Democracy and Class Struggle has recently published an article in tribute to Mike Hamlin of the Black Workers Congress here :
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/what-road-to-building-new-communist.html
and we have also republished Lenin on the Bund here:
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/separatists-in-russia-and-separatists.html
These articles illustrate the bourgeois cosmopolitan revisionist road of the RCPUSA on the national question and its incorrect use of the term Bundist to describe Mike Hamlin in the 1970's.
The posts have elicited the following responses from RCPUSA.
Anonymous said...
http://bobavakian.net/articles/grasprevolution3.html
and pay careful attention to this:
"Now, on the other hand, we had to struggle against people whom (drawing from the history of the Russian Revolution) we came to call Bundists, within our own ranks and more broadly in the revolutionary movement of that time, in particular the BWC (the Black Workers Congress) and the PRRWO (the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, which emerged from the Young Lords Party). They were basically arguing that the nationalism of an oppressed people or nation is bound to be revolutionary and that revolutionary nationalism is essentially identical with proletarian ideology. And we came up with a formulation that really infuriated them [BA laughs], partly because it was sort of deliberately provocative: we said all nationalism is...nationalism, and all nationalism is ultimately bourgeois ideologically."
Bob Avakian was right!, then and now. I don't believe Nick Glais has ever really tackled BA's own writings or the New Synthesis, but is attacking something in order to defend his own bourgeois nationalist project, which is frankly 'all played out'.
nickglais said...The land question and the language are important parts of the national question that communists take up to advance the democratic struggle for socialism and exposing land ownership by the British Crown and Aristocracy in Wales is part of exposing the power of the British Monarchial Imperialist state but a bourgeois cosmopolitan like Avakian would no nothing about that with his mantra all nationalism is bourgeois ideology which provides ideological cover for imperialism
Anonymous said...i would like to ask Nick Glais if he believes the Ltte struggle in Sri Lanka was a proleterian struggle? or that of the Basque seperatists? or is it a fact that these movements are 'all played out'?
nickglais said...Lenin clarified this question for those socialists who sought to counterpose the fight for "pure socialism" to the national struggle and who had contempt for national independence and sovereignty.Lenin said :
" To imagine that a social revolution is conceivable without the revolts of small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without the revolutionary outbursts of a section of the petty bourgeoise with all its prejudices, without the movement of non class conscious proletarian and semi proletarian masses against the oppression of landlords ,the church, the monarchy,foreign nations etc.
To imagine this means to repudiating social revolution.
Only those who imagine that an army will line up and say "We are for socialism" and in another place an army will say "We are for Imperialism" and that this will be a social revolution, only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic opinion could villify the Irish Rebellion by calling it a "putsch",
"Whoever expects a "pure social revolution will never live to see it, such person pays lip service to revolution, without understanding what a revolution is"
Lenin - Discussion on Self Determination Summed Up - 1916
nickglais said... nickglais said...What revisionists fail to grasp is that that Britain, France and Spain were created has states from internally colonising own native nationalities long before they went on to become Imperial Empires. English colonial policy in Wales 400 years later was applied in India but revisionists like Avakian are blind to this fact.
The nationalities in the periphery of Europe will rise up and smash the imperial parasitic centres of London, Paris and Madrid has part of the process of making socialist revolution - the only thing that is played out is Avakianism which fails to recognise its own errors and historic missed opportunity in the 1970's to build a truly multinational communist party in the USA because of its sectarianism and revisionism.
nickglais said...Anonymous said...
Anon writes above:
"The RCP USA is a strong powerful party that is respected across the world..."
This statement is astonishing in its delusional distance from basic reality.
The RCP,USA is a small and crumbling cult. Its biggest day (membership-wise) was the day it was founded in 1975 (with around a thousand membvers) and it has shrunk steadily for forty years.
It is now no longer a national presence, only having active cadre in a smaller and smaller number of cities.
It is in a permanent financial crisis --so that fundraising is the only activity of its aging and often dazed members. I expect they will stop publishing a naitonal newspaper soon (having more and more abandoned a supposedly "weekly" schedule). And it has dropped its smaller bookstores, and will probably lose its flagship store in New York.
Saddest of all, its remaining few dozen cadre are more and more burned out -- looking like classic cult members. Repeating memorized phrases, looking vacant eyed and even disheveled. And with very few under fifty (younger people "come around" for brief periods of time, but are over and over and over repulsed by the ugly cult of personality that defines the RCP now). They have not had any naitonal youth formation since the RCYB shattered after the emergence of the full cult of personality.
They are isolated, and considered a joke by virtually everyone in the world... with very few exceptions. (And those exceptions are overwhelmingly people with zero contact with the actual RCP, or basis for evaluating its actual "work").
It is now a permanent fundraising machine for its central figure... with no public discussion of where those funds actually go.
May 14, 2014 at 1:05 PM
