In the spring of 2021, a gang of Politically Degenerate Right Liquidators launched a vicious attack on the US Maoist movement, going against our principles and passing over to the camp of the enemy. They have reversed the lessons hard earned by our class and exemplified by the Day of Heroism.
In the false narrative of the liquidation, they are always the victim. Their perspective is bleak. Here the word “abuse” is a favorite term allowing them to divert the necessary political struggle into a finger pointing farce. Their circus has degenerated into a contest for who can come up with the most outlandish tales. They have distorted self-sacrifice, discipline, and commitment into “abuse,” “manipulation,” “brainwash,” and “cultist fanaticism.”
To be clear, though many have rejected claiming to be Marxists entirely, the basis for the PDRL is still revisionism. Their basic argument is one against discipline, organization, leadership and revolutionary armed struggle. They praise the work of other revisionists, particularly the Democratic Socialists of America and they decry election boycotts. They seek alliances with Trotskyites and other traitors to the revolutionary cause. Mainly they conduct organized police work and intelligence gathering.
The nature of the PDRL is opportunism, therefore they change masks to appeal to the good nature of their changing audiences. When talking to non-Marxist students and activists the liquidation will rely on scandalizing with classic anti-communism decrying the “cult of personality,” the so-called “death toll” of the Chinese and Peruvian revolutions among other tropes. They label political opponents with anything they can to appeal to the assumed politics of the students. They change up when talking to the youth who are supportive of, or sympathetic to Maoism: the very same liquidators then put on a red mask and claim to be comrades who are simply condemning “abusive behavior” which is never supported with proof but only hearsay and empiricism. When one disguise fails, they will only put on another.
The PDRL is just the most recent manifestation of a revisionist trend that has festered in this country for a long time. The Communist Party of the USA was liquidated by the revisionist Earl Browder into the Communist Political Association in 1945. Since then, the contradiction for the communists has been and remains the contradiction between reconstitution and liquidation. Liquidators play their part against reconstitution today in two ways: first, by rejecting Maoism, the ideology of the international proletariat, and attempting to convince others to reject it as well—this is to prevent reconstitution from growing in the mass movements under the correct leadership—and secondly, by disrupting the process of uniting under Maoism, making personal and secondary disagreements principle, applying reckless labeling and false accusations, then attacking anyone who does not acquiesce to their opposition to unity. The liquidators first do not want anyone accepting Maoism, and second they do not want those who accept it to struggle for unity, but to remain dispersed and decapitated.
It is incorrect to consider the PDRL as exhausted; they continue their attacks in less obvious ways. The liquidationists hailed from the right-wing of the movement to reconstitute the Communist Party, and while they have since rejected the Party and openly oppose reconstitution, they remain in close contact with their agents who exist in the right-wings of revolutionary nuclei around the country. The danger represented by the liquidators is revisionism, which is the main danger to the revolutionary movement.
The defeat of the liquidation is a long process that will go on after the PDRL is destroyed. In this process it is the struggle to unite under Maoism and the struggle against revisionism, reaction and imperialism that spell victory for the movement in overcoming the dispersal of revolutionary forces.
In overcoming the current manifestation of liquidation, the revolutionaries must practice Marxism, not revisionism; be honest and above-board, do not plot or intrigue; unite and do not split! The complexity of the situation can only be navigated with these principles.
A less obvious way the liquidators gain success through dispersal of forces is encouraging demoralization, allowing the errors made in political work to totally discredit the entirety of the work. This pessimistic and capitulationist demoralization must not be allowed to fester; on the contrary, revolutionaries must stick to their post, remain connected to the masses, and deepen their contact. It is in the interests of liquidation for all fronts to collapse, for the connections between the masses and the revolutionaries to whither, and for the revolutionaries to be separated from one another with leadership prevented from arising. The idea that working towards unity requires abandonment of political and mass work is a liquidationist notion.
Be warned that liquidation further sells itself as putting tasks before and at the expense of the principle task: the reconstitution of the Communist Party, which is today expressed in the struggle to unite under Maoism.
The Worker as the advanced agent of the Daily Worker is committed to serving the reconstitution of the Communist Party as an organ of revolutionary working class expression, one which serves the goal of unity under Maoism, combating dispersal, revisionism and liquidation. We call on all those who stand for reconstitution to deepen the struggle to unite under Maoism.