On behalf of the outgoing Central Committee, and in the name of the entire Party, I welcome you to these important proceedings and thank you for enduring all the physical and economic hardships that have been necessary to make your presence here possible.
Comrades, five long years filled with struggle have passed since our last Congress. As distinct from the parliamentary organizations, we do not hold Party Congresses on a regular basis. Our Party, following the demands of a revolutionary movement, holds Congresses only when the ever-shifting economic and political conditions demand that our line–our stated estimate of that political and economic reality–be reassessed and, if necessary, revised. Much has happened since 1975. At that time we pointed out political and economic tendencies that have since then matured into realities. Thus we need the Congress.
Five years is a long time. We need to sum up the activities of the central apparatus of the Party and bring the representatives and delegates from the various areas up to date on the activities of the leading bodies of the Party. Thus we need a Congress.
Most importantly, our organization is maturing into a real revolutionary party. Such an organization necessarily moves from simple responses to the violence and exploitation by the capitalist class to a position of planning how to work with the objective forces at play and create a strategic plan of how to overthrow the system and elevate the working class to the level of ruling class in the country. Thus we need a Congress.
Comrades and friends, it is a well-known axiom that it is impossible to understand any of the parts of a phenomenon without understanding the motion of the whole. Hence, communist reports start on the level of the whole–the worldwide phenomena. Further, politics as a process rests upon economics as a process. Therefore, the Central Committee’s report to the Congress necessarily starts with a summary of the international economic situation.
In our struggle to become, as Engels put it, the “subjective expression of the objective process,” there is no more important and difficult task assigned the revolutionaries in the USNA and in the world than to understand and clarify present and future developments in the world economy.
Briefly stated, the long-term tendencies in the international economy reassert the correctness of Lenin’s law of uneven development of capitalism. Not only is capitalism continuing to develop unevenly, but its unevenness is accelerating.
A brief 80 years ago, France and England were top world powers and apparently stable in that position. Forty years ago the new lions in the arena–Germany, Japan and the USNA–achieved a shared predominance in capitalist imperialism. Thirty years ago all competing powers had been either crushed or were absorbed into an emerging new form of a world imperialism led by and dominated by USNA imperialism.
After a short 30 years of USNA hegemony over this world imperialism, the regeneration and growing share of Federal German and Japanese imperialism is evident. For example, in 1948 the USNA accounted for 51 percent of industrial production in the capitalist world; by 1973 that share was down to 37 percent.
This figure represents less of a decline of the economic might of the USNA than it indicates a process of leveling off and evening up at least between the major capitalist nations of the world. This evening up process holds clear indications of a growing tendency toward stagnation as a result of the glutting of the world markets. At this stage of development the overlords of capital are again faced with the necessity of further expanding or a new round of revolutions.
There have been three distinct expansions of USNA capitalism since the Great Depression. The first was World War II. When that war ended, the ability to continue the expansion on that basis was eliminated and done with. The capitalist world began to slide toward crisis. Rebuilding war-ravaged Europe and Japan provided a new basis of expansion. As that rebuilding was completed there could be no further expansion on that basis. Again the capitalist world slid toward crisis. With the dismantling of the direct colonial system, the intermediate and economically-backward countries of the world provided a new area for the latest and largest of the economic expansions.
The dramatic rise of the national state in the new neo- and semi-colonies and their equally dramatic entanglement and domination by international capital was the features of this period.
The current stage of imperialism–modern imperialism–has shown two contradictory motions in its development. First, there is the obvious clear tendency to create the national state. This is being accomplished by reducing the imperialist multinational state to a national state and by creating the national state to replace the direct colony.
Simultaneously, modern imperialism has shown a definite and sustained tendency toward elimination of the national state. This is done by the relentless struggle for free trade and freer investment. This tendency seeks to eliminate one of the fundamental tasks of the modern bourgeois state–the protection of the national market in favor of the national bourgeoisie.
Today, these semi- and neo-colonies are some $450 billion in debt. They are economically prostrate before the demands of the big oil companies. They face an international market that is increasingly protected from their commodities. The further industrialization of the intermediate and backward areas of the word is not possible, profit-wise, in the coming period. Thus, capitalist expansion on this basis has reached its limit.
Do the imperialists have further maneuvering room? Yes, they have. We should not forget that further expansion of the market demands a further expansion of the system and herein lies the problem. The extremely advanced character of the productive forces is in such conflict with the mode of distribution that some 25 percent of the capitalist world’s work force is today permanently unemployed.
These countries are no longer populated by scattered producers. The gigantic inflow of investment capital has meant the rapid proletarianization of the population. For example, two-thirds of the people of Latin America live in cities. Clearly the fighting capacity of these peoples has increased dramatically.
Prosperity is the death of a revolution. This Marxist axiom has been fully confirmed by the collapse of most of the traditional communist parties, and the disorientation of so many others. The on-going, developing, deepening crisis is compelling revolutionary life to assert itself. Our time is coming. We can fully play our role only if we have a firm grasp not only on the current situation, but also a profound grasp of the immediate past, the economic and political flow, the tactics of the bourgeoisie, their past and current capabilities.
Clearly the control of world finance and oil was the principal weapon with which USNA imperialism battered down the resistance of traditional European imperialism and clamped a new form of colonial slavery upon the so-called emerging nations before they were able to take a single free breath.
Let us, for a moment, examine the role of the control of oil and finance in the past period.
The upheaval of World War II was a violent and accelerated phase in the restructuring of world political power so that capitalism could reproduce itself on a more intensive, centralized level. This occurred within the context of a shrinkage or contraction of the capitalist system due to the growth of the socialist camp. US financiers at the end of the war headed the US state apparatus and an unscathed industrial base. They commanded the only currency that could serve as the store of value and medium of exchange in the development of the post-war economy. This dollar domination was formalized in the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 which tied the dollar at a fixed rate to gold and tied all other currencies at relatively fixed rates to the dollar. These dollars flowed into Europe and Japan as redevelopment proceeded.
This situation guaranteed that the US could dictate the development of an oil-based industrial capacity in Europe through the Marshall Plan, as well as a petroleum-based development strategy in the industrializing neo-colonies. The US domination of oil insured a supply of relatively cheap oil during the post-War period. During the 20 years from 1949 to 1969 the real price of oil fell 30 percent. The only way producers could increase profits was by increasing output. This in turn guaranteed cheap fertilizer, rubber, and synthetic fiber during the period.
The petroleum-dollar domination of the early post-War development period assured the stability of the Bretton Woods Agreement. No other currency was in a position to challenge the dollar as a world reserve asset. These dollars flowed into the coffers of governments and banks around the world, financing developing infrastructures, defense, manufacturing, and social services.
With the revival of the European and Japanese economies, conditions were set for the challenging of the dollar. The 1958 recession in the US resulted in falling interest rates within the US while the booming economies of Europe were accompanied by high interest rates. Major banks and speculators traded dollars for various European currencies for the first time since the war, dramatizing the changes in relative economic strength which were occurring. In 1960 a run on the dollar pushed the dollar price of gold above the pegged rate of $35-per-ounce and depleted gold supplies in central banks by 10 percent. The industrialized capitalist world entered the 1960s amid “urgent” discussion of the need for international monetary reform.
For the US, monetary reform meant avoiding the stagnating effects of domestic inflation while ensuring the “liquidity”– or the supply of an adequate volume of sufficiently stable dollars–for the continued expansion of the world economy. Domestically the US confronted the need to finance the Vietnam War and to continue the “Great Society” budget. The solution was unavoidable and obvious inflation. The Federal Republic of Germany and Japan were unwilling to revalue their currencies and accept the consequences in decreased trade, and the US was prevented from devaluing the dollar by Bretton Woods. The agreement had become outmoded. Nixon suspended convertibility of the dollar to gold in 1971, allowing the dollar to “float” or adjust to its decreased value in relation to other currencies. This was a step in the process of developing a new basis for dollar domination in a world economy that was approaching a crisis in the circulation of the fruits of post-War reconstruction–a commodity glut.
Another result of the accelerated dollar expansion of the 1960s was that the domestic attempts to “wring” excess dollars out of circulation, to combat inflation with credit regulations (Regulation Q, Income Equalization Tax, etc.) resulted in the rapid flight of dollars into the Euromarkets. By 1973, the Eurocurrency market had grown to approximately $100 billion.
The stage was set by 1973 for the exercise of the political and economic muscle of US financiers in major steps to reorganize the world financial system in their interests. In two years they had reestablished international dollar dependency and US financial dictatorship in a new manner, allowing for creation of increasing international “liquidity” while avoiding dollar collapse and collapse of the medium of world exchange along with it. With the collusion of the major oil companies, OPEC quadrupled the price of oil at the end of 1973.
The $75 billion cost of this increase to OECD nations eventually found its way into the international capital markets where the financial community reinvested these “petrodollars” in the western industrial economies and in the rapidly industrializing, non-oil lesser developed countries. Europe and Japan were taxed to a greater degree due to their relative dependence on imported oil.
In 1975 the final move was made. An agreement was made, probably involving the Saudis, the oil majors and the US financiers, that OPEC petroleum purchases would be paid for in dollars exclusively. From this point on, the world economy was hooked to dollars as firmly as the world’s productive capacity was hooked to oil. Whatever the conviction that the dollar was overvalued, the world that needed oil had to accept dollars. The US bourgeoisie was in the position of being able to finance its oil imports with a currency it did not have to earn while forcing the world banking community to maintain reserves of dollars that were flooding the world economy. Each increase in petroleum prices brought increased profits to the financiers who skimmed interest off the loans to OECD and the non-oil LDCs, as well as profits to the major oil companies who raised prices of all downstream products. The non-oil LDCs incurred an aggregate current accounts deficit of $162 billion in the period from 1973-1979. Their external debt increased from $142 billion to $315 billion in the same period. This was raised 61 percent in private banks and at least 50 percent was raised in loans from 30 banks. Morgan Guaranty estimates the aggregate deficits of the non-oil LDCs to increase by another $12-15 billion in the next year. The surplus accruing to OPEC nations last year was approximately $100 billion. Next year it is expected to be in the neighborhood of $120 billion. This money must be invested in a system that is threatening to split at the seams.
The current crisis, like all crises of overproduction, results from the inability of capitalism to sell its products to a relatively impoverished working class. The breakdown of circulation interrupts the cycle of capitalist reproduction, of realization of surplus value and reinvestment in production on an expanded basis. The history of the past two decades has been that of the maintenance of the continuity of circulation and reproduction through an acceleration of credit growth based on the gigantic explosion in manufactured dollars forced on the world through the exclusive relationship of dollars to oil. The extent of this inflation is astounding.
The prospect of major banks eventually confronting country or bloc defaults on loans and bringing down the world credit system with their failure, is a current nightmare of the financiers of the world. Currently legislation is being passed which is designed to avert disaster. The implications of these measures are mind-boggling as well.
This year saw the passage of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. This act increases the scope of the Federal Reserve to create money and for banks to create credit. It permits the Federal Reserve to print and hold unlimited amounts of vault cash. It allows the Comptroller of the Currency to declare bank holidays as necessary. It expands the definition of collateral, facilitating borrowing by commercial banks. It also permits the central bank to suspend reserve requirements for repeated 180-day periods.
The Depository Institutions Protection Act of 1980, presently being discussed, is also known as the “Troubled Banks Act.” This would essentially waive all anti-trust legislation for the banking industry in emergency situations. It allows for US financial institutions to take over banks on the verge of bankruptcy no matter in what state the banks are chartered and regardless of the type of charter of the institution. This is in contradiction to the anti-trust laws such as the McFadden Act. All that is required is the agreement of four out of five government heads of banking regulatory agencies.
Congress has sanctioned legislation permitting the US Treasury to print the reverse sides of $1 bills using methods other than the traditional engraving process.
Within days of the presentation of the Depository Institution Protection Act, the Federal Reserve Board had to bail out the First Bank of Pennsylvania (23rd largest bank in the US).
It is clear that the government has no ability to stop the process of inflation and is currently engaging in the charade of monetary stringence while actually increasing hidden or off-budget federal deficits while claiming to be decreasing deficits by 60 percent. Carter’s true budget deficit amounts to approximately $60.7 billion in contrast to the claimed deficit of $15 billion.
In the face of this threat of collapse of the credit system, the bourgeoisie is attempting to pose various schemes for reorganization or temporary stabilization. The increase of IMF-World Bank burden in the recycling process is a proposal to spread out the risk beyond the commercial banking system to the governments of the world.
No matter what the scheme, the fact is that credit is the grease that has allowed the world economy to move forward. The current commodity glut is compounded by the glut of money. No system of banks, no government can afford to indefinitely lend money to people or nations that cannot pay it back. Yet to halt the lending–to call in the collateral–is to declare the worthlessness of that collateral and precipitate an international financial collapse. To paraphrase a recent article in the Nation, the parameters of the impending catastrophe are difficult to imagine.
The economic situation in the country, in many ways, reflects the world downturn. The expansion of the US economy ground to a halt in 1973. The US control of world trade and finance made it possible to shift the burden of the recession onto the backs of the weaker countries and peoples. Thus it has taken longer for the recession to take effect in this country. No one today can deny that the recession is taking a deep and real effect. The decline in purchasing power of the so-called lesser developed countries, the galloping revolutionization of the means of production here, and the saturation of the US market makes it impossible to keep the downturn out of the country.
Despite optimistic statements demanded by an election year, signs of an increasingly desperate economic situation continue to appear.
No one doubts the enormous influence of the banking structure of our country. Nor do they doubt that as the banks become entangled in the debtor economy they have created, the possibility of a real collapse of the economy becomes, for the bourgeoisie, a frightening probability.
In the unending drive for greater profitability, the banks first saw to it that individual buyers overextended themselves; then that industry overextended itself; the result is inevitably that the banks have overextended themselves and like industry are relying on short-term borrowing. Consequently, if industry defaults to the bank, the overextended bank also defaults. This process of declining liquidity of the banks has been underway for some time, but now threatens the entire financial structure. Indications of this lie in the fact that by the end of 1979, banks had lent $917.6 billion as against $1,062.6 billion deposited–or a dangerous ratio of .86. This stands against loans to deposits ratio of .17 in 1945.
An expression of the fundamental sickness of the economy is shown by the debt-inflation spiral that apparently cannot be stopped. The decline of available cash has prompted reliance on short-term loans which fuel the inflation which compels more short-term borrowing and so on. For example, the country’s gross national product in 1951 was $330.2 billion and debt stood at $432.9 billion. Or it took $1.31 of debt to finance $1.00 of GNP. In 1978 there was a GNP of $2,127.6 billion and debt stood at $3,351.4 billion. Or in 1978 it took $1.58 of debt to develop $1.00 GNP. Today corporate debt service amounts to 35 percent of profit before interest earnings.
If the financial crash of 1929 was a harbinger for the industrial depression of 1932, you can imagine the effects on modern industry when the over-extension of the banks becomes a crash.
Of course the bourgeoisie is not huddled in a corner awaiting their doom. Far from it. The Congress is rushing legislation in an attempt to stave off the threatening disaster. As Lenin noted, and history has fully confirmed, governments cannot make political laws which supercede economic laws.
The fact of the matter remains that debt is a direct gauge of stagnation because it indicates the lag between production and realization.
Liquidity is bound to fall, debt will continue to rise, inflation will pave the way for greater debt and stagnation will deepen. Pass what laws they will, this situation is the negative built into the imperialist days of wine and roses.
Each day in the press, and each night on television, we are assured that the recession has ended. Too bad our government has to be so frank about this country, because as one commentator was declaring that the upswing in auto sales heralded a new boom for all, the government was releasing statistics to show that the auto industry is losing the greatest amount of money in industrial history. Well they might be concerned with auto. It is one of the few truly root industries. Steel, glass, rubber, plastics of all kinds, a huge amount of construction, tool-making and road building depend on the viability of the auto industry. This is also true of housing construction. Any real investigation of the slight rise in auto and housing production will show that this is the result of government subsidy and the record auto losses are the real indicator of the direction of the economy. When the house builders propaganda machine brags about new starts, they have their eye on the fact that mortgage interest rates are continuing to rise and saving deposits are running 90 percent below last year. Quite a recovery!
You are all aware that under such conditions the misery of the working class is bound to increase. The rotten, moribund economy is causing headaches for the capitalists, but the workers are paying in hunger and declining standards of health and culture. They are paying with broken homes and despair. What might be a recession for some is a catastrophic depression for others. Industrial cities such as Flint have a staggering 23 percent unemployment. Teenagers are 19 percent unemployed with unemployment among black youth topping 40 percent. The rate of unemployment for the black worker is 14.7 percent. How can one talk of recovery when over 25 million people in the US live in officially recognized poverty; over eight million are registered as unemployed; over 700,000 summer jobs for youth were lost over the last year. Close to one million workers are no longer even counted in the labor force because they are convinced that they will never again find work.
The human misery that reflects the cold statistics on banking and debt can hardly be overstated. However, the working class of this country is a fighting class. We accept this gauntlet thrown down by the enemy. They dare us to move into the masses and carry out the difficult fight to organize them to fight for their unity and against the tide of human misery. While we reject the counterrevolutionary slogan of “the worse the better,” we accept the social results of the developing depression as the arena for our battles.
Comrades, the recent elections must be commented upon. Of course we have not had an opportunity to either closely examine the statistics or to hold the proper analytical meetings. Certain things can be said. First we cannot approach an analysis of the elections from a nonpartisan standpoint. We have to at least be as militant as the bourgeoisie. Both the enemy and ourselves view the election from the point of view that at best they are a gauge of the consciousness of the masses.
In this respect, what do the elections indicate? First of all that there is a growing disillusionment of the people with the bourgeois electoral process. Over the past three elections there has been a steady decline in voter participation. In this election, preliminary reports indicate that barely half the eligible voters participated. Secondly, large numbers of workers are being drawn in under the hegemony of the “New Right.” This shadow grouping includes such fascist fronts as the Moral Majority, the John Birch Society, the National Conservative Political Action Committee and the various politicalized fundamentalist religious sects.
The immediate effect of the election upon all aspects of the labor movement will be the struggle to rebuild the Democratic Party. We must resist this with all our might. Our goal is clear. We must exacerbate the disillusionment of the masses in the electoral process. The misleaders of the people are in grave danger. They stand exposed as never before. We must take advantage of the already visible ground-swell to reject the misleadership.
As far as this Congress is concerned, we have to accept the situation and move toward an offensive. The first step is to tighten the centralism of the Party. The elections are going to have a sobering effect on the comrades. The one unfulfilled prediction in the 1978 Political Bureau Report to the Central Committee is for the swift and deep attack of the reaction. I’m sure the comrades are aware of this and now see its inevitability.
Finally, revisionism in all its forms is being exposed. That exposure means that our Party is going to have to fill a void in the political left. The dangers and consequently the opportunities have never been greater. We are a fighting Party and welcome the opportunity to take the fight to the masses because that is the only way that we can strengthen our proletarian base.
The most fragile aspect of the capitalist world economy is, of course, the so-called emerging nations.
These areas are and have been fair game for a financial imperialism desperate to expand. We were quite correct in our estimate of the situation back in 1978. We pointed out that there was no future in capitalism for the peoples who had, with great sacrifice, thrown off the yoke of direct colonialism. Competing with the other neo-colonies for a market becoming glutted with their commodities, they have attempted to undersell the competition and, at best, they could only work themselves into the poor house. Some $450 billion in debt, reliant upon an industrial oil-based system, at the mercy of the inflationary pressures of the imperialist countries, these nations will slide another $80 billion into debt this year.
The neo- and semi-colonies are meeting greater and greater resistance by the banks to their heavy borrowing. The banks, faced with mass default on the part of the neo- and semi-colonies on the one hand, and facing their own crises of liquidity on the other, are expressing a new caution. Yet, if they don’t continue to loan, the game is up. There is already more than $1 trillion circulating outside the country of origin. OPEC currently is attempting to deposit $150 billion in short-term deposits.
The banks cannot possibly safely loan such amounts of money to defaulting colonies. Yet, with the decision of the USNA imperialists to induce the recession to protect the dollar, the neo- and semi-colonies become the only place to loan. So, glutted with short-term deposits of other people’s money, they are going to take the 1929 gamble and hope this time it works since they are dealing in the trillions instead of billions and on a world-wide basis.
The neo-colony is faced with the choice of absolute economic catastrophe or accepting loans on a 20 percent interest basis. Their only hope, as they sell themselves into a new slavery, is that their creditors will keep them alive in order to collect at least some of the loan, or at least prop them up to stave off their own collapse.
The situation in the semi- and neo-colonies is getting worse. As we have noted before, figures don’t lie, but liars can figure. Even though the so-called developing countries have, for the past decade, had an average growth rate of some six percent per year, it has only meant an increase in the suffering of the masses. As in Latin America that growth has meant that the poorest 20 percent of the population exists on some four percent of the GNP while the richest 20 percent of the population gets 60 percent. The world economic growth has added only $20 per year to the income of individual workers in the developing countries. The gap between the imperialist countries and the colonies did not narrow, it widened. One billion people have an income of less than $200 per year and two-and-a-half billion receive less than $500 per year.
Several things are clear from the world economic situation. First, that the world capitalist system is entering into its gravest crisis since 1914. Secondly, that the USNA, in alliance with the other imperialist powers, has no intention of backing away, but instead is already taking the necessary political and economic measures to stave off the imminent debacle. These measures call for a new round of recolonizationon the one hand, and the most aggressive militarization of the USNA economy on the other.
In many respects, the world is being evened up politically and this allows for the one pole, the semi- and neo-colonies, to learn from one another’s’ experience. There was a time when the Asian experience meant little to Latin America, or the Latin American experience meant little to the movement in Africa. Neocolonialism has changed that situation. Today, Africa is entering into a stage of development in which the Latin American revolution has had a rich experience. That stage is the struggle against neocolonialism.
The experience of Central and South America is that at the point of successful mass uprisings, the imperialists assist in the pulling down of the gorilla regimes and by doing so gain a foothold on a sector of the revolution. The new democratic regime is financially dependent upon the USNA for the physical survival of a section of the population–that is the importation of food and medical supplies. Of course the economy is structured in such a way as to block the effectiveness of any decree dealing with the fundamentals of the economy. The weapon of aid increases this dependence and allows for the slow development of the political situation that ends with the emergence of a new gorilla regime.
Although the form of such motion is different in Africa than in Latin America, the content is the same. In Africa, the liberation front maneuver against the progressive and potentially progressive regimes is simply a form of this motion. From Angola to Ethiopia, so-called liberation fronts serve as the mask to hide the sinister features of an imperialism that has been militarily defeated, but economically and politically still maintains a stronger position than the victorious people.
The legacy of imperialism includes the fact that in each of the neo-colonies there is an extremely narrow stratum of administrative personnel that must be utilized by any regime in order to hold the country together. This stratum is a seedbed for subversion within all the progressive regimes no matter the area. The utilization of anti-communist hysteria, the organizational consolidation of the right wing of society, the propaganda about Soviet “social-imperialism” all are on the upswing in the so-called emerging nations and all this is part of a massive buildup of counterrevolution.
This is not 1952 and the stage of history that was entered into with the struggle against the direct colony cannot be repeated. Revolution and counterrevolution are proceeding, this time under conditions more favorable to the victory of the proletariat. The tremendous scientific achievements of the past decade express themselves in the massive revolutionization of the means of production. Just as the development of the means of production created the necessity of revolutions in the past period, the further development of these forces absolutely prevents their backsliding or a substantial or sustained victory for imperialism. The consolidation of the proletariat of the economically backward countries, their mass adherence to the socialist ideology, their constant, daily tempering in the most brutal combat, all indicate the direction of the coming struggle. We have never doubted nor do we doubt today the validity of the social law that proclaims that the class which manipulates the instruments of social production will eventually own them.
Capitalist states, in time of economic crisis, show a marked tendency to further separate themselves from society and express a life of their own. To be sure, they never cease to be an organ of violence in the hands of the bourgeoisie, but they tend more and more to separate themselves and expand by becoming the source of money and the market through the military budget. Each time there is a downturn in the economy, it is expressed through the idleness of the means of production. In order to prevent an economic collapse, the capitalist state puts this idle machinery to work the only way it is able–by having the capitalists produce arms. This means a certain inflationary trend, plus the most aggressive political reaction.
There is militarization and militarization. Ever since World War 1 the USNA has, as has the world, turned more and more to militarization. We are now entering a new stage in this development. Before we look at the horizon, let us summarize the existing military situation.
As with the industrial product, the industry of human slaughter has leaped forward on the basis of the breakout of science. Added to this is the enormous inflation in the price of military hardware. Combined, they seriously threaten the existence of the economy and indeed life itself. For example, compared to World War II prices, the cost of a squadron of fighter aircraft has gone up 155 times and one Trident Submarine is 340 times the cost of a World War II attack sub.
The bomb that leveled Hiroshima and killed 100,000 people had a destructive area of three square miles. One MX missile will totally destroy an area of 300 square miles. One of the currently deployed Minuteman 3 missiles carries more explosive power than all the bombs dropped by all combatants during both World War II and the Korean War. A missile launched today has an error of impact of some 600 feet after traveling some 6,000 miles. The USNA possesses and has targeted some 9,200 of these nuclear weapons.
Of course, the cost of maintaining the armies is almost unbelievable. In the USNA, the public expenditure per soldier is $46,610. Even Haiti, with a per capita GNP of $191 per year, spends some $1,571 per soldier and $1 per capita on public health. Such is the impact of militarism.
The different stage we are entering into no longer allows for the militarization of a part of the economy. The economy, the political life of the country, the culture, all aspects of civil liberties, are threatened with being absorbed and subordinated to the needs of the social and political reorganization around the military.
Dealing with the economy of the coming period, it is clear that if the economy is to provide the military with the equipment and manpower that has been agreed upon, it means that there must be a massive conversion from consumer to military production. An example of this is the MX system of trenches and silos which will be the biggest construction project in history. Conservative estimates are that it will take some three years to create the necessary industrial base for the new militarization, and that the economy will suffer a massive dislocation for the next decade due to the change-over from consumer to military spending.
It would be impossible to put forth the total of statistics that indicate the enormous waste of material and human resources, or to really convey the real and immediate danger posed by the existence and proliferation of the most destructive of weapons. That is the task of our fractions in the peace efforts. We here have to restate and determine that the Party must learn from history and must move in a decisive manner into the struggle for peace. We will deal with this point later in the report; however, we want to indicate that the battlefield chosen by the enemy is the one on which we must fight. That battle is the ideological and political effort of the class enemy to subvert the labor movement, to threaten the existence of humanity, to deny the hard-won civil rights of the people by compelling everyone to submit to the demands of the arms race.
The ideological battle is the revival of anti-Sovietism and anti-communism. The goal is to make the people pay for the widening gap between productive capacity and national consumption. Militarization has always been the enemy of the people. Today it appears as an enraged beast cornered by history. Either we kill it or it will kill us.
Comrades, our Party was formed in the struggle against revisionism. Far from being a simple clash of theoretical opinions, this struggle emerged as and remains the fight for the correct path for the revolution in our country. The struggle against revisionism has been and still is measured in blood. This struggle is at the core of our intellectual and practical activity. Although such a meeting as this is not the place for a detailed analysis of the struggle, we do want to indicate the level of the struggle and the objective processes that are under way. Processes which, for the first time in several decades, are turning social motion in our favor.
First let us restate our outlook on the Soviet Union. Our support of the Soviet system and our respect and comradely affection for the heroic Soviet people are the foundation of our struggle against a modern revisionism that has as its ideological and theoretical base a section of the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). We do not confuse the political groupings within the CPSU with the proletarian dictatorship. Neither do we allow the revisionists to make it appear that the struggle against Soviet revisionism is a struggle against the Soviet system or the dictatorship of the proletariat there. Our treasured political independence allows us to separate these factors and struggle against one while upholding the other.
First of all, historically speaking, the victory of modern revisionism became inevitable when the traditional communist parties could not change politically to conform to the role of every communist party. That role is to subjectively express the objective process. While the modern imperialists were maneuvering to eliminate the direct colony and in its place substitute the neo-colony, the world communist movement was proceeding as if the alternatives and the process were colonialism to socialism.
Suddenly, it appeared as if the revolutionaries were faced with a new imperialism, an imperialism that appeared to aid the imperialized, that spoke of cooperation with the socialist sector of the world, that spoke of peace. Small wonder that the tiny group of misleaders was able to confuse the mass and entrench themselves in power.
Krushchev’s name will be forever associated with the greatest betrayal of the world revolution.
It was Khrushchev who created the essential body of theoretical deviations which remain nearly intact to this day and are responsible for the disorientation and collapse of the world communist movement. Under changed conditions, Khrushchev took the form of the old unity of the Comintern–proletarian internationalism as defense of the Soviet Union–and twisted it into support for the current national (and nationalist) policies of the Soviet Union. The world communist movement began its collapse under the weight of the nationalism that Khrushchev interjected into it to defend the policies he needed to secure his control.
Brezhnev wrested power from a discredited Khrushchev and moved to reinstate “orthodoxy,” to calm the waves of Khrushchev’s “petty bourgeois radicalism,” to return to the more acceptable “Leninist” norms. This included the 1970 attempted rehabilitation of Stalin. Thus, the Brezhnev years represent the consolidation of the worst features of the content of Khrushchev, without the excesses of its form.
Brezhnev’s “return to orthodoxy” converted Khrushchev’s peaceful coexistence into the strategy of detente. Khrushchev’s threshold of communism became Brezhnev’s mature socialism. Khrushchev’s state of the whole people was modulated to Brezhnev’s socialist democracy.
But what remained were the fundamental tenets of the compromise with imperialism, the retreat from principled confrontation, the selective support of revolutions, the substitution of the national interests of the Soviet Union for the interests of the world communist movement.
Brezhnev represents the final compromise between the impulses of revisionism and the objective realities of Soviet society and economy. What they could do, their ability to “reform” and change, was limited by the strength of the economy–the objective character expressed as the laws of socialist economy–and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The field of revisionism was confined to political and ideological manipulation within more narrowly conceived limits. The prevailing character of the regime was toward institutionalization of the status quo, that is detente, “mature socialism.”
Thus, as the period of imperialist expansion began to draw to a close, the revisionists had already begun to see limits on their horizon and were politically retreating into a new “orthodoxy,” a new status quo, which they are now dug in to defend and whose passing signals their political demise. According to prominent US “Soviet-watchers:”
With the benefit of more than a decade’s hindsight we see that the two implications of Stalin’s death have in fact been of little real significance. The alterations in planning methods first introduced in 1965 have not changed the basic operation of Soviet central planning; indeed, many of them have been effectively abandoned. Moreover, the best prognosis is that, while there may be further modification in the future, they will prove to be at most tinkering that will prove disappointing, and, in the end, these modifications will be abandoned, too. The reason is that, over the range of modification the Soviets seem willing to try, tinkering creates problems that can only be alleviated by ceasing to tinker. In short, the system will out, and fundamental change in the system is not in prospect. (Cohen et al., The Soviet Union Since Stalin, pp. 129-30.)
For these shallow victories, the Soviet revisionists sacrificed the lives of countless revolutionaries and thrust the world communist movement into chaos. But from this chaos new ideological poles emerge with ever greater clarity under the pressure of imperialist exploitation and oppression in the very corners of the world sacrificed to imperialism by the treachery and accommodation of revisionist policy.
The weakness of the revisionists flows from their strengths–they represent the forces of a certain period of history, the period during which imperialism expanded to the limit of its quantitative growth, producing phenomenal wealth, but exhausting its reserves for the future and opening the era of implosion and destruction of the system at the hands of the world it created.
Just as the rise of the revisionists reflected the expansion of imperialism, their fall is mandated by the contraction of imperialism and the violent revolutionary implications of that period for the entire imperialist world.
The ability for imperialism to avoid direct confrontation was always tenuous, possible only so long as the need for war was buffered by economic expansion. (There have been few years since World War II where there was not a war somewhere.) But the pressures now being generated make the drive toward war virtually unstoppable. Thus the revisionists, who purchased their dachas with peace at any price, will be unable to maneuver. The objective impulse of the imperialists toward II confrontation will throw the revisionists from the saddle. Leadership will then be seized by those who can act to protect and defend not only the Soviet Union, but the interests of world communism, both inside and outside the Soviet Union.
Detente, irreversible detente, the banner of the revisionists, is also their ball and chain. While the imperialists are compelled to stem revolution, and thus to take an increasingly aggressive military role–overtly and covertly–the revisionists are unable to calm the waters of even their “socialist-oriented” allies. The dominant interest of the Brezhnev grouping is to maintain the status quo; that alone ensures their ability to survive. But history surges forward. The revisionists built their castle upon the sands of detente, and now that base is eroding.
... In many respects the Soviet-American clash over Afghanistan climaxed, rather than contradicted, the trends of the year. Even before the crisis, developments in a variety of areas had conspired to generate a vague but pervasive sense in both the US and the USSR that something had gone profoundly wrong between them. If detente is a shared belief in the rewards of mutual accommodation and the risks of confrontation, then detente had long since been eroded by changes in the environment of the relationship. These adverse developments were, for the most part, continuations of gradual trends or consequences of earlier events. Still, in many cases 1979 brought a quantum leap in the intensity or the complexity of the problem. (Foreign Affairs, Vol. 58, No. 3, p. 518)
Because of the form their struggles took, the revisionists consolidated their hold first over the leading organs of the party and later over the upper echelons of the state apparatus. The elite stratum of Soviet society, those most ideologically tied to detente and the Brezhnev clique, exert a political and administrative hammerlock on official policy. Brezhnev, as head of both party and state, is able to paper over emerging splits with officially reported speeches.
Stalin, the engineer of Soviet socialism, was clear that the dictatorship of the proletariat consisted not only of the government organs, but of the intermediate levels and the mass base of .the state, the mass organizations, youth organizations, trade unions, etc. And that these are the means through which the dictatorship of the proletariat is exercised. The dictatorship of the proletariat is objective. Even today in the USSR:
No people is more actively involved in governmental activities than the Soviet population. They regularly cast ballots for millions of legislative candidates who assemble in parliamentary bodies (Soviets) to vote on bills proposed by the government and party, they belong to a huge variety of social and political organizations for public action, and attend countless meetings convened to discuss political issues... It is likely that one out of every four or five adult citizens participates in some form of public control activity, and this places the citizen inspector in almost every area of economic and social life in the Soviet Union today. (Problems of Communism, July-August 1980, pp. 82-83)
“What if the party itself begins, in some way or other” – Stalin asks in Problems of Leninism – “to counterpose itself to the class, thus upsetting the foundations of its correct mutual relations with the class, thus upsetting the foundations of mutual confidence?”
The history of our party provides a number of such cases. Various groups and factions in our party have come to grief and disappeared because they violated these conditions. . .
Stalin spoke with such confidence and authority that where the party erred it was brought into line with the interests of the proletariat because the class exercises the dictatorship; the socialist proletariat asserts itself through its dictatorship.
The impulse toward confrontation with imperialism, like every other revolutionary impulse, rises up from the masses. Confronted with increased danger, they necessarily demand action. All the decisions to confront imperialism were made as the result of splits and struggle in the CPSU.
It is this impulse arising from the mass base of the proletarian dictatorship which will deal the coup de grace to the Brezhnev groupings’ mortal clutch on the status quo.
Whether in Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, or as in the present paralysis in the Middle East, the revisionists have been forced to move when not doing so spelled mortal danger and the threat of mass protest at home. But in every case, their use of these situations to further their strategic aim – detente – prevented the consolidation of revolutionary gains.
Thus we find the disgusting and immoral spectacle of the Soviets–the fraternal ally of the Vietnamese in their heroic struggle against US imperialism–taking Richard Nixon to their bosom. The recent book Soviet Perceptions of the United States comments on this phenomenon:
In pursuit of [discrediting detente], the [US] media are said by Berezhkhov to be carrying on a ’persistent fight against the policy of easing tensions.’ To this end no efforts are spared. According to Berezhkhov’s deputy, N. D. Turkatenko, the opponents of detente use ’all means including the most base. One of their favorites includes personal attacks on precisely those people who in one way or another are connected to the policy of detente.’ According to Turkatenko, the screening of the film All the President’s Men, based on the book by Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate affair, and the simultaneous publication of The Last Days by the same authors, were nothing more than salvos in the campaign against detente. The publishing and film industries, apparently, made common cause with the Washington Post in a campaign to defame President Nixon and his foreign policy–using methods ’most base.’ (Schwartz, Soviet Perceptions of the U.S.)
Watergate and the purging of Nixon are reduced through the lens of revisionism and nationalism to attempts by the reactionary military-industrial complex to fight Nixon’s championing of detente. Nixon, the author of the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and the genocide of Cambodia, is seen as a friend of the progressive peoples of the world in the distorted never-never-land of revisionist foreign policy.
The same attitude carries over to their treatment of such luminaries of supranational money as David Rockefeller and other “friends of detente.”
The same book notes:
The pursuit of detente, furthermore, tends to encourage those in the US who support the policy of improved relations with the Soviet Union. One of the consequences of expanded East-West trade, notes Oleshuk, ’is the strengthening of the immediate interests of influential US business circles in the improvement of Soviet-American relations. . .In turn, these representatives of the US business world who, according to political scientist Marshall Shulman have become persistent adherents of peaceful coexistence, are actively influencing sentiment in the US in favor of deepening and expanding relations with the Soviet Union.’ Increased trade strengthens the immediate interests of David Rockefeller, Armand Hammer, et al. in the political normalization of Soviet-American relations. Active Soviet support for the policy of detente, therefore not only weakens the political position of their critics but also helps bolster support for more ’realistic’ forces in the US. (Soviet Perceptions, pp. 140-41)
Thus they even do us a favor by strengthening the hand of the supranational financiers. While even in their propaganda directed at and concerning the neocolonial world, they never hint at the real role of these butchers and hangmen of revolution.
In fact, of the paradigm of the political representative of supranational financiers, the US Soviet watchers note that they have this to say:
Soviet writers again and again come back to the exceptional cases–FDR, Kennedy and Nixon–presidents who were able to surmount bureaucratic and economic pressures and take independent, i.e. favorable, policy decisions. Roosevelt, writes Ernst Genri, ’was incomparably more farsighted than his diplomats and subordinate officials... He, of course, nourished no special sympathy for Soviet or socialist ideas. At no time did Roosevelt stand apart from the bourgeois society in which he was raised. But the democratic traditions of T. Jefferson and A. Lincoln were alive in him; he sincerely hated fascism and understood that a victory by Hitler would threaten the world. (Soviet Perceptions, p. 44)
Regarding the presidency of John F. Kennedy the same Soviet watchers note that
Soviet treatment of Kennedy’s administration is of the same cloth. Kennedy was mistrusted by many, writes Gromyko, precisely because they feared he ’might become a new Roosevelt’... The ’ghost of Roosevelt’ has always frightened those on the ’right’ both for his domestic policies and because he normalized relations with the Soviet Union. They feared Kennedy would seek to do the same. Kennedy did move in a realistic direction, as we have seen. .. more than any of his predecessors (writes Trofimenko) the Kennedy administration seems to have tended toward changes in US-Soviet relations and a certain restraint in the policy of military confrontation. Such ’restraint’ was particularly notable, according to Trofimenko, during the ’second phase’ of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Though ’confronted with mounting pressure from the US military and political establishment calling for a military solution,’ President Kennedy ’finally overcame his earlier vacillations and committed himself to a settlement by political and diplomatic means.’
Reactions to the foreign policies of the Nixon administration have been even more positive. (Soviet Perceptions of the US, p. 45)
Thus, through the rosy glasses of revisionism, all is peace, democracy and socialism. But the ugly realities of the world are now sweeping up in a revolutionary tide that is showing the revisionists not only as ideological cousins of the supranational financiers, but doomed to be swept away by the surging forward of the revolutionary proletariat.
The policies of the revisionists have created a situation in which not only is their political house in disorder, but they have failed to fine tune the economy to meet their needs. By tinkering and then tampering, they have been unable to solve fundamental problems. The shortage of investment capital, inconsistent agricultural policies, the shortage of labor (another legacy of World War II), all play a role in the slowing growth rate of the Soviet economy. But perhaps the most volatile and contradictory factor is the role of military production.
For at the same time as the Soviet revisionists eat, sleep and breathe detente, they are arming to the teeth. This allocation of social wealth makes it impossible to fulfill the consumer dream that was dangled carrot-like to divert attention from the nightmare of revisionist foreign policy. The tampering with allocation of wealth between heavy and light industry, between town and country, are all constrained by the growing burden of military expenditure.
Yet military expenditure is imperative in a world in which the most salient international feature is imperialist encirclement and a rising tide of revolution in the neo-colonies. Ideological problems arise from trying to explain why there are lines for sausages–when these are the fruits of detente–in order to arm in a world in which the “correlation of forces” favors socialism and there are no intractable antagonisms. The people are willing to sacrifice for the revolution; they are willing to fight and die. But in order to rally the people to this kind of sacrifice, the leadership must be able to accurately and objectively describe the danger that confronts them. The revisionists cannot sound the alarm without at the same time exposing themselves. As a result, they tinker; the more they tinker, the worse the situation becomes. In order to exploit their vast Siberian energy resources, they must have capital goods. Shall these be produced at home at the cost of sacrifice, but in the spirit of Stalin and the defense of the revolution; or shall new deals be sought with imperialism, at the expense of revolutions in the Middle East and Latin America?
These are the questions that can no longer be postponed. The revolution in the neocolonial world cannot be staved off. The crisis triggering and intensifying the world revolution is rooted in an imperialism that has exhausted its quantitative growth and can only grow more fierce and ruthless in its predatory exploitation of its sector of the world. Confronted with this reality, the impulse toward revolution in the neo-colonies is also impelled toward forms of unity that can help strengthen and advance the revolutionary forces.
The movement of the revolutionary proletariat in the imperialist sector strengthens the hand of the revolutionary proletariat in the Soviet Union. Since any external sign of weakness exposes the USSR to attack, the revisionists can demand unity in the name of defense. The strengthening of the revolutionary forces in the capitalist world is the precondition for the real assertion of the revolutionary proletariat in the socialist camp who are now suppressed by the political and ideological mufflings of revisionist leadership.
The conditions are emerging for a new international, which can break free from the Soviet-centrism of the revisionists and base itself on an international proletariat which now exists and provides an objective base for a broader and potentially limitless world communist movement.
The role of modern revisionism in the national liberation movements cannot be separated from the general alignment of modern revisionism on the one hand and modern imperialism on the other.
The political projections and needs of the specific leading groupings within the USSR (the privileged bureaucratic sector represented by Khrushchev) and the Trilateralists (as represented by Kennedy-Johnson) in the USNA, had to be formed within the general and historical demands of the ruling class of their respective countries. This demanded a great deal of theorizing on the part of modern revisionism and a great deal of deception on the part of modern imperialism.
The peoples of the socialist camp very well understood the necessity of decolonialism as a means of permanently disarming the European drive toward a new fascism and war. By decolonialism they implicitly meant the development of socialism in the former colonial world.
The Trilateralists meant other things. For them decolonialization necessarily meant a recolonialization in a new form that more accurately reflected the current level of the development of the productive forces of the leading Trilateral countries.
The people of the US, and indeed the world’s toilers, were in support of the dismantling of the colonial system as it had already proven itself to be the basis of the world’s greatest slaughter of human beings.
Within this context the deal was struck. European reaction lost its base of aggressive strength, the USNA foreign policy turned from a roll-back to the containment of communism. The revisionists delivered on the promise of “peace.” The reactionary colonial comprador bourgeoisie, cloaked themselves in the garb of socialism and became the puppet rulers of their neocolonial states; the toiling masses were delivered into a new and more brutal slavery.
Awkward “theories” that were barely ideological fig leaves sprang from all sectors. The best known is the “non-capitalist, non-socialist road” to national liberation and the anti-Marxist theories on the “progressive” nature of the army. These theories all added up to one position, that the petty bourgeoisie would lead the nation to socialism and there was no need for a national liberation vanguard. Mirski, the Soviet expert on national liberation, summed it up:
The doctrinaires and dogmatists will reply, ’Wait’. . .but. . .the national liberation revolution can immediately break out of the framework of bourgeois democratic revolution and begin the transition to socialist revolution. . .if the conditions for proletarian leadership have not yet matured, the historic mission of breaking with capitalism can be carried out by elements close to the working class. . .by helping to provide the political, military and economic requisites for the continuous advance of the national liberation revolution... the socialist world system is performing the function of proletarian vanguard in relation to imperialist-oppressed nations. (New Times, No. 18, 1964)
If the national interests of the USSR were served by a murderous reaction, the revisionists gave it their blessings. Thus while Nasser jailed and tortured the communists he was held up as a revolutionary hero. Qadaffi has followed suit in the destruction of the communist movement in Libya to the praises of the nationalists in Moscow. The butchery of the communists in the Sudan failed to raise an iota of revulsion among the revisionists. Their support of aggressive fascistic Iraq and embracing them as a “Socialist Republic” hasn’t even brought forth an embarrassed blush. These betrayers of the revolution did not hesitate to disband the communist parties when they stood in the way of good, if temporary, relations between the bourgeois leaders of a new state and the USSR. Thus the communist movement in the Arab world was disorganized and disbanded.
The overthrow of Khrushchev hardly meant the overthrow of revisionism in this regard. It did require the purging of the Khrushchev terminology while maintaining the essentials of Khrushchevism. So in place of the “non-capitalist” path to a “non-capitalist, non-socialist” economic system we now get the convoluted “broadest possible front of democratic and anti-imperialist forces” placing socialism last on their agenda. There it becomes the agenda point never discussed because of revisionist filibustering.
Further, a 1966 issue of Problems of Communism noted that
The dominant theme of Moscow-line writings on Latin America in 1965 was the creation of the ’broadest possible front of democratic and anti-imperialist forces.’ Specifically named for inclusion in such fronts were the ’left Christian Democrats,’ as well as such familiar communist target groups as the Peronists in Argentina and the Trabalhists in Brazil. Beyond this the formula was vague, but now far it went was indicated by the Brazilian Communist Pedro Motta Lima, who asserted in the August 1965 World Marxist Review that the ’broad united opposition front’ must take in ’wherever possible, those sections of the oligarchy which are not directly connected with the ruling camarilla.’
As has been noted, the basic need of the revisionists is to maintain the status quo. Concretely that means maintaining the existing balance of forces by stopping revolutions. Since there has not been a single transformation of a social system in world history except by violence, the struggle to impose the line of peaceful transition means the halting of the revolutionary process. How far this can go is shown by the position of the revisionist Communist Party of Chile (CPC). For example, in the July, 1978 issue of Political Affairs, in an article titled “The Unarmed Road of the Revolution: How it worked out in Chile” by Luis Corvalan, the CPC General Secretary stated
The Chilean revolution has suffered a temporary reverse, but such an outcome does not refute the assumption that in other countries, and perhaps even in Chile itself, the working class and its allies will be able to win political power and carry out their revolution without resort to the use of arms.
The inescapable conclusion is that the confluence of three currents – the struggle for national liberation, the deep historical struggle for peace, and the need of modern imperialism to expand into the newly created neo-colonies – created the conditions for the rise of modern revisionism. The transformation of these currents, the completion of certain processes, and the forward motion of the productive forces, have brought an era to an end. The process moves to its point of origin on a historically higher level.
Times does not permit a thorough examination of the role of modern revisionism in the East European democracies. We would like to indicate the political motion developing there.
The first point is that the Marxist-Leninists never had a real chance to get started in Eastern Europe. The Hitler occupation almost totally wiped out the local communist cadre. The ruthless blood-letting and the cultural destruction associated with the fascist attempt to reduce Eastern Europe to a colony left the nations of the area barely able to organize themselves. Assisted by the Stalin group and the Soviet Army, a real effort was made to help the healthy developing Marxists gain and maintain control of the various state apparatuses. The death of Stalin jeopardized this effort and the rise of Khrushchev ended it.
The anti-Stalin campaign was necessary for Khrushchev to defeat his opposition at home. In Eastern Europe it freed the hand of the local petty bourgeois and bourgeois forces to attack the “old guard.” The Hungarian counterrevolution and the Polish uprising followed in a matter of months. Khrushchev did nothing as Gomulka was released from prison with 30,000 political prisoners, and was elected to the leadership of the Polish party. On October 20, 1956, Gomulka addressed the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers Party, stating
The model of socialism can also vary. It can be as that created in the Soviet Union; it can be shaped in a manner as we see it in Yugoslavia; it can be different still.
Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin unleashed forces in Eastern Europe that were difficult to control. Khrushchev was in the position of taking one step to the right at home and finding the Eastern bloc regimes pulled several paces to the right. The Liberman “reforms” in the USSR, which made profit the gauge of economic effectiveness, found extreme expression in the “New Economic Mechanism” in Hungary and the theories of Ota Sik of Czechoslovakia.
The anti-socialist motion in the Eastern European countries is bound up with the struggle against centralized economic planning. Room for the development of the small producer and economic nationalism has become the rule in these countries. The Soviet revisionists show a concern only when the rightists threaten to undermine the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.
This motion could not develop except that it found real favor in the West. The growing glut of the capitalist market plus the immense amount of cash in commercial banks made the East European countries look very tempting. On the one hand, these countries had a real need of especially certain kinds of technology. On the other hand, the industries and banks wanted to do business. The problem of cash to carry out these transactions did not inhibit the deals. The imbalance between exports and imports was covered by western government credit guarantees, promissory notes and suppliers’ credits. The shifts in the economy toward the available credit and the then-expanding market had as predictable effects in these socialist countries as in the more productive neo-colonies.
Total Comecon debt at the end of 1979 was $68 billion. Eastern Europe paid $4.5 billion in interest in 1979. Their combined trade deficit amounted to $4.8 billion. It is estimated that debt is likely to rise at least another $30 billion in the next three years if current trends continue. A great deal of the increase in industrial productivity of the late 60s and early 70s came from science and technology. A sizeable portion of this has been imported.
Should access to western credits diminish, the implications for Eastern Europe’s economies, structured as they are for the environment of detente and capitalist expansion, are troubling.
According to the London Economist
. . .a new study by the Department of Commerce reckons that on present trends there would be a need for Rumania’s exports to the West to rise 23 percent a year, Poland’s by over 1614 percent a year, East Germany’s and Czechoslovakia’s by over 14 percent a year. (Economist, 20 September 1980)
Under conditions of capitalist crisis with markets shrinking, the possibility of this relationship continuing can be considered impossible. Yet many of the East European parties, relying as they do on the delivery of a certain standard of living to their people, and on certain managerial sections that benefit from the current arrangement, are not in a position to try to reverse the policies of the past decades. Poland perhaps best exemplifies the kind of turmoil that can result when the party attempts to back away from the commitment to living standard purchased with the credits of detente. Poland, of course, represents an extreme example. What can one say of a socialist country where 80 percent of agriculture is in private hands and most of that in plots of under 30 acres; where 80 percent of this private farming is done by horse?
The revisionists realize the price of having to abandon the detente relationship, and are forced to try to ignore the changing world conditions, trying to find policies which will allow them to escape the spectre of Lenin and Stalin.
To this end, discussion of linking the currency system of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the transferable rouble, to the SDR of the IMF, is under way. Lawrence Brainard, a vice-president of Bankers Trust of New York wrote in the journal Euromoney
A tie between the transferable rouble and SDR would–it was argued–provide the basis for credit drawings by CMEA countries. . .The repayment of the loan would rest on the creditworthiness of the entire CMEA. (“Why Eastern Europe is Talking About the IMF,” Euromoney, October, 1979)
Polish economists discussing the same proposal commented
... the indebtedness of the CMEA countries has increased because of the need to maintain larger reserves in convertible currencies. Furthermore these countries have become more sensitive to the crisis phenomena occurring in the world capitalist economy: inflation, fluctuating exchange rates, etc. Therefore together with the introduction of payments in convertible currencies in dealings with third countries, work has been done on the possibility of using the collective currency of the CMEA countries, the transferable rouble, for doing business with those countries. (“Improving the Function of the Transferable Rouble as International Currency,” Andrzei Bien and Grzegory Nosiadek, translated in Foreign Trade, Summer 1980)
The Soviet response to Brainard’s article was expressed in an article in the journal Novosti, in October, 1979. The Soviets’ opposition to outright membership in the IMF, based on the questions of information transfer and “conditionality, was tempered by their eagerness to tap the credits of the IMF. An Austrian economist commented
The measures undertaken to restructure the international economic system create adequate conditions for the participation of the CMEA countries in these discussions. (quoted in A. Zwass, Foreign Trade, Summer, 1980)
The same economist correctly perceived the options for Brezhnev:
Any discussion about the future framework of the world trade and monetary system makes sense only if the Eastern partners desire a real political and economic organization of world affairs, if they desire to develop the existing basis of cooperation and not destroy it, if they want to integrate the Eastern markets into the world market, linked by a common workable international monetary system.
If the CMEA authorities are really ready to discuss this very complex problem they may help to solve some important problems of political and economic cooperation between East and West as well as between North and South. (Zwass, Foreign Trade)
Clearly the deal being proposed is further credits and indebtedness for Eastern Europe and a chance for the international monetary system to get an infusion of currency backed by the gold reserves of the second largest gold producer in the world. But, like the capitalists’ various schemes for restructuring the world economy and averting disaster, these revisionist pipe dreams have little basis in reality.
The figures on economic performance give ample evidence of the vulnerability of the Eastern European economies to the contractions of the world market.
Although the present five year plans of CMEA countries (for 1976-80) on the average set lower rates for growth of gross industrial production than were recorded in the past five year period, fulfillment of these plans is now clearly impossible. (Problems of Communism, E. Kux, March 1980, p. 28)
Clearly, Eastern Europe has come to represent the most glaring contradictions of modern revisionist policy. The Soviet leadership is unable to undo the changes that are still proceeding in these countries without a reassertion of the economics and politics of Stalin and Lenin throughout the socialist camp. They can only be pulled further along the line of compromise with capital while objectively the crisis of capital creates pressures that can only bring the workers of eastern Europe into motion. The policies of revisionism, under the changing conditions of world capitalist crisis, have created the conditions for the destruction of revisionism and the reassertion of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the politics and economics corresponding to the needs of the world’s proletariat.
Comrades, we can testify that it is difficult to build a correct communist party in a multinational imperialist country. The pressures of bribery of all forms, of chauvinism, of living in the richest, most powerful country in the world, make the struggle for line and organization a very difficult ”one. However, we have spent a decade in that fight and we know that it is not necessary to capitulate to the social pressures or to be subverted by the agents of the enemy. Hence we have no sympathy whatsoever for the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) for the situation in which they now find themselves. The CPUSA was never a Marxist-Leninist party. From time to time there were real forces of revolution within the party, but they never got the upper hand in its activities. Partly due to historical circumstances, the struggle was never between Marxism and revisionism, but between anarcho-syndicalism and a right-wing revisionism that was an expression of “American exceptionalism.”
Just as the other revisionist-led parties are sinking into a deep crisis, the CPUSA is going through another cycle of its destruction. This time the cycle includes the facts that the party, having based itself in the trade union bureaucracy, the black petty bourgeois nationalists, the “left-wing” Zionists, and the remaining left of a rag-tag remnant of the Roosevelt coalition, cannot shift their tactics to meet the coming period because the unprincipled base of their membership will not let them.
A party that can, without evaluation, shift its support from Stalin to Khrushchev to Brezhnev normally would be laughed out of existence. A party that shifts its line without consulting its membership, a party that expels its members without trial or charges, a party that upholds democracy based on human slavery, would seem to be not a very dangerous party at all. However, they are dangerous. They are dangerous because not only are they the dutiful mouthpiece for the center of world revisionism, but this is compounded by the fact that they are so riddled with agents of the enemy that they become a very durable and divisive force within the revolutionary movement. They absolutely must be exposed and fought.
There is a tendency to look upon the CPUSA as more of a knitting circle than a revolutionary organization. While there are reasons to believe this, the fact of the matter is that they have, over the years, evolved a body of so-called theory that must be understood in order to be dealt with and thrown out of the working class movement.
Today these theories generally fall into two headings–the anti-monopoly coalition and the left-center unity gimmick. Both of these theories are rooted in Browder’s concept of super-imperialism. Briefly, this concept held that the objective development of modern imperialism would bring about a socialist transformation of the world in a peaceful manner. The thing that needed to be done was to hamstring the reactionaries and block with the progressives of all classes to facilitate this objective motion.
Browderism, whether it takes the form of the “people’s front” or the “anti-monopoly coalition,” rests on certain clear revisionist theoretical assumptions which are:
1. The “balance of forces” theory which holds that since the October 1917 revolution in Russia, the permanent crisis of capitalism has resulted in a balance of forces encompassing the Soviet Union, and the revolutionary proletariat and toiling masses favorable to the victory of socialism on a world-wide basis. Since the end of World War II, these favorable balance of forces have included the countries of the socialist camp, the national liberation movements, and the non-socialist (but supposedly anti-imperialist) neo-colonies. This balance of forces approach is usually expressed in revisionist documents as the “. . .forces of socialism, peace, and progress. . .”
This balance of forces doctrine has allowed the revisionists of the CPUSA to cloud the “American exceptionalism” of Lovestone and Browder behind a means of analysis in which the revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat in the USNA is portrayed as unnecessary since the balance of forces in the world is in favor of socialism, and therefore the role of the CPUSA is to organize support for the “... forces of socialism, peace, and progress...” more likely to tip the world balance of forces in favor of socialism. In other words, for the CPUSA a revolutionary situation is nearly impossible in the USNA. Its historic mission is seen as chipping away at the bourgeois state in the battle for reforms and to support others in their revolutions (as long as this support doesn’t get too dangerous) so that when everyone else has established socialism, the USNA capitalists will just roll over and die.
The revisionist strategic projections based on this balance of forces theory have their tactical postulates expressed by the CPUSA as “building Left-Center unity.” This tactical line is based on an understanding that the role of the CPUSA is to build coalitions in which the communists are just one part. This tactic of “Left-Center Unity” rejects the Leninist approach that the communist party must establish the hegemony of revolutionary socialist ideas over the proletariat. It adopts the outlook that only small sections of the proletariat will be socialist and revolutionary, and therefore the way the communist carries on political work is to establish a working relationship with reformism.
2. The theory of the permanent split in imperialism which holds that since the October Revolution, and more clearly since the end of World War II, a section of imperialism has recognized the growing balance of forces in favor of socialism and has adopted a realistic approach to the existence and growth of socialist countries. This is basically the good capitalist/bad capitalist theory which is expressed in numerous ways such as the “sane capitalist elements,” the “progressive bourgeois forces,” the “non-reactionary elements,” the “small capitalists,” etc.
Gus Hall, not the brightest of the revisionist theorists, but perhaps the slickest, has expressed this theory in the following way in his book Imperialism Today.
There have been other moments in history when specific national interests have overshadowed the overall world class interests of capitalism. This does not mean that worldwide class interests have disappeared. For the moment the contradictions within the global class have greater force than the appeal for worldwide class unity.
All this takes on a qualitatively new significance when seen in the context of, and in relation to, the existence of the world system of socialism and the rising national liberation movements. In fact, divisions among the capitalists show themselves over the question of how they should relate to the reality of the present world revolutionary process. How to use the new divisions that arise form the new situation in the capitalist world, has emerged on a new level for all forces of the world revolutionary process. (P. 68)
On the basis of this type of analysis the revisionists argue that it is possible under present world conditions for the communists to lead the working class into an alliance with certain sections of the capitalist class, and that this alliance will allow for a transitional political situation in which bourgeois state rule will be transformed into proletarian state rule.
It is necessary to see these two main revisionist theoretical formulations in order to follow the process of development from Browder’s “people’s front” into the present-day “anti-monopoly coalition.”
In 1946, soon after Browder was exposed by the Cominform, and was expelled from the CPUSA, the remaining leadership of the party began casting about for a “new line.” The main character in this quest for “new” line was William Z. Foster. Foster’s attempt to reestablish a Marxist-Leninist line for the CPUSA was a little more than a surface rejection of Browderism. In a series of Political Affairs articles, and then in 1949 in his book The Twilight of World Capitalism, Foster replaced Browder’s analysis of a world situation in which the balance of forces favorable to socialism has created a great alliance between the Soviet Union and the US (in which the US was ruled by an enlightened bourgeoisie) with the analysis that the balance of forces favorable to socialism had forced a split in the US ruling class clearly exposing the reactionary circle of “big” capitalists. Foster, while rejecting the Browder of 1944, returned to the Browder of 1936. It was Foster who is credited with coining the term “anti-monopoly coalition” and introducing the concept of the US having a state monopoly capitalist form of rule. Evidently when Foster raised these ideas the fact that they were so close to Browder’s raised a great deal of consternation within the leading elements of the CPUSA and they were quietly shelved awaiting a later time.
Even after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, after the outbreak of the Korean War, and during the period of McCarthyism, the CPUSA leadership hung on to its Browderism. In 1952, the CPUSA published Foster’s magnum opus, History of the Communist Party of the United States; writing in the conclusion Foster, after attacking the social democrats and Browder, lays out the strategy for socialism:
The Communist Party holds the view that socialism in the United States, although inevitable in the future, is not now on the immediate political agenda. Therefore, the Party never has, and does not now, venture to predict the precise time, forms, and methods of the eventual establishment of socialism in this country. ..
American conditions and world socialist experience make it realistic, however, to suppose that, in their march to socialism, the American people, as many others are doing, will take their path through the successive phases of the people’s front and the people’s democracy. But in so doing, they will doubtless reflect specific American conditions. . .
It is in line with the foregoing general principles and perspectives that the Communist Party has long proposed the regular election, under the United States Constitution, of a broad coalition government, an American variant of the people’s front, made up of the representatives of the political and economic organizations of the workers, the Negro people, the small farmers, intellectuals, and other democratic strata, who constitute the great bulk of the American people. . . (pp. 553-554)
During the late 1940s, and throughout the 1950s, the CPUSA kept on talking about the “people’s front” or “broad democratic alliances,” yet more and more the concept of being anti-monopoly was introduced into party materials. Indeed, during the 1948 elections, the CPUSA leadership advanced the electoral slogans of “For a people’s government that will advance the cause of peace, security, and democracy! For an anti-imperialist, anti-monopoly government!”
McCarthyism, followed by Khrushchevite destalinization purges, reduced the CPUSA to not more than 5,000 members. Up until 1962, the CPUSA was in complete shambles. The upsurges of the Negro people, and the development of the anti-war movement around Vietnam provided the CPUSA with the conditions to try to rebuild. Its main tactic was to focus on students and young intellectuals who were developing some social and political consciousness during the 60s.
During this time the political line of the CPUSA was little more than “we’re experienced, we know best, and we’ve always stood for peace and equality.” In the late 1960s, the leadership of the CPUSA began to make more theoretical and strategic projections in order to orient the new, mainly young, members without any experience with Marxism. The anti-monopoly coalition first suggested by Foster in 1946 was put forward as the party’s strategy.
The theoretical foundation for the anti-monopoly coalition was the position that the US had evolved from monopoly capitalism into state monopoly capitalism. In this context the political struggle against the state was presented as taking the form of struggles against the policies practiced or supported by the monopolies. Here is Gus Hall making the analysis:
In the present stage, US capitalism is state monopoly capitalism. The big corporations have a stranglehold on the economy, on banking, trade, and the government. Small business, small farmers are becoming forced out. It has become almost impossible for anyone to start a meaningful new small business. The handful of big corporations determine wages, taxes, prices, rents, insurance rates, land values, fares, medical costs, and even funeral costs. They control the two parties of capitalism and most of the politics in them. It is the iron grip of the big corporations that blocks social progress. The grip has become tighter. But the struggle against it is growing. The confrontation is getting sharper.
The workers in the industries are the most direct victims of the monopolies. Where trade unions play ball with the corporations the rank and file are taking things into their own hands. They are setting up their own rank and file forms of organization.
Black Americans who are the victims of a special system of racist oppression are in rebellion. Women are rebelling against their special form of discrimination.
The young people are keenly aware of the necessity of this historic moment. They are rejecting the priorities and values reflecting monopoly capitalism and its needs. The movements of Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Indian Americans are in motion against the policies of racism and discrimination.
There is rebellion and movement amongst the professionals, farmers, and small business people.
These are the victims of monopoly capitalism. This is the growing force behind the historic necessity.
These movements are building their own organizations. There is a growing unity of action between them. Within the old political structure people are forming the new political formations. The people’s movement is toward political independence. These movements are already electing new kinds of people to public office. They are seeking political power. These movements will grow. They will give rise to a new people’s anti-monopoly party. (Hall, Imperialism Today, pp. 354-56)
Five years after Hall made his anti-monopoly analysis, Henry Winston, CPUSA party chairman, summed-up the strategic thrust of the anti-monopoly coalition:
The aim of monopoly is to force a reversal of every aspect of bourgeois democracy, limited as it is, in order to open the way for fascism. The aim of the anti-monopoly program, as advocated by the Communist Party, is to bring about a strategic breakthrough to a deeper and wider degree of democracy, one that would powerfully accelerate the revolutionary process, opening the way to black liberation and socialism.
Once this anti-monopoly strategy succeeds in breaking the control of state monopoly capital over Congress and the government, the forces exist, internally and internationally–in contrast to the anti-slavery period–that can prevent the betrayal of the struggle. There is such a perspective, and this is so, first of all, because the forces of class and national liberation, headed by the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, have changed the world balance of power. (Henry Winston, Strategy for a Black Agenda, p. 285)
The CPUSA’s line of anti-monopoly coalition is a distortion of the Comintern’s line of united front of the working class, and popular fronts against fascism. The CPUSA’s conception of the political thrust of the proletariat is that the working class must make alliances with other classes and strata in order to carry out the revolutionary task of getting elected into power. The CPUSA often uses terminology like “class struggle,” yet, its analysis of the class struggle seems to deny the possibility of class against class in the US. When the CP does address matters of winning the working class over to its anti-monopoly strategy, this is always discussed in the context of building left-center unity.
The idea of left-center unity had its historical foundation in the syndicalist history of the working class movement, and was a reflection of the split in the working class between the bribed stratum in the crafts that formed the AFL, and the mass of unorganized workers, primarily in basic industry. William Z. Foster was the first to call for left-center unity on the basis that the working class could never organize itself unless the more revolutionary and/or militant sections of workers who gravitated around the IWW, Syndicalist League, and TUEL, united with the rank and file of the AFL. Later, during the 1930s, the line of left-center unity came to mean first that the workers, under the influence of the CPUSA, needed to unite with the workers in the AFL. Then somewhat later, the workers in the CIO needed to unite with the workers in the AFL.
As a distorted version of the Comintern’s call for working class unity against fascism, the CPUSA’s left-center unity gained a great deal of prestige in the 30s. However, the Comintern’s position was based around the conditions in Europe in which other parties had their affiliated trade unions and workers organizations so that it was possible to have an alliance of communist, socialist, social democratic, Catholic, and liberal trade unions in joint struggle against fascism.
The CPUSA’s present interpretation of left-center unity was formulated in the late 60s. It sees the CPUSA using the tactic of forming coalitions within the trade unions in which the party represents the “left” and seeks out the “center” forces which are defined as “. . .a force that is breaking with, and moving away from the worst features of class collaboration.” (Hall in Labor Up-Front). Once the “center” force is located, it is the role of the “left” to unite with “the center” on the basis of the “center’s” program. This is justified on the basis that due to the crisis of capitalism the “center” will be radicalized and then can be moved to the “left.” Evidently there has been a real struggle in the CPUSA over what the “center-left” tactic really means as evidenced by Gus Hall’s report to the 22nd CP convention in 1979 (the same Labor Up-Front).
What the “left-center” concept implies is first that the working class movement is primarily confined to activity within the trade unions, and that the role of communists in the unions is to unite with “center” forces of workers who can then be maneuvered into a broad anti-monopoly coalition with blacks, chicanos, etc., in other words, “non-working class” sections of society. The CPUSA doesn’t seem to recognize that the proletariat is also part of the various national movements, and that the working class movement is much greater than the unions. Second, this concept sets the communists apart from the working class as a sectarian element that must seek alliances in order to lead the working class. The basic foundation of Marxism as formulated in the Communist Manifesto that the communists have no interests separate from the working class has been revised by the CPUSA to mean that communists are a separate part of the working class movement, a more radical union to be part of a broad confederation of labor.
The consequences of the CPUSA’s line of anti-monopoly coalition and the tactics of left-center unity in the unions can be seen in the way the CPUSA approached recent events.
In response to the Miami and Chattanooga uprisings the CPUSA took the position that these were terrible happenings forced on black people by unemployment and racist police; rioting was unfortunate and wrong, but understandable. The CPUSA’s solution was to demand jobs programs and the election of more black officials.
When steel mills were closed in the iron triangle area the CPUSA called on people to buy the plants with federal loans and run them on a non-profit basis. There was no call for struggle within the USWA for nationalization of the steel industry, and to make this demand to the capitalists. The result was that the workers were left without jobs, while the CPUSA built its anti-monopoly coalition with ministers, social workers, small businessmen, and petty politicians trying to get foundation grants and federal loans to buy a steel mill.
When the misleaders of the UAW, USWA, UMW and other unions were rallied by the national finance capitalists to scream about foreign imports, the response of the CPUSA was to unite with the center and cry about how the monopolies were exporting American jobs. The CPUSA didn’t raise a single call for unity of the US working class with workers in the colonies against the multinationals.
The CPUSA has tried to ignore the fascist violence which has swept the South. Struggles likes those of the United League have been applauded as part of the struggle against racism, yet, nothing has been done in the North to raise this type of terror as an issue among the workers.
This type of list could go on for pages. The heart of the matter is that the CPUSA and its strategy of anti-monopoly coalition is trying to convince the working class that the ruling class that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, that murdered one million Vietnamese, that is starving one-half of the world’s population, that has taken a hand in every coup and massacre of the masses in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, that broke the strike of steelworkers at Newport News with police terror, that has allowed the murder, rape, torture and mass round-up of Mexican workers, that allows fascist gangs to penetrate the police and military with impunity– that this ruling class is going to let itself be voted out of existence by an anti-monopoly movement. And, in preparation for taking on this ruling class, the CPUSA is telling the working class that its position of being three-fourths of society is insufficient to overthrow the capitalists, what is needed is the might of the petty bourgeoisie, small capitalists, and various other middle elements to be successful.
What the anti-monopoly line of the CPUSA is also saying is that the CPUSA is not preparing, indeed, not willing, to lead the proletariat in a struggle to seize power. They want to wait for a proper balance of world forces. They will support the Salvadoreans, Chileans, South Africans, Ethiopians, and anyone else in their revolutions, but God forbid, let the CPUSA have its peace. Let other communists and other workers wage the heroic struggles of bloody revolution, so that the CPUSA can wage the heroic struggles of the ballot box.
Comrades, the most important aspect of the report from the Central Committee is that which evaluates the struggle of the Party and indicates the direction of the coming period. It is interesting to note that the Trotskyites and the revisionists delight in declaring that the biggest error of Stalin was his militarization of politics and the Party. We have every reason to uphold the view that politics is war without guns, just as surely as war is politics with guns. Clausewitz wrote, “We see, therefore, that war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.”
The laws of war and the laws of politics are similar because the motion is the same. Therefore the comrades will excuse us if we rely upon certain military concepts to indicate what cannot be stated as if we are playing a game and at its end we all shake hands and be friends. The goal of our Party is human happiness. It cannot be attained so long as the bourgeoisie owns and controls the means of production. Therefore, our strategy is to seize and consolidate power through the political dictatorship of the proletarian class in order to win the means of production over to the hands of the people.
Now many parties declare that this is also their goal; this is the socalled bottom line of Leninism. The problem is, what is the path of achieving this? People support a party because of its strategic considerations–not simply what it says, but what it does. Marx often pointed out that the most revolutionary of weapons is the human mind. If we cannot think out a real, concrete, applicable strategic approach, then we cannot win this fight. In class war this approach depends upon exactly the same laws as in a military war–that the main and concentrated blow must be thrown against the center of gravity, the center of power of the enemy. This, and this alone, makes the decision.
What is the center of power of the enemy? Ours is a country wherein the working class constitutes the majority of the population. This class can be ruled only so long as it is disunited. That disunity is achievable only through the material bribery that is gained from the superprofits of imperialism and through the ideological corruption that rests upon it. A relatively small but powerful and influential group of mass and labor leaders has been brought over to be the principal social pillars or props of the imperialism that guarantees them their social and financial privileged positions. This ideologically corrupt, socially powerful, politically influential core of misleaders of the people represents the center of gravity, the center of power of the class enemy. The armed forces do not represent that force. In our country, the army, being drawn to a great extent from the masses, is not politically reliable. Therefore it is clear that our strategic approach is to throw the main blow at this grouping.
This blow concretely is to utilize every spontaneous movement of the masses to expose and isolate this center. What are the elements of isolating this group? The principle element is to step by step organize the masses and get them into motion and, through that motion, move them away from the various ideologies of imperialism and help them grasp the ideology of the proletariat. The center of gravity of the imperialist bourgeoisie is hemispheric, consequently the main blow is also hemispheric.
In our country, actually in our hemisphere, the multinational industrial corporation not only serves the purpose of economically evening up most of the workers, but makes their interdependence clear to them. Our strategic approach must be to fight to gain control of at least a section of the workers in those multinationals which operate in a politically decisive way both here and in the most important countries of the hemisphere. Only through such control can the unity of the class be built. Our approach is to gradually build our strength in this regard. We should concentrate our forces so that the next round of struggle on the part of the industrial proletariat of Latin America will find its alliance here or vice versa.
Part of this main blow must be the struggle for a hemispheric proletarian international. As you know, certain aspects of this effort are underway with the struggle of certain Latin American revolutionary organizations and parties to unite. We must become part of this motion. We are. prepared to start at any point in this process and struggle to develop it until conditions favor a formal unity of action of the hemispheric revolutionary movement. Perhaps a good place to start would be a revolutionary information center that could serve to strengthen unity of action.
In this regard, we cannot state too often the importance of linking up with the broad revolutionary movement of Mexico and Canada. Close ties with the proletarian movement on our borders is indispensable for us. We cannot state too often that we must imbue the workers of this country with the understanding that none of this is possible without a sharp and sustained ideological and practical struggle for the independence of Puerto Rico. No militant, toiling under the lash of imperialism, will believe that we are interested in the equality and independence of a big and important neo-colony if we fail to struggle for the independence of a small country. We cannot make the Puerto Rican report here, but we are clear that the enormous financial investment in Puerto Rico is superceded in importance only by the ideological consequences to the USNA workers of maintaining this shameful exploitative direct colonial relationship.
Again, we want to emphasize that these thrusts, as important as they are as such, are elements of the decisive struggle to isolate and destroy the middle, the social prop of imperialism, the misleaders of the people. This strategic approach describes our activity in the totality of the social movement. The trade unions are the broadest and most politically important organization of the working class. Some communists make a career of the unions. Our interest is that, given their importance, they are also the main target of the misleaders. The struggle for the control of the unions is of immense importance; that importance lies in our strategic approach.
In order to implement our strategy, we must send our cadre in all directions. Our goal must be to dig into and fight for the leadership of every social movement. We must not do so as “do gooders.” If it were possible to alleviate the suffering of the people under capitalism, who would need socialism? The movement of the youth, the women, the aged–the struggle of other sectors of society–must be approached from the same singleness of purpose. The only reason for combat is to break the strategic back of the enemy. If we dissipate our strength by isolating and then struggling to emancipate the various sectors of society we will surely fail.
Every process has an absurdly weak link. It’s a link with which both sides of a process must deal. One side attacks it, the other defends it. In modern war the area that connects the flanks of two defending units is the weak link that every attacker goes after. This is also the area most carefully guarded by the defenders’ reserves. What is the weak link in the chain that binds the workers? That weak link is the Negro National Colonial Question. It only appears that this is the strongest weapon of the enemy. Like the flanks of the enemy division, it is most heavily guarded because it is the weakest area. It appears to be the strongest weapon of the enemy because potentially it is the decisive weapon of the proletariat.
Let us briefly restate the question. By 1875, the militarily defeated plantation area of the former Confederacy was converted into a colony of Wall Street. Utilizing color hatred that was a legacy of slavery, the imperialist bourgeoisie guaranteed the disunity and political impotence of the masses of that area. Through the disenfranchisement of the masses, and the consequent election and reelection of the most reactionary members of Congress, Wall Street came to dominate the entire country through its domination of the Congress via control of the Negro Nation. The ideology of white chauvinism, increasingly buttressed by bribery of a broadening strata of white workers, served to not only limit the organizational unity of the workers in the North, but almost totally prevented the organization of the southern workers. This almost total separation of white and black in the country had its roots in the segregation of the masses of black toilers to the plantations, while the whites worked in the factories.
The industrialization of the South has changed the material conditions. Unable to solve the southern labor shortage without drawing in the black worker, formal segregation was ended and blacks and whites at least toiled in the same work place. Simply because the material basis of an ideology is weakened does not necessarily mean the one-to-one weakening of the ideology that corresponds to it. The color hatred, the white chauvinism, not only persists but is growing. The complex problem is this. The workers cannot defeat the enemy because they are disunited. They are disunited because they are unequal. They are unequal because the black worker physically cannot, by himself, win that equality. The historic color hatred, the white chauvinism, prevents the white worker from joining in that struggle for equality so that they can unite and can fight for the interests of the class.
Just as the whole wheel and axle assembly of a car is held together by a small cotter pin, the whole edifice of world imperialism, led by USNA imperialism, rests on this minute and absurd ideology of white chauvinism. It is precisely here that the misleaders concentrate their fire. It is here that the blow must be struck. The misleaders encourage the radicals to misdirect their fire into their own ranks. This is done by the black nationalists, the white chauvinists, the “new left” formulation that the white workers are the basis of fascism, that they are the main enemy of the black workers, and that they are not receptive to communist agitation and propaganda. Even within the ranks of our Party, we have not been able to overcome this rot. We know that the enemy agent is the propagandist for this line, but the rotten white chauvinism in many of the comrades prevents its being combatted.
Thus we see the white comrades responding to outrageous attacks against the black masses by chauvinistically explaining to the blacks that they have been attacked.
Historically, during the slave period and especially since the post-Civil War reconstruction, the strategy of the ruling class is based on preventing the white worker from joining in the struggle for equality. The unity of the white petty bourgeoisie and the black worker is acceptable because it is no threat. How skillful, and how clever, the enemy has been! What a great victory to successfully label proletarian uprisings as black riots.
The CPUSA can testify that the moment of attack by the reaction is the moment that successful work is being done to unite the working class. The leadership of that party can also testify that the way to blunt the reaction is to sacrifice the black worker. Thus we recall, with shame and bitterness, the period in 1949, when the CPUSA leadership illegally disbanded the CPUSA in the South. On pain of expulsion from the Party we were ordered out of the successful Negro Labor Councils. All this was to pacify the ruling class and create the conditions for the government to strike a deal around the trial of the CPUSA leadership. Negro work was abandoned and that deal was struck.
USNA revolutionaries instinctively know that the struggle to involve the white worker in the fight for the unity of the class is the nodal line between harmless playing at revolution and the serious business of strategy. Our Party is crossing that line. We will not and cannot allow any backsliding. Do we work among the black workers? Of course we do. We have no intention of giving up that work.
The black masses are fighting heroically against the frightful rise of violence, murder, kidnappings, unemployment and isolation. The mass rejection of the black misleader is an aspect of the international struggle against neocolonialism. The political and economic situation is such that the black masses have no maneuvering room. It is either into a new slavery by following the misleaders or it is violence against the ruling class. There are no alternatives. As never before, since the Civil War, the black masses are desperately in need of not only clarity, but of technical assistance in the struggle. We dare not and will not fail at this.
Comrades, we absolutely must reorganize and clarify our line of march as regards the Indian question in general and the complex problem of the Southwest. The struggles around energy, ecology, and trade union organization are becoming inseparably connected to the question of the fight of the Indian masses for physical survival. We are beginning to make some important connections with this movement, but our lack of clarity prevents us from taking advantage of the favorable situation. Throughout the country–in the North Central area, in the Northeast, in the South and the Southwest–the social and land-based struggles led by or based in the Indian movement are some of the most volatile.
Our practical work among the Mexican nationals and national minority of the Southwest is at an acceptable level. The problem is that the theoretical work in this regard has just about collapsed and it is only a matter of time before we will begin making serious mistakes. We must especially step-up our propaganda around the unity of the Mexican and black worker of the Southwest. This area is decisive to unity with the toilers of Mexico and it is precisely the area where the misleaders of the people are concentrating to prevent this unity.
Comrades, our country is changing, our Party is changing. What was impossible two years ago is necessary today. The most important word in the communist vocabulary is the word “clarity.” If we are clear as to the historical demands of the moment, if we are clear not only why, but how, there is no force on earth that can stop the uprising of the proletariat of this country.
We are entering into a decisive moment of history. The ruling class, being much more conscious, much more knowledgeable, understands that it is fighting for its life. In such a fight, all is fair. One of the principle weapons of the enemy is the utilization of the agent. I hope I frighten no one when I say that the agent is among us. Their job is to do from the inside what they cannot do from the outside. They must split the movement. They must gut it of its militancy. They must destroy it as a fighting force while keeping it alive. This was the history of the CPUSA during the pre-McCarthy period. Our only weapon in the struggle against the agents is democratic centralism. The more the enemy attacks from the inside, the more necessary it is to tighten our centralism. The agent cannot fight theoretically and win. We are too advanced. Their weapons are rumor-mongering, slander, and gossip. They rely on exciting the bourgeois egotism of certain comrades. They rely on federalism and upon privilege. They cannot win. Our Party is a disciplined Party. Our comrades are loyal comrades. Our problem is ideological. We have to fire up the fighting capacity of the comrades. We have to see to it that each and every comrade is so personally committed in the struggle that they cannot tolerate one bit of deviation. Under such conditions, agents cannot hurt us.
The other aspect of this fight is the question of security. Far too many comrades use the telephone and mail as if there is no FBI. There is far too much loose talk concerning other comrades’ work. We recall how the struggle for vigilance and security during the McCarthy period was utilized by the agents to conduct witchhunts and expel some of the best comrades. We are not going to have a witchhunt. However we have suffered some serious reverses due to a combination of a lack of vigilance and the activity of agents in our midst. If we are to move the Party forward, vigilance must be the task of all. Recent publications on this question decisively show that the government, with all its technical equipment, relies 90 percent on the inside agent for information and disruption.
Comrades, we are living in an heroic period. Since that moment in 1917 when the workers, under the leadership of the great Lenin, fought their way into the dawn of human history, our mighty proletarian armies have liberated one-third of the earth’s surface. The disarray of our forces suffered during the recent offensive of capital is being overcome. Everywhere new forces are rising, new revolutions are underway. No area today can be considered safe for human exploitation. The imperialist chain in Africa, the first and last reserve of capitalist exploitation, has been shattered by the long-suffering, heroic Ethiopian masses. Today, the red banners of the victorious toilers fly over the birthplace of humanity.
No matter how deep and dangerous the betrayal of the leadership of the Chinese state and party, mighty China has awakened–never again to be lulled asleep. In a new context, and a new situation, we urge the revolutionaries to remember the words of Lenin, “Do not forget the East.” With their blood the heroic Vietnamese masses are safeguarding the security and future of Southeast Asia. They are writing a new chapter of internationalism and revolutionary devotion.
Heroic Cuba, the standard bearer of the proletarian revolution in the western hemisphere, has selflessly grasped the hand of the new revolutions in the English-speaking Caribbean and on the mainland of the Americas.
Scientific socialism, the mighty liberating ideology of the proletariat, is today the most powerful force in human history. The frontline troops, our battle hardened comrades, are reforming their ranks. Our limitless reserves are being organized. We dip the banners of this Congress in honor of our fallen comrades and in doing so raise again the mighty battle cry of the revolution:
Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to win!