preparation for this interview, “I am legally clean and there is no hindrance to my freedom of thought and expression.” In defiance of the many attempts to suppress his political activity, Sison served in the capacity of Chief Political Consultant for the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and remained highly active as a public intellectual against imperialism and in defense of the socialist cause until the very end of his life, as this interview attests to. Sison lived in Utrecht, Netherlands, his place of forced exile, with his comrade-in-arms and long-life partner Julie de Lima, surrounded by a community of supporters and friends of the Philippine national democratic movement.

This interview has been further edited since its original release in October 2022 to bring it more in line with the video interview (being released imminently), which diverts from and adds very slightly in a couple places from the original interview text we received. We made the choice that the final publication should reflect more closely to the video interview given rather than the written transcript we received. The added benefit of these new edits is that this interview transcript is now much closer to verbatim what was spoken in the video, thereby making the video a strong accompaniment to listen along with while reading this interview.

Key Words: Communist vs. Leftist and Postmodernist Conceptions

Click through the article cover image above for a PDF version of this piece.

Today, when people in North America join protests against injustice, try to understand what’s behind all the oppression in the world, and look for strategies to end it, they soon encounter Leftist and postmodernist politics, especially on social media, and are quickly inculcated in Leftist and postmodernist world outlooks.¹ Since Leftist and postmodernist politics and world outlooks are impediments to the development of revolutionary politics and prevent people from acting towards the revolutionary transformation of society, kites has been consistently polemicizing against them. Even with these polemics, many kites readers still have trouble distinguishing between genuine communism, on the one hand, and the paltry visions of the Left and postmodernism, on the other—a consequence of the lack of socialist states since the 1976 counterrevolutionary coup in China and the lack of communist vanguard parties in the US and Canada today.

This impasse is in part a consequence of Leftists using communist terminology but with a whole different conception of that terminology that is diametrically opposed to revolution. So we thought it might be helpful to contrast communist conceptions of some “key words” with those of Leftists and postmodernists. We hope this “compare and contrast” exercise can spark some debate and help would-be revolutionaries distinguish between the communist world outlook from ways of viewing the world that pose as radical but in fact can never serve the revolutionary transformation of society.

Seven Theses on Imperialism and the Drug War

by Aiyanas Ormond

kites received the following submission from Aiyanas Ormond, a leading activist within the International League of People’s Struggles chapter in Canada who also has considerable experience and knowledge on the question of the bourgeoisie’s drug war, gained in part through eleven years of work in the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. Beyond their specific analysis of the drug war, these theses also provide a model for making specific class analysis—defining who are our friends and who are our enemies—and outlining a program for class struggle based on that analysis.

1. The criminalized drug industry is fully integrated into the global monopoly capitalist economy (imperialism).

Profits from the illicit drug trade are stashed in big banks and financial institutions. It is an open secret that this money is laundered through the big banks. US bank Wachovia—now a part of Wells Fargo—recently paid authorities $160 million for its role in laundering money from the criminalized drug industry. In 2012, UK bank HSBC paid almost $2 billion in fines for stashing drug money.^¹ The head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has stated that during the 2008–9 financial crisis, drug profits constituted a key source of liquidity (cash available for investment) for the big banks, and that, as a result, $352 billion in drug profits were “absorbed” into the economy.^²

The Psychosis of Imperialism

kites Issue #7 Editorial

by the kites Editorial Committee

As the crisis of the world capitalist-imperialist system deepens and the bourgeoisie has no resolution, and in the absence of an international communist movement posing a revolutionary alternative, not just individuals but whole classes are losing their damn minds. The COVID-19 pandemic—not so much the virus itself, but the accompanying social instability, failed government policies, and mass discontent fueling conspiracy theories—pushed things over the edge, and the psychosis of imperialism is setting in.¹