We feel both very proud and very fortunate to be able to be in attendance at this assembly of the new organization that has been founded. The Revolutionary Union feels that this assembly represents a tremendous progress in the whole revolutionary movement in the United States, and also, we feel, in Puerto Rico. And that it is a qualitative leap forward in the development of the struggle of the proletariat and the people of this country for liberation. In particular, we feel that a new step has been taken for the eventual forming of the multi-national communist party of the proletariat which will lead the proletariat in establishing its leadership of a united front of all the progressive forces to defeat U.S. imperialism.
What I’d like to do as briefly as possible, although I have a reputation for not being very brief, is to try to trace the main questions we think have been discussed here and we’d like to put forth our views on these main questions.
The first of these questions is the rise, the development, and the decline of U.S. imperialism; and what it is that has brought us here and got these forces represented here into this room at this stage of the struggle.
Second of all, the question of forging a correct political line, the proletarian line, in opposition to both left and right opportunism.
Third, is the view on the relationship between the national question and the class question in the United States.
And finally, our view about what steps concretely need to be taken and can be taken towards the development and the forging of the multi-national party of the proletariat of the United States based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought.
First of all, on the question of the rise and decline of U.S. imperialism. When we say “the rise,” we have to explain immediately that we mean the temporary rise, because we know that imperialism represents capitalism at its highest and final stage. We’d like to briefly outline how U.S. imperialism, in attempting to prolong its life in this country, each day only lays more the basis for its destruction. And so what we hope to do today is to lay out so people can see our view of the dialectical development of the stage; and in fact, the movement rather than being set back during certain periods, has always gone forward. The general direction of the revolutionary struggle has been to advance, to move ahead and not to be set back.
For reasons that we don’t have time to go into today, U.S. imperialism was able during most of World War I to remain on the sidelines. Or as Mao Tse Tung once described it: “to sit on the mountaintops and watch the tigers fight.” As a result of this, U.S. imperialism, stepping in to clean up and get all the spoils at the end when its rivals had weakened themselves, surpassed British imperialism and became the main imperialist power in the world during the 1920’s. This was a period similar to the 1950’s in one important way. It was a period when the revolutionary movement was at an ebb and the working class move capitalist class preached that there would be permanent prosperity and bragged about how Henry Ford had defeated Karl Marx.
In fact, what was going on was just laying the seeds for the tremendous crash and depression of the 1930’s. Henry Ford’s method of introducing mass production lines, continuous speedups only led because of the basic contradictions of the capitalist system, where those who produce are not the owning class and are constantly producing more than their meager wages can buy back – because of all this, production had a tremendous increase during the ’20’s – at the same time the purchasing power of the masses was being reduced.
The stock market crash of 1929 and the depression of the ’30’s dashed to pieces the hope and the propaganda of the capitalist class that the capitalist system would live forever and would continue to provide for the needs of the people and there war no need for revolution. During the 1930’s, led by the Communist Party which during that period played a very positive role as a multi-national party of the proletariat, there were tremendous struggles to organize the industrial working class; to organize the Black people in the South, particularly the sharecroppers, and ether national minorities; and struggles among the youth, students and women and other sections of the people.
If all this is true, the question then rises: “Why then was there no revolution during the 1930’s?”
The answer lies in the way U.S. imperialism was able to get itself out of this crisis; and in fact, that because of this, the crisis did not develop the full revolutionary situation. The answer also lies secondarily in the erroneous policy of the Communist Party during that period, but we don’t have time to analyze them and they weren’t the main feature because no revolutionary situation fully matured.
The first maneuver of U.S. imperialism during the ’30’s was the famous policy of FDR, the “Good Neighbor Policy,” which meant further penetration and exploitation of the markets and resources and of the labor power of Latin America. Latin America had always been, since the days of the Monroe doctrine, considered by the imperialists to be a backyard for private exploitation – even as it still is today. But during the 1930’s, with the crisis inside the United States, and other colonial areas temporarily held out of U.S. control, this exploitation of Latin America was intensified.
Because of this and cipher factors during the 1930’s, a partial recovery took place in the United States, in the economy. Unemployment dropped somewhat although it was far from eliminated; and U.S. imperialism was able to ride out the crisis until other imperialist countries, specifically Japan, Italy, and Germany, through, crises even more severe, were forced to begin raiding each other’s colonies and going to war with each ether or attacking other imperialist’s colonies.
At the beginning of what became World War II, which initially was an inter-imperialist war, U.S. imperialism was once again able to take the comfortable position of sitting cut the war, of sitting of the mountaintop, making loans to both sides and selling war materials to both sides as a way of reviving temporarily the economy, even after formally entering the war, not situated at the storm center of the struggle of the war, U.S. imperialism was able to hold back, and once again, at the end of the war was able to move in and clean up and get the lion’s share of the spoils.
What we have to understand is that each of these factors which enabled U.S. imperialism to make a temporary recovery through and immediately after the war only laid the seed for the coming crisis which would be even deeper and far more shattering to imperialism than the preceeding crisis of the ’30’s. The contradictions of capitalism were not, and could not lie, eliminated after the war. In fact, with the further development of imperialism, these contradictions were raised to a higher and even more intense level.
I’d just like to review very briefly the factors that led to the temporary rise and recovery of U.S. imperialism after the war and show how each of these is turning into its opposite and bringing about the decline, decay, and eventual defeat of U.S. imperialism.
The first is the penetration and domination of all the other markets of all the other imperialist countries through the Marshall Plan after the war. The U.S. imperialists initiated the Marshall Plan for two reasons. One, it was very profitable; and two, they felt that if they did not rebuild the monopoly capitalist economies of these countries, all of them would fall to proletarian revolution and become socialist. But the result of the rebuilding of these economies has been, as has already been discussed here, the increasing rivalry of these revived imperialists with U.S. imperialism, and the growth and intensification of inter-imperialist contradictions.
The second factor was the betrayal by the revisionists in the Soviet Union and their taking the Soviet Union back to capitalism, which was encouraged by the U.S. imperialists themselves. But the revival of capitalism and the development of social-imperialism in the Soviet Union, while it removed the socialist enemy from U.S. imperialism, has led to the development of a strong imperialist rival. In fact, Soviet social-imperialism is today probably the only major imperialist power capable of forming both an economic and military bloc to not only conduct economic war; but if necessary, and maybe even inevitable, military warfare for domination of the world against U.S. imperialism.
The third, and overall most important factor, was the fact that at the end of World War II all the other imperialist powers were so weakened by the war that they were unable to hold on to their colonies; so U.S. imperialism stepped in and inherited all these colonies, particularly in Asia and Africa. But along with inheriting all the colonies, U.S. imperialism also inherited all the colonial national liberation struggles which now become directed and focused against U.S. imperialism. These colonial national liberation struggles have been since World War II the storm center of the worldwide revolutionary struggle and it is for this reason that we say the contradiction between the oppressed nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and U.S. imperialism has been the principal contradiction in the world.
In fact, since World War II, in succession, U.S. imperialism has suffered 3 major defeats. First, U.S. imperialism lost China to the Chinese people. Second, the Korean War where U.S. imperialism was bogged down and could not win a military victory. And third, as we all know, Vietnam and IndoChina where U.S. imperialism is being battled and defeated.
Within the United States itself, beginning in the 1950’s, we saw the development of a tremendous revolutionary force in the Black liberation struggle. Underlying this, and making it all the more powerful, was the transformation of the Black nation within the U.S., which until the second world war had been a peasant nation concentrated in the South, whose main form of economic activity was sharecropping. After the war the mechanization of agriculture in the South led to the proletarianization of the Black people, their moving from the farm to the city and from being peasants to being workers.
Although in the early stages, in fact until this point, tie main force of the Black liberation struggle has not been the organized struggle of Black workers – that is today what is on the rise, and this proletarianization of the Black nation is what has given rise to the tremendous Black liberation struggle.
At the same time and particularly throughout the ’60’s and into this decade, the Black liberation struggle has been joined by the Chicano liberation struggle, the struggle of the Puerto Rican people, and other national minorities in the United States. And as the material base for this we also see the transformation of the Chicanos from peasants to workers, and we see the same thing going on – Puerto Rican people getting off the farmlands of the island of Puerto Rico and becoming proletarians here.
At the same time in addition to these national struggles we saw the struggles of the youth and students against the war, the struggle of the people against fascism, the struggle of the women against the oppression of women, and lately rising and becoming more intense, the struggle of the working class as a whole. In fact the struggle of the working class had always gone on because the basic contradictions of capitalism, of course, had not been eliminated. But in the next few years with the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, these contradictions have been intensified, and U.S. imperialism is stepping up its attacks and its exploitation of the working class as a whole here; and this has led to increased resistance.
Today, U.S. imperialism is faced with a growing and tremendous crisis: monetary crisis, balance of payments/tremendous inflation, over-production, and unused productive facilities. For example, in the steel industry only approximately 50% of the factories, machines and raw materials that are owned by the capitalists can be productively employed at this time.
So we can see what it was that led to the particular aspect of the economic crisis. In fact, the balance of payments and inflation–the underlying causes of this are the tremendous amounts of U.S. dollars that have to be exported abroad to maintain U.S. military bases abroad. So we can see just in this example that whatever steps U.S. imperialism takes to try to hang on a little longer to prolong its life – in fact, exactly these steps only make the crisis much worse. This is because imperialism is capitalism rotten ripe, bursting apart at the seams, maturing for revolution, completely parasitic capitalism.
The monopoly capitalists today are just like vampires, sucking the blood out of society, and we all knew what we should do with vampires.
Just one example right here in New York City. Everywhere you go and everywhere you walk, you can see the decay and collapse of this city. Let’s take just the subways as an example. Up until 1934, the subways were the property of Rockefeller, and then they became “public property.” What the Rockefellers did was to unload the subway on to the city at a great killing for themselves. In other words what they did was to sell it to the city at a great profit. They could do this because they not only control the city government of New York City, but in a large part they control the entire state. Now how does the city get the money to pay the Rockefellers at a killing for the subway? Naturally, it taxed the people and floated bonds. And who got the bonds and made all the interest off the bonds, which is still being paid today? The Rockefeller bank.
So today we see the subways are falling apart, need repair, new trains and tracks need to be built; but none of this can be done even though the fare is going up, because interest is still being paid to the Rockefeller bank. And if these aren’t vampires, I don’t know what it is.
And it is clear that because of all this, the wealth that is icing produced by the people not only is taken away by the direct capitalists they work for, but is being sucked up by the finance capitalists, the bankers und so on. And for these reasons, people in society can feel it falling apart, and people are forced into continuous struggle just to stay alive and keep up with what’s happening.
Of course, in order to destroy vampires, you have to discover the laws of how vampires exist, and this is why we all today are casing to the understanding that we have to master Marxism-Leninism in order to know where and how to drive the stake. So today we are gathered here because of the growth of all these struggles and along with all these struggles and the beginning of the rise of the working class, the rise of a great revolutionary movement of Marxist-Leninist forces, forces based on Mao Tse Tung Thought.
Here we have to mention the Cultural Revolution in China, because this cultural revolution popularized the thought of Mao Tse Tung, not only in this country but throughout the world. Today the Cultural Revolution has played a similar role that the Russian Revolution played in 1917 in the development of Marxism-Leninism and the spread of Marxism-Leninism throughout the world.
Just as Stalin said in 1924: “Today to be a Marxist, you must be a Leninist,” so today it is true that in order to be a Marxist-Leninist, yon must base yourself on Mao Tse Tung Thought. So today the growth of the revolutionary forces basing themselves on Mao Tse Tung Thought is in direct opposition to the decay, the degeneracy and the complete betrayal of the revisionist parties of the United States.
During the course of this assembly, we have talked about the question of how to forge a proletarian line, and we’ve come to unity around the fact that we have to begin laying the base for the eventual formation of the multi-national party based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought. We believe that the task before all the organizations that genuinely base themselves on Mao Tse Tung Thought is to go out among the working class in particular, and other sections of the people, to sink deep roots there and become a part of the struggles of the people; and on this basis, define the areas where common work can be developed to forge closer links and lay the base for the eventual merging of these organizations in order to help form the party by based on Mao Tse Tung Thought. Ideological struggle to resolve differences between these various groups is extremely important; but in order for this to be meaningful, it must go on in the context of actual struggle around common areas of work so that we can discuss real things and not as we used to say, “count hairs on Trotsky’s ass.”
So we would like to put out a few of our ideas about some of the ideological struggle that has gone on here today and how we see some of these things developing. Some of the things that I am going to try to summarize can be found in part in our theoretical journal, Red Papers, especially #4 and the Selections from #1, 2, and 3. And some of our thoughts on the national question will he developed more in the next Red Papers, #5.
First of all I would like to say a few things about the question of developing a correct proletarian line in opposition to both left and right opportunism. Mao Tse Tung once wrote a little essay called, “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From.” But I think it is also important for us to study the opposite, where do incorrect ideas come from? What then is the material base of left and right opportunism and what do they have in common?
We’ve discussed the decay and the decline of imperialism or parasitic capitalism in its dying stage, and it is important to understand that one of the first results of this is the crumbling and decay of the most unstable class in society, the petty bourgeoisie. Many small shop owners and professionals find themselves unable to find their place in the sun any longer under decaying imperialist society. Students who go to school and become teachers find that teachers are a dime a dozen, and the same thing happens to engineering students. This radicalizes sections of the petty bourgeoisie and forces them into struggle against imperialism.
But because of the weak position of the petty bourgeoisie and its individualistic way of making a living, its struggle tends to veer now to one side and now to the other, and never to base itself firmly on proletarian principles of collectivity and mass struggle. So we see on the one hand a left form of opportunism – a frantic, desperate struggle. “We got to bring it all down now. Everything’s falling apart. It’s got to all come down now.” These sections of the petty bourgeoisie have just started to feel the full crunch of the imperialist system and therefore it becomes very panicked.
But the working class has been feeling it all along and has beer, struggling all along. But when their (the petty bourgeoisie) individualistic, anarchistic form of struggle is smashed and is shown that it can’t lead to victory, then the petty bourgeoisie flips over to the other side and becomes defeatist and capitulationist and lie down and don’t want to struggle. This is why people who were left opportunist yesterday may very well be right opportunist today.
A few years ago, in the white petty bourgeois movement we had the Yippies and the Weathermen. They said, for example, Jerry Rubin, “We can’t be coopted because we defy everything, and we won’t touch anything that is legitimate.” In this way they completely isolated themselves from the people and made people feel, “Well if that’s revolution, revolutionaries must be crazy and who needs them, there’s enough madness already!” Today, however, we see the Yippies and Weathermen for McGovern. A few years ago they told us that the Vietnamese had already won the war in Vietnam so therefore, I suppose, we didn’t need to struggle in support of them. Now they are saying the only way the Vietnamese can be saved is if we deliver the movement up to bourgeois politicians.
So here we can see a classic example of petty bourgeois vascillation from first left and then to the right, and I think it is obvious what they both have in common. They both have in common that they lack confidence in the masses of the people and the working class in particular to make history and to change society and to move forward rather than to be moved backward.
We don’t have time here to examine all these forms, but we can simply say that the petty bourgeoisie while it’s driven to struggle against imperialism, at the same time wants to find a way to maintain its privilege over the working class. It looks down on the working class and thinks workers are stupid and backward and can never understand what the petty bourgeoisie can understand. In fact, the proletariat is quite capable, much more capable than the petty bourgeoisie, of understanding these questions – and not only understanding them, but moving and changing reality.
We have also seen how the petty bourgeois outlook exists not only in the petty bourgeoisie, but also exists in the illegitimate petty bourgeoisie the lumpen proletariat. We see the same kind of vascillation in the lumpen proletariat, also to some degree among the backward and demoralized elements of the working class, particularly people who have been forced out of work for a long time and have lost any relationship to the means of production.
For example, we see in the Black liberation struggle, various groups who yesterday said, “We are going to burn everything down, wage guerilla warfare. We don’t want to have nothing to do with no white folks.” And today they’re working for the poverty programs. It is not to attack these people, but to simply point out why the revolutionary movement must be based upon the proletariat and be led by proletarian ideology.
We have to get rid of the idea that used to have circulation in the revolutionary movement that there was a direct relationship, which expressed itself in the form of “the more oppressed equals the more revolutionary.” Oppression certainly leads to resistance and has very much to do with revolution; but nevertheless we have to have a scientific understanding of what class is most strategically located and whose conditions of life most enable it to grasp the ideology and discipline we need to overthrow this monster. Lenin takes on this argument, “more oppressed equals more revolutionary,” in the first part of State and Revolution. He put it out that the peasants were always in worse conditions, suffering more and living under worse oppression than the workers; but nevertheless, the peasants could not be the leading force in revolution although they could be an important ally of the proletariat so long as the proletariat led the struggle.
Let’s examine this. In China, for example, the peasants before 1949 lived in wretched conditions, worse than the workers in the city. Nevertheless, the peasants lived in very backward conditions, living off very small plots of land with perhaps only a hand hoe or if they were lucky maybe a plow pulled by an oxen or by a member of the family. For hundreds and even thousands of years, the Chinese peasants rose up in mass rebellions, often overthrowing landlords. But they simply replaced one landlord with another, and the system basically stayed the same – feudalism remained. Why? Because once the poor peasants had overthrown the immediate oppressors the question was what now to do with the land and so on. And the land was very poor and their implements of production were very backward. So even after they divided it up, they still weren’t very much further ahead than they had been before. For this reason, because people were still hanging on by a thread, very fierce struggle and competition developed among people, and this led to exactly the same situation as before.
What did the peasants lack? The peasants had never seen tractors. They had never seen the mass means of production that could produce thousands of tractors, electric power, farm implements and other things that could lift the backward farm economy out of the condition that it was in and could remake the country. They had never worked socially together, and they had no understanding of socialized labor which could save the whole country. Only the working class and particularly the industrial proletariat in large-scale production could see these things, had this experience, and only on the basis of class could a party be formed which could give leadership to the peasant struggle and liberate China.
So I think we have concluded that in this country where the proletariat is larger, more concentrated than in these colonial and semi-colonial countries, the question of basing the revolutionary reverent on the proletariat and building a party of the proletariat to lead the struggle is even more important.
Since we don’t have too much time, I would like to move ahead briefly to the question of the relationship between the national question and the class question in the United States. I described earlier the mechanization of farming and the transformation of the Black nation in the U.S. from a peasant nation to a proletarian nation. Today the masses of Black people, and this is also true of various other national minorities, are overwhelmingly proletarian, overwhelmingly working class; and for this reason our organization has made the analysis that the struggles of the Black people, the Puerto Rican people, the Chicanos, and so on are at one and the same time national struggles and an advanced component of the working class struggles.
For this reason, we believe it is necessary to do two things. Because all the great majority of members of the oppressed nations and national minorities in the United States suffer national oppression and are therefore willing, and in fact are, struggling against U.S. imperialism, it is necessary to build the broadest united front of these peoples against imperialism. At the same time, it is necessary to fight for proletarian leadership within these struggles and to link them with the overall working class struggle.
In order to develop the revolutionary unity of the proletariat necessary to lead the people in overthrowing imperialism, it is necessary to wage a systematic struggle against white supremacy and white supremacy’s ideology, or racism, in this society; and at the same time to support all forms of struggle genuinely in the interests of the nations and national minorities oppressed in the United States. We believe that a very good base has been laid for developing this unity and is still being laid every day by the development and strengthening of revolutionary nationalist movements among the various nations and national minorities in the United States.
Some years ago, among white workers it used to be said that it wasn’t right to oppose the struggle of the Black people and the national minorities for equality. Today the question is not, “it isn’t right.” The question is, “you better not.” We believe this is teaching a very valuable lesson both to the Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and other people and to white workers. It is smashing the idea that the national minorities can never get together, that they are not capable of managing their own affairs, and that there is nothing to unite with, and is, in fact, turning that situation completely around.
We believe that, in conclusion on this part, that it is necessary to develop both the national aspect and the class aspect of these struggles to develop proletarian leadership in the liberation struggles and to merge them together, and in this way develop the class struggle forward. For this reason we believe it is necessary to have both national forms of organization – all Black, all Puerto Rican, all Third World, or whatever – as well as multi-national formations. Both before and after the party is formed, this will be necessary. Much work must he done to discover exactly the way to develop these forms and how they relate. But we know both forms will be necessary and will require selfless work on the part of communists to develop them and link up these struggles.
Which brings us to the last point, and I’ll try to summarize it quickly, the steps towards building the multi-national party of the proletariat. We feel that it is a very positive and important step that unity has been achieved here, and at this point it has to be formed based on the understanding that a party is a vanguard detachment of a class; and we have, as we like to say, one class, and therefore we need one party and one line. Which also flows from the dual nature of national struggles. At the same time, we feel that at the present time the basis has not yet been laid to form a multi-national communist party, much as many of us may like to see it formed as soon as possible. We believe that in this pre-party period it is necessary to have both multi-national Marxist-Leninist organizations as well as national Marxist-Leninist organizations, because of the uneven development of the national struggles and the overall class struggle and the fact that their merging has just begun.
We can understand the need for and support the development of Marxist-Leninist organizations among the Puerto Rican, Chicano, Black people, and other national minorities. But we don’t believe that there can be at this time in the United States any such thing as a Marxist-Leninist white organization. We believe the two are in contradiction. The reason is because the Black people, Puerto Ricans and so on are oppressed nationally. They are oppressed nationalities. The white nationality is an oppressor nationality. White workers have no interests other than their class interests and therefore we don’t believe that a party can be formed or an organization that is Marxist-Leninist can be formed only among whites. There is no struggle of the nationally oppressed people in the United States that is not in the interests – if it is in the interests of those people, it is in the interests of the entire working class. However, struggles that are in the interests of whites across class lines, may not be in the interests of the working class.
For this reason, we believe that, as I said, we need both national and multi-national organizations, but white workers need to be in organizations with people of various other national groups, particularly the oppressed national minorities. We also believe that there is a need for some multinational organization now, because we need to accumulate experience on how to work out these contradictions that arise, and our experience shows us that it is going to be a real monster to work them all out.
The question may come up, “How are contradictions that arise from racism or from different national cultures resolved in the Revolutionary Union?” We don’t have time to go into that, but we can only say in one simple phrase – through a hell of a lot of struggle. But we are convinced that our direction in this way is forward and not backward, and that we are forging greater unity and not less. We want to make one thing very clear in conclusion now. We are not saying that multi-national forms are a higher form, or a better form, or a more important form – only a necessary form along the road.
To sum up, we believe that the task indicated now is for the organizations that genuinely base themselves in Mao Tse Tung Thought, both those that are national and those that are multi-national forms, to sit down and try to figure out what are the common areas of work that we can begin on today. How can ideological struggle go on in a consistent way? And how in this way can we help lay more of a base for the eventual multi-national party?
We are confident that this task can be done. We know we must do it, because it is necessary in order to carry forward the struggle of the proletariat, liberate the people, overthrow imperialism, and bring about a whole new era – where we can really have the kind of society that we want, where we can really, not just those of us in the room, but everyone in society, live with each ether and deal with each other as brothers and sisters and comrades and move society forward to our common goal – communism.