Unity through struggle!

Our movement is divided, broken, shattered by the twin enemies of state repression and internal revision. It is plagued with amateurism and opportunism, with reformism and chauvinism. The past century has been a record of domestic failure for the Communist movement within the U.S. Empire — failure to protect the oppressed, failure to advance the struggle of the masses, failure to prevent the enemy state from striking down the bulwark of the Soviet Union, failure to inculcate revolutionary consciousness among the working people of the Empire, failure, in short, to proceed from organization toward revolution. That which does not advance retreats.

Although this is hardly the place for a detailed critical analysis of the past century, we can situate the decay of the Communist movement in the United States in the 1930s. This is the period when the official Communist Party worked with the left fascist Roosevelt to save capitalism. It accelerated in the late 1940s with the final fruit of Browderist revisionism in the liquidation of the Communist Party and, in the wake of its refounding, the mass-expulsion of Communists who supported self-determination for New Africa. The failures grew deeper and more substantial in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the Communist Party abandoned Black liberation movements, in the 1970s as they abandoned American Indian liberation movements, and permitted the FBI to slaughter revolutionaries indiscriminately — a far cry from its work in Scottsboro or Camp Hill in 1931.

Partly as a result of these enormous failures, partly through the assiduous work of government spies and saboteurs, division reigns among the remaining Communists in the U.S. Empire. What is the first duty of Communists? It is to unite the objective conditions of revolution — that is, the misery of working masses, which have long existed here in the heart of the U.S. Empire — with the subjective conditions of revolution, namely, class consciousness. In the absence of leadership from the Communists (who are, after all, merely the most politically developed members of the revolutionary working class), what has become of the political consciousness of the masses? It has been captured by petit-bourgeois democrats (both little and big d), or prey to the self-defeating tactics of adventurism and decentralization. The masses have been systematically deceived and divided by a century of opportunists, reformists, and imperial chauvinists whose overriding interests are in the rehabilitation, in the minds of the proletarian masses, of the irredeemably corrupt, venal, and evil U.S. imperial system.

When a vanguard party abrogates its responsibility to the masses, when it disclaims and renounces revolution itself, consciousness is left to develop along lines dictated and guided by the counter-revolutionary intelligence agencies, that is, by the agents of the bourgeoisie, or else to develop unguided and unchecked through the intellectual leadership of the vacillating petit-bourgeois strata.

But the duty of the Communist is still to raise the class and political consciousness of the masses. To bring the masses to the red banner, to raise their consciousness, we must also repair the damage done to the movement. The problem of division confronts us immediately. Until the movement unites, there can be no solution to any of the problems that plague it. Only a united movement, even a unified movement which holds to incorrect strategy and tactics, can, through struggle, develop the correct strategy and tactics. It is not ideological purity that will unify the movement, but rather the unification of the movement that will burn away impurities and leave behind only the tempered steel that is the weapon of the masses. Thus, prior to beginning the work of raising class consciousness — or, perhaps, simultaneously with it — stands the immediate work of drawing out the most advanced elements of the movement from all the moribund, dying, revisionist, and anti-democratic parties, sects, and organizations into a single Marxist, Communist movement and then transforming that movement, by means of a foundational conference, from its many streams, tributaries, and sects into a coherent, single, party.

The State of the Movement

As we stated above, the U.S. and Canadian Communist movement is riven by division, disunity, and by the scar tissue of the past century: failure to make revolution, deep wounds caused by FBI attacks, internecine sectarian conflict, often fostered by the capitalist intelligence agencies themselves, and the grievous inheritance of chauvinism and opportunism have pockmarked our history. There stands, as yet, no one sect or group that can realistically lay claim to the mantle of the vanguard of the people. In order to do so, such a group would need to command the broad respect, trust, and faith of the revolutionary masses – it must stand at the head of the proletariat and sub-proletariat, and be capable of organizing and mobilizing not only proletarians, but the lower strata of the imperial petit-bourgeoisie.

We have inherited this movement in the center of the most advanced capitalist empire in history. It is insufficient to merely list the defects of the currently-existing incoherent (or inchoate) Communist camp; we must also recognize the strengths and weaknesses of our enemy, the bourgeois settler state (both in the abstract, organizational form and in the individualized form of direct agents) and its capitalist masters.

A Note on Capitalizations

Throughout this document (and throughout our press), we use a somewhat non-standard capitalization for the terms Communist and United States Empire or U.S. Empire. We capitalize the term Communist to signify that it means more than the vague claim of adherence to a communist aim; that, rather, it is a proper noun, a term meaning someone who not only studies Marxism (in our case, Marxism-Leninism) and who is not only devoted to Marxism, but who is actively engaged in the struggle to bring about revolution. Although our comrades who, for one reason or another, cannot be actively engaged are invaluable to the movement, it is the Communist – specifically the active, practicing Communist, whose aim is the overthrow of all existing social conditions – to whom we refer.

As for the U.S. Empire – we acknowledge that this is not the standard usage. It is not that, through this particular formulation, we are actually changing any fact about the empire’s rapacious, imperialist nature. Rather, we believe that this capitalization will allow us to express and expose the true nature of the U.S. political machine to its fullest. Where it masquerades as a republic (admittedly one in which the ruling class struggles to conceal the herrenvölkische nature of its underlying institutions), it is a globe-spanning empire of exploitation, imperialism, and outright military domination. This fact is easy for those who live within its borders (and are not regularly subject to the presence of U.S. stormtroopers) to forget. By adopting this formulation, we hope to bring to the forefront the imperialist nature of the U.S., to expose the fundamentally undemocratic way this empire imposes its will on its internal colonies or semi-colonies, on its so-called “allies” (actually either its junior partners in plunder or vassal states), on its neo-colonies, and ultimately, on the rest of the world.

Further, we use the adjective “imperial” to refer to any group that is engaged in or directly benefits from capitalist-imperialism and “imperialist” to denote those capitalist-imperialist states. Capitalism-imperialism is, of course, the plunder of colonies and semi-colonies through tools many and varied: direct political control, destructive warfare, predatory lending, covert overthrow, the fostering of local comprador allies, and so forth. It is important to note in this context that not every war is an imperialist war.

The Strength of the Enemy

Of all the piratical imperialist states, the empire overseen by the U.S. ruling class is the undisputed chief. It has long been the practice of imperialist states, going back into the period of direct colonial imperialism that reigned in Europe prior to the modern capitalist imperialist period, for the imperial powers to corrupt their own working class by means of bribes or payoffs. As Lenin wrote, “the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement” relies on “vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market.” Lenin, V.I., Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

The present divisions of the U.S. ruling class have their origins in the Roosevelt realignment of the 1930s. Capitalist retrenchment, in the form of the New Deal, was supported by some members of the U.S. ruling class and staunchly opposed by others. The realignment of the two ruling class parties was solidified by the early 1960s as part of Nixon’s so-called “Southern Strategy” and has been periodically refreshed (for instance, the “Republicans in Name Only” of Reagan).

The two ruling class parties, apart from partaking in the various everyday schemes of electioneering for profit, selling offices, and open corruption between private enterprise and government, have in turn worked to regulate the precise amount of superprofits that must flow to the working classes (particularly the white working classes) in order to pacify the workers within the empire. The Democrats, by virtue of their unstable cross-class alliance with certain strata of the petit-bourgeoisie, labor aristocrats, and upper strata of the proletarians, have traditionally promised expansions to the “social safety net.” The Republicans, on the other hand, have fought tooth and claw against this model – a program famously and effectively developed and championed by that titan of Progressive policy, none other than the peaceable Prussian, Otto von Bismarck.

Between the social chauvinists on the left wing of capital and the social Darwinists on the right, the effect has often been characterized by the more radical liberals as a “one-way ratchet.” This ratchet action has the actual effect of perverting the consciousness of large swathes of the imperial working classes, trapping them in what Lenin called trade-union consciousness, and transforming them into labor aristocrats. Underlying this process is the much older and more complex economic history of the national question as it applies to the U.S. settler-republic.

The National Question in the United States Empire

The labor aristocracy is won to the side of the ruling class through material incentives. In the United States, these incentives are the spoils of national oppression. Originally, this took the form of the theft of wealth from the Indigenous nations in the form of land, property, labor, and knowledge. It was soon expanded to include the physical theft of Black African labor in the form of human beings stolen from Africa and transplanted into the West Indies and into all the English seaboard colonies. In the modern U.S. settler-empire, this manifests as the presence of colonies and semi-colonies within the borders of the country (Indian reservations and the Black national territory of New Africa in the Black Belt south), oppressed national minorities, and out-and-out colonized territory outside the borders of the continental empire.

As the ruling class systematically robs and exploits both workers and national bourgeoisie of the oppressed and colonized nations, it doles out the benefits to the white working classes. This is supplemented by plunder, stolen at gunpoint from the rest of the world. Thus, international looting (in the form of cheap commodities, low-cost computing resources, concentration of high-paying jobs in the imperial center, and so forth) which benefits all the U.S. working classes is compounded by the distribution of the stolen wealth from the internal colonies among the white working classes.

This process has:

broadened the white petit-bourgeoisie of the empire,
delayed proletarianization for sections of that same petit-bourgeoisie,
built up a large section of labor aristocrats among the working classes,
caused, among Communist organizations, the general triumph of social chauvinism.

The Communist movement has foundered in the U.S., and failed to produce a revolution. Factors 1-3 made it an uphill battle in the first place, but factor 4 (actually a result of the first three factors), this corruption and decay of the movement, has been the strongest prop of the U.S. imperialists. It is undoubted that the intelligence agencies actively encouraged this degeneration of Communist principles and championed these chauvinist deviations to defang our movement.

As a rule, class consciousness among the capitalists develops during periods of acute crisis. However, when crisis is not imminent, it is common for the ruling class to remain politically divided along the narrow lines of self-interest. The political class of the U.S. Empire attempted to answer this weakness in the early 20th century through the creation of its intelligence services. The FBI, CIA, and NSA serve as the organized counter-revolutionary vanguard and remain class conscious even in periods of relative stability. It is through the continuous consciousness of these class-instruments that the empire has managed to weather periods of revolutionary upsurge. But for all that, the empire will fall.

The U.S. Empire Has Feet of Clay

Despite these strengths, the ruling class has sown the seed of its own destruction. The stability of the U.S. Empire is based on a continued allegiance of broad sections of the petit-bourgeoisie and white proletariat. In order to secure this alliance, there are two conditions: 1) the (at least nominal) functioning of the Democratic or some other “Capitalist-Progressive” party capable of doling out benefits to the white workers, and 2) the continuing operation of the network of imperialist war and extraction from which the benefits that are given to this relatively privileged section of the working classes are drawn. As we know from the study of history, neither of these conditions can pertain indefinitely.

The systems of repression relied on by the U.S. Empire naturally create their own opposition; the more legitimate redress is denied through official channels, the more these systems are called upon to act, the more real and lasting enemies within the U.S. Empire the ruling class makes: the higher class consciousness among the working classes develops. The more wealth extracted from the periphery and the internal colonies and semi-colonies to placate the white working classes, the more enemies the empire creates in the periphery and in those colonies.

Further, we know that capitalist-imperialism cannot sustain itself, and must necessarily fall into periodic crises. The inevitability of the next shockwave of the capitalist crisis provides the time and date for which to strike the first blows against the enemy state. The general rule, long since proven, is that the rate of profit – that is, the amount of profit returned by each dollar invested – falls over time. The organic composition of capital (the ratio of machines to wages) continuously changes in favor of machinery, reducing the returns on investment. Imperialism provides a counterbalance to this tendency, bolstering the rate of profit by destroying the industrial base of peripheral countries and allowing the imperialists to move in and employ more people at lower wages. This merely prolongs the life of the capitalist system for a time; it cannot and does not represent an indefinite extension.

As the rate of profit falls and the strategies of imperialist super-exploitation become less effective, the working classes of all nations awaken once more to their power. Peripheral countries are seizing with the agitation of the working classes and oppressed peoples. Latin America, for too long the plaything of U.S. ruling interests, awakens to the call of the Indigenous and working people. The Euro-American alliance in the form of NATO stands on weaker footing today than ever before. The empire is built on sand.

This weakness is, conversely, our greatest strength and is the basis of the historical inevitability of our victory.

Addendum: The Settler-Colonial Relation and the National Question

The national question within the U.S. Empire has additional special characteristics that make it sharper and more immediate than in Europe. These characteristics are the result, first, of the settler-colonial genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Historically, this has manifested in a land-drive; the expropriation of Indigenous lands to turn over to white smallholders and relieve the pressures of class struggle along the eastern seaboard has made an indelible imprint on the property relations within the Empire.

The national question has two important “local” characteristics: the development of 1) semi-sovereign remaining Indigenous nations encysted within the U.S. imperialist system (although treaties guarantee their sovereignty, in actuality, every tribe and nation is subject to severe legal curtailment of its sovereign authority) and 2) the garrison-police force. As for the Indigenous nations, they maintain some degree of sovereignty even under the repressive imperial system designed to slowly strip them of their remaining territory and destroy them; this is a weak point in the imperialist chain. As to the police, unlike police in Europe, the U.S. and Canadian police forces developed not merely as a professionalized bodyguard and private property defense corps, but as a general garrison to “hold down the fort.”

The settler-relation is a property relation by which people possessing certain phenotypical and familial characteristics – generally by which they become racialized as “white” – are given better access (for example, an easier time getting loans, loans from the federal government, lower mortgage rates, etc.) to land, jobs, and housing. Anyone benefiting from this settler-relation receives imperialist super-profits of the kind that have the tendency to transform even higher-strata proletarians into labor aristocrats.

Land is the most critical relation in the settler empire. Control over territory forms the basis of the garrison-state. Land is the most basic of productive properties; it was land that the European settlers were seeking when they were displaced to the “New World” as excess population during the 16th-18th centuries. It is the privately owned, state-enforced division of land, the land-property regime, that underpins the genocidal settler republic and its domestic policies. It is, in fact, this conflict in relations that creates the settler/Indigenous contradiction.

Settler society is typified by shifting the site of class conflict from an internal location to an external one; thus, its laws and culture are obsessed with siting a “frontier,” whether that’s an Indigenous reservation or the urban regions declared “lawless” by the local garrison-police. Indeed, settler society is necessarily a garrison society.

We must be sensitive to these two unique qualities in the Empire. Settlers are often tapped to become paramilitary arms of the police, and the police themselves are a kind of settler garrison. But on the same hand, the semi-sovereignty of the Indigenous nations and the geographical concentration of the Black nation, means that a resolution to the national question within the Empire is of immediate concern to both those peoples – and the only resolution that can be reached, the only real resolution rather than accommodation, is a revolutionary one.

The Communist Movement

Axiomatically, when the empire is very strong, the movement is very weak. As the empire weakens, the movement grows in strength, breadth, and capacity. Following the “Allied” victory in World War II, the U.S. Empire took center stage astride the world as the representative and defender of monopoly capital. The U.S. ruling class has served ever since as the “big brother” of European capital; the unholy Euro-American alliance between the settler-fascist United States and the Neo-Nazi ruling powers of Europe has dominated world affairs and funneled most of the wealth and development, funneling most of that wealth back to its members.

As the head of this international alliance (and we should be clear that any alliance between capitalist powers is really a temporary compact between a band of thieves that will break down at the first sign of serious division) stands the United States and its governing empire, and at the head of that empire is a coterie of the leading monopoly capitalists in the world. Due to the immense strength of our enemies, thanks to this enormous net of chains that stretches from Washington to every corner of the earth, the Communist movement in the United States has been cut down at every turn, pruned by the twin evils of the imperial intelligence services and internal chauvinism.

It’s not enough, however, to gloss the last century with a simple hand-wave and a few glib comments. We must grapple intimately with the state of the movement at the current time and in its current configuration. This requires us to take the measure of our environment in a number of ways. First, we must survey the main types of Communist organization currently present in the empire. Then, we should identify the major (even if only nominally) Communist organizations working within the empire. We should also estimate the general development and leaning of the actual Communists that make up the movement, organized or not, as well as the development and class consciousness of the masses.

All-empire formations

The first type of formation is the large all-empire organization or “party,” and the archetypical example of this formation is, of course, the CPUSA. Other examples include the Party of Communists USA (PCUSA), the Communist Party of Canada (CP Canada), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), International Marxist Tendency (IMT), and Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), to name but a few.

Although we have not exhaustively investigated the ground conditions of each of the large all-empire formations, we may divide them into three general groups: a) the revisionists, who are Marxist-Leninist in name and social chauvinist or opportunist in deed; b) the Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, etc.; and c) FRSO.

Revisionists and Trotskyists

Modern revisionism is the chiefest and most dangerous weakness within the Communist movement today. This trend represents those organizations which are Marxist-Leninist in name but opportunist or social chauvinist in deed, such as the CPUSA, PCUSA, and CP Canada. These organizations share in common with the Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyists the tendency to develop extremely anti-democratic structures to protect an entrenched, even generational, leadership and then to trumpet this anti-democracy as the height of principle and militancy.

Between them, the all-empire revisionist organizations appear to have some 2,000-5,000 members. Of this number, the vast majority are either newly radicalized or engaging in a years-long struggle against their revisionist and chauvinist leadership. However, in each case, those engaged in internal struggle have been subject to harassment and repeated purges dating all the way back to the initial splits from the arch-revisionist period of the CPUSA. For instance, the CPUSA nearly dissolved in 2014 after years of openly supporting the Democratic Party under the leadership of Sam Webb; it recently delayed its “convention” for two years because it is the one period during which their political line and tailism can be challenged. Similarly, the CP Canada, in defense of its revisionist and abusive leadership, ignored its own constitution and selected improper electors to re-elect its leadership (which was, under its constitution, ineligible to continue in that role). Leadership in these large revisionist organizations have become careers, sources of income, with their multi-million dollar properties, networks of grants, connections with state and federal politicians, the apartments owned by the parties, and the salaries drawn by party leadership have all become something to defend against real revolutionists who threaten to wreck the whole show.

Many of the Trotskyist organizations, such as PSL, have fallen prey to the same deviations: they have created unassailable central organizing positions which are not accountable to any democratic process, and then held these positions tightly. Whether, like the revisionists, this began as a means of ideological control, it has developed into a system that is resistant to change and to growth.

Most of the big all-empire organizations are moribund and immune to development. They have lost whatever proletarian class character they may have had and become thoroughly bourgeois or petit-bourgeois; they have entered the political class of careerists receiving a salary for their participation in pseudo-revolutionary politics or, in some cases (like the CPUSA), become corporate landlords or entered the political arena to do battle on behalf of the established bourgeois parties.

At the risk of repeatedly holding the CPUSA up for scrutiny in the place of the other revisionist parties, we can demonstrate this trend by the manner in which CPUSA’s executive body (which controls the entire party at almost all times) is chosen: rather than elect individuals to serve on their executive committee, the executive committee itself picks a replacement slate. Once every four years (longer, if the convention is delayed), this slate is sent to the convention. Delegates cannot nominate candidates, they merely vote yes or no on the slate. Individual members of the organization cannot even vote for the slate – only their delegates can. Delegates are selected by the local-level leadership, through a similar process. Thus, at every level, democracy has been extinguished within the revisionist organization.

FRSO

Standing out among these organizations for maintaining a non-revisionist line is the Freedom Road Socialist Organization or FRSO. This is an amalgam of several 1970s New Communist Movement formations. Not properly a party, although with some of the attributes of one, FRSO has not fallen to revisionism. It is, in the opinion of the Press, the most well-ordered and maintained organization of those that exist in the Empire and may form the basic material of the new party-to-be.

However, despite our respect for the organization, we would be committing a basic error if we did not also forward our criticisms of FRSO. Whether these are well-grounded remains to be seen; only through engagement with FRSO members and discussion as to our critical positions can we determine if they are correct. We mean to be clear: the press intends no disrespect to the comrades who are valiantly working toward the unification of the movement as members and cadre of FRSO. Comradely criticism is a necessary element of achieving unity and coherence.

We can express the main points of our disagreement along three lines: 1) FRSO has reversed the primary aspect of the local autonomy/centralization contradiction at this stage of the movement; 2) FRSO has intermingled aboveground and underground methods of work without differentiating them and acts as both a party-in-miniature and a pre-party formation; and 3) FRSO avoids attacking the immediate hurdle to Marxist unity in the U.S.: the revisionist parties. Each of these is comprehensible, but ultimately in error. In totality they stem from a single central error that dominates FRSO’s public program: the belief that the movement is not only totally incoherent, but incapable of cohering and the misguided desire therefore not to unite all that can be united, but to build a new movement out of the organically arising consciousness of the working classes. We will address each of these criticisms in turn.

i. Local / Central

At this stage of the movement, the local aspect of the contradiction between local autonomy and centralized control is primary. Centralization can only come about as the result of a union between local organizations. The primary building block of a Communist Party is the local organization; so much so that we might even call these primary organizations. As we note below, a party is an organization of organizations.

FRSO recognizes in theory that primary organizations must be built. However, despite claiming that they are a pre-party formation and not a party, they operate like a party-in-miniature, with congresses, a Central Committee, and central decision-making. The efforts of local FRSO organizers are directed at creating primary organizations — the local is being directed by the center. This reverses the necessary stages of growth of the Party.

Local, primary organizations must be encouraged to grow and band together into leagues. They cannot be subjected to centralization at this stage; they must be free to experiment, raise the level of consciousness, etc. Marxist-Leninists, no matter how dedicated, cannot go into the field and create other Marxist-Leninists out of thin air. The synthesis of Marxism-Leninism must be achieved not by importing organizational practices, but by organically rediscovering them.

No central organization can seed primary organizations if it is determined to retain control over them at this stage. Central organs — of FRSO, for instance — are simply too weak and do not hold the undivided faith of the masses. It is only once the vanguard party is constituted that the primary aspect of this contradiction will shift to centralization.

ii. Aboveground / Underground

FRSO was created out of the NCM, and the NCM saw a fostering of widespread underground activities. However, the primary aspect of the aboveground/underground contradiction is currently the aboveground. FRSO has no aboveground presence. Their meetings are secret. Their determinations are secret. Their structure is secret. Their membership is semi-secret.

This has created a dual membership structure within FRSO wherein one first joins to pay dues but is excluded from meetings unless specifically invited and cannot take part in the political education program. This isn’t really a “membership” so much as it is a supporter, fellow-traveler, or hanger-on. The second tier of membership is the “cadre” membership, in which cadre are expected to be transferred across the country, if need be, to engage in work under the direction of the central party. The outer membership does not have any idea what the inner membership is doing.

Thus, the normal every day workings of the FRSO are transmuted, by the alchemy of a confused set of aboveground/underground priorities, to entirely underground work, which cannot attain political power without an aboveground arm. Indeed, the winning of the faith of the masses cannot occur as the result of an underground movement without an aboveground arm with which the masses can interact, into which they can deposit their faith, and to whom they can address their concerns and questions.

iii. Avoidance of Criticism

FRSO is refreshingly open to criticism about itself — at least compared to the revisionist organizations. Where it falls into error is that the organization refuses to criticize the revisionists. This is an expression of what we referred to in our initial prospectus as one of the “opposite and complementary major organizational problems: aversion to criticism and obsession with criticism.”

We maintain that

Both are manifestations of extreme liberal individualism and both trend towards the movement’s greater fracturing, atomization, and dissolution. The latter, obsession with criticism, is the liberal-individualist’s attempt at a domineering exertion and projection of their personal will, in service of inflating one’s ego. The former, aversion to criticism, is, in contrast, the liberal-individualist’s defense mechanism, an avoidance tactic that serves to protect one’s ego from shattering under pressure. Neither extreme is acceptable for a Communist and both attitudes must be overcome. Communists must learn to do the work of engaging in a comradely, principled, and constructive debate.

At the press, we divide our understanding of the political positions of the various main classes capable of revolutionary consciousness (as a class) in the U.S. Empire in the following way: the subproletarian and proletarian classes and the laboring section of the petit-bourgeoisie (excluding the non-laboring section). These classes can be divided into three levels of political development and consciousness: backwards, intermediate, and advanced. There are then three overarching strata in each level: tailing, central, and leading. This produces the following schema:

Reactionary Elements. These are composed of the tailing-backwards and central-backwards elements.

Salvageable Backwards Elements. Composed of the leading-backwards elements.

Tailing-intermediate Elements.

Central Intermediate Elements.

Leading-Intermediate Elements. These are class-conscious workers who are not yet Marxists or Marxist-Leninists. They are developed politically without having formal political education. This is the group that FRSO wants to advance into advanced elements.

Tailing, intermediate, and leading Advanced Elements. These are the organizing elements of the three identified classes that not only possess class-consciousness but possess some degree of political development. These are by and large contained in organizations like the DSA, but are also locked up in CPUSA, PSL, etc.

FRSO’s strategy calls for abandoning the advanced elements, and placing their focus entirely on the central-intermediate and leading-intermediate elements of the working classes. This is untenable. We do not yet have a sufficient gravity of advanced elements united under one banner to establish functional workers schools, etc. Advanced elements should be taking the class struggle to the streets and organizing the intermediate elements — but they cannot do this if they are locked up in revisionist parties and organizations.

For this reason, we urge FRSO to engage in debate on their strategy and organizational form with the Press and to commit to attending a unity convention when such a convention is called and scheduled. We must reject the “I won’t join you, you will join me,” attitude that pervades the movement, and we believe FRSO is capable of overcoming this endemic, movement-wide attitude.

Local formations

In contrast to the all-empire formations, local formations have one or a handful of chapters at most. These are, broadly speaking, either engaged in local “survival” work or else engaged in developing militants and Marxists through study. Rarely, these two types of work are joined in a coherent program. Examples of local formations include From the Heart (FTH) in Seattle, which provides meals, community defense, and medical aid to the unhoused encampments that grew up in Seattle during COVID while the traditional police sweeps were in abeyance.

It is difficult to estimate the total number of these groups in operation, but it’s safe to say that every state has at least a handful of them. They are not all strictly (or even nominally) Marxist; many anarchists are engaged in survival work as a kind of direct praxis. Nevertheless, Marxist-Leninist, Marxist, Maoist, or anarchist, all of these formations are part of the stream of the anti-capitalist movement, and even anarchist-run and staffed mutual aid groups may be drawn into the overall struggle by the Communists.

Red Aid

There are two broad kinds of survival work: that which builds class consciousness and elevates the struggle, and that which does not. We have taken to calling survival work that elevates class consciousness “Red Aid,” to distinguish it from the other two types which are mutual aid and “red” charity.

The defining principles of Red Aid are:

Reliability and consistency. Red Aid is not fly-by-not, but returns over and over again at pre-arranged periods known by the community. This is because it is a real survival program, which the community can then come to rely on for critical services, knowing it will always be there for them.
Openly Communist. Communists disdain to conceal their aims, etc. One of the prerequisites for raising class consciousness is that the masses know what Communism is and see Communists engaged in work. Red Aid does not seek to hide its nature.
No proselytizing. Unlike religious charity, Red Aid is not predicated on the ideological alignment of the people it serves, nor do Red Aid services require those attending them to sit through a lecture or a sermon. Red Aid services are conditioned only on the attendants not presenting a danger to others.
Unidirectional Aid. Red Aid, unlike mutual aid, does not require those in attendance to do anything. Not to listen, not to pay money, not to exchange goods, not to pledge labor. Red Aid is unidirectional.
Meeting the masses. Red Aid also heightens the struggle by providing a place for the organized Communist to meet directly with the rest of the masses. The Communists at a Red Aid service don’t simply help meet survival needs, they interact directly with the masses and, when those they are serving are interested, explain Communism, heighten class consciousness, invite those at the service to mass meetings, offer literature, and so forth.
Responsive to the masses. Nor do Red Aid services predetermine what they are going to provide and provide it no matter what the people need. Instead, Red Aid requires the Communists at the service to continually be asking questions about the needs of the local community, and then acting responsively to those needs.

There are numerous Red Aid programs or Red Aid-style programs operating throughout North America at this moment. These represent a very practically advanced form of local organizing. They address community questions, provide survival material for those subject to the most brutal forms of capitalist exploitation, and prepare the ground as class consciousness organically rises with the failure of imperialist “services.”

Although there is no guarantee that Red Aid organizations are run by highly ideologically developed Communists, it is a necessity (due to the principle of consistency) that they be run by militant Communists with a high degree of discipline. This makes even underdeveloped Red Aid organizations perfectly positioned on two fronts: firstly, no amount of political development can instill discipline, but any disciplined Communist can achieve the highest level of political development; second, these organizations are in direct communication with the masses and are poised to lead all local struggles for which they have sufficient labor.

Red charity or mutual aid

Survival programs that lack a number of the Red Aid principles – that are, for instance, not consistent, or do not help heighten the ideological development or organization of the communities they serve, or that do not communicate at all with the masses during their service – are essentially what we mean when we speak (derisively) of “red charity.” That is, this work does nothing to organize the masses. Meeting the immediate one-time material needs of a community on a one-off basis is nice, perhaps it is even morally good, but it does nothing to alleviate the conditions that create those needs in the first place.

Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy way to distinguish between Red Aid and red charity without a detailed investigation of each individual survival program. It is likely that the great majority of the currently-running survival programs in the U.S. and Canada fall into the category of red charity. In fact, it is also likely that most of the survival programs that are generally called mutual aid are also red or black (that is, anarchist) charity.

In contradistinction to both Red (or even Black, if an anarchist analogue exists) Aid and red (or black) charity, mutual aid is characterized by exchange. That is, mutual aid (which may or may not be a survival program, that is, designed to assist a community ravaged by capitalism), is truly mutual aid only when those engaged in the program are both giving and receiving. This can involve community labor, community gardens, labor exchanges, etc. and is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the concept of an organizing force that raises class consciousness. That is, a complex and mature organizing effort may incorporate both elements of Red Aid and mutual aid.

It is our belief that there are very few actually existing mutual aid programs currently being run within the U.S. Empire.

Reading and study groups

For as long as there have been socialists, there have been reading and study circles. Initially, it was reading and study groups that formed the seeds and seedlings of the more advanced socialist parties and eventually the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), the precursor of the Bolshevik organization as well as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

These groups are generally formed by the most class conscious elements in a given area. Formal parties and organizations sometimes either pattern their local levels on the reading group (for instance, even revisionist CPUSA requires a half-hour of “study” in each meeting) or open their own reading groups to make contact with unorganized but class conscious or budding communist elements.

The purposes of reading and study groups should be multifarious. Among them are:

The most obvious is to increase the theoretical awareness and political development of those in attendance.
To increase the militancy and political discipline of the attendees.
To study specific local problems of political economics and propose solutions within the framework of revolutionary organization.
To study generalized problems of political economy throughout a region or super-region and to propose solutions.
To establish and maintain contact with other revolutionary or semi-revolutionary organizations.
Eventually, to engage in local action to carry out the proposed solutions established by the organization; to then study the effects, acknowledge weaknesses and setbacks as well as victories and advancements, and then to reformulate solutions and prepare for further action.

Reading groups have both class character and class orientation. Class character is determined by the makeup of the membership; class orientation is determined by the goals and strategies used by the organization. Communist reading groups should all properly have a proletarian class orientation. Generally “left” but not necessarily Communist reading groups may have proletarian or petit-bourgeois class orientation.

This leaves class composition or class character. These reading groups can be divided into three general compositions: primarily proletarian, primarily petit-bourgeois, and admixed. It is likely that the large majority of reading and study groups are petit-bourgeois — the petit-bourgeoisie by and large have more free time and money than the proletarians, even where the classes are extremely near (upper-strata proletarians as against lowest-strata petit-bourgeoisie, for instance).

Political development of the movement

The Communist movement is extremely under-developed as compared to other periods in its history. Even those formations that are semi- or well-organized and are undertaking nearly continuous action – for instance, Red Aid/charity or reading groups or even less fruitful but more visible action like leading marches or being arrested in demonstrations – are woefully short on developed and militant membership. Indeed, throughout all Communist organizations in the U.S. Empire, there appears to be first and foremost a critical deficiency in organization and secondly, in trained and militant workers.

Thus, the gravity of our movement falls almost entirely toward amateurism in word and deed. Not only are we without a vanguard, we are without even the precursor of the vanguard: the semi-organized but well-trained and well-developed individual, local organizations. Instead, our movement is characterized by the general prevalence of extremely fragmented amateur cliques, mis-developed sects like the PSL and CPUSA, fractured and scattered individuals, and the widespread existence of eclecticism in each of these organizations, groups, individuals.

In the middle and end of the 19th century, the movement was being formed. It suffered from some of these problems, but was inexorably being driven toward coherence. Now, however, we are dealing with warped fragments of knowledge from the past; the movement had adhered, was corrupted, has been destroyed. Thus, the amateurism of our period is unlike the amateurism of the 19th century; it is an amateurism studded with pitfalls and traps laid by our enemies, or with false-starts and dead ends created by the alignment of the movement’s wreckage.

The movement is not, at the present time, in a coherent enough or organized enough state for functional political lines to be forwarded and developed in anything approaching a useful fashion. Indeed, only when the entire movement submits to a generalized attempt at establishing basic and fundamental ideological and strategic unity in a fully open and democratic process during which the most principled and developed must strenuously advocate for the theoretical positions they have discovered through practical work, will the movement be ready to correct its deep developmental unevenness.

The Masses

The organic consciousness and growth of the masses has run far ahead of the movement in the recent past and this present period. The objective conditions for revolution – the immiseration of the masses, particularly the nationally oppressed masses, the decay of the imperialist infrastructure that, through the 20th century successfully extracted superprofits and fed them back into the Empire, etc. – have existed for a considerable time. We have witnessed the masses striving toward consciousness, most notably in the June Uprisings of 2020-21 that resulted from the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd.

The masses are ready. They lack only the organization and far-sightedness of a guiding body. They have run far ahead of the movement, which trails them in tactic, in strategy, and in organization.

Our Press

We are a Marxist-Leninist press. We are working to advance Communism, in particular to, at the same time, increase the class consciousness of the revolutionary masses while working for Communist unity, in the belly of the world-imperialist beast. We are not a party, nor are we a pre-party formation. We intend, through the press itself, to bring about the greater organization of the Communist movement; to help professionalize that movement; to work toward uniting all that can be united; and to bringing about the holding of a general unity conference in North America – Turtle Island – among all the fragments, individuals, and organizations within the still-ruined Communist movement so that we can help facilitate its reunification.

In essence, Unity–Struggle–Unity exists because we all have the fervent hope to play a part in the foundation of a truly all-empire party that is capable of becoming the vanguard of the people in their struggle against the capitalists, their fascist lackeys, and the class conscious advance forces of reaction.

Our Plan

Unity–Struggle–Unity will put out two major publications with three major goals. The first, already in publication online, is The Red Clarion, a mass political newspaper with the purpose of raising consciousness among the working masses, of bringing the advanced sections of the masses to Marxism-Leninism, and of integrating the struggles throughout the U.S. Empire into a single, all-empire struggle. We have now integrated the material that was designed for a second publication, which we would have called Crucible, into The Red Clarion. This material is the discussion and critique of revolutionary organizing itself. We hope to provide a forum for debate and struggle inside the movement, serve as a way to integrate the disparate local organizations into a network of discourse, and finally advocate for the eventual assembly of an all-empire unity convention.

A second publication, The Unity Journal, is a planned quarterly theoretical journal that will be devoted to complex issues of political economy and theory; it will also serve as a center of communication between the disparate organizations, and help to solidify the basic questions confronting the movement into discrete forms that can be discussed and debated when the time of the unity convention is at hand.

We will also be releasing occasional pamphlets and booklets on specific subjects ranging from broad propaganda to help raise class consciousness and dispel common capitalist myths to specialized booklets designed to assist in the professionalization of the movement by detailing organizing principles, theory, technique, etc. that can be applied on the local level.

All of these publications will work toward the same common goals using common principles. Nor do we intend to publish merely those works with which we already agree; anything that is not intentionally reactionary and violates none of the basic principles of our organization, anything that may assist the movement will be published for review, struggle, and submission to the general knowledge and review of the various organizations and groups that comprise the movement.

The First Weapon of the Proletarian Class is Organization

The enemy is organized. It is, in fact, organized to a very high degree. This organization takes the form firstly, of the enemy state; secondly, of the various private international corporations; thirdly and finally, in the form of local settler-garrison societies, private white supremacist clubs, and paramilitary militias. As the empire suffers crisis after crisis, the enemy’s organizational forms have been undergoing consolidation. Settler-garrison societies like the Oathkeepers have been integrating into the government apparatus. Corporations have constructed “public-private” partnerships with the state police force. Yet, the main reserve of the enemy’s strength is not its organization; it is the control and “ownership” of productive property, capital, and political power.

In order to oppose even one of these forms of bourgeois power, let alone to oppose them when each separate form has been united into a single fighting front against the proletarian revolution, we must be organized. Just as self-reproducing life is the special property of organized matter, thought is the special property of highly organized living cells, and society the special property of highly organized individual humans, class-power is the special property of the highly organized class. This organization does not occur on its own, but rather requires the application of conscious individual and collective effort.

To stand a chance against the capitalists, we must marshal our energy to strike as hard as they do. To challenge their concentrated power, we must concentrate our power. The power of the proletariat resides in its position as:

The necessary workforce for all production, and
The fundamental basis, the social foundation, of modern capitalist society.

These strengths cannot be accessed so long as the class is disorganized. One proletarian cannot threaten all production alone; one proletarian cannot convince their entire class to resist capitalist blandishments and bribes, or to stand firm and push toward the total dismantling of capitalist society. It takes a disciplined organization to do this.

As discussed above, the proletarian class is not currently organized as a single, vanguard party, or as anything even approaching that. No such class-party exists today. There are, nevertheless, many, local, primary organizations.

What is the route to the founding of a Marxist, revolutionary, class party? It is the combination of primary organizations. It is the complex of those organizations, subordinated to a single, central authority and obeying a definite chain of command, a structured set of rules, and pursuing an articulated minimum and maximum program. Thus, we must locate the primary organizations, knit together their cadre and most militant members, bring them to a common point of unity, and begin the struggle to form the nucleus of an organization of organizations: the fighting vanguard party.

It is to this task particularly that USU’s Crucible is devoted. Indeed, it is the specific and essential purpose of Crucible to provide a forum for struggle over revolutionary questions such as strategy, tactics, etc. By encouraging these primary organizations to engage in constructive struggle with one another, we ensure they form inter-relationships. As these relationships develop, we hope, as USU and as individuals, to play a part in the call for an all-empire unity conference to establish the basic form of a real, revolutionary, proletarian party.

The Red Clarion, our mass paper, will also, as a consequence of its primary mission of publishing the articles, publicizing the achievements, and making available the on-the-ground reports of primary organizations throughout the U.S. Empire and its junior partner, Canada, serve as an organizing principle. At one and the same time, the Clarion can raise the general consciousness of the working classes while providing that organizing principle to local, primary organizations. This will be accomplished by linking up every local struggle against particularly vicious and ruthless capitalists, landlords, state agents, etc. as well as all local struggles for economic reforms, with the all-empire political fight against the capitalist state.

Unite All That Can Be United

At this stage, it is critical for our movement – divided, scattered, some locked into sclerotic and dead “parties,” others carrying the psychological trauma of the movement and refusing to join in any large-scale organization and therefore reduced to anarchic liberal-individualism – to emerge from the twilight of amateurism and step into the full light of day as a professional, militant, and politically disciplined camp of revolutionists.

To withstand the power of the capitalist state and its reactionary vanguard, the intelligence agencies, it is necessary now to unite all that can be united – to set forth definite lines of demarcation which will establish the limits of our organizational demands and thus lay the groundwork for unity on the most basic issues. Within the boundaries thus set, it is then necessary to unite all groups, persons, forces, and trends by which the remaining questions – from concrete political lines to developed strategy and tactics for victory – can be decided through collective struggle.

To that end and for that purpose – the working out of the basic questions by which we can establish our initial operational unity among those engaged in the movement – we welcome debate, even where contributors do not agree with the positions of our Editorial Board or our general body, so long as those positions are not purposefully and evidently chauvinist or liquidationist.

In order for this dialog to proceed, we firmly believe that USU cannot be the voice of any one “party” or organization. It must remain a neutral force, above the sectarian fray. Despite each of our disagreements with and objections to the strategies and forms of the various extant formations, we nevertheless hold out working membership in our press to members of any or no “party.” The only requirements to permanent membership on the USU staff are:

Continuous labor on USU projects of a degree at least equivalent to the production of one short article per month;
Membership and work in a local revolutionary organization (this can be waived on a case-by-case basis); and,
Payment of monthly dues in the amount of roughly 2 hours of your hourly wage.

Those who wish to write for the press but cannot or are not prepared to devote that degree of time or resources are free to join our Correspondence Network and work with our writers, graphic artists, and editors, and speak directly with our membership.

From Online to Print

Our distribution method began solely online, with our websites (http://www.unity-struggle-unity.org and http://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org). These represent the press and the Red Clarion, respectively. However, we are already in the process of producing and distributing a print edition of the Red Clarion, to be distributed directly to local, primary organizations.

In order to expand our reach, we are seeking affiliate organizations. It is these primary organizations, in the act of contributing to, reading, and distributing USU materials, that will eventually form the nucleus of an all-Empire fighting revolutionary organization – the Communist Party of North America, or whatever name its constituent parts may choose.

Further, our first print pamphlets are already in proof and will soon be available to order. In order to defray the costs of printing and distribution (postage, etc.), we cannot distribute for free, or even at cost; we must continue to expand the production of our press and reach further, offer our work more cheaply, etc. However, that is not to say that any of the members of the press will ever personally profit from the work. We are volunteers, not paid writers.

Cohering the Movement

USU has embarked on a plan to increase the general development of the movement by running training workshops. Our first workshop on agitation and propaganda writing was a resounding success, with five outside attendees. Our second workshop, a three-class course on the history of Communist organizing, promises to draw even more attendees.

It is necessary for the Communist movement in North America to begin cohering around a center. This will form an anchoring point around which the vanguard party will eventually form. The Press is not meant to be a party, or a pre-party formation. Nevertheless, we have embarked on a new phase of our plan: to assist in the development of local, primary organizations; to help organize those groups to speak with one another, increase the development of their membership, and coordinate their actions. As more primary, local organizations form outside of the stultifying confines of the calcified parties, the potential for a convention — a true unity convention — increase.