The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (also known as RCP, The Revcoms, or Revcom) is a new communist party in the United States founded in 1975 and led by its chairman, Bob Avakian. The party organizes for a revolution to overthrow the system of capitalism and replace it with a socialist state, with the final aim of world communism. The RCP is frequently described as a cult around Avakian.
History
1960s–1970s
In early 1968, Avakian, Leibel Bergman, H. Bruce Franklin, Stephen Charles Hamilton and a score or so others—comprising both veterans of the Communist Party USA and Bay Area radicals based in Palo Alto, Berkeley, and San Francisco, formed the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU). Among the BARU's first tasks was to challenge the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) over its positions on the Black Panther Party, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the direction of Maoism. The early RU joined with the Revolutionary Youth Movement faction in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in opposing PLP's role in SDS at its national convention in Chicago in 1969. The resulting split led to PL controlling the SDS name, while RYM split into two factions.
In 1971, Franklin led a more militant faction of BARU out of the organization to join Venceremos. The RU continued to expand, uniting collectives across the country and becoming a national organization with the long-term goal to form a new communist party. The new nationwide structure induced BARU to change its name to simply the Revolutionary Union (RU). Avakian was elected to the central committee of the RU shortly thereafter. The RCP claims that of the various groups coming out of SDS, it was the first to seriously attempt to develop itself at the theoretical level, with the publication of Red Papers 1. In 1974, RU started publication of its newspaper Revolution (renamed Revolutionary Worker, and adopting a weekly format in 1979).
In 1973, the anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) entered into reforms after the end of the Vietnam War, including an explicitly anti-imperialist stance and opening its membership to civilians. During this period, the RU became a popular faction within the VVAW, reaching its peak in 1975, when the RU-controlled national office voted to remove members, expel chapters and place the organization into ideological uniformity. After the integration, RU reconstituted itself as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).
After the death of Mao in 1976, the RCP split, with about 40% of its membership leaving, over which position to take in relation to the new Chinese leadership. Avakian led the majority of the party that rejected what it analyzed as a counterrevolutionary coup against Mao's allies. After this split, Avakian wrote and published the book Mao Tsetung's Immortal Contributions, which summarizes the developments of Maoism.
In January 1979, Avakian and 78 other Party members and supporters were arrested and charged with various crimes in connection to a militant protest against Deng Xiaoping's visit to the White House. Seventeen demonstrators, including Avakian, were charged with multiple felonies that carried a combined sentence of up to 241 years. After the RCP and its supporters waged a mass campaign for political, legal, and other support for the defendants, the charges were dropped in 1982, by which time Party leadership had decided to go into exile, with Avakian applying for political asylum in France, where he remained for many years.
1980s–2000s
The RCP organized May Day 1980 rallies in 16 cities across the U.S., including Los Angeles, New York, Portland, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Weeks before the May Day demonstrations, RCP member Damian Garcia and two others climbed the Alamo, tearing down the American flag from its pole, and raising the Red Flag in its place before being arrested. Shortly thereafter, on April 22, Garcia was stabbed to death while organizing in a Los Angeles housing project. At the time, police said that Garcia's murderer was gang-affiliated, while RCP insisted that he had been assassinated by the state in retaliation for his action at the Alamo. Avakian remarked in his memoir that Garcia's murder was "very clearly tied in with police agents ... it was an attack on our Party."