Although far from all our readers are Marxists, we must take a moment to address those who are by occasionally publishing bulletins like this one. Our hope is not to detract from the reporting that you have come to trust us to deliver, but to add immeasurably to it by offering tangible ways in which the injustices between these pages can be thwarted.
To those who are not: we urge you to undertake the study of Marxism, to join a group of Marxists and learn. Although we all can see and feel the monstrous inequalities and evils of the present-day U.S. state and the capitalists who run it through their puppet-politicians, it’s not enough to see and feel the truth! We must not only feel it in our bones, but know it, learn how to combat it, how to overthrow it, and what must be done not only to relieve the present miseries, but also how to set society on a new basis; how, in other words, to achieve the freedom and liberation of all human beings on Earth from the decaying chains of capitalism, colonialism, of feudalism, of racism, sexism, and of all the bonds made by one man to enslave and ensnare another. Marxism is the science of freedom.
What is the soul of Marxism? The soul of Marxism is proletarian revolution. It is the revolution of the class of workers, the producers who make everything, whose labor, whose blood is in every commodity that is exchanged today. Those who deny, degrade, or dismember the revolution can’t be counted as Marxists. These deniers, these liquidators of revolution, are in command of every major “Marxist” organization in the United States Empire. Marx’s formation of the maximal program, which he wrote for the Workers Party of France, has been abandoned, but we will repeat it so its tocsin can sound loud and clear, an alarm that should echo through the ranks of the Communists in North America:
Considering,
That the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race;
That the producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production;
That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them:
- The individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress;
- The collective form the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society;
Considering,
That this collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organized in a distinct political party;
That such an organization must be pursued by all the means the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, which thus will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation;
The French socialist workers, in adopting as the aim of their efforts the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to the community of all the means of production, have decided, as a means for organization and struggle, to enter the elections with the following [minimal] demands…
But do we have a distinct party of the proletariat? No!
Our movement has fractured. It has been divided by great nation chauvinism. It has decayed under the repeated attacks of the bourgeoisie and their reactionary vanguard in the form of their intelligence agencies. They have fostered disunity, division, and backbiting — and it doesn’t take much to get socialists to fight one another! We must unite, yes, but we must unite around principles.
The largest of the old revisionist parties in the US, the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (CPUSA), explicitly renounces revolutionary action while claiming to embrace it. Their leadership condemns violence. But what violence? Their co-chair, Joe Sims, wrote in 2019 that “Power comes not from the barrel of a gun.” Ah! The CPUSA condemns revolutionary violence. As to how it will answer the violence of the capitalist class, this is left to the much vaguer “united action of workers and people in struggle.” Their party program calls revolution “a profoundly democratic process” that rejects “violent action” and will make it “politically impossible for the former ruling class to use political or military means to return to power.” This is nothing short of the liquidation of revolution under the slogan of revolution!
The Trotskyist fragment of the World Workers Party, the so-called Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which now bills itself as Marxist-Leninist, is another sect. Hypersecurity and the asphyxiating rules that the Western parties call “democratic centralism” are used to prevent chapters from speaking to one another and to ensure an entrenched leadership of a single, central family retains power in that org — at all costs.
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization’s (FRSO) program uses the word revolution, and they appear to mean actual revolution when they say it; but their program of revolutionary action is to “build[] a united front against the monopoly capitalist class.” Admittedly, the FRSO acknowledges that it is not a revolutionary party but merely a “socialist organization.” This self-awareness is good! But without a firm commitment to revolutionary action, the slogan of revolution rings hollow.
The CP Canada suffers from the same commandism, anti-democratic trends, and false adherence to a lie of “democratic centralism” when what they mean is centralist commandism. Witness the convention of 2022, in which the party leadership violated their own constitution to protect leadership, expel delegates, and ensure that the same circle of leaders retained control of the heights of the party apparatus.
The fact is, a century of distortion and revisionism under the watchful eye of the U.S. Empire’s “letter agencies” — the CIA, FBI, and NSA — and their companions in Canada have produced a woeful dearth of Marxist education. The workers’ schools have been shut down. Revolutionaries were purged from the CPUSA shortly before it was dissolved in 1944. For this reason, most people who consider themselves Marxists in North America have never actually grappled with the core texts, ideas, organizational forms, goals, tactics, or history of Marxism to any degree.
Worse, a century of accruing material wealth and being diverted down the dark roads of great nation chauvinism and personal advancement mean that the leaders of each of these parties have a vested interest in maintaining their leadership roles. They are in control of vast resources: they pay themselves salaries through shell companies, they collect dues, and they serve as a captive opposition to the bourgeois state: a honey-pot into which the naïve but resolute often fall.
Those who have and who maintain the revolutionary line, who adhere to the necessity of a transitional period where the proletarian class becomes the ruling class and where the old enemies of humanity are suppressed and politically disenfranchised, must band together.
This bulletin is a CALL FOR UNITY.
If you are among the camp of true Marxists, no matter what organization you belong to, Unity–Struggle–Unity is asking for you to come forward and be counted.
Among every revolutionary, pseudo-revolutionary, and revisionist organization in North America, there are real Marxists, real Communists. There is a backwards, reactionary strata; there is an intermediate, confused or vacillating strata; there is a Communist strata. That Communist strata must begin the process of uniting across all organizations, among all groups.
We at USU Press will play our part in that unification. We implore you to reach out — to write letters, to send an email, to get in contact with our Press Organization, and to begin the discussion that our movement urgently needs: the isolation of liquidators and the unification of Marxists, which is the first step in the march toward revolution and liberation.
