The Right Opportunist Labor Line of the Right Opportunist Headquarters (ROHQ) in the US

Introduction

For several years the so-called New Labor Press (NLP) has been elevating sectarianism and inventing “political lines” to support their sectarian stance. Chief among these lines is the labor line. In this process, the right opportunists trudge out the “New Labor Organizing Committee” (NLOC) which represents just another degeneration in this same direction⁠—more fat around the Right Opportunist Headquarters in the US. These represent the New Revisionism, opportunism, and of course liquidationism.

As part of dissecting the rightist line which extends to the rest of the tepid pool of the Right Opportunist Headquarters (ROHQ) in the US, it is necessary to look at the politics and program pertaining to the labor question of New Revisionism. As mentioned in previous articles, when The Worker brandished, defended, and applied the slogan “Unite Under Maoism,” NLP responded by elevating sectarianism to the level of an ideological principle, inventing phantom plots and ranting to the heavens. This made them the main coordinators of liquidationism inside-out and, more importantly, the architects of the ROHQ. It became evident that the maneuverings of these rightists represented the pragmatism of preserving their circles rather than overcoming the problems faced by Maoists through the ideology. In the interests of giving them a fair shake and a way out we restrained our responses considerably, but their ensuing venom only increased their rate of decomposition.

Their efforts always feature the elevation of secondary matters over principles and the principal issues. They will raise division over disagreements on labor tactics while avoiding the major points of ideological contention; they avoid communist principles in order to escape facing their own deviations and to preserve their circle’s claim to revolutionary credentials. They use the postmodern methodology of constructing a narrative which might appear plausible to those approximating their circles, but they are ultimately incapable of serious investigation which would dispel the narrative. This drama has played itself out in so many ways to no real effect⁠—other than assisting the genuine Maoists in finding unity against the new revisionism of the ROHQ.

While the immediate and urgent task of the Maoists has developed since the original contention with the rightists of NLP, the matter of what to make of the existing unions and efforts at unionization is still secondary. It has been the easy go-to for the rightists to treat this⁠—as well as their ill-conceived idealist notions of the national question⁠—as principal in order to foment as much enmity and division as possible against anyone who criticizes their stupidity on these questions. They seek to secure their split so that their small group of rabid intellectuals is not meaningfully challenged. It is a simple matter of either agreeing with them or being called an abusive “Daltonite” plotter. Following this course has turned them from misguided want-to-be revolutionaries into active revisionists and enemies of the process of reconstitution.

Through the elevation of secondary matters, NLP advanced and embellished the importance of its Althusser-like position on “State Unionism,” making this the cornerstone of its labor line. They publish article after article on the “state unions,” promote presentations of their hackneyed essays on it, and denounce everyone but themselves as revisionists and tail-enders of these chimeras of their own invention.

This is wholly based on sectarianism and the evolution of the sect. It begins with subjectivism in study pertaining to the unions, negating the class struggle within them and only seeing the capitulationist bureaucrats at the top. Here they make another subjectivist error: they see the aspect of state collaboration and take this to an extreme conclusion that the unions are now part of the state, and hence any other quality is negated. While the state itself, much like the mode of production it protects, is not something one has the full privilege to opt out of, the logic of our rightists, if extended rationally, would imply that we should give up fighting for public schools, roads, and other things because they are state schools, state roads, etc. It is infantilism clear as day, but given a mystique in the labor line of the right. It is now easy enough for our rightists to end up at extreme sectarianism, and, according to them, they have solved the labor question for the US and that is final. Anyone who disagrees or seeks to struggle about it is the enemy and, most importantly, they are free to focus their propaganda not against the boss mainly, but against the so-called “state unions.”

Unlike NLP and co., The Worker does not consider the principal task of revolutionaries to be resolution on the tactical orientation toward the unions, but on the need to reconstitute the Communist Party, making the most urgent task (after the split) uniting under Maoism, the ideology of the international proletariat, rather than dividing over what this or that small circle has come to think of the existing unions. This task develops⁠—based only on the degree in which the real Maoists unite⁠—into the task of making Maoism incarnate, that is, embodying its ideological, political, and organizational stance in the three types of social practice: production, scientific experiment, and class struggle. In spite of their tendency to write excessively, the rightists accuse those insisting on a firm theoretical foundation of being idealist intellectuals. This is necessary to prevent their own people from seeing how far from Maoism their intellectual leaders have actually landed. Opposed to Maoism, the right aims to treat the formation of effete “red” unions, which in reality are a rehash of “rank-and-file committees,” as the principal task.

The persistence of small groups trumpeting some sort of novel thought on the topic of unions, etc., is in reality little more than the recycled trash of what was already refuted in theory and practice by the Communist Party here and the International Communist Movement of the last century. It is more proof that these people not only embrace their amateurism but also confuse it for virtue. Their attitude is identical to that of Bob Avakian, the New Revisionist leader of the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party USA: the preposterous notion that with “scientific” thinking, an American with a typewriter or computer can answer all the main problems internationally and issue the appropriate corrections and demarcation⁠—never mind how horrendous their social practice actually is. In their view, anyone insisting on basing themselves in the theoretical doctrine of the international proletariat are in fact “dogmato-revisionists,” a term the ROHQ have lifted directly from the Avakianites.

In spite of producing 8-legged essays at a tempo that would make even the boss blush, the “theoretical journal” of NLP really says almost nothing. The compatriots who follow this journal likewise produce very little signs of life; they do not display an increase in red marches, successful strikes, or organized workplaces⁠—all of which the “Daltonites” whom they cannot stop crying about have produced for the past decade.

In place of imposing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism with the contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo as the sole commander and guide of the revolution on the world level, including this country, NLP aims to mechanically impose their sect as the sole representatives of the “left line” innate in their minds. Hence, they treat the calls to unite under Maoism as a direct attack on their self-assured authority, an existential threat to their headquarters. This reflects their impoverished understanding of what ideology is, so they relegate it to a secondary status by focusing on tactical orientation questions and organizational form. They extend this deviation by reducing criticism to a matter of personality in order to avoid ideological two-line struggle. On the contrary, ideological unity, which is ongoing and enhanced through reiterative struggle, is the prerequisite for tactical and organizational unity.

The theoretical foundations of the ROHQ are based on the slipshod work of arrogant petty bourgeois interlopers who have become so enamored with the smell of their own noxious flatulence that they can no longer detect how things really are. Their work among the class and the masses ranges from anemic to embarrassingly repulsive. Flowing from this, they condemn the more advanced workers in order to organize on the margins. Their method in many articles, pieces, and theoretical documents is to make some correct observations, noting some historical truisms, only to immediately insert the most insane and unsupported conclusions along tactical prescriptions. This is the form that their extreme sophistry and subjectivism takes.

This subjectivism extends among the ROHQ everywhere, and most pronounced among the New Laborite section is their utter lack of political economy. From their shop floor papers, to NLP, and the adjacent “newspaper” The Partisan, the ranks of the ROHQ ideologues, like most of the modern US “Left,” neglect the study and use of political economics, downgrading this component and integral part of Marxism to mere superficial formula to unpack or distort when opportune.

They cannot correct this embarrassing dearth of understanding because they oppose theoretical training and discipline, making for a stunting environment keeping an intellectually malnourished rank and file from confronting a flabby, stupid, and self-assured leadership.

This is related to the fact that they are steeped in postmodernism, which considers the study of economics in the Marxist sense an outdated and backward stain of the enlightenment⁠—which forces the spiritual, cultural, and emotional ambitions of the worker into a straitjacket of economic determination and, worse, corrals them into the stifling structure of the Communist Party (in their view). Class becomes simple identity, a matter of discourse and individual personality; it is not to be understood through the raw and callous science of exploitation.

This has reverberating effects and destroys one’s legitimacy as a proletarian organization. It turns what should be a shop floor paper into a passion play, leaving a sad stack of articles which most workers will find annoying and unreadable rather than articulating their experience and answering their burning questions, let alone inspiring them to swing harder. Any idiot can complain, and the NLOC formula offers little else. It begins with the “objective” compiled data about a job site, then the “subjective,” a bunch of whining combined with excuses for their poor quality work, before ending with rationalization on why things will get better. We are reminded of the Revolutionary Study Group reports from the right. Now repeat this spittle for a hundred pages and call it mass work!

Subjectivism allows for barring the masses of proletarians from participating in the reconstitution of their own Party and casts the business unions, which the ROHQ incorrectly call “state unions,” as the principal enemy of the working class, who are to receive no political education in Maoism and are to be organized into the same rank-and-file associations the Trotskyists have been promoting for years.

In terms of labor tactics and strategy, they are indistinguishable from World Socialist Web Site: “Rank-and-file committees are of, by and for the rank-and-file workers, who have a different set of interests than management, the bosses, the politicians, and the trade union apparatus, who oppress workers in order to defend the profits of the ruling elite.” This Trotskyite manifesto could just have easily been scribbled by the NLOC; no one could tell the difference! The similarities do not end there. Let the reader compare this to NLP’s writing: “…revolutionary workers have to start breaking with the state unions now instead of later. It means upholding the principle of the political leadership and independence of workers over bureaucrats, and upholding the line of the class-conscious workers against the lines of the reactionaries and corporatists who lord over them. It means recognizing the reality that a political-organizational split with the state union centers is an inevitability and a necessity, and we must begin mobilizing and preparing workers for such a split now rather than feeding them the delusion that revolutionaries can ever seize control of degenerate fascistic structures like the AFL-CIO.”

The New Laborites cry that their opponents use the straw man argument that they won’t work within unions against them. We are aware that this is really their main work⁠—no different than other reformists⁠—we only add that this work is in the interest of the boss, in the interests of ruining what feeble safety nets the workers have accomplished while offering absolutely nothing better. This is similar to their approach to the Maoist movement: destroy whatever organization they are within and replace it with a farce or nothing at all. Everywhere they go, they act as a virus; the vaccine is Maoism, its definition, defense, and, principally, its application.

Marx says that “…in historical struggles one must distinguish… the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.” On the one hand the New Laborites work mainly within the business unions, while on the other they denounce The Worker for running articles about workers fighting and conquering victories in strikes, albeit in the business unions. In this vein they railed against a guest article in The Worker which analyzed a strike of union staffers. It must vex them terribly to sort out who is right and who is wrong in a strike of one “state union” against another! This is their miserable reality, against their conception of themselves.

We intend to go over our major points of contention with their phony, opportunist, revisionist, liquidationist, and reactionary political line as it pertains to labor.

A Pure Splinter: Problems of Party Reconstitution and the Labor Question

It is important to begin with what work in the labor trench serves in regards to communism. The Worker stated in 2023 that labor struggles are “the principal site of struggle fighting for reconstitution [of the Communist Party] and socialist revolution [in the US].” It is on the labor front mainly, and not in one of the auxiliaries, in long-winded boisterous articles, or in resolutions between small groups, that the real advance in reconstitution takes place. After all, the only place where natural proletarian leaders are spontaneously formed is⁠—not by coincidence⁠—the place where they are exploited.

Postmodernism, its forefather Althusser, and his copy cat Avakian have all gone to the greatest lengths to deny this simple fact to serve the interests of preserving petty bourgeois hegemonic leadership over the class struggle. Only in the labor trench can the spontaneity be given correct political direction and can ideological training be given to the best sons and daughters of the proletarian class.

In many of these places the workers have, on their own, without the help of the NLP or others, been forced to spontaneously rebel and are already taking up the fight in unionized workplaces within the economic struggle around wages and working conditions. It becomes necessary to provide the ideological foundation allowing the workers to go beyond what the ruling class and its administrators accept, and this is mainly an ideological question. Pronouncing heavenly mandates and easy verdicts on the question of the orientation toward the unions will not do; it cannot deal with reality as it exists.

The ROHQ, due to their inadequacy, can only take on a single aspect, and from this they can weave whatever fantasy is most suitable to their sect in the short term and at that moment. Because there are contradictions, and the law of contradiction is the sole fundamental law of the incessant transformation of all eternal matter, the method of the ROHQ can never accomplish anything good. So while there is a contradiction with labor laws⁠—on one hand they were won in connection with workers’ struggles, while on the other they are used by reformists to achieve labor peace⁠—the NLP and their cronies can only see one aspect and are not willing to struggle over it. See for instance their “Problems of Labor Law,” which goes from saying revolutionaries should use labor law while educating workers in its limits to rhetorically asking: “At what point does trashing the existing collective bargaining framework become simpler than tinkering with it?” and ranks “obligatory [union] membership” as among the “worst aspects” (!) of labor laws in the US.

They proclaim the line and proclaim who is left and right, without any substantiation or development, and move on. This is a parody of the worst deviations of the past ten years of the Maoist movement in this country which these losers have split from, and is by no means a correction.

Next we should try to understand the problems of the unions. Unions themselves are driven by a contradiction; on one hand, they can be basic defense organizations of the workers, while on the other, they can serve as anchors of capitalism within the proletariat, as tools of bourgeoisifying sections of the proletariat and corrupting them, improving the social organization of production in the interests of private profit. Both aspects exist, but like the true splitters and liquidationists they are, the ROHQ can do nothing more than break away and attempt to form their own “perfect” organisms which cannot compete with, replace, or provide an alternative to what already exists. When inside the union they act as union busters; when outside of it they act as cackling hens.

The prescription for dual unionism and “red unionism” was already attacked by the Communist International under the direct leadership of the great Lenin. Revolutionaries were correct to be critical of the business unions of Lenin’s day; their frustrations were rooted in material reality. They were as conservative, corrupt, and collaborationist as they are today. This caused the infantile leftists to attempt to leap from them and attempt to form pure splinters. When this started it was more forgivable than still playing the same old track over a hundred years later. Today such a theory can hardly justify itself in novelty or support itself in utility and it becomes a more naked declaration of mass abandonment, splittism, and liquidationism. As the ROHQ seeks to expand its political club into the workplace, honest workers and especially revolutionaries should denounce them and send them packing, the tired old dogs.

A pure splinter is exactly what the cretins at NLP want to accomplish, and it is a mistake; hear their formula: “The basis for the New Labor movement is in developing these tiny daily uprisings into stable organizations of the proletariat and⁠—ideally, eventually⁠—into full-fledged labor unions.”

On the contrary, revolutionaries must enter and work within even the reactionary and conservative unions, not to wield their bureaucratic apparatus, but to win their people for reconstitution. It is only at an advanced level of development and in specific conditions that organized revolutionaries can or should generate red unions. Putting the generation of such before the basic task of uniting the communists is to reverse the order of things, is to construct the front backwards.

Likewise, the Communist Party of Peru expressed how Communists have a responsibility to fight alongside the masses and to lead them around their daily demands, combining these with the struggle for political power (the main demand). It is necessary to not only generate organisms of various colors suited to the particular conditions, but to penetrate even the most counter-revolutionary organizations. This is a level of tactical sophistication that exceeds the thinking capabilities of the ROHQ⁠—mainly because they cannot think beyond a single aspect of a problem, and they have not adopted a better guide to thinking than their own misguided identity politics. In any case, it is the Party that leads the revolution, and not the unions, so it is the question of the Party that is most important, and it is the Party that is the most important instrument for the masses; no other organizations can rival it.

State Unionism?

One of the biggest distortions of the ROHQ is their so-called “state union thesis.” It is the results of subjectivism in study combined with sectarianism in organizational relations, striking a pose, and creative mania. The ROHQ have created a web of distortions each worthy of polemic, and in order to fully understand how backward their “state-union thesis” is we will later have to get into their distortion of the united front and their Avakianite position on “ascending fascism”; these three distortions are knotted up together and mutually depend on the subjectivist idealism of each other.

The ROHQ deny the process of reactionization of capitalism, like Avakian and, before him, Kautsky; there are variations on this theme, all resulting in denial that imperialism is reaction all along the line, and in the face of its inevitable decomposition and doom, in the face of its atrocity, labeling it fascist, creeping fascist, or in the case of the ROHQ “ascending fascism.” This theory suggests that the US society is undergoing a process of corporativization, without evidence. This process of course would allow for the possibility of state unions. Corporativization, however, does not factor into the process by which the US is reactionizing. The process of this country is total reactionization in politics, economics, and culture. Many of the things held as common sense values in such a decline are in fact part of the process of reactionization, including the principles of most would-be progressive activists related to identity politics.

NLP and co, however, are unable to analyze reality; they have an idea and proceed from here to find whatever they can to make their idea seem true, even if it means ignoring how things are and how they are moving. They seek the appearance of hardworking theorists, but on the contrary are lazy pseudo-intellectuals who import the term “state unionism” from works by Brazilian comrades. The problem is: the conditions for state unionism actually existed in Brazil and do not exist in the US.

Particular features of the Brazilian Unicidad Sindical system allow for the state unions. The Brazilian labor relations “trade union monopoly” exists not by the workers themselves but by the state via legal mandate. Membership is automatic and mandatory. Unicidad does not mean a unity of unions, but statutory unity imposed by the state.

Readers who understand history can already smell fascist Italy and its corporativization all over this model. The Brazilian version dates back to the 1930s and ’40s. Importantly, dues were paid in the form of tax collected from every worker directly by the state, and allotted directly by the state for operating costs incurred by the state unions. These bodies, paid for by tax dollars, existed explicitly to mitigate class conflict in the interests of the state. These are the conditions present which allow for the state unions to operate, and when the comrades write of state unions this is what they are talking about. By pilfering terms from a legitimate source, the New Revisionists distort the theory and mean something completely different.

Our right opportunists use the same thinking as the French revisionist Louis Althusser who classifies unions into his so-called “Ideological State Apparatus.” According to him, the union is no longer contested; it simply serves the reproduction of capitalist production relations via ideology. He considered the union’s ability to negotiate only in the aspect of reformism, in part because he denied that production determines society and denied the revolutionary role of the Communist Party of the New Type, and also to inflate the role of the superstructure and shift the focus from labor itself onto other questions. This thinking was incorporated into Avakianism from early on and it has stained many untrained Americans’ understanding of Maoism. Much of Althusser’s slop and denial of Marxist philosophy is taken for granted and assumed as a common sense feature of Maoism because of Avakian, and it persists because of those who operate under the false banner of Maoism and refuse to do away with Avakianism.

The naming conventions found among the ROHQ bear a telling similarity to Avakian in so far as they use “New” not to represent the development of the ideology but to frame Communism and its established positions and doctrine as “old.” This miserable convention dates back the ’60s and ’70s of the last century, just like Avakian. It is not superficial either; the “New Labor Press” and “New Labor Organizing Committee” get their theory not from the old Marxism-Leninism (today Maoism), but rather they lean heavily on the so-called “New Left” and “New Communist Movement.” These existed not as a pole against revisionism but as an alternative to Marxism and a vessel for the postmodernism which is the whore of old ideas and not new thinking.

It should be noted that “New Labor” and “New Union” are terms found in the writings of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), and the ROHQ may be appealing to authority with these terms. However, they bear far more semblance to the “New” of the “New Communist Movement” than to that of the TUUL, which says for instance they would never surrender the “old unions” to the “labor agents of American imperialism.” This is how the TUUL used the terms “old” and “new.”

Among the “New” theories the ROHQ echoes are those which seek to break with Marxist philosophy, to deny its existence like Althusser or to pose it as inherently oppressive. In any case this trend of “New Leftists” and “New Communists” had to break with historical materialism, or at least to redefine it through distortion⁠—hence how “New Labor History” was developed among the intellectuals of the ruling class in their promotion of identity politics and postmodernism against Marxism.

“New Labor History” seeks in form to counter bourgeois positivist philosophy also found among revisionists, while in essence it is denying the operation of the law of contradiction as the sole fundamental law of motion throughout and applied to the question of history and how to apprehend labor history particularly.

Positivism subjectively determines that labor history is a single line of progress, mainly through mediation, by which working conditions improve steadily and science advances steadily. Postmodernism is extreme subjectivism which cannot follow positivist assumptions because it has to deny all totalizing narratives such as progress itself; it coincides that, like positivism, it denies the class struggle and production being determinant over society.

Marxist dialectical materialism on the other hand opposes subjectivism; it considers the class struggle as the motor of history and it understands how the proletariat can conquer things and how the bourgeoisie can utilize all these to promote social peace and prolong its rule. The Maoists have always proclaimed this and issued policy based on it.

The ROHQ uses “New Labor History” and not the verdicts of historical materialism, let alone Maoism, to promote their positions. The “New Left” sociologists were opposed to Marxist historical materialism⁠—this is a major feature of the “New Left.” It would produce “New Labor History” in opposition to both positivist historical distortion of class conflict and Marxists’ use of dialectical materialism to understand history through the mode of production. The revisionist attacks on comrade Stalin would continue the trend inside of the ICM as well; Stalin would be blamed for the Marxist theory of five epochs (primitive communal, slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist) and the New Revisionists have not stopped trying to eradicate this theory from Marxism.

Let us look at the diffused, so-called “history from below” and how it differs from Marxism⁠—but not from the “theory” produced by the ROHQ. The main focus of the “New Labor Historian” is to examine daily life, culture, lived experience of workers themselves; a good example of this is Althusser’s pupil and critic Jacques Ranciere, who weaves tales of workers’ lives using the type of empiricism which returns to idealism and does not allow itself to fuse around the question of exploitation. “Worker” is here reduced to a vague individual identity⁠—not a class in the Marxist sense but a nebulous aspiration. Marxism, on the other hand, focuses on the mode of production and the social structures which rise from it.

In sum, New Labor History avoids political economics and reduces the role of economy, increasing the cultural interests, while Marxism considers political economy one of its three component and integral parts. Following all this is the same “New” concepts about unions; whereas Marxists have seen unions in the dual aspect and always advocated entering them and fighting within them to bring the economic struggle to the political level, “New Labor History” sees any effort at collective bargaining or use of law as an automated surrender which, like Althusser argued, seeks to de-fang the workers, incorporating them into the “Ideological State Apparatus.”

There are very particular differences between Maoism and “history from the bottom up” or “New Labor History;” understanding these differences is useful to see the New Revisionism behind the “New Labor” groupings of the ROHQ. As we have mentioned in previous polemics and touched on in this one, the ROHQ do not see reconstitution of the Communist Party as the principal task; they consider the united front a thing to be constructed from the bottom up in their disorganized work places following no strategy and without indicating what sectors of industry are decisive (this is beyond the scope of New Labor historians).

Note the ridiculous 2025 May Day statement of New Labor Press, where they put forth the objective of re-founding the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), from the US, based in their arbitrarily cooked-up “New Labor” politics: “The objective basis for the construction of a class-conscious labor international is primarily in the following tasks: instead of the masses meandering from sellout to layoff, provide correct guidance to new labor organizations and ensure the corruption of old labor organizations finds a proper outlet for exposure and opposition in the creation/expansion of new principled labor organizations”… and “…if revolutionaries are able to cohere internationally around a strong labor line, then both the international workers’ movement and its conscious revolutionary element will be strengthened.”

First, the complaint about “straw men” regarding dual unionism is further exposed here as crocodile tears: the “exposure and opposition” to the old labor organizations is to take place through the creation of “new principled” ones. Second, the masses are not “meandering;” they are struggling spontaneously and need revolutionary organization. Third, the basis for adherence of revolutionaries internationally is put here as a labor line instead of the ideology of the international proletariat. How convenient for our Right Opportunists, who can thus call for the reconstitution of the RILU instead of the reconstitution of the Communist International, which must necessarily follow Maoism and nothing else!

Maoism understands that the Party is the leading force of the revolution, while New labor historians argue that the working class has no immediate need for the Party, that it must act autonomously and authentically⁠—and through its own culture and self-activity is how it will transform society. It makes sense then why the NLOC cannot talk about Maoism or the Communist Party but is free to present its alternative of rank-and-file committees, reform caucuses which strike poses as revolutionaries, and too many literary organs.

Maoism considers class to be a concrete thing, a real thing determined by relationship to production, whereas New Labor historians consider class a nebulous thing shaped by one’s individual identity and culture, where class is something that is “lived” like any other identity. Maoism holds that trade-union struggles alone only bring about bourgeois consciousness, and that class consciousness develops in class struggle guided by scientific theory. “New Labor History” holds to empiricist criteria that shop-floor resistance alone develops a community culture which naturally advances class consciousness. It is no surprise then that the ROHQ has mounted such a major effort to deny the importance of revolutionary theory in the face of their stupid practical prescriptions; they base their opposition to the Campaign to Unite Under Maoism on this exact deviation.

The main difference is found in the respective approaches to history. Maoism considers history developing through epochs defined by the mode of production, corresponding to stages of economic development; these are primitive communalism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. “New Labor History” considers this too totalizing and oppressive and rejects it most often as “Eurocentric.” Instead, it imagines its “history from below” where economics are not determining but rather anything can be, hence its “cultural anthropological” attempts to see history through the subjective worldview of individuals.

Maoism considers discipline as a key aspect for the struggle for political power which is principal. “New Labor History” rejects this entirely and is opposed to or skeptical of all bureaucracy; it focuses on less formal networks and suffers from severe individualism. History is destroyed by this trend and the New Revisionists re-brand this old vomit for a new audience.

Understanding the trend of “New Labor History” exposes the pattern of deviations leading up to the revisionism of New Labor Press and New Labor Organizing Committee. The ROHQ are not Maoists; they are postmodernists simply trafficking in the labor struggles, at the expense of the class, to assert their own petty bourgeois intellectual leadership over and against proletarian leadership. They are liquidationists and opportunists. The ROHQ reject the great Lenin to revive the wretched ideas of Althusser, Marcuse, Avakian, and so on.

We are required then to turn to the great Lenin, specifically to how he opposed the economists with What Is to Be Done?, how he opposed the amateurish and dangerous “left” deviations in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, how he opposed the Liquidators and the Liquidators inside-out, always insisting that there must be a revolutionary party guided by revolutionary theory. The ROHQ, as we have exposed elsewhere, deny the role of the working masses in the process of Party reconstitution, and in its place promote exactly the same kind of activity that is promoted by all liquidators: the focus on building educational circles, literary organs, and labor institutions; throw in a little “mutual-aid” and there you have it⁠—nothing “new” about it.

In opposition to their conception, The Worker will continue making the utmost effort to expose liquidationism, opportunism, New Revisionism, and the pathetic kind of centrism which seeks to keep all these debates and disagreements behind closed doors, in rooms which no one will enter.

We see no immediate utility in building “new” unions which cannot even compete with existing ones; this further divides and domesticates the labor movement. All legal work, including that within the unions, must be subordinated to the principal task of reconstitution; that means the above ground is always subordinated to the clandestine. All workplace organizing for daily demands inevitably ends up falling into economism if it is not advancing reconstitution among the workers.

Hence, we insist that revolutionaries must not remove Maoism from the discussion with the workers, nor must they present “reconstitution as a closed process” in order to protect their legal organizations from the spectral “fascists.” And so we see that the New Laborites are indeed like very old revisionists.

Through this series of subjectivist pitfalls, the ROHQ reach the following conclusions found in “State Unionism in the United States”, published on New Labor Press:

– Through legalization, the state has co-opted all the unions, which rely on government bodies (NLRB) further allowing state control to the degree that the unions become part of the state itself.

We oppose this logic because it makes several blind leaps. First, the major unions such as AFL-CIO predate the NLRA and operated (at least in the case of the AF of L) the same as they do now⁠—as business unions.

Second, the thesis rejects workers having any legal recourse. It rejects utilizing what has been conquered in class struggle to persevere in class struggle. For instance, recognition strikes can be used to prevent advanced workers from being terminated upon striking; workers fired for organizing are able to file lawsuits and continue struggling, potentially winning and increasing morale and revenue, or getting the jobs of fired organizers back. Contrasted to this, in the name of workers’ self-reliance, the ROHQ removes several weapons from the workers’ arsenal, tools which the big capitalists also want removed.

Third, and mainly, we oppose this logic because corporativization is not the main trend in the United States; the state itself is based mainly in private monopoly capital and prefers the bourgeois democratic form of government to maintain its dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It has not incorporated the business unions into the state; this thesis is not based on Marxism but on revisionism and postmodernism.

– Mass mobilizations are falsely counter-posed to legal struggle.

The ROHQ pretends that the two are not dialectically related. The ROHQ has a well-established pattern in their documents of treating mass mobilization as a magical antidote to legalism. Legalists, for one thing, carry out mass mobilizations. For another, illegal mass uprisings require legal support. The New Laborites fail to understand the communist method of transforming the legal above-ground work into the illegal clandestine work, and how the former supports the strengthening of the latter.

We oppose this mechanical counter-posing because the masses are already mobilizing beyond what their union bureaucrat leadership in the business unions want, and it cannot be stopped. When such mobilizations take place there must also be a fight for legal petition of the grievance and a legal fight in court. It is infantile to see the use of law one-sidedly as either the cure-all or as something to be avoided at all costs. One has to look no further than how communists have always had to organize legal struggles following mass uprisings and mass mobilizations, and how these served as mass propaganda efforts growing the Party’s ranks with workers. The Communists have generated entire organizations for this purpose such as International Labor Defense and Red-Aid, both of which used the law as an auxiliary to mass mobilizations.

– Identity politics is used in place of class analysis.

NLP and their subscribers argue the problem with the bureaucrats in the business unions is their class background or professional training. This is how their thesis begins and it is a common thread in their writings.

For instance, in their flagship article “State Unionism in the United States”, one can find praise for the “organic organization” of the masses, a delightful phrase by which they mean, in sum, organizations “from below”, without professionals, lawyers, and union staffers controlling the “spontaneous workers’ movement”.

They harp on this excessively, forgetting that Marx was an intellectual, not a rank-and-file factory worker, and that Lenin was a lawyer and journalist, etc. They consider that the existence of professional staff automatically eliminates a union’s ability to fight.

This thesis takes formal appearance and dresses it up as a class analysis, failing to get to the deeper issues. Neither class background, nor an individual’s personal relationship to production alone, matters in determining which class they serve. The main thing that matters is the person’s ideology, and ideology is transformed through organization.

Without communist leadership, the intellectuals will have bourgeois consciousness⁠—as will the workers! A militant union aligned with the class interests of the proletariat can be led by individuals who are not proletarian or of a proletarian background, and a bourgeois union can be led by those who came from the ranks. The problem with the leadership of the business unions is a political one, and not because they are lawyers, economists, etc. The cheap subjectivism of NLP is dangerous identity politics and must be condemned.

– To counter the state unions, there must be generated as many class conscious and combative union organizations as possible, refusing to utilize labor law and focusing on mobilization.

We oppose this for the exact reasons the great Lenin opposed it in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. It is an idealist thesis, which first deviates by arguing that it is the front which constructs the Party and not the Party which constructs the front. Second, the ROHQ lacks the actual connections to form such unions to begin with; some 50,000 workers were initially organized into the Trade Union Unity League from its earliest moments⁠—and under the leadership of the Party and the Red International of Labor Unions⁠—but these conditions do not exist currently. The rightists’ NLOC is formed from a handful of local shop papers, and not from serious, well-rooted workers’ organizations.

This is worse than the mistakes of the past because it is a complete farce. It is idealist because it assumes that propagating this old idea as new is enough to populate its organizations, which are impotent.

Third, because it lacks all strategic sense, none of the ROHQ organs have identified the most important sites of class struggle, nor the most important trenches in production in which small forces can get big results through fighting. In the absence of political economics and serious study, there is no analysis of industry, where it makes sense to send people to organize⁠—not only which cities and regions, but which industrial sectors. They have no understanding of the importance of industry, and hence can only punch out in all directions, doing whatever spontaneous, incoherent activity in whichever workplace their small forces find themselves, thus further serving the dispersal of forces and liquidationism.

This is related to their class composition, which they have not transgressed through first making an ideological leap. They are made up mainly of the precarious petty bourgeois intellectuals who have been forced to get jobs. As is so common in this country, those with useless degrees end up mainly in the service industry, where they can remain closer to their former class, or they go into logistics, but seldom into heavy industry, construction, or other important areas of the economy. So they have some shop papers in Amazon, stage work, and among some baristas. There is no strategy, no focus on specific sectors, no preparation for the storms to come.

The Convergence of Interests of “New Labor” with “Right-to-Work” Laws

Marxists understand that the National Labor Relations Act⁠—and its concomitant National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)⁠—exist so the state can mediate the class conflict between workers and owners, but also that it was forced into existence because workers went beyond what the state permits in the first place. Like any law, it should be utilized at every possible opportunity in the interests of the workers in class struggle, but without illusions that any law or reform is going to resolve all grievances or remedy class conflicts, let alone be enough to replace the struggle for political power. It is the thinking of “New Labor History,” examined above, which allows the “New Labor” Press to spend so many of its pages attacking the existence of the NLRB, actively discouraging workers from utilizing labor laws, and doing this at precisely the same time that the world’s richest imperialist Elon Musk at the head of DOGE was attempting to destroy the NLRB. These are interesting bed fellows.

As is usual for the ROHQ, they are unable to approach the National Labor Relations Act dialectically. On one hand the NLRA was an attempt by the old-state to increase its effectiveness in mediating the class struggle in its interests, as the lack of regulation provoked explosive and spontaneous struggles. In some respects it indeed reflected the tendency toward corporativization. On the other hand, the Act was a concession forced on the old-state by decades of class struggle, compelled by workers and communists who spilled their blood to freely associate, to form their own organizations that could fight for their demands. The NLRA did not automatically conjure the existence of “state unions,” nor could it transform the existing unions into “state unions.” As mentioned above, many of the largest unions were already led by reactionaries, or were already bourgeoisified on the basis of craft unionism, such as the AF of L.

To understand the NLRA, we must understand the conditions present. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the National Recovery Administration were taken by the Roosevelt administration during the economic crisis (Great Depression) to bail out a divided and desperate monopoly capitalist class. They not only wanted to be rescued by the government but were brought on board in order to rationalize competition and reorganize the US economy. They would do this through reducing wages, lowing standards, increasing exploitation, and raising employment. Hence “by paving the way for more extensive and destructive crises and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented,” they kicked the can down the road so it can explode for later generations.

The NIRA directed monopolies to write up “codes of fair competition,” establishing prices, wages, and production quotas. Within all of this was a struggle around section 7(a) which stated that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively though representatives of their own choosing.” The Wagner Act was an attempt to codify this section of the NIRA into federal law.

Communist leader comrade William F. Dunne, in testimony for the Senate Committee on Labor expressed that:

It is true the Wagner bill has a certain emergency character, but its main provisions are inherent in clause 7A of the National Recovery Act of which it is an extension. As such, the Wagner bill, under the guise of stimulating and increasing the so-called bargaining power of labor organizations, actually diminishes the power of workers to obtain better wages and working conditions by putting still more obstacles in the way of effective use of the strike weapon⁠—that is, the ability of labor organizations to stop production for profit by refusal to work until their demands have been acceded to.

Since the Wagner Bill is intended to strengthen or replace the Clause 7A; since Clause 7A brought about the greatest development of company unionism ever seen in this country; since Clause 7A was intended to substitute futile negotiations under control of government agencies for effective organization and struggle by workers; … and since … many hundreds of thousands of workers have seen the necessity of organized struggle for better wages and conditions, thus cutting into profits, it follows logically that the Wagner Bill … must be intended as part of the Recovery Program, to protect profits; to make it more difficult for workers to exercise their bargaining power, i.e., the strike weapon.

The Wagner Act, and Clause 7(a) before it, was the state developing a legal mechanism to affect the balance of forces in the struggle between capital and labor. History confirms comrade Dunne’s prediction, in that Clause 7(a), prior to the Wagner Act’s passing, promoted the growth of company unionism. In a November 1933 survey of 3,000 monopolies, capitalists reported a 129% increase in union membership, with company unions growing by 185% in that period as capitalists generated their own sponsored organizations to counter the threat posed by the coinciding workers’ upsurge.

However, the Communists within the opposition groups and in leading posts in the rapidly-growing Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which was now outpacing membership in the Trade Union Unity League-affiliated revolutionary unions, pointed out how section 7(a) lacked any mechanism to force employers to bargain. They agitated against the NRA, calling it the “National Run Around.” Many of the Communists as well as unaffiliated leftist workers began to organize what would soon be known as “Recognition Strikes;” in other words, the revolutionaries among the organized workers were able to take advantage of legal opportunities to carry out illegal actions which brought workers into combat with the state and bosses.

The National Labor Relations Board, which was newly formed, noted that most strikes in the latter part of 1933 were over recognizing unions. This put Roosevelt and the Democratic mafia on notice: strike dynamics had developed and the government could either provide a concession and back up the strikes with some mechanism to recognize unions, or risk further instability. A 1935 analysis by the ruling class Brookings Institute acknowledged that the late 1933 strike wave made it apparent that the government would need to be compelled to engage in action favorable to recognizing unions. The strikes of 1934 continued this trajectory, leading to the establishments of labor boards which compelled contracts to be recognized, and to the banning of company unions⁠—continuing the struggle, including the use of illegal tactics, even under a normal bargaining procedure.

The inability and indeed unwillingness to approach history dialectically has led the ROHQ into the service of scabs and union-busting bosses, all of whom hide behind “Right-to-work” laws either directly or in spirit.

The NLOC proclaims in point 4 of its program, titled “democracy” that, “We reject the obligatory membership and dues model imposed and upheld by the state unions and embrace the model of conscious and voluntary membership and dues paying.”

Voluntary dues paying, that is, removing dues-check-off, is a favorite tactic of the union-busters, including the chieftains of the business unions whom the NLOC rails against as “state unionists”: see for instance the punishment for the transit workers of New York City in retaliation for their wildcat strike of 2005, with their local president imprisoned, fines levied, and automatic dues check-off revoked in collusion between the government and the union’s national leadership. Brushing aside the hackneyed idiocy of the “New Labor,” we can see from this history how unionists turn a bad thing into a good thing. The union activists organized voluntary and conscious collection of dues and thus strengthened the union by resisting the union-busting punishment for striking and struggling. Nowhere do we find a trace of the workers demanding an end to dues check-off, even as they organized “conscious and voluntary membership and dues paying”!

The cretins do not sound like Communists facing down the business unions on their own turf, refusing to abandon the workers there, and struggling for class-conscious, “class against class” leadership⁠—to use the language of the TUUL. They sound instead like the rusted, creaking bellows of the Wall Street Journal railing against mandatory unionization as infringements on vaunted personal freedoms⁠—of the employee to be exploited and the employer to exploit, it must be whispered!

Surreptitiously, the serpent of right-to-work enters the fray, coiled under our right-opportunists’ hats.

The reactionary “Right-to-work” laws based in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act are of similar mind to our right opportunists: they argue against mandatory dues and this works well in states with “at-will” employment to keep unions weak with the aim of keeping them out. This is the case with most of the US South.

Supporters of “right-to-work” laws have always argued these laws are more democratic, that they protect the free choice of individuals. In reality they lower wages, weaken collective action, and allow for worse working conditions. They are designed to weaken the unions until the workers see no benefit in supporting them, and hence busting them. In a right-to-work state, the workers, even having won a union election, are not required to pay dues, and the union is still required to provide its services to all workers union or not, forcing fighting with fewer resources. When the business unions are faced with this they use it as an excuse to continue failing their members.

This bad thing can be turned into a good thing only through tenacious organizing and mass work; the bureaucracies in the South lack staff competent of building such active membership culture as is required to defeat the conditions imposed by Right-to-Work. Right-to-Work is not insurmountable, nor is it something any serious unionist promotes like the reactionaries of NLOC do. Right-to-work laws function well for the capitalist; they depend on the un-energized and stale climate of the business unions to achieve the desired result, but they are laws which will be used to compete with the fantastical “red” unions that NLOC imagines too⁠—and the outcome will be no more democratic.

As with the police work they defend, the right opportunists are eager to use the state against their enemies, be they other rightists in the labor movement, the FRSO revisionists, or their political enemies among the Maoists.

The Class Character of NLOC

The reactionary, opportunist, and liquidationist character of NLOC does not stop with the stupid positions above but runs through their whole project. It presents itself as organized labor, posing as a practical, salt-of-the-earth fighting organization, yet it reveals its actual composition and formation openly:

“The [NLOC] founding organizations are the following: New Day at UPS, New Day at Amazon, Organization of Class-Conscious Service Workers (aka The Service Worker, the organization’s shop paper) Strike the Stage (labor organization in events/entertainment), and Barista’s Voice (organ of Starbucks Workers.)”

These are not stable, tested, and well-rooted or integrated workers’ organizations. They are poor quality shop floor papers made by a small handful of people, not the aspirations or expressions of an organized work force. Yet similar to the Avakianites, meeting with only themselves in 1976 and then calling themselves a Party, the ROHQ find it suitable to just cobble together some shop papers and call it a New Labor Organizing Committee. As long as the external appearance of organization is presented and there are a few contacts to hold up some red banners, then they have accomplished their goal: striking a pose. They have not accomplished a labor organizing committee, new or otherwise.

And what is the point?:

“The Purpose of NLOC is to organize joint action of trade unionists against imperialism in the interests of the working class.”

“Trade unionists against imperialism” is their purpose. This comes after admitting that their basis is not in the working class but in a few workers running shop floor papers and a revolving door of WordPress websites⁠—without the real organizational presence of a national newspaper.

The joint action of trade unionists is a great step backward. Marxists do not prefer trade unions but industrial unions, though it is questionable whether or not NLOC understands the distinction.

Communists in this country have fought as industrial unionists, struggling against the business unions and then the company unions of the 1920s and 1930s on the basis that their focus was not on industry but trades. This was part of the fight to push all workers within a single industry, regardless of trade, skill, or identity, into the same union. In spite of their preposterous stance, NLOC at least does not demonstrate a real understanding of history or the difference between industrial and trade unions. If the purpose is mobilizing people against imperialism and in the interests of the working class, then this certainly must not be limited to “trade unionists,” and if this were one’s primary focus, then the way to do it is through propaganda and agitation and not the formation of perfect splinters.

Their five objectives are not much better.

They will “begin preparing the ground for and planting the seeds of a new labor center.” The ruling class must tremble reading that kind of tautology! They will prepare to begin preparation, but not before they finish thinking about thinking. The ground has been prepared by the class and the class struggle for over 100 years. The masses clamor for leadership over their justified rebellion.

The main thing this sniveling promise to “begin preparing” is levied towards is the “struggle against state unionism”; this is the first point of their objectives! Note, it is not to immediately struggle against the ruling class for the demands of the working class and to combine this with the question of political power⁠—no, that is far too radical. Our pandering losers instead have an objective to begin preparing to struggle against the “state unions.” They have no principles and their priorities are all out of order.

Next they list some things worth doing but in a completely ridiculous order:

“[W]ork to forge proletarian class consciousness through the political struggle against the labor aristocracy, the current labor liberal establishment, the capitalists, capitalist state, their traitorous agents among the workers, and the mindsets [!] of the imperialist, patriotic and middle-class ‘labor movement.’”

Here NLOC does little more than give vent to emotion. It does not proceed from the fundamental contradiction in this country, i.e., that between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and so it cannot land squarely on what is needed for the type of revolution for this type of country. In sum, it is sectarian ravings which mention the capitalist class incidentally among lesser class enemies. Postmodernism cannot rank the class struggle as the key link.

Point two concludes with something really strange; they claim the objective “To always link our struggles and organizations to the ultimate historical goal of our class, the conquest of political power for the workers.”

Had the NLOC not wholesale rejected theoretical discipline and ideological struggle for unity under Maoism, they might know that political power for the proletariat, while fundamental to Maoism, is not in fact “the ultimate historical goal of our class,” but the communist society is. This is significant; the conquest and defense of political power is not the unalterable, let alone ultimate, goal itself; it is simply necessary to that unalterable goal, and therefore fundamental to the ideology forged by the only class capable of leading to that goal. Communism is the unalterable goal, nothing else, and NLOC must stop trying to alter it at once!

The proletariat is the revolutionary subject like no other, not because it is capable of seizing, holding, and defending political power, but because unlike all classes who have done this, the proletariat is the only one that can eradicate itself and with it all classes. It is the only class that can arm all the masses, end exploitation on earth, end the contradiction between man and man, and set the world free, without states or classes. This is the only thing which justifies the ocean of blood through which it has to march to get there.

It is an important feature of all ROHQ organizations to conceal communism from the workers and keep them at the margins of the reconstitution process and the communist movement. They are ideological, political, and organizational liquidationists.

In point three of the objectives, NLOC state “the creation of new forms of organization,” “new forms of unionist action,” etc., but do not define these “new forms” beyond the same old “new left” rhetoric. As with all other points, the sectarian-freak-show presents the business unions as the principal enemy of the working class, and spend far less time addressing the mode of production or the monopolists or the old-state which represents their interests.

True to “New Labor History,” NLOC negates the role of the Party in point four which we will quote entirely, though in two parts:

“To re-develop a unionism that upholds and puts into practice the old correct lines of relying on our own class, on the workers themselves, our own practical and political leadership, and our own strengths in everything we do.”

We insist, and will keep on insisting, that the workers’ self-reliance in the union struggle is capable of nothing more than trade union consciousness which is bourgeois consciousness, and that this form of so-called self-activity is nothing more than the old-incorrect idea of the economists and others who were justly repudiated by the great Lenin.

They continue point 4:

“To defend unionism from attacks from the right, which turns unionism into a tool to control the workers and undermine our demands, and from the ultra-‘left’ which denies the political importance of the struggle for working class collective action and the daily demands of the workers in the workplace. To elevate the principle of proletariat self-reliance and proletarian leadership in all aspects of our work.”

NLOC here has struck out at the “right” and “ultra-left” while simultaneously embodying and codifying their most vulgar historical errors because, just like the liquidationists historically, the NLOC and all of its friends share in common the rejection of the Communist Party. They embody the old privileging of economic struggles and proletarian self-leadership, without presenting anything on this class’s need to form for itself a political party distinct from and opposed to the political parties of all other classes. This is the main thing, and it is not to be left aside with the false pardon of “protecting legal work” from being repressed.

One cannot correct rightist deviations through being too scared to proclaim the urgent need for the reconstitution of the Communist Party, the main and most important instrument of the proletariat’s justified struggle for political power. One cannot transcend the rightist muck by indicating the need for power unless one is able to explain why, for what purpose, and to what end do the workers need power, what type of power, and power over what. That is to say, all calls for power are nullified in the absence of expressing the unalterable goal.

In place of the Communist Party, all we get from the NLOC is the useless, milquetoast, and flaccid point 5: “It is the duty of all class conscious trade unionists to lead and sharpen the spontaneous struggles of the workers…” And their objectives end here, without substance, and without answering the most important question: how do we struggling workers get from exploited and oppressed to conquering and defending political power? What is it we are missing⁠—just a chapter of NLOC?

The ROHQ, under the preposterous “principle” of “not seeking state recognition” in reality neglects the fight for workers’ legal rights, and while The Worker is well aware that the laws are stacked against working people, and that all democratic rights in this country are dwindling, we raise and will keep raising the point that every conquest which the workers do not fight to preserve is stripped from them, and so the workers must fight each battle out of necessity.

The absurd position of the ROHQ can be found in the few “self-criticisms” of NLOC via its “New Day at UPS” shop floor paper. After issuing a hilarious “self-criticism” for being too modest, in which they declare that “Any organization claiming to represent the workers that rejects our trade union policy is de facto revisionist,” they would issue another “self-criticism” for doing nothing when 99 day shift workers in West Charlotte were laid off.

Particularly, they address missing “critical opportunities” to advance their line, and they point out their “failure to organize any notable fight against the layoff of the day sort. Ninety Nine UPSers lost their jobs without so much as a peep from West Charlotte New Day committee…”

The meat and bones of this is that they lost confidence, recessed into personal life, failed to distribute their tiresome shop floor paper, and abandoned their posts cynically. This is all likely true; however, what our right opportunists fail to address is that even after they did nothing to fight the coming layoffs, they also did nothing to mount a campaign on behalf of the 99 workers who were laid off. Apparently, they continued in the spirit of “nothing can be done” which they identify as “the attitude of capitulators and liberals, not labor organizers.” It is also the attitude of infantile and amateurish organizers who would see their morale benefit greatly from more flexible fighting and more victories. No mention is made by NLOC of attempting to file Unfair Labor Practice charges, which, incidentally, can be done independently of the “state union.” Instead of jumping in the fight late, they let it die at their feet; after self-criticizing for doing nothing they kept doing just that!

The New Laborites base their entire operation on subjectivism in study and sectarianism in organizational practice. This is embodied in both the arrogance as well as the impotence displayed above. The opportunists of New Day criticize the reform caucus model of Labor Notes, yet in practice tail it and offer no practical demarcation. New Day in spite of its near constant vitriol and boasts⁠—“we are putting an end to the Teamsters tradition…”, etc⁠—in reality does not offer a new strategy distinct from the Trotskyists, former Trotskyists, or fake Maoists (Maoist Communist Union) around Labor Notes. They are just another branding of the same soft-drink, only with the honorary distinction of being even more sectarian, less effective, and with a smaller support base than their above-listed counter-parts. In spite of all the hot air about “state unions” and so on, and why it is futile organizing inside of them, and the need for “new” and “red” unions etc., their organizations become little more than caucuses fighting other caucuses.

The reason they are even less relevant to workers is that they can only promise to get you fired, then reject any legal recourse on your behalf⁠—refusing to make NLRB claims or OSHA complaints, to seek workers compensation etc., etc. After all, in their view, this activity would only integrate them into the state. Unlike the other reform caucuses, this one is firing blanks and giving a leftish face to old union busting tactics.

However, like the other revisionist reform caucuses, these revisionists unite on the basic idea that workers are not entitled to political education, and, if they are, then it must not be too political! It must conceal from them the question of Communism, the Communist Party, armed struggle, etc. Their solution to survival of the reform caucus is simple⁠—do not promote communism, Party reconstitution, or socialist revolution by force of arms. Meanwhile the business unions themselves, from the top, do not stop carrying out political agitation and propaganda; they cannot stop proclaiming “national pride,” etc. Any union worker who checked the emails from the union in September will have received some “9/11” themed email chocked full of social chauvinism. The reformists and the pose-striking sectarians both fail miserably at instilling in working people a better vision, understanding, and conception that radically contradicts the common sense of capitalist society, because they are simply afraid of fighting for communism. Communists on the other hand, while perhaps concealing their affiliations tactically when the conditions call for it, fear nothing and disdain to hide their views. These are ineradicable principles of Maoism.

Conclusion

The economic crisis of imperialism linked to the overproduction of the means of production has an effect of the greatest magnitude on all aspects of life. While the US as the world’s sole-hegemonic imperialist superpower has been able, with the use of its immense wealth, to mitigate the crisis more favorably than the rest of the world, it is impossible to completely seal off the masses of this country from the global crisis.

What follows the economic crisis is a political and cultural crisis of increasingly dark character. The society has decomposed; wanton hedonism and vice are taken as normal, while impulsive and self-destructive, anti-social behaviors are not only legalized but promoted from coast to coast. A numb population stumbles reaching out for drugs, stimulation, feeling, a way out. All of this comes coupled, of course, with a decomposing ideology, the ruling class’s cannibalistic way of fighting its past and preserving itself.

Its “new” ideas of the 1960s, its identity politics, its sexual awaking, and all the complex value sets which accompany these are bound up with the ideological decomposition of imperialism, and for decades they festered on university campuses and were spoon fed to its victims. The “old” Marxism was put on a shelf to die. The current crisis is worse than the last and this is the motion of imperialism-in-decomposition; it is reaction all along the line and it cannot make anything good now. It is rot and death ideologically, politically, and organizationally.

Nevertheless, the imperialists cannot stop provoking the justified and ever-burning rebellion of the masses, and the prescriptions of postmodernism and identity politics have had less narcotic effect than intended. People increasingly reject postmodernism and its identity politics; the failings of Democratic mafia electoral strategy and the weakening of its grip on mass activism reflect this fact. As new generations of activists and old workers alike reach out for Marxism to answer their questions and to solve their problems, the postmodernists are forced to adapt to survive: to don a Marxist mask through shared ground with revisionism, to form postmodern groups under this banner, and to embrace and continue in the New Revisionism⁠—which is a new take on the same old revisionism which was classical, and then modern.

Likewise, the postmodern insistence on ignoring production and the economic determination of society has shown its ugly, miserable nature, with the so-called “left”’s pivot away from labor struggles proving itself to be little more than bourgeois and petty bourgeois politics. Now the postmodernists have to go back to face the “New Left” origins and square up; they have to enter the labor trench or starve to death on the same small pool of college campus recruits. So they have to find ways to kill Marxism there, and this is where the New Laborites of the ROHQ come in.

The ROHQ is refuse of the split in the Maoist movement, spawned from the support committees of Tribune of the People and small cells of students integrated into labor sites, which grew fungus and got arrogant. They did not want to break with their postmodernism and wanted to justify the liquidationist attacks in which they took part.

They are little more than a tiny part of the process, the latest bubble at the top of seeping sewage, and, in time, with the correct policy of decapitation, they will be a footnote in the history of the Reconstitution of the Communist Party of the United States.

There are conditions necessary for the realization of this short-term goal: first is uniting under Maoism, and the last four years of our work have accomplished strides in this. Now we must make Maoism incarnate. This means combating the sanctimonious centrism which insists on moderation, confronting it with self-criticism and criticism of the movement’s main mistakes, mistakes which allow postmodernism with its extreme individualism to fester⁠—that is, subjectivist philosophical deviations and a fear of going against the tide. Armed with this we proceed to metabolize centrism and defeat the right.

The destruction of liquidationism is the victory of reconstitution; it is the insistence on proletarian leadership over the entire socialist revolution, which is part of and in service to the world proletarian revolution, with the industrial proletariat being the base force and the leading force. It requires its own political party, the Communist Party, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist with the contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo Party of the new type, distinct from and opposed to the political parties of all other classes, the commander and leader of its own army and united front. Denying, then, being too scared to uphold it, defend it, and apply it, ultimately excludes one from the revolutionary process and returns one to the stale old economism of a rancid past.

The labor line of the ROHQ is of critical importance to its reactionary and black structure; it must be attacked so that the corpse can be buried and any honest workers in that plague-ship can return to their posts and establish the correct channels for two-line struggle in the reiterative process of Maoist unity.

For the top leadership of the ROHQ, the rats and the rat collaborators branded with fire, their trials and sentences are connected only to the question of political power, how much or how little the proletariat has. Let them find god and pray for our downfall, because we, like the class that spawned us, never forget and collect on all debts. The relative weakness of the Maoist movement in the world’s sole hegemonic imperialist superpower is the only thing allowing them to exist.

Editorial modified on 10/20/2026 to correct typos.