The Three key points on classes, the party and racism are proving to be a powerful tool for the construction of a genuine communist party in this country.
In the great variety of trends that exist in the communist movement, the three key points mark off working-class ideology from bourgeois ideology, uniting revolutionaries and pointing the way to the Party program.
What are the three key points? What role do they play in building the party? How do we use them to judge specific trends? These questions concern every advanced worker committed to Marxism-Leninism.
The first point is to insist on a class analysis of the United States and to uphold the programmatic slogan that flows from such an analysis, The Enemy Is Capitalism, The Fight Is For Socialism! Marxism begins with an analysis of the classes that make up a society. By analyzing the economic relations and antagonisms in U.S. society, The New Voice has shown that the working class makes up over 90% of the population, facing a narrow band of capitalists, one or two percent. An economically weak petty bourgeoisie makes up seven or eight percent. At the same time, bourgeois ideas represent a far greater danger than these figures indicate. Our task is to unite the working class and give it class consciousness in the struggle against the bourgeoisie and bourgeois ideology.
The analysis of classes shows us that the revolutionary goal is proletarian revolution for socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This will be the climax of a long, arduous and complicated political and armed struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. The party is the leading staff of the working class in this revolutionary battle.
Our concrete analysis results from a study of the facts and conforms to Lenin’s general conclusions “...we know but three classes in capitalist and semi-capitalist society: the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie (with the peasantry as its chief representative), and the proletariat. What, then, is the sense of saying that the proletariat is isolated from the other classes, when the issue is a struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, of a revolution against the bourgeoisie?” (“Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?”, Sel. Works, 6, p.256)
Revisionism–any tendency that calls itself Marxist-Leninist but revises the revolutionary heart out of Marxism–evades a clear analysis of classes. The leaders of the October League (OL) have never put forward a class analysis. Others, like the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), talk about a petty bourgeoisie which they fail to define according to the materialist method. This splits the working class and creates antagonism among the people. Whether evading a class analysis or coming out with a non-Marxist analysis, both the OL and the RCP have put forward the “united front against imperialism” as their proposed revolutionary strategy. In the U.S., this strategy is revisionist. It serves to deprive the workers of class consciousness. It raises the phony problem of uniting the working class with some other large, mythical class. It substitutes anti-imperialism for socialist revolution.
Every group that considers itself communist must adopt a class analysis. It is impossible to be a Marxist and a revolutionary without a class analysis. As Lenin said,
To speak of the struggle of trends in the Russian revolution and to distribute labels, such as ’sectarianism’, ’lack of culture,’ etc., and not to utter a word about the fundamental, economic interests of the proletariat, of the liberal bourgeoisie and of the democratic peasantry–is tantamount to stooping to the level of vulgar journalists. (“The Historical Meaning of the Internal Party Struggle in Russia,” Selected Works, 3, p. 500)
How these words expose so much of the phony polemics among communist groups today!
Yet so-called communist leaders often ignore the role of classes and refuse to study the fundamental economic interests of the working class. How many times have we read the phrase “workers and oppressed nationalities,” for example? This notion splits the working class, suggests that you fall into one category or the other, puts a class concept and a non-class concept on a par with each other, and in general relies on a shallow, eclectic analysis of workers, nationalities, women, youth, etc. Whatever one’s national background or skin color, one is a member of a definite class. The job of Marxist-Leninists is to unite all workers and teach them that they are members of the working class, including the workers of the oppressed nationalities.
It is simple but crucial: what is your class analysis? What revolutionary strategy does it lead to? This is the first key point on which to test every self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist group and leader.
The New Voice has put forward the slogan, Make the Workers’ Struggles the Party’s Struggles, Make the Party’s Outlook the Workers’ Outlook! It combats sectarianism, the refusal to take up the workers’ spontaneous struggles in a serious way and give them profound communist leadership. It combats economism and right opportunism, too, the failure to give the masses a Marxist-Leninist outlook.
This slogan was first raised when The New Voice joined the Continuations Committee set up on the initiative of the Communist League. It was a telling criticism of the CL’s refusal then to support workers’ struggles on the alleged excuse that U.S. workers were bribed and too well off to support. The CL went off to form the pro-Soviet Communist Labor Party.
The slogan also exposes the failure of the opportunists to do Marxist-Leninist education among the working class. Recently, the 0L joined the fashionable discussion of whether to emphasize propaganda or agitation. The OL is using this secondary question to cover up the fact that it does extremely little and extremely poor class education of any kind. Its newspaper rarely has an extended class analysis of anything. When it ventures a series of articles on a classic work of Marxism-Leninism, the OL only reveals the confusion of its thinking. (See, for example, our analysis of how the OL and the Guardian treated The State and Revolution in a series of newspaper articles–TNV, June 28, 1976.)
But long articles alone do not qualify as a serious effort to take the party’s outlook to workers. How many issues of newspapers from the so-called revolutionary wing have been filled with pages whose class content is virtually nil, which deal only with organizational alignments among narrow trends! The debate about propaganda and agitation, made into the major issue by groups from PRRWO to Martin Nicolaus, has had the effect of displacing the class content of all work, whether long article or short expose, whether mass slogan or small study group.
Every group considering itself Marxist-Leninist must show, for example in a newspaper like The New Voice, that its cadre are laboring to make the workers’ struggles into struggles of communists and that the group is really taking the Marxist-Leninist outlook to workers in every possible way.
The third key point takes up the major divisive issue in U.S. society today, the oppression of minority people of nonwhite skin color and of various nationalities. The overwhelming majority of these people are part of the working class, a part whom the capitalists exploit even more extensively, oppress more openly and crush more brutally than the capitalists exploit and oppress workers generally. This superexploitation of minorities is an intense political issue, because the capitalists use the difference in treatment of workers to divide them, to incite one section to attack another, to make the “average” worker think that he is privileged and must fight to maintain his alleged privilege, etc. In reality, the capitalist is the enemy of all workers. The capitalists maintain superexploitation of minority workers, the exploitation of all workers and the rampant ideologies of division that workers get every day from the press, in capitalist-financed movements, from the courts, etc.
No worker profits from racism or the oppression of national minorities. A working class divided by racism does not fight a strong, united battle for better wages, more social services and ultimately socialism. The general condition of workers is worse to the extent that the capitalists’ racism takes hold among them. What good is it to the “privileged” worker to earn less after a broken strike or weakened negotiations because of racism? What good is it if the union cannot fight layoffs because of divisions among workers and scrambles to keep the few jobs left? Better to unite, win better wages, keep more jobs, and approach equality among workers at the same time.
This is a class analysis of racism. It is the only Marxist position. It is the only guide to action for communists.
Consider, for example, the struggle over forced busing in Boston. Forced busing was a racist attack by the capitalist class to get workers to fight each other while the School Committee ran down the schools of all workers. The New Voice took the position that Marxist-Leninists must unite workers to demand more resources for education in Boston, not less, and to put more money where it is needed more urgently, recognizing the worse condition of schools for black children. This was a program to unite workers and direct the attack at the capitalists. This program fought division of the workers and racist discrimination in the allocation of school funds. TNV advanced demands to improve education and make the capitalists pay, not to waste resources forcing children to ride buses to poor schooling far from home.
The OL attacked white workers, played down the capitalist class as the source of racism (distinguishing between Louise Day Hicks and merely weak liberals like Teddy Kennedy, in reality the arch enemy of Boston workers) and supported forced busing.
The RCP pushed racism among white workers by playing down attention to the worse condition of black schools and framing no basic demand to fight these worse conditions.
Here we have three stands but only two class approaches: the working-class line of The New Voice and the mirror-image capitalist lines supported by the OL and the RCP. This is what the third key point, Fight Racism!, exposes to the light of day.
All other positions were variations of these basic ones. Some groups made opposition to forced busing their main focus (for example, Workers Viewpoint). This failed to turn the struggle around into a demand to make the capitalist class pay for more educational resources.
As a matter of general theory, the class analysis of racism in the communist movement has had to fight the view that creates artificial nations where they do not exist. The doctrine of a black nation when it does not exist according to Stalin’s definite Marxist criteria for a nation only splits workers, encourages nationalism in place of class consciousness and evades the basic class analysis. If the black people really were a nation, that would provide the material basis to explain their superexploitation. But the attempt to stretch a nationalist explanation of the proportionally few remaining people in the Black Belt counties into a satisfactory explanation of the oppression of black people (mostly workers) throughout the country is absurd and is seen to be absurd by workers black and white. More importantly, this focus on one geographic area and on the past of slavery is a way of evading the class analysis of capitalist exploitation and super-exploitation that applies now to the whole country, to the entire working class. And any tendency that plays down the class analysis serves the propagation of bourgeois ideology.
So confused are some persons that they believe it is good to uphold mythical nations and racist to make a class analysis. The August Twenty-Ninth Movement (ATM) published the remark of a comrade that ATM in the Greg Jones struggle “upheld the right of the Afro-American nation in the Black Belt South to self-determination and political secession. ATM was opposed on this by the chauvinists of the OL, the New Voice” and others. (Revolutionary Cause, Nov. 1976, p. 5) Dear comrade, if you divert the attention of black and white workers fighting racism in Oakland, California to a little enclave in certain counties of the South, you are one who refuses to fight racism here and now. If it is chauvinist to unite the workers of this entire country to fight the capitalists’ racist oppression of black people, if it is chauvinist to lead struggles against racism here and now and to head directly to socialism for the entire U.S. as the basic solution to racist oppression, if it is chauvinist to raise the banner of the working class that will liberate black people in Oakland, Detroit, Harlem and everywhere, then we can only say: this is a peculiar definition of “chauvinism” and if you can make it stick, you will perform miracles!
Whether or not to press the class point of view on this most burning issue in the U.S. today–this is the third key point on which to test every self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist group and leader.
The three key points are crucial in building the party. They get to the class essence of all differences and put secondary questions in their place.
The three points have proved to be key in the communist movement in practice. There can be no abstract deduction of key points. For example, the essence of being a Marxist-Leninist is to adhere to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and we believe that those who strongly push revisionism on the main issues today will become enemies of proletarian revolution later. But now the dictatorship of the proletariat is formally endorsed by all. The three key points on classes, the party and racism reveal the heart of things and show where people stand.
The three key points serve as a pointed transition to the Party program. We are not writing a draft program at this moment, because it would do more to divide than unite communists. But the three key points accurately identify those questions on which the dividing line between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism must be drawn. They concentrate our attention on the most revealing and the most crucial questions. If we can solve these, we can proceed rapidly to the Party.
How do we use the three key points to judge specific trends? Those who are committed to the revisionist position on these issues are precisely the opportunists whom we must expose. The leaders of the OL and the RCP hold dearly to three anti-points: no Marxist class analysis, distortion of the party’s work and liberal racism or outright reactionary racism. They have shown no sign of giving up such views. On the contrary, the basic strategy of the OL is to oppose the class analysis of racism and to use its anti-Marxist analysis to wreck and divert in the communist movement. The RCP still advocates the united front against imperialism and a seriously wrong notion of classes, especially the petty bourgeoisie. In its demands and concrete actions, the RCP ignores the superexploitation of black people.
Other groups have passed over some of the three key points and taken an incorrect stand on others. Most frequently, groups that arose in one sector of this society or another have not made a class analysis yet and have used the theory of a black nation in place of a class analysis of racism. The stand of these groups on the three key points will inevitably become clear; they cannot exist in a semi-nationalist limbo forever.
More and more, the rank and file militants and individual communists are examining all groups closely. Because the three key points are a reliable tool of Marxist-Leninist analysis, they will confront everyone in the communist movement more insistently. This is not because The New Voice put them forward, not because The New Voice continually raises them, but because the issues are objectively at the heart of the class struggle in the U.S. As Marxists, proceeding from a deep analysis of material reality, we should speed up this process. The way to do this is to grasp the three key points, defend the Marxist-Leninist line, demand unity of all who can unite on this line and isolate those diehard revisionists who refuse to give up bourgeois ideology on the three key points.
The variety of groups and self-proclaimed “parties” in the communist movement in the U.S. cannot last. There can be only one genuine communist party in a country. All differences of principle boil down to the two camps of Marxism-Leninism and bourgeois ideology. The Marxist-Leninists will unite: the revisionists and opportunists will be ridden with competition, factions and splits. The New Voice has advanced the three key points to move from variety and confusion to clarity and a staunch, genuine communist party based on Marxism-Leninism. We exist to dissolve into that Party. We are proceeding to that day. Let everyone grasp the three key points to unite Marxist-Leninists, isolate the revisionists and found the Party.