Originally published in 2023 as kites #8, this reprint, published in 2025 by Going Against the Tide, features a new layout with art by Ruby Lois.
For anyone asking how we can make proletarian revolution in the present, how we can learn from our predecessors on that path, this volume offers rich lessons in revolutionary strategy and tactics—not pat answers, but ways to think through the challenges and avoid repeating past mistakes. It features lengthy summations of the rise and fall of the two previous communist vanguard parties in the US, the Communist Party, USA and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, and a chapter on the bridge between (and/or separating) them, the revolutionary movement of the 1960s. Written by the contemporary heir to the communist tradition, the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US), it ends with a summation of why no revolutionary movement emerged from the 2010s and a call to build a new communist vanguard party today.
The full text is available online at goingagainstthetide.org.
Table of Contents:
- Preface to the 2025 edition
- Introduction
- The CP
- Antecedents
- 1917–23: Forming the Party…well…Parties
- 1923–25: Grandiose schemes and outmaneuvered maneuvers
- 1925–28: Bolsheviks gonna bolshevize; factionalists gonna factionalize
- 1928–33: The dawn of the red decade
- 1933–35: Broadening out
- 1935–39: The Popular Front
- 1939–41: Soviet diplomatic maneuvers and American dogmatic idiocy
- 1941–45: Capitulation and liquidation
- 1945–…: Stuck in the swamp of revisionism, never to escape
- The Sixties: A Revolutionary Decade without a Vanguard
- What gave rise to the revolutionary storms?
- From revolt to revolutionaries; from sharpening objective contradictions to subjective revolutionary forces
- The paths the Sixties generation of revolutionaries took: an overview
- The bourgeoisie regains the initiative: the regime of preventive counterrevolution in the 1970s
- Appendix: Selected Sources on and from the 1960s Revolutionary Movement
- The RCP
- 1968–72: Moving mountains – The early RU
- 1972–76: Building the Party
- 1976–78: Discarding the CP baggage
- 1978–81: “Better fewer, fewer better” – Taking a bold stand with cold revolutionary politics in command
- 1982–88: “Masters of the wharf or slaves to tonnage?” – Hinging revolutionary work on a grand crisis ahead
- 1989–91: “The end of a stage, the beginning of a new stage”
- 1992–2001: Proletarian islands in a petty-bourgeois sea; severing political work from revolutionary objectives
- 2001–2003: Gaining a mass following, but at what cost?
- 2004–5: A “cultural revolution” without the masses
- 2005–8: Fewer, but not better
- 2009–15: The “new communism” in practice
- 2016–20: “First time as tragedy, second time as farce”
- The Party’s over
- The Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today
- The 2010s as a decade of revolutionary potential diverted
- What would it take to build a vanguard?
- Some particularities that the construction of a new vanguard in the US needs to pay attention to