Editors Note: In this issue of Rally, Comrades! we are publishing the Program of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, adopted by delegates to its 9th Convention held in June 2018. The LRNA Program is a precise formulation of the actual process underway, formulates the League’s basic view, and establishes its immediate political task.
The United States of America – indeed the entire world – is in the throes of epochal economic revolution. Transformation from electro-mechanical industry requiring human labor to operate gigantic means of industrial production to digitally controlled production requiring little or no human labor is the determining content of our time.
The qualitatively more efficient means of electronic production greatly lowers the cost of production of the basic necessities of life. This makes possible a sustainable economic paradise of abundance for all. Under capitalism, however, it leads to the falling price of labor power and fastens the chain of poverty, exploitation, and stultifying toil ever more tightly upon the worker.
The steam engine created an industrial working class that replaced the existing manufacturing class. A new class of workers is being created by electronic production. This new class consists of employed and unemployed sectors. The part-time, contingent, minimum wage, below minimum wage workers within the employed sector are already over forty percent of the U.S. work force. This employed sector of the class is constantly drawn into the growing unemployed sector that ranges from the structurally unemployed to the absolutely destitute, homeless workers.
The new class cannot solve its economic problems without the public ownership of the socially necessary means of production and the distribution of the social product according to need. For the first time an objective communist economic class is forming to become the foundation for a communist political movement.
Globalization creates this new class everywhere. Global unity is the condition of its national emancipation. The League extends its hand of comradeship around the globe.
Wageless digital production is antagonistic to capitalism, which is based on the buying and selling of labor power. This antagonism is economically, socially and politically polarizing society, making social and political revolution inevitable. A new fascist State form, the naked rule of corporate power, has arisen to oppose this motion. Society must take over these corporations or these corporations will continue to take over society.
Today, whether through words or deeds, vast numbers of socially conscious people declare themselves revolutionaries in opposition to the degenerating social and economic conditions. The League’s mission is to unite the scattered revolutionaries on the basis of the demands of the new class, to educate and win them over to the cooperative, communist resolution of the problem. The demands of this new impoverished class for food, housing, education, health care and an opportunity to contribute to society are summed up as the demand for a cooperative society. Such a society must be based on the public ownership of the socially necessary means of production and the distribution of the social product according to need.
The new class must have political power to achieve these goals. In the effort to achieve this political power, the League fights shoulder to shoulder with all political organizations and sections of society that fight against the growing poverty, social and ecological destruction, fascism and war.
In spite of worsening economic conditions, nothing can be accomplished until the American people hold a vision of where they want to go and what they want to be. Creating this vision with them is the overriding task of revolutionaries and the foundation of our organization.
Destruction of the environment, the growing threat of nuclear war and looming pandemics are calling the very existence of the human race into question. The battle is class struggle. The war is for the existence of humanity. We in the League face the future with confidence. We call upon all revolutionaries to abandon sectarian differences, to unite around the practical demands of the new class and to secure the imperiled future of humanity and the planet.
November.December 2018 Vol28.Ed6
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