First Published: Workers Viewpoint, Vol. 4, No. 18, November 5, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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A new era in the glorious history of the U.S. proletariat has begun. Today the working class has its Party, the Communist Workers Party, U.S.A. The Founding Congress of the Communist Workers Party, held this past October, was a militant Congress, far-sighted and with iron will and discipline. It declared war against the bourgeoisie. Building on the fighting tradition, staunch character and correct line forged by the Workers Viewpoint Organization, the Communist Workers Party is charging forward to meet the bright dawn of a socialist U.S.A. breaking on the horizon!
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In the midst of rotting capitalism, there is a crisis of leadership. The U.S. bourgeoisie has been sitting on top of an erupting volcano since the turn of the century. They have constantly cried and today still cry, “red peril” and “crisis of confidence.”
Comrades, we are still in the era of imperialism, the eve of proletarian revolution. In the coming decades the people will undergo trial by fire. Imperialism abounds with crises and flare-ups. It is weak and full of irreconcilable, antagonistic contradictions.
Following from this, the proletarian revolution is an immediate and practical question.
We must tear off the fig leaf of bourgeois democracy, strip it naked and expose its hollowness, its unprecedented viciousness, rather than allow it a new lease on its degenerate life.
We must break imperialism. We must crush the chain of wage slavery, and its ugly national oppression.
Our class emancipation needs no condescending saviors, whether they be robed as moral preachers or packaged as new technological miracles. For we know deeply that imperialism is parasitic, decaying, and moribund capitalism. It is stagnation defined. The subjective factor of the working class is the only thing. Only the dynamic role of the subjective factor will enable us to emancipate ourselves.
The coming 50 to 100 years will indeed be an era of great disorder, full of social upheaval and historic challenges. We welcome it and we love it. Today the world situation is indeed excellent. Despite the betrayal of the Soviet revisionist bureaucrats and most recently joined by the Chinese revisionist warlords, the genuine communists will seize the opportunity to go against the tide, temper themselves and grow. Communists are dauntless. Our specialty is to confront contradictions head on and turn them around. Indeed it is our lofty habit forged in the fires of our history.
U.S. imperialism, exposed naked around the world, sounds a retreat to make a comeback. The Soviet Union, the other superpower, never learns. Wanting to take over the bloody mantle of U.S. imperialism as the number one hegemonic power in the world, it hurls itself headlong towards its first Vietnam.
Seize the time!
The people of the world are awakened as never before. The third world, on the heels of the global victory against imperialism, charges in hot pursuit of neo-colonialist plunderers. On the other hand, the superpowers and the second world are helplessly entangled among themselves, with the second world uniting to block the export of capital, inflation and bullying.
Countries want independence, nations want liberation and people want revolution. The oppressed people of the world are thundering out to the superpowers, imperialists, Zionists, racists and all reaction: “No More!” Indeed the heyday of imperialism is gone forever. The sun is setting on the empires of yesteryear.
But it shines brighter on a fiery new dawn for the formerly subjugated, plundered and downtrodden in all four corners of the globe.
The struggles of the third world have pushed back the danger of world war by ripping off corner after corner of the globe – the markets for the exploitation of capital and the basins of raw materials-away from the clutches of the superpowers.
Nevertheless, propelled by irreconcilable internal contradictions, the superpowers run headlong into a new world war, prepared actively by their predatory peace masked by “detente” and “security treaties.”
We are opposed to world war. We are not afraid of it. But when it comes, we will certainly turn it into a civil war to bury the U.S. bourgeoisie forever. And it too will temper us and awaken us and we will certainly win the war for the proletariat and win the permanent peace.
In the U.S., the temporary stabilization of capitalism ushered in during the 50s has ended. It must be ended forever.
The revolutionary situation brews. In the era of imperialism the bourgeoisie is trapped by the grave dug with its own hands. Trapped by the ever-sharpening and enlarging contradiction between the socialized production and the private ownership of the means of production, and by the consequent stagnation of production. They pull their trap tighter with their anti-stagnation measures, only to engineer inflation and great vulnerability in the economy, to a point where there is less and less room for the production of useful goods. More and more, it becomes an ever greater task to come out of the pull of crisis temporarily except through the most gargantuan joint efforts of the bourgeoisie through state monopoly capitalism. But common effort among the bourgeoisie is against their very nature. Its impossibility is second only to class peace between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Indeed without understanding Chairman Mao’s theory of Three Worlds, we cannot understand the contemporary situation and how deeply the bourgeoisie is stuck, and how excellent the situation really is. Without understanding Chairman Mao’s theory of Three Worlds, we cannot see our strength and how it gives us the time to rally our forces for the revolutionary onslaught.
The independent working class party, the vanguard party of the proletariat guided by the historical experiences of the workers of all nations, the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought, is the key to break the imperialists forever. Millions of toilers have fought heroically for, sacrificed and shed their blood for the formation of our party. But repeatedly the bloody hands of revisionism from imperialist bribery have dragged down our party into the abyss.
Each time we must pick up the pieces to start all over again. But each time wiser, each time more determined. And we have, taking up the mantle of proletarian revolution from the generations of fighters before us.
Seize the time! It has been too long that our class has been dormant, for close to thirty years. However vulnerable the last decades have been for the imperialists, they have kept us dormant, made possible due to the parasitism of the U.S. as a rentier state.
Our class was lulled into a drugged sleep foremost of all because the labor aristocrats and other bribed agents in our ranks had handed state power back to the bourgeoisie on silver platters after World War II. In the face of the seemingly more powerful enemy, they lose their nerve and want to live on the fat of imperialism squeezed from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Their betrayal means we were robbed of our leaders and condemned to the stranglehold of the bourgeoisie, allowing them to perpetuate their wage slavery.
But through the darkness of the imperialist night, the rays of the morning sun burst through. Inspired by Chairman Mao’s spirit of daring to struggle and daring to win, guided by his fierce communist vision that saw through to the weakness and cowardice of imperialism, that imperialism strategically is only a paper tiger, the communists and revolutionaries were rejuvenated. Inspired by the nine polemics against modern revisionism and the salvoes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, we have let go of the hands of the sold-out Communist Party, U.S.A. and the rest of the marsh. Walking on a dangerous road paved with lessons paid for in blood and through our own trial and error in fighting, failing, fighting again, we found our party–the Communist Workers Party, U.S.A.
State power is the cornerstone of the Communist Workers Party’s line. For without state power, the proletariat has nothing. We must seize state power in the midst of the bloodbath of class struggle. We must make immediate and all-rounded preparation for the seizure of state power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The forging of the Communist Workers Party, U.S.A. beyond the possibility of defeat in the coming period is the most crucial part of the preparatory work to seize the country in the bloodbath.
The Party members and advanced elements of the proletariat must seize the time, actively learning to assume leadership by actually assuming leadership in all spheres of life without exception. Kick out the hacks and misleaders of all shades and colors.
There are only two roads. The U.S. workers are torn. Spontaneously, in the workers’ struggles unity is forged here and broken there and meanwhile society drifts towards fascism and world war independent of our will.
Only the vanguard of the U.S. working class, which recruits its finest sons and daughters from all backgrounds and nationalities, sees further and marches at the head of the entire U.S. people, is capable of uniting the vast majority to fight to escape the hell of capitalism and reach the bright future of socialism.
The act of building up the Party of the U.S. working class is the act of the awakening of the U.S. working class itself.
Its collective will, wisdom and might will not be tapped until it forges its own Party. Its power will not be realized without its Party.
Our class, the working class, is not any old transitional class in history. The working class is the most organized, far-sighted, greatest and last class in history. It is the last and greatest class ever in the history of mankind.
The proletarian revolution is no ordinary revolution. The victory of the working class in its fight to bury the capitalist class will be the last class conflict. It is the war to end all wars, the class to emancipate the whole of mankind.
To win this battle, the working class has been preparing for over a hundred years, from the Paris Commune, to the Russian and the Chinese revolutions. The proletarian revolution criticizes itself constantly and interrupts itself continually in its own course, until there is no turning back.
Comrades, seize the time, build the Communist Workers Party, Prepare for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! We must steel ourselves, perfect our organization and deepen our perspective and vigilance, by grasping the correct line, in the course of actually assuming leadership of the working class. Only then will we be able to seize the time, fight, fail, fight again, fail again, and fight until we reach the point of no return, where all turning back is impossible, until final victory.
Comrades and fellow workers! The Communist Workers Party hereby declares war against the U.S. bourgeoisie and reaction in all lands!
WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
DOWN WITH THE CRIMINAL RULE OF THE U.S. MONOPOLY CAPITALIST CLASS!
SEIZE THE TIME, BUILD THE COMMUNIST WORKERS PARTY, PREPARE FOR THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT!
LET THE BOURGEOISIE TREMBLE AT THE SPECTRE OF COMMUNISM!