Criticism and Self-Criticism: Red Guards or Iron Guards?

As socialists, we need to have each other’s backs. We all have our differences and they are often of a serious nature. Yet in the end, we should aim to be on the same side of the barricades. The task of building a better world leaves no time for the narcissism of small differences endlessly dividing our own camp. But who exactly is in our own camp? What happens when a group crosses the line and ends up on the other side of the barricades? An example of a group that has done this is the combination of front groups and collectives associated with the organization Red Guards Austin, or Committee for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party USA. Konstantin Sverdlov argues that groups like the Red Guards have fully crossed the line to the point where they deserve to be treated as if they are class enemies just like fascists. By violently attacking other leftist organizations the Red Guards have joined the camp of the class enemy. We must point our guns at the enemy, not at those who fight at our side, even if they use methods we find ineffective or ideologies we find misguided. Yesterday was the anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. John Brown knew to take aim at the slaveocracy, not the moderate Republicans with reformist views. In this sense, we must be like John Brown. 

In the past, I was an outspoken defender of the organization known as Red Guards Austin (RGA) from state repression.  Despite many differences with them, I believed that they were genuine revolutionaries who stood on the side of the working class. As of October 12th, 2019, this current can no longer be considered anything but an anti-working class organization bent on the subversion of the class struggle. The Kansas City affiliate of the Red Guards, moving beyond their usual disruptive and sectarian tactics, physically assaulted and hospitalized an anti-war disabled veteran and socialist during an event highlighting indigenous resistance to the United States. Communists, socialists, and anyone who fights for the life and liberty of the oppressed need to be prepared to physically defend themselves against this force that is, from the perspective of the working class, indistinguishable from fascism. Defending the Red Guards and their members is equivalent to defending Patriot Prayer and its members. No genuine communist would ever lose sleep over Joey Gibson facing repression because he, like the Red Guards, in practice serves the state and capitalist interests. That isn’t to say we should support the state repressing them or anyone. We should not. The state is a principal enemy. But we should treat conflicts between the state and these groups as a contradiction between our enemies. Though writing this places a target on my back, I believe it’s my duty to rectify the errors of my previous position. 

Why is it necessary to talk about the Red Guards? To many on the left, they seem like a cartoonishly irrelevant sect of LARPers. But to those who have dealt with them for an extended period, they are a worryingly dangerous problem. Even though their numbers are small, the Red Guards have the potential to play an outsized role in suppressing the communist movement in the United States. Our movement is only now rebounding after decades of defeat and decline. It remains fragile. While alone a group like the Red Guards could not hope to stem the tide of genuine communist organizing, they have the state and fascist as comrades-in-arms in their goal of liquidating all other communist groups. In their eyes, anyone on the left who is not a Red Guard is a social fascist who is misleading the workers, when in fact it is their own sect whose tactics place them on the same road as actual fascist organizations. All socialist organizations, regardless of how much we disagree with each other’s lines, must stand together to defend themselves. The Red Guards once seemed to be in that camp, but have instead thrown their lot in with the interests of the FBI. By looking at what led the Red Guards to this position we can understand why we must stand up to them and how.  

The Red Guards were founded in Austin, Texas, in 2015. They formed from a split in a previous Maoist party-building attempt, the history of which is not relevant. Their initial organizational work consisted of “serve the people” charity and transgender rights activism through their front Revolutionary Alliance of Trans People Against Capitalism — ATX. They quickly gained popularity by denouncing the much-hated but hegemonic International Socialist Organization among activists in Austin. By taking a radical posture in both polemic and street theater, RGA was able to metastasize throughout the country, mainly by splitting pre-existing small Maoist collectives. These efforts included grooming members of rival groups at a cadre training camp and sending them back with orders to co-opt the organization or, failing that, split and wreck it. Meanwhile, RGA took to denouncing and harassing any other socialist organization that came onto their radar, from the Party of Socialism and Liberation and the former Austin Socialist Collective to the Democratic Socialists of America. Their affiliates like Red Guards LA have disrupted tenant organizing efforts because they occurred on what they consider to be their “turf,” and in St. Louis have left dead animals on the doorsteps of rival Maoists and have attempted to jump them. Eventually, they would come to abandon their militantly pro-trans line in favor of a semi-transphobic position where gender-based oppression is entirely rooted in how “female” someone looks, rebranding  RATPAC-ATX first as Stonewall Militant Front, and then the Popular Women’s Movement. This corresponded with taking the side of a transphobic split from the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada. Their coup de grace at this point was placing pig heads around their city in a misguided anti-electoral stunt. The litany of absurd, pathetic, and deranged actions carried out by this current is too long to list here, but there is no reason to think they will stop. The Red Guards believe that they are creating a “new power” that stands as a pole against capitalist society by adopting what are essentially street gang tactics to build influence from neighborhood to neighborhood. Even as this strategy is unlikely to win them significant gains against capitalist society, it has put them on a collision course with any communist who organizes in any area the Red Guards consider theirs.    

As much as they paint themselves as on the bleeding edge of revolutionary politics, the tactics of the Red Guards are nothing new. Many erstwhile communist organizations began their descent into reaction along this well-worn sectarian road. Any hope that they will reverse course and return to the fold of genuine revolutionary organizations is misplaced. It’s easy to bandy about words like “cult” to describe the Red Guards, but, as accurate as it may be, it’s necessary to look at the history of organizations that have engaged in similar praxis to see where the RG network will end up. We can’t just use a tidy little term to avoid thinking deeply about this threat facing anyone who fights for the working class wherever it exists. 

The forebearer of the Red Guards is the Peruvian Communist Party, popularly known as the Shining Path. The Red Guards and many other Maoists uphold this organization as the pinnacle of “revolutionary science” and seek to emulate it despite its failure to overthrow the Peruvian government. Chaired by Abimael Guzmán, who the party called Presidente Gonzalo, the PCP left a deep scar across the face of Peruvian society. Responsible for atrocities against indigenous people, rival communists, and urban civilians, the Pathists rapidly fell apart when their leader was captured in a government raid. The Peruvian Communist Party began as a movement of students who went into the countryside and began a struggle on behalf of the peasants against the tyrannical government. This won them considerable popular support and loyalty, at least initially, but they were unable to make inroads with the labor movement or many pre-existing indigenous organizations. Because they had a Manichean view that said if you weren’t with them, you were against them, they began a campaign of murder and terror against socialists and indigenous leaders who would not submit to Presidente Gonazalo. This included the mass killing and torture of villagers in Lucanamarca on April 3rd, 1983, the assassination of Marxist union leaders, and the use of slave labor. To be sure, the violence of the Shining Path paled in comparison to that of the fascist Fujimori government, which often blamed its own atrocities on the Pathists, but this does not erase the actions of the PCP. At the end of the day, despite struggling against the bourgeois state, the PCP’s actions supported its survival. 

Why do the Red Guards look to this organization for guidance? It can’t be for a successful model revolution since all of the territorial gains the Shining Path made were erased. Even within the Maoist movement, the Communist Party of the Philippines has successfully maintained itself against the bourgeois state much longer, as have the Indian Naxalites, while the Nepalese Communists were able to successfully overthrow a reactionary monarchy. It is because the Red Guards confuse violence in itself with revolution. The Red Guards posture with guns at protests and resort to beating up socialist rivals because they believe that “power grows from the barrel of a gun.” They also believe that “correct ideas” are what determines class character rather than material forces, which then justifies their belief that so-called “revisionists” are an existential threat to the working class. This idealist philosophy is rooted in Mao’s self-justification for the failure of the Peoples’ Republic of China to move beyond bureaucratic capitalist forms. Mao blamed the degeneration of the revolution on a struggle between two sets of ideas — the “socialist road” and the “capitalist road” — because he couldn’t recognize that the organizing class he was a member of had, in itself, competing material interests with the working class. Elevating the struggle of ideas within the socialist movement to an armed principle means the Red Guards will only intensify their degree of violence until anyone they perceive as a misleader of the workers submits or dies. 

Like Peru, Japan had its own violent and destructive Maoist movement. The Japanese United Red Army  (URA) focused its violence principally on its own membership, though a cadre that grew to 40 members continued a sustained international terror campaign against civilians (in alliance with the PFLP). Established on July 15, 1971, the United Red Army was a merger of the terrorist Japanese Red Army Faction and an ultra-left split from the Japanese Communist Party. Beginning with 29 members, the URA would come to murder 12 of them within a year of their founding during a military-style training retreat. Most were killed for lacking sufficient revolutionary discipline, or as the URA called it, “death by defeatism.” Some were killed for questioning the ideas of the organization’s leaders. They faced violent “struggle sessions” where the dissenter was beaten and verbally abused until they gave a satisfactory “self-criticism” for their wrong ideas. The corpses of several members were found tied to posts with evidence of beating. It’s not an exaggeration to compare the Red Guards with this group given they espouse essentially the same rhetoric, have a proven history of violence towards leftists with “wrong ideas,” and engage in similar adventurist “military” exercises. Though there is no known instance of a Red Guards organization murdering its own members, the dynamics that exist within their collectives are the ideal breeding ground for such outcomes. 

Though radically differing in ideological content, another group with a similar trajectory to the Red Guards is the now-fascistic LaRouche movement. Slightly bloodier than their Maoist counterparts, the LaRouche movement, which began in the National Caucus of Labor Committees (a split from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party), has its own sordid history of torture, sectarian violence, and destructive behavior. Believing that they were the only true Marxists and that all other socialist groups, like the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party and the Progressive Labor Party, were trash that needed to be swept aside, the NCLC organized a campaign of violent assaults they called Operation Mop-Up. They hoped to win command of the radical student movement, centered around the Students for a Democratic Society, and earnestly saw their several-hundred member strong organization as the true vanguard of the working class poised to lead the workers’ movement to the rapid overthrow of the US government. As they grew more isolated from mainstream socialist organizations and class-conscious workers, the organization began to degenerate. Seeing international assassination plots around every corner, their leader Lyndon LaRouche organized brainwashing sessions to root out alleged mental conditioning and prepare the minds of members to accept a new socialist consciousness. These sessions were not unlike the struggle sessions Shining Path–inspired Marxist-Leninist-Maoists conduct in form. The LaRouche movement would come to ally with a branch of the Klu Klux Klan, pro-life activists, and right-wing Black Nationalists, eventually settling on becoming a front for the Trump movement. Although the LaRouche movement doesn’t share Maoist roots with the Red Guards, there are Maoist groups that have followed a similar trajectory. For instance, the Angolan Maoist party UNITA since has evolved into a rightist conservative nationalist party after having allied itself to the United States and pro-apartheid forces for the sake of defeating the pro-Soviet and pro-Cuban Marxist-Leninist MPLA. 

To compare the Red Guards to fascists is no light thing, and could easily be mistaken for the fascist-jacking their network does to justify their attacks. But if one examines the actual history of fascism, it’s impossible to not see striking parallels. The term fascist is now near-universally used to describe far-right authoritarian-nationalist movements whose concrete politics are often completely at odds with each other. However, the origins of fascism lie in the left. There are many antecedents of fascism, like the Yellow Socialists who embraced chauvinistic and reactionary positions while claiming to represent the working class, but it is not until the crisis of the First World War that the movement truly emerged, where a split between the anti-war socialists and pro-war socialists gave birth to fascism. Drawing on the theories of French Marxist  and syndicalist theorist Georges Sorel, the prominent German Marxist intellectual Werner Sombart, the Romantic social corporatist Gabriele D’Annunzio, and many others, a mix of anarchists, left-wing socialists, young reactionary hooligans, and others coalesced into a new movement. Above all else, the fundamental principle of fascism was the glory and purity of violence. It was a movement that was at once hyper-modernist, nostalgic, proletarian, petty-bourgeois, anti-democratic, mass-democratic, misogynistic, feminist, liberal, illiberal, and so on. Above all, the worship of the gun united them. In 1919, the Fascist Party was a left-wing organization that stood for worker participation in industry, a generous welfare state, the abolition of the monarchy, anti-clericalism and so on as the first step to an ostensibly socialist transformation of society.  By 1922, the party was a far-right organization bent on the suppression of trade unions, allied with the Church, and in the pocket of the bourgeoisie. Likewise, other interwar fascist organizations like Romania’s Iron Guards promoted themselves as anti-capitalist and uniquely hostile to the socialist parties. They claimed to fight for “The People” rather than the working class, which in the context of a non-oppressed nation like Romania or the United States can only express reactionary content. Maoists would object to being compared to the universally despised fascists, but beyond their shared fetishism of violence, they have a common intellectual history as well. The founder of MLM, Gonzalo, the so-called Fourth Sword of Marxism, was profoundly influenced by Georges Sorel. It is from Sorel that Gonzalo got his embrace of the cult of personality, his fixation on the power of violence for purification, and voluntarist attitudes toward revolution. And it isn’t as though having “correct” (Maoist) ideas prevents an organization from capitulation to the bourgeoisie. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) followed the long and distinguished tradition that unites the Marxist-Leninist AKEL of Cyprus, the former Marxist Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) of Spain, the German Social Democratic Party, Italian fascists, and many others in capitulating to the bourgeoisie when they took power. It isn’t a question of tactics or ideas, it is a question of who your guns are pointed at: the boss, or your fellow workers. This does not mean the Red Guards are fascist, at least not yet, but they are fellow travelers with fascism.

In saying that ideology and tactics don’t matter in this context we should not make the mistake of falling into economism. Much might be made of the predominantly student makeup of the Red Guards, but such a composition is common among leftist sects who pose no threat to anyone at all, be they other communists or the capitalist system. It is also important to note that Maoism contains within it the seeds of other trajectories that are either genuinely communist or right-opportunist. The Rainbow Coalition, the Communist Party of Nepal, RCP-USA, and many other Maoist groups became reformists and social democrats in actual practice while speaking the same theoretical language as the Red Guards. Likewise, the Black Panther Party and Communist Party of the Philippines stuck with a proletarian communist orientation. The reason the RGs, like the LaRouchites, have degenerated into, at best, unwitting agents of the bourgeoisie is the emergent logic created by sociological factors. These factors were established by ideological imperatives — criticism and self-criticism’s elevation to a ritual beyond its practical use, the fetishism of the gun, and dogmatism — but the same tendencies can be induced by many other causes. During the Third Period, the CPUSA had members like the black poet Richard Wright beaten up for failing to denounce Trotsky quickly and eagerly enough and sent members to die in Russia under Stalin. But unlike the CPUSA, which faced enormous external pressures both from the American bourgeois dictatorship and from the Stalinist Comintern, the Red Guards have created such dynamics all on their own and lack countervailing currents like a strong democratic internal culture or a real connection to a working-class base. Where the CP could course-correct, the Red Guards cannot. 

If historical materialism is our guide, we can see that the tragedies of past movements manifest themselves again in the farce that is the Red Guards. But no amount of laughter and mockery will insulate the workers’ movement from physical threats. The Red Guards along with their various above- and below-ground organizations are functionally no different from fascist organizations like Patriot Prayer who seek to bust up any socialist organizing regardless of its strategy. On the same day that Red Guards Kansas City beat up a reformist, an unidentified assailant murdered an anarchist with a car in Portland. Tomorrow it might be a Trotskyist, syndicalist, or non-Gonzaloist Maoist who is beaten up or even murdered. Though many of us might not fear death for ourselves, our families, comrades, and fellow workers are under the same shadow. Fighters for liberty have no choice but to stand together across tendencies, even with people we might personally detest, in solidarity from these threats. The Red Guards of the USA are nothing like their namesake: militant students who fought against an increasingly bureaucratic state. Instead, they are following in the footsteps of the Iron Guard as they do the dirty work of the bourgeoisie. These are our Years of Lead, and regardless of our actions, tensions will only intensify. In practical terms, this means reaching out to other members of the movement, across organizations, and building ties of solidarity and agreements of mutual defense. To defend against the dual threat of fascists and their pseudo-revolutionary fellow travelers, the working-class movement will have to put aside its differences and form a united front. Wobblies, Democratic Socialists, Leninists in the Marxist Center, Trotskyists and so on all have differences, but will all be on the same side of the barricades. And the barricades may be going up sooner than many perhaps expected.