Statement from the Editors: On September 7th, 2024, delegates from several local organizations, as well as individual observers and observers from nascent organizations, met at the Lake Quonnipaug Conference in Connecticut with the intention of forming a worker’s league. This is the keynote speech given at the conference by a delegate from the Connecticut Radical Reading Group (CTRRG). After a day of discussions, the majority of attendees agreed with forming the league, beginning with the adoption of a league charter. The purpose of the formation is one of building unity, to connect the advanced masses across regions into a higher level of cooperation, particularly with a focus on the development of member organizations through mutual support. More details will be published as this new All-Empire Worker’s League is constructed.
The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, which would give birth to the Bolshevik faction and ultimately the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the science of Marxism-Leninism, held its founding conference in 1898 in the city of Minsk. The Communist Party of China was founded on July 1, 1921. In both cases, the parties were created out of the union of study circles as their principal element. The unification of these study circles into militant revolutionary parties was a necessary step on the road to social revolution. No such solid history undergirds the so-called “parties” in the U.S. and Canada today. Here and now, on September 7th of 2024, fully 126 years after the founding of the R.S.D.L.P. and 103 after the founding of the CPC, the date in the most powerful capitalist empire in the world might as well be 1897.
Not only did the U.S.-Canadian movement never establish a solid foundation — thanks, in part, to the ComIntern’s merger of the CPA and SPA in the early 20th century and the failure to establish an organizational safeguard against the latent reformism and opportunism that already plagued those formations — we have a century of false starts and the wreckage they created to deal with. At the heart of what we can call the American errors are 1) the failure to establish national liberation of the Black nation and captive Indigenous nations as a special stage in the U.S. revolution due to the settler-colonial relations, and 2) the failure to establish gender liberation as a bedrock principle of Communist organization. I can confidently state that, had those issues been properly addressed by the overwhelmingly white petit-bourgeois leaders of the early CPUSA — had the party not sidelined and then expelled Harry Haywood and the other so-called “Black nationalists,” every other error would have been, if not avoided, at least avoidable.
The list of secondary and subsidiary errors made by the movement in the U.S. over the course of the 20th century is too long to enumerate today. Now, we must assess the current conditions and put forward a program and plan that takes these conditions into account. What are these conditions?
I. Rightism Predominates
The overwhelming tendency on the U.S.-Canadian left has historically been and continues to be the predominance of rightist deviations from Marxism-Leninism. This has manifested as opportunism — the adoption of politically popular but non-Communist positions to maintain personal power and popularity — as revisionism — the “revising” of Marxism to remove its revolutionary content — as tailism — the adoption of positions which are already no longer relevant to the masses and their consciousness because they appear to be “safe” — and as simple reformism. The reason for these deviations is manifestly a desire to preserve the system of capitalist exploitation because the corrupt leadership of these formations does not in fact desire a world in which the benefits of national oppression have been eliminated. If the choice, they reckon, is between being socialist but eliminating whiteness, or being capitalist but nice, they proclaim: “Let me be capitalist – but let me be white.”
In other words, the movement has never progressed in any meaningful sense beyond the social chauvinism of the Second International.
To protect their social chauvinist lines, the U.S. and Canadian formations have adopted a perversion of democratic centralism. They cannot admit full democratic participation within their parties because to do so would be to invite real revolutionaries in and jeopardize their century-long legacy of tailism and legal Marxism. Over time, as leadership became insulated from democratic pressure, they parroted the justification of “professional revolutionaries” to give themselves unassailable perquisites, such that leadership in one of these parties comes with stipends, apartments, and paychecks. Every word ever written by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or the founders of the CPC, can be perverted once the living legacy is gone. These parties have adopted the political slogans, but emptied them of meaning and now they spout them to justify the inverse policies of the historical revolutionaries. They are, in a very real sense, traitors to the cause of revolution.
II. Leftism is the Natural Response
The predominance of rightism in the movement throws up its own dialectical shadow: ultra-leftism. When it is impossible to participate in a party with a revolutionary line, and where the existing parties pervert and corrupt the revolutionary line into a reformist one, committed revolutionaries are prone to leftist errors. These are made as a result of the predominant rightist errors, and sometimes even made knowingly, as a corrective. But it is not the ultraleftist deviation that currently threatens the integrity of the movement. The ultraleftists could be brought back into the revolutionary fold of correct theory and practice if (and only if) the rightist deviation were defeated.
The most pervasive version of this ultra-leftist response is what we have jokingly called “anarcho-maoism” in the past. This is a form of extreme misreading combined with doctrinaire book worship of Mao Zedong while excluding the historical context of his works (for instance, the fact that the Communist Party of China was already iron-strong compared to the limp-noodle parties of the modern West) and to essentially read him as an anarchist. Anarcho-maoism focuses almost entirely on “doing the work,” and utterly rejects all attempts to produce and agree upon correct revolutionary theory as “philosophizing.” Anarcho-maoism advocates narrow, local work to connect with the masses above and beyond the work of organizing a functioning party. This is a dangerous deviation, because it deprives us of both the theoretical and practical basis upon which to build up the Communist Party.
Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.
Without the Communist Party, there would have been no new China.
III. The First Weapon of the Proletariat is Organization
All across the left, the mistaken call goes up: “just do the work.” Many sources tell us not to worry about the party-form, that we don’t need it yet or that it will arise “naturally” as we connect with the masses. This is a holdover or expression of the same anarcho-maoist ideology which we criticized above. It may also manifest as a type of Third Worldism in which the job of overthrowing the empire is shrugged off from its historical subject, the U.S.-Canadian proletariat, and thrust upon those who are already the most oppressed by the imperial machine, the Third World proletariat. These are two different types of ultra-left capitulationism, two different ways of ignoring the world-historic task set out before us, and ultimately feed back into the rightist belief that the United States capitalist empire is too powerful to be overthrown; the rightists and segments of the ultra-left both ask us to adopt a “holding pattern” until the day that American capitalism falters and a new horizon comes into view.
Other ultra-left sects demand immediate application of terror tactics, the formation of combat organizations, open revolt against the enemy state. This, too, is incorrect. Even in the conditions of a fully-formed party as in Russia, combat organizations of socialists were often used by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, to crack down on socialists, to jail them, to hang them. The use of terror split the socialists from the masses, who were not prepared for it, and isolated these lone terrorists; stranded and alone, they were unable to spark a mass movement.
If our weapons are not, at this stage, arms (guns, bombs, bullets) nor survival programs (food, shelter, showers), then what are they? The chief weapon of the proletarian class is organization. Although our enemy is already organized and supplied with both its main force (the state in the form of police and the armed forces) and its auxiliaries (paramilitary settler-garrison societies like the Oathkeepers), the strength of our enemy does not lie in its organization, but rather in its command of the productive property, capital, and political power. To challenge the concentrated power of the capitalists, which is everywhere funneled down from the glass and steel towers into the battering ram of the police on the street, we must be capable of exerting concentrated proletarian power.
Revolutionary capacity — proletarian class power — is a special characteristic of an organization that is organized in a certain way and which possesses an authentic connection with the masses and which develops and adheres to the correct revolutionary theory. The power of the proletariat is expressed in these two simple truisms:
- The proletariat is the necessary workforce for all social production and,
- The proletariat is the fundamental basis, the social foundation, of all capitalist society.
One proletarian alone cannot access the strength implicit in either of these statements. One proletarian cannot alone convince the class to resist the capitalists’ blandishments and lies. So long as the class remains disorganized, this power is latent, sleeping. Only once the class has become organized in a highly disciplined form according to true democratic principles and along Marxist-Leninist lines can it exert its class power. What is the vehicle for this organization? It is the revolutionary political party.
Will it be built spontaneously? No. Only through dedicated study, hard struggle, and long hours of labor will it come into being. The first task of every cell of the Party-to-be must be the production of new, militant, revolutionaries. That is one reason why Unity–Struggle–Unity is working with RedSails on a schema for a series of political education courses.
IV. A Party of a New Kind? No! A Party of the Correct Kind
We have already acknowledged that we lack this vehicle above, that there is no militant, disciplined, revolutionary political party currently organized on the correct lines that would enable the revolutionary class to exert its class-power here in the U.S. or Canada.
What are the hallmarks of the vanguard party? In both Tsarist Russia and the Qing Empire, the Communist Parties were formed from the unification of study circles and struggle leagues: local, primary organizations that operated on the ground. We must study the party-formation period of these two organizations to learn the “secrets” of what came before. In Russia, where incorrect socialist theories made the formation of the party difficult, one of the preconditions of party formation was the demolition of those theories to pave the way for the R.S.D.L.P.
As Comrade Stalin wrote in the Short Course History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks), (and here, comrades, I apologize, as I will quote at length):
In a number of his writings during this period Lenin criticized the methods of political struggle employed by the principal Narodnik group, the “Narodnaya Volya,” and later by the successors of the Narodniks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries—especially the tactics of individual terrorism. Lenin considered these tactics harmful to the revolutionary movement, for they substituted the struggle of individual heroes for the struggle of the masses. They signified a lack of confidence in the revolutionary movement of the people.
In the book, What the “Friends of the People” Are, Lenin outlined the main tasks of the Russian Marxists. In his opinion, the first duty of the Russian Marxists was to weld the disunited Marxist circles into a united Socialist workers’ party. He further pointed out that it would be the working class of Russia, in alliance with the peasantry, that would overthrow the tsarist autocracy, after which the Russian proletariat, in alliance with the labouring and exploited masses, would, along with the proletariat of other countries, take the straight road of open political struggle to the victorious Communist revolution.
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Of immense significance, too, was Lenin’s struggle against “legal Marxism.” It usually happens with big social movements in history that transient “fellow-travelers” fasten on them. The “legal Marxists,” as they were called, were such fellow-travelers. Marxism began to spread widely throughout Russia; and so we found bourgeois intellectuals decking themselves out in a Marxist garb. They published their articles in newspapers and periodicals that were legal, that is, allowed by the tsarist government. That is why they came to be called “legal Marxists.”
After their own fashion, they too fought Narodism. But they tried to make use of this fight and of the banner of Marxism in order to subordinate and adapt the working-class movement to the interests of bourgeois society, to the interests of the bourgeoisie. They cut out the very core of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. One prominent legal Marxist, Peter Struve, extolled the bourgeoisie, and instead of calling for a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, urged that “we acknowledge our lack of culture and go to capitalism for schooling.”
In the fight against the Narodniks Lenin considered it permissible to come to a temporary agreement with the “legal Marxists” in order to use them against the Narodniks, as, for example, for the joint publication of a collection of articles directed against the Narodniks. At the same time, however, Lenin was unsparing in his criticism of the “legal Marxists” and exposed their liberal bourgeois nature.
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In 1898 several of the Leagues of Struggle—those of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Ekaterinoslav—together with the Bund made the first attempt to unite and form a Social-Democratic party. For this purpose they summoned the First Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (R.S.D.L.P.), which was held in Minsk in March 1898.
The First Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. was attended by only nine persons. Lenin was not present because at that time he was living in exile in Siberia. The Central Committee of the Party elected at the congress was very soon arrested. The Manifesto published in the name of the congress was in many respects unsatisfactory. It evaded the question of the conquest of political power by the proletariat, it made no mention of the hegemony of the proletariat, and said nothing about the allies of the proletariat in its struggle against tsardom and the bourgeoisie.
In its decisions and in its Manifesto the congress announced the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
It is this formal act, which played a great revolutionary propagandist role, that constituted the significance of the First Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.
But although the First Congress had been held, in reality no Marxist Social-Democratic Party was as yet formed in Russia. The congress did not succeed in uniting the separate Marxist circles and organizations and welding them together organizationally. There was still no common line of action in the work of the local organizations, nor was there a party program, party rules or a single leading centre.
For this and for a number of other reasons, the ideological confusion in the local organizations began to increase, and this created favourable ground for the growth within the working-class movement of the opportunist trend known as “Economism.”
It required several years of intense effort on the part of Lenin and of Iskra (Spark), the newspaper he founded, before this confusion could be overcome, the opportunist vacillations put an end to, and the way prepared for the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
In contrast, the Communist Party of China faced a relatively easier road to consolidation. The incorrect tactics, theory, and practice of the 19th century had already been exposed globally by the foundation of the Bolsheviks and the triumphs of October by the time the labor struggles intensified in China. There were no major competing socialist formations for the Communists of China to sweep away. Instead, Li Dazhou, a Chinese peasant born in 1889 who became the librarian and professor of Peking University in 1917 and who had fought for national liberation of the Chinese people, founded a study circle in Beijing that would become the core of the party. He also began to publish a Marxist newspaper designed to unify the budding Marxists in the country.
As a result of the leadership of Li Dazhou’s study group during the May Fourth Movement protesting the continued national humiliation of China under the Versailles treaty, Li’s protest against the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, etc. he became one of the leading lights of Marxism in China. Along with Chen Duxiu, Li built up the basic organizations that would unify to become the Communist Party of China.
Both the R.S.D.L.P. and the Communist Party of China were constructed not out of whole cloth; not conjured into being by the dictate of a central organ, but through the diligent creation and unification of local, primary, organizations.
V. But What is the Party of the Correct Type?
Let us look at the structure of the CPSU and the CPC, the debates around their forms and formations, to understand the structure of a Marxist-Leninist party, for we will not find it incarnated in the so-called “parties” of the United States or Canada.
The split between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in the R.S.D.L.P., which led directly to the foundation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was precipitated around the question of “Paragraph 1” of the party rules draft presented by Julius Martov for the second party congress, held in 1903. This concerned membership in the party and what was required to be a member. Martov’s draft became the party rules for the Mensheviks; Lenin’s, for the Bolsheviks.
Martov’s draft reads: “A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who, accepting its programme, works actively to accomplish its aims under the control and direction of the organs of the Party.” Comrade Lenin took issue with this formulation, correctly stating that this was “only an empty phrase. That Party members must work under the control and direction of the organs of the Party goes without saying; it cannot be otherwise, and only those talk about it who love to talk without saying anything… can the organs of the Party exercise actual direction over Party members who do not belong to any of the Party organizations?” Comrade Lenin’s reformulation was that members must belong to a Party organization.
And what does Comrade Lenin say about the Party at large? In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, he writes “The word ‘organisation’ is commonly employed in two senses, a broad and a narrow one. In the narrow sense it signifies an individual nucleus of a collective of people with at least a minimum degree of coherent form. In the broad sense it signifies the sum of such nuclei united into a whole…. the Party is an organisation, should be an organisation (in the broad sense of the word); at the same time, the Party should consist of a whole number of diversified organisations (in the narrow sense of the word).” He says, “The Party should be a sum (and not the mere arithmetical sum, but a complex) of organisations.”
At the same time, the Bolsheviks had to struggle mightily against the “circle principle,” the idea that individual party organizations had “rights” of their own. The party is more than just a sum of organizations, an organization of organizations, but a unity divided into cells. Comrade Lenin and the Bolsheviks also struggled over what democratic centralism meant. In 1906, Comrade Lenin published Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action in which he strictly defined democratic centralism’s relation to criticism. This is critical, because criticism and self-criticism is the chief weapon of struggle within the Party (which we will see when we turn to Comrade Mao’s On Correcting Mistaken Ideas In The Party and other writings): “The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies the universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.”
In our context, a primary organization is therefore the cellular network of Marxists working in any given region, enterprise, or locality and performing real work to develop its membership in political understanding of Marxism-Leninism as well as developing connections with the masses and elevating their consciousness. In essence, the organically-forming local Marxist organizations already engaged in real Marxist work, from ongoing logistics and survival mass-oriented programs to political education and cadre-building, are the basic stuff of which the Party will and must be made. In other words, the organizations that have sent delegates to this very conference are the building blocks of the Party-to-be. We will hear reports of work later today in order to more fully understand and communicate the conditions in each region that is represented here.
VI. Class Consciousness is Rising
What else typifies our current moment in the heart of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist block? The tide of class consciousness has reached a lifelong high. Why is this? To put it very simply indeed, we have come to the end of a long period of capitalist-imperialist stabilization in which Western capital was relatively more powerful and secure than it had been and we are entering — or have entered, with the outbreak of war in Ukraine and Palestine — a period of instability and crisis.
Beginning in 1991 with the forceful disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and the reopening of one sixth of the surface of the earth to Western capital and the depredations of its markets, the instability of the imperial centers in Washington, London, and Berlin was more or less ameliorated. This doesn’t mean there weren’t a series of crises within the Western block; the crash of 2008 and the Eurozone debt crisis of 2009 are stand out examples of the periodic capitalist crises evidenced even during this period of stabilization. However, the periodic crises did not throw the Western capitalist block into a sustained depression. The Western capitalists were able to crawl out of the occasional and intermittent holes into which they stumbled by virtue of the overall character of stabilization.
This period lasted roughly thirty years, between 1991 and 2019. In 2020, the COVID crisis erupted across the world and stabilization can be said to have come to a close. As the Western block began to decompensate, other signals of this shift in the overall character of capitalism emerged: the 2020 June Uprisings in the U.S., the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to prevent the joining of that country into the NATO block, the 2023 invasion of Palestine in response to the heroic October 7 strikes, etc. Civil unrest within the core of the capitalist block has become endemic, and periods of calm are relatively fewer and shorter between. Labor struggles have become more acute, and several major strikes have either been broken by the U.S. government or capitulated through their leadership. Standards of living are decreasing in the imperial core. Despite the muttering of bourgeois mouthpieces, actual wages have fallen sharply. The median household income in 2019 was roughly $69,000/year. At the current rate of inflation between 2019 and 2024, that would have had to rise to $85,000/year to maintain its equivalent purchasing power. In actuality, the median household income in the first quarter of 2024 is roughly $59,000/year. That is a fall of 14%.
The imperialist contract, the promise of superprofits in exchange for class peace, has broken down.
National consciousness is also rising. It is, in fact, national liberation that will provide the wedge that will split apart the capitalist block and put an end to the Western capitalist empire. Every time class consciousness rises and then recedes, it reaches a higher resting state and the next explosion of consciousness carries the high-water mark further and faster, leading to progressively more intense bursts of class-activity. The U.S.-Canadian proletariat is not yet aware of itself as a class-in-itself, but this awareness is growing. As the awareness of American imperialism becomes more widespread, the basic features of class are becoming more and more widely known. As the system of imperialist spoils and the distribution of imperialist superprofits breaks down, the working classes of the capitalist empire are beginning to rise, to look around them, and to realize their actual position vis-a-vis the ruling classes. Each failed rising creates a new population of activists who are aware, who are becoming more well-versed in organizing techniques and tactics, and who have seen the state repress their movement. There is a straight line through the sixteen years between Occupy and the 2024 Student Intifada.
It is now our task to harness that rising tide. The Communists must stand at the forefront of all progressive movements, and there is nothing more world-progressive than attacks on U.S. empire across the world. At this time, resistance against the imperial genocide of Palestine, backed by the U.S. colonialists for the security and profit of the zionist state, is the forefront of the class struggle. It is recognized as the forefront of the global class struggle across the world. This is our proving ground.
VII. Building Capacity, Building the Party
It is now our duty, then, to build the basic blocks of the Party-to-be so they can be united in an inter-circle struggle. Today we are taking the first tentative steps toward unification. It may be that, like the first Congress of the RSDLP, we fail to achieve our lofty goals today. We have set our sights high. Yet, even should we fall short, the fires we light today will help us clearly see the way forward.
In order to settle theoretical issues once and for all, we must have an organization capable of democratically debating them and testing them against the world through manifest practical action. That organization is none other than the Communist Party — I don’t say reborn or reforged, because the Communist Party in the U.S. Empire has always been compromised, going all the way back to its foundation. Let us say a real Communist Party of a type that has not been seen in the U.S.-Canadian block before.
The road to the militant party is long, but we are embarking on that journey today. We must create organizations capable of reproducing Communist cadre. We must pool our resources together, use the technological advances that unlock our capacity to work across regions, across cities, across the continent. We must labor diligently toward the day we can confront the enemy state.
History is with us. The time is right. It is the tidal force of history that brought all of us here today to embark on this great project. It is my suggestion — and to be clear, not mine alone, but developed with the other theoreticians at Unity–Struggle–Unity and the members of the Connecticut Radical Reading Group — that we must first unite in an organization of organizations, continue working toward a loose effective unity across the entire empire, then, when we have brought together those circles, to unify them such that they are no longer a federation of organizations but a single, powerful, militant, revolutionary political Party that can challenge the enemy state on every field: economic, political, military.
We propose today nothing short of casting the very metal from which the social revolution will be forged!
