“Lin Piao, bourgeois careerist and conspirator, was the greatest splitter in our Party. In order to implement his revisionist line and counter-revolutionary political principles, and to oppose the proletarian revolutionary political principles of Chairman Mao, he, more than anyone else, recruited fanatics into the organisation, formed sects, encouraged the counter-revolutionary forces, organised a bourgeois headquarters and opposed the Central Committee of the Party led by Chairman Mao. He and his accomplices did everything they could to sabotage the unity of our Party, our army and revolutionary ranks. They developed a line aimed at advancing their ends, extensively practised favouritism in the choice of cadres and implemented a consistent bourgeois reactionary line of “striking at the large majority to protect a handful.” They clamoured that they wanted to “redistribute power” and “struggle for the power of leadership,” which finally led them to launch an armed counter-revolutionary coup d’etat with the vain hope of assassinating our great leader Chairman Mao, establishing another Central Committee and capitulating to revisionist Soviet social-imperialism. All this clearly shows that Lin Piao, bandit, conspirator and splitter, was the enemy of the entire Party, army and people. To cover up his criminal activities aimed at sabotaging revolutionary unity, and of splitting the Party, Lin Piao claimed that “we must cooperate even if we do not agree.” This fallacy ignores the ideological basis of unity in the Party and the revolutionary ranks; it denies the class content of this unity, in the hope of making us renounce revolutionary principles and the struggle against revisionism.”

– A Basic Understanding of the Communist Party of China

Normally at New Labor Press, when polemics are released against something we have published, we try to take our time in releasing a response so that we can fully answer the major questions and lines brought up. While we are still working on a longer response that goes more in-depth into the ideological-political problems at the heart of the matter, we find ourselves forced to issue a shorter immediate statement in response to the publication The Worker’s recent polemics against us for some unfortunate, but as you will see, very predictable reasons.

Beginning on July 3rd, a series of texts were published in quick succession, with a group calling itself the “Central Group of the Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party USA” publishing by proxy a self-criticism to the website redlibrary.info, the next day the publication The Worker publishing a polemic against our criticism of the article “Center Palestine by Centering Revolution”, and then the day after publishing an “Open Letter to the Signatories of the Statement “Center Palestine by Centering Revolution”, all while The Worker quietly erased and deleted articles of our fraternal organizations they had previously republished.

Concurrently, in the days following the publication of these articles, we were informed by organizations NLP communicates and works with, like the Revolutionary Student Union and chapters of the Revolutionary Study Group, that they had been the subject of an organized putsch that sought to break their internal discipline, poach branches and members of their organizations, and bring these tricked comrades under the leadership of an obscure, organized, and recently activated nameless conspiracy focused on the “Central Group’s” “self-criticism”. As one report shared with us stated, the unprincipled faction activated against the revolutionary organizations sought to “divide and conquer”, attempting to split comrades from comrades.

To raise public struggle, while maneuvering and intriguing in the shadows. To decry splits, while actively fomenting one. Never have more vile, anti-Marxist, under-handed tactics been so openly used against NLP and the revolutionary organizations it works with.

In their polemic against us, The Worker engages in clear police tactics, labeling us without substance as “communist rudiments”, “communists in formation”, and insinuating that we are a pre-party organization rather than the open theoretical publication we are and have always claimed to be. For the sake of their plot, their abortive scheme, all basic revolutionary principles regarding security and correct conduct are thrown out the window. Unlike The Worker, NLP will never do the police’s work for them, and will never engage in incorrect and inaccurate speculation regarding the links between open and closed organizations. Instead we will refer to these factionalists according to their common ideological-political trend, the “Daltonites”, after the pen name of their principal theoretical leader, Ed Dalton.

For those that know them, the use of intrigue, conspiracies, innuendo, and back-handed maneuvering is a just another part of this trend’s toolbox. The Daltonites complain about how we never answered their emails, knowing very well that the reason we decided not to engage in direct communication with them is a direct result of their history of revealing private communications in public polemics, of beginning struggle under false pretenses all while conspiring behind an organization’s back, of using seemingly honest interactions as a means to infiltrate and then liquidate or split organizations. As is now plain to see, our hesitations were completely vindicated, and more!

We are told the attempt to attack and split these revolutionary organizations has failed, ironically just as the attempt to intimidate those same organizations by the self-proclaimed “liquidator” clique failed the year prior.

What all of these renegade groups don’t understand is that the US Maoist movement has begun to turn a new page. After more than a decade of misleadership, of fratricidal inter-organizational attacks, of conspiring and gossiping, of intrigue and innuendo, of endless liquidationist plots and splittism, with a single voice the genuine Maoist organizations emphatically proclaim we will not waver from the patient forging of our unity! We will not be split! We will not dirty ourselves in the filth of renegade methods! We will not allow the process to reconstitute the Communist Party USA to be once again wrecked and undermined by liquidationist and police provocateur tactics!

Like vultures, various former leaders in the US who ran their organizations into the ground, calling themselves all manner of things and ideological labels, circle the new large and growing movement to reconstitute the Communist Party USA, that becomes more unified through struggle every day, seeking to strike at every opportunity. But their renegade anti-Marxist tactics no longer work against us. We have become steeled through years of struggle against wreckers, misleaders, and liquidationists of all stripes and creeds, and we are no longer so easily tricked.

While the Daltonites go on about liquidationism without understanding what they are even talking about, going so far as to label anyone who does not integrate under their isolated factionalist leadership as a “liquidationist”, it is the genuine revolutionary camp which has spent the last three years systematically and patiently regrouping revolutionary forces in the US. It is the revolutionary camp which has worked to eradicate liquidationism in all its forms, not defining it as the lack of fealty to this or that renegade leader or clique, but defining and struggling against liquidationism as everything that attacks, denies, weakens or undermines the hegemony of the proletariat, that attacks the theory and practice of the proletariat’s vanguard party. Ironically then, it is trends like the Daltonites who continue in words and deeds to put forward that liquidationist and wrecker methods are ever necessary or justified, thus actively sowing the seeds of endless cycles of domestic liquidationism with their conspiratorial Trotskyite maneuvers and wreckerist approach. It is they who flagrantly attack the basic Marxist principles of conduct, work, and party reconstitution, who would lead us away from Marxism and repeat the same errors that lead us to our prior state of disorganization from which we are only now barely climbing out of, who would propagate a “self-criticism” while committing those same errors that very week. It is the Daltonites who taught the splittist methods the liquidators used to attack them, the same methods that, in a strange twist of fate, both trends now use to harass and attack the revolutionary camp.

Against these harmful, renegade, wreckerist attacks, we raise the only Marxist method of the Three Do’s and Three Don’ts. Practice Marxism, not revisionism. Unite, and do not split. Be open and aboveboard, don’t intrigue and conspire. With all of our power we hold these principles close to our hearts, and will never cast them aside them for the sake of convenience, for the sake of schemes and posturing. We do not raise them as a rhetorical strategy, but rather because for us they are truly indispensable in theory and practice.

While we have our differences, we the principled proletarian revolutionaries in this country will deal with them using Marxism. Whether publicly or privately we will use open and honest line struggle, and will uphold the weighty task of party reconstitution without ever engaging in police tactics and without ever speculating on who is doing this or that aspect of closed work for the sake of scoring cheap wins in the realm of public discourse. We will never use factional conspiracies of a Troskyite or Lin Biao-ist style to attack each other organizationally, to split and liquidate those who we work and struggle with. We will not just abstractly uphold Marxism, but actually practice and implement it without fail in everything we do, regardless of whether it is easy or hard to do.

Upon learning of the failure of their plot and in a hasty cynical attempt to preempt their righteous condemnation at the hands of the large and principled revolutionary camp, the Daltonites have published another desperate piece implying that all those who refuse their renegade leadership are factionalists and splitters, that it is those who resist their renegade tactics and back-door schemes who are the actual “liquidationists”. Truly their capacity for manipulation and intrigue knows no bounds.

Through their surface-level waving of slogans like “Unite Under Maoism” and “Reconstitute the Communist Party of the USA”, we know there are genuine revolutionaries who have been caught within the schemes and machinations of the Daltonites. Thus to these comrades we offer a very simple call: expel those in your leadership who persist in their use of wreckerist tactics, who for years have clung to the methods of revisionism and the enemy, who stubbornly and egotistically damage our movement and limit the ability for a principled struggle for unity domestically with liquidationist-style attacks and double-talk. Then patiently struggle for unity with the revolutionary camp in the US upholding and practicing the Three Do’s and Three Don’ts, sharing in our tasks of party reconstitution, uniting the dispersed revolutionary groups under Maoism, and elaborating a class line in the popular movements. Practice Marxism, not revisionism, the choice is simple.

It is undeniable that the various domestic renegade cliques and factional sects like the Daltonites have caused immeasurable harm in our country to the prestige and cause of the International Communist Movement, in particular its left line, and have endlessly disrupted and distracted from the patient tasks of party reconstitution. We have no doubt there is the possibility that in their desperation to maintain the already damaged facade of their reputation domestically and internationally, the Daltonites will resort to all sorts of cynical and dirty maneuvers in the weeks and months ahead. They will deny and pervert the material facts of our country’s revolutionary movement (which has re-grown its strength and finally started to forge itself in Marxist methods, much to the chagrin of renegades of all stripes) and will pull out all the stops, manipulating and calling on anyone who will listen to support their schemes. In the true spirit of Lin Biao, the small handful of top leaders within this trend have for a decade now repeatedly taken the “consistent bourgeois reactionary line of ‘striking at the large majority to protect a handful’”, whether it be internally within their own organizations or externally against outside revolutionary and progressive organizations.

Whatever they do, know that we remain firm in our convictions and our commitments. We the proletarian revolutionaries of our country will not be distracted, will not sway or deviate from our central tasks, and will never forget the hard-fought lessons we have learned in the last decade of struggle against wreckerism, misleaders, liquidationism, and revisionism. We have turned a new page, and on that page is written the path to victory for our revolution and our class.

For the reconstitution of the Communist Party USA!

For the struggle against revisionism!

For the rejection of all dirty tactics, manipulations, splits, schemes, and lies!

New Labor Press