The student movement for the liberation of Palestine continues to defy the police across the U.S.-Canadian empire. Those handful of encampments that capitulated to traitor’s bargains, promises of “studies” on divestment, or other wheedling and cajoling from their administrations, are just that: a small minority. Elsewhere, the student movement has boldly resisted the extreme violence brought to bear by local police and universities.

The time has come for escalation. The student movement should not have to stand alone. Palestine should not have to stand alone. The invasion of Rafah will be carried out by the occupation forces, but the weapons that will flatten Rafah are not being sent from Tel Aviv — they come from Washington, D.C. The rear of the occupation force is not located in Palestine, but in the domestic production of the U.S. and Canada. Weapons shipments must be stopped. Aid to the zionists must be halted. We must stand together!

The criminal Biden regime has already felt the wind of change and delayed arms shipments to the zionists. We must transform the delay into a permanent halt. The $216 billion dollars that has flowed to the zionist government since 1946 must cease. The zionists purchase 80% of their arms from U.S. war production, and the money given to the occupation government flows back into private U.S. corporations like Boeing, AM General, Caterpillar (which produces armored bulldozers for destroying Palestinian homes), Colt, Day & Zimmerman, Flyer Defense, and the ever-present U.S. behemoth of General Dynamics.

It is thus more important than ever that all progressive organizations unite into an anti-zionist front. If your union local is anti-zionist, it must unite with the student movement. If your DSA chapter is anti-zionist, it must unite with the student movement! If your CPUSA club is anti-zionist, it must unite with the student movement!The zionists are poised for crushing defeat. Let us help deliver it to them.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

To those who are not: we urge you to undertake the study of Marxism, to join a group of Marxists and learn. Although we all can see and feel the monstrous inequalities and evils of the present-day U.S. state and the capitalists who run it through their puppet-politicians, it’s not enough to see and feel the truth! We must not only feel it in our bones, but know it, learn how to combat it, how to overthrow it, and what must be done not only to relieve the present miseries, but also how to set society on a new basis; how, in other words, to achieve the freedom and liberation of all human beings on Earth from the decaying chains of capitalism, colonialism, of feudalism, of racism, sexism, and of all the bonds made by one man to enslave and ensnare another. Marxism is the science of freedom.

What is the soul of Marxism? The soul of Marxism is proletarian revolution. It is the revolution of the class of workers, the producers who make everything, whose labor, whose blood is in every commodity that is exchanged today. Those who deny, degrade, or dismember the revolution can’t be counted as Marxists. These deniers, these liquidators of revolution, are in command of every major “Marxist” organization in the United States Empire. Marx’s formation of the maximal program, which he wrote for the Workers Party of France, has been abandoned, but we will repeat it so its tocsin can sound loud and clear, an alarm that should echo through the ranks of the Communists in North America:

Considering,

That the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race;

That the producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production;

That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them:

1. The individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress;
2. The collective form the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society;

Considering,

That this collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organized in a distinct political party;

That such an organization must be pursued by all the means the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, which thus will be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation;

The French socialist workers, in adopting as the aim of their efforts the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to the community of all the means of production, have decided, as a means for organization and struggle, to enter the elections with the following [minimal] demands…

But do we have a distinct party of the proletariat? No!

Our movement has fractured. It has been divided by great nation chauvinism. It has decayed under the repeated attacks of the bourgeoisie and their reactionary vanguard in the form of their intelligence agencies. They have fostered disunity, division, and backbiting — and it doesn’t take much to get socialists to fight one another! We must unite, yes, but we must unite around principles.

The largest of the old revisionist parties in the US, the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (CPUSA), explicitly renounces revolutionary action while claiming to embrace it. Their leadership condemns violence. But what violence? Their co-chair, Joe Sims, wrote in 2019 that “Power comes not from the barrel of a gun.” Ah! The CPUSA condemns revolutionary violence. As to how it will answer the violence of the capitalist class, this is left to the much vaguer “united action of workers and people in struggle.” Their party program calls revolution “a profoundly democratic process” that rejects “violent action” and will make it “politically impossible for the former ruling class to use political or military means to return to power.” This is nothing short of the liquidation of revolution under the slogan of revolution!

The Trotskyist fragment of the World Workers Party, the so-called Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which now bills itself as Marxist-Leninist, is another sect. Hypersecurity and the asphyxiating rules that the Western parties call “democratic centralism” are used to prevent chapters from speaking to one another and to ensure an entrenched leadership of a single, central family retains power in that org — at all costs.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization’s (FRSO) program uses the word revolution, and they appear to mean actual revolution when they say it; but their program of revolutionary action is to “build[] a united front against the monopoly capitalist class.” Admittedly, the FRSO acknowledges that it is not a revolutionary party but merely a “socialist organization.” This self-awareness is good! But without a firm commitment to revolutionary action, the slogan of revolution rings hollow.

The CP Canada suffers from the same commandism, anti-democratic trends, and false adherence to a lie of “democratic centralism” when what they mean is centralist commandism. Witness the convention of 2022, in which the party leadership violated their own constitution to protect leadership, expel delegates, and ensure that the same circle of leaders retained control of the heights of the party apparatus.

The fact is, a century of distortion and revisionism under the watchful eye of the U.S. Empire’s “letter agencies” — the CIA, FBI, and NSA — and their companions in Canada have produced a woeful dearth of Marxist education. The workers’ schools have been shut down. Revolutionaries were purged from the CPUSA shortly before it was dissolved in 1944. For this reason, most people who consider themselves Marxists in North America have never actually grappled with the core texts, ideas, organizational forms, goals, tactics, or history of Marxism to any degree.

Worse, a century of accruing material wealth and being diverted down the dark roads of great nation chauvinism and personal advancement mean that the leaders of each of these parties have a vested interest in maintaining their leadership roles. They are in control of vast resources: they pay themselves salaries through shell companies, they collect dues, and they serve as a captive opposition to the bourgeois state: a honey-pot into which the naïve but resolute often fall.

Those who have and who maintain the revolutionary line, who adhere to the necessity of a transitional period where the proletarian class becomes the ruling class and where the old enemies of humanity are suppressed and politically disenfranchised, must band together.

This bulletin is a CALL FOR UNITY.

If you are among the camp of true Marxists, no matter what organization you belong to, Unity–Struggle–Unity is asking for you to come forward and be counted.

Among every revolutionary, pseudo-revolutionary, and revisionist organization in North America, there are real Marxists, real Communists. There is a backwards, reactionary strata; there is an intermediate, confused or vacillating strata; there is a Communist strata. That Communist strata must begin the process of uniting across all organizations, among all groups.

We at USU Press will play our part in that unification. We implore you to reach out — to write letters, to send an email, to get in contact with our Press Organization, and to begin the discussion that our movement urgently needs: the isolation of liquidators and the unification of Marxists, which is the first step in the march toward revolution and liberation.