Unifying Principles

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Or, “what the hell’s a ‘point of unity,’ anyway?”

Whenever an organization is founded for the purpose of advancing revolutionary struggle, you have to establish minimum principles with everyone involved (“what’s an organization?” start here!). These are usually written out in a form that all the prospective members read over and agree to. The list of principles is called the organization’s points of unity. It represents the issues around which membership is unified. These should be as broad as possible to permit continued internal struggle over details.

In order for an organization to function, it must be ideologically coherent. Every meeting can’t be a relitigation of the basic questions (do we support violent revolution? are we reformists? what theory do we agree on?) — that way lies both madness and liberalism. Without points of unity, an organization cannot make headway. It spends all of its time treading water, debating over and over again on topics that should be closed.

You’ve probably been in meetings like this. Something is proposed that seems like it should be agreeable. People start to agree to move forward on it as an action item. Suddenly, someone takes the floor and questions the very principles on which the proposal is made. The meeting quickly devolves into a debate club about whether or not the organization “has the authority” to “make this kind of decision,” or whether “we really want to be opposing the police directly” or some such pablum. The entire night is wasted. You won’t even be able to address other potentially actionable items because you don’t meet again until next week.

Points of unity spell out the ideological commitments that all members of the organization agree to in order to become and remain members. They allow the membership to ensure it has a sufficient ideological coherence that it can come to agreement on actions. The points of unity essentially create the basic ideological character of the organization, and help ensure that even new members adhere to the ideological direction that it intends to move in. These are critical in a revolutionary organization, because the immediate horizon must always remain revolution, and deviating from that goal is what creates rampant opportunism and tailism (like that experienced within the Four Opportunists).

What Do We Need to Agree On?

Your organization, in order to be an effective revolutionary fighting-force, and in order to express class-power, should, at the very minimum, be prepared to agree on the fact that Marxism-Leninism is the revolutionary theory that guides your actions, and that it is a living doctrine comprised of the culmination of all experiences and theory from the entire history of the class struggle rather than a dead orthodoxy to be transmitted from dusty books.

The minimums required for a principled formation with a proletarian outlook in the imperial center are:

• Decolonization
• Sex liberation
• Disability liberation

Other commitments are up to your individual organization to determine based on its theoretical understanding of what is necessary for a revolution and for total liberation. Remember, without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

What Other Purposes Do Points of Unity Serve?

When you are ready to begin work with another revolutionary organization, you should compare your points of unity and determine what degree of unity exists between the two organizations. Understanding strategic and theoretical overlap can help you quickly identify shared areas of work.

We are in a moment when the Communist movement for liberation in the US, Canada, and Mexico needs to unify. This is the period in which we must unite all that can be united. If your points of unity show sufficient unity with another organization’s, you may be able to simply unite the two organizations and operate with more available resources and labor, coordinate more efficiently, and accomplish greater and greater feats of revolutionary action.

For Example…

If you need help drafting your points of unity, we have an example from a real, existing organization.

The River Valley Liberation Organization has the following points of unity that help it remain coherent and ideologically aligned:

Article I. Ideology.

Section 1. The ideology of the RVLO is Decolonial Marxism-Leninism.

Section 2. 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.

Section 3. This cell shall take ideological and practical guidance from the relevant experiences and contributions of revolutionaries from every land and region.

Article II. Self-Determination.

Section 1. All peoples have the right to self-determination.

Section 2. This cell shall work toward the universal realization of that right within and without the existing US empire and its junior partners of Canada and Mexico (the US-led bloc), that is, the decolonization of North America, as a precondition for a just society.

Section 3. The anti-colonial and national liberation struggles constitute a special stage of the social revolution.

Section 4. The social revolution includes the liberation and self-emancipation of the Black nation of New Afrika, all pre-columbian Indigenous peoples, and the US Empire’s colonial territories.

Article III. Sex Liberation.

Section 1. This cell shall study a revolutionary materialist feminist theory and work to enumerate and expand it.

Section 2. The materialist feminist theory shall be 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.

Section 3. This cell is committed to depatriarchalization, entailing the full legal emancipation and structural liberation of women, LGBT persons, and gender-variant persons, and all efforts will be taken to ensure this is practiced in the cell organizations.

Section 4. This cell shall vigorously defend the rights of women, LGBT persons, and gender-variant persons within its membership and shall endeavor to make study and work accessible and safe for such persons through a process of internal depatriarchalization.

Article IV. Disability Liberation.

Section 1. This cell agrees that the abolition of disability as a social structure and the liberation of disabled persons is a vital component of the social revolution.

Section 2. This cell shall ensure that disabled comrades and members are included and empowered to participate in all branches of this organization’s work and study.

Towards the Formation of a League

The RVLO is a Member Organization of the All-Empire Worker’s League. By joining the League, the RVLO adopted the League points of unity as well. The League principle allows small local organizations to band together in a form that is more coherent than a coalition, but something less than the militant party-to-be, which must still be formed out of the broadest possible consultation with Communists across the US settler-empire.

We urge all local primary organizations that have compatible points of unity to begin building or joining secondary organizations that allow them to coordinate their efforts and move toward organizational unity. The AEWL is an all-empire secondary organization, collecting and coordinating the efforts of a number of local organizations with the plan of building up the necessary consensus to form the militant party of the (new) new type necessary to confront the settler state.

If you believe your organization is already unified around a line that is compatible with that of the AEWL, we urge you to reach out and begin discussions. If it is not yet unified, we urge you to work on your internal development until you reach unity on these questions.

The AEWL points of unity are:

1. The overthrow and total abolition of the fundamentally illegitimate and irredeemable United States and its junior partner, Canada;
2. Black and Indigenous sovereignty over their respective indigenous homelands and/or rightfully claimed national territories, in forms that will be collectively and democratically decided by each people, nation, and community on its own terms, on the basis of mutual respect for the right of all peoples to self-determination;
3. Partition of any remaining (that is, unclaimed) territories into a centralized union of local socialist states, wherein self-determination for all oppressed peoples, nations, and communities is guaranteed;
4. Reparations in the forms of wealth, land, and labor, to be forcibly extracted from the U.S.-Canadian imperialist and settler bourgeoisie, landed colonial aristocracy, and other exploiting classes, as well as from the colonial police and imperialist military, and justly redistributed to the victims of U.S.-Canadian colonialism and Western capitalist imperialism;
5. A program for structural depatriarchalization, focused on true emancipation for women and LGBTQ+ people; the reorganization of social labor, the labors of production and reproduction, on gender-equal lines; the abolition of all outmoded institutions, industries, and medical, professional, and cultural practices that rely on gendered violence and maintain gendered oppression; justice for all victims and survivors of sexual violence — in short, the beginning of the end of gendered oppression in all its forms;
6. Preparation for humanity’s collective survival of the ecological devastation wrought by modern colonialism and capitalism in the pursuit of worldwide environmental justice through internationalist cooperation and reparations;
7. Abolition of outmoded and inhumane models of “justice,” including modern police, jails and prisons, psychiatric “hospitals,” and other such institutions, to be replaced with models of revolutionary justice;
8. Defense of the revolution, including the ruthless defeat and suppression of all reactionary classes and counter-revolutionary forces, especially the forces of white supremacy, within North America, through an organized and sustained campaign of Red Terror;
9. Internationalism, put into practice by supporting the independent economic development and self-reliance of the world’s underdeveloped countries and regions, by forming comradely alliances with socialist countries, and by supplying aid to revolutionary struggles across the world;
10. The democratically self-determined, cooperative, ecologically sustainable development of socialism in every state that emerges from the total decolonization of the North American continent, planned and administered by the revolutionary Dictatorship of the Oppressed.