First Published: Revolution, Vol. 3, No. 6, March 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Since the Kalama Valley occupation of 1971, in which farmers, youth and workers took a determined stand against capitalist landowners and developers, eviction struggles have become a very important battle-front in Hawaii in the struggle against capital. From that first militant stand in Kalama to the Waiahole-Waikane Occupation (see Revolution, Feb. 1977) last year, these battles have grown from isolated struggles mainly fought by the affected residents into class-wide battles: on one side thousands of working people taking a stand against years of being driven down; on the other side, the capitalists whose profits and power are made with their foot hard on the masses’ backs. Ever since the Kalama Valley struggle, revolutionaries and communists have united with these struggles playing a key role in determining the revolutionary direction. Many activists from these struggles united to join the Party at its inception.
Further, with the founding of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in 1975, the Party actively united with these struggles, mobilizing the masses to fight in the class interests of the working class, and in each struggle striving to fulfill the three objectives (winning all that can be won, raising the level of consciousness of the masses, and developing and training communists), making every possible preparation for revolution, when conditions are ripe. Through militant-mass struggle, through setbacks and advances and with sharp line struggle among communists as well as the masses, this hard and high road has been fought for in these eviction struggles.
It is against this background that much can be learned by the activities of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) who have recently crawled onto the stage of the eviction struggle. The CP(ML) in attempting to increase their minimal influence in Hawaii, is dishing up a new serving of the outright reformism, revisionism and tailism that its predecessor, the October League, grew infamous for in their days of openly and unabashedly trailing every reformist or bourgeois current in society. Further, the CP(ML)’s pitiful attempts to undo the advances made in the Hawaii eviction struggles over the past years shows that the only thing consistent about the CP(ML)’s political line is their opposition to the working class and its Party, and it is their underlying reformism which, emerging once again to the surface in Hawaii, is the real basis on which the CP(ML) seeks to attract “other Marxist-Leninists” into their opportunist swamp.
With this in mind, it is worth examining the CP(ML)’s performance at a recent mass meeting on the island of Kauai. This meeting was held to get down on some communications problems among the various communities fighting evictions as well as to begin to sum up some major lessons that would help move the eviction struggles ahead.
The CP(ML) came to the meeting under the guise of helping to advance the common interests of the struggle. But their maneuvers proved that they had no common interests with the struggles of these working class people. Instead, in order to serve their own careers and interests, they tried to turn the meeting into a head-on attack against the RCP, hoping to discredit the role that the Party had played in these struggles in the eyes of people from the various communities.
The meeting opened with two letters and a statement being presented, signed by four people in or close to the CP(ML). The letters accused certain workers and revolutionaries close to the RCP of publicly taking a stand at a forum two years ago criticizing the leadership and line of the Ota Camp struggle (a working class community which had fought evictions several years back.)
We plead guilty. The stand of Party members in Hawaii has been that the Ota Camp struggle was an advance for eviction struggles in Hawaii in that it was one of the first large mass battles, that the residents of Ota Camp did take a fighting stand against their evictions, and that to an extent at the time this did serve to inspire others also to stand up and fight evicts in their communities. However, what we did criticize at the forum (held some months before the RCP was founded) and will hold to today is the leadership given to that struggle by a so-called Marxist lawyer, now a hack lawyer for the ILWU. Now the CP(ML) is very acquainted with our line d practice around these eviction struggles. They have seen our practice and in the past we have even engaged directly in line struggles against the reformism of some of the people who are their members and supporters today. So in attacking the Party they were clear what they were hitting at. But out of all of our recent practice why did they choose a struggle which took place some four years ago, two years before the Party was formed, to deal such a “hard blow”?
Precisely because they unite with this lawyer’s revisionist and reformist line. What is this line? In those days, this “Marxist” lawyer had a lot of influence among revolutionaries and he had worked out a complete economist and revisionist line which he actively spread around. His line was to build community associations to take up these battles comprised only of tenants (he didn’t want any revolutionaries or communists around) who would act as a pressure group in his “high-powered” finagling among the politicians. Much reliance was placed on the ILWU legislative lobbyists, instead of mobilizing the masses as the real motive force, he would call on them periodically to demonstrate as his “power base” at key points in his maneuvers with the politicians and courts. A handful of “advanced” would be taken under his wing and become privileged to take part in all of this wheeling and dealing.
The rest of the people were to be mobilized, using the “carrot and stick” method, as this lawyer would boast. After all, he would argue, these people are only interested in their own selfish interests, they don’t care about politics or broader issues. At times, with this line he was able to get some concessions for some of these communities. And these concessions he used as his personal capital to refute revolutionary line and practice being developed by genuine revolutionaries and communists.
In fact he tried to push his line as a model for all eviction struggles and at one time organized an organization known as the “Grassroots Coalition.” The main activity of this group was to register people to vote so that they could become a pressure group in elections for governor.
This is the line and practice that the CP(ML) would take us to task for daring to criticize. Well, we did fight to kill that line, and at that forum, held as a way to clarify the lines of different groups calling for the formation of a new communist party, that line was soundly thrashed. And it was also at that time that those who went forward and united with the formation of the RCP took a decisive step away from this opportunist line and those who now unite with the CP(ML). This step led to a whole new stage in the anti-eviction struggles.
After the formation of the RCP, the Party continued to fight to develop a revolutionary line for these struggles. In opposition to the Grassroots Coalition, the Party, summing up experience of Kalama Valley and Waiahole-Waikane, fought to expose the line that said the only hope of workers was to rely on politicians and courts and to tread lightly while asking (if not begging) for concessions. The Party fought for the line that these struggles could only be waged successfully by uniting all who had common cause against our common class enemy–the capitalist class.
As this line developed, the Party played a key role in building the “Stop All Evictions Coalition” which led a massive demonstration of 1500 workers, youth, farmers, students and professionals. (See Revolution, March 15, 1976) And while this demonstration dealt a powerful blow against the capitalists, it was also significant that in the months leading to the demonstration, there was active struggle among all who participated around the role of the state, how do we deal with the courts, who do we rely on to wage these battles, is it right to fight back when attacked by the police, etc. By struggling over these questions and reaching unity, the Coalition was able to unite thousands across the islands, dealing a strong blow against the enemy and gaining a deeper understanding of the system we are fighting, capitalism.
At the Kauai meeting it was clear that CP(ML) had chosen the line of the Ota Camp Struggle to defend because it is the same backwards line that they hope to “revise” under a new “communist” guise. To put this line to practice they proposed some concrete steps backwards.
Their proposal was that an organization be formed made up of strictly those residents directly being affected by evictions. This meant no other workers, communists, youth or students. Of course, since it was their idea, they made an exception of themselves! Their reasoning was that right now workers’ concerns were only around their immediate economic interests and that workers not involved in these struggles could not be rallied to play an active role and unite behind these struggles. Along with this they said that in order for the residents to learn from their own experiences, residents should exclude “outsiders” from their organization. A couple of community leaders did support this proposal, citing their own experiences and how hard it was for them to organize the people in their communities. One of the so-called communists from the CP (ML) united with this, talking about his own problem organizing on the job site, again holding that workers were interested in only bread and butter issues.
This proposal was a complete reversal of correct verdicts–a negation of the advances in organization and understanding made over the past several years. This proposal was directly opposed to the line that the RCP, together with others, has fought for in these struggles, and uniting with it would call for taking the big strides backwards from real advances that had been gained in building these eviction battles.
What have been these advances that the CP(ML) wants to reverse? While the CP(ML) may think that workers can’t be united except around the “carrot and stick” approach, the experience gained around the Waiahole-Waikane struggle has proved the opposite.
In stark opposition to this revisionist garbage, in uniting with these eviction struggles, the RCP has applied its basic line of building the united front against imperialism under the leadership of the proletariat. That is, “to unite with those engaging in every such battle; to make clear through the course of these struggles the common enemy and the common cause of the masses of people; to develop fighters on one front against the enemy into fighters on all fronts; and to show how all these contradictions arise from and relate to the basic contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and can only be finally resolved through the revolutionary resolution of this basic contradiction– the seizure of power by the proletariat and the continuation of the. revolution to the elimination of classes and class conflict.” And, “To do this the working class must take up and infuse its strength, discipline and revolutionary outlook into every major social movement.” (RCP Programme, pp. 98-99, 102-3)
Under the guidance of this revolutionary line Party members in Hawaii have united with and helped give leadership to the eviction struggles. In late 1976, the Party united with workers to build Workers United to Defend Waiahole-Waikane. Formed to help build broad support among workers behind the Waiahole-Waikane struggle. It was an organizational form which, together with the Party’s work with the Waiahole-Waikane Community Association and independently, made it possible to fight to bring the strength, discipline and revolutionary outlook of the working class to this mass struggle. (See Revolution, February 1977)
Along with carrying the struggle to their fellow workers. Workers United to Defend Waiahole-Waikane united with the Waiahole-Waikane Community Association to call a mass meeting to unite the broadest sections of people, including youth, students, lawyers, doctors, Hawaiian organizations and others. Rather than “appealing” to these other forces on narrow self-interest terms or begging for their mercy, the political work amounted to targeting the capitalist enemy and boldly dealing head on with the questions and doubts that many of the masses did have about the struggle and how it was being fought. Doesn’t the landlord have the right to evict people, isn’t the law on the landlord’s side, don’t we have to obey court orders, how can we defend the valleys, doesn’t a capitalist have the right to invest any way he wants? These were some of the questions that were struggled out in meetings, at work, on street corners and on radio and TV.
The broad support the struggle was receiving along with the revolutionary political work carried out even forced the bourgeois press to carry big articles and editorials in which they both tried to apologize for and defend the “system of private property.” When concessions were won, no politician could easily say he had been the people’s savior. When the governor was forced to buy the land and to hold off evictions, he was accused by other capitalists and politicians of giving in to the threat of revolutionary violence.
The five day occupation in which hundreds actively, illegally occupied and defied the bourgeoisie’s efforts to evict the residents was a result of revolutionary political work. The hundreds in the occupation and the thousands who supported it were not united because they were all out to get some housing out of the struggle. This iron unity which enabled people to militantly face down the bourgeoisie and its state was based on the developing understanding that the masses of people had “a common enemy and a common cause.”
This line and practice of the RCP in these eviction struggles, in opposition to the sniveling reformism in which the revisionist CP(ML) proposes to sink the struggle, is in fact the only line that can lead the anti-eviction struggles forward as part of the overall revolutionary struggle, something which more and more active fighters have come to recognize in the course of struggle.
It was against this experience that the low roaders tried to spread their poison and weaken the unity of these fighters at the mass meeting. Appropriately enough, these people never once identified themselves as “communists.” This was probably the only honest thing they did the whole night. They used the honest questions and doubts of some of the people there to put revolution in contradiction to the interests of the masses. When one tenant voiced the wrong idea that “the outsiders weren’t interested in the fact that his people were in desperate need of housing,” the CP(ML) united with this as another reason why “outsiders” shouldn’t be allowed into the organization they wanted to build.
And with what success did they meet? They ended up fooling very few people. In fact this attack on the Party and the advances the working class had made in these struggles has served to strengthen rather than weaken the understanding of active fighters in these communities. For now it has become more clear that different lines lead to different roads. Discussions are being held and struggle over these lines is bringing out differences among the different communities as to the road ahead and how to fight. All of this is a good thing and is serving to deepen people’s understanding of the nature of the struggle and the enemy and is also further exposing the backwardness not of the masses but of the line and stand of the CP(ML) and other common reformers.
One tenant under the influence of the CP(ML) made an honest but telling comment. He stated that “all I want to do is get something for our people so that we can go back to leading normal lives [after four years of hard struggle]. Is that so wrong?” But as one comrade later responded: Is it so wrong? Well, it’s impossible. And people then went on to discuss that the capitalist system will be around whether housing is won in a particular struggle or not, that it is in the capitalists’ interests to steal that back and more. Comrades struggled that there is no peace for the working class under capitalism, and that while fighting for housing and other concessions, we must fight to end the system that forces us to fight in the first place.
The line of the CP(ML) is becoming more exposed with each struggle they “intervene in” (as the Trotskyites call it when they deign to enter the mass struggle). It is clear that they unite for their own interests and bring with them a defeatist line which appeals to the narrowest interests of the masses and at the same time preaches to the masses about how backwards they are. It is a coward’s line that will keep the working class chained to the system of wage slavery. It is the low road.
The high, hard road to revolution stands opposed to this low road. The road of each struggle fighting for the overall interests of the working class and more importantly, in everything we do striving to fulfill all three objectives, carrying out all work in the present non-revolutionary situation with the goal of preparing the ranks of the advanced and the broader masses to make revolution when conditions ripen.
The two roads are clear and despite the confusion the CP(ML) and other opportunists stir up, the working class will move forward, leaving them cowering in the dust.