Published: Red Flag, No. 6, April 1985.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Every state is the dictatorship of some class over another. It is a body of armed men organized by the class in power to carry out that class’ will unrestrained by any laws, & to suppress the rights of those classes opposed to the continued rule of the dominant class. In the US today, the bourgeoisie rules thru its state over the proletariat (the working class). Our task is to overthrow this state, break it up, & replace it with a workers’ state founded on a popular militia that will arise in the course of a truly popular uprising.
The present state, which demogogically claims to be a “democracy” of all the people, of all classes, is no such thing. It is a special body of armed men paid & organized by the capitalist class in power to protect that class’s property & to keep the proletariat subserviant & slaving in the factories of the rich. Their state includes, besides the standing army, the police, the courts & the prisons, also the school system, the bourgeois political parties, the legislative bodies & the government bureaucracy. Extensions of this state include the trade union apparatus & the paramilitary fascist organizations.
All the laws passed by the capitalists’ congress have as their purpose the enslavement & robbery of the masses & the protection of the unjustly acquired wealth of the bourgeoisie, who produce nothing of value, but appropriate the product of the sweat & blood of the workers & other productive toilers. No matter how fine-sounding these laws “which apply equally to rich & po6r alike”, they were only written to deceive the people & enslave them; and these laws never have & never will prevent the bourgeois state machine for a moment from attacking the people & their just progressive struggles. The masses can count on nothing but their own numbers, organizations & militancy to fend off the blows from “America’s finest”.
We must carry out the revolutionary struggle for democracy. Even the most piddling reforms, where some small concession is made simultaneous with increasing police-type spying, are only the byproduct of revolutionary struggle. The revolutionary struggle is the preparation of the masses for the revolution, for the organized illegal uprising. The only type of struggle that can prepare for such an act is the organized struggle to overthrow the unjust laws oppressing the people. Only out of fear, in the face of such struggle, is the enemy ever forced to recognize, no matter how tentatively, any of the masses’ rights, or to grant even the slighest reform.
The State acts on the basis of the naked self-interest of the ruling class & so the masses must not be fooled into taking part in the election hoax, where the bourgeoisie claims that the masses can elect their own representatives who could then be allowed (by the reactionary police & military officers !!) to make the capitalist state work in the interest of the people. Nor should the masses allow themselves to be tricked into involvement in the “struggles” to write the “strongest possible language” into bills supposedly to restrain the security forces of the enemy class, forces that never pay the slightest attention to legality , and for which they are never called to task as long as they follow their real directive & act solely for the capitalists’ interests.
When choosing to run and, if elected, “In taking part in the daily legislative & other activities of the [Congress], the [Marxist-Leninist] group must pursue its constant tasks of criticism & agitation & not pursue the object of direct legislation; & it must explain to the people that such legislation is ephemeral & futile so long as real power remains entirely in the hands of the [capitalists’] government.”(Stalin, V.2, Red Star Press, pp82-83)
All the reformists, liberals & all opportunists are 100% enemy agents & are sent into the masses’ struggles by the capitalists in order to break those struggles up, & to lead the masses away from direct confrontation with the rich & their state machine. Such confrontations allow the workers to win immediate demands of the class & to train themselves & harden their resolve, their organization & their contempt for the enemy & trust in themselves in preparation for the necessary general uprising which alone can solve finally all the everyday problems of the class. The reformists are not “just misguided fools” who fight only for the immediate demands while forgetting the long term goal, as they & the bourgeoisie would like us to believe. No, they are enemies of every demand, no matter how simple or basic, of the masses, & they bring only one answer to every problem: “Surrender before you are hurt!” The reformists are saboteurs & puppet repeaters of every silly management tale spread to make us give up & return to our wage-slavery. The reformists are savage persecuters of the communists & other fighters for the basic & long term interests of the masses, & they would do anything to stop the working class from seeing clearly the problems before it & the only solution – self-sacrificing struggle.
The reformists try constantly to get the masses to believe in the decrepit legal system & legal rights supposedly granted by the capitalists to their wage-slaves. And they rant at the proletariat that its sufferings are not due to the dictatorship under which it is groaning, but to the “laziness & apathy” of the workers who won’t “learn their rights &«use them”. They try to get the people to give up their “unreasonable” face-to-face fight against the rich &, instead, take the useless path of “proper channels” & legal action. They try to get the masses caught up in the diversions of taking sides in various (bourgeois manufactured) “public” opinion debates, where both “sides” are bad for the people. The workers can only be successful in their fights, whether for their immediate or final aim, if they throw these traitors out of our movement & battle tenaciously against those who would grind us into the dirt.
Marxism-Leninism is a science. Like all sciences, Marxism-Leninism has developed as the summation & leading, force in a great practical struggle to “remake the world11, in this case, the struggle to transform society from capitalism to socialism thru revolution, & liberate mankind from exploitation & class bondage. Marxism-Leninism continues to develop steadily as we learn more & as the struggle led by our science brings the new into being. But the general laws of Class Society discovered by the earlier leaders of the proletariat – Marx, Engels, Lenin & Stalin – have not become out-of-date, any more than the laws of motion & universal gravitation of Newton. The truth does not change though matter evolves. We just get to know it somewhat more fully, & get to study the new laws coming into being as the contradictions mature, and as new ones arise.
The law of value, of the labor theory of value, of the wages being determined by the value of labor-power, the law of the increasing organic character of capital & the falling rate of profit, the law of the averaging of rates of profit between different capitals, & the selling of commodities from highly organic production at above their value & those from labor-intensive production at below value, the basic economic law of modern capitalism – the necessity of obtaining the maximum profit determining all the major phenomena in the development of modern capitalism, the law of the uneven development of monopoly capitalism & the decay of the countries richest in capital...all of these fundamental laws of Marxism-Leninism still hold their validity & are operating with particular virulence now in the decadence & final crisis of capitalism.
The masses must be armed with these & other scientific laws if they are to consciously make history & bring an end, once & for all, to class society. The masses make history, the Party makes them conscious – this is our stand. And the masses will never learn scientific socialism unless the Marxists go to them & explain it, both thru theory & by using the science to explicate timely burning issues. There is no, absolutely no, point in spreading illusions, the “traditional lies of the bourgeoisie”, under the hoax that they are better known & more readily available to the masses & will better get them into motion!
It is impossible to have a revolutionary movement without a revolutionary party founded on scientific bases which exhibits heroic & disciplined continuous activity. When there is no party, the most important and, indeed, the only task is to form the party because nothing, no demos, caucuses, propaganda organs, or anything else, if carried out as an end in themselves, will be able to keep on for long under the all-sided attacks of the bourgeoisie & their ideology without the party to lead the action & to defend the purity of the line. All these tasks & work must contribute directly to the struggle to found the Party or else they are drawing forces & effort away from doing it, & are thus counter-productive at this time. The Party is the most precious thing! And it is only when we live by this truth, when defending the party & the purity of its Marxist-Leninist line becomes more precious to us than life itself, it is only then that we can organize the people to overthrow this damnable despotism & liberate society.
Everyone who wants to fight capitalism & will dedicate themself to that fight should join in one party on the basis of the scientific practical theory that our class has worked out in heroic struggle against the enemy. Then and only then, will we be able to bring a new & revolutionary situation into being in the US, & lead the fight for democracy, national liberation, the liberation of the woman, & socialism to victory & make each battle for the realization of the rights & livelihood of the masses into a conscious component part of the preparations for the revolution.
Even after the founding of the party, & even after the revolution, the consolidation & strengthening of the party will remain the leading task. Only by making the party into the disciplined union of all the most dedicated members of our class & its supporters, can the leading role of the party & of Marxism-Leninism in everything be assured.
This party we need must be a part of the International Marxist-Leninist Communist Movement. The movement in each country does not exist in a vacuum of time & space, isolated from history & from the rest of the current world. The working class is international & has been fighting for a century & a half for its liberation. It has continuously developed its ideas & practice as the result of the general summation of its experience in the class struggle & with the growing decadence of capitalism & the development of true socialism. Marxism-Leninism did not stop developing at some point in the past, with no further knowledge arising from the continued struggles of the class, anymore than the further struggles & experience ever invalidated the laws already discovered & summarized in Marx’s & Lenin’s times.
The “ML”PUSA, “R”CP, PLP, & so on, who try to cut Marxism off from the real struggles, who want to “return to the basics”, that is, take some classic out of its time & deduce the present from it by the “self-evident” laws of pure reason, have, by this approach, shown that they have thrown science out the window & retreated into metaphysics & idealism.
Comrades Stalin, Dimitrov, & Zhdanov led titanic struggles of the international proletariat & oppressed nations: to build socialism in the USSR based on Lenin’s plan; to defeat the Fascist beasts; & to fight the “cosmopolitanism” & new imperialist offensive after the Second World War. There can be no sound grounding for our party if it negates all of this. Nor can any progress be made by trying to expunge the monumental struggles against the Krushchevite betrayal since Stalin’s death, & against the sabotaging actions of the Titoites, Maoists, Eurocommunists, etc. All over the world, the progressive people rose up to fight for the purity of Marx-ism-Leninism under the leadership of the Party of Labor of Albania & comrade Hoxha, & built the new Marxist-Leninist communist parties & launched revolutionary battles.
In some countries, the new parties, like our PL, were smashed from within & without, & the movement was temporarily set back. But all over the world, & especially in Socialist Albania, the anti-revisionist communist movement tempered & united itself & grew in struggle with the traitors & cowards, & further developed our revolutionary theory & practice from their experience. It is on the basis of this theory & practice, on the most modern theory & practice available, on the experience of great struggles still going on now & on our own experiences in the long fight to rebuild the Party, as well as the experience of all the others in the International Movement...it is on this basis that we must found & build the Party we need – as a contingent of the International Marxist-Leninist Communist Movement (the IMLCM).[1]
The bourgeoisie derive billions of dollars in extra profits from the enslavement & oppression of the nations imprisoned within the US & from the national minorities forced to immigrate to the US by the crisis. The US imperialist class, driven by its ever-growing necessity for more & more profits in a dying economy, is racist to the core, & has no choice but to constantly escalate the ruin & plunder of the oppressed nations & nationalities. The extra exploitation of the workers of these groups is used to split the workers, & drive down both White Anglo wages & those of Chicano/Mexicano, Afro-American, Puertorriqueno, Native, & so on, workers, while trying to blame the problems of each on the others & not on the capitalists.
The Union hacks are mobilized to spread racism, especially white supremacy & chauvinism, & anti-immigrant propaganda (often under an anti-discrimination mask) as part of their service to their capitalist masters. The bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations & nationalities are a 100% traitor class. Together with the poverty agency hacks & leaders of the “civil rights” organizations (funded by the giant multi-national companies), they seek to spread narrow, cultural nationalism & racism among the workers of “their” people, to pretend that the white Anglo workers are the main enemy of the people & workers & of their national aspirations, & not the imperialist racist overlords. Like the trade union hacks, they try to split the working class & keep it down so that the maximum profit can be made from their exploitation. On top of this, they try to replace the demands of “their” people for national liberation & the end of oppression with a rotten call for “assimilation”, for the extinction of the beautiful & heroic culture of the nation & its replacement with the cosmopolitan “culture” of US imperialism, & they try to wipe out any demand of the nation for their rights to their own language, customs, &, most of all, the right to rule in their sacred homeland – the right of self-determination, up to & including secession.
To continue to extract extra profits from the labor of the oppressed nationalities & nations, the bourgeoisie have constructed a system permeated with racism & national chauvinism, where special political oppression is brought down on the entire nation or nationality in all spheres of society. The only road open to the national minorities & oppressed nations is the proletarian revolution & the end of the system of production for profit. Only thru this change will it become in the interest of the new state (of the working people) to mobilize all the nations at full production to realize their great potentials to build the new society & meet the ever rising needs of the new men & women of the nations.
The often heroic struggles of the petty bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations can only continue to suffer defeats if it does not come under the leadership of the working class led by a consistent scientific proletarian party that has a real solution to the problem of the nation. These forces continually vacillate, sliding off from their own just stands, to “make use of the media to reach the people” or to work with parts of the government that are “being reasonable”. This should not be allowed to stop us from working with those who depend on the working masses & not the imperialist corporations or the government for their business, & who take a basically uncompromising stand in defence of the nation’s rights & on the enemy nature of the US state.
The only road to the unity of the national liberation front is thru the unity of the Marxist-Leninists, & their leading role in the struggle for the rights of all nations up to & including the right of secession.
The purpose of the Marxist-Leninist stand on the national question is to defeat the attempts of both the great-nation chauvinist & narrow-nationalist capitalist agents to split the working class; the purpose is to preserve & continuously strenghten the monolithic unity of our class in its revolutionary purpose. The comrades of the oppressor nation & those of the oppressed nations have two different practical tasks – fighting great-nation chauvinism & narrow nationalism respectively – but both are working for our class’s united goal.
Our purpose is not to spread the idea that secession is the solution to the problems of the oppressed nations. If the enslaved nations are able to launch their uprising to bring the masses to power in their home lands before the general uprising is the order of the day in the oppressor nation, then, of course, the whole proletariat & its united party, which has called for, & organized for, this uprising from the beginning, will give all possible support to this uprising to bring the Afro-American masses to power in their nation & prepare the stage for the proletarian revolution & building a revolutionary base there to aid the coming revolution in the oppressor nation.
The oppression of women arose with class society & the exploitation of man, & can only be ended by ending class society. In present day capitalist society, it is the extra profit from paying women less (estimated at over $70 billion a year in the US) & not providing necessary services that is the reason for the unrelenting male chauvinism of the imperialists. Male chauvinism, just like national chauvinism & racism, has its source in the imperialist class & its ever-growing need for profits, & it will continue to be spread by them & their state & media as long as the system of private property & their dictatorship continue to exist.
Pornography & the sale of women as a commodity in general, is big business, especially in advertising where almost nothing can be sold without the promise that it will help the male purchaser to get a woman (or help a woman “sell” herself...). And it’s the needs of advertising that control modern corporations where the main problem is always the need to artifically create demand in the shrinking market in order to realize the surplus value extracted. They also trade in women directly, making billions thru prostitution, legal & illegal, & purchasing others as mistresses or as wives.
There is no oppression nor exploitation of women in socialism, in present day Albania, nor was there in the USSR before Stalin’s death. There is no pornography, advertising nor religion to denigrate women. There is truly equal pay for equal work, all necessary services are provided free or nearly free of charge, & jobs for all; so, for the first time, women & girls can choose their life-mate for love, without worrying about money.
The bourgeoisie knows this & therefore one of their most pressing long term needs is to keep women from turning to the proletariat & its revolution as the sure way to a bright future. Therefore, it mobilizes, on the one hand, its labor union hacks, priests, & so on, to whip up male chauvinism among the male workers, to try to convince the men that women should keep quiet & do what they are told & not get involved with the big questions of the day, & that they should not “steal men’s jobs”, but be content with whatever is left over. On the other hand, it activates its women lieutenants, the feminists, to try to turn the women’s movement away from the pressing demands of the time, especially the need for the transformation of society to socialism thru violent revolution. The feminists attempt to convince the women workers that the problem is not the imperialist class men & women, but all men, including their loved ones! Thus, both groups of misleaders try to split the class & help the bourgeoisie sabotage the women’s struggle for even their simplest demands.
We must build a Democratic Women’s Union, a militant fighting organization to help mobilize women of the working class (& other oppressed strata), under our party’s leadership, for the revolutionary struggle. And the dual tasks of combatting male chauvinism (amongst the men) & feminism & passivity (amongst the women) play a key role.
The entire capitalist-revisonist-imperialist world is in the throes of an all-sided crisis, the combination of the last phase – depression – of the latest economic cycle on top of the general crisis (caused by the ever-decreasing market) of the monopoly capitalist system...& this crisis is the dawn of the proletarian revolution. Both the menace of imperialist depression, war & fascism and the revolutionary & socialist struggle against it & for the bright future are growing rapidly.
The system of production for profit in the era of mass production must be monopoly capitalism, imperialism. Whether this system masquerades as free enterprise & democratic competition (in the US & the West), as communism with a human face (in the USSR, etc.), as workers self-management (Yugoslavia, etc.) the mixed society, or whatever, it is the same monopoly capitalist system everywhere, showing the same characteristics of terminal rot & disaster. Capitalism must grow to survive, must increase its profits thru reinvestment, but first it must be able to realize past expenditure & profit from the sale of the commodities already worked up by the proletariat at its command. In the shrinking market created by monopoly capitalism, this becomes ever more difficult, & all the imperialist states, without exception, are turning to war as a solution, as a sure government guaranteed market (for tanks, planes, ships, uniforms, etc.), as a safe source of interest (on the national debt, already piled up & still growing), & with the hope of seizing markets, sources of raw materials, cheap labor, etc. thru local wars of plunder & thru a general war to redivide the world. The falling rate of profit & the general attack on the masses’ standard of living to counteract it, along with the fascization of the country & its militarization to force the masses to accept this “new reality” of ever-worsening poverty in the midst of every-growing productivity...this is one of the two main, outstanding characteristics of the whole of the capitalist-revisionist world. Included within this are the inflation, unemployment, rising taxes on the workers, & the racism, chauvinism, & pornography & religious obscuratinism...whether in the US, Britain, Japan, Mexico, etc’ in the West or in the USSR, Poland, Checkoslovakia, China, etc. in the East.
The other main characteristic of the time is the ever-growing struggles of the workers & masses against their impoverishment, the growth of the armed national liberation struggles to oppose the stronger countries’ attempts to save themselves by plundering the weaker ones, & above all, the uprising of the whole of the-democratic & progressive mankind, led by the proletariat to overthrow the dying system of exploitation, of wage-slavery, of the production of commodities for the market, & to replace it with socialism & communism, the production by a free people to meet their ever-growing material & cultural needs. Socialism has been a fact, not just an aspiration, since the time of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Whereever the proletariat has overthrown the reactionary anarchic dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, & built & defended the new democratic centralized dictatorship of the working class, the crisis has disappeared, & the laws of capitalist production have been replaced by the laws of socialist production, the ever expanding production of the goods the workers need, with full employment & steadily rising wages & falling prices, as labor’s productivity ceaselessly grows. This was the wav the economy developed in the USSR in the 1930’s &, after WWII, in the late ’40s, & how the economy has behaved in Socialist Albania, where the road of Lenin & Stalin was not abandoned, since the first day of the revolution, 40 years ago.
The coup, both “peaceful” & armed, carried out, after Stalin’s death, by the Krushchevite traitors in the USSR (& the rest of the socialist camp, except for Albania), showed a weakness in the proletarian dictatorship, which the revolutionary party in Albania, under Enver Hoxha’s leadership, then investigated & eliminated in their country (proving that the restoration of capitalism is not inevitable). The overthrow of socialism in the Soviet Union & elsewhere, the return to the system of production for profit, could not solve the problems of capitalism. Far from 1t; the entry of the great productive forces of the USSR & others onto the world market could only exacerbate the oversupply crisis, & speed up & intensify the world-wide preparations for war. The new Tsars have thrown hundreds of thousands out of work,jacked up the necessities of life to astronomical heights thru manufactured shortages, looted the collective farms of joint property, extorted billions thru unequal exchange & foreign Investment 1n the neo-colonies, & launched imperialist wars of conquest & plunder in Czechoslovakia, Angola, Eritrea (“part” of Ethiopia), Afghanistan, & so on. But nothing can save its moribund & parasitic system & it too faces the workers & their revolution.
Socialism works; Imperialism doesn’t. Only Marxism-Leninism has a solution to the crisis & that solution can only be the overthrow of the dictatorship of the exploiters, once & for all,& the spread of socialism & communism across the entire world.
What is new in the world (& US) situation is that the objective contradictions have completely matured and (possibly the last) temporary stabilization of the imperialist system has come to an end. THE REVOLUTION IS NO LONGER JUST AN ASPIRATION, BUT THE TASK TO BE TAKEN UP FOR SOLUTION NOW. The objective factors exist already everywhere. The task is to build the subjective forces, &, first of all, the Party, to make the class & the people conscious & lead them 1n the revolution to smash capitalism & its constant companions – crisis, fascism & war, & usher in the new dawn of classless society, socialism. Imperialism has nothing to offer any of us but degeneracy & wage-slavery. Each & every one of you must join with us now to lift the red banner of Marxism-Leninism, of selfless heroism, & fight back the dark night the bourgeoisie is trying to bring down on all of mankind’s progressive history, & on all of our higher sentiments - to turn us into Storm Troopers for the new Nazis.
Comrades & friends, the time has come to go out to the people fearlessly & create a mass movement to study Marxism-Leninism & found the Party, building it among the most aware & far-seeing members of the masses & especial ly of our class, whose long struggles have shown them the Insufficiency of anything else!
The tenth point is very short & simple: the US is NOT an exception to any of the laws & points expounded above! This point must be made & emphasized for 2 reasons: 1) because it is true &, it is essential that the masses & their advanced fighters, especially the Marxist-Leninists, understand & uphold this in theory & in practice; and 2) because every time people begin to “see” the US as an exception, to say that this or that principle doesn’t apply, they have fallen, & will fall, headlong into the swamp of opportunism & degeneracy.
DEATH TO IMPERIALISM, SOCIAL-IMPERIALISM, AND ALL REACTION!
UNMASK REFORMISM AND ALL OPPORTUNISTS, AND DRIVE THEM FROM THE PEOPLE’S RANKS!
GLORY TO MARXISM-LENINISM!
FOUND THE GENUINE US MARXIST-LENINIST COMMUNIST PARTY!
GLORY TO THE INTERNATIONAL MARXIST-LENINIST COMMUNIST MOVEMENT!
WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE – WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS AND A WORLD TO WIN!
[1] The IMLCM, besides the PLA in Albania, includes parties or groups in these countries: Canada (CPCml - from whom we continue to learn much); Mexico (CPCml); Ecuador (CPMLE); Peru (PCPml); Brazil (CPB); Surinam (CPS); Trinidad & Tobago (CPT&T); & several others in Latin America; Spain (CPSml); Ireland (CPIml); Britain (RCPBml); Portugal (PCP reconstructed); Denmark (CPDml); & several others in Europe; New Zealand (CPNZ); Japan (CPJ left); Turkey (TDKP); India (CGPI); & many others in Asia. It should be clear from this that this is indeed an International Marxist-Leninist Communist Movement from which we can learn much, and of which we are a part.