There comes a time when the conditions of the working class in the imperial core — specifically within the U.S. Empire — dictate certain questions must be addressed. The rising tide of class consciousness, which has been accelerating in magnitude for over a decade, now dictates that we grapple with a specific issue. We find ourselves upon the shoals of the same dilemma that recurs again and again over the last hundred years, but with a markedly different character. That burning question is this: how can we build a party that can lead at the forefront of revolution but that is also resistant to opportunism, great-nation chauvinism, and the other forms of reaction?
It may seem like a curious question to raise. After all, don’t we have a profusion of parties, pre-parties, party-likes, and other non-party formations? But it is exactly this multiplicity of grouplets, cults, protest-mobilizers, and political organizations that require us to bring this question once more into debate. If there were a single, recognized vanguard party, the question would be meaningless. We wouldn’t need to ask it, because the answer would be self-evident. The fact is that there is no party recognized by the proletariat as serving its interests. This accounts for the decreased political participation in all U.S. elections over the last century.
Look around you at the profusion of viewpoints and revolutionary contentions. There are ten thousand paths and ten thousand roadmaps. Our class is not moving together toward revolution, but separately, along countless valleys and byways, where we are diverted, picked off, killed by the reactionary vanguard of the U.S. intelligence machine. Yet that hasn’t stemmed the flood. Class consciousness is still rising.
Unite All That Can Be United
An objective assessment of the Communist movement in the West can only lead us to one conclusion: it is scattered, broken, divided. The United States and Canada, forming one natural unit of economic strength and military might, sharing a single ruling class between them, and with a long unguarded border such that Canada serves merely as an adjunct to U.S. interests, have between them at least 15 major Communist or socialist “parties.” Add the various groups, grouplets, sects, and local organizations and you have a number reaching the hundreds.
There is hope in this, but there is also despair.
These various fragments of a single movement are the soil from which a real, united threat to capitalism and the ruling class can spring. We have merely to look at the history of past revolutions to recognize the fertile ground that is being created by these partial and furtive movements. In Tsarist Russia, it was the shards of the Narodnik and other idealist socialist movements that gave birth to the worker’s councils and struggle leagues that lead to the foundation of the RSDLP — which would become the Communist Party. In China, it was the petit-bourgeois study groups and struggle leagues that united to become the Communist Party.
There are differences, too. The U.S. Empire is not a semi-feudal semi-colony. In fact, we can consider North American capitalism to be the most developed form of capitalist economy. This is meaningful for several reasons. First, in the developed economies of the West, communist organization was achieved by the conscious growth of the workers movement: the unions and drives to unionization. That process took place in the U.S. and Canada, and has more or less been completely subordinated to ruling class interests (see, for instance, the UAW’s recent endorsement of the genocidaire Biden, despite his administration’s brutal attacks on unions and worker’s rights during his term).
Second, that advanced development has led to atrophy in the most productive labor, and export of most elements of the most exploitative labor-processes to the Third World. This was not the case during the 19th century when our movement was developing in Europe; this logic of imperialist capitalism only came about at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
Third, the advanced development of the North American economy has led to a concomitantly advanced development of the state apparatus. The U.S. Empire has the most advanced security state ever developed, capable of surveilling and breaking down attempts at worker organization. The managers of the world-capitalist economy, seated primarily in New York and London, have also developed numerous techniques of stalling, slowing down, and partially averting crises of capital.
That means the field of play, as it were, is filled not only with the shoots of new and growing organizations and budding class consciousness, but it is joined by the huge, decaying shards of dead or dying organizations that have completely lost their dynamism. These are the after-images of the process of Communist consolidation that occurred in the 19th century — failed parties, splintering against the rocks into smaller and smaller subdivisions.
For us, this creates a situation of extreme peril.
The party-fragments and partial parties that grew up during the early 20th century — particularly the CPUSA and its many offshoots, refoundations, and successors (such as the Socialist Workers Party, which would give birth to the WWP, PSL, etc.) — don’t act as centers of gravity for the movement, but rather as black holes. Without exploring the history of these splinters in detail (the Clarion has already carried a piece specifically on the history of the main CPUSA), the net result of the Communist movement’s failure to cohere in the U.S., embodied most obviously in the repeated break-ups and splinters of the CPUSA, has created a dialectical shadow.
This shadow is a political ideology that manifests as the rigid sect-form.
The Incoherence of the Movement
In opposition to the failures of the mainstream Communist movement in North America, as a reaction to it, the New Communist Movement of the 1960s and 1970s attempted to combat the kind of lax opportunism and careerism that had so infected the Communist organizations in the U.S. This gave rise to the militant sect-philosophy. This philosophy not only rejects unity with open opportunists and careerists, it rejects unity with any group that does not profess essentially the same points of unity as the sect. It closes down discussion with outsiders in order to insulate the sect from political decay and infiltration by state agents.
This sterile strategy is merely the dialectical reflection of the flabby laxity of the infiltrated movement. No organization that follows these lines can grow much beyond its original membership. The single most important capacity of any revolutionary organization is the ability to reproduce an ideologically and politically militant membership. If the ranks remain closed, the organization will be denuded by burnout, wear-and-tear, and state action. It will die.
The inability of our movement — the Communist movement in North America — to cohere throughout the entire 20th century has created these two opposing organizational trends: ossification of leadership and sect-like rejection of unity.
At the same time, it has created the twin poisons of obsession with criticism (prevalent in the sect-form) and complete rejection of all criticism (prevalent in the ossified form). Both are deadly to real, Communist unity and both are symptoms of a desire to achieve a suffocating degree of unity. That is, they both serve the purpose of total ideological control of an organization from the leadership, flowing downward, to the ground-level of the rank-and-file. In both cases, this suffocation is encouraged in the name of “democratic centralism,” which it is not.
Unity — Between Marxists
What is necessary to “unite all that can be united”? Lenin famously said that “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists and opponents and distorters of Marxism.” He warned against “liberal-labour politicians,” “disruptors of the working-class movement,” and “those who defy the will of the majority.”
This merely begs the question: who are Marxists? Who are liquidators?
Of course, we need recourse to some theory in order to answer it. Thankfully, past revolutionary experience has given us examples and explanations that we can use to analyze our present situation.
The Marxists, then, must adhere to the following principles, which must form the basis for unifying all advanced elements of the working class struggle in the United States and Canada:
- Proletarian Revolution. No one is a Marxist who is not a revolutionary. A firm commitment to the revolutionary overthrow of the existing capitalist order is the first and foremost necessity for any Marxist.
- National Liberation for the Indigenous Nations, New Afrika, Puerto Rico, and All Enslaved Nations. The mangy yellow dog of national chauvinism lies at the bottom of almost every opportunist deviation and almost all revisionism and reformism. A firm commitment to genuine truth and reconciliation, to land reform, and to the actual, political and economic self-determination of all enslaved nations in North America is a requisite point.
- Sex Liberation and Depatriarchalization. Second only to the national liberation struggle, gender chauvinism and reactionary commitment to the patriarchal order have also been the root cause of many revisionist turns. Only by a full and real unity along the sex (and sexuality) liberation lines and a real unity in agreement with the depatriarchalization of society can a functional party be born.
- Disability Liberation. The fascist drive to liquidate the so-called disabled individuals — those whose laboring capacities don’t conform to the dominant technologies of production and efficiency — must be countered by a strong commitment to the abolishment of the capitalist category of disability and the true integration of all comrades into the struggle for liberation.
These positions should not be contested. As a matter of strategy, this is the broadest possible liberatory coalition; to omit any of these four points — the primacy of the class struggle or the special fronts within it — is to cut the size of the revolutionary coalition unnecessarily. There is no significant group that would be excluded from the foundation of the party with the inclusion of any of these points. Theoretically, it is important to recognize the “special manifestations” that the class struggle will take here in North America. Failure to grant them their proper place — not as subordinate struggles, but as incarnations of one and the same struggle — is to risk repeating the movement’s slide into revisionism, opportunism, and careerism.
A Concrete Plan: Unity by ‘25
Nor is it enough for us to “call” for unity, or to postulate its necessity. Such sloganeering is nothing more than hot air. There must be a plan, even if it is preliminary.
We are forwarding such a plan now, for debate among the advanced elements of all organizations. Smaller organizations, not afflicted by the debilitating rot of opportunism, may choose to attend the proposed conference in their entirety by sending delegates.
A vanguard party is an organization of organizations. We propose therefore to call a Unity Convention by 2025, in a location physically central to those organizations that, in part or in whole, intend to send delegates. Battles over strategy and tactics, timelines, and organizational forms must be subordinated to the need for Marxist unity — to unite all that can be united. This means sectional debates between, for instance, Maoists and Trotskyists, are beyond the scope of such a convention. The people need a party. The time to unite is now.
