The process of change is difficult and complex. In a world whose history is of revolutions, today’s revolution is unique and qualitative. It is not flames of social discontent. It is a qualitative leap to a new world.
Robotic and electronic production are overthrowing the industrial economy, just as the double acting steam engine did away with economies based on agriculture. Electronic production is doing away with human labor in every sector of the economy, while the capacity for untold abundance grows daily.
A new kind of society is possible. Are we to settle for extreme wealth alongside of extreme destitution? The new epoch of social revolution demands new thinking and a new way forward.
The League of Revolutionaries for a New America is an organization of revolutionaries. Our goal is a peaceful cooperative world and a happy humanity. For the first time, this age-old vision is realizable. A new social force, a new class, is being created by new means of production that need little or no human labor. This new class needs and is fighting for housing, healthcare, education, and other necessities of life without money to pay. Once this class becomes conscious that it is actually struggling to transfer capitalist property to itself in order to survive, it can play its historic role of leading society to a new world. Educating and uniting the new class and society around this vision is the overriding task of revolutionaries and the foundation of our organization. The future of humanity depends on it.
Society is reaching a nodal point. All revolutionaries feel it. The League has developed an understanding of the qualitative changes in the economy and society, the strengths and weakness of our class and our enemy, and we have put forward a program to resolve the crisis in which humanity now finds itself. We have put forward a general strategy to achieve this resolution, general tactics of where to concentrate and how to do so, and a mission that guides the League and everyone in the organization.
The strategy of the League is to stand on the economic demands of the new class, to introduce class consciousness and arouse the people to fight the class enemy. Our task is to be part of the historic effort to transform the disorganized, disoriented American mass into a conscious political force. Our tactic is to participate in their crossing over from the defensive to the offensive. Our goal is to utilize this spontaneous process to prepare the people to reclaim their country, by assuming state power and transforming the property relations from private to public.
History shows that dying economic systems fight to stay alive. The revolutionary vision – based on the capacity of the new means of production – must be fought for. Special organizations must be created to carry out this fight. Until there is a new vision, even the most revolutionary fighters end up looking backward, fighting to recover what was lost.
The League’s program is victory to the new class in their fight for the basic necessities of life. We do not have a separate program from that of the class. Long ago, we recognized that what we are dealing with is an objective communist movement. The tasks of the revolutionaries is to adopt the program of the new communist class and fight for its achievement. That program is the creation of a cooperative, communist society as the only resolution to the problems faced by our class.
Examination shows that this new class, as it achieves political independence, can go in only one direction – to revolution and a communal society. We need no longer be so concerned with the form of the struggle. Various organizations exist to deal with different aspects of the struggle of this new class. We must strive to meet, to know, and to unite them where they can be united.
In every social struggle today there are growing flashes of awareness, impulses toward an understanding that society is composed of a ruling class and a subordinate class. Our approach is to seize every opportunity – to “strike where the iron is hot” – to be an integral part of the social struggle. In doing so, we disseminate our propaganda, connect with and educate the revolutionaries, and build the League.
League members participate in organizations that are fighting for the interests of the new class. The League members are not outside of the movement, but are part of it, bringing the League’s estimate of the situation and propaganda to the emerging revolutionaries in the process of the fight.
The League’s tactic is to carry out the struggle for political unity where equality of poverty exists. We must never forget the fundamental law of politics: No one for long can cling to a political morality that contradicts their economic wellbeing.
We point out to those within the growing equality of poverty the common interests of the workers, regardless of color or nationality, by exposing the common enemy and raising the question of capitalist private property. We point out the necessity of overthrowing private property and transferring the gigantic socially necessary means of production into public property. We present a vision of the kind of society we can have, and the strategy to get there.
League propaganda and the press are at the center of our work. Our propaganda and press answer the questions of the day and connect the League to the revolutionaries. We identify and unite with these emerging revolutionaries around the struggle of the new class for the necessities of life. This is essentially and practically the fight for a cooperative society. Developing and conducting widespread propaganda along the lines of that vision is central to reaching the revolutionaries.
In the many struggles in which the League members are involved, our measure of victory is the unity of the key section of the class. For the revolution to advance, it needs a broad core of revolutionaries capable of disseminating an understanding of the problem and a vision of the solution, and that is able to connect that vision to the building of an organization of revolutionaries clear on the strategic and tactical steps of achieving it. The new revolutionaries are already disseminating the problem and solution far wider than our organization is able to do today, and will expand the reach and influence of the message, vision and strategy that the League brings to the struggle for the new society.
Excerpted and adapted from the LRNA Central Body Political Report to Local Strategy Conferences, October 2017.
May/June 2018 Vol28.Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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