From time to time, it is beneficial for an organization to publicly commit or re-commit to its founding principles. In the current environment and under the current conditions, the Communist movement in the West — scattered, undermined by revisionism and opportunism, inchoate — must also adopt, in large part, similar principles.

The Press Organization of Unity–Struggle–Unity Press, responsible for the publication of the Red Clarion and the other USU material, hopes that this statement can help serve not only to clarify, ratify, and renew the ideological and strategic principles of its membership and to set forth, our goals and the means for achieving them, but that this republication can also serve as the bedrock upon which other groups may build.

At this moment, the most pressing task for Communists is to cohere into local, primary organizations. We urge all Communists to find like-minded people and begin to organize — not into the temporary, easily-dismantled groups of march organizers or event planners, but into a primary organization. Reading groups are a good place to start, and we have published a short handbook for the formation of such groups (see The Study Group, published by USU). We urge all of our readers to form such organizations, and to ratify statements of principles such as these.

Strategic Principles

The overriding need is to build the Party. Lacking an organized vanguard, we cannot tackle the larger tasks at hand. The Party must be built on sound foundations, and must reject all the corrupt opportunism that has poisoned the movement in the West since the 1930s. We must reject opportunism and revisionism in the construction of the Party, and fashion it in such a way as to prevent opportunism and revisionism from dominating Party affairs.

Democratic Centralism: The most powerful weapon we have against opportunism and revisionism is the true and correct practice of Democratic Centralism. The so-called Democratic Centralism of the Western parties — particularly of such formations as the revisionist CPUSA and the PSL — is to stifle all criticism and dissent, to order from on-high the tasks of the day or hour, and to prevent changeover in leadership.

The principle of Democratic Centralism of the Party must be one that permits dissent and even the organization of factions in times of peace, when contradictions are relatively lax. This is the model given to us by Lenin, by Mao, by Ho Chi Minh, and by countless other revolutionaries. Freedom in criticism, unity in action. These are the bywords of Democratic Centralism.

Criticism that does not imperil the capacity of the Party to pursue a democratically-determined course of action is necessary. That means engaging in struggle against incorrect lines by debate, discussion, and even through calling new meetings of Party organs to challenge those lines is critical to a healthy party.

Criticism and Community Criticism and the Two-Line Struggle: We jointly recognize that the Party will be subject to a two-line struggle. Although the two-line struggle more properly refers to a period after the beginning of socialist construction, we may apply it in a different way during the early Party period as meaning a struggle against the infectious forces of opportunism. Petit-bourgeois elements will be an important part of the Party — but they must shed their petit-bourgeois consciousness. Only the truly proletarian class position can triumph.

The two-line struggle can be more properly stated as the struggle within the Party as opportunist and deviationist tendencies coalesce into non-Proletarian lines. These come in the form of both right- and left-deviation. So long as class society continues to exist, so long as the old ideological forms persist, line struggle will be a necessary component of Communist organizing. But line struggle can only properly occur in the context of a vanguard party which is recognized by the masses as the vanguard of the working class movement. No debate or struggle over correct ideological and political lines, regardless of the necessity of that struggle, can manifest as a party program absent the Party.

This is why we hold it necessary to set the minimum conditions of unity with other advanced elements — the points of unity — but impossible to set the outcome of any line struggle in advance. Points of unity flow directly from liberatory principles and past revolutionary practice. Lines flow from the immediate challenges facing an already-constituted party.

The engine for this struggle is criticism and community criticism, or the practice of identifying harmful trends and subjecting them to the purifying power of the community meeting. The perversion of self-criticism that dominates the parties, sects, and “pre-parties” of the West is merely a tool of social control and abuse. This must be rectified and returned to the proper proletarian model.

An Organization of Organizations: Lenin articulated the fundamental structure of the party as an “organization of organizations.” The Party is not a monolithic structure in which all work is concentrated at the head; it is not a federated structure in which organizations act in a league. It is an organization that encompasses within it many different individual organizations of many different types.

The Founding Conference: We acknowledge that the movement is still in its nascent stages. There are advanced workers, proto-Communists, and even Communists caught up in the nullifying and pacifying bodies of many formations in the West. These advanced elements must be shaken loose and brought together in a Unity Convention or a Founding Conference.

Tactical Principles

To accomplish our long term strategic principles, we must apply tactics. These tactics must also be guided by a plan, which leads us to the tactical principles by which we act.

Raising Class Consciousness: The first and most primary struggle of any Communist should be to raise the class consciousness of the working masses. At the same time as we work to organize the movement, we must also organize the proletariat itself.

Building Primary Organizations: Primary organizations — local formations with real organization, that is, real rules, connections, strategies, goals — will form the foundational or core of the Party. It is incumbent on those of us who have access to empire-wide platforms like our Presses to work to spark or crystallize the formation of these primary organizations everywhere we can.

By growing, shepherding, and nurturing these primary organizations, we will act as gardener, helping bring the Party to be. By building these primary organizations and providing them with the channels of communication, we will be building the very foundations of a convention or conference in which to formally organize them.

Criticizing Opportunism: In order to free up the locked labor, energy, and genius of those advanced workers that have been sequestered into dead, revisionist, or floundering formations, we must ruthlessly criticize the opportunism of these formations and distribute publications to their members.

Principles of Liberation

We are Marxists-Leninists and social revolutionaries.

Marxism-Leninism is a living body of revolutionary theory and method; it is the culmination of revolutionary experience from the whole history of the class struggle.

We take ideological and practical guidance from the relevant experiences and contributions of revolutionaries from every land and region.

We agree that all peoples have the right to self-determination. 

The universal realization of that right within and without the existing U.S. empire and its junior partner Canada. The decolonization of North America is a precondition for a just society.

The anti-colonial and national liberation struggles constitute a special stage of the social revolution.

The struggle includes the liberation and self-emancipation of the Black nation of New Afrika, all pre-columbian Indigenous peoples, and the U.S. Empire’s colonial territories.

We are materialist feminists.

Materialist feminism is distinguished from the reformist and unscientific feminist trends by: (i) recognition of gendered oppression as structural and (ii) recognition of the failure of reforms to bring about true emancipation.

We are committed to depatriarchalization, entailing the full legal emancipation and structural liberation of women, LGBT+ persons, and gender nonconforming persons, and all efforts will be taken to ensure this is practiced in the Group’s organization.

We shall vigorously defend the rights of women, LGBT+ persons, and gender nonconforming persons within its membership and shall endeavor to make study and work accessible and safe for such persons through a process of internal depatriarchalization.

The abolition of disability as a social structure and for the liberation of disabled persons is a vital component of the social revolution.

We Urge You To Join the Struggle!

These principles can stand as points of unity among and between organizations, as well as within them. We urge all our readership to carry forward the struggle under the banner of liberation, and to share that struggle with the press.

Together, we will press forward to victory over all decrepit, decayed, reactionary forces and toward the final liberation of all!