Editors Note: In this issue of Rally, Comrades! we are publishing the Political Resolution of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, adopted by the delegates to its 9th Convention, held in Chicago, Illinois during June of this year. The Political Resolution is a general political analysis and estimate of the international and national situation. It lays out how the organization sees the world, the changes taking place, a vision of what the world can be and a strategy for getting there.
The foundation of all social and economic relations, culture, and sense of identity has entered the process of change – destruction and rebirth. During such an epochal moment, no theory or ideology can serve as a revolutionary guide. Only a philosophy arising from science and illuminating change can serve to guide us. That first stage of change, the introduction of antagonism and polarization, has penetrated every aspect of life. We in the League have kept up with and maintained our orientation. Why? Because we early on understood that the leap from electro-mechanical production to robotics would necessarily bring about a leap from one social order to another.
The financial crisis brought on by the expanding use of electronics in production is continuing to tighten its grip both internationally and nationally. The cyclical crisis of under-consumption is developing. Automated production drives labor-produced commodities off the market. In this process, wages are dragged down to the cost of automated production. All production by labor, including the production of the workers themselves, is becoming superfluous. Unprecedented production and unprecedented want describe our time. The electronic revolution in production, combined with the cyclical crisis, brings about an unprecedented crash of the capitalist system.
As electronics replaces labor, money – instead of production – is used to make money. The greater the use of electronics, the more valueless money becomes. As money ceases to express exchange value, it more and more becomes an instrument for speculation, rather than investment in production. Less and less of this money is used for wages. The result is an unprecedented polarization of wealth and poverty. Hundred-million dollar mansions and trillions of dollars in national debt express the destruction of money as an expression of value.
How is production and exchange to continue under such conditions? The capitalist class has proven itself incapable of ruling. The death knell of capitalism has sounded. Today, the objective conditions exist for the historic vision of the reconstruction of society in the interests of humanity to finally be won.
From the right and from the left, the people are disgusted with and distrustful of the government. All the elements of a social upheaval are moving into place.
The people are responding to, but do not yet fully understand, the root of the problems they face, or as it engulfs them, the reality of what fascism is in America.
Revolutionaries cannot understand this moment and simply go on as before.
Global Polarization
We are witnessing the exponential advance of the electronic revolution, and its impact upon the economy. We see an acceleration of the efforts by the ruling class to grapple with and to maintain their hold on private property as polarization and crisis in the world deepen. Within ruling circles both nationally and internationally a struggle is under way, grappling with changes in the world economy and geopolitics. The world order that has been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union, a unipolar, hegemonic order dominated by the U.S., is being challenged by the rising of a new multipolar world order, particularly the Russian Federation and China, as they rise to contend with U.S. hegemony. The overriding quality of the process is deepening polarization and instability.
The advancing rate of automated production, the ongoing destruction of value, and along with it the decline of value of the worker and the polarization of wealth and poverty, all lead as an inevitable consequence to the rise of and domination of speculative capital. The hegemony of speculative capital today is a worldwide phenomenon. It is an integral dimension of globalization in the epoch of electronics. Laborless production means valueless production. Speculative capital does not create value, but makes money largely from amassing vast sums based in debt.
With the creation of a world market, national corporations become multinational, multinationals become transnational, and transnational corporations become supranational. Supranational corporations have blended into and become part of national States. To protect its private property interests, a rising global ruling class is creating a fascist world order and is conceptualizing a fascist world-view.
War is a political inevitability under capitalism. War becomes so entangled as an instrument of policy that if the policy is going to be put forward, war becomes the inevitable means of developing and implementing that policy.
Around the globe, deepening economic and political polarization define the times, as the global market continues to shrink, and the economic center of gravity shifts from the West to the East. New polarities are developing between the U.S. and its allies, who are forced to protect their national economies. Regional blocs outside of the U.S. sphere of influence are consolidating to protect their markets, as more countries discuss alternatives to using U.S. petrodollars as the exchange currency for oil trading. As the U.S. loses its economic dominance in the world, it is increasing its war footing with more than 800 military bases around the globe. In addition to its encirclement of the Russian Federation and China, U.S. military policy is designed to create regional instability and conflicts around the world, as a counter to the growing economic influence of its adversaries. These conditions are leading to not only full-scale world war, but to the possible annihilation of humanity through nuclear war.
Peace is a life and death question for the masses of the world’s working classes, including the rising movement here at home. It is now a matter of survival for humanity itself. To impose peace on the war-makers is a profoundly revolutionary act. It means creating a society where exploitation, competition, and inequality can be done away with. And by doing so, ending war forever.
Fascism
Today fascism – the merger of the corporations and the State – is an objective reflection of an economic revolution that is destroying the foundation of private property itself. While there are subjective aspects to the development of fascism – things that are consciously engineered by the ruling class – the fascism we are experiencing in the U.S. and elsewhere today is not a subjective choice of the ruling class, but is an objective reflection of economic development. As the economic base of society is transformed, the social and political superstructure that rests on and reflects the base must also be transformed. Fascism today seeks to facilitate a whole new world based on private property without capitalism.
This process has distinct, yet interrelated, aspects. The objective foundation of fascism developed first. These economic aspects of fascism are evidenced in the merger of the corporations and the State, and are now in place. Laws have been and are being passed to eliminate the economic rights of the workers and to further erode their standard of living. Laws have been and are being passed to contain the upsurges of the masses. These laws are transforming the legal structure to protect the interests of the corporations and the ruling class to the exclusion of the American people.
The growth of a new class of proletarians threatens private property. The ruling class cannot allow them to have a say in society’s direction. Even the limited bourgeois democracy we have had is being forced to give way to the dictatorship of the corporations.
The ruling class can neither reverse the technology nor save the capitalist system. The world is now on a perpetual war footing. The U.S. military budget is being increased, and this is being paid for by the cutting of funds to meet the basic needs of the public. The economies and societies of the world are being militarized. Nuclear war is an ever-present danger. Ecological catastrophe is destroying the planet. The ruling class is forced to deal with the social results of profound inequality. The polarization of wealth and poverty has reached obscene proportions. Eighty-two percent of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase at all. In the U.S. the three richest Americans have the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the U.S. population. To control the growing upsurges taking place throughout the world, including the U.S., their tactic must be to go on the offensive against the people. They have to secure the ways and means of controlling them.
People are being beaten and murdered by a militarized police force, families are being torn apart and deported, the everyday conversations and activities of tens of millions of Americans are under surveillance by the State, the government is moving against those who are speaking out. We are seeing the creation of an environment in which the lives of a growing section of the American people are considered worthless.
This offensive – what we call the social face of fascism – is an admission by the ruling class of their weakness, not evidence of their strength. It shows us that the ruling class is so weak that it has to turn to naked and open violence in order to enforce some element of social cohesion.
The workers’ fight for survival, their fight for basic necessities of life, can defeat any lies and tricks of the ruling class. Revolutionaries rely on the objectivity of that fight to introduce new ideas.
The qualitatively new technology confronts society with either the continuation of private property with a fascist State, or the possibility of a cooperative society based on the public ownership of socially necessary means of production and the distribution of the social product based on need. The modern fascist movement is arising on the foundation of this antagonism, and in response to it. The real target is the political system – the substitution of one State form for another, that will allow the full scope of private property interests to operate without restriction.
This cannot happen automatically. The ruling class needs a political motion to clear away the obstacles, to move the new economy forward. They are laying the foundation for a new political movement that is based on the interests of corporate power that is completely merged with the State. The ruling class is adjusting its ideology to the new conditions, feeling its way towards a more fully formed fascist political ideology, that will facilitate the new fascist forms of government and State power. The importance of the bitter battles taking place among the ruling class over how they will carry out their program is part of the struggle to coalesce a fascist movement that reflects the new conditions.
The growing economic crisis is bound to bring on political crisis – the clash of two antagonistic processes, with one forced to destroy the other to survive. The developing crisis is the impossibility of maintaining the bourgeois democratic superstructure with the qualitatively new economic foundation that is being created. To succeed in this effort, the ruling class is building a mass base for fascism.
U.S. history is rooted in genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery, the concept of a “white man’s country,” and the conquest and exploitation of other peoples. Today, a whole culture of fascist violence, hatred and disregard for human life has taken hold. It is the ideological foundation for the outlook that the individual has no rights and for a government and society that has no economic or moral responsibility for the well-being of its people.
The New Class
Every step the ruling class takes only makes the situation worse. They have to keep developing the technology and producing more with less and less labor. In turn, less and less value is being created and more and more money is being created throughout the whole world. Globalization is undercutting the system of social bribery everywhere.
New means of production are eliminating the necessity for human labor in production and creating a new class of workers. It is a new section of the working class, a new quality within it. This new section of the working class is outside of, and has no stake in, private property relations.
The majority of the new class is contingent, minimum wage, below-minimum wage, and part-time workers – now over 40 percent of the workforce. This employed sector of the class is constantly being drawn into the growing unemployed sector that ranges from the structurally unemployed to the absolutely destitute, homeless workers.
Increasingly driven out of the relationship between worker and capitalist, the new class is forced to fight as a class for a new society where society owns the means of production and the social product is distributed according to need. The actual program of this new class is to abolish private property, and this communist program is in the interest of the whole of society.
The historic role of this new class is to unite all those who can be united and lead society toward a new world. The ability to fulfill its historic role will depend on it achieving consciousness of itself as a class and of its historic mission.
The Dispossessed
The world is in constant motion. Revolutionary politics conform to change. Change in the economy creates shifts in the center of political gravity. Revolutionaries concentrate on the current center of gravity and shift with it.
We look first at what is objectively happening in America, where the enemy is the most vulnerable. We have to determine the group which at this time, under these particular conditions we see developing in the real world, can pull the whole process forward along the path to a communist society. Once we identify this “center of gravity” it is essential to develop a plan that has the goal of politically influencing this group as a means of politically influencing the class as a whole. At the same time, through taking this strategic approach, an organization of revolutionaries not only shapes the political and intellectual formation of the class, but seeks to influence the coming revolution in America.
The progression of electronics has now hit the center of American politics. This formerly secure sector of the industrial working class and a section of the intelligentsia bound the mass to the capitalist class. The destruction of this middle is of the greatest political importance.
This recently dispossessed section of the new class is educated, socially aware and used to organization. They are all colors and nationalities. They are not at all a cohesive political entity, and have been pitted against one another along color, ethnic, gender, and religious lines. Because they are part of the unraveling “middle” of American politics that supported the policies of the ruling class, many among them tend to be the most socially and economically conservative. Their deteriorating economic position is forcing them to move against their conditions. And as they do they are going to pull – by virtue of their position in society – a huge section of society with them.
They are the current center of gravity. Our program is the program of the new class. Our current point of concentration is the newly dispossessed.
The rapid growth of the new class, and the emergence of this dispossessed sector, is revolutionizing the political landscape. The ruling class is being forced to strike at its own foundation. It is impoverishing and brutalizing the very people who once supported them. This new relationship of forces – the destruction and undermining of the rulers’ base of support and the loss of their reserves – is creating the basis for a new stage of the social revolution. We must understand and grasp this reality and change toward it.
The Fight for Class Unity
The rulers’ goal is to stop the revolution from proceeding on a class basis. Their aim is to guarantee that the new class does not unite. Changes in the economy present the problem to the ruling class of maintaining working class disunity. The growing hitherto unknown breadth of equality of poverty – a poverty that knows no color – is creating the basis for real class unity.
Social privileges granted to white workers over Black workers have always kept the workers apart. But, now that social bribery is being taken away, these workers can unite based on their common economic and political class interests. Real class unity of the American working class is objectively possible. For the first time in our country, the formula that has been used to control and exploit all workers for centuries is beginning to crumble. Objectively today, political bonds of color can now be replaced with political bonds of class.With political education and propaganda, as workers begin to gain class consciousness, they will politicize those around them, those who are becoming more impoverished daily, and who no longer remain an objective material base of political support for the ruling class.
Unity is the key to any victory. The unity of the revolutionary force, the communist class being created today, is based in class consciousness. Unity rests upon the new objective equality of the class economically, and the fight for intellectual subjective consciousness. This fight has to be carried on by the revolutionaries throughout the country, within every section of the working class. The objective changes are redrawing political battle lines in America. Forces that under one condition were remote reserves are now being thrown into the forefront of struggle. We must find our way into the new motions and organizations of the spontaneous movement we see throughout the country. But if we are to learn from history, we must make inroads into the section of the class that has been the historical base of support of the bourgeoisie. This is a key link to unite the class, and we must do this now.
In America, the manipulation of race within and against class has kept the world’s most potentially powerful working class impotent and subservient to its masters. As with all other phenomena, the interpenetration and transformation of these contradictory sides of race and class demand that we pay strict attention to the historical development and interrelationship of both. That dialectic is based on the stubborn hanging on of the old against the irresistible strength of what is new and arising.
Race is a political not a scientific concept. It is used for identification and can be used in any manner that suits the political needs of the ruling class. The ruling class cannot abandon the weapon of race, since it is historically evolved and an integral part of American politics. Irreversible changes in the world economy, expressed as globalization, are incompatible with race as color. The ruling class must adapt. Color as racial identification by the ruling class still exists, but they are replacing it with identification based on culture and class differences. They are using these class and cultural differences with the ruling class as the ideological basis for their savage assault against the new class as a class. Class and color are intertwined. The old is never abruptly replaced by the new. The ruling class has not given up its use of color divisions to escalate attacks and isolate the Black masses, and by doing so divide and weaken the entire class. The history of racism makes such actions and propaganda possible. This tactical offensive by the ruling class is central to their fight to impose fascism on society as a whole.
No matter how the ruling class attempts to divide our class, the reality is that today the workers can take no steps forward apart from the resolution of the problems that confront the new class as a whole. We are dealing with a political question. The new class is already forming along the lines of a unity based on what is practical, real, and possible. Fully conscious of the viability of the race question and how the ruling class uses it politically, our strategic focus is on the question of the political unity of the new class.
Consciousness lags behind the objective changes we are observing. Therefore, the intellectual grasp of class unity, the subjective side, must be fought for. Recognition of the necessity for that kind of unity is a result of consciousness. The task will not be easy because we are confronting centuries of national, ethnic, and racial divisions. They can only be overcome through intellectual struggle linked to daily experience. Every struggle of the class must be used to explain the meaning of their activity, to show them a vision of the cooperative society that is possible and a strategy to get there.
The League’s tactic is to carry out the struggle for political unity where the growing equality of poverty exists. Our aim is class unity, across all division of color, nationality or gender. Nothing can be done without this unity and consciousness. We must reassert the time-honored slogan of “all for each and each for all.” No matter where the attacks against our class brothers and sisters take place, we must go there with our propaganda. Unity of the new class united around distribution based on need is the only ideology that reflects the reality of material conditions and the potential of the new technology. It is the only ideology that truly expresses the interests and aspirations of the majority of the world as they struggle for their immediate needs.
Revolutionaries must throw everything into the fight for the political unity of the new class.
Edging Toward a New Stage of Consciousness
A broad social motion is arising in response to the worsening conditions. Within this motion, the demands of the new class are increasingly coming to the fore. The destructive consequences of the ongoing introduction of the qualitatively new means of production make it more and more clear that the demands of the new class also represent the interests of society as a whole.
Experiencing growing poverty and the refusal of the government or the politicians to redress their grievances, the workers are losing their faith in the government and beginning the process of separating from the political system. This is a necessary step in their development as a class and for their independence from the capitalist class. Simply fighting back is no longer enough, and the workers are beginning to put forward programs in their interests. The workers are beginning to demand the government solve society’s ills. This means something fundamentally new for the revolution in America. Objectively, a section of the working class is attempting to break away ideologically from the capitalists.
We would like to say a special point about the youth. The youth are in a position to play an important role in the revolution. They have the special problem and unique opportunity of integrating themselves into a society in change. The objective reality is that they do not have a future in this system. A youth movement will need to learn how to create the new world they are going to occupy. This is why we want to bring youth into the League – to help prepare them for their revolutionary role in the fight for this new world.
Women have always played a major role in American history. The women’s movement today is integral to the fight for humanity’s future, and women in the new class are out of necessity in the forefront. The revolution cannot succeed without women making their indispensable contribution, and the League provides the conditions for women to do so.
The response of the workers to the class offensive against them is spreading, as they lose their hopes and dreams that come with losing a decent paying job, a house to call home, or their health care. They are beginning to fight for the basic necessities of life, and to come together with others in that same fight, regardless of what specific issue it might be. The impulse toward unity among the new class of workers arises out of their common interests, rooted in the fight for the basic necessities. Their common condition is undermining all of the old ideologies that have been used to divide the class. While some workers are being moved by the rulers toward a more fascistic outlook, a growing number within the class are moving toward a more socially conscious position. Social consciousness is a necessary stage in the process of the new class ridding itself of old ideas and becoming politically independent of the ruling class. With social consciousness, the workers come to understand that they are members of a class and that they need class solidarity. They become aware of the ruling class, and that it has class interests contrary to their own. Revolutionaries have to grab hold of and develop the impulses toward class awareness, no matter how contradictory and embryonic they are.
The demands of this rising movement are objective; the people cannot give up and go home. They need housing, food, health care and other basic necessities of life. They are also demanding a society that guarantees justice, equality and democracy. This fight goes hand in hand with the struggle for basic necessities, since the workers cannot secure a democracy without securing their control over the necessities of life. Their demands are coming into conflict with the State, which is standing in the way of them securing basic necessities. This movement is in fact, if not in understanding, struggling to transfer capitalist property to itself in order to guarantee itself the necessities of life and a democratic society. Under these historical conditions, a prosperous and truly democratic society for the workers can only come about as a result of communism.
The rise of third parties is inevitable given these conditions. The growing motion toward a third party is part of the splitting and destruction of ruling class institutions of the past period as a result of the objective economic changes. These parties will not simply be one or another of the individual third party formations in existence today, but will reflect the broad social motion as it develops. Revolutionaries enter this motion the same way they enter any motion – on the basis of a fight for unity around the concrete demands of the class for jobs, housing, health care, education, and other basic needs.
Electoral activity is an indispensable school for the development of both the organization and consciousness of the working class. The workers will use the electoral process as part of their fight to force the government to guarantee their basic needs are met. Their experience in this process sets the stage for them to begin to see that their problems cannot ultimately be solved at the ballot box. It is crucial to influence the consciousness of the revolutionaries involved in the process. Revolutionaries always unite with the workers’ impulses toward political independence and use propaganda to raise consciousness and influence political direction.
The development of a third party, even one created by the ruling class, is an indispensable stage in the revolutionary process. It will accelerate the political polarization in society and the political formation of the new class. A third party is a step in the process of the scattered economic struggles becoming united political struggles against the State. It is a necessary and inevitable step toward a workers’ party and the embryonic form of political class consciousness a workers’ party represents. The evolution of the various party formations reflects the evolution of consciousness among the workers, and their impulse toward political independence from the ruling class. A third party is an indispensable stage in the development of the workers’ consciousness.
The ruling class cannot allow the interests of individual corporations, or even industries, or sections of the economy to interfere with their overarching goal of keeping private property and remaining a ruling class. They must stabilize the economy and bring the vast economic and political order under control. Only the State can intercede to impose this kind of stability. To protect private property, on behalf of the ruling class as a whole, the State has to take over control of the economy, that is nationalize it. Similarly, the workers need nationalization in their interests to secure what they need to live, and objectively they are beginning to fight for this. The final battle of the revolutionary process will be fought over the control of the State, in no small part because of its control of the economy. Nationalization prepares the ground for the eventual battle to be concentrated against the State rather than directed at thousands of scattered capitalists. Nationalization raises the issue of which class the State serves, and nationalization becomes a battlefield where class consciousness can be taught.
The scattered struggles for clean and affordable water, food, clothing, housing, health care, and education all have a common cause. Combined, they are politically summed up as a program for nationalization in the interests of the people. Public access to clean and safe water means the nationalization of the nation’s water supply, just as public control of quality health care and housing and free, quality public education require nationalization in the interests of society and not the private interests of the corporate few. Although the workers may not be calling for nationalization per se, objectively they are fighting for it.
The demand for nationalization in the people’s interests is developing on the basis of common needs and is in every battle unfolding today. These struggles are beginning to coalesce and are not so scattered anymore. This battle for the basic necessities of life is the fight taking place against fascism today.
These new battles are being carried on by a new type of revolutionary, who is practical, not ideological. There is an objective foundation for people to unite. This is undermining all the old ideologies that have been used to divide the class. These new forces are very solid in what they understand and what they are doing. Without a strategy and an ideology that reflects the new situation they can’t win, and the role of revolutionaries is to bring these things to the struggle.
What is important in this entire process is that people are ridding themselves of deeply held ideas that those they elect, and even government itself, are going to represent them. They are seeing that there can be no democracy when private corporations own the economy. This is a necessary stage in the development of the workers as a class and for their political independence from the capitalist class.
It is in the process of the movement’s realization that the State will not redress its grievances that demands for new solutions will arise. Revolutionaries work within this process to develop the stages of consciousness along the line of march from scattered economic struggles, to united political struggles against the State. Such a task requires widespread propaganda within this growing movement that offers a vision of what’s possible and a strategy of how to get there.
Defeat the Enemy’s Strategy
Any approach to planning, whether it is within a corporation, a military unit, or an organization, has to start off with an estimate of the entire situation. We look at the relationship of forces, the strategy and tactics of the enemy, its weaknesses and strengths, as well as our own. Once we understand the situation we are facing, then we are able to talk in terms of what we must do and how. This approach allows revolutionaries to think strategically about what the ruling class is doing, and to use the objective processes that are underway to defeat them.
Whether in military war or in political war, it is not possible to defeat an enemy without defeating that enemy’s strategy. Simply attacking the enemy’s tactics cannot win the war. Fighting back without putting forward a vision of what is possible today only disarms our class.
What is the strategic goal of the ruling class today? It is to protect private property. It is not to defend capitalism. Whether they want to or not, they are going to have to let the capitalist system go. This is because objective factors are absolutely putting an end to the capitalist system. The ruling class understands that they cannot go on in the same way. They know they cannot continue to create money and not create any social worth, where the people of the world are becoming poorer and poorer as the world becomes awash with money.
If we look at the history of the world for the last thousands of years, we can see that the letting go of one system, and fighting to rebuild another, has happened over and over. Slavery, feudalism, and capitalism are quantitative stages in the development of private property. But they themselves were not strategic. The strategic goal was private property. If the capitalists have to change the form in order to maintain that content, they have proven they will do that. They are doing that now. While they attack the rights and standard of living of the masses, they are evolving, step by step, this new system based on private property.
Tasks of the League
Strategically, the enemy is on the defensive. The entire world has been pulled into the capitalist system. Qualitatively new means of production are destroying that system. Capitalism can only exist as long as it can expand. Capitalism has reached the limits of its expansion. Tactically, the ruling class is on the offensive. The purpose of this offensive is to prevent the workers from uniting around a common cause.
Strategically, our class is on the offensive. This is so because qualitatively new means of production are destroying the capitalist system and creating the foundation for a world without private property. Tactically, our class is on the defensive. It is preoccupied with defending what it had, because it does not understand what is possible.
The last trench of the ruling class is the defense of private property. Therefore, it is here that we must orient all our tactics. Sections of the intelligentsia are already questioning capitalism. Revolutionaries do not have to make that our line of attack, but we can take advantage of that opening to go on the offensive with our tactics. We want to add what others cannot.
We attack the system of private property. We point out the necessity, this time, of overthrowing private property and transferring these gigantic means of production into public property.
The attack against private property cannot succeed without vision. The goal of all of our work today is to create with the American people a vision of what is possible. It is a vision of a world where no one has to fight another for the daily bread of existence. It is a vision where cooperation and fulfilling the needs of humanity are the guiding principles. It is a vision that satisfies the deepest yearnings of the people for peace.
Revolutionaries face real difficulties: the established foundation of fascism and its growing political and social features, and the rise of an anti-fascist movement that does not have the slightest possibility of success without a recognition that communism is the solution. Yet these realities must outline our tactics.
The American people have to be won over to the reality that private property can be brought to an end. That can only be done if revolutionaries have an answer. In the past, it was sectarian to say that what we need is communism. Today, proposing communism is not sectarian, but the practical solution to the problems the workers face. Communism is the public ownership of the socially necessary means of production and the distribution of the social product according to need.
Communism is no alien proposition, but an expression of the deepest strivings of the people: Independence from the chains of exploitation, the guaranteed ability of every person to contribute to society, freedom from want, and an expectation of a better life that makes true democracy possible.
Americans have fought for this vision, but it could only be partially realized. At one time, Americans worshipped King George. Conditions changed, and they fought a revolution to break away from monarchy and English domination. At one time, the majority of the American people embraced slavery. Conditions changed. They came to understand they had to end slavery and they fought a war to do so. Today conditions are changing once again. New technologies make possible the realization of the vision for which generations of Americans have fought.
It is only through widespread propaganda that we can get this vision over. We must reach into the life of the workers. We must bring the message that private property can be brought to an end. We must show a cooperative society is not only possible, but is the only practical solution to the problems they face.
Causality is the philosophical foundation of our organization. Our understanding that the events of today are the basis for the events of tomorrow, demands that we not only carefully examine today, but use that knowledge to prepare for tomorrow. The progression of political events follows the dialectical process – that is, from quantitative to qualitative stages. It is not possible to deal with qualitative change, without adjusting thinking and activity with each quantitative stage of development. Of crucial concern is achieving the League’s mission. We must unite the revolutionaries on the basis of the demands of the new class, educate and win them over to the cooperative, communist resolution, as a means to achieve the first task of guaranteeing some political unity of the class. In doing this, the League can achieve its urgent task of recruitment.
Thus far, events over the past period have shown the correctness of our general line.
Fundamental to the League’s thinking is that a new motive force (the micro-chip) has allowed for the development of the new means of production that are destroying value as the basis of exchange. Value-less production is marginalizing a new class of proletarians, who cannot exist without distribution according to need. The destruction of value and the emergence of a communist class have shifted the communist party – the subjective expression of the actual movement – from an ideological to a concrete and practical, i.e., political, base. The old ideological communist party is obsolete and must be replaced by a practical, political communist party that represents the motion of an actual communist class. Such a party does not exist. History cannot move forward without it. How is such a party to be built? What kind of an organization of revolutionaries is needed to build such a party? These are some of the questions this growing social motion has thrust upon every revolutionary.
Nothing has been done in America except in small groups, but it has been small groups relying on gigantic processes that are underway. If we can grasp that dialectic, we can do something important in history.
Forward to victory!
September/October 2018 Vol28.Ed5
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction.
