This issue of kites consists entirely of a major new document from the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, “The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the Crying Need for a new Communist Vanguard Party Today: Summing up a century of communist leadership, organization, strategy, and practice in the United States so that we can rise to the challenges before us.” A significant amount of preview content has already been released and can be sampled at kites-journal.org.
kites is a journal of communist theory and strategy for revolution focused on North America. It emerged in 2020 from the initiative of two organizations: Revolutionary Initiative (RI) in Canada and the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (OCR) in the US. Its Editorial Committee is composed of a few communist revolutionaries from across North America, and operates as an independent entity.
Table of Contents
The CP, the Sixties, the RCP, and the Crying Need for a Communist Vanguard Party Today: Summing up a century of communist leadership, organization, strategy, and practice in the United States so that we can rise to the challenges before us
by the ORGANIZATION OF COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONARIES (US)
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
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
APPENDIX 1: An OCR Study Guide for Training Communist Cadre
APPENDIX 2: Selected Sources on and from the 1960s Revolutionary Movement