These Points of Unity have been written over a period of eight months that have seen our collective go through many changes. In general the politics herein reflect a strong political influence of the Bay Area Prairie Fire Organising Committee (PFOC). They have been very helpful to us, though there has been no organizational tie established. In particular, their politics hove helped us develop a critique of our mass work in Ocean Beach (published separately) and have turned us in the direction of revolutionary anti-imperialism, away from opportunism, liberalism, reformism, white and male supremacy. We are in struggle with many other local comrades and friends, trying to deepen the content of our unity, and of marxist-leninist ideology.
Our collective is small, but we have been in study with a larger circle of people who share a desire to raise ourselves out of the localist tendencies that have characterized our work. In general our political coots are in the mass struggles of the ’60s and early seventies, especially the anti-war movement. We came together in the context of community organizing in Ocean Beach, a mainly white beach community of San Diego. As our political understandings have deepened, and our understandings of our weaknesses in our mass work have increased, we have drawn ourselves out of the Ocean Beach movement, and are trying to grow together in a more revolutionary directions.
Finally, there are several areas where this paper does not go that are pretty important to us. One notable one is the area of culture, and the relation of cultural work to the revolutionary process. We hope to study that more soon. Also we are aware that several traditional areas of revolutionary theory and practice are missing, such as a position on the trade unions, and a deeper statement on organizational strategy. But this our unity [in original – EROL], and it does not include everything we have ideas about, but rather the questions we have come to believe are central for the growth of a revolutionary movement here in the US empire’s heartland, and the ones that we have struggled about together to where our unity is fairly substantial.
Of course we welcome all feedback on this paper. We hope it is a contribution to a larger process which will lead to more unity with more forces in the revolutionary movement in San Diego and around the country.
A. The principal contradiction under capitalism is that between the social/collective nature of society’s basic production process and the private nature of appropriation of the product of that process. This is in the form of profit, which represents wealth taken from those who produce through the system of wage labor.
B. The resolution of this contradiction is and must be a revolution to establish socialism, a system characterized by the struggle to end all exploitative relations and establish collective ownership and control of society’s resources and production. This will result from the class struggle on a world-wide level, between the many who take part in social production and social life, and the small few whose power and wealth rests on their control of the means of production, and power to appropriate the fruits of the labor of the many.
C. Our tool for understanding and furthering this struggle is the ideology and methods of scientific socialism: dialectics and historical materialism. This ideology, classically formulated by Marx and Engels, and first put into practice in the world by Lenin, has been developed and refined through the revolutionary practice of great numbers of people and their political leadership, usually organized in a revolutionary communist party. Specific historical contributions have been made by the people and parties of Soviet Russia, China, Viet-Nam, Korea, Albania, Cuba and Guinea-Bissau. The process goes on – we hope to contribute.
D. Though our practice, what we do in the world, is the main thing, it will never develop beyond early mistakes unless we constantly succeed in learning from it – to work hard at drawing necessary and appropriate conclusions from it, to guide future practice. There will be no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory, the generalizing of countless practical experiences.
E. The state is an elaborate political institution, and under modern imperialism, it contains many contradictions, as does the class it represents. But, its main function is to protect and serve the power of the ruling class. In spite of apparent concessions, it will always protect the (process of) private appropriations of social production.
Because of this, socialist revolution requires that the state of the capitalist ruling class must be destroyed. It must be replaced by a new institution, a political instrument that serves the interests of the huge majority of exploited people, those who contribute to the social product and to social life. To do so this instrument must be capable of suppressing the former ruling class power, and those who follow it.
F. Because of the nature of the state, and its power which rests on the “special bodies of armed men. Which have prisons, etc. at their command” (Lenin State and Revolution), the revolution will require armed struggle against state.
G. To carry on this struggle, and to unite all the sectors of the exploited and oppressed majority, to aim their revolutionary energy in a focused and strategic way, there is a need for a particular form of revolutionary organisation, one which rests on a combination of “centralism and democracy, discipline and freedom unity of purpose and ease of mind for the individual...” (Mao, speech at Party Work Conf., 1961 in Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People). This organization, a revolutionary party, represents the broadest long-term interests of, exploited classes and oppressed peoples.
H. For us in the United States, our present central task, the one which defines the context for all others, is the building of such a party. We have none now. We see the current step as one of struggling to unite oppressor nation revolutionaries into an organisation which can become part of such a party.
The priorities for this organization is to promote the struggle against white supremacy and male supremacy, the main roadblocks to class unity, as well as a whole range of petty bourgeois tendencies that have characterised much of our movement: reformism, ultra-democracy, liberalism, individualism, careerism; in a word opportunism, a word we attempt to define in more depth in section V of this paper.
I. Since a hundred years ago, capitalism has developed into imperialism, the capitalism of the era of monopoly and empire. This has changed the nature of the particular content of the fundamental contradiction and altered the content of the class struggle:
1) The “characteristic feature of imperialism is the division of the world into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressed nations which command colossal wealth and powerful armed forces...” (Lenin, Intro to a report on National and Colonial Questions to the Communist International, 1920). The object of private appropriation is now the labor and wealth of whole nations.
2) National liberation struggles have become “national revolutionary” in content, not “bourgeois-democratic,” They are now a part of the struggle for socialism: they define the leading component of worldwide class struggle.
3) imperialism also intensifies the oppression and exploitation of women; male supremacy has become a source of material benefit to imperialism, one of the material props that maintain the ability to continue increasing profit.
A. Imperialism still includes the five basic features outlined by Lenin in his famous study in 1916.
1) “The concentration of production and capital has developed to create powerful monopolies that play decisive roles in economic life...
2) “The creation of finance capital and a financial oligarchy
through the merging of bank capital with industrial capital...
3) “The export of capital replaces commodities as the main export.
4) “The formation of international monopolist capitalist combines which share the world among themselves...
5)“The territorial division of the whole world among the largest capitalist powers is completed.”
B. Imperialism is world system which has divided the world into a few oppressor nations and many oppressed nations. The ruling class of oppressor nations exploits its own working classes as always. But the super-exploitation of the labor and wealth of oppressed nations has become a source of super-profits under imperialism. This has become historically significant as the key element in maintaining the profits of imperialism, eroded somewhat through class struggle at home, since these super-profits are used to bribe sectors of the homeland working classes, raising their material standards to support political loyalty.
C. US imperialism leads world imperialism. It is in the midst of growing crisis, but is still the main enemy of most of the peoples of the world.
D. The crisis of US imperialism is directly linked to the rise of and increasing success of national liberation movements around the world. These represent direct attacks against the key material prop of imperialism. The struggles of the people s of nations oppressed by imperialism have become the world’s leading force in the struggle against imperialism.
E. Imperialism is also materially propped up by the intensified exploitation and oppression of women, especially in the oppressed nations, but increasingly in oppressor nations as well.
F. Imperialism exists within the current borders of large multinational states like the USA; that is nations are oppressed by US imperialism within the borders of the US oppressor nation.
G. Due to the necessity for imperialism to increase profits, and the consequent redivisions of the world depending on which capitalist state is particularly strong or in need at a given time, war is an inevitable consequence of imperialism.
H. The USSR is an imperialist state. It is a rising danger to the world’s peoples, but we don’t equate it with US imperialism at this time.
1) It oppresses other nations, manipulating their economies for its own ends, as in Eastern Europe or Mongolia. In these places it is the main enemy of the oppressed people.
2) In other parts of the world it is in serious contention with the United States imperialism for hegemony and control: Africa, India, the Mid-East.
3) This contention between the US and the USSR is the main source of danger of imperialist war in our era.
4) With others we have been confused by Soviet support of progressive and revolutionary struggles. We are in the process of deepening our understanding of how imperialism grows out of deformed socialist revolution.
I. As Imperialism develops, and resistance to it grows, the most characteristic form of oppression is what is called neo-colonialism: the systematic exploitation of nations which have formal political “independence” through a variety of financial, trade and diplomatic and military arrangements, through corporations, banks, international financial and economic institutions rather than through direct political domination and control.
J. Imperialism develops whole ranges of forms of ideology and culture and other aspects within the superstructure to enforce justify and support its rule: national and white chauvinism, male chauvinism, religion, consumerism, spectator sports, alienated commodified sexuality, other forms of pop culture, etc.
K. Imperialism uses many tools and institutions through which, it transmits its ideology: mass media, entertainment, schools, the family, welfare systems, legal systems, trade unions, etc.
A. The struggle against imperialism and for socialism includes two dialectically inter-related forms of class struggle against the imperialist ruling class: the struggle of oppressed peoples for national liberation, and the struggles of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries. Both these struggles are social manifestations of the fundamental contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation, neither is more basic than the other.
1) In this period of the era of imperialism, national liberation struggles are the leading form of class struggle both within and without the borders of imperialist oppressor nations. This is because they attack the most important source of continuously increasing profit, the oppression of nations.
2) Because under imperialist oppression, the national bourgeoisie of oppressed nations tends to either join interests with the imperialists or merge with the masses of working people, national liberation struggles are now led by the working class, not by the bourgeoisie as in the period of rising capitalism.
3) Stalin’s criteria for nationhood, written in 1913 were based on conditions of rising capitalism, and really do not speak to the particular conditions that have developed as imperialism has consolidated. Liberation struggles do not merely increase the democratic rights of a people but are now actually part of the struggle for socialist revolution and the defeat of imperialism. What is a nation, is now less a matter of definitions, and more a matter of learning to understand the distinctions between oppressor and oppressed nations, and how nations develop and emerge out of the consolidation of people’s resistance to imperialism.
B. The ruling class of imperialist nations use their super-profits extracted from the super-exploitation of oppressed peoples to create a privileged standard of living for oppressor nation workers. Selected sectors are especially bribed and become a “labor aristocracy” within the working class. However, the entire oppressor nation working class shares in varying degrees in the benefits and privileges of imperialism derived from the oppression and super-exploitation of oppressed peoples.
1) This reality of relative privilege is the material basis for the ideology of national chauvinism. In white oppressor nations, national oppression is white supremacy and national chauvinism is the ideology of white racism: an ideology that rationalizes and enforces the privilege of white people and the oppression of non-whites.
2) White supremacy in the US has its historical roots in a conscious political decision of the colonial ruling class to respond to class struggle and shortage of labor by developing a strictly racial system of slavery for blacks in and free labor for whites. This was the start of a dual system of labor in this country which is the organized manifestation of differential positions of workers of different national origin which persists to this day.
3) In the US white supremacy has been the basis of social control of white workers. It is also the primary obstacle working class unity. The system goes so deep that it has also been the primary basis for the non-consolidation of a revolutionary left in this country.
4) But the great mass of white workers in this country are exploited and suffer class oppression. There is a material basis for white workers to struggle for revolution.
a. Within the white working class, the trend is for men to gain more privilege than women. This means white working class women have more of a potential for revolutionary politics.
b. On the whole the gap between white and oppressed workers is increasing, but white women are moving closer to nationally oppressed women workers.
c. The oppressor nation in the US was forged in the process of oppressing other nations, by means of the growth of white supremist institutions as a means of gaining the collusion of exploited white working people. As capitalism developed, spurred by the intensive super-exploitations of black and later other oppressed peoples’ labor, and the theft of Native American and Mexican land, the white US ruling class extended relative economic, social, and political privileges to generations of white workers – often being little more than the absence of the more heinous forms of oppression that make up national oppression – in exchange for complicity in and acceptance of the enslavement, genocide, and conquest of whole nations.
This relative privilege, paid for by the super profits and rapid capital accumulation based on the oppression of peoples, was the material basis for the ideology of white racial superiority, crucial to the assimilation of various European nationalities into one new white nation, dominated by the Anglo-Saxon element. This assimilation aided by massive cross-marriage and ethnic fusion reproduces a specific culture distinct from those of oppressed peoples, which in turn it attempts to deny or destroy.
As imperialism has developed neo-colonial programs to replace those of direct conquest or colonisation, the specifically racial aspect of the oppressor nation breaks down – imperialism will hire anyone of any color who will work for it ’ but the reality of national oppression continues, in material, cultural and psychological terms.
D. White racism and chauvinism lead some parts of the oppressor nation working class to take a direct part in the national oppression of third world people. This is often done through the medium of reactionary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, Nazi groups, or through local formations that exploit the racist backlash oppressed people’s demands in workplaces or communities, like the various “anti-busing” groups. This ideology results from the narrowness of understanding of class interests, and it promotes the main contradiction within the working class: the competition among the workers.
Fortunately many white workers do accept the gains made by oppressed people through their struggles. Under imperialism, this attitude is rarely more developed than passive acceptance. But this partial rejection even of the imperialist “bribe” is an embryonic form of understanding that “a nation which oppresses other nations cannot be free.” We will struggle to raise this understanding from passive acceptance of token gains by oppressed peoples, to the level of active support for the full range of national struggle for those peoples. Under imperialism, this is an essential element of class consciousness for oppressor nation workers; we want to arm this repressed class consciousness with organization and strategy.
Though few oppressor nation workers now grasp the reality of their own exploitation, due to the false consciousness of privilege and national chauvinism, many more will come to that understanding through a realization of their own relationship to the oppression of others.. We do not believe the working class of the oppressor nation has been fully or permanently won to class collaboration.
E. The borders of the United States are the boundaries of an empire achieved through the brutal policies of expansion, conquest, genocide, forced migrations, super-exploitation of labor. Imperialism is one system inside and outside the current boundaries of the US. These borders come under contest as resistance to national oppression grows, such as the Native American Sovereignty movement, or the continued northward pressure of “illegal” Mexican workers migrating from Mexico, and other national liberation struggles.
1) Black people throughout the US today are people of an oppressed nation with full rights to self-determination. Formed as a nation through the common experience of slavery, and their growing resistance to it, Blacks consolidated as a nation during and after the Civil War. The super-exploitation black labor was a major source of capital accumulation and profits for the US ruling class, both as slaves, and also through the forms of economic servitude that replaced Slavery (sharecropping, tenant farming, etc.). In fact black oppression was deepened by the re-imposition of national oppression in a more developed form after reconstruction which was a period of brief national liberation.
a. The theft of the value created by black people’s labor was always a part of emerging and maturing capitalism in the US in spite of the apparent feudal nature of slavery in form,
b. The proletarian status of the overwhelmingly majority of black people places them in a strategic position as leadership of the over-all US class struggle.
c. Black people will decide in the course of revolutionary struggle in the US what form their national liberation movement will take in terms of organisation, control over their own communities, territory, etc.
d. Black people who choose to live outside black-controlled territory if and when it is won will constitute a national minority, but not until then.
e. The nature of black oppression and resistance has led blacks to play an objectively leading role in opposition to US aggression, against Mexico, Cuba, Viet-Nam. Blacks, as the most oppressed sector of the working class, have
led and won struggles for better working conditions, education, against religious discrimination, such as in the 1860s-70s.The black movement in the 1960s revived the white left which had become almost extinct in the 1930s.
2) We support the independence struggle of the Puerto Rican nation, which includes the people on the island, and those forced to migrate to the United States. Not until an independent Puerto Rican nation is formed will Puerto Ricans who choose to stay here form a national minority here.
Imperialism has transformed Puerto Rico from a primarily agricultural nation to an advanced technological capitalist colony, increasingly of more value for its mineral resources and as a location for high-pollution, capital intensive industry than for the high profits of exploiting its labor force. The Puerto Rican people hence have become a fetter on capitalist exploitation of their homeland, more useful as a drag on wages as a part of the reserve army of labor – hence their forced exile to the mainland.
Puerto Rico also serves as the main US base for its military and CIA espionage bases in Latin America. It is a test-ground for counterrevolutionary strategies, from evangelist missions to massive forced sterilization in the Third World.
3) Native Americans in the US are of oppressed nation(s) either partly or wholly within the borders of the US. The material basis of their national oppression is the outright conquest of their lands, destruction of their culture, the theft of their natural resources, and the theft of the labor of those Native Americans of increasingly working class status.
We support the Native American people(s) in their struggle for sovereignty and self-determination. Whether they forge one nation or many will be determined in the course of their protracted liberation struggle.
4) The Mexican/Chicano people are or are a part of an oppressed nation. Their national oppression is rooted in the theft of their land, resources and labor by the US oppressor nation ruling class. This theft was accomplished through settlement, military occupation, and ultimately war against the Mexican nation to reduce its borders. It was and is also apparent in the super-profits from the super-exploitation and manipulation of their labor to support imperialist expansion, especially in railroad construction, and, in this century, in agribusiness and now in light industry/runaway shops.
a. Though conditions of oppression are different on each side of the border, to divide these people into two separate nation would give into an historically illegitimate border and rob them of self-determination. On this side of the border, national oppression has included the grossest forms of cultural oppression and suppression. But on both sides of the border, imperialism disrupts and deforms the collective and individual lives of this oppressed people.
b. To the extent that continued mass “illegal” crossings of the border result from economic dislocations is Mexico caused by US imperialism, then these crossings constitute a form of national resistance, a non-recognition of the border – and defines a “border zone” that is under contest though not yet in a politically organized way.
c. The precise form of this nation will emerge only after much struggle – that has begun to emerge as a serious crisis for US imperialism.
5) US imperialism oppresses many other peoples within its borders. The condition of Hawaii, settled, colonised, annexed by the US is analogous to the Native American nation(s) as genocide has threatened the very existence of both. Samoa, Guam, Micronesia and the Virgin Islands are all classical colonies of the US, like Puerto Rico. And similarly large segments of these peoples have been forced to come to the imperialist homeland to sell their labor. This “exile of workers” is even more true of the Filipino people, though the Philippines are more a neo-colony not a colony.
US neo-colonial penetration into the economies of the various Caribbean and Latin American states forces workers of these nations to seek work here where they share the day-to-day oppression of other black and Latin peoples. The US maintains the Canal zone as a colony at the expense of the people of Panama whose nation is divided and who get little benefit from the Canal. In expressing solidarity with these groups, an understanding of their historical relationship to their homeland is crucial.
The super-exploitation of the labor of, and the national oppression of Chinese and Japanese peoples in the US has been decisive to the expansion of US imperialism at certain key historical points. They remain nationally oppressed and unassimilated into the US oppressor nation working class. Arabs and Koreans, concentrated in Detroit and California are nationally oppressed in the US and also subject to attacks by the neo-colonial state apparatuses of their homelands, therefore their struggles remain linked to the national struggles of their homelands.
6) Our support of these national liberation struggles rests on our belief that they are the main force in motion against imperialism at this time. On their success rests our hope for revolution in the imperialist homeland. Real internationalism will be possible only after all nations oppressed by imperialism gain their right to self-determination. Under imperialism, the struggle for national liberation, led by oppressed nation working class forces, and our solidarity with these struggles constitute real internationalism.
F. As revolutionaries of and in the oppressor nation, it is our role to fight for the self-determination of nationally oppressed peoples who are oppressed by “our imperialists.” We must be aware of our oppressor nation reality, and understand the special burden it places on us.
We must win the oppressor nation working class to understand that their interests always lie in uniting with the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples as a central part of defeating imperialism and building socialism. We must struggle for the understanding that true class unity must be based on putting out front the needs of the most oppressed sectors of the working class. This means struggling against the national chauvinism among oppressor nation workers and struggling for an end to competition among the workers. Revolutionary strategy demands that we build a base of support for national liberation, and the struggles of nationally oppressed workers within the oppressor nation working class.
(THE REMAINDER OF THE PAPER IS STILL IN A “PRE-DRAFT STATE”)
A. Women’s oppression is a part of the material basis for imperialism, which relies on women’s labor for maintaining the growth of its profits. Women are oppressed as women workers in conditions of super-exploitation, from whose labor surplus value in the form of super-profits are appropriated. Women are also oppressed as women in their traditional role in the home, where their* unwaged labor provides the reproduction and maintenance of new generations of workers.
1) Because the principal contradiction of imperialism is between oppressor and oppressed nations, the nature of women’s oppression is determined by their position in oppressor or oppressed nations, and has different content for white and third world women in the United States.
2) Within each nation, the principle differentiating factor between women is their class position.
B. The oppression of women has its roots in the inception of class society. Women in primitive societies held a high level of respect and autonomy. Inheritance was determined by “mother right” and woman’s place in the social division of labor was accorded the importance its place deserved.
With the appearance of private property, a social surplus and commodity production, mother right was overthrown by men to insure the process of inheritance through male lines. Earliest class society was characterized by male supremacy just as it is today under imperialism. The overthrow of male supremacy is integral to the overthrow of imperialism. Imperialism needs to intensify the oppression and exploitation of women and causes more and more women to be affected by the double shift: the super-exploitation of her labor in the workplace; and the unwaged labor of reproducing, socializing and maintaining the workforce.
C. The dialectic of women’s oppression and liberation is an emerging contradiction under imperialism whose essential features history J will make clearer. The issue can be fully understood only in its material relation to the crisis of imperialism. It is precisely because the awakening consciousness of women’s liberation is a clear response to imperialism’s efforts to step up its exploitation of women as a major source of profit and power, does it become and important part of imperialism’s contradictions, on the material level.
The failure to root their analysis of women’s oppression in the material reality of imperialism distinguishes our perspective from that of feminists, social-democrats, most marxist-leninists, or socialist feminists. That failure tends to prevent the development of revolutionary perspective because women’s oppression is reduced either to one of class oppression alone (women’s super-exploitation in the workplace) or of psychological and cultural oppression (women’s oppression in the family).
D. Inside the working class, male supremacy as a material system gives certain relative rewards and benefits to all men, and is increasingly a major basis for competition among the workers. These benefits exist as wage differentials, social and legal privileges, absence of sex discrimination. But in many ways the difficulty in isolating and identifying and rooting out male supremacy is because it rests in the maintenance of personal power by men over the women closest to 1b.em, in their family, wife, daughter... or at work, clerical help, secretaries – a most deeply entrenched benefit that remains invisible to most men short of a jarring change of consciousness.
Men of oppressed nations also gain privileges as men within a male supremicist society, although they take different forms and are extremely limited compared to those of white men.
E. Male chauvinism is the ideology that reflects and reinforces the material structures of male supremacy. It carries out the distribution of privileges to men through the whole array of capitalist institutions that serve society: health care system, the schools, welfare, legal system, religion, the family.
This ideology is rooted in biological determinism of women’s “natural characteristics.” Women are regarded, and learn to regard themselves as weak, emotional, inferior. The struggle against women’s oppression under imperialism must include the struggle against this ideology and its manifestations. The effects of the ideology vary greatly depending on the national and class position of the women involved.
1) The nuclear family is a core institution of imperialism which facilitates women’s oppression, national oppression, and class exploitation. It enforces women’s role as socializers of the labor force, it reproduces many of the characteristic social relations and attitudes of capitalist production.
2) Under imperialism, the structure and function of the family is different within oppressor and oppressed nations. In particular it is often supportive of resistance to oppression within oppressed nation communities.
F. White women participate in the relative privileges accorded to all white people in a white supremist society. Within the oppressor nation, however, white women benefit least from the privileges of white supremacy. For this reason they are a key strategic sector of the white working class, and can lead the struggle against male and white supremacy within the oppressor nation, but this is not automatic. Historically, the white women’s movement has opted to benefit from the privileges of white supremacy. We must struggle to overturn the identification of white working women with the oppressor nation, and build a strong base for anti-imperialist politics within the women’s movement of the oppressor nation.
G. Gay oppression and liberation
1) We support full democratic rights for all gay people.
2) We recognize the historically significant leadership provided in the anti-imperialist movement by gay people over the
last two decades in the US.
3) We recognise a strategic potential of gay struggles since
gays represent a significant proportion of the working class
and overall population, geographically concentrated in several large cities: San Francisco, New York, LA, Boston, etc...
4) Homosexuality challenges the need for sexual relations between people to be based on the reproduction function.
5) Lesbianism challenges male chauvinist ideas that women are necessarily psychologically and sexually dependent on men. It also counteracts men having power over “their” women.
H. Revolutionaries of the oppressor nation must struggle for a revolutionary anti-imperialist line on women that places the struggle against women’s oppression as a central task in the over-throw of imperialism.
1) Expose and overthrow all forms of male chauvinism within our revolutionary organisations, and struggle against them in all mass organization.
2) Locate our work in the strategic places where the most advanced anti-imperialist women’s struggles have been taking place: prisons, health care, daycare, right to self-defense anti-sterilization...
A. Opportunism is the open expression of narrow self-interest small group, small sector or craft causes, peaceful transition and class collaboration, as opposed to the struggle for the demands of the whole working class and all oppressed peoples in our revolutionary tactics and strategy. Opportunism is placing the needs of the few before the needs of the many.
B. The material basis of opportunism is the super-profits that oppressor nation ruling class extracts from its super-exploitation and oppression of oppressed peoples, from its super exploitation of women’s waged and unwaged labor, and the exploitation of all workers. These are distributed to key sectors of workers to win the allegiance and identification of these to the class stance of the ruling class, for complicity in maintaining national and sexual oppression, and hence the profits of the ruling class.
These benefits are the material basis for opportunism within the oppressor nation working class, within the left, and within the the marxist-leninist movement. It is this which leads to diminished capacities to revolutionary struggle against white and male supremacy, and against the state.
C. This opportunism is rationalized by the ideologies of white and male chauvinism, and are historically the prevalent ideologies of the society at large, within the oppressor nation working class and within the marxist-leninist movement. We are not calling anyone names. We are attempting to analyse the basis for the various paths followed by different political organizations and movements that seem to lead us no closer to revolution, but seem to reproduce the weaknesses of those that have gone before.
D. Whether it involves putting up front the demands, of only skilled workers, or just of one ethnic group, or to submerge the whole struggle beneath one person’s vocational, career, or power goals, or just being satisfied with reforms without educating to the need for revolution, all opportunism contributes to the main tool used by the ruling class to keep the working class divided: competition among the workers: between men and women, between oppressor and oppressed nation workers, skilled and unskilled, production and service. Ultimately, any political program or campaign not designed to break down all those differences through a program based on the needs of all, especially the most oppressed and exploited, is opportunism.