Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Draft Program of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)


7. The Parties and Political Trends of Capitalism

With the exception of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), all other political parties in the U.S. are defenders of the capitalist system.

The two main capitalist parties, the Republican and Democratic, are parties of capitalism and enemies of the working class and oppressed people. Each one of them is nothing but a party of trusts, of finance capital, of the biggest business interests in the country.

While one may claim more often than the other to be the “friend of the working man,” their common policies of continued exploitation and oppression for the masses reveal that there are no real differences between the two parties.

Although the bourgeoisie is wracked with contradictions between different monopoly groups and these contradictions are reflected in each party and between the parties, the electoral struggle between the Republicans and Democrats is a staged fight to instill democratic illusions in the minds of the people.

The revisionist Communist Party USA provides no alternative to the two old imperialist parties. Because the Communist Party USA continues to mask itself with the signboard of socialism, it is especially dangerous and the most insidious of all the bourgeois parties. The CPUSA, like the other bourgeois parties in the U.S., is a party of imperialism. It stands not only for reformism and compromise with U.S. imperialism, but even more significantly, it is an agent of Soviet social-imperialism, a fifth column of social-fascism within the workers’ movement.

The CPUSA has betrayed the revolutionary aim of the workers’ movement–the proletarian dictatorship. It has rejected the need for armed struggle to overthrow U.S. imperialism and instead promotes the treacherous line of “peaceful transition to socialism” and the revisionist strategy of the “anti-monopoly coalition.”

By spreading the hoax of superpower “detente,” the CPUSA attempts to cover over Soviet aggression, portray the Soviet Union as “socialist” and leave the working class disarmed in the face of superpower war preparations. Rather than relying on the strength of the masses themselves, the CPUSA teaches the working class to rely on “great” men and “great” powers to save itself. This is a suicidal course of action for the working class movement.

The CPUSA attacks the right of self-determination for the oppressed nations and tails the chauvinism of the bourgeoisie and the trade union bureaucrats. It calls on Black and other minority peoples to abandon their revolutionary struggle for freedom and to work within the system of capitalism for a few crumbs from the bosses’ table.

Our Party calls for the complete destruction of this agent of imperialism and social-imperialism. The CP(M-L) rejects the line of “united action” with revisionism. Furthermore, we call on whatever Marxist-Leninists and other honest forces who still remain in the CPUSA to repudiate revisionism and the revisionist party and join the ranks of the genuine communists.

The Trotskyite parties, especially the Socialist Workers Party, are also ruling class agents. These petty bourgeois splitters and degenerates were long ago expelled from the communist ranks for their sabotage and wrecking activities, including their collaboration with Hitler fascism. They stand outside the workers’ movement. With the rise of modern revisionism and its attacks on Stalin, the Trotskyites were dragged up from the grave. Today, the Trotskyites have regained their infamy through their attacks on the national liberation struggles and their vicious anti-communist attacks against China and other socialist countries. The Trotskyites echo the modern revisionists’ reformism and support for Soviet social-imperialism.

The centrists are a collection of parties, small circles and groupings. They are a political trend that uses Marxist-Leninist terminology to cloak their revisionist political line. While they claim to oppose revisionism, they call for “united action” with revisionism and social-imperialism. Like the Trotskyites, the centrists represent a petty bourgeois trend, and their class stand reflects the vacillation characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie.

Divorced from the working class and also representing the class outlook of the petty bourgeoisie are the terrorists, who are organized into small, isolated bands. The terrorists promote the same program of reformism as the liberals and revisionists, only they cloak it with the methods of terror carried out by a small group of “heroes.”

Since World War I, social-democracy has been a political trend characterized by chauvinism, anti-communism and social-fascism. Today’s social-democrats include the Social-Democrats, USA, the Socialist Party and other organizations.

In general, the social-democrats have little independence from the Democratic Party. They have almost completely dropped their socialist rhetoric, are open supporters of U.S. imperialism and imperialist aggression, especially Israeli Zionism, and are rabid anti-communists.

As staunch defenders of U.S imperialism, the social-democrats can be found acting as advisors to the bourgeois leaders and their representatives in the top echelons of the labor bureaucracy, promoting the same chauvinist, anti-communist and anti-working class policies.

Often times merging with each other, all of these parties and political trends are the defenders of capitalism and all repudiate, in one form or another, the working class and its struggle for socialism and the proletarian dictatorship. The bourgeoisie consciously promotes the phony defenders of socialism as well as its own political parties in order to mislead the workers’ movement.

The revolutionary struggle in the U.S. cannot succeed without the consistent exposure of all these bourgeois political trends and most importantly, the trend of modern revisionism and its representative, the CPUSA.

We call on all those who oppose the system of capitalist exploitation and oppression and who stand for socialism to reject all other political parties and to rally around the CP(M-L) and take up its program wholeheartedly.