Who are our friends? Who are our enemies? These are questions that it is critical for us to answer in order to advance our movement. We must grapple with a number of issues to answer these two, seemingly very simple, questions. Failure at any stage in the process to align our analysis with objective reality will cause serious deviations in strategy and tactics and do deep and lasting harm to the movement, even as incoherent as it currently is.

The first question: which are the primary revolutionary classes in the United States Empire and Canada? Which are the classes that can be drawn to the primary revolutionary classes to adopt their stand-point?

The second question: what is the current political development of each of these classes?

The third question: which formations are our friends and which formations are our enemies? With whom can we unite? Whom must we not unite with?

The enemy — the capitalist bourgeois class and their political puppets — knows firmly who their allies are. They are drawing up their battle lines and preparing for a confrontation. It is now time to organize our camp and arrange our forces according to the necessity for all-out conflict, but in order to this we must have a thoroughgoing and complete accounting of who stands inside our camp, and who is without.

Revolutionary Classes

We must draw our understanding of the revolutionary classes within the U.S.-Canadian Empire from the experience of the past century and the theory of Marxism. Capitalism subjects the old classes to a constant process of consolidation; it is the universal social solvent, tending to dissolve old relationships into the primary classes of industrial capitalism: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

In each country and economy subject to capitalism, the decay of the old classes into these two primary and opposed camps (as Marx and Engels put it) is unique. We cannot be content to understand the revolutionary classes generally, we must comprehend their specific manifestation in the U.S.-Canadian Empire. The science of historical materialism furnishes us the tools to comprehend the class-interests of these classes.

What are the classes? They are those groups of a people who share common material interests by virtue of sharing common productive, social, and juridical relations. Lenin defined classes as “large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it,” in the June 1919 article, A Great Beginning.

In the U.S.-Canadian Empire, as in all instances where capitalism has reached even a moderate stage of development, the primary revolutionary class is the proletariat. The proletariat is not alone as a class possessing revolutionary potential. The working classes broadly — the subproletariat, which is composed of under-employed proletarians and proletarians who are otherwise excluded from labor and the lower, laboring ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie are both allied class-fractions or class-fractions that can be drawn into a permanent alliance with the proletariat.

This understanding must be tempered with a comprehensive understanding of the settler-colonial foundations of the U.S.-Canadian Empire and the ongoing settler-relation that provides the social and legal underpinnings of the two states.

The U.S.-Canadian Empire was explicitly founded on a settler-colonial model which required the importation of European — primarily English, Irish, Scottish, and French — settlers to serve as an occupying force. The early colonies were in direct conflict with the Indigenous peoples of the North American continent, and as they evolved into the first settler-republics they actively sought to exterminate those Indigenous peoples to expand the land-base of their economies. At the same time, the early colonies both enslaved Indigenous peoples and began to import an alien labor force from Africa.

The slave system took root in what is now the southern United States and not the northern regions of the settler-colonies primarily because the soil was very fertile and thus did not require intensive cultivation. Slave production cannot be intensive production, because slaves have a high incentive to damage complex machinery, find ways to avoid labor-intensive tasks, and so forth; this limited the use of slaves in the northern stretches where the soil was less productive. The outcome of the settler-colonial and slave systems was to produce a number of unique class-combinations in the U.S.-Canadian territories and to entrench a racial apartheid based on phenotypic appearance and ancestry within the U.S.-Canadian legal and social systems.

Today, the settler-colonial slave system imparts several new or unique questions to the U.S.-Canadian Empire in terms of its class composition. The Black Nation, created by slavery, and the many Indigenous Nations, encysted in the vice-like grip of the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, have their own class compositions. As Anglo-American imperialism spread in the wake of WWII and dominated the entire world-capitalist system, the U.S.-Canadian territories have also seen the influx of peoples from the imperial periphery, who have formed other internal nations within the geographical borders of the U.S.-Canadian Empire.

Thus, the semi-colonies of the Black Nation (called the Black Belt by Harry Haywood and other Communists), have their own class structure. Within these semi-colonies we find both comprador bourgeoisie — a Black bourgeois class that receives its benefits from the U.S. Empire, is granted a larger market-share and control of more resources within the Empire at the expense of other Black bourgeoisie — and the national bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie of the Black Nation, which are in conflict with the compradors and their haute-bourgeois puppet-masters.

A similar distinction can be made for the Indigenous territories within the Empire, which are more properly classified as full colonies: geographically discrete, subject to underdevelopment, and relegated to producing natural materials and labor for the Empire while they are purposefully choked of resources.

At the same time, the settler-relation provides to the dominant political group — the “white” bourgeoisie and working classes — a benefit from the theft of Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican, and third world labor. To a lesser or greater extent, the white working  classes are therefore corrupted at various levels; their revolutionary potential is lowered (as with the majority of the “middle” white working classes) or perverted into labor aristocracy, aligning them with the enemy.

Political Development

The main revolutionary class (the proletariat, excluding the settler labor aristocracy) and the allied classes (the subproletariat, the laboring classes of the petit-bourgeoisie) can be divided into three levels of overall political development and consciousness: backwards, intermediate, and advanced. Within each of these levels, we can identify a further subdivision of tailing, central, and leading groups. When combined in one analysis, we are left with the following schema:

Reactionary Elements. These are composed of the tailing-backwards and central-backwards elements. They are our enemies. They must be isolated and will not adhere to any communist program.

Salvageable Backwards Elements. Composed of the leading-backwards elements. These are the reactionaries that can be re-educated through experience, study, labor, and activity within or adjacent to the movement.

Tailing-intermediate elements. The tailing-intermediate elements tend to be those on the cusp of the labor-aristocracy or the petit-bourgeoisie. These elements are those who are fully entrenched into mainstream Democratic politics.

Central Intermediate Elements. The central-intermediate elements are those working class people who are “progressive” Democrats and who are becoming disabused with the rot within the Democratic party. It takes only a little push to bring a central-intermediate group into the leading-intermediate strata.

Leading-Intermediate Elements. These are class-conscious workers who are not yet Marxists or Marxist-Leninists. They are developed politically without having formal political education. These leading-intermediate elements are angry now — most angry within the nationally oppressed groups — and are prepared to act.

Tailing, intermediate, and leading Advanced Elements. These are the organizing elements of the three identified classes that not only possess class-consciousness but possess some degree of political development. These are by and large contained in organizations like the DSA, but are also locked up in CPUSA, PSL, etc. Advanced Elements are even now organizing Marxist and Marxist-Leninist cliques, circles, and organizations within the U.S.-Canadian Empire.

Our Friends and Our Enemies

Now to the central questions: who are our friends? Who are our enemies? This will help us understand how to act, what strategy to pursue, with whom we may unify, with whom we may ally but not unify, and who we must isolate from the movement or openly attack. The prior analysis will only serve us up to a point for, although we can now identify class-fractions that will serve both as the main material for the revolutionary movement and its allies with the above schema, this does not illuminate either the class-character or class-composition of organizations within the U.S.-Canadian Empire. We must be able to articulate why there is no vanguard Communist party within the Empire and how such a vanguard can come to be. Critically, we must separate the rank-and-file of various organizations from their corrupted, misguided, careerist, revisionist, or opportunist leadership.

To what end must we make this distinction? Because the advanced elements of the working class are, by and large, swallowed up by, contained within, and therefore negated by these very careerist, revisionist, and opportunist organizations. Organizations have both class-character and class-standpoint. In careerist or revisionist organizations, the character of their makeup tends to be negated by strict structures of antidemocratic control. Where the rank-and-file have a structural incapacity to alter the direction, course, political lines, or material acts of an organization, the class-standpoint of that organization is decided entirely by its leadership. To make it simpler: class-standpoint is decided by the determining factors in an organization. When an organization negates its rank-and-file as a determining factor, its class composition becomes irrelevant to its class-standing. Rather, its class-standpoint is then decided entirely by its leadership — invariably, at this stage, petit-bourgeois or bourgeois.

This is the form of “democracy” exhibited in the bourgeois republic. As the toiling masses within the bourgeois republic are powerless, through their votes, to influence the decisions of their elected representatives — as Lenin says, “Participation in the bourgeois parliament (which never decides serious questions in bourgeois democracy — their decision is for the stock exchange and the banks) is fenced off… an alien institution” — so the complaints, votes, and political activity of the membership of these kinds of organizations (whether the organization calls itself a “party” or something else) is powerless to influence its direction. No outcry could force, for instance, CP Canada’s leadership not to countermand its own constitution and seat a farce convention. No amount of protest or impassioned pleas could prevent that leadership from re-electing itself even in the face of mass outrage over the fact that the very same committee had protected sexual abusers.

Thus, we may identify as enemies those organizations that claim to be Marxist, contain a large number of advanced elements, and yet exhibit these antidemocratic structures. However, the members within these organizations, those with advanced levels of political development — indeed, even those with merely intermediate levels of development — are our allies. More, we must unify with them. How are we to do this?

Domination of the field by these ossified organizations — CPUSA, PSL, IMT/RCI, PCUSA, etc., etc. — must be broken. We must ruthlessly expose them as objective tools of capitalism. We must spare no effort, pass up no chance, to reveal the true nature of these organizations as evinced by the actions of their leadership. We must discard any semi-revolutionary or radical words they speak and look at the policies and activities they engage in. At each turn, where they suppress their own membership, where they disclaim a truly revolutionary position, where they endorse defeatism, American exceptionalism, or reform, we must hold up a light to this rot and exclaim “there!”

At the same time, we must not attack the advanced members of these organizations. We must draw them out, provide them the evidence of the perfidy of their leadership, and then unite them into the party-to-be.

Onward, Toward Revolution

Only once those distorters of revolutionary Marxism have been cleared away, their ideas thoroughly discredited before the advanced workers, the detritus of their “organizations” swept into the grave and soundly buried, can we build a fighting force capable of confronting the enemy class.

Thus, we urge all the advanced workers to join together in combating the liquidationists who preach Marxism in words and practice reformism in action. We cannot afford to tail the bourgeois parties any longer. To you, we say: onward, toward revolution!