Note: The purpose of this appendix is to concretize what we think should be the level of unity of a party-building organization. What is most important here are the points we think should be covered, the questions that should be answered. The statements that we list are, of course, what we consider to be the correct answers; but we recognize that the struggle over party-building line might produce unity on different positions. The point is that some position should be taken on each question covered here.
I. Our overall purposes and methods are summed up in the science of Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism must be applied to concrete conditions, rather than used as a dogma, but it includes certain universal principles.
A. The main universal principles, which are negated neither by particular conditions in the U.S. nor particular features of the historical period, are these:
1. Capitalism, including capitalism in its present imperialist stage, inevitably produces exploitation and poverty, war, national oppression, the oppression of women, poisonous environmental pollution, and waste of human and natural resources, none of which can be consistently eliminated without the socialist transformation of society.
2. That transformation cannot be begun without the violent, revolutionary overthrow of the existing bourgeois state. Such revolutions will take place in different countries at different times, depending on the conditions in each.
3. For any socialist revolution to succeed, the proletariat must be its leading force. In general the industrial proletariat is the most advanced section of the working class.
4. But the proletariat must lead a broad united front of the revolutionary sections of all classes and strata whose interests are antagonistic to those of the bourgeoisie (monopoly and non-monopoly).
5. The proletariat must be led by its own vanguard detachment, organized into a Leninist party (with such adaptations as conditions require). There should be a single party for men and women of all nationalities.
6. The victorious proletariat must exercise state power in the form of its revolutionary dictatorship, to consolidate socialism and pursue the gradual development of classless communist society. The general tasks of this dictatorship are abolishing all the exploiting classes, developing socialist economy to the maximum, enhancing the communist consciousness of the masses, abolishing the differences between ownership by the whole people and collective ownership, between workers and peasants, between town and country and between mental and manual labourers, . . .[abolishing inequality between nationalities and between the sexes,] eliminating any possibility of the re-emergence of classes and the restoration of capitalism and providing conditions for the realization of a communist society. . . preventing attacks by international imperialism (including armed intervention and disintegration by peaceful means) and . . . giving support to the world revolution. ..[1]
7. The party must apply the mass line, taking the separate and scattered knowledge of the masses about their own needs, the reality in which they live, and ways of changing that reality; summing up this knowledge in light of Marxism-Leninism and historical experience, and taking this higher level of knowledge back to the people.
8. The party must apply criticism/self-criticism, including soliciting criticism from the masses.
9. The democratic demands for which the party fights must include full equality among all nationalities and between the sexes, including those forms of special assistance needed to help create real equality. This applies not only to society at large, but to the party and its organizations.
10. The proletariat stands for the voluntary union of nations and peoples, which is impossible without the right of every nation contained within the borders of a larger state, and of every colony, to self-determination, i.e., the right to form a separate nation-state.
11. The chief internationalist duty of the proletariat in every capitalist country is to overthrow its own bourgeoisie and thus weaken the worldwide system of imperialism. The proletariat must also support other proletarian revolutionary movements, as well as all genuine national liberation movements, i.e., those that will carry the struggle for independence and development to a higher stage.
12. The struggle against imperialism cannot be waged without a consistent struggle against opportunism, both right and “left.”
B. Because of the strong influence of various forms of opportunism in this country, communists disagree on the application of many of these principles. Many such disagreements exist within our party-building organization, but for it to function properly we must limit its members to those who can at least accept scarcely-disputable facts, and the implications of those facts. In particular, we all recognize these points:
1. The Soviet Union has been ruled for a long time by revisionists, who in practice oppose the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat listed above. Internally the revisionists exploit and oppress the people of the USSR, and externally they play a counter-revolutionary role on a wide scale[2]
We do not agree on whether its economic system remains socialist or whether a form of capitalism has been restored, on whether or not the country is an imperialist superpower, or on whether or not a significant part of its international role is progressive.
2. We have no unified position on whether the present leadership in China is revisionist. We are all at least open to the possibility that it is.
3. Neither current nor immediately foreseeable conditions justify a tactical alliance by the U.S. proletariat with the U.S. bourgeoisie; no conditions would justify a strategic alliance. Agitating for imperialist war preparations, in the form of opposition to “appeasing the USSR,” is only consistent with such an alliance.
We do not agree on whether the Theory of Three Worlds, correctly applied, is Marxist-Leninist or revisionist.
4. The disagreements stated above are important not only because they will affect communist propaganda and agitation on important events, but because they reflect ideological differences that will lead to disagreement on other major questions. Our differences can coexist in this network now, but one of our tasks is to resolve them expeditiously.
II. The purpose of this organization is to build a new communist party. We agree on the following line to guide this work.
A. In the U.S. there is neither a consistent Marxist-Leninist party, nor one sufficiently open to criticism of its opportunism that communists should focus their party-building efforts on uniting with it. [Excludes those in basic unity with existing parties.[3]]
B. To create the conditions for formation of such a party, Marxist-Leninists who agree with these points of unity should join a nationwide pre-party organization, a network of local circles. [Excludes the ”expanding-local-circle” view of party-building, and the line that communists can only build unity through direct joint practice.]
C. Though a party is best suited for organizing theoretical work and ideological struggle, the pre-party organization must:
1. Define the questions which a party program must answer; identify those that are unanswered or controversial among us; organize the study and the struggle to answer those questions, including concrete investigations of the particular status and outlook of the various classes, the different nationalities, and women.
2. Study and write about the political economy of the U.S., the state, the trade unions, and other major institutions of bourgeois society, both to provide a tactical orientation for the working-class struggle and to provide material for communist propaganda and agitation.
3. Organize study and struggle over the nature and functioning of the party we week to build, including norms for the operation of democratic centralism.
4. Take up these theoretical projects in the order of their importance, first using the two criteria of value for settling controversial programmatic questions and value for our practical work in the proletariat, passing to a focus on questions of party organization as the time for forming a party grows closer. [Excludes the line of postponing most theoretical work until we have a party, and line that we are well grounded theoretically.]
D. The developing U.S. workers’ movement and the spread of communism among radical intellectuals and other petty bourgeois have taken place separately, and the two movements remain largely separate. We must work for their fusion into a communist working-class movement. [Excludes “fusion is at a high level” and equating petty bourgeois communists in the factories with communist workers.]
E. Though a party is best suited for all forms of mass work, the pre-party organization must take up the following practical tasks in order to begin the building of a party that will eventually be proletarian in composition and will lead the working-class movement, to ground our theory in reality, to provide some assistance to the people’s struggles against the attacks of capital and the drive towards war, to assist in the remolding of our own outlooks, and to further the struggle for communist unity:
1. Provide practical leadership to popular resistance to the capitalists and their state, especially the struggles of the industrial proletariat and of oppressed nationalities. [Excludes disdain for people’s day-to-day struggles. Excludes, while fusion is low, focus on liberation support coalitions or various struggles that attract mainly the petty bourgeoisie.]
2. In the course of providing that leadership, use agitation to raise the workers’ understanding of how the problems they face are rooted in the class contradictions of capitalism, and their grasp of the role of the bourgeois state. [Excludes “propaganda as chief form of work,” and fusion as immersion in the class struggle at its existing level.]
3. Work with the most progressive and active workers who come forward in these struggles, so as to jointly provide leadership to the struggle (both training these workers and learning from them), to do propaganda work to raise their political level, and, where possible, to win them to communism and our organizations. [Excludes inattention to development of a vanguard detachment of the working class.]
4. The main purposes of our mass work before we have a party that is in fact a proletarian vanguard party are to assist the development of a working-class vanguard (of advanced and intermediate workers), to win that vanguard to communism, and to carry out investigations required for our theoretical work. [Excludes line of simply recruiting an existing vanguard, and line that fails to distinguish between practice in a period of party-building and practice when the party can really lead the mass movement.] [E.1-E.4 also exclude postponing significant mass work until communists, or party-building forces, either unite on political line or accomplish a large part of our theoretical work.]
5. There are few advanced workers, as Lenin defined them, in the U.S. today, nor even a substantial number of intermediates (active agitators and organizers who believe in socialism). We must learn how to do communist work in these conditions, and we must learn how to describe politically significant strata as they exist in the class today.
F. Other functions of the pre-party network
1. Exchange lessons from each others’ practice systematically, and permit evaluation of each others’ practice.
2. Arrange necessary travel and conferences, to broaden our knowledge and conduct struggle over differences.
3. Follow developments in other parties and organizations in the movement, and arm those in common practice with other forces with an understanding of their lines
G. Network organization [Details depend on number and attributes of forces participating]
1. An elected steering committee must survey our forces; organize security; establish communications, reports, and publications; identify programmatic and major tactical questions and decide priorities for study and struggle over them; make assignments to bodies doing theoretical work (ensuring that existing different lines are represented); organize monitoring of the communist press; prepare conferences. The steering committee may not answer, for the organization, important questions that are still controversial within it.
2. Participating groups may struggle within the steering committee for their views on questions within the committee’s authority. On matters fundamentally affecting the work of the network, member groups may also take their disagreements to the entire network.
3. Each group commits itself to having its entire membership study and discuss the different positions when there is struggle within the network over political line or other key questions.
4. [Specify role of independents.]
5. [State, generally, local groups’ expected commitment of human and financial resources to the work of the network.]
6. Repeated deviations from principled methods of struggle are grounds for expulsion from the network. [Specify required vote of members.] [F. and G. exclude anarchic, localist, spontaneous party-building.]
H. Among our theoretical, practical, and organizational tasks, the theoretical are primary. In other words, the acute absence of developed, correct, and widely-accepted theory is the greatest obstacle to our work. But neglect of practice or the work of organizing our own forces would cause intolerable harm to party-building. [Excludes “party-building is fusion,” line of organize first without clear unity, and one-sided insistence on theoretical work only.]
I. A geographically dispersed, democratic-centralist organization like the former “pre-parties” in this country is a party. We should form a party when, and only when, all of us who can agree on a correct program and a common conception of how the party should function do so agree, and when we can choose leaders whose practice has prove their fitness for the responsibilities of leadership. [Excludes premature party-formation, i.e., without meeting preconditions, and unnecessary preconditions of uniting most Marxist-Leninists, specified levels of fusion, and more theory than that required for program and principles of party organization.]
J. Meeting the preconditions for use of the democratic-centralist party form does not at all guarantee that we will immediately have sufficient advanced theory, the unity of most or all communists, and an organization which truly unites the vanguard detachment of the working class. We will use our higher level of organization to struggle to meet these requirements for a strong and effective party. [Excludes specifying unnecessary preconditions, and assumptions that party-formation automatically means that we have the theory we need, that fusion is at a high level, or that we are the only real communists in the country.]
K. The main deviation in party-building in the U.S. has been “left,” in rushing to form parties before any of the preconditions were met, in extreme sectarianism towards other communists, in petty-bourgeois communists’ attempts to present themselves as a working-class vanguard, and in refusal to take the time to do absolutely essential theoretical work. The failure of other forces to take up party-building has generally been a consequence of rightist lack of initiative and contentment with primitive, local forms of work. [Note: We provide a skeletal statement of the deviations here, but the unity statement of a pre-party network should contain a more developed critique]
[1] Editorial Departments of Renmin Ribao and Hongqi, On Khrushchov’s Phoney Communism and its Historical Lessons for the World: Comment on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU (IX) (FLP: Peking, 1964), pp. 12-13. The words in brackets are not a paraphrase of the text, but our own addition.
[2] We think comrades who believe that the USSR has a progressive side to its international role should recognize the truth of this statement, knowing as they do that the Soviets have opposed or openly betrayed several national liberation struggles, occupied Eastern Europe, and supported a worldwide system of revisionist parties.
[3] We determined these points by listing the aims and methods of a pre-party organization, not by thinking about particular forces that should be excluded. However, since some comrades mistakenly think that unity on party-building is so vague and broad so as to admit almost everyone, without changes in their lines, we have inserted statements of the lines that would be excluded with the level of unity we propose.