My neighbors White and Black, The people who just came here, Or from generations back,

THE question asked of Communists more frequently than any other, if we can judge from the Hearst newspapers, is this:

“If you don’t like this country, why don’t you go back where you came from?”

The truth is, if you insist on knowing, Mr. Hearst,’ we Communists like this country very much. We cannot think of any other spot on the globe where we would rather be than exactly this one. We love our country. Our affection is all the more deep in that we have watered it with the sweat of our labor—labor which made this country what it is 5 our mothers nourished it with the tears they shed over the troubles and tragedies of rearing babies in a land controlled by profit and profit-makers. If we did not love own country so much, perhaps we would surrender it to Wall Street.

Of course, when we speak of our love of America, we mean something quite different from what Mr. Hearst is speaking about in his daily editorial diatribes. We mean that we love the masses of the toiling people. We find in these masses a great reservoir of all things admirable and lovable, all things that make life worth living. We are filled with anger when we see millions of these people whom we love being degraded, starved, oppressed, beaten and jailed when they protest. We have a deep and moving hatred of the system, and of those who fatten on the system which turns our potential paradise into a living hell.

We are determined to save our country from the hell of capitalism. And most of us were born here, so Hearst’s gag is not addressed to us anyway. But workers in America who happen to have been born abroad are just as much Americans as anybody else. We all originated across the waters, except perhaps a tiny minority of pure-blooded American Indians. The foreign-born

workers have worked harder for less wages on behalf of this country than anybody else. They deserve, at a minimum, a little courtesy from those who would speak of Americanism. There is less historical justification in America than perhaps in any other major country for that narrow nationalism, that chauvinism, which makes a cult of a “chosen people”.

We in America are a mongrel breed and we glory in it. We are the products of the melting pot of a couple of hundred nationalities. Our origin as a nation acknowledged its debt to a Polish Kosciusko, a German von Steuben, a French Lafayette and countless other “foreigners”.

Furthermore, let’s be careful not to get snooty about pedigrees j half the names in the American social register were originally borne by men who were transported from Europe after conviction of crime or who in the new country became bold bandits and buccaneers. It was the more aggressive and violent types who rose to the top most quickly in our early days and laid the foundations of the great American fortunes. They were the Al Capones of their day, with no income tax department to bring them to grief.

We love the past history of America and its masses, in spite of the Astors and Vanderbilts. We find in it a wealth of tradition striped in the purple tints of glory—the glory of men and women fighting fearlessly and self-sacrificingly against the throttling hand of a dead past, for those things upon which further progress depended.

Around the birth of our country as  an independent nation cluster such heroic names as those of Patrick Henry, whose famous shout, “As for me, give me liberty or give me death!” re-echoes down the corridors of time of Thomas Paine, whose deathless contributions to our national life of a militant anti-clericalism has long survived the many pamphlets with which he fought, the form of which alone belongs to a past age; of Thomas Jefferson, whose favorite thought revolved about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants (he thought this “natural manure” should be applied to the tree about every twenty years!) of all the founding fathers, whose chief claim to glory lies in their “treason” to the “constitutional government” of their day, and among whom the most opprobrious epithet was “loyalist”.

These men, in their own time, faced the issues of their day, cut through the red tape of precedent, legalism and constitutionalism with a sword, made a revolution, killed off a dying and outworn system, and opened up a new chapter in world history.

Our American giants of 1776 were the “international incendiaries” of their day. They inspired revolutions throughout the world. The great French Revolution, the reverberations of which filled Europe’s ears during the entire nineteenth century, took its first steps under the impulse given by the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was for that time what The Communist Manifesto is for ours. Copy all the most hysterical Hearst editorials of today against Moscow, Lenin, Stalin; substitute the words America, Washington, Jefferson and the result is an almost verbatim copy of the diatribes of English and European reactionary politicians in the closing years of the eighteenth century against our American founding fathers. Revolution was then “an alien doctrine imported from America” as now it is “imported from Moscow”.

After the counter-revolution engineered by Alexander Hamilton had been victorious and established itself under the Constitution in 1787, a period of reaction set in. There was, as in our modern days since the World War, a period marked by oppressive legislation which went down in history as the “Alien and Sedition Laws”. But the American masses had not been mastered those who rode high and mighty with their eighteenth-century counterparts of criminal syndicalism laws, deportations, Palmers, Dicksteins and McCormicks, were driven out of power in a struggle, often bloody and violent, which again for a period placed the representatives of the masses (then predominantly agrarian) in control of government.

The greatest figure of them all in the American tradition, Abraham Lincoln, became great because he, despite his own desire to avoid or compromise the struggle, was forced by history to lead to victory a long

and bloody civil war whose chief historical significance was the wiping out of chattel slavery, the destruction of private property rights in persons, amending the Constitution in the only way it has ever been fundamentally amended. Lincoln’s words, which still live today among the masses, are those which declared:

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

These words of Lincoln are but a paraphrasing of the Declaration of Independence. Our national holiday, July 4, is in memory of that immortal document of American history. The very heart of the Declaration, that which gives it life, without which all else becomes empty phrases, are these lines, the memory of which had grown dim until the Communists rescued them from the dust of libraries:

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. . . . When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them [the masses] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.”

This is the heart of the American tradition. Without this revolutionary kernel, the whole history of the origin of our country becomes only the’ strutting of marionettes and stuffed shirts, the spread-eagle oratory of the Fourth of July under imperialism, the vulgar yappings of the Hearst press. Without this, patriotism becomes—as that acid critic of the British bourgeoisie, Dr. Johnson, described it—the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The revolutionary tradition is the heart of Americanism. That is incontestable, unless we are ready to agree that Americanism means what Hearst says slavery to outlived institutions, preservation of privilege, the degradation of the masses.

We Communists claim the revolutionary traditions of Americanism. We are the only ones who consciously continue those traditions and apply them to the problems of today.

We are the Americans and Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century.

That does not mean, of course, that we Communists raise the slogan of “Back to 1776”. Such reactionary stupidity was committed by the LaFollette “third party” movement in 1924, typical as that movement Was of a class grouping (petty bourgeoisie refusing to ally with’ workers) that had lost its historically progressive significance. That was no more in the spirit of our revolutionary forefathers than it would have been for the Declaration of Independence to proclaim, “Back to the Republic of Rome”. To each day its own task that of 1776 was. to free a rising capitalism from the fetters of a dying feudal system, enabling it to expand the productive forces of mankind to a new high level; that of today is to free these tremendous productive forces created by capitalism, which are now being choked and destroyed because they have grown too big to live longer under capitalist property relations.

Americanism, in this revolutionary sense, means to stand in the forefront of human progress. It means never to submit to the forces of decay and death. It means constantly to free ourselves of the old, the outworn, the decaying, and to press forward to the young, the vital, the living, the expanding. It means to fight like hell against those who would plow under the crops in our fields, who would close down and scrap our factories, who would keep millions of willing toilers, anxious to create the good things of life, living like beggars upon charity.

Americanism, as we understand it, means to appropriate for our country all the best achievements of the human mind in all lands. Just as the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence had been nurtured upon the French Encyclopedists and the British classical political economists, so the men who will write our modern declaration of independence, of a dying capitalist system must feed themselves upon the teachings of Marx; Engels, Lenin and Stalin, the modern representatives of human progress.

In the words of a famous American whose memory we love, we say to Mr. Hearst and all the Red-baiting cohorts of Wall Street: “If this be treason, make the most of it.” This is how we American Communists read the history of our country. This-is what we mean by Americanism. This is how we love our country, with the same burning love which Lenin bore for Russia, his native land. Like Lenin, we will fight to free our land from the blood-sucking reactionaries, place it in the hands & of the masses, bring it into the international brotherhood of a World Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and realize the prophetic lines of Walt Whitman: ‘We have adhered too long to petty limits . . .the time has come to enfold the world.”

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.

About 150 years have passed since then. Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxurious fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated nations in level of development of the productive forces of collective human endeavour, in the utilisation of machinery and of all the wonders of modern engineering. At the same time, America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism. The American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of “liberating” them, and are throttling the Russian Socialist Republic in 1918 on the pretext of “protecting” it from the Germans.

The four years of the imperialist slaughter of nations, however, have not passed in vain. The deception of the people by the scoundrels of both robber groups, the British and the German, has been utterly exposed by indisputable and obvious facts. The results of the four years of war have revealed the general law of capitalism as applied to war between robbers for the division of spoils: the richest and strongest profited and grabbed most, while the weakest were utterly robbed, tormented, crushed and strangled.

The British imperialist robbers were the strongest in number of “colonial slaves”. The British capitalists have not lost an inch of “their” territory (i.e., territory they have grabbed over the centuries), but they have grabbed all the German colonies in Africa, they have grabbed Mesopotamia and Palestine, they have throttled Greece, and have begun to plunder Russia.

The German imperialist robbers were the strongest in organization and discipline of “their” armies, but weaker in regard to colonies. They have lost all their colonies, but plundered half of Europe and throttled the largest number of small countries and weak nations. What a great war of “liberation” on both sides! How well the robbers of both groups, the Anglo-French and the German capitalists, together with their lackeys, the social-chauvinists, i.e., the socialists who went over to the side of “their own” bourgeoisie, have “defended their country”!

The American multimillionaires were, perhaps, richest of all, and geographically the most secure. They have profited more than all the rest. They have converted all, even the richest, countries into their tributaries. They have grabbed hundreds of billions of dollars. And every dollar is sullied with filth: the filth of the secret treaties between Britain and her “allies”, between Germany and her vassals, treaties for the division of the spoils, treaties of mutual “aid” for oppressing the workers and persecuting the internationalist socialists. Every dollar is sullied with the filth of “profitable” war contracts, which in every country made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And every dollar is stained with blood—from that ocean of blood that has been shed by the ten million killed and twenty million maimed in the great, noble, liberating and holy war to decide whether the British or the German robbers are to get most of the spoils, whether the British or the German thugs are to be foremost in throttling the weak nations all over the world.

While the German robbers broke all records in war atrocities, the British have broken all records not only in the number of colonies they have grabbed, but also in the subtlety of their disgusting hypocrisy. This very day, the Anglo-French and American bourgeois newspapers are spreading, in millions and millions of copies, lies and slander about Russia, and are hypocritically justifying their predatory expedition against her on the plea that they want to “protect” Russia from the Germans!

It does not require many words to refute this despicable and hideous lie; it is sufficient to point to one well-known fact. In October 1917, after the Russian workers had overthrown their imperialist government, the Soviet government, the government of the revolutionary workers and peasants, openly proposed a just peace, a peace without annexations or indemnities, a peace that fully guaranteed equal rights to all nations—and it proposed such a peace to all the belligerent countries.

It was the Anglo-French and the American bourgeoisie who refused to accept our proposal; it was they who even refused to talk to us about a general peace! It was they who betrayed the interests of all nations; it was they who prolonged the imperialist slaughter!

It was they who, banking on the possibility of dragging Russia back into the imperialist war, refused to take part in the peace negotiations and thereby gave a free hand to the no less predatory German capitalists who imposed the annexationist and harsh Brest Peace upon Russia!

It is difficult to imagine anything more disgusting than the hypocrisy with which the Anglo-French and American bourgeoisie are now “blaming” us for the Brest Peace Treaty. The very capitalists of those countries which could have turned the Brest negotiations into general negotiations for a general peace are now our “accusers”! The Anglo-French imperialist vultures, who have profited from the plunder of colonies and the slaughter of nations, have prolonged the war for nearly a whole year after Brest, and yet they “accuse” us, the Bolsheviks, who proposed a just peace to all countries, they accuse us, who tore up, published and exposed to public disgrace the secret, criminal treaties concluded between the ex-tzar and the Anglo-French capitalists.

The workers of the whole world, no matter in what country they live, greet us, sympathise with us, applaud us for breaking the iron ring of imperialist ties, of sordid imperialist treaties, of imperialist chains—for breaking through to freedom, and making the heaviest sacrifices in doing so—for, as a socialist republic, although torn and plundered by the imperialists, keeping out of the imperialist war and raising the banner of peace, the banner of socialism for the whole world to see.

Small wonder that the international imperialist gang hates us for this, that it “accuses” us, that all the lackeys of the imperialists, including our Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, also “accuse” us. The hatred these watchdogs of imperialism express for the Bolsheviks, and the sympathy of the class-conscious workers of the world, convince us more than ever of the justice of our cause.

A real socialist would not fail to understand that for the sake of achieving victory over the bourgeoisie, for the sake of power passing to the workers, for the sake of starting the world proletarian revolution, we cannot and must not hesitate to make the heaviest sacrifices, including the sacrifice of part of our territory, the sacrifice of heavy defeats at the hands of imperialism. A real socialist would have proved by deeds his willingness for “his” country to make the greatest sacrifice to give a real push forward to the cause of the socialist revolution.

For the sake of “their” cause, that is, for the sake of winning world hegemony, the imperialists of Britain and Germany have not hesitated to utterly ruin and throttle a whole number of countries, from Belgium and Serbia to Palestine and Mesopotamia. But must socialists wait with “their” cause, the cause of liberating the working people of the whole world from the yoke of capital, of winning universal and lasting peace, until a path without sacrifice is found? Must they fear to open the battle until an easy victory is “guaranteed”? Must they place the integrity and security of “their” bourgeois-created “fatherland” above the interests of the world socialist revolution? The scoundrels in the international socialist movement who think this way, those lackeys who grovel to bourgeois morality, thrice stand condemned.

The Anglo-French and American imperialist vultures “accuse” us of concluding an “agreement” with German imperialism. What hypocrites, what scoundrels they are to slander the workers’ government while trembling because of the sympathy displayed towards us by the workers of “their own” countries! But their hypocrisy will be exposed. They pretend not to see the difference between an agreement entered into by “socialists” with the bourgeoisie (their own or foreign) against the workers, against the working people, and an agreement entered into for the protection of the workers who have defeated their bourgeoisie, with the bourgeoisie of one national colour against the bourgeoisie of another colour in order that the proletariat may take advantage of the antagonisms between the different groups of bourgeoisie.

In actual fact, every European sees this difference very well, and, as I shall show in a moment, the American people have had a particularly striking “illustration” of it in their own history. There are agreements and agreements, there are fagots et fagots, as the French say.

When in February 1918 the German imperialist vultures hurled their forces against unarmed, demobilized Russia, who had relied on the international solidarity of the proletariat before the world revolution had fully matured, I did not hesitate for a moment to enter into an “agreement” with the French monarchists. Captain Sadoul, a French army officer who, in words, sympathized with the Bolsheviks, but was in deeds a loyal and faithful servant of French imperialism, brought the French officer de Lubersac to see me. “I am a monarchist. My only aim is to secure the defeat of Germany,” de Lubersac declared to me. “That goes without saying (cela va sans dire ),” I replied. But this did not in the least prevent me from entering into an “agreement” with de Lubersac concerning certain services that French army officers, experts in explosives, were ready to render us by blowing up railway lines in order to hinder the German invasion. This is an example of an “agreement” of which every class-conscious worker will approve, an agreement in the interests of socialism. The French monarchist and I shook hands, although we knew that each of us would willingly hang his “partner”. But for a time our interests coincided. Against the advancing rapacious Germans, we, in the interests of the Russian and the world socialist revolution, utilized the equally rapacious counter-interests of other imperialists. In this way we served the interests of the working class of Russia and of other countries, we strengthened the proletariat and weakened the bourgeoisie of the whole world, we resorted to the methods, most legitimate and essential in every war, of manoeuvre, stratagem, retreat, in anticipation of the moment when the rapidly maturing proletarian revolution in a number of advanced countries completely matured.

However much the Anglo-French and American imperialist sharks fume with rage, however much they slander us, no matter how many millions they spend on bribing the Right Socialist-Revolutionary, Menshevik and other social-patriotic newspapers, I shall not hesitate one second to enter into a similar “agreement” with the German imperialist vultures if an attack upon Russia by Anglo-French troops calls for it. And I know perfectly well that my tactics will be approved by the class-conscious proletariat of Russia, Germany, France, Britain, America—in short, of the whole civilized world. Such tactics will ease the task of the socialist revolution, will hasten it, will weaken the international bourgeoisie, will strengthen the position of the working class which is defeating the bourgeoisie.

The American people resorted to these tactics long ago to the advantage of their revolution. When they waged their great war of liberation against the British oppressors, they had also against them the French and the Spanish oppressors who owned a part of what is now the United States of North America. In their arduous war for freedom, the American people also entered into “agreements” with some oppressors against others for the purpose of weakening the oppressors and strengthening those who were fighting in a revolutionary manner against oppression, for the purpose of serving the interests of the oppressed people. The American people took advantage of the strife between the French, the Spanish and the British; sometimes they even fought side by side with the forces of the French and Spanish oppressors against the British oppressors; first they defeated the British and then freed themselves (partly by ransom) from the French and the Spanish.

Historical action is not the pavement of Nevsky Prospekt, said the great Russian revolutionary Chernyshevsky. A revolutionary would not “agree” to a proletarian revolution only “on the condition” that it proceeds easily and smoothly, that there is, from the outset, combined action on the part of the proletarians of different countries, that there are guarantees against defeats, that the road of the revolution is broad, free and straight, that it will not be necessary during the march to victory to sustain the heaviest casualties, to “bide one’s time in a besieged fortress”, or to make one’s way along extremely narrow, impassable, winding and dangerous mountain tracks. Such a person is no revolutionary, he has not freed himself from the pedantry of the bourgeois intellectuals; such a person will be found constantly slipping into the camp of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, like our Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and even (although more rarely) Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Echoing the bourgeoisie, these gentlemen like to blame us for the “chaos” of the revolution, for the “destruction” of industry, for the unemployment and the food shortage. How hypocritical these accusations are, coming from those who welcomed and supported the imperialist war, or who entered into an “agreement” with Kerensky who continued this war! It is this imperialist war that is the cause of all these misfortunes. The revolution engendered by the war can not avoid the terrible difficulties and suffering bequeathed it by the prolonged, ruinous, reactionary slaughter of the nations. To blame us for the “destruction” of industry, or for the “terror”, is either hypocrisy or dull-witted pedantry; it reveals an inability to understand the basic conditions of the fierce class struggle, raised to the highest degree of intensity that is called revolution.

Even when “accusers” of this type do “recognise” the class struggle, they limit themselves to verbal recognition; actually, they constantly slip into the philistine utopia of class “agreement” and “collaboration”; for in revolutionary epochs the class struggle has always, inevitably, and in every country, assumed the form of civil war, and civil war is inconceivable without the severest destruction, terror and the restriction of formal democracy in the interests of this war. Only unctuous parsons—whether Christian or “secular” in the persons of parlour, parliamentary socialists— cannot see, understand and feel this necessity. Only a life less “man in the muffler” can shun the revolution for this reason instead of plunging into battle with the utmost ardour and determination at a time when history demands that the greatest problems of humanity be solved by struggle and war.

The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration the “destruction” of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!

The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war. But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie—now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.

The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the American labour movement strengthens my conviction that this is so. I also recall the words of one of the most beloved leaders of the American proletariat, Eugene Debs, who wrote in the Appeal to Reason, I believe towards the end of 1915, in the article “What Shall I Fight For” (I quoted this article at the beginning of 1916 at a public meeting of workers in Berne, Switzerland)—that he, Debs, would rather be shot than vote credits for the present criminal and reactionary war; that he, Debs, knows of only one holy and, from the proletarian standpoint, legitimate war, namely: the war against the capitalists, the war to liberate mankind from wage-slavery.

I am not surprised that Wilson, the head of the American multimillionaires and servant of the capitalist sharks, has thrown Debs into prison. Let the bourgeoisie be brutal to the true internationalists, to the true representatives of the revolutionary proletariat! The more fierce and brutal they are, the nearer the day of the victorious proletarian revolution.

We are blamed for the destruction caused by our revolution. . . . Who are the accusers? The hangers-on of the bourgeoisie, of that very bourgeoisie who, during the four years of the imperialist war, have destroyed almost the whole of European culture and have reduced Europe to barbarism, brutality and starvation. These bourgeoisie now demand we should not make a revolution on these ruins, amidst this wreckage of culture, amidst the wreckage and ruins created by the war, nor with the people who have been brutalized by the war. How humane and righteous the bourgeoisie are!

Their servants accuse us of resorting to terror. . . . The British bourgeoisie have forgotten their 1649, the French bourgeoisie have forgotten their 1793. Terror was just and legitimate when the bourgeoisie resorted to it for their own benefit against feudalism. Terror became monstrous and criminal when the workers and poor peasants dared to use it against the bourgeoisie! Terror was just and legitimate when used for the purpose of substituting one exploiting minority for another exploiting minority. Terror became monstrous and criminal when it began to be used for the purpose of overthrowing every exploiting minority, to be used in the interests of the vast actual majority, in the interests of the proletariat and semi-proletariat, the working class and the poor peasants!

The international imperialist bourgeoisie have slaughtered ten million men and maimed twenty million in “their” war, the war to decide whether the British or the German vultures are to rule the world.

If our war, the war of the oppressed and exploited against the oppressors and the exploiters, results in half a million or a million casualties in all countries, the bourgeoisie will say that the former casualties are justified, while the latter are criminal.

The proletariat will have something entirely different to say.

Now, amidst the horrors of the imperialist war, the proletariat is receiving a most vivid and striking illustration of the great truth taught by all revolutions and bequeathed to the workers by their best teachers, the founders of modern socialism. This truth is that no revolution can be successful unless the resistance of the exploiters is crushed. When we, the workers and toiling peasants, captured state power, it became our duty to crush the resistance of the exploiters. We are proud we have been doing this. We regret we are not doing it with sufficient firmness and determination.

We know that fierce resistance to the socialist revolution on the part of the bourgeoisie is inevitable in all countries, and that this resistance will grow with the growth of this revolution. The proletariat will crush this resistance; during the struggle against the resisting bourgeoisie it will finally mature for victory and for power.

Let the corrupt bourgeois press shout to the whole world about every mistake our revolution makes. We are not daunted by our mistakes. People have not become saints because the revolution has begun. The toiling classes who for centuries have been oppressed, downtrodden and forcibly held in the vice of poverty, brutality and ignorance cannot avoid mistakes when making a revolution. And, as I pointed out once before, the corpse of bourgeois society cannot be nailed in a coffin and buried.[*] The corpse of capitalism is decaying and disintegrating in our midst, polluting the air and poisoning our lives, enmeshing that which is new, fresh, young and virile in thousands of threads and bonds of that which is old, moribund and decaying.

For every hundred mistakes we commit, and which the bourgeoisie and their lackeys (including our own Mensheviks and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries) shout about to the whole world, 10,000 great and heroic deeds are performed, greater and more heroic because they are simple and inconspicuous amidst the everyday life of a factory district or a remote village, performed by people who are not accustomed (and have no opportunity) to shout to the whole world about their successes.

But even if the contrary were true—although I know such an assumption is wrong—even if we committed 10,000 mistake for every 100 correct actions we performed, even in that case our revolution would be great and invincible, and so it will be in the eyes of world history, because, for the first time, not the minority, not the rich alone, not the educated alone, but the real people, the vast majority of the working people, are themselves building a new life, are by their own experience solving the most difficult problems of socialist organization .

Every mistake committed in the course of such work, in the course of this most conscientious and earnest work of tens of millions of simple workers and peasants in reorganizing their whole life, every such mistake is worth thousands and millions of “lawless” successes achieved by the exploiting minority—successes in swindling and duping the working people. For only through such mistakes will the workers and peasants learn to build the new life, learn to do without capitalists; only in this way will they hack a path for themselves—through thousands of obstacles—to victorious socialism.

Mistakes are being committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our peasants, who at one stroke, in one night, October 25-26 (old style), 1917, entirely abolished the private ownership of land, and are now, month after month, overcoming tremendous difficulties and correcting their mistakes themselves, solving in a practical way the most difficult tasks of organising new conditions of economic life, of fighting the kulaks, providing land for the working people (and not for the rich), and of changing to communist large-scale agriculture.

Mistakes are being committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our workers, who have already, after a few months, nationalized almost all the biggest factories and plants, and are learning by hard, everyday work the new task of managing whole branches of industry, are setting the nationalized enterprises going, overcoming the powerful resistance of inertia, petty-bourgeois mentality and selfishness, and, brick by brick, are laying the foundation of new social ties, of a new labour discipline, of a new influence of the workers’ trade unions over their members.

Mistakes are committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our Soviets, which were created as far back as 1905 by a mighty upsurge of the people. The Soviets of Workers and Peasants are a new type of state, a new and higher type of democracy, a form of the proletarian dictatorship, a means of administering the state without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. For the first time democracy is here serving the people, the working people, and has ceased to be democracy for the rich as it still is in all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic. For the first time, the people are grappling, on a scale involving one hundred million, with the problem of implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat and semi-proletariat—a problem which, if not solved, makes socialism out of the question.

Let the pedants, or the people whose minds are incurably stuffed with bourgeois-democratic or parliamentary prejudices, shake their heads in perplexity about our Soviets, about the absence of direct elections, for example. These people have forgotten nothing and have learned nothing during the period of the great upheavals of 1914-18. The combination of the proletarian dictatorship with the new democracy for the working people—of civil war with the widest participation of the people in politics—such a combination cannot be brought about at one stroke, nor does it fit in with the outworn modes of routine parliamentary democracy. The contours of a new world, the world of socialism, are rising before us in the shape of the Soviet Republic. It is not surprising that this world does not come into being ready-made, does not spring forth like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.

The old bourgeois-democratic constitutions waxed eloquent about formal equality and right of assembly; but our proletarian and peasant Soviet Constitution casts aside the hypocrisy of formal equality. When the bourgeois republicans overturned thrones they did not worry about formal equality between monarchists and republicans. When it is a matter of overthrowing the bourgeoisie, only traitors or idiots can demand formal equality of rights for the bourgeoisie. “Freedom of assembly” for workers and peasants is not worth a farthing when the best buildings belong to the bourgeoisie. Our Soviets have confiscated all the good buildings in town and country from the rich and have transferred all of them to the workers and peasants for their unions and meetings. This is our freedom of assembly—for the working people! This is the meaning and content of our Soviet, our socialist Constitution!

That is why we are all so firmly convinced that no matter what misfortunes may still be in store for it, our Republic of Soviets is invincible.

It is invincible because every blow struck by frenzied imperialism, every defeat the international bourgeoisie inflict on us, rouses more and more sections of the workers and peasants to the struggle, teaches them at the cost of enormous sacrifice, steels them and engenders new heroism on a mass scale.

We know that help from you will probably not come soon, comrade American workers, for the revolution is developing in different countries in different forms and at different tempos (and it cannot be otherwise). We know that although the European proletarian revolution has been maturing very rapidly lately, it may, after all, not flare up within the next few weeks. We are banking on the inevitability of the world revolution, but this does not mean that we are such fools as to bank on the revolution inevitably coming on a definite and early date. We have seen two great revolutions in our country, 1905 and 1917, and we know revolutions are not made to order, or by agreement. We know that circumstances brought our Russian detachment of the socialist proletariat to the fore not because of our merits, but because of the exceptional backwardness of Russia, and that before the world revolution breaks out a number of separate revolutions may be defeated.

In spite of this, we are firmly convinced that we are invincible, because the spirit of mankind will not be broken by the imperialist slaughter. Mankind will vanquish it. And the first country to break the convict chains of the imperialist war was our country. We sustained enormously heavy casualties in the struggle to break these chains, but we broke them. We are free from imperialist dependence, we have raised the banner of struggle for the complete overthrow of imperialism for the whole world to see.

We are now, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief. These detachments exist, they are more numerous than ours, they are maturing, growing, gaining more strength the longer the brutalities of imperialism continue. The workers are breaking away from their social traitors—the Gomperses, Hendersons, Renaudels, Scheidemanns and Renners. Slowly but surely the workers are adopting communist, Bolshevik tactics and are marching towards the proletarian revolution, which alone is capable of saving dying culture and dying mankind.

In short, we are invincible, because the world proletarian revolution is invincible.

In Comrade Vladimir Lenin’s letter to American workers in 1918, an explanation was set forth for all Marxist-Leninists to factor into our analysis of the July 4^th 1776 Revolution.

“The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilized” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.”

• V.I. Lenin, Letter to American Workers, 1918.

This July 4^th is the day that we celebrate our independence from the British. While the development from a colony of a monarchy to an independent capitalist democracy was objectively progressive, it’s crucial, now more than ever, to recognize that independence of the country was not independence for all of the nations or classes within that country. Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement constituted the economic and political foundation of our country at its founding and shaped our development.

The subjugation of women has permeated throughout our history and culture, the LGBT+ community has been murdered and oppressed, and the general working class has suffered from the ongoing exploitation and subjugation perpetuated by the capitalists and their reactionary lapdogs. Even though we have made some progress in our development as a country, we still have much more to accomplish. For those who genuinely love their home and their neighbors, we must understand the need for further revolutionary progress; that is, the complete transition of power from the minority of capitalists to the working class which is the majority and the establishment of a socialist state. In spite of the horrors unleashed by our ruling class, the American people have also given rise to the abolitionist movement of the 1800s, the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s, the anti-imperialist movement during the Vietnam war of the 1970s, and of course, the influential labor rights struggle of both the 1930s and the present period.

The American Revolution of 1776 had an international impact as exemplified by the colonial national liberation war against British imperialism. The Revolutionary War also had an internal domestic aspect exemplified by the popular upsurge against the idea that government could only be derived from a “divine right” to rule under a monarchy. It ushered in the modern era of revolutionary struggles and became the prototype of a whole series of bourgeois-democratic upheavals in Europe and colonial uprisings throughout the world. Today, looking back at Comrade Lenin’s support for the American bourgeois revolution of July 4, 1776, is significant considering the Ultra-Left attacks against the American Revolution. Referring to petty-bourgeois “left” radicals, Comrade Gus Hall correctly analyzed that their attack is basically against the long-standing legacy of Communists who have always served as the working-class patriots of their respective countries.

Our country represents the Marxists idea of a contradiction between having in its entity both oppression and resistance. We’ve achieved national liberation from British imperialism but social revolution is still yet to come. The first revolution was a war of national liberation against the colonizer. The second revolution completed the bourgeois revolution during the Civil War. The third revolution sets forth the task of the party to see to the victory of socialism. In the words of Grenadian revolutionary Maurice Bishop, “Forward ever, backward never.”

Nolan Prejean
Contributing Editor 

Since the dawn of the New Left, the notion that Marxism-Leninism and Enlightenment liberalism are completely antagonistic ideologies has become prominent among certain sections of the Petit-Bourgeois Left. Marxist-Leninist theory, however, as developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, proves the contrary.

Historical materialism demonstrates that Marxism-Leninism is not the complete negation of liberalism, and is the logical next step of ideas set forth during the Enlightenment Period.

The ultra-left, owing to its petty-bourgeois nature, cannot help themselves but to distort this historical development. Most on the ultra-left side see no difference between liberals and conservatives, even between liberalism and fascism. Certain elements of the ultra-left go to the extreme in claiming that Marxism-Leninism has more in common with conservatism.

Ultra-Left Attacks on Liberalism in Service of the Bourgeoisie

Ultra-leftists claim that, “if you scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds.” While the inability of the liberal center to effectively defeat fascism is well known to Marxist-Leninists; this line of thinking only helps feed into the sectarianism that prevents the defeat of fascism. Originating in the New Left, this phrase is nothing more than a modern adaptation to the underdeveloped concept of “social fascism” from the Third Period of 1928 to 1935. It is no surprise that with this idea, the ultra-left openly rejects the more successful Popular Front policy, which replaced “social fascism” as the official policy and analysis of the Comintern at the Seventh Congress in August 1935.

Continuation from Enlightenment Period

As the development of the capitalist mode of production reached its climax in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the character of the bourgeoisie became reactionary. Large sections of the bourgeoisie began to abandon their progressive ideals. Ideas like advocacy of universal suffrage, the elimination of want, and the freedom of speech and association were discarded in their maximization of profit. 

As the capitalists, especially the monopolists, dropped “the torch of liberty”, the ascending working class picked it up. The revolutionary working class, with their vanguard communist parties, carry on the task of preserving and expanding Enlightenment theories. Communists have removed the idealist and static aspects of liberal ideology. By removing these archaic aspects, Communists were able to correctly identify the dominant progressive and reactionary forces at a given point in history and accordingly develop correct strategies and tactics to carry on the struggle for liberation. It is therefore important to review the principles of Historical Materialism in order to set the basis for the connection between the Enlightenment liberal tradition and the Marxist-Leninist outlook.

Brief Review of Principles of Historical Materialism

Historical materialism as a science demonstrates that the historical development of humanity occurs in successive stages according to the contradictions of social forces of that epoch. Comrade Stalin explained that: 

“Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social life, an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study of society and its history.” 

Dialectical and Historical Materialism is the philosophical and scientific method at the heart of Marxist-Leninist ideology that bases itself on four main axioms:

1) Reality is fundamentally material and objective and that consciousness and ideas are the reflection of the material world.

2) The development of matter, both nature and society, develop according to the laws of dialectics. These laws state that this development takes on a gradual, quantitative pace until it reaches a critical point whereby the matter takes on a qualitative transformation via revolution with conscious leadership before taking on further quantitative evolution. 

3) That this development occurs primarily by contradiction between opposing forces within the matter or society.

4) That in society, the primary contradiction that drives its history is the contradiction within its means of production; between the forces of production (i.e. the instruments of production, laborers, raw materials, etc) and the relations of production (i.e. the relations between those who work the forces of production and those who expropriate the products of the labor).

When taken as a whole, the theory of Historical Materialism asserts that society is always in a state of development that is governed by the contradiction between the forces of production and the incompatible relations of production. Furthermore, the development of the forces and the social relations of production are independent of the will of humanity. At a critical point of development where the forces of production develop beyond its corresponding relations, an acute conflict begins. Guided by a class-conscious leadership, society erupts into social revolution where the fetters of the outdated relations of production are either thrown off or reaction succeeds in eroding the means of production. 

Comrade Karl Marx also made a distinction between the objective (i.e. material conditions) and subjective processes (i.e. the consciousness of the laboring class). He explains that as the material conditions of society (social relations and forces of production) develop, the consciousness of the members of society correspondingly develop. At the same time, the conscious reflection of the inhabitants also influences further development of the social being of the masses. Marx stated, 

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. 

He continues:

With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of production and the relations of production. 

In essence, class conscious elements of the subject class develop ideological and political frameworks that correspond to the development of the modes of production. These ideologies guide the subjected masses in the struggle to dislodge the ruling class from the means of production and their moribund ideological, philosophical, political, etc, superstructure.

What was Enlightenment fighting for?

In Europe and America, where the semi-feudal and colonial superstructure was being outmoded by the capitalist mode of production, the rising bourgeois class developed its liberal ideology in what was called the Enlightenment Period. With feudal relations and colonial subjugation obstructing the development and spreading of capitalism, historical necessity “demanded” ideology that rejected the supposed divine right to rule by kings, that allowed the bourgeois press to criticize the monarchy, and that removed barriers to manufacturing and trade such as Intolerable Acts in the American Colonies.

Beginning in the late Middle Ages, and culminating in the age of bourgeois democratic revolutions; trade guilds (particularly merchant), secret societies, and fraternal orders developed as institutions of the emerging bourgeois superstructure. Similar groups formed in the American colonies with groups like the Sons of Liberty in Boston. Each of these organizations played different but inter-connected roles in the struggle to overthrow monarchy, remove colonial monopolies from trade and production, and guarantee individual liberties.

Trade guilds formed among the petty bourgeoisie and handicraftsmen who struggled to secure contracts under feudal society. The guilds developed as a way for the collective of guild members to secure contracts and in order to develop political control over the cities. Later on, these guilds developed into monopolies like the East India Company. These monopolies created a hostile environment for the emerging industrial bourgeoisie. These monopolies gave preferential treatment to handicrafts which opposed the mass production of the manufactories. Out of the struggle between these sections of the young bourgeoisie, manufacturing capital developed an ideology that favored free trade and equality amongst the bourgeoisie economically and politically.

The emerging bourgeoisie lacked the recognition and privileges that had been afforded to the nobility and the guilds they supported. The rising bourgeoisie brought in the workers, farmers, and others who had been oppressed by the ruling nobility and their allies in both the clergy and the guilds. They threw off the fetters that the ruling class put on the means of production and the superstructure of society. From there, bourgeois governments began to emerge. Conflict rose again as the now emergent bourgeois were beset with splits and conflicts within their ranks and against the working masses. As capitalism built up, the bourgeois became the new oppressors of society and the workers. The advanced workers, building on the prior philosophy and ideas in the Enlightenment, began to develop the ideas of socialism as a solution to the evils of capitalism. Early iterations were idealist, while Karl Marx and Frederick Engels turned it truly scientific and rational. 

(Need to expand on the prior section some and how it leads to the ideology developing).

(Need better transition to the next section). (One is how the bourgeoisie dropped Jeffersonianism and picked up Hamiltonianism).

Bring in the passage of the Declaration of Independence that Thomas Jefferson wrote that was struck out due to being for the banning of slavery and the full citizenship of the African-American people.

In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson included the following passage:

He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

This passage was struck from the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson claimed, on objections from the planter-landowners in South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants and bankers who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. At the time, it was struck to preserve the alliance of the bourgeoisie with the workers and others in order to declare independence.

Hamilton represented the desire for a new aristocratic oligarchy to rule and suppress the masses as the fascists and Trump are doing today. The Chambers of Commerce, which sprung up thought ideas of Alexander Hamiliton related to free enterprise and represented the large merchants and gentry, operated as early monopolies in the towns and cities and tended to be more loyalist. They wanted small reform and ability to trade with whomever, but feared revolution as they feared it would go to the masses. They were reluctant supporters of the American Revolution, and many were open collaborators and colluders with the British Empire around the War of 1812. 

The working class picked up the ideals of Jefferson. The farmers, the artisans, the small traders, the “yeomen”, tended to support the Revolution. They picked up the ideals of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

Communists Carry On Revolutionary Tradition, Reject the “Back to 1776” Slogan

Former General Secretary Earl Browder correctly outlined that the task of American Marxists is not to idealize the bygone era of 1776 or to recreate the social conditions that existed. His lesson is to learn from our predecessors and apply Marxist-Leninist theory creatively to the existing conditions today. Comrade Browder states:

“We Communists claim the revolutionary traditions of Americanism. We are the only ones who continue those traditions and apply them to the problems of today. We are the Americans and Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century. That does not mean, of course, that we Communists raise the slogan of “Back to 1776.” Such reactionary stupidity was committed by the LaFollette “third-party” movement in 1924, typical as that movement was of a class-grouping that had lost any historical progressive meaning. That was no more in the spirit of our revolutionary forefathers, than it would have been for the Declaration of Independence to proclaim “Back to the Republic of Rome.” To each day its own tasks; that of 1776 was to free the rising capitalism from the fetters of a dying feudal system, enabling it to expand the productive forces of mankind to a new high level; that of today is to free these tremendous productive forces created by capitalism but now being choked and destroyed because they have grown too big to live longer under capitalist property relations.”

Comrade Browder continues:

“Americanism, in this revolutionary sense, means to stand in the forefront of human progress. It means never to submit to the forces of decay and death. It means constantly to free ourselves of the old, the outworn, the decaying, and to press forward to the young, the vital, the living, the expanding. It means to fight like hell against those who would plow under the crops in our fields, who would close down and scrap our factories, who would keep millions of willing toilers, anxious to create the good things of life, living like beggars upon charity.”

Comrade Browder is clearly stating here that the progressive nature of the American Enlightenment liberals in their fight against the British monarchy is carried on by the working class in its fight against the current economic royalists, the monopoly capitalists.

Jacob Ginsberg
Contributing Editor

We are living in a very dangerous and tumultuous period of history which contradicts the long-standing view that we have been living in the “end of history.” Many have considered our country’s 250 years of existence to be proof of the stability of its political system. Many times, in history, historians took the analysis that the fascist leaders, the ‘Mussolinis’ and ‘Hitlers’ were clowns— they were ‘farcical characters;’ meaning they were disconnected from the real class interest of the capitalists. After a closer analysis, it became evident that these so-called ‘farcical characters’ were in reality, using very logical tactics to maintain their class rule. The capitalist class which had ushered in democracy over monarchy has now begun ‘to put a straight-jacket’ on democracy; they consider it a hindrance to continue to maintain their class rule. When bourgeois democracy is no longer useful, the bourgeoisie try to get rid of it. When the softness of the velvet glove is no longer useful for continued class control, the bourgeoisie resorts to the harshness of the iron fist.

Georgi Dimitrov talks on the rise of fascism when capitalism is in a crisis. Capitalists are drawn to reaction in this crisis and there is a struggle within the bourgeoisie to go towards fascism,

 …the accession to power of fascism must not be conceived of in so simplified and smooth a form, as though some committee or other of finance capital decided on a certain date to set up a fascist dictatorship. In reality, fascism usually comes to power in the course of a mutual, and at times severe, struggle against the old bourgeois parties, or a definite section of these parties, in the course of a struggle even within the fascist camp itself—a struggle which at times leads to armed clashes, as we have witnessed in the case of Germany, Austria, and other countries. All this, however, does not detract from the fact that before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and institute a number of reactionary measures, which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism.

 Today, in the courtroom, the attack on the First Amendment is represented by Trump’s Executive Order 14161 “Protecting the US from Foreign Terrorists and other National Security and Public Safety Threats”, the unnumbered executive order on “Designating Antifa as a Terrorist Organization”, and National Safety Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” which are meant to suppress the labor movement in the US. All of these orders are a direct attack on the ability of Americans to speak their mind and to exercise their constitutional right to peacefully assemble and protest.

The Trump Administration has used the facade of ‘making the federal government more efficient,’ when in reality, it is weakening the public sector union movement by eliminating unionized federal workers and replacing them with non-union, lower-paid employees. ICE is denying American citizens’ right to the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments. ICE and other federal agents are denying people the right to assemble to peacefully protest and record ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. They are also denying people their Second Amendment rights with the murder of Alex Pretti and their Fourth Amendment rights with the seizure of people out of their homes by agents without just cause. However, the First Amendment violations are the most egregious.

Federal agents have attacked people for filming and peacefully protesting. Renee Nicole Good was expressing her rights as a legal observer to ICE arrests, and was murdered when an agent fired multiple shots into her car. Alex Pretti was protesting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents and was helping a woman who was shoved down by agents. Pretti was attacked without provocation by agents with fists and blunt objects, he was shoved down to the ground, maced, then disarmed of his legal concealed carry firearm that he never touched or reached for. Afterwards, he was murdered when multiple agents emptied their guns into him.

Public Sector Unions are being prevented from the “right to assemble” through an executive order that dissolved recognition of federal unions. Under the guise of “National Security”, the Trump Regime stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their collective bargaining agreements through Executive Order 14251, Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs (E.O. 14251), and Executive Order 14343, Further Exclusions from the Federal Labor-Management Relations Program (E.O. 14343). Trump’s executive order proclaiming this came at the same time when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was mass-laying off thousands of federal workers and siphoning the data and personal information of millions of Americans. The capitalist’s aim is to gut the public sector and declare it “inefficient” since the agencies are unable to carry out their work. The “solution” is to replace unionized workers who have extensive legal protections with underpaid scabs who lack the protections of collective bargaining agreements and related laws. Federal unions traditionally had dues taken out of paychecks and given office space at worksites for union work. These have disappeared from attempts in the current environment to weaken labor and progressive workers in the public sector and society.

Historical Context

The attack on the First Amendment requires that we analyze our country’s history from its inception in the Bill of Rights, passed by Thomas Jefferson’s leadership, to the current constitutional crisis that the Trump Administration has exacerbated.

The first attack on the right of freedom of speech, expression and assembly was that of the struggle for independence and the formation of a democratic nation. Thomas Jefferson was denounced as an agent of the French Revolution by the mercantilist property owners, exemplified by Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist Party, which turned towards reaction. The Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 were based upon the theory that the rising democratic movement in the United States was merely an extension of the forces behind the French Revolution. The Federalist Party feared that the democratic clubs in the new United States were reminiscent of the Jacobin Clubs in France.

Defenders of the First Amendment, embedded in the Bill of Rights, were slandered as agents of a foreign power, namely Republican France. Reactionaries called the rising forces of democracy “seditious,” and their inspiration and leadership as “alien”. Jefferson was pictured as an “agent of the French Jacobins,” while “French gold” was supposed to furnish the means of his struggle. Jefferson’s election as President in 1800 was a rejection of the policies behind the Alien and Sedition Laws. Throughout history, reactionaries always tend to use similar tactics against progressive ideas and their adherents (the Federalists would go on to create a counter revolution in the War of 1812 against the newly-founded democratic America).

Legislation like the Alien and Sedition Acts gave birth to the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the 1950s. After 1947, anti-Communism influenced all of America’s democratic processes. A notable example was the anti-Communist oath demanded of Associate Justice Byron White when he became a Justice of the Supreme Court. He had to sign an affidavit stating he was not now and never had been a member of the Communist Party. Such “loyalty oaths” violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution he was supposed to protect.

John Foster Dulles, a foremost political adviser, admitted that our government was engaged in a tidal wave of “artificial hysteria.” America’s ruling class has historically made a supreme effort to halt progressive legislation and ideas. The capitalist class resorts to loyalty oaths through such reactionary formations as the HUAC and its comparative legislation as the Smith Act and the McCarran Act. It resorts to punitive prison sentences against those who refuse to adhere to a foreign policy that leads to wars of aggression against America’s neighbors.

Comrade Stalin said the following on both the ultra-left and right opportunists: 

 “[…] the “Left” deviations in essence the same thing as the Right opportunist deviation, then what is the difference between them, and where do you actually get two fronts? Indeed, if a victory of the Rights means increasing the chances of the restoration of capitalism, and a victory of the “Lefts” would lead to the same result, what difference is there between them, and why are some called Rights and others “Lefts”? And if there is a difference between them, what is it? Is it not true that the two deviations have the same social roots, that they are both petty-bourgeois deviations? Is it not true that both these deviations, if they were to triumph, would lead to one and the same result? What, then, is the difference between them?

If the Rights say: “Let the kulak alone, allow him to develop freely,” and the “Lefts,” on the contrary, declare: “Strike not only at the kulak, but also at the middle peasant, because he is just as much a private owner as the kulak,” it must be admitted that there obviously is a difference.

…

There you have a picture of the specific platform and the specific methods of the “Lefts.” This, in fact, explains why the “Lefts” sometimes succeed in luring a part of the workers over to their side with the help of high-sounding “Left” phrases and by posing as the most determined opponents of the Rights, although all the world knows that they, the “Lefts,” have the same social roots as the Rights, and that they not infrequently join in an agreement, a bloc, with the Rights in order to fight the Leninist line.

 That is why it is obligatory for us, Leninists, to wage a fight on two fronts—both against the Right deviation and against the “Left” deviation.”

Stalin’s words are a guide to understanding the clear difference between the ultraleft and right deviation when it comes to the Marxist-Leninist position today on the First Amendment. It is plain to see the high sounding “Left” phrases of the ACP which in reality are objectively supporting the suppression of speech by monopoly capital.  [5]

The Ultra-left on the First Amendment

The ultra-left places little importance on the issue of the First Amendment. Multiple groups in the US either lack a stance on the First Amendment or take an ultra-left position arguing that the United States and the Constitution itself are all instruments of the bourgeoisie. For example, the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) states that while the Bill of Rights is seen as the only guarantor of basic political rights in the Constitution, they ignore its historically progressive nature for its time.[1]

 The Trotskyites take an even further ultra-left position. The Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) (ironically a Trotskyite organization, not a Communist one), states that besides the Bill of Rights there was nothing “democratic” in the US Constitution. To quote:

                “…the Bill of Rights was a concession by those who held the most power, in order to give the illusion of a genuinely popular democracy, a concession ultimately designed to   prevent a popular revolt against the new federal government.”[2]

To the ultra-left, the Bill of Rights and First Amendment are nothing more than a “legal thorn” in the side of the monopoly capitalists that while it may give the workers some legal rights also serves the ruling class as a way to foment acceptance by more reactionary elements of the working class to their interests and policies both abroad and internationally.[3] Therefore, according to the ultra-left, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution should be done away with as they are instruments of the ruling monopoly capitalist class.

This understanding lacks a historical materialist analysis. The ultra-left forget that levels of consciousness change as the relationship to the means of production changes in class society. The First Amendment was a product of the most progressive thinkers at the time, and since its inception, reactionaries in monarchies and now capitalism try to curtail and limit it for all progressive forces.

Right Opportunism on the First Amendment

There are those who call themselves “Communist”, but they are “Communist” in name only. They are detached from reality where they only exist online in a petty-bourgeois environment removed from any working class. They call for free speech for fascists but call for suppression of “liberal” and “woke” speech, decry “cancel culture”, all while distorting the spirit of the First Amendment. They admire Alexander Hamilton while ignoring that Hamiliton was a Federalist that was opposed to the Bill of Rights being added to the Constitution. In reality, these people are Right-deviationists and opportunists.

They criticize liberal and woke speech, decry cancel culture, all while distorting the spirit of the First Amendment which objectively benefits fascists (state differently?).

 A questionable-backed seemingly-manufactured formation who call themselves the “American Communist Party” (ACP) is an example of the petty-bourgeois right deviationist trend. They are reminiscent of the government COINTELPRO operations of the past. The ACP frequently denounce science, Enlightenment thinking, and incite hatred against LGBT+, workers, and immigrants, yet cry when they get banned on various social media platforms for spouting hate while hosting meetings with reactionaries and neo-nazis.

Recently, printed in their March 2025 edition of their “theoretical journal”, an interview with the ACP quoted:

 “Trump has proposed creating a national fund and potentially buying TikTok with it. This would be a monumental return to a Hamiltonian style American economics, which is a lot closer to a socialistic style of banking than the current federal reserve. If TikTok gets bought with this national fund, that means that the first amendment (freedom of speech, press, etc.) is protected under it. As someone who belongs to a communist Institute that, after amassing almost half a million followers on TikTok, has had seven accounts banned, this would be superb for disseminating revolutionary, anti-imperialist information.”

 Here, the right-opportunist ACP platforms a right-winger, who uses their own social media stats and history, to hail a possible buyout of a social media platform as “free speech, press”. Objectively they champion a backdoor form on suppression of speech no different from what corporations do already on platforms like Meta. TikTok was bought on January 22, 2026 by billionaire monopoly-capitalist Larry Ellison, who is on Trump’s so-called ⁠President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Since then, TikTok frequently suppresses speech and expression of leftist thought.

 Trump’s idea of a “national fund” is not controlled by the working class in any way. Nationalization by itself is not inherently socialist unless it is controlled by the working class. In the United States, “nationalization” of companies, especially when ordered by the government, results in primarily benefiting monopoly-capitalists by letting them reap all rewards with no cost once the companies and institutions are re-privatized. In U.S. the only examples we have are during wartime, for instance in WWI the railroad industry was nationalized, then after the war, they were re-privatized.

 These capitalists further restrict First Amendment freedoms of speech like what Meta under Mark Zuckerburg has done with Facebook. Elon Musk’s X and Steve Huffman’s Reddit have similar suppressions of progressive speech. These platforms then give freer rein to rightwing voices that opportunists like ACP are closer to than progressive groups.

PCUSA Position on the First Amendment

For communists in the US, the defense of the first amendment is of vital importance. It is a proud American tradition to defend the right of workers to speak their mind, especially in the face of persecution from the bosses who try to limit the ability of workers to organize. In American history, the attack on the First Amendment has always precipitated from the interests of the capitalist class to further the growth of reaction. If the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), did not defend itself in court against the fascist-minded McCarthyites in the 1950s, the ability of anyone to question monopoly capital in this country would have ceased to exist openly.

The victory of the CPUSA in its movement to defend the First Amendment was a victory for the average American. For us to not defend the First Amendment would guarantee the ideological victory of reaction over the workers movement. Lenin was clear that such left-sectarian tendencies are a “Left-wing Communist” failure, and in particular the slogan of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) “After Hitler, us.”

In fact, every victory of the working class is reliant on the existence of the First Amendment to organize freely against the aims of monopoly-capital. Indifference or refusal to defend this most vital civil liberty is to objectively aid reaction, and ultimately, disarm the workers in allowing the victory of fascism. Through his experience with the IWW and the anarcho-syndicalists, William Z. Foster proved that indifference towards struggle against reaction surrenders the fight and allows reactionaries free reign to influence the working masses.

Reactionaries revel in ultraleft apathy and destroy democracy in darkness. Both the Right and the ultra-Left are bringing up something alien that is not in the interest of the working class. The First Amendment is crucial for those who seek social change.

Timothy Dirte
Editor in Chief

Communists are not anti-American (e.g., Lenin was anti-Tsar not anti-Russian; Communists are anti-Capitalist not anti-American).

Today there is an infection in the left which dates back to the time of Lenin which he called “Left-communism” or what we call “Ultra-leftism” today. Lenin referred to these ultra-leftists in his book “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”. The gist of Lenin’s analysis is that there are some who call themselves “communists” but who failed to apply the correct application of Marxism to their situation, instead falling for non-Bolshevik methods of work. 

Left-wing communism takes the form of ultra-leftism which is best exemplified by the various trends of petty-bourgeois radicalist-philosophies of anarchism, Maoism, Trotskyism and so-called self-proclaimed “radicals” who are infected with the Frankfurt School’s New-Left radicalism. All of these groups suffer from the same “infantile disorder”. These ideologies have a sense of national nihilism, i.e., their adherents have separated themselves from American history; they reject the national history of their own people and how it is traditionally viewed by their people.

America, as with every other bourgeois country, exist with different classes. A small, ruling class that controls the superstructure of that country, and the masses of people who produce the wealth of that country.

It is incorrect for Marxist-Leninists to consider the whole society illegitimate and therefore seek its destruction, if its ruling class is the cause of this illegitimacy. In the case of apartheid South Africa, the position of the South African Communist Party was to eliminate its apartheid leadership and set the country on a new road of racial equality and social justice. This understanding was pointed out by Lenin when he stressed that the propertied ruling class of a country does not necessarily represent that country, they are just the parasitic current rulers of that society.  Once again, “We don’t throw out the baby when we throw out the dirty bathwater”. Lenin stated:

“Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness. To us it is most painful to see and feel the outrages, the oppression and the humiliation our fair country suffers at the hands of the tsar’s butchers, the nobles and the capitalists. We take pride in the resistance to these outrages put up from our midst, from the … Great-Russian working class having created, in 1905, a mighty revolutionary party of the masses; and in the Great-Russian peasantry having begun to turn towards democracy and set about overthrowing the clergy and the landed proprietors.”

This means that communists are not National Nihilists. Communists have a great love for their country because of their desire to uplift its workers to a higher level of class consciousness in order to get rid of the capitalists who drag their countries through the mud, plundering the world in their insatiable search for profits. This is why we want to retake our country from the corporations and return it to its’ working class which built it up.

There are some petty-bourgeois radicals who consider our country to be wholly reactionary and deserving only of destruction, in other words, to throw the baby out with the bath water. Such  views were never shared by either Marx or Lenin and is in fact one which was borne outside the ideology of the working class. Workers must work together to improve the consciousness of their brothers and sisters to organize the class struggle. Workers, comprising the majority of society, do not have a nihilistic view of their own country. They want to make life better for themselves and their family.

I. The Ultra-Left on Patriotism

The ultra-left takes a generally negative view of American patriotism anytime it is mentioned. The idea of patriotism and being a patriot is seen from the ultra-left in the same way as the nationalist-chauvinism of the bourgeois and American exceptionalism. Historical documents like the Constitution are viewed by the ultra-left from a present-day understanding when the means of production have advanced and levels of consciousness are higher. They do not view the documents in a historical materialist manner, which prevents them from seeing the progressive nature of the Constitution.

This view is paradoxically an exceptionalist view. This is because it is different in form from the American exceptionalist view of Jay Lovestone in the 1920s, but is in essence the same. The present-day theory of settlerism states America and its workers are inherently reactionary, denies the class struggle of white workers, and confuses what class struggle does exist objectively dividing the working class. In short, the ultra-left assumes anyone who calls themselves a “patriot” is automatically a “traitor to the revolution” and should be chastised. This view paints a picture of a country whose political economy has been turned on its head and forms a “peculiarity of American capitalism”. Which is the same argument made by Jay Lovestone, a so-called “Communist” who later defected to the CIA, in which Stalin refuted in his speech to the American Commission of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1929.

II. Left in Form and Right in Essence

Is it a departure from an internationalist position to be patriotic of one’s country? It is an immensely patriotic stance, standing in contradistinction to the barbaric policies of finance capital, to take the side of the working class, the overwhelming majority of this nation. How could it be otherwise? And how could we ever hope to instill among our people the vision and drive for revolution if it is based on a regressive and backwards view of the national question in the US? The ultra-left speak of the balkanization of the US, a contradiction to the basic tenets of a revolutionary position on the national question to the workers and call it a “enlightened vision” of the future. Comrade Liu Shaoqi in Internationalism and Nationalism wrote:

“Genuine patriotism means fervent love of one’s own fatherland, and its people, language, culture, literature and best traditions, behind which lie thousands of years and generations of historical development. This kind of patriotism has no connection whatsoever with self-centered, selfish and anti-foreign bourgeois nationalism, nor with such national prejudices as narrow-minded exclusivism, isolationism, sectarianism and provincialism, which reflect the sentiments of the small peasant and the backward patriarchal system.”

Such ultra-left perspectives on the national question in the US will isolate and disparage the workers and their history in their totality. It is a reactionary position and a gift to those pursuing fascism who seek to uphold the most reactionary characteristics of our national legacy which would preserve bourgeois class domination. The ultra-left perspectives fail to separate the progressive sections of our history from the reactionary ones and allows fascist support to be built among working people. Lenin noted such “infantile leftists” are relegated to the fringes of the Communist movement, isolated from the majority of the workers who inherently have an interest in the future of their country.

The American people’s understandable anger at the transgressions and oppression organized by the bourgeoisie in the history of our nation might serve as the impetus for the objectively progressive and patriotic initiative to free the American people from the bourgeoisie dragging the country through the mud.

We of course must recognize the destruction of the indigenous cultures which is a blot on the country’s history. It is a requirement for the full liberation of the workers from capitalist oppression to see to the emancipation of the nationalities that the United States oppresses. In the words of Karl Marx:

 “…in the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded.”

Karl Marx, Capital Vol I Chapter 10 Section 7

However, settlerism is an anti-Marxist position which is characterized by a confusion on the class characteristics of racism, white-supremacy, and the national question applied to the US. It is inconsistent with a Marxist-Leninist perspective. The objective realities of the political situation in the US requires the unity of Black, White, and Native American workers to abolish monopoly-capital and its Confederate-minded bosses in the south, which William Z. Foster called “the bulwark of racism and anti-democratic activity”.

Our present society is fundamentally meant to defend the development of capitalism. But our bourgeois-republic is at the same time poised to exhibit an extreme backwardness cultivated by the capitalists taking inspiration from the Confederacy in order to make possible the victory of fascism. This backwardness develops out of the regressive and backwards elements of the bourgeoisie in the US such as the most reactionary elements of finance capital.

All the means of production, distribution, and communication, are sufficiently centralized for the immediate transition into socialist production. Yet, because of the complete backwardness of the bourgeoisie, we experience crises of compounding severity while fully cognizant of the methods and means to organize production scientifically. Under capitalism, science is degraded to a subservient position to be used in the interests of the capitalists. The increasing frequency and severity of the crises, because of the lack of scientifically-organized production, compels the political development of the masses. Every American from the most advanced proletariat to the most socially-disconnected person who in good times lived comfortable, routine lives and paid no heed to concerns around them, are reacting to the crisis. As the proletariat awakens to the barbarity of their oppression, fascism, which is in development in the US, serves as the counter to preserve the class domination of the bourgeoisie.

Our bourgeois-democratic republic was progressive in contrast to slave society, but it has reached a decadent, decaying, and rentier state which necessitates its abolition for the further progression of our society. We must therefore take up the patriotic aim of lifting up our people to a progressive and socialist consciousness to combat the disfiguring influence of the bourgeoisie on our national development and to realize real freedom which to many for so long has been but a lofty idea.

That is why it is a cover and disguise to uphold “freedom” without detailing for whom and what class. We speak here, always, and forever, for the freedom of the workers. We stand in defiance to the freedom of the capitalists to inflict our people with illness and death. We ruthlessly expose the decadence of the present bourgeoise-republic and reject the idea that this is the highest form of democracy. At the present time, those who speak of freedom and democracy in general, while our people are tattered and worn by exploitation at the hands of the capitalists, prove themselves to be but the watchmen for our people’s suffering. Our present democracy is simply the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

The supposed “patriots” espousing bourgeois reaction and the ultra-left petty-bourgeois radicals in despair who fail to uphold the progressive characteristics of working-class history in the US will prove themselves traitors to the workers of this country, to the international community of nations, and to the cause of socialism. This includes participation in activities which the ultra-left considers to be beneath them such as meeting the workers where they are. We must first build an anti-monopoly coalition to raise the class consciousness of the American worker to what is necessary for the victory of socialism. As Lenin says, “the masses learn from life and not from books.”

The vast majority of Americans are workers and oppressed nationalities, who at present have little access to democracy. Real patriotism seeks to establish for the American people a democracy based on Marxism-Leninism.

 movement against their power. All progressive Americans must continuously fight against these tactics, because they will never cease so long as the capitalist system is in place. Americans must understand that the drive of fascism is not one of abstract totalitarianism, but rather it should be seen as a concrete expression of the will of corporate America and the military-industrial complex, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to suppress democratic institutions.

We can say with confidence that the 17^th Convention of our Party has fulfilled its responsibilities.

When the national committee discussed convention perspectives some months ago and developed a general onward-and-outward outlook, many were not sure what particular place this convention would have in our party history. Generally we felt that it would be a step in the process of rebuilding a Marxist-Leninist Party. There were, however, some differences in assessing how ready our Party was for a national convention. Some of us were a little more optimistic, some less so.

But I think we can now all agree that it has been a very big step in the process of rebuilding the Party. Further, we have removed many serious obstacles from our path and can move forward at a faster pace than previously.

We can also say that we have had a meeting of the minds at this convention, While this would not be true under all conditions, under the present circumstances—in the period of rebuilding and remolding—it is healthy that nobody really had his way at this convention. None of us can say he is the same as when the convention opened. Because of the searching reports and the decisions, we are all better equipped to fulfill our responsibilities and are more mature Marxists. If there is a single comrade who feels this convention has not influenced him, I would say: look at yourself critically, not at the convention.

It is natural that in this type of gathering (and we did attempt too much in a four-day convention) there would be minor irritations and disagreements on various questions. But all in all, considering the rush and pressures, the convention proceeded in rather harmonious fashion.

Above all—and of crucial importance—emerging from the 17^th Convention is the fact that we have one party, one policy and one direction. And that is new. We have not had that fully in the last few years. Policy was not set down definitely enough; it was not concrete enough; it was not clear enough. And many of our difficulties stemmed from this. The policy, line and direction set forth at this Convention will be the policy, line and direction for the whole Party, for every member, including national committee members and officers.

Some Weaknesses

Many other positive things can be said about our convention, but we must also note some weaknesses. Among them is the fact that the agenda was too long and that we tried to hammer out policies and make corrections in too many fields in four days. But there were some others worthy of particular mention.

Possibly the most serious shortcoming is that concrete experiences in mass work did not emerge as the central feature of our convention. The electrifying effect of some that did emerge, like the speech of Archie Brown on his campaign for Supervisor in San Francisco, proves that we should have provided for more of this. I single out this convention weakness because we see here reflected a shortcoming in the Party’s daily work.

Somehow, that which holds the foremost position in our Party is the exhortation, the generality, the bombast. Somehow that is still dominant in our proceedings, in committees, in state organizations and even in clubs. We must elevate to a higher position in all committees, including the national committee, the examination of concrete experience in life and in leadership of masses. Bombast, exhortation and generalities must not replace examination, analysis, concreteness.

Now, a word about factionalism. This is necessary because even at this convention an element of this cropped up. We must draw the conclusion that this fight is not over; there are elements of factionalism yet, and it is unhealthy. We have no factions or “wings” in our party. We must not assess our cadre on past! positions but on present understanding, present performance, on today’s results. If I read this convention right, it gives the leadership a man. date to root out all elements of factionalism from our Party.

I want to add that even if you are presenting correct ideas—it makes no difference how right you are—if you do it in a factional way, you are wrong. To be right gives you no license to resort to a factional method of carrying your point. We have reached the point where there is no room for factionalism—and the Party decisions on this are not going to be on paper alone. Factionalism will not be allowed on any level. We have to make it as definite as that, and every member of the Party must be on notice of it.

We must find methods of work that show trust and confidence in the united Party we now have. In the past, when policy was unclear, there might conceivably be the excuse that factionalism existed because of the fight for a line. Today the Party has one policy, one direction, one line. There is no basis for .factionalism. Today a continuation of factionalism can be purely on the basis of unprincipled careerism, of opportunism. This, I believe, the Party will not permit.

On Leadership and the Individual

I don’t want to sound like a lecturer, but perhaps a word about the role of the individual in leadership here would not be amiss. In earlier years, when Marxist movements and Marxist-Leninist parties were fighting for a place in the sun—for acceptance and full recognition—it was understandable that individual leaders played important and sometimes the key roles. They necessarily became the spokesmen, the symbols, of the body of Marxist thought.

Today these economic, philosophical and theoretical principles have become established and widely accepted. They are the guide for nations and peoples numbering nearly one-half the world’s inhabitants. Political life does not require individual symbols in quite the same way as in the past. Today individuals can make their best political contributions only if they do so through the medium of the collective. Each individual will mature and grow only to the extent that the collective of which he or she is part develops and grows. Make no mistake about it: an absolute necessity in the structure of democratic centralism is the need for the individual to be part of a collective in the development of thought and work.

Maverick methods in political thought and work are by-products of a dog-eat-dog individualism (understandable, perhaps, in bourgeois politics, but not in ours). Marxist individualism is individual initiative, study, thought, work. This individualism seeks collective judgment and is ready to accept changes and additions to one’s own thought, fully accepting the scientific concept that no final thought is the product of any one mind. An individual who is unconcerned about the unity of the collective, the growth, morale, the fighting spirit, the togetherness, if you like, of the collective body—whether it be a committee, club, state or national organization—does not serve our Party or class. The enemy does all it can to disrupt and divert our work. Let not sincere but misguided comrades give them a hand.

Need for Greater Clarity

Now a word on some other matters. Our Party has adopted definite positions on a number of theoretical and policy questions, but this does not necessarily close the gate to developing and deepening these questions. This is an atmosphere we must preserve in the Party, and I don’t want to give the impression that I want to shut all doors on further discussion.

Take the peace question. I think we need some further clarity on this. There are some exaggerations and one-sidedness here and there. There is no disagreement on the proposition that the peace struggle is on a new level and that there are important new factors we must take into consideration. Neither do we disagree that it is central to us. This should not, however, lead us to one-sidedness.

Take the question of the role of President Eisenhower. I think the balanced position is that he is the spokesman for those circles which recognize the need for something new in U.S. foreign policy. This is clear and this we hail. Personally, Eisenhower apparently wants to go further, if possible. But he also has the problem of carrying other forces along with him. That also is true. But that should not blind us or lead us to become one-sided as to how far he has gone. In this connection I would like to read to you some remarks made recently by Soviet Premier Khrushchev. Talking about what is new since 1956, he said:

“The progress is in the direction of understanding the necessity of peaceful co-existence—that is the thing that is different from 1956.”

Further, in speaking about Eisenhower, he said:

“We felt a sincere desire on the part of the President to reach agreement to attain relaxation of international tension—that is very pleasant. True, so far this is nothing but our impression and a man’s feeling is not a very exact measuring stick. There can be a good deal here which is subjective. Nevertheless, we trust that the desire to improve relations will soon take on concrete form.”

Khrushchev made this speech just a few days ago. I think he placed the question in a very balanced way, particularly when he added the following:

“I think the President also wants that, but apparently he cannot take such a step for the reason that there are still strong groups in the US. that take a stand against disarmament. We must not deceive ourselves on that score. Why have bourgeois politicians come to recognize the idea of peaceful coexistence? It is said that being determines consciousness. There are some who put it this way, however: beating determines consciousness. I would say that both the one and the other are correct. The way it works out is that beating helps some people in being. At least they begin to recognize the necessity of peaceful coexistence.”

Considering that Khrushchev was at Camp David and thus had an advantage over us by being present in the negotiations, we can well regard his view as a balanced judgment based on a close examination of the concrete facts. So there is this great new development—but the cold war is not yet over. Our approach should be: we, along with the peace forces of the world, want to take advantage of everything that is new in the broadest and best possible way, but we recognize that it means struggle, mobilization, movement. One might ask: if the cold war is over, why a peace movement? There would be no need for it. But the need for a peace movement arises exactly because the cold war is not yet over. But the possibilities for ending it are tremendous—and that is what is new and must be taken into account.

On the Anti-Monopoly Coalition

Now a few words on the anti- monopoly coalition, another field where there are some possible differences, although there has been an increasing meeting of the minds on this question and very little basic disagreement remaining. We can say that the slogan of “anti-monopoly coalition” was much misused in the Party and has been used interchangeably with other concepts like the democratic front and the third party. Confusion necessarily resulted.

What is this anti-monopoly movement? Possibly it is more accurate to term it a political concept, a strategic political concept. It arises and develops out of present-day America; it is not invented by anybody. It is a realistic reaction to the class forces of our society. The era of imperialism brings forth this trustified, Big Business system of monopolies that rule and influence virtually everything in the nation from beginning to end. It has one main direction—towards maximum profits for the monopolies. The vic- tims of this monopoly domination are the majority of Americans, first of all the working class, the Negro people, the farmers, small businessmen, professionals, white collar people and, very definitely, sections of 95 the capitalist class. The present drive against organized labor is a part of the general process. Now, what is important about this is the very base of our broadest united front policy. If we do not understand the anti-monopoly coalition concept, we will not have the very broadest united front approach. To repeat, the anti-monopoly coalition is a political concept, expressed in a movement to organize the majority of American people to resist the domination of monopoly capital.

Now there will be stages in this. We must understand that all struggles, all rivulets of struggle, on all fronts, ultimately will meet the resistance of big monopolies. All struggles, whether for reforms of any kind, for a government not controlled by the monopolies, or any movement for democracy and progress and for socialism, will move through this avenue of resistance. The anti-monopoly coalition will grow in the resistance against the monopoly powers in America. This is a basic concept and from it flows our strategic view of the role of an anti-monopoly coalition in America.

Now, does this mean that if certain sections of the capitalist class and even certain sections of monopoly take positions that coincide with that of the great majority of Americans, that this nullifies our basic policy? Of course not. The basic policy remains and the antimonopoly movement will have to learn to take advantage of these differences. One of the reasons for con- fusion on this question is that we have not fully in our Party’s history appreciated how to take advantage of divisions and diverse interests among the monopolies. This is tactically important and, in an electoral sense, extremely so. But this does not basically change the concept of the anti-monopoly direction of our policy. For we all know that if sections of monopoly differ at times, their fundamental class character remains and the class forces at work in the country remain.

This is of importance because of some of the confusion evident in some resolutions presented in the pre-convention discussion that called for a “national front.” A national front is a practical outlook only under conditions when the whole nation or national existence is in danger. This is not what we face today, and it is a one-sided view of what is new in American conditions.

A further point. Does our basic anti-monopoly concept require that in united front relations everyone in the united front must share our understanding? The fact is that in most cases they won’t. We will be working with forces that will not under- stand the role of monopolies nor the fact that objectively the resistance to monopoly grows through such movements. Such lack of understanding is no obstacle to the broadest possible united front and we can set no such pre-conditions to united front work and policies.

If we take a realistic position, instead of setting up static concepts and generalized slogans in advance (although we have an outlook, a concept and a direction) we will realize that the main task of the Party is to work with an appreciation of the level of this anti-monopoly resistance, including the peace movement. We will then be able to work with this many-sided movement at many levels and help direct, guide, prod and nurse it along) in its manifold variations. As a result more forces will spring up, the anti-monopoly movement will grow and we will find words to describe it more scientifically than if we had first set up the concept and§- then tried to fit life into it—something we often do.

In a convention of this kind, one has an opportunity to hear not only speeches from the podium but also rich thoughts in personal and informal conversations. Based on such conversations, let me add a few thoughts about the ruinous negativism and cynicism which still persist in some quarters, and their side-effects. There are many degrees and levels of such effects. Some comrades so affected formally go through the motions of being active, even making speeches. But they cannot be effective because they lack real conviction. They cannot inspire or lead. Others hide their affliction by being critical about everything, making much ado about the insignificant. The figleaf for others is to be always looking for something “new,” something so “broad” that this be- comes the obstacle to any practical work or activity.

Such negativism affects relations not only in the Party but also with the mass of non-party people and organizations. Our theory as well as the time of day in history and the direction and speed of events realistically calls not for negativism but for the most sober, positive, optimistic outlook. We must have as our starting point not that on which we disagree with others but rather what we have in common. Criticism not based on the framework of points of agreement will fall on antagonistic and deaf ears.

Now a few words on the cadre question in the Party. To this we must give a lot of attention. Firstly, because our cadre is rather scattered and, while it is growing now, we need a lot of good Marxist-Leninist cadre. We are going to build and grow, all of us, in the process of work, but we must have a certain approach to this question.

I want to say these words especially in view of the fact that all the state conventions, except the state of Washington, will be electing leadership in the coming period. The leadership will have to show some real understanding of the present level of our process of rebuilding. In this connection I would like to suggest that we take to heart the warning that Comrade Mao Zedong gave to the Chinese Party about promoting and bringing into leadership “only those that are near and dear.”

We must be able to mold a leadership that takes into account the still different emphases that different comrades have, and that takes into account the infusion of both old and new as much as possible. We must have a unified leadership. We must understand that this is a process— a process of molding a unified leadership. Especially with the coming state conventions I urge we take such an approach in our cadre policy.

Finally, comrades, as we all agree, this has been a good convention. But when I say that, that is exhortation. That is bombast. Well, a little of that we have to have. But the fact remains that it does not necessarily prove that it is a good convention. The test of whether this is a good convention will have to come in the days and weeks ahead and months and years ahead. The approach we should use is that it has laid a good foundation for our work. We are a united party. We have an outlook. We have a united policy. But in about a year we should check the results. On such a concrete basis we will make final judgment as to how effective those proceedings have been and what place the 17th Convention will hold in our history. I have no hesitation in prophesying that the results will add up to a “well done.”

Our responsibilities and tasks are great. The obstacles are not small ones. But we need not be weary. Life and the direction of history, all subjective and objective elements, point only to one direction—to victory!

ince the 1970s, the American working class has been faced with a seemingly nonstop cycle of pauperization. It is of no coincidence that this reinvigorated assault on the working class came in parallel with the rise of neo-liberalism and later increased with the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union. This pauperization has been in a consistent accelerated state since the 2008 recession which was then compounded by the post-COVID recession.

In the last decade, there has been a visible increase of militancy within the labor movement, though in most cases it has been aimless, with at best spontaneous actions. The first hint of this militancy came in 2017 when over 1,800 workers walked off the job at Spectrum Cable in New York City, only to eventually be sold out by the typical craft-union misleadership of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3 five years later. We saw this militancy rise with the wildcat Teachers’ Strikes in 2018. Spontaneous as they were, at least in the short term they led to major gains.

COVID did not bring a screeching halt to the growing labor militancy, unlike much of the rest of society. COVID-induced speed-ups led to two major national strikes in 2021 at Kellogg’s and John Deere. On top of these successful strikes, 2021 saw the growth of the drive to organize workers at Amazon leading to the successful authorization vote at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island in April 2022. The massive organizing drive at Starbucks has been another sign of a growing militancy within the American labor movement.

Perhaps the most important industry to see a growing rank-and-file militancy has been the railroad industry. This became apparent during the 2022 contract fight that saw railroad workers reject tentative agreements (TAs) which blatantly ignored rank-and-file objections to increasingly dangerous working conditions, only to be forced by then President Biden and a bi-partisan majority in Congress to accept these TAs thanks to Biden-imposed provisions from the Railway Labor Act. More on them later.

What can be the solution to the movement’s inability to harness the growing rank-and-file militancy into strength to lead the fight against monopoly capital? In 1922, former Communist Party USA General Secretary William Z. Foster made it clear what the solution is in the face of these attacks:

“What must be done? The answer is that we must stop our stupid and ruinous tactics of single trades or groups of trades going alone against the companies while the rest stand around twiddling their thumbs and awaiting the pleasure of the companies to give them a beating. What we must do is to so combine our forces that every railroad worker will stand shoulder to shoulder. We must build up such a solidarity that the entire body of railroaders in the country will move as one man, so that if one section is attacked all the rest will rally to its support. When we have accomplished that, then the ‘open shop’ slave drive will soon come to an end. Really united, the … railroad workers would be invincible.”^[1]

What is Amalgamation?

What Foster is clearly saying is the only path forward to guarantee the maximum strength for the labor movement is amalgamation. What is amalgamation? Amalgamation is the very essence of industrial unionism, mainly one industry-one union. Communists and class-oriented trade unionists in the United States have been fighting for amalgamation for over a century.

The push for industrial unionism dates back at least to the 1890s. The American Railway Union (ARU) led by Eugene Debs was an attempt at industrial unionism among the railroads which led the Pullman Strike of 1894. The ARU would be crushed by the strike, thanks largely to its ultra-left nature as a dual union. Dual unionism is the formation of a separate union within an industry, in this case the more militant unionists, which divides the workers in an industry. Dual unionism failed because it separated the militant unionists from the broader rank and file making it easier to defeat.

The dual unionist concept of organizing industrial unions was later picked up by the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Before the October Revolution and the building of the Communist Party in the United States, the IWW was the center of not just the drive for industrial unionism, but militant unionism in general. Many soon to be leaders of the Communist Party would first pass through as a member of the IWW—also known as Wobblies—including William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Eugene Dennis, John Reed and Earl Browder, among others.

Foster in his days as a Wobbly would go on to see clearly that its strategy of creating dual unions was not the answer to the workers problems. This started with a trip to Europe in which Foster became intrigued in France by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT). He witnessed how the syndicalists within the CGT organized militant cadre within their mainstream unions leading the workers’ everyday struggles. This led to Foster soon developing his strategy of “boring-from-within” aimed at organizing the rank-and-file of the moribund craft unions of the old American Federation of Labor (AFL).

This strategy is largely still used by many left-wing forces within the labor movement through the various concepts of rank-and-file movements. This strategy played a major role in the development of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s. Since the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, many unions have consolidated to form larger unions.

TUEL Attempts to Amalgamate the Railroad Unions

The fight to amalgamate the railroad unions goes back to the days of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL). In 1922, TUEL launched a drive to amalgamate the sixteen railroad craft unions in the U.S. into one industrial union. Foster noted then that:

“When American railroad men embark upon the amalgamation of all their trade unions into one industrial union they will not be pioneers blazing a trail through an unknown wilderness. On the contrary, they will be setting forth on a well-travelled road. … In fact, the United States is the only important country in the world where the industrial form of union is not predominant among railroad workers. Here alone, where the need for solidarity is greater than anywhere else is the antiquated craft type supreme—which does not speak well for our spirit of progress.”^[2]

There was some early success with the campaign as by the end of 1922. Eleven State Federations with the AFL passed resolutions in favor of amalgamation. As future General Secretary Earl Browder reported:

“A great call for the solidarity of Labor has gone out from the State Federations. Taking the form of a demand for industrial unionism through amalgamation, this call has swept through the Federations like a whirlwind, gathering victories at every turn. Many of the State bodies meet in the late Summer and early Fall, and in 13 of them the issue was raised. In 11 instances, the demand for amalgamation was adopted by an overwhelming majority, in many cases with only a scattered vote or two in opposition. It has been a veritable upheaval of sentiment for solidarity.”^[3]

In December 1922, a National Railroad Amalgamation Conference took place consisting of, “some 425 delegates, of all trades and callings, including smaller delegations from the four Brotherhoods, from all over the United States and Canada.”^[4] In a report for the International Press Correspondence, Foster wrote:

“They endorsed it 100%, declaring wholeheartedly for one union for the entire railroad industry. Then, organizing a committee of 100, members of which be located in all the principal railroad centers, they prepared to launch a great campaign to bring the many organizations together. …

“The conference adopted a general plan of action looking forward to the calling of a general amalgamation convention, at which all railroad unions, or as many as possible of them, shall be combined into one body. Instructions were given the executive officers to push this relentlessly. The plan of this program is of the utmost importance, destined in fact to mark an epoch in American trade unionism.”^[5]

Unfortunately, the campaign faced many setbacks, and neither TUEL or Foster would live to see the railroads amalgamated.^[6] On a positive note, the failure of this campaign would provide lessons which ultimately helped in the formation of the CIO in the 1930s.

Partial amalgamation would eventually come to the railroads with the 1969 merger of the Order of Railway Conductors (ORC), Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen (BLFE), the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen (BRT), and the Switchmen’s Union of North America (SUNA) into the United Transportation Union (UTU). Then in 1986, the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks, Freight Handlers, Express and Station Employees (BRAC) would merge with the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen (BRC) to form the Transportation Communications Union (TCU) which would then merge into the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) in 2005. The UTU would later merge in 2014 with the Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association (SMWIA) to form the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART).

The Need for Amalgamation Today

With this in mind, is amalgamation still applicable today? The answer to this can only be yes; although there are fewer, but larger unions, many industries are still divided among multiple unions. This can be seen in industries such as warehousing, transportation, service, etc.; but perhaps where it is most glaring is in the railroad industry.

As briefly mentioned earlier 2022 saw a prolonged contract fight between the different railroad craft unions and the National Carriers’ Conference Committee (NCCC)—the modern day cartel of railroad corporations. Of the remaining twelve railroad unions, ten unions came together to bargain as the Coordinated Bargaining Coalition (CBC) in these negotiations. This positive step towards possible amalgamation led to major wage gains in the tentative agreement that was ultimately rejected by the rank and file. Two unions did not join the coalition, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWE) and SMART-MD (Maintenance Division).

Ultimately, the rank-and-file membership would reject the tentative agreement because the NCCC would not address the increasingly dangerous working conditions faced by railroad workers. This would lead to then President Biden invoking provisions of the Railway Labor Act of 1926^[7] which would force so-called “cooling-off periods”, arbitration and eventually lead to Congress and the President forcing the rejected tentative agreement on the railroad workers in December 2022.

Throughout this fight, which actually lasted three years, there was a cross-craft caucus of railroad workers leading the way in organizing the rank and file to fight back against the speed-ups of the railroad cartels. This group, Railroad Workers United (RWU), was the voice of the rank and file throughout this fight. They put a spotlight on the draconian “Hi-Viz” attendance policy being implemented, as well as, the massive cuts to maintenance and speed-ups caused by so-called Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) while the capitalist media claimed the only hold-up was sick days^[8]. The path forward for amalgamation is through rank-and-file caucuses like RWU.

How Can Amalgamation Be Fought For Today?

RWU has consistently passed resolutions calling for coordinated bargaining among the railroad unions; they passed a new resolution in February last year with a new reinvigorated push to unite the railroad unions:

“Whereas, In 2022, the last round of bargaining for the national contract covering over 100,000 railroad workers made headlines around the world, bringing attention to the crisis in the U.S. railroad system and the poor conditions of railroad workers; …

“Whereas, While a coalition of the various railroad unions was formed for the last round of negotiations, unity broke down as individual union officials began to accept tentative agreements based on the inadequate Presidential Emergency Board recommendations …

“Whereas, Very little was done to involve rank-and-file railroad workers in negotiations or mobilize them in actions designed to put pressure on the companies in order to break the deadlock; and

“Whereas, The lack of strike preparation carried out by the unions meant that the companies felt confident in delaying negotiations and not offering any serious improvements …

“Therefore be it resolved RWU calls on rail labor to adopt a new approach for future contract negotiations, one based on real unity of all unions and crafts where no union settles until all unions have a satisfactory agreement, open negotiations with clear communication to the rank and file about progress, and mobilization of the membership for actions to build up a credible strike threat; and

“Be it finally resolved that RWU is calling for and willing to help organize a conference of all members of rail labor committed to discussing, debating, and developing a strategy for an aggressive, united contract campaign going forward into the upcoming round of national handling in freight service.”^[9]

RWU is taking a proactive step towards uniting the railroad craft unions. Actions like these are the only steps forward to ultimately amalgamate the different crafts into one industrial union in the railroad industry.

This latest push towards amalgamation has not come without backlash from the misleaders of the railroad unions. Throughout 2024, several of the unions agreed to individual tentative agreements with several of the individual rail carriers leading to a split in the CBC. There is no doubt that these misleaders of labor saw the growing push from RWU as a threat to their power.

As Foster noted in 1922:

“A more powerful objection to amalgamation, however, than any of the foregoing is one that is never expressed by those holding it; viz, the fear of the higher officials of the craft unions concerned that in the new, more economically operated industrial union they will lose their authority, and probably their very jobs. This fear is by far the most serious hindrance to amalgamation; it always does more to block the fusing of labor organizations than any other factor. Few officials can rise above it.”^[10]

It is clear the struggle to amalgamate the railroad unions is far from over. We must mobilize all possible forces to support RWU in their goals. With this, the railroads are not the only industry where amalgamation is necessary. For example, the Building Trades is another industry in need of a cross-craft rank-and-file movement similar to RWU with the goal of amalgamating the different crafts into one industrial union.

Organizing at Amazon Needs to Amalgamate within a Single Union

While the earlier mentioned organizing victory at the JFK8 Amazon Fulfillment Center was a sign of breakthrough of a budding militant labor movement, the campaign to organize Amazon has been a spotlight on the fragmentation of the labor movement as a whole.

This campaign was launched with a pandemic-era organizing effort by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in Bessemer, Alabama. This campaign was riddled with both organizing mistakes and an all-out assault by Amazon which ultimately led to its defeat in April 2021. As the workers in Alabama were casting their votes, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) JFK8 unionization effort kicked off in Staten Island, followed by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) passing a resolution to organize Amazon at their convention that June. To add to the disarray, multiple unionization efforts were launched after the ALU victory at JFK8, some affiliated with the new ALU, others independent on their own.

What has been the result of this fragmented, disorganized effort to organize Amazon? The answer is simple, nothing has changed for Amazon workers. Foster, when talking about the Steel Workers Organizing Committee’s (SWOC) efforts to organize the steel industry, made it clear how a mass industrial unionization campaign should be national in scope:

“The organization movement must be industrial and national in character. That is … in every steel center, not simply here and there spasmodically in individual mills or steel centers.”^[11]

The solution is clear, the campaign to organize Amazon cannot succeed until it becomes national in character, and not simply a loosely-connected effort in a handful of locations nationwide. Amalgamating these efforts within a single, united union is necessary for this organizing drive to reach its ultimate aim in unionizing Amazon. This process began in June 2024 when ALU members voted to affiliate with the IBT forming Local 1 of the new division of the Teamsters, ALU-IBT.

More still needs to be done as the RWDSU campaign in Bessemer is awaiting a third election, and Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE), an independent union, lost an election at the RDU1 facility in Garner, North Carolina earlier this year and has continued their campaign there. These movements must unite into one united effort to organize Amazon.

The Communist Role in the Struggle for Amalgamation

It is clear that these campaigns mentioned are attempting to move the labor movement in a progressive direction. However, there is something lacking within these movements preventing them from reaching their logical end—an amalgamated and united labor movement. This is where the Communists come in.

Another core part of a major organizing drive, such as what is necessary at Amazon as well as amalgamation of the railroad unions, is discipline. Foster made it clear when again talking about SWOC’s efforts:

“The campaign must develop a strong discipline among the organizers and workers in order to prevent the movement from being wrecked by company-inspired local strikes and other disruptive tendencies. The necessary discipline cannot be attained by issuing drastic orders, but must be based upon wide education work among the rank and file and the development of confidence among them in the cause and ultimate victory of the movement.”^[12]

When looking at the state of the American labor movement since the CIO organizing drives of the 1930s, it is clear the only period in which this necessary discipline existed was the heyday of the CIO. It was Bolshevik discipline and what Foster termed “characteristic Communist clarity” that helped play a decisive role in building a nascent industrial union movement in the 1930s.

[1] Foster, William Z., “Amalgamation or Annihilation”, The Labor Herald, April 1922, p. 6.

[2] Foster, William Z., Railroaders Next Step—Amalgamation; Trade Union Educational League: Chicago, 1922. Available in Selected Works of William Z. Foster, Vol. 1; New Outlook Publishers: Seattle, 2025, p. 40.

[3] Browder, Earl, “Eleven States Demand Amalgamation. What Are You Going to Do About it Mr. Gompers?”, The Labor Herald, December 1922.

[4]Foster, William Z., “The National Railroad Amalgamation Conference in the U.S.A.”, International Press Correspondence, January 23, 1923, Vol.3, No. 9, p. 69.

[5]Ibid., pp. 69-70.

[6]For more on the TUEL’s campaign in the 1920s you can find several pamphlets and articles by Foster in Selected Works of William Z. Foster, Vol. 1; New Outlook Publishers: Seattle, 2025. You can also find the complete collection of TUEL’s The Labor Herald at https://luel.us/publications/the-labor-herald/.

[7] For more on the Railway Labor Act see: Foster, William Z., The Watson-Parker Law: The Latest Scheme to Hamstring Railroad Unionism; Trade Union Educational League: Chicago, 1927.

[8]You can find more on the railroad workers struggles of 2022 here: https://youtu.be/HhjlDc3uKic?si=dGentqGxBW3I8QTo

[9]The full resolution can be found at https://www.railroadworkersunited.org/resolutions.

[10] Foster, Op. Cit., 1922 in Op. Cit., 2025, p 56.

[11] Foster, William Z., Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry; Labor United Educational League: Staten Island, 2025a, p. x.

[12] Ibid.

Editor’s Note: This is the concluding chapter from Comrade Winston’s larger book of the same title.

Does the US Military Economy Help Workers?

It seems paradoxical that the recent avalanche of books and articles portraying the Black condition in the U.S. as that of a colony has been issued by the same monopoly-controlled book and newspaper publishers who use most of the rest of their ideological output to deny the imperialist nature of U.S. state monopoly capitalism.

It seems paradoxical but it is not. This development marks a new state of sophistication in the ideological offensive of U.S. imperialism. The colony theory is particularly useful to the monopolists because it appears to be so radical; in fact, it contains the admission that the oppression of Black people in the U.S. is comparable to colonial oppression in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This emphasis on the intensity of Black oppression gives the colony theory its ring of authenticity.

But this admission of oppression is not as candid (one might even say benign) as it might seem. By promoting the colony theory, the white ruling class aims to define and determine the direction of the Black liberation movement. In yet another form, the monopolists are striving to prevent Black people themselves from defining the specific features that constitute the special oppression they experience.

By analogy, this theory directs attention to those aspects of the Black condition in the U.S. which most closely resemble colonial conditions. These similarities are so powerful that one’s attention may be diverted from what is unique in the status of the triply-oppressed Black peoples in colonial or semi-colonial situations, past or present.

Via the colony analogy, and variations on this unscientific, anti-Marxist theme, U.S. imperialism’s ideologists are trying to influence the Black liberation movement into adopting a self-defeating strategy. While the U.S. “internal Black colony” theory resembles a winning strategy for an oppressed majority living in a colony, it would mean certain defeat for an oppressed minority—which has indeed been the Black condition for more than 350 years in this part of the world.

The supposedly “revolutionary” (even so-called “Marxist”!) books on the colony analogy, now in mass circulation, were written by white radicals who have abandoned the struggle against racism, and by Black radicals who seek rhetorical shortcuts to liberation. By portraying the status of the Black people in the U.S. as a colony, these radicals assist the ruling class’ aim of diverting the Black liberation movement from a winning strategy: one that would advance the self-organization of the Black liberation movement, and simultaneously combine this independent strength with that of allies—the working class, Black, Brown, Yellow, Red and white, together with all the poor and exploited—in a new formation. This is the basis for an anti-monopoly coalition, the only strategy that opens the way to a future without racism, exploitation, poverty or oppression.

Genesis Of the Colony Theory

Among the radicals, Black and white, who have popularized the colony theory are Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Regis Debray, James Foreman, Tom Hayden, Harold Cruse, James Boggs, Stokely Carmichael and Robert L. Allen.

It is ironic that many of these radicals, who claim that Marxism is European in origin and must be revised in order to apply to the Black people in the U.S., advance theories based on revisions of Marxism by such Europeans as Herbert Marcuse, Leon Trotsky and Regis Debray, as well as the Trotsky-like revisions to be found in the “thought” of Mao Zedong.

It was especially under the influence of Marcuse and Maoism that the New Left radicals began to be attracted to one or another pseudo-revolutionary theory, including the concept of an “internal colony” of Black people in the U.S. While Marcuse’s ideas are not identical with “the thought of Mao,” the views of both stimulated anti-Marxist misconceptions of the world revolutionary process, the historic role of the working class and its relationship to the liberation struggles of oppressed people, and the imperative need for strategies based on the specific features and historic development of each country, each working class and each national liberation movement.

During every upsurge in the people’s struggles, especially those of the mainly working-class Black people, there is a more extensive activation of counter-measures designed to sustain disunity and block alliance between Black and white workers, together with the Black people as a whole, against corporate monopoly.

In writing about this, Marcuse is revealed as very much a part of the problem, rather than the solution:

“Contemporary society seems capable of containing social change … [T]he capitalist development has altered the structure and function of these two classes (bourgeoisie and proletariat) in such a way that they no longer appear to be agents of social transformation. An overriding interest in the preservation of the status quo unites the former antagonists in the most advanced areas of contemporary society.”^[1]

Marcuse also makes it clear that his elitist contempt is not limited to the working class:

“Technological controls appear to be the very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests—to such an extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction impossible.”^[2] (my italics—H.W.)

And he spells out even more precisely which “social groups” are included in his elitist contempt in the following quotation:

“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation (!!!—H.W) indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”^[3]

There is, of course, no more truth to Marcuse’s assertion that Ford assembly line workers go to “the same resort places” as the Ford family (except as moonlighting waiters trying to make ends meet!) than to his racist stereotype of the Cadillac-owning Black workers.

It is with such fantasies that Marcuse seeks to convince us that, even though classes have not disappeared, the struggle for class and national liberation has been eliminated because of “the extent to which the needs and satisfactions … of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”

This Alice-in-Wonderland vision of mass satisfaction—instead of mass hatred of exploitation, poverty and racist oppression—forms the core of Marcuse’s “revolutionary” ideology. And his inclusion of Black people among those incapable of “counteraction” is a direct ideological descendant of the racist stereotype of the “happy,” “docile” slave.

It is logical that Marcuse’s contempt of the working class and of Black people be accompanied by hatred of the Soviet Union! The Soviet Union embodies the power of the working class and of formerly oppressed peoples. It is precisely such forces that will end exploitation and racism in the U.S. and internationally.

The Historic Distinction

It is not far-fetched to assert that those influenced by Marcusian ideology—which dismisses the masses, Black and white, as incapable of struggle against racism and exploitation—would be receptive to any theory seeming to offer a “shortcut” to mass struggle.

In the recent period these “shortcuts” took the form of advocating “instant revolution,” “power out of the barrel of a gun,” “urban guerrilla warfare,” etc. However, as this rhetoric became increasingly exposed as a roadblock to mass struggle, the colony theory emerged as a new diversion.

The colony theory, with its radical ring of protest against oppression, has great attraction for radicals on the Left and for advocates of “Black capitalism” on the Right. Although concealed by a rhetorical facade of “colonization,” “under-development,” etc., both these groups can be found on a parallel—or even a common—platform of accommodation to monopoly.

However, those radicals who advance the “Black colony in the U.S.” theory fail to see the historic distinction between the effect of the slave trade on Africa—which altered Africa’s relationships internally and externally and resulted in the colonial subjugation of many African peoples—and the role of slavery within the United States.

The African people transported to slavery within the U.S. became the basis of and impetus for the most rapid rate of original capitalist accumulation in history. Every people, on every continent, has passed through one or another form of slavery in the course of world history. But slavery in the United States was unique: it was the most massive, the most brutal type, because it was directly tied to the capitalist market, to the rise of capitalism. Karl Marx wrote:

“as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labor … are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc. … But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the Negro and sometimes using up of his life in 7 years of labor became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus-labor itself.”^[4]

Many times Marx compared the inhuman exploitation of workers in the textile mills of England and New England in the pre-organization days of the working class with that of the slaves in the South. At the same time, Marx did not confuse analogies in intensity of exploitation with scientific explanations, as do the contemporary advocates of the colony theory. Marx never lost sight of the distinction between the nature and role of exploitation on a directly capitalist basis.

Marx, for instance, quoted this statement from the County Magistrate of Nottingham, which appeared in the London Daily Telegram of January 17, 1860:

“There was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilized world. … Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate. … We declaim against the Virginian and Carolinian cotton-planters. Is their black market, their lash, and their barter of human flesh more detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order that veils and collars may be fabricated for the benefit of capitalists?”^[5]

As Marx demonstrated, the intensity of exploitation—though it required different strategies of struggle—developed for a considerable period of time, in England and the Northern United States, along parallel lines with that of slavery in the Southern United States. Marx quoted the following from a speech of a member of the House of Commons, April 27, 1863:

“The cotton trade has existed for ninety years. … It has existed for three generations of the English race, and I believe I may safely say that during that period it has destroyed nine generations of factory operatives.”^[6]

Then Marx went on to state:

“That which today, e.g., in the State of Massachusetts, until recently the freest State of the North-American Republic, has been proclaimed as the statutory limit of the labor of children under 12, as in England, even in the middle of the 17^th century, the normal working-day of able-bodied artisans, robust laborers, athletic blacksmiths.”^[7]

These are some of the many examples Marx used to show the relationship between the effects of the rise of slavery in the South and the rise of the capitalist mode of production in the North and in England.

But in making these analogies in human misery, Marx—unlike those who now make an analogy between colonial oppression and the oppression of the descendants of slaves in the U.S.—always sought out the specific strategy of liberation of the oppressed and exploited.

For example, the emerging proletariat, still in its unorganized state, suffered inhuman exploitation comparable to that of the slaves in the South. But the development of capitalism opened up the material basis for collective class resistance of the workers; while the slaves, within a different and lower form of production, did not have the objective possibility of carrying out anything except fragmented, though heroic, struggles.

Marx saw that “The establishment of a normal working-day is the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and labourer.”^[8] He saw this as the center and generator of the class struggle. And, along with Frederick Douglass, he was in the forefront of forging the broad strategy to destroy the slave power. He knew that only when the oppressed Blacks became a part of the same mode of production as the other exploited could the class struggle in North America achieve the full collective might of labor with a Black skin joined to labor with a white skin.

And Marx warned that just as the English ruling class used religious and national prejudices to divide the Irish and English working class, the U.S. capitalist class would do all in its power to disfigure and divide the class struggle through racist practices and ideology in order to hold off the day when Black and white labor would lead the struggle against monopoly capital and achieve what Marx’s and Douglass’ strategy achieved in ending the slaveocracy.

A Different Liberation Strategy

Marx recognized that the strategy of struggle under slavery could not be the same as that against capitalist exploitation. And today, despite similarities in oppression, the liberation strategy for the oppressed Black minority in the U.S. cannot be the same as that for a colony. Both, for example, need and would be greatly aided by allies on an international scale; but the Black liberation movement requires first of all a strategy that involves internal allies.

While Marx demonstrated what was similar in the intensity of exploitation under slavery and capitalism, he also showed what was different in the nature of the oppression of the slaves as compared with that of “free” labor. Along with Frederick Douglass, Marx developed a strategy that combined the struggles of slave and “free” labor within the Abolition movement. Because of this strategy, Marx and Douglass were able to combat and overcome weaknesses in the Abolition movement and bring about a broader anti-slavery coalition, resulting in national power strong enough to defeat the slavocracy.

This strategy succeeded because Marx and Douglass distinguished between the condition of the oppressed Blacks in the U.S. and those coming under colonial subjugation in Africa and elsewhere. Despite the similarities in this oppression, Marx and Douglass based their strategy on the specific economic and political developments in the U.S. It was a strategy in which the fate of the slaves was recognized as more immediately tied to that of “free” white labor in the North than to Black people within the African colonies.

In the course of advancing their closely parallel anti-slavery strategies, Marx and Douglass strongly advocated the principle of international solidarity of the oppressed and exploited—while recognizing that each develops under different conditions.

A New Sophistication

The monopoly-controlled publishers have been demonstrating a new sophistication in the books they issue by radical writers on the colony theory and other subjects. But there has also been a spate of materials written, as well as published, by direct representatives of the ruling class, and these, too, display in many cases a new sophistication.

Take, for example, the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which made quite a stir when it was published a few years ago. Popularly known as “The Kerner Report,” it was the work of the commission, headed by former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, which President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed following the 1967 ghetto upsurges in Newark and Detroit.

In substance, this massive report is no different from its predecessors dealing with “civil disorders”; in 600 pages of historical and contemporary material on the Black experience, it avoids any mention of the class source of racist oppression. And the “solutions” offered by the report are also an echo of the past, as the well-known Black scholar Dr. Kenneth B. Clark in effect forecast when he appeared at the hearings of the National Advisory Commission:

“I read that report … of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading a report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’42, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot.”

“I must again in candor say to you members of this commission—it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture re-shown again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, the same inaction.”^[9]

In its class essence, the “Kerner Report,” issued after these hearings, reflects the same state monopoly capital interests as the report of the McCone Commission, which was chaired by John J. McCone, former head of the CIA and currently an official of ITT, the giant conglomerate so actively involved in Wall Street’s and Washington’s efforts to block freedom struggles in Chile and other parts of the world, as well as in this country.

However, there is an interesting difference between the Kerner Report and its predecessors—its “solutions” are presented in a more sophisticated style, even including echoes of the rhetoric used by the radicals who have popularized the “internal colony” theory.

Where the McCone Commission spoke in the language of “law and order” to maintain segregation and racist oppression, the Kerner Report adapts radical concepts for the same purpose, as well as for diverting the mass struggles of the oppressed.

In the hands of the Kerner Commission, the pseudo-revolutionary “Black colony” concept becomes a liberal admonition, a “warning” that the country is divided into “two societies” and that this may become a condition:

“To continue present policies is to make permanent the division of our country into two societies; one Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and outlying areas.”^[10]

The resemblance between this statement and the “Black colony” theory is inescapable: all the radical adherents of this concept also assert that the country is composed of “two societies.”

But two separate societies do not and cannot exist in the United States. The segregation and triple oppression of Black people occur within a single system, a system that locks all forms of class and racist oppression into one society based on the same economy.

The concept of separate societies—whether presented in terms of an “internal colony” or “two societies”—obscures rather than explains the special character of segregation and triple oppression of Black people within the same society, the same economic system dominated by the same racist monopolists who control the lives of the white as well as the Black masses.

Those in the Black liberation movement who advance the idea of “two societies” or an “internal colony” inevitably become attracted to the separatist fantasy of a “Black revolution,” i.e., a revolution without allies; or to the other extreme of the same separatist illusion—”Black capitalism.”

Monopoly’s Role Obscured

The Kerner Report advances the “internal colony” concept of “two societies” in order to promote directly the separatist fantasy of “Black capitalism.” But in doing this it simultaneously feeds illusions about a separatist “Black revolution.” By concealing the special character of Black oppression, the Kerner Report seeks to divert the oppressed from a strategy of liberation as a people within a single economy and a single society.

In pursuing its “two societies” theme, the Commission also projects the fantasy of a “predominantly white and affluent society,” thus obscuring monopoly’s role in the special oppression of Black people as a whole, the super-exploitation of Black workers, and the exploitation of white workers.

In this way, the Commission suggests a complementary fantasy, i.e., that the conditions and class interests of white workers on the GM assembly line are identical with those of the GM Board of Directors and are therefore contradictory to those of their fellow Black workers.

The Kerner Report skillfully uses the “radical” concepts of the advocates of separatism to camouflage its Washington-Wall Street strategy. It exploits the “separate society”—”separate colony” theory in an effort to divert the Black liberation movement with the allurement of the “Black capitalism” fantasy of “ghetto enrichment.” “We believe,” states the Kerner Report, “that the only possible course for America” is a policy “which combines ghetto enrichment with programs designed to encourage integration of substantial numbers of Negroes into society as a whole.”^[11]

When the commission suggests that a “substantial number” (read: a small minority of the Black petty bourgeoisie) be given a limited degree of opportunity outside the ghetto, while the vast majority—offered the illusion of “enrichment” via the fantasy of “Black capitalism”—are to continue to be contained within the ghetto, we can see the link revealed more clearly between the “two societies” and “internal colony” theory and monopoly’s strategy against the Black liberation movement.

For serving the aim of the monopolists, the Black bourgeoisie is offered the myth of ghetto “enrichment,” a euphemism for the permanent segregation and inequality of Black people within the single economy of monopoly capitalism.

The only path for “enrichment” of the people is through a great anti-monopoly formation, with Black and white workers at its center and in its leadership, which—in moving to break the power of monopoly over the total economy—can bring about Black liberation and end poverty and exploitation for all.

The concept of an “underdeveloped,” “colonized” people represents a backward step from the direction taken by Martin Luther King before his death. In fact, such concepts were often advanced as a substitute for King’s increasing orientation on Black workers united with all the exploited and oppressed in struggle against the ruling class.

The programs advanced by those who advocate the “internal colony” and “underdevelopment” concept are not aimed at challenging monopoly through struggle against racism, inequality and poverty. Instead, they offer either the rhetoric of “revolution” or the illusion of “Black capitalism” as alternatives to mass struggle.

Substituting the “underdevelopment” concept for that of struggle against racist oppression and class exploitation is not just a question of semantics. The idea of “underdevelopment” in the ghettos would bury the struggle against racism, poverty and war by obscuring the fact that the oppression of Black people arises directly out of the national economy, which is totally controlled by state monopoly capitalism.

Nixon Exploits the Fantasy

Richard M. Nixon also exploits the fantasy of the Black people determining their own destiny through the perpetuation of ghetto enclaves. In a radio broadcast on March 28, 1968, Nixon stated that it was his aim that the Black people should have power “over their own destinies, the power to affect their own communities… the power that comes from participation in the political and economic processes of society.”

Nixon then went on to make it clear that by “participation in the political and economic processes of society,” he meant the continued exclusion of Black people from equal participation in the economic and political life of this society as a whole. Along with the bourgeois liberals of the Kerner Commission and the “radical” adherents of the “internal colony” idea, Nixon based himself on the “two societies” concept. And upon this false premise he projects his own strategy for the defense of corporate monopoly.

“What we do not need now,” continued Nixon in a broadcast on April 25, 1968, “is another round of unachievable promises of unavailable funds. What we do need is imaginative enlistment of private funds, private energies and private talents, in order to develop the opportunities that lie untapped in our underdeveloped urban heartland.” (my italics—H.W.)

Here, of course, we see how the anti-Marxist concept of Black Americans as a “colonized” people living within “underdeveloped” urban enclaves fits right into Nixon’s racist, imperialist ideology and strategy. This strategy seeks to impose on the Black people a “Nixonized” version of Booker T. Washington’s “self-help” submission to racism, segregation, poverty and inequality. According to this idea, Black people should not demand equal participation in the nation’s total economy, but should instead determine “their own destinies” through “Black capitalism” within the ghettos, shut off from the economy they helped build.

To accept the colony analogy in any form is to allow pseudo-radical theories to condition us to accept imperialist ideology, and thus to submit to monopoly capitalism’s offensive against the Black liberation movement.

Unlike a subjugated people who form a majority within a viable though underdeveloped economy, this country’s Black minority is segregated within the urban ghettos not because of underdevelopment but because of racism and inequality within the most highly developed economy in the capitalist world.

The populations of the so-called “underdeveloped” ghettos in the “urban heartland” of the U.S. are certainly more directly a part of the laboring process of the single developed economy of this country than, for example, many better-off white suburban ghettos of the country.

When Nixon speaks of “unachievable promises and unavailable funds” for Black people, he is simultaneously trying to use the power of the Federal Government to make good his promises to Wall Street to make funds available for imperialist profits and aggression, instead of for the needs of the people.

The true “opportunities that lie untapped” in the urban ghettos consist of maximum mobilization of the Black masses in the struggle for full equality and unrestricted political and economic participation in order equally to share in the highly developed economy built through more than 350 years of Black oppression and super-exploitation.

The Black people in the U.S. will reject the misleading, though radical-sounding, colony analogy because they will not accept permanent inequality in the guise of overcoming “underdevelopment” within the most industrially developed economy in the world. And while rejecting the “tokenism” inherent in the colony theory, the Black people will just as resolutely reject the pseudo-revolutionism that it gives rise to.

The colony theory lends the appearance of nationalist militancy to cover both conservative and “radical” accommodations to state monopoly capitalism—accommodation to new and devious forms of “self-help” which amount to no more than fake alternatives to struggle against the racist oppressors.

Differences Outweigh Similarities

Of course there are many similarities between the oppression of the Black minority in the U.S. and of present and former imperialist-controlled colonies. But in terms of strategy for the Black liberation movement in the U.S., the differences in status outweigh the similarities in oppression.

In colonially-subjugated countries, the people’s movement emerges in the struggle for independence from foreign domination of the country and its economy. When independence is won, the economy of the country, depending on circumstances, comes either under the control of the people or of the national bourgeoisie allied with and accommodating itself to neo-colonialism.

But can the struggle against racist oppression in this country enable either the Black bourgeoisie or the Black masses, a minority within the country, to take control of the state and the economy? Even to ask the question suggests the absurdity of the “Black colony” or “Black capitalism” concept.

Those who use the colonial theory as the basis for advocating “Black capitalism” do so in the hopeless effort to somehow give the word “capitalism” a revolutionary sound. In fact, placing “Black” next to “capitalism” is supposed to cancel out the negatives that people now associate with capitalism. Even to get the ear of the Black masses, any proposed solution to the hard fact of oppression must at least appear to have a revolutionary potential.

At a time when the people’s anti-imperialist movements all over the world—from Hanoi to Santiago—find that even independence does not mean liberation unless a non-capitalist, socialist direction is taken, it is ironic that some in the Black liberation movement who like to consider themselves revolutionary, propose “Black capitalism” as the solution to oppression.

Those who talk of taking over the economy of the ghettos either through “Black revolution” or “Black capitalism” fail to understand the fundamental difference between the position and demands of a colonial people and those of the oppressed Black people in the U.S.

When freed of imperialist control, the colony has the possibility of developing a separate, viable economy on its own territory. But the ghetto enclaves across the country cannot form the basis for a viable economic life apart from the nation’s total economy—either on a capitalist or a socialist basis.

Unlike colonies, the ghettos scattered across the country have no economy and territory that can be separated from the monopoly-controlled economy dominating every nook and cranny of the country, including the ghettos. Moreover, unlike colonies, there are no riches in the form of oil, minerals and agricultural products to be extracted from the ghettos.

Overlooking the history of capitalism in this and other countries, the advocates of “Black capitalism” pursue the illusion that the white monopolists stand ready to share their control of the country’s economy with Black capitalists. This is particularly ludicrous since any would-be Black capitalist can recount the difficulties he faces in even trying to get a petty loan from the Small Business Administration to get his projected business venture off the ground.

Black business has always been marginal even within the ghetto. And capitalism in its present stage takes the form of giant conglomerates that increasingly devour all small business. Any possible “enrichment” for Black business lies not within monopoly’s strategy of perpetuating the ghettos but within a broad all-encompassing people’s strategy—an anti-monopoly movement in which the primary force is the working class, Black, white, Brown, Yellow and Red, together with the organized Black liberation movement as a whole.

Ghettos, Descendants of Slave Quarters

A liberation movement in a colony consists of a majority struggling to take over the economic life of a common territory. But Black liberation in the U.S. cannot be based on a colonial strategy of political independence to be won for a majority within a common territory and a viable economy. The ghettos of this country, despite the intensity of their oppression, are economically and politically unlike a colony. These ghettos are the descendants of the original Southern Slave quarters, and as economic units they are no more viable than were their forerunners on the plantations.

A colony, which always has a common economy and territory, is usually geographically separated from the “mother” country. But whether separated or adjacent, a colony’s economy is detachable from the imperialist country to which it is linked. When we speak of colonial economies, we are talking about diamonds, cocoa, sugar, cotton, bananas, copper, spices, oil, silver, coffee, tin, jute, gold, uranium, tea, nickel—the sources of untold billions in imperialist super-profits. The raw materials of industry and agriculture are found in the colonies—but not on the barren, rubble-littered streets of a U.S. ghetto.

In the colonies, some of the key imperialist investments go into developing mechanized means of transporting the resources of mine and field from the colony to the “mother” country. In U.S. ghettos, such as Watts, the monopolists do not provide even the semblance of adequate human transportation despite the fact that the majority of Black workers have to travel long distances to jobs—if they can get them—outside the ghetto.

In a colony, the agricultural and other raw materials come from a common territory with more than ample scope for development—the consistent hallmark of such colonies is always and everywhere their underdevelopment. Obviously, this underdevelopment cannot be equated with the condition of economic, social and political inequality within the ghettos of the U.S.

Central to a colony’s underdevelopment is the imperialist’s export of capital for the purpose of controlling its resources and economy. No matter how great the extent of imperialist penetration into a colony, imperialism prevents production of the means of production.

As a consequence, many former colonies and semi-independent countries remain underdeveloped and tightly controlled by neo-colonialism except, in today’s context, when and to the degree that they join with the world anti-imperialist forces, with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, break the shackles of neo-colonialism and take the non-capitalist path of development toward socialism.

Are Ghettos Detachable from U.S. Economy?

The people who live and toil in a colony earn their living within that colony. But do the majority of the people of Harlem, Watts, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Chicago’s South Side, etc., earn their living in these ghettos? Are these ghettos geographically separated or detachable from U.S. monopoly capitalism—except in the eyes of those who confuse segregation with economy and geography? Do these ghettos possess fields, mines, oil wells and an economy separate or detachable from the U.S. economy? A colony does have the possibility of providing complete economic, social and political development for its people. But is this possible in a Harlem or a Watts?

Stokely Carmichael claims that it is possible. He equates the barren ghettos with colonies that have provided the raw materials for the super-profits of imperialism. He states:

“The struggle for Black Power in the United States, and certainly around the world, is the struggle to free these colonies from external domination, but we do not seek merely to create communities where black rulers replace white rulers, controlling the lives of black masses and where black money goes into a few black pockets. We want to see it go into the communal pocket.”^[12]

Carmichael’s rhetoric about “black money” going into the “communal pocket” contributes nothing to the struggle to put money into the pockets of unemployed, underemployed and underpaid Black masses. That requires a different strategy.

In equating U.S. ghettos with colonies, Carmichael also distorts the meaning of Black power. He equates the strategy of Black liberation with that of colonial peoples fighting for independence and liberation. Despite his radical rhetoric, what Carmichael proposes closely parallels the “Black capitalism” myth of “enrichment” within the ghetto advanced by Nixon and other advocates of segregation and inequality.

That Carmichael’s program is camouflaged as “communal” instead of capitalist does not conceal its accommodation to racism and oppression; power and liberation for the Black people cannot be won via a separatist “strategy” based on the illusion that they can be found within the confines of the ghetto.

When we talk about power, we are talking about political power—the shift of power from one class to another. The Civil War resulted in the change of power from the slave-owners to the rising capitalist class. Today the monopoly capitalist class controls the total economy of the United States. Therefore, all talk of self-determination in the ghetto is a fraud. And this certainly includes the concept—called “Ujamaa”—advanced by Imamu Amiri Baraka:

“Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)—To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit together from them.”

Baraka offers not a strategy for Black liberation but a recipe for bourgeois nationalist accommodation to the white ruling class against the interests of the Black people. The Black bourgeoisie will share in the limited Black market, while the mass of the Black people are diverted from the wider anti-monopoly struggles for equality and jobs—that is, for jobs where, as and if they can be found, outside the ghetto.

An Indivisible Part of National Economy

If the possibility of a separate economy for Black people in the U.S. ever existed, it was before Southern agriculture was transformed into large-scale capitalist agriculture. With the massive penetration of monopoly capital throughout the South, any possibility whatsoever for a separate economy disappeared. The area of the former Black majority in the South became an indivisible part of the total national economy, in which Wall Street, not cotton, is king.

In the period between the betrayal of Reconstruction and the end of World War II, while the majority of the former slaves worked the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers—a serf-like condition somewhere between chattel slavery and wage labor—the economy of the South was gripped in a process of dual development. Though coming more and more within the orbit of the national economy, the South—and especially the area of continuing Black majority—still retained aspects of differentiation from the country’s total economy. The pattern of economic development in the area of Black majority was until recently neither fully separate nor identical with the national economy.

It was in the period when the South’s dual process of development had not yet brought its economy fully into the national pattern of monopoly control, and along with it the shifting of the former Black majority to the urban ghettos, that the Communist Party was organized. It developed from the Left forces within the old Socialist Party and the Left forces that emerged from the struggles of Black people in the post-World War I era.

A central difference between the Left and the Right in the old Socialist Party was the rejection by the founders of the Communist Party of the anti-Marxist, simplistic denial of the special character of racist oppression in the U.S. While the Communist Party saw from its inception that the struggle against racist oppression was part of the class struggle, it also recognized that Blacks were oppressed as a people and that labor with a white skin and labor with a Black skin could not be free unless the special demands of the triply oppressed Black people were put at the center of the struggle for progress and socialism.

At that time the Communists based their approach to Black liberation on an analysis of this continuing duality in Southern development. In October, 1930, the following resolution was adopted at a Congress of the Communist International, describing this duality and its significance for the Black people:

“It is not correct to consider the Negro zone of the South as a colony of the United States. Such a characterization of the Black Belt could be based in some respects only upon artificially construed analogies, and would create superfluous difficulties for the clarification of ideas. In rejecting this estimation, however, it should not be overlooked that it would be none the less false to try to make a fundamental distinction between the character of national oppression to which the colonial peoples are subjected and the yoke of other oppressed nations. Fundamentally, national oppression in both cases is of the same character, and is in the Black Belt in many respects worse than in a number of actual colonies. On one hand the Black Belt is not in itself, either economically or politically, such a united whole as to warrant its being called a special colony of the United States. But on the other hand, this zone is not, either economically or politically, such an integral part of the whole United States as any other part of the country.”

This analysis was made at a time when the duality in the South’s development had not yet culminated in the changes which would eventually wipe out the main differential between its economy, with its huge Black majority territory, and that of the rest of the country. At that time the Communist party adopted a program calling for the right of self-determination in the area of Black majority in the South, but even then the Party placed the primary, immediate emphasis in every struggle, North and South, on the fight for full equality.

Some may feel there is room for differences on whether the Party was correct in adopting the program of the right to self-determination in the Black Belt—a policy it discarded after the South’s economy had become an integral, undetachable part of the total economy of state monopoly capitalism. This basic change in the South’s economy was accompanied by a fundamental shift in Black/white population ratios in the South, one that above all meant the reduction of the former Black majority in the 189 counties comprising the Black Belt. In turn, this transformed the existence of the majority of the Black people from agrarian to urban in character.

But when the Communist Party advanced the slogan of the right of self-determination, the circumstances were fundamentally different from those of today. By contrast, adherents of the “Black colony” theory continue to advance the idea of self-determination when it no longer has even the semblance of relationship to present-day economic and political reality. As a result, the colony analogy has given rise to distorted, anti-Marxist variations of the slogan of self-determination sometimes in the form of “Black capitalism,” sometimes as “revolutionary” self-determination in the scattered ghettos of the country.

Of course there are profound historic differences be­tween earlier periods when the Communist Party advanced the slogan of the right of self-determination and today when, among the adherents of the “Black colony” theory some can be found advocating a conservative, some a “revolutionary” form of self-determination. The reasons are many.

For one, the area of Black majority in the South is gone. Yet even more important than this change are the basic economic and political differences underlying the shift of the Black majority from the rural South to the big urban ghettos—North, South, East and West. This mass population shift, literally involving millions, reflects a transformation in the class composition of the overwhelming majority of the oppressed Black people.

From a predominantly agrarian population constituting a majority in a vast contiguous Black Belt and plantation area, the oppressed Black people, goaded by hunger and fleeing oppression, have been transformed in their overwhelming majority from peasants to proletarians—suffering new forms of super-exploitation and racist discrimination within the total national economy under the control of corporate monopoly.

It was in this context that James E. Jackson, a leader of the Communist Party, wrote:

“The objective factors operating in relation to the Negro people in the United States are working not in the direction of national insularity or separate development of its nationhood.”^[13]

Contrast with the Status of Puerto Rico

One need only contrast the status of the people of Puerto Rico and their relationship to U.S. imperialism with that of the oppressed Black people to expose the fallacy of the “internal colony” analogy.

While the analogy suggests some of the common features of oppression, it conceals the fundamentally different position of Afro-Americans from that of Puerto Ricans within the system of U.S. monopoly oppression. As a result, it obscures the basically different strategy and demands required by the Black liberation movement in the U.S. compared to the Puerto Rican or other independence movements against neo- or semi-colonial rule.

The people of Puerto Rico occupy a territory in which they are a majority. Puerto Rico’s economy, now linked to and dominated by U.S. imperialism, is—as was Cuba’s—detachable from the U.S. economy. And the first demand of the Puerto Rican people—like that of the Cuban struggle, which opened the way for national and social liberation—is for political independence: Puerto Rico is forcibly kept within the orbit of U.S. monopoly capitalism under the so-called “Commonwealth” formula. This demand for political independence represents the starting point of the Puerto Rican strategy for sovereign control of Puerto Rico, its economy and government.

The bourgeois nationalists of Puerto Rico, however, continue to oppose political independence. To the demand for independence, they counterpose the myth of Puerto Ricans jointly determining their future with the U.S. within the “Commonwealth.”

It is interesting in this connection to see what Lenin wrote concerning radicals in his time who misunderstood the meaning of the right to self-determination:

“Our Polish comrades like this last argument, on joint determination instead of self-determination; so much that they repeat it three times in their theses! … All reactionaries and bourgeois grant to nations forcibly retained within the frontiers of a given state the right to ‘determine jointly’ their fate in a common parliament.”^[14]

And today we see how the position of the Puerto Rican bourgeois nationalists merges with that of U.S. imperialism; for Puerto Rico—which has its own separate economy on the common territory occupied by the Puerto Rican people—the monopolists do not fear to offer the “right” to “determine jointly” with the U.S. Congress the fate of that country.

Any formula for so-called joint control of Puerto Rico is a fraud, a one-way street. The Puerto Rican liberation movement is not out for joint control or participation in the U.S. economy in any form—it is demanding an end to so-called joint control of its economy.

In Puerto Rico, the Puerto Ricans constitute more than a majority—apart from the handful of representatives of U.S. imperialism, they make up the entire population. On the other hand, the Black liberation movement represents a minority which seeks equality in determining the economic and political life of the U.S. But the ruling class does all in its power here to prevent, to stifle, to block the right of Black people to determine, “jointly” or otherwise, or even to share in the economy of this country along with all other segments of the oppressed and impoverished.

Of course, the oppressed and exploited within the U.S. do not have the objective of even becoming “partners” in a joint enterprise with U.S. imperialism! The task of the majority of the people of all races and backgrounds, under the leadership of Black and white workers, is to break the power of monopoly over the government and the economy. It is this anti-monopoly struggle—which cannot be waged by the Black minority alone, but only in unity with the non-Black majority—that alone can bring about joint power to the people and control of the economy.

U.S. imperialism uses and has always used its economic and military power to oppose self-determination in Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Chile and the other countries throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America where the people have in some degree their own separate economies. Ironically, it is this same U.S. imperialism that deliberately fosters every form of separatist fantasy for Black people, including “self-determination” for a people who have no common territory or separate economy but whose population on the contrary is dispersed in more than 160 major urban ghettos around the country. The same U.S. monopolists who propose “joint control” of Puerto Rico with the Puerto Ricans offer Black people the trap of “self-determination” in ghettos where that is impossible—either in the form of “Black capitalism,” Baraka’s “cooperative economics” or Carmichael’s “communal” concept.

Black liberation in the U.S. calls for a strategy the exact opposite of Puerto Rican and other liberation movements outside the U.S. In colonial and dependent countries, the people’s aim is to break the links that artificially tie their economies to imperialism. A liberating strategy for Black Americans does not involve a break with the U.S. economy, but instead must aim at overcoming forcible exclusion of Black people from their rightful participation in the U.S. economy: The goal here is for full equality within the total economy.

Thus, James E. Jackson wrote:

“The path of development of the Negro people toward individual and national equality does not take the route of struggle for national independence and political-geographical sovereignty and statehood. The Negro people in the United States historically, now, and most probably for the future, seek solutions to its national question in struggle for securing equality of political, economic and social status.”^[15]

The fact that Black people were forcibly transported to this country and held in chattel slavery for over two centuries should not be allowed to obscure the specific reality of the Black condition in the U.S. today, which has been transformed into the opposite of what it was in the past. Today, instead of being forcibly attached to the economy, Black people are increasingly excluded from it by racist discrimination and underemployment. The only path to liberation is through resistance to the forces that now forcibly separate, segregate and exclude Afro-Americans from full equality within the total economy.

Revolution Proceeds in Its Own Way

Lenin wrote, “One must understand the changes and growth of every revolution. The revolution proceeds in its own way in every country.”^[16] And on another occasion, Lenin declared that “different nations are advancing in the same historical direction, but by very different zigzags and bypaths.”^[17]

For colonial peoples, liberation starts with rejection of the myth that their fate can be determined “jointly” within the framework of the tight controls that link it to the U.S. economy. For the Black people in the U.S., on the other hand, liberation is realizable only on the basis of overcoming exclusion and inequality through an anti-monopoly movement, in which the Black people and all who are exploited by the common corporate enemy seek to establish joint control of the country’s economy. It is within such a revolutionary process that Black people will gain full and equal participation in the entire economy, and equality of representation in all aspects of the social, political, economic and governmental life of the country.

The ideology of separatism, of determining “Black destiny” on a go-it-alone path—rejecting united action with non-Black opponents of monopoly power—is in today’s context equivalent to the idea of emigration to Canada or Africa counterposed by some as an alternative to Douglass’ strategy of forming an anti-slave power coalition—the strategy which did ultimately bring an end to chattel slavery.

This becomes most apparent when one considers the parallelism between the separatist ideology of Imamu Amiri Baraka and the racism of George Wallace—a contemporary version of the pre-Civil War parallelism between Black emigrationism and the American Colonizing Society, formed by slavery-supporting antecedents of George Wallace for the ostensible purpose of returning slaves to Africa. However, the real purpose of the American Colonization Society was not to abolish but reinforce slavery by stimulating separatist tendencies aimed at bringing about the withdrawal of Black people from the emerging Black and white majority movement against the slave power.

Today there is a coincidence between the Baraka and the Wallace stand on busing—but for both it is a false issue. Nixon, Wallace and Baraka have demagogically inflated this issue at a time when less than 3% of busing is used to alleviate school segregation. Wallace and Baraka are well aware that busing is only a small part of the school segregation question, but each has his own separate but parallel ideological and political motives for opposing it.

Wallace exploits the busing issue in order to serve the pro-fascist forces of monopoly capital, who aim at preventing the unity of Black and white—especially of Black and white labor—by vastly intensifying the ideology and patterns of racism. Baraka’s opposition to busing is related to his strategy of exploiting every issue in order to promote the ideology and politics of separatism, of withdrawal from the struggle against the racist monopolists Wallace serves.

Separatism also distorts the meaning of valid features of the struggle for Black liberation. For instance, all varieties of separatist ideology, including Baraka’s and Carmichael’s, equate “community control” and Black institutions with liberation. Black institutions and control of communities in which Black people constitute a majority are a vital part of the struggle for liberation. But Black liberation can develop only as a part of a wider struggle for “national control” over the economic and political life of the entire country, a struggle which cannot be carried out by Black people alone.

There is no realistic basis for the Black people determining their lives through a strategy limiting the struggle to “community control”—which is but one of the key starting points in the struggle to take national control out of the hands of the monopoly power.

There are some, however, who will admit that “self-determination” in the ghettos is impossible—but who nevertheless entertain an equally unrealistic view: by expanding the idea of community control to Black control of a separate state, these forces maintain that the concept of Black separatism would then become a viable instead of an illusory one.

However, the reality of the matter is that the shift of national power from the monopoly oppressors to the people calls for a wider strategy in which the self-action of the Black minority becomes a vital, independent part of the total struggle in alliance with the non-Black majority against the common enemy.

Baraka Exploits the Views of Nyerere and Senghor

While radicals such as James Boggs, Stokely Carmichael and James Foreman falsely attach a “Marxist” label to their variations on the theme of separatism, Imamu Amiri Baraka, an openly anti-Marxist bourgeois nationalist, exploits the views of Julius K. Nyerere and Leopold Sedar Senghor to advance his divisive separatist aims. For instance, in calling for “Ujamaa, collective or cooperative economics,” Baraka says it is the “’traditional’ way of distributing wealth for the Black man.” But, he points out, “Ujamaa is not, as it has been said, ’African Socialism.’ Ujamaa has always been the African attitude towards the distribution of wealth … It has never been a European attitude, but rather a theory. Can you get it?” (See Julius Nyerere’s paper Ujamaa in Uhuru na Umoja). Italics in the original.

Baraka uses the “outer forms” of African tradition in order to mystify—i.e., to conceal his adherence to capitalism in both Africa and the United States. There are differences as well as similarities in Nyerere’s conception of Ujamaa as “African socialism” and Baraka’s Ujamaa as “collective or cooperative economics.”

Even a cursory examination of Nyerere’s views reveals that when he refers to “African Socialism,” he is really talking about African capitalism:

“In the individual, as in the society, it is an attitude of mind which distinguishes the socialist from the non-socialist. It has nothing to do with the possession or non-possession of wealth… The basic difference between a socialist society and a capitalist society does not lie in their methods of producing wealth, but in the way that wealth is distributed.”^[18]

In the traditional African society, Nyerere states:

“Both the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ individual were completely secure. … Nobody starved, either of food or of human dignity, because he lacked personal wealth; he could depend on the wealth possessed by the community of which he was a member. That was socialism. That is socialism … Socialism is essentially distributive. Its concern is to see that those who sow reap a fair share of what they sow.”^[19]

Nyerere equates the early, classless African tribal society with the present day. But today there is no “traditional” or “third” way for countries that have broken the external chains of imperialism: they must take either a capitalist or non-capitalist path. Those who take the path of capitalism become involved in submission to new forms of imperialist domination.

On the other hand, those countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America which take the non-capitalist path and move toward socialism—are able to consolidate independence and insure liberation on the basis of internal socialist development and with the solidarity and support of the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, together with the worldwide anti-imperialist forces of class and national liberation.

When Nyerere says that “Socialism is essentially a distributive system,” he reveals his hesitancy to break with the internal and external opponents of scientific socialism for his country, Tanzania. Socialism is based on abolition of capitalist control of the means of production. Nyerere’s so-called “distributive system” would imply simply to allow the means of production to remain in the hands of a developing capitalist class. He makes this very clear when he says:

“Just as the Elder, in our former society was respected for his age and his service to the community, so, in our modern society, this respect for age and service will be preserved. And in the same way as the ‘rich’ Elder’s apparent wealth was really only held by him in trust for his people, so, today, the apparent extra wealth which certain positions of leadership may bring to the individuals who fill them, can be theirs only insofar as it is a necessary aid to the carrying out of their duties.”^[20]

This, of course, is Nyerere’s rationale for denying the development of classes. In the meantime the new bourgeoisie are gaining control of the economy of Tanzania. For Nyerere, these newly rich Tanzanians are not capitalist exploiters. They are the “Elders,” the preservers of the ancient traditions of African “communal” society.

In exploiting Nyerere, Baraka calls for “the African attitude toward the distribution of wealth” in monopoly-controlled United States. His purpose is to divert the mass struggle against the class controlling the means of production—which, in the United States, means the monopolies, who control the entire economy.

But for Baraka, monopoly control is irrelevant. In effect, he calls for submission to instead of struggle against monopoly. He would pacify the Black liberation movement with the fantasy of an “African attitude towards the distribution of wealth”—which could mean only the continued distribution of poverty instead of jobs to the ghetto millions.

Baraka’s concept of “race” and a “nation” is also based on exploiting Senghor’s ideology of Negritude. In Senegal, Senghor’s ideology of Negritude is turned into an instrument for enrichment of a tiny minority and of accommodation to new forms of colonialism. In the U.S., the role of Baraka, who exploits the ideology of Negritude, reveals that all forms of separatism—whether his own “militant” rightist variety or one or another “leftist” variation—serve to separate, to divert the Black working class from leadership of the liberation movement.

There is a profound difference in the objective role of Nyerere and Senghor, and that of Baraka, despite the fact that Baraka, for his own purposes, seeks to project himself in the image of the views of these two African statesmen.

Both Nyerere and Senghor, though inconsistently, operate within the framework of the struggles for the independence of their own, and of all African countries. On the other hand Baraka’s role is to subordinate the Black Liberation Movement in the U.S. to the aims of bourgeois nationalist accommodation to racist monopoly at home—and to the new phase of U.S. imperialism’s neo-colonialist strategy against African liberation.

Baraka plays with the symbols of Africa’s past, adapting them to his own separatist aims in order to evade the substance of the Black condition and the imperative of an anti-monopoly strategy for Black liberation in the U.S.

However, the majority of Afro-Americans long ago decided that their roots and rights were second to none in this country.

Even before Frederick Douglass challenged separatist concepts, strong opposition appeared to such tendencies, expressing what is to this day the main thrust of the struggles and aspirations of the Black majority. As early as January, 1817, James Forten organized a protest meeting to combat separatist influences among his people, and to oppose the American Colonization Society. This meeting, held at the Bethel Church in Philadelphia, adopted the following resolution:

“Whereas, our ancestors (not by choice) were the first successful cultivators of the fields of America, we, their descendants, feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessing of her luxuriant soil, which their blood enriched, and that any measure or system of measures, having a tendency to banish us from her bosom, would not only be cruel, but in direct violation of those principles which have been the boast of this Republic.”^[21]

The resolution then went on to make it unmistakably clear that all forms of separatism were contrary to the interests of the majority of oppressed Blacks:

“Resolved that we will never separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country; they are our brethren by ties of consanguinity, suffering and wrong; and we feel there is more virtue in suffering with them, than fancied advantages for the season.”^[22]

Forten believed that “any tendency” separating Black people from a strategy to win full equality within the “bosom” of the country’s economy was contrary to the aspirations of the Black majority. This was underscored a few months later at another protest meeting organized by Forten, which adopted a resolution written by him, stating:

“Let not a purpose be assisted which will stay the cause of the entire abolition of slavery and which may defeat it altogether, which proffers to those who do not ask for them benefits, but which they consider injuries, and which must insure to the masses, whose prayers can only reach us, misery, suffering and slavery.”^[23]

The principles advocated by Forten, and later by Frederick Douglass, are still applicable. They need only be adapted to today’s total industrial economy, which has been “enriched” by the blood of Forten’s and Douglass’ ancestors and descendants. Today, the extension of these principles means that “any measure or system of measures, having a tendency to banish” the Black people from full and equal participation in the national economy would indeed mean offering “to those who do not ask for them benefits, but which they consider injuries.”

As others said to the separatists of today: “Let not the purpose be assisted which will stay the cause” of the formation of a great new people’s challenge to the common enemy—the monopolist descendants of the slave power. This is the strategy for today’s Black agenda—the strategy for Black liberation.

[1] Quoted in an article by Graubard, Allen, in Beyond the New Left; McCall Publishing Co.: New York, 1970, pp. 147-148.

[2] Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man; Beacon Press: Boston, 1966, p. 9.

[3] Ibid., p. 8.

[4] Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. l; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1974, pp. 227-228.

[5] Ibid., pp. 233-234.

[6] Ibid., p. 267.

[7] Ibid., p. 271.

[8] Ibid., p. 270.

[9] Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Bantam Books, New York, 1968, p. 483.

[10] Ibid., p. 22.

[11] Ibid., p. 24.

[12] Carmichael, Stokely, Stokely Speaks; Vintage Books: New York, 1971, p. 87.

[13] Jackson, James E., Theoretical Aspects of the Negro Question in the U.S., February 1959, p. 11.

[14] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, Vol. 22; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1974, p. 322.

[15] Jackson, Op. Cit., 1959, p. 10.

[16] Lenin, V.I. Collected Works, Vol. 28; Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974a, p. 123.

[17] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, Vol. 29; Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1974b, p. 195.

[18] Nyerere, Julius K., Freedom and Unity/Uhuru Na Umoja; Oxford University Press: London, 1967, pp. 162-163.

[19] Ibid., p. 164.

[20] Ibid., p. 168.

[21] Forten, Charlotte L., The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, Macmillan Co., New York, 1967, p. 15.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., p. 16.

The State of the Left

In December 2024, a United Healthcare CEO was assassinated by a lone gunman. Much of the public in America did not react with remorse, but instead shared their frustrations with the state of healthcare in this country; stories of denied claims, expensive bills that cause many families to go into debt, and overall lack of quality care. It is understandable that in the wake of such an act that many Americans would express indifference. The ultra-left, in their typical “super-revolutionary” fashion, proceeded to applaud the vigilante proclaiming that we need to replicate this same scenario for every CEO. In doing so, many so called “communists” and anarchists fall victim to what Gus Hall expresses as “petty-bourgeois radicalism”.

In Gus Hall’s “The Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism”, the former CPUSA General Secretary breaks down the logic of the ultra-left:

“Thus the very premise of petty-bourgeois radicalism is that it is impossible to win the working class in the struggle against capitalism. From this it follows that mass concepts of struggle are not possible, necessary or realistic. This leads to actions based on small elite groups––or to individual action. Because this concept is not concerned with winning over masses, it promotes and condones actions that alienate masses. There is an inner logic to this path. Specific actions are taken because there is a lack of confidence in mass–in class–actions. These ill-considered actions result in widening the gap between the petty-bourgeois radical movements and the masses. This widening gap then becomes ‘proof’ that you cannot win masses and therefore the line of conduct of these movements is justified. Each step leads to a further isolation. This is the inner logic of petty-bourgeois radicalism.”^[1]

The ultra-left have shown a fetishization with “action” in the form of terrorism that does not progress the working class struggle, but instead hampers it. Their lust for adventurism blinds them to the serious, consistent, and stubborn work that must be done on a daily basis to win the working class over to the side of the Communists.

In America, the surge of individuals towards leftist beliefs began around 2016 when Social-Democrat Bernie Sanders ran for president on a platform calling for many progressive reforms to the healthcare system, transportation, workers’ rights, etc. What naturally happened with his defeat (and the Democrats’ loss to Donald Trump) was a leftward swing among those in the center left. Many were seeking a more concrete solution to society’s ails, which led many to discover Marxism for the first time.

The death of Gus Hall in 2000 left a vacuum in the American Marxist-Leninist camp as the party adopted anti-Sovietism and Social Democratic views. Until the People’s School for Marxist-Leninist Studies formation in 2016 by the Party of Communists USA (PCUSA), there was effectively no party providing a dialectical outlook in the United States. Naturally, this caused many on the left to fall into either the Maoist/Trotskyist or Anarchist tendencies which comprise the bulk of the ultra-left.

While the ultra-left may disagree on issues such as the State, they make up for it in uniting on tactics and their general disdain for any organizing beyond super-revolutionary cliques and slogans. This is evident in Maoists and Anarchists adoption of what Henry Winston would call the “transference of strength”:

“Lenin long ago exposed the anti-Marxist, anarchist nature of such views. In one of his 1902 Iskra articles, Lenin quoted the following from a Socialist Revolutionary leaflet:

“‘Every terrorist blow, as it were, takes away part of the strength of the autocracy and transfers all this strength to the side of the fighters for freedom.’ Such a theory, Lenin said, ‘turns upside down, not only all past experience, but all common sense as well.’ He said further: ‘we know from the past and see in the present that only new forms of the mass movement or the awakening of new sections of the masses to independent struggle really rouses a spirit of struggle and courage in all.’^[2]

“As Lenin pointed out, strength cannot be transferred. It develops out of involvement in mass struggle, for which there is no substitute. Mass struggle generates greater and greater unity, strength and consciousness as the science of socialism is more and more closely linked to the struggles by the Party of the working class.”^[3]

What we are witnessing is a repeat of mistakes that revolutionaries have already experienced and adapted our theory through scientific process. The ultra-left (Maoists and Trotskyists specifically) claim to be the next “heirs of Lenin” and can’t be bothered to understand his disapproval of economic terrorism, instead fanning away criticism as “liberalism” or no longer applying to the current situation. Their claim that the Marxist-Leninist theory, advanced by Comrades Lenin and Stalin, is no longer applicable is thinly veiled anti-Sovietism wrapped up in revolutionary vigor.

In the 20^th Century, the CPUSA was able to withstand right opportunism and ultra-leftism in their theoretical struggle. Led by General Secretary Gus Hall and National Chair Henry Winston, the party gave American Communists an unbreakable foundation to understanding Marxism-Leninism and how it applied to America. Most prominently, the theory of the anti-monopoly coalition led by the working class, which is now at the forefront of the tactics utilized by the PCUSA. In his book, Working Class USA: The Power and the Movement, Hall says:

“Those who would reject the anti-monopoly concept proceed from two lines of argument. The first of these downgrades and discards the democratic struggle, and calls for a ‘pure’ revolutionary strategy —an ‘anti-capitalist’ or ‘anti-imperialist’ strategy. It pits these ‘revolutionary’ strategies against the allegedly ‘non-revolutionary’ anti-monopoly strategy. It is adherence to such a ‘non-revolutionary’ strategy, say these upholders of ‘pure’ revolution, that makes the Party itself a conservative, no longer revolutionary organization. They refuse to see the interrelationship of the democratic anti-monopoly struggle and the revolutionary struggle for socialism.

“Views of this kind distort the attitude of Communists toward the democratic movement. ‘Theoreticians’ of this brand maintain that Communists call for postponing the struggle for socialism until the democratic struggles are won. But this is sheer nonsense. The fact is that the development of the anti-monopoly coalition as a political force is impossible without the development of a powerful Left, without simultaneously advancing the class consciousness of the workers and building a socialist-conscious contingent within their ranks. The very process of radicalization is the necessary foundation for developing the anti-monopoly movement.”^[4]

The ultra-left today removes the rich history of the CPUSA and the American Communist movement, opting for theories of national nihilism (“America is a settler colonial state”) and that America is ultimately doomed with no redemption. They see the United States and ultimately the working class of this country as nothing more than “settlers”, who must be sent back to their country of heritage, even those who were born here and have been here for generations. This is not to excuse the history of America, the genocide of the Native Americans, the enslavement of Black people, etc. but the ultra-left have fallen into a trap of attempting to turn back time and right all wrongs by claiming the working class is “labor aristocracy” while glorifying sections of the lumpen-proletariat. In doing so, they continue to capitulate to reactionary forces in this country. The “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement in America is one such iteration that uses patriotism and American pride as a tool against the non-white sections of the working class and pushes xenophobic and racist rhetoric, effectively splitting the working class among color lines. The ultra-left commit the same error, instead opting to exclude white workers. In Strategy for a Black Agenda, Henry Winston comments on what he calls a “suicidal skin strategy”:

“Differences in skin color are used by monopoly capital to create and perpetuate division between the white majority and the Black minority in the United States, a division that originated not in differences of skin color, but from a different system—slavery—which was grafted onto the rising capitalist system.

“This different system was the basis for developing the differential in the nature, intensity and character of the special oppression and exploitation of Black people as compared to the white masses.

“But today the Black minority and the white majority are no longer separated by different economic systems. Now only the power of monopoly-fostered racism maintains disunity between Blacks and whites, and perpetuates discrimination against and super-exploitation of the Black minority.”^[5]

Ultimately, much of the left today refuse to do the substantial amount of work required to propel the working class into a revolutionary situation required to transition the United States into Socialism. Instead, many have opted to spending hours on social media, creating and dispensing memes proclaiming we need revolution now. The problem compounds when those sharing “revolutionary” propaganda online have no party education, are not cadre in any party, and have a grasp of Marxist theory based only on a small handful of books they have read, but are the ones claiming to have the most accurate positions. This then leads to people who are newer to Marxist theory being exposed solely to ultra-left views as well as driving away those who could be won over, but are now alienated and given a bad impression of the left. The reality is, none of them are to be found on the factory floors, in the trade unions, building working class consciousness and unity. As Gus Hall also said in Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism: “It is a way of keeping a radical image when in fact one has retreated and given up the struggle.”

History of the American Communist Movement

Henry Winston, in Strategy for a Black Agenda addresses one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century, the alliance of the CIA and Maoist groups against their common enemy, the Soviet Union and the working-class movement around the world. The CIA had found the use for these Left-Wing adventurists in order to dismantle an “anti-imperialist, internationalist [working class] strategy with a bourgeois nationalist policy, dividing and thereby weakening the struggle against oppression.” [find from SFBA]

In South Africa, the anti-apartheid movement that was led by the African National Congress (ANC) inspired by Nelson Mandela was set-back due to the reckless, individualistic actions of the separatist Maoist formation of the Pan African Congress (PAC).

The PAC was headed by a South African trade unionist linked with the C.I.A, and had the support of anti-Soviet, Maoist intellectuals like George Padmore. Padmore had the support of the so-called International Free Trade Unions, whose operations were financed by the C.I.A.

With Padmore’s encouragement, this group returned to South Africa, supported by the Chinese Maoists. The group’s first aim was to subvert the ANC’s revolutionary program. The members joined the ANC with the intention to influence it with its separatist, gun-toting, “revolutionary” ideology and organized the Pan-African Congress. The group formally became the PAC as a split off from the African National Congress in 1968.

Winston in “South Africa: Neo-Pan Africanism and Maoism”goes into how the PAC members sabotaged the leadership of the ANC by promoting their adventurist protests in front of police stations in Sharpeville, South Africa:

“The ‘leaders’ of the Pan Africanist Congress, who called the people to the police stations in the name of ‘Congress,’ were serving the apartheid rulers through a strategy directed against the liberation movement. They undermined unity and diverted the people’s forces from a realistic action under conditions of fascist terror, [emphasis ours—Ed.] which the ANC had set to begin the March 31 Anti-Pass National Work stoppage—an action aimed at confronting the regime with the mass unity of the people. By calling upon the people to appear at the fascist police stations, the PAC provocateurs were not only signaling to the fascist regime that the united front of the liberation movement had been breached—in addition, by deceitfully calling this separate action they trapped an unarmed people into a direct confrontation with armed, strong points of South African fascism. Even now [in 1972 when this was written], in the new stage of guerilla warfare led by the African National Congress, this would be sheer adventurism! Clearly, the Sharpeville massacre could not have taken place except as a direct result of the PAC ‘leaders’ splitting of the liberation movement deliberately misleading the people.”^[6]

The adventurist’s protest of the PAC put Nelson Mandela and others into prison and impeded the struggle against apartheid. But despite the hindrance of the PAC’s one-day strike in Sharpeville and the massacre that happened afterwards, the ANC was continuing to gain popularity. While the PAC was falling apart due to infighting and disunity within their organizations, the late 70s and 80s marked a turning point for the fight to end the racist regime in South Africa.

Winston mentions that there was a United Front effort that included the armed-resistance against the fascist apartheid coinciding with the peace movement. That was a possibility due to the coordinated effort of the ANC. Winston continues:

“The recent strikes of African workers in mines, factories and on the docks are an historically necessary, revolutionary part of the mobilization of masses for ever-higher levels of struggle for liberation in South Africa. One reason why this mass action takes the form today of direct strikes as compared to the ANC’s stay-away-from-work day—an equally revolutionary tactic in an earlier period—is the difference in the present level of struggle. [emphasis ours—Ed.)

“The strikes are taking place against a background of developing armed struggles led by the African National Congress of South Africa and by organizations of the liberation movements in Rhodesia and Portuguese-occupied areas. The armed struggles are adding to the people’s unity and confidence in all forms of struggle—and intensifying the crisis of white minority rule in South Africa and other countries.

“These armed struggles are directed at the most vulnerable points of fascist rule, while in contrast, when the neo-Pan-African misleaders called upon unarmed people to attack the police strong points, the armed struggle had not even begun.”^[7]

What should be apparent by Winston’s analysis is that the PAC wreckers started an isolated struggle prematurely removed from the masses. In contrast, the strategy of the ANC which had the support of the Soviet Union, would lead the struggle from the 60s until the early 90s leading the masses where they were in struggle. The Soviet Union would train thousands of cadres of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC, to fight against the apartheid regime to attack the fascist apartheid at its weak points, but along with this, continued non-violent strikes, and the protests to free Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders was all part of the popular United Democratic Front strategy.

Today, ultra-leftist use similar strategies and tactics that take the form of advocating “instant revolution,” “power out of the barrel of a gun,” “urban guerrilla warfare,” etc. These short-sighted radicals can never gain the support of masses of people. Objectively, their actions allow the ruling imperialists and capitalist leaders to destroy any semblance of solidarity needed to fight against oppression.

American and Anti-Soviet-”Communists”

It is not only the ultra-leftists and Maoists that found interest in the support of the Anti-Soviet groups that claimed to be communists. On the world stage, the U.S. imperialists through the CIA and its shell organizations, found efforts to undermine the anti-imperialists liberation movements led by a working-class coalition. The goal was to secretly cultivate influence, outsource America’s dirty work and undermine the national liberation movements that were progressive and pro-Soviet.

Former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski under Lyndon B Johnson and Jimmy Carter described how he convinced China to support the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

“I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.” According to Brzezinski, the USA “winked, semi-publicly” at Chinese and Thai aid to the Khmer Rouge. Well into the 1980s, the United States itself would support the Khmer Rouge against Cambodia’s neighbor and America’s old wartime enemy, the Vietnamese Communists which was supported by the Soviet Union.

Integrated closely into the CIA’s intelligence and psychological warfare units after WWII, organizations, according to the CIA’s own website like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, helped to solidify the CIA’s emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left – the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.

In the case of Afghanistan, handpicked by U.S. administrators to participate in a UNESCO/Columbia University program, Hafizullah Amin was sent to New York in 1957. He later completed a master’s degree at Columbia–coincidentally, at a time when Brzezinski was gaining prominence there as a professor. Later Amin would become General Secretary of the Afghan Communist Party.

Amin would develop an analysis that was nothing but in name Marxist. Rather than pulling a Marxist-Leninist theory of leading a revolution through a labor-led strategy, Amin through his education at Columbia put those responsible for the education of the youth of the country, in the intelligentsia in the seat of the “revolutionary class.” It was through intelligentsia that the ground would gradually be prepared for the revolution, according to Amin’s analysis that he took back to Afghanistan. His revisionist strategy aimed first at the radicalization of Afghan teachers, and through them the radicalization of the Afghan population, especially the rural population. This would gain the support of Maoist China.

While in power, General Secretary Amin’s ultra-leftist tactics were unleashed within the party to liquidate the pro-soviet party members. The agricultural development was hit hard in the rural and religious communities, people were rounded up and detained. Amin deliberately initiated a policy closing mosques which only fueled a growing religious fanaticism that would empower the anti-socialist movement of the Mujahadeen, which included the Taliban and Al-Qaida.

The Soviet Union saw Amin as reckless and denounced his cruel reign. General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev himself told then Afghani President Muhammad Tarekhi in a meeting that the Afghan government must broaden its political base and stop shooting people. Amin would only continue to promote ultra-leftist tactics while demanding the Soviet Union to send troops in the skirmishes it was fighting with CIA and Maoist Chinese-backed radical Islamic groups like the Mujahideen.

Among the many lessons of Afghanistan, the one described here is that ultra-leftist  deviations did not develop the proletarian class in the country to lead. The Party was led astray due to Amin’s overemphasis on intellectuals and violent repression of the clergy and peasantry.

Erasure of the American Communist Movement

Much of the theoretical outlook of the ultra-left, besides coming from a petty bourgeois radical view, is disconnected with the broader American Communist movement. The majority of them have not read the likes of Gus Hall and Henry Winston, the CPUSA’s most influential leaders that produced the most consistent Marxist-Leninist world outlook in the United States. In ignoring our history, the ultra-left seek to repeat the mistakes Hall and Winston warned us about. Issues of sectarianism and isolation plague the Maoist and Anarchist circles, making the average American worker unrecognizable to them. One such prominent issue is the two state solution with Israel/Palestine. The ultra-left have sunken to a level of national nihilism that further adds to their isolation, nationally if not globally from the Communist movement. Many now feel the need to call Israel “the Zionist entity”, implying that Israel has always been and will only ever be Zionist and should therefore be destroyed. They applaud Hamas’ actions against any and all Israelis because to the ultra-left, Israelis are nothing but “settlers” from Europe.

Many would be shocked to learn that it was the Soviet Union under Comrade Stalin’s leadership that sought to advocate for the creation of Israel along a two state solution. The CPUSA held the same line on Israel/Palestine, citing Hyman Lumer’s Zionism – Its Role in World Politics and Israel in Crisis by A.B. Magil. The ultra-left intentionally conceal the Communist movement’s historical stance of a two state solution.

“The basis for the coming into being of the State of Israel was not created by Zionism. Until the advent of Hitlerism with its monstrous crimes against the Jews, comparatively few Jews were induced by the Zionists to migrate to Palestine (in 1931 the Jewish population was about 175,000, a little more than one-fourth of the 1946 figure). It was the wave of immigration of refugees during and immediately after the war that first created a substantial Jewish community, and the new wave of immigration from Eastern Europe after 1948, stemming from the horrors of Hitlerism, that swelled the size of this community, doubling its numbers within a few years. But it was the Zionists who retained control and who fashioned the state according to their own design. The validity of Israel’s existence as a state derives from the UN partition resolution. However, the state envisioned by that resolution is not that conceived of and established by Zionism.”^[8]

Further erasure of American Communist history is the concept of industrial concentration. Many of the ultra-left, if asked, would profess that the industrial worker are no longer relevant in 2025 as America has sent many manufacturing jobs overseas to foreign countries. The truth is America is still the second highest manufacturing country in the world still, behind China and over double the output from Japan in third. It would be a grave mistake to conclude that industrial workers are no longer the backbone of the American economy. As Gus Hall says in Working Class USA:

“Communists have always pursued a policy of industrial concentration, with special emphasis on the basic section of the industrial working class. Basic industrial workers occupy a special position in the engine room of capitalism, and the system has developed in them a high degree of collectivity and cooperation. For this reason, industrial workers are the most revolutionary section of the working class.”^[9]

We’re faced with the age old question from Lenin: what is to be done? The American Communist movement must regain its industrial and working-class base. Historically, Communists have come from within the trade union movement. The vast majority of the American left are not located in the trade unions. As Lenin says, “[Communists] must learn to penetrate into prohibited premises where the representatives of the bourgeoisie are influencing the workers”. This includes methods such as “boring from within” the reactionary trade unions because setting up our own “revolutionary” unions would only further isolate us from the working class. In refusing to do this, the left “cannot hope to win over the majority of the workers”.

On the same premise, American Communists must get involved in bourgeois elections. Of course, elections under the capitalist system have limitations and cannot be looked upon as the end all, be all tactic, which is the line of Social Democrats. Lenin in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder says, “it has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revolutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament, even a few weeks before the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with”. Yet, much of the American left view bourgeois elections as a waste of time and that willingly participating in it makes one complicit to the continuing of the capitalist system. Such views are born out of the nihilist tendencies within the left and are not of Marxism-Leninism.

Finally, and perhaps the most pressing and important tactic of our generation, promoted by Gus Hall and Henry Winston, is the anti-monopoly coalition. Gus Hall, in Working Class USA, explains, “Anti-monopoly movements do not call for the abolition of the capitalist system, but objectively they are anti-capitalist because they weaken the position and power of the capitalist class and give broad-based support to the issues and struggles of the working class. The movements against monopoly are not in and of themselves for socialism. But objectively they clear the path toward socialism.”

To echo Gus Hall, Americans have a rich history in anti-monopoly struggle. Much of the right-wing use American history to further jingoistic, anti-working class, and counter-revolutionary language when instead the case should be made that events like the American Revolution, which Lenin regarded as “one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars”, inspire the American people to take action against the monopolies.

The American left have a rich history to inspire the working class of this country, regardless of how much the ultra-left deny the revolutionary potential of the industrial proletariat and the working class at large. Instead, the Maoists and Anarchists want to throw all Marxist-Leninist tactics in the “dustbin of history”, viewing them as outdated. On the contrary, the theory of Marxism-Leninism has withstood the attacks of the ultra-left and provides the most concise and correct theoretical outlook for the working class to this day.

“Someone is talking about a one-state solution. If you believe that a one-state solution now is possible, it will be an apartheid state, because Israel has all powers in its hand and they can control all Palestine as they are doing now. And they are committing discrimination policy even against Palestinians inside Israel who are citizens of Israel. You can imagine how they will treat Palestinians in West Bank or in Gaza under the Israeli occupation.

“Someone is talking about a one-state solution. If you believe that a one-state solution now is possible, it will be an apartheid state, because Israel has all powers in its hand and they can control all Palestine as they are doing now. And they are committing discrimination policy even against Palestinians inside Israel who are citizens of Israel. You can imagine how they will treat Palestinians in West Bank or in Gaza under the Israeli occupation.”^[10]

[1] Hall, Gus, “The Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism”, The Communists, Vol. 2; Party of Communists USA: Seattle, 2022,p. 46.

[2] Lenin, Op. Cit., 1977, pp. 189-191.

[3] Winston, Henry, Selected Works of Henry Winston, Vol. 3; New Outlook Publishers: Seattle, 2024, pp. 173-74.

[4] Hall, Gus, Working Class USA: The Power and the Movement; International Publishers: New York, 1987, pp. 293-94.

[5] Winston, Henry, Strategy for a Black Agenda; International Publishers: New York, 1973, p. 18.

[6] Winston, Henry, “South Africa: Neo-Pan Africanism and Maoism” in Selected Works of Henry Winston, Vol. 3; New Outlook Publishers: Seattle, 2025, pp. 233-34.

[7]Ibid., p. 238.

[8] Lumer, Hyman, Zionism – Its Role in World Politics; New Outlook Publishers: Seattle, 2024, pg. 11.

[9] Hall, Op. Cit., 1987, p. 59.

[10] Taqaz, Dr. Aqel, “Palestinian Communist Leader Dr. Aqel Taqaz Supports Two-State Solution”, The Daily Worker.