THE INTERNATIONAL WORKER EDITORIAL

We Must Dare To Expose Our Errors

September 1974

No other party, no other class in capitalist society can dare to expose its own errors, its own weaknesses before the whole word in the clear mirror of reason-for the mirror would reflect the historical fate that is hidden behind it. The working class can always look truth in the face even when this means the bitterest self-accusation; for its weakness was but an error and the inexorable laws of history give it assure its final victory.

Rosa Luxemburg
The Junius Pamphlet

As Rockefeller and his faction move the world ever closer to fascism and thus move the human race ever closer to annihilation; every revolutionary must recommit herself or himself to our singularly important task-the organization of the vanguard working-class party and the organization of the class for itself. At this most critical moment in history, the task of every revolutionary is thus to organize the class for itself by organizing the left hegemonic working class organization-the International Caucus of Labor Committees (ICLC) to take on the role of class-wide leadership.

Cognizant of that necessity and of Luxemburg's critical realization that only the working class can organize with its errors in the full light of day, the International Workers Party (IWP) now opens what has heretofore been a closed "internal" polemic with the ICLC to the entire class. For the essence of the IWP-ICLC polemic is the question of whether we can develop a mass working-class organization in the U.S.A. and that question-not questions of program-is the question whose answer will determine the fate of humanity.

We will organize the class around our potently correct ideological tendency-a tendency which has evolved from a corrective to the tendency of the ICLC-to demand that the ICLC take on the organizational leadership of the class.

A schizophrenic split prevails at this historical moment between the hegemonic ideology of the IWP-an ideology grounded in a Marxist methodological corrective to the ideological tendency of the ICLC and the hegemonic organization of the left, the ICLC-an organization whose ideology and practice is mired in idealism and paranoia. The IWP ideological tendency has developed as a corrective to the tendency of the ICLC precisely as the ICLC gained left hegemony by way of an ideological corrective to the impotent and reformist tendencies of such organizations as the Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party USA, and the Progressive Labor Party. Attempts to change the ICLC tendency from within failed. For this reason 39 ICLC organizers left the organization to found the IWP with national offices in NYC and regional offices opening in September in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit, Washington DC, and Chicago. This state of schizophrenia must be cured-the polemic must be intensified. The vanguard party must become a unity of the historically hegemonic organization, and the historically hegemonic ideological tendency.

The class desperately needs leadership. Forced with the alternatives of class-wide organization or class-wide annihilation, we cannot present the class with divided leadership. The reality of the "split" and the necessity for unity demands the principled development of the polemic into a class-wide organizing issue. The IWP is not a splinter group; neither is it a competing alternative to the ICLC; nor is it a nag group set up either by the CIA or by its own well-intentioned but pathological conception of reality. We cannot and will not-at this crucial period in human history-irresponsibly divorce our tendency from the historical process from which we arose-a history of 150 years of increasing capitalist oppression and bitter struggle by the working class and working class organizers in the face of this oppression. We will not abandon our comrades of the ICLC who have lawfully brought the ICLC to a position of hegemony at this most critical moment in all of human history.

In the 8 years of its existence, the ICLC has struggled with and intervened upon the most crucial issues facing the class-the worldwide depression and the Rockefeller faction's moves toward fascism, behaviorist mind control of the class, the destruction of class-wide institutions, and the substitution of divisive community control apparatus. The working class movement is no arena for academic debate. It is within the working class movement that the most critical ideological struggles are waged. The ICLC has consistently addressed itself to the critical conceptual issues which face the class-more often than not in the face of ridicule and slander by other so-called working class organizations. The polemic which currently engages the ICLC and the IWP-a polemic once waged from within and now in the most principled way opened up to the class-is the singularly most significant political struggle of this period. For only when thoroughly grounded in Marxist class-for-itself methodology can the party and the class move; only then can the party lead the class to revolution; only then will the human race survive the genocidal zero growth plans of Rockefeller and his fascist friends. The class must be brought into this struggle.

The working class must look truth in the face. Truth reveals the immediate necessity of class wide organization and demands therefore the organization of the mass party within the most advanced capitalist sector, the United States. Truth reveals the schizophrenic split between the hegemonic tendency (IWP) and the hegemonic organization (ICLC). The ICLC has erred in its refusal to ruthlessly confront and thereby to purge itself of its idealistic and paranoid methodology as explicitly documented in Fred Newman's "Idealism, Paranoia, and the Mass Organization," a methodological corrective to the Labor Committee tendency.

Though rarely practiced, Marxism is a science. At this critical moment it must be practiced. As a true science it admits of neither shortcuts nor formulas. We move now-out of immediate historical necessity-to organize the class to demand the scientific changes and therefore the proper leadership of the ICLC. If the ICLC cannot "expose its errors by means of the bitterest self-accusation," it will suffer organizational death, for increasing idealism and paranoia is a move towards death. The IWP commits itself to the working class now, when necessity demands the organizing of the ICLC, and in the future, when our actions will be determined by the inexorable forces of historical necessity.

For the IWP, as a true communist organization sees that there is but one fundamental struggle-the dynamic of world history-the class struggle. The only methodology that will enable us to finally purge humankind of that class antagonistic struggle is Marxist methodology. Our scientific premises, like Marx's, are real men and women-the real men and women of the working class whose productive capacity is the reality factor in the bourgeoisie's fictional world of capitalism; the real men and women of the ICLC, an organization committed to revolution-lawfully hegemonic among left organizations-and equally lawfully deteriorating in its closed and paranoid environment; the real men and women of the IWP and of the human race who are ready to move, ready to build a class-wide mass organization. We do not abandon our premises for moment. We do not abstract ourselves or our comrades from the historical process. It is our location in the process that impels us now to organize the class on the basis of CLASS WIDE ORGANIZATION OR HUMAN ANNIHILATION. We move now to organize the class around this most principled and serious polemic. For only with a correct resolution to this class-wide struggle can we have the unified class-wide organization necessary to assure not merely the defeat of the fascist Rockefeller; not merely the survival of the human race, but a move to a world of unprecedented productivity and unprecedented human happiness.