Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

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The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP, USA), known originally as the Revolutionary Union, is a Maoist communist party formed in 1975 in the United States. The group has few members at this time and is considered by many to be a relic of the Old Left. The organization's main activities include publishing the Revolution newspaper (formerly the Revolutionary Worker), publishing books, running front groups and promoting the writings of their main leader, Bob Avakian.

Bob Avakian first entered political life in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, where he was an advocate of direct action. Other notable moments came when he organized a strike of Chevron workers in the North Bay Area, and as a candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party. Avakian was a fellow traveler of the Black Panther Party, sharing the stage with Panthers and learning about Mao Zedong, who Eldridge Cleaver then called "the baddest motherfucker on planet earth."

In the Revolutionary Communist Party's 1978 split, the Avakian-led majority supported the so-called Gang of Four while the minority favored Hua Kuofeng, and later Teng Xiaoping, the leading promoter of the "capitalist road" inside the Chinese government. Teng went on to oversee the Tienanmen Square massacre in 1989, a student and worker uprising that the RCP politically supported. The minority also felt the RCP was withdrawing from mass work and was becoming too "ultra-left." This minority split in January 1978 and formed the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, which in turn merged with several other "New Communist" groups to form Freedom Road Socialist Organization. The RWH faction went on to work with Jesse Jackson,and continues to do work at the edge of the Democratic Party. The RCP believed that the minority group was confusing state capitalism for socialism, and that they would end up as "union hacks" and social movement activists instead of revolutionaries.

In January 1979, 17 RCP members were arrested on felony charges in Washington, D.C. where they were protesting the visit of Deng Xiaoping, the leader of China, who was meeting with U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Their intention was to send a signal flare to revolutionaries around the world that capitalism had been restored in China, a then-controversial (and minority) analysis. Among those arrested were RCP chairman Bob Avakian who went underground following this. He is rumored to be in France, but following the release of the DVD Revolution, with footage from speeches on the "West Coast" and "East Coast," speculation is rife over his current whereabouts.

The RCP runs a chain of bookstores called "Revolution Books" in several US cities, and publishes the newspaper [Revolution][1], and maintains the website revcom.us. Previous publications include Revolution (theoretical magazine), The Communist (line journal), Revolutionary Worker (bi-lingual newspaper).

The RCP believes that reform is impossible within the structure of the capitlist state and advocates a revolutionary vanguard party to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Noteworthy is their belief in "world revolution" and not just regime change. Following classical Marxist-Leninist theory (that they now call Marxism-Leninism-Maoism), they believe that the class struggle continues under socialism, with constant mass struggle as the way to check the development of state capitalism.

Their heavily promoted leader Bob Avakian engages in regular arguments within the international communist movement over what this means exactly, with a heavy emphasis on "What Is to Be Done?"-era Leninism, and is particularly criticial of the Stalin-era method of compulsion and repression. The RCP is the vanguardist party.

The RCP is a participating organization in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, a semi-clandestine group of Marxist-Leninsit-Maoist parties around the world whose most prominent participants include the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). They also maintain friendly relations with the Communist Party of the Philippines and the "Naxalite" peasant movement in India.

The RCP national spokesperson is Carl Dix, a military resister from the Vietnam era. Other prominent leaders include: Travis Morales, Joe Veale, Dolly Veale, Mary Lou Greenberg. C. Clark Kissinger is a writer for their newspaper and activist who founded Refuse and Resist and helped pen the Not In Our Name statement of conscience.

The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade is their youth affiliate. Current spokesperson: Sunsara Taylor. Taylor has been on Fox News during the Schiavo tussle in Florida, and got a full-page New York Times write up during the Republican National Convention in 2004. She is also a signatory to the World Can't Wait call to action. Prior RCYB spokesperson was Joey Johnson, defendant in the Supreme Court flag-burning case Texas v. Johnson that established the constituional right to burn flags.

The RCP tends to avoid "coalition politics" believing that what is necessary is a "United Front Under the Leadership of the Proletariat." This follows from Avakian's analysis that the Old Left was bound by a Popular Front that permanently subordinated the revolutionary movement to the "democratic wing of capitalism." The RCP militantly rejects electoral politics, and believes that every state on earth must be overthrown by popular revolution. They have an insurrectionary model for imperialist countries, and allied Maoist parties follow Mao's People's War model in the third world. In the meantime, they avoid all violence (and have strict rules against drug use and other petty crimes).

[edit] Front Groups

Groups that the RCP has initiated include: Refuse & Resist!, Not In Our Name, World Can't Wait, No Business As Usual, La Resistencia, October 22 Coalition Against Police Brutality, Comm. to Suport the Revolution in Peru, and more.

[edit] Criticism of RCP

Anarchists accuse the RCP of being authoritarian and a personality cult. Many anarchists have also accused the RCP and other communist groups of setting up front-groups within the anti-war movement, such as The World Can't Wait, Refuse and Resist and Not in Our Name.

The RCP is subject to common criticisms made against Marxism-Leninism in general, authoritarian leftism and to the idea of the vanguard party in particular. Other than accusations that the many organizations in which it has a heavy presence are its front groups, critics have claimed its contributions to the organization of mass leftist rallies amounts to engaging in lesser-evil politics (also discussed here), particularly with the World Can't Wait campaign.

The RCP has had an often stormy relationship with the broader political left. From the initial publication of the Red Papers that formed the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, and their highly controversial (and qualified) inclusion of Joseph Stalin as a historical leader, the RCP has cut against the dominant anti-communist political discourse in the United States with particular gusto. Highly critical of the former Soviet Union, which they viewed as "state capitalist" and "social-imperialist," they were subject to particularly sharp attack from Soviet partisans within the USA.

The RCP does not generally attempt to maneuver inside leftist coalitions, preferring to launch independent initiatives to compete with political movements on a more radical basis. Unlike many activist groupings, the RCP expects members acting as members to uphold their organization positions, refuse illegal drugs and habits, and maintain exceptional standards of personal morality.

Much of the criticism of Avakian's leadership steers clear of engaging the set of ideas that he's responsible for, particularly regarding class struggle under socialism, the need for a "solid core" of revolutionaries even in non-revolutionary times, the insistence that political line is "decisive" and their openly stated goal of world revolution leading to communism. Instead, the main point of criticism is formal: that the RCP exists, promotes its leadership core and doesn't triangulate their objectives to the needs of every locality in which they operate.

Competing communist and socialist groups have labeled the RCP as a cult of personality around the leadership of Bob Avakian. Those opposing such a cult of personality question whether it is necessary or desirable to build one up at all, and particularly whether it is justified to build one up around a leader that may or may not eventually gain the credibility and respect to have one. Such critics say that it is presumptuous of the RCP to put forward Bob Avakian as an exceptional leader when he is nowhere near the "status" of Marx, Lenin or Mao Zedong, from whom their "Marxist-Leninst-Maoist" ideology takes its name. Others additionally allege that personality cults were a weakness, not a strength, of the old communist movement, and that as such, these mistakes do not need to be repeated in a new revolutionary communist society. This debate has taken on renewed life since the Nepalese Maoists have disassociated themselves from this method of promoting leaders.

Many on the Left also criticized the RCP for its opposition to homosexuality. The RCP changed its position on homosexuality in the early 1990s.