All over the world the main tendency is revolution and the triumph of socialism. The main enemy of the people, yankee imperialism, is in crisis and under attack. It can no longer do what it wants to do – oppress the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the multi-national working class of the United States.
The leadership of the world revolution are the national struggles in the colonies and neo-colonies of the world. These national struggles can only be successful if led by the working class. This has clearly been shown by struggles that did not have working class leadership (Algeria or Peru), who gave away their countries to a new form of imperialist domination. The national liberation and anti-colonial struggles are class struggles against imperialism–they are the worldwide leadership in the class struggle in the stage of imperialism.
The people of IndoChina have been in the vanguard of those struggles, and the main example is the peoples of Vietnam. Through the past 12 years the IndoChinese people have been waging a protracted struggle which has dealt a heavy blow to U.S. imperialism–taking from the U.S. a sought-after market and giving the whole world an example of how a country that has been trampled on can fight an oppressor nation.
The necessity to cut its military budget has created an economic crisis for the United States government. Its economy can only go forward, through war and expansion. But its expansion is resisted and its wars are defeated.
In Africa strong revolutionary mass movements are developing. Zimbabwe which is under the control of the Rhodesian oppressor is one example, and so is Namibia, invaded and controlled by the racist government of South Africa. These struggles are uniting more and more with the anti-colonial armed struggles in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola against the weakest imperialist power, Portugal.
The third front is Latin America, especially the industrialized countries, Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico. The growing economic crisis in these industrialized countries has caused a brutal attack on the Latin American working class, but the attacks only give strength to the rise of the working class. The dictators of Brazil, Argentina Uruguay, Santo Domingo are no longer tolerated by the people. In all parts, large mass movements are rising up protected by working class armies. But one weakness of the Latin American movement is the predominance of revisionist ideology and petty-bourgeois ideas in the leadership. But the growing trend is more towards a proletarian ideology.
In Europe, the most oppressed country, Ireland, gives an example to the rest of the world, especially to the European proletariat, of the necessity to destroy English imperialism, the most faithful to the American imperialists.
The Palestinian front, very strong a year ago, has suffered great losses because of the alliance of Russia-North America-Jordan-Israel-Egypt against the Palestinian people.
All of these anti-colonial and national liberation struggles make impossible the normal economic relations which the imperialists need to make profits. They are losing their profits in different parts of the world, causing an economic recession.
At the end of the second world war, the United States was the most powerful of all imperialists. But in the last years, the rebirth of Japanese imperialism and the common market of Western Europe, headed by Germany is creating a new crisis of competition. Japanese imperialism and Western Europe have to expand, but the areas for expansion are very small. This is why competition develops. The monetary crisis is an expression of this competition.
The result of all this is a world depression. In many oppressed countries, unemployment is as high as 30%-40%. In the advanced countries, unemployment is 10%-12%. In order to save money the imperialists invest more in Third World factories (at lower wages); they try to concentrate the riches, and the big capitalists try to dominate the small capitalists. This can only lead to war.
The Russian Revolution marked the beginning of the revolutionary era. But in the ’50’s, the petty-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie took power once more in the communist party and in the Soviet Union; and they proceeded to sell out the world revolutionary movement in favor of peace and economic competition with the United States. Using the words of Marxism-Leninism, they “revised” Marxist-Leninist ideology and practice to establish capitalism in the Soviet Union. We call this phenomenon “revisionism.”
Little, by little, the Soviet revisionists began to unite with, and support, revisionists in other countries, control the politics of the remaining socialist countries, and control poor countries through “mutual aid.” Soviet revisionism evolved into social-imperialism (socialism in words, imperialism in deeds). Today, yankee imperialism and social imperialism are uniting and at the same time are in competition with each other to divide up the world between the two of them.
Social-imperialism is the second force against the independence forces of national liberation and socialism, and it’s as dangerous as the imperialists. The other revisionist countries-East Germany, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, etc.–are all colonies or neo-colonies of the Soviet Union. Like the U.S., the Soviet Union has soldiers, money, and technicians all over the world, controlling and trying to buy off the new (comprador) capitalists, like those in Egypt or India. In countries like Cuba, Chile, and Palestine, the Soviet Union out of its own interests tries to control their politics. Recently, the Soviet Union has been supporting India, the second most populated country in the world, in order to get an ally against the People’s Republic of China. “Bangladesh” was a creation of social imperialism, Indian expansionism, and the Pakistani comprador class, in order to attack China.
The growing world depression is a direct result of the contradictions that are inherent in the capitalist system, contradictions between the national liberation struggles and imperialism, contradictions the imperialists have among themselves, and contradictions between socialism and capitalism.
The result is hunger, unemployment, misery and war at a never-ending pace throughout the world. The world is in a state of war. Big changes are occurring while thousands and thousands of workers in the industrialized countries are seeing the contradictions of capitalism for the first tine since the second world war.
The world is preparing for a third world war, as the only way to solve the heavy contradictions of the capitalist system.
At the same time that we put our daily work into organizing and mobilizing the masses in political and economic struggle, we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility of a world war. As Chairman Mao Tse Tung has said: “Either the revolution will prevent the war, or a third world war will bring on the revolution. In either case we must be prepared.” In times of world war, especially between China and the United States or in terms of fascist repression, our organization has to be ready to struggle clandestinely against imperialism, in Puerto Rico and in the U.S.
In our political work, we’re going to meet up with different political tendencies opposed to our line–fascism, as an ideology, is going to grow. In times of crisis, the right-wing capitalists (the Hitlers, Nixons, and Ferres) unite to organize a fascist base. And they direct their attention to the petty-bourgeoisie and the privileged workers, who feel their economic life threatened. They try to escape from being blamed for the economic and political crisis by blaming the working class, the international communist movement, the oppressed minorities, and through pushing racism. They try to consolidate the petty-bourgeoisie while dividing the working class with drugs, welfare, gangs, etc. If the revolutionary movement becomes very strong, they’re prepared to create an open, terroristic dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or fascism.
Another dangerous line is that of the “left-wing” capitalists who unite, in time, with the petty-bourgeois liberals and the revisionists in a large anti-communist and anti-fascist front. This sector tries to oppose us, but at the same time compromises with fascism, trying to hold back a true leadership in the interests of the people. Our duty is to be clear that the main enemy is yankee imperialism, especially in their fascist form, and social-imperialism. And what about the rest of the revisionists? We have to struggle against their ideas, against their attempts to confuse and divide the people. At the same time, the liberal petty-bourgeoisie, the national bourgeoisie of Puerto Rico must win under the leadership of the working class. In any form possible, we have to isolate imperialism and its lackeys, the comprador class.
The IndoChina war, capitalist competition, and its result, the economic depression, has had a great effect on Puerto Rico. For a decade, the government of the Popular Party of Munoz Marin has pacified the people through the forced emigration of 700,000 Puerto Ricans to the United States, and through the industrialization of the colony. But with the decline in power of the Republican Party, and with the growing defeat of the United States, the people have been awakened. Thousands of Puerto Ricans have died in Vietnam. Thousands have seen the suffering of the Vietnamese people under “north american protection.” Unemployment increases every day, and the young working class is starting to see that their life as a class is dependent on the wishes of capitalism. The anarchy of a system based on profit is becoming more and more clear.
The immigration of 50,000 Cuban reactionary exiles increases the forces for statehood and fascism, but at the same tine raises consciousness about our national oppression–that there ain’t no unemployment among the Cuban gusanos, but there’s 30% unemployment among the people; the gusanos are allied with the yankee businessmen.
We are rising up against these attacks, The squatters’ movement is spreading throughout the whole country–from Fajardo to Ponce, the people are taking over their unused land. The strikers’ movement is gaining strength, especially since the anti-worker legislation of Ferre’s colonial government. The telephone strike, the El Mundo strike, the truck drivers’ strike. All these strikes give hard blows to the yankee pockets. But all of these strikes have only an economist viewpoint, and are being led by either sold-out union leaders or by left-wing opportunist parties. They (the strikes) are spontaneous uprisings of the working class that the opportunists are trying to head.
The student struggles, being struggles mainly of the upper petty-bourgeoisie, have become since March 11, 1971, secondary to those of the working class.
There are a number of political parties in Puerto Rico. Each represents interests of a particular class or a section of a particular class.
THE NEW PROGRESSIVE PARTY represents the imperialist interests in Puerto Rico and of the comprador class: Ferre, Rexach. Their base of support is the right petit-bourgeoisie, all the bourgeoisie of the colonial government, all of those who manage yankee interests in Puerto Rico, and the gusanos (Cuban exiles).
THE POPULAR PARTY represents the interests of the middle bourgeois class. Its origin rests in the landowning class which did not unite with the imperialists at the beginning of the yankee invasion and started to lose its lands. In the 1940s’s, this class organized the poor campesinos (country men and women) middle campesinos and agricultural workers in alliance with the proletariat to attack the old colonialism of the sugar corporations. At the same time, this class transformed itself into a commercial and industrial bourgeoisie class, industrialized Puerto Rico. Its class base today is the country people and a large sector of the proletariat. Its strength of support are the leftist yankee imperialists like Kennedy, Lindsay, etc.
THE NATIONALIST PARTY OF PUERTO RICO. The party of Don Pedro Albizu Campos, the nationalist Party represents the small landowners and large campesinos, the intellectuals of the countryside destroyed by the yankee invasion and the destruction of the Spanish power in Puerto Rico. Because of the reason of its destruction as a class, the Nationalist Party has always maintained an antagonistic relationship to imperialism, and for that reason are a progressive force in the struggle for national liberation.
In their insistence on the necessity for armed struggle against the yankees, for their history of war against the imperialists, the membership and sympathizers of the nationalist Party will ally themselves in the anti-imperialist struggle of the Puerto Rican nation. The Nationalist Party also opposes elections.
THE PUERTO RICAN SOCIALIST LEAGUE represents the worldwide Trotskyite movement. They represent the interests of the extreme left petty-bourgeoisie which condemns organization discipline and the prolonged character of the revolutionary struggle. They attack the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam as revisionist countries, and they themselves cause divisions among revolutionaries and confuse the people. In not defending the patriotic character of our struggle, as a struggle of national liberation, they cause more divisions among the people. The League does not participate in elections either.
THE PUERTO RICAN INDEPENDENCE PARTY represents the interests of the national bourgeoisie, the small capitalists limited by the northern capitalists and the gusanos; they are the owners of furniture scores, businesses, contractors of small factories, all threatened by the monopoly of the yankee buyer. Their class base is the left petty-bourgeoisie of the city, teachers, professors, government workers, lawyers, businessmen. Recently, they have made on effort to win over the poor and middle canpesinos and city workers, especially service workers. Seeing the worldwide trend towards socialism, they spread the word of socialism; they really search for a new bourgeois democracy through elections. They are the loyal opposition of the yankee.
THE PUERTO RICAN SOCIALIST PARTY represents the interests of the middle petty-bourgeoisie of social workers, teacher’s, service workers, university students, small businessmen, etc. Their class base is students, service workers, intellectuals, and a small sector of the more privileged working class.
This party represents revisionism in Puerto Rico. It calls for the dictatorship of the proletariat and for independence and socialism. But in reality what they want is that they, the petty bourgeoisie, rise in power on the backs of the working class struggle so that they car. govern the country more independently in the name of socialism. They are very dangerous and confuse the people when they speak of socialism. The people see their practice, their class, just as the people see the reality of the conditions in the Soviet Union and say “if this is socialism, I don’t want anything to do with socialism.” Because of their class composition, PSP vacillates in terms of the elections with electoral strikes or united front, but not with a clear line.
YOUNG LORDS PARTY. Up until now we have represented the interests of the lower petty-bourgeoisie. Our membership is principally unemployed proletarian youth, students of proletarian origin, service workers, and semi-proletariats. Our base of support is the proletariat, semi-proletariat, lumpen, unemployed proletarian youth, and petty-bourgeoisie. Our position as to elections is clear; we are an invaded country. The elections, even though they appear to be democratic in a bourgeois country, are the instruments of colonial domination. They are not worth anything when we are controlled by yankee imperialism. We oppose the yankee elections with the demands of the people.
LONG LIVE A FREE AND SOCIALIST PUERTO RICO, SOLIDARITY WITH INDOCHIHA.
Our primary task in Puerto Rico is to build the party of the proletariat, a fighting party for the proletariat’s interests. Our secondary task is the building of unity between the proletariat of Puerto Rico and its principal external ally, the proletariat of the United States.
The struggle in Puerto Rico is developing rapidly. PNP is organizing its fascist base and its armed hand and is preparing itself for civil war. The strategy of PIP is to win elections, consolidate its power, oppress the revolutionary movement and have a statehood plebiscite in 1974. If not a plebiscite, at least to establish a base in case of world war. The PPD loses its working class base every day. The working class every day will see more independence and socialism as a solution to their problems. PIP and PSP are competing for who is going to lead the working class towards independence. PSP calls for a United Front of Independence, but guides that united front towards elections to sell the country out, in agitation without strength. PIP rejects a united front because of their class contradictions with PSP–the national bourgeoisie against the petty-bourgeoisie. But with the growth of fascism, the class struggle and our organization, the two parties will unite (the union of left capitalism and revisionism).
Our duty is to organize the people to fight against yankee imperialism and the sell-out parasites, and maintain a constant ideological struggle with revisionism and reformism in Puerto Rico.
The armed struggle in Puerto Rico is held back by reformist and revisionist lines of the independence parties and by the same revisionist line of the Comandos for Armed Liberation who don’t believe in the possibility of defeating imperialism militarily. The MIRA, an organization with a clearer political line, appears to have fallen because of the repression of the northamerican government. If other armed organizations are rising, we have not seen their practice. No organization or armed nucleus up until this point has concrete relations with the oppressed classes of the world.
The United States, the center of yankee imperialism, is in its own way a product of capitalism and imperialism.
The European capitalist system, seeing itself in a constant economic crisis in the 18th and 19th centuries, sent millions of workers and expropriated peasants to land in the U.S. as a way of expanding Europe’s system and at the same time to prevent social revolutions in Europe. Already established as a semi-capitalist, semi-slave country, the U.S. kept its system of exploitation of slavery in the south and capitalism in the north, constantly expanding and becoming more and more an Imperialist power. After the abolition if slavery and the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, imperialism began to develop in its modern form. The yankees expanded all over the world and brought to their country millions and millions of immigrant workers to build the multi-national empire called the United States of Northamerica. This natural resource, in both slave labor and immigrant labor, made the construction of the largest empire in the world possible, and at the same time created a constant oppression of the national minorities and dominated peoples inside of the yankees’ own territory.
Many different national minorities and peoples who are completely dominated, like the Native Americans (Indians), live inside of this territory. Over the k centuries of the history of this empire, other immigrants have benefited in certain measures from imperialism, from the oppression and the racism towards the Afro-American, Chicano, Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Asian, and Native American peoples.
The division that exists in the worldwide proletariat–between the workers of the oppressor countries–England, France, Japan, Germany–and the workers of the poor, oppressed countries (for example, Guatemala, Sudan, the Philippine Islands, India, etc.) ore large. The degree of oppression and exploitation is very clear. Imperialism has tried to pacify its domestic proletariat by exploiting the proletariat of Asia, Africa, and Latin America even more. In this process, the international consciousness of the proletariat of the advanced countries has gone backwards, because of the material base of their better living conditions and because of the revisionist politics of the communist parties of those countries.
Inside of the United States, we find the same contradictions. The difference between the communities and territories of the oppressed minorities and those of the working class and petty-bourgeoisie of European origin is very great. Inside of the factories and workplaces, the treatment of workers of the oppressed nationalities is much worse, the pay much lower. This causes racial and national divisions in the working class. A direct result of imperialism.
In the United States, because it’s a multi-national empire, the contradictions between the peoples of the oppressed minorities and the rest of the empire are heavy. It shows in the racism that exists among the different nationalities and races, especially the racism of the northamerican people against the minorities and oppressed nationalities. But in order to unite the masses of working and oppressed people inside the empire of the U.S., it’s not enough to call for unity, or to insist dogmatically that it’s a class struggle, as has happened by comrades in the past.
We have to recognize the particularities of how the class struggle manifests itself inside of this empire. First of all, the yankees have direct, external colonies–the Virgin islands, Micronesia, Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Puerto Rico, of which Puerto Rico is the most important in terms of industrialization and profits for the yankees. Secondly is the contradiction that exists between all of the proletariat of the U.S. and yankee imperialism. And third, the struggles for self-determination and democratic rights of the peoples and oppressed minorities inside of the territory of the U.S.– Afro-Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asians, Native Americans.
The northamerican proletariat will not be able to gain more and more proletarian . consciousness if it does not accept its international duty of demanding an end to colonialism, neo-colonialism, and national oppression. An end to the imperialism of its own government.
Struggles of the northamerican working class that don’t raise the imperialist nature of the U.S. are economist struggles, struggles for the short-range economic interests of only one sector of the worldwide proletariat. The revolutionaries inside of the U.S. have to investigate the particulars of the contradictions around the different peoples who have been united to form the United States. In the future, we have to launch a united front against imperialism. This is how to unite the struggles of all the colonies, the peoples and oppressed minorities and the northamerican proletariat in a great united front under the leadership of the working class.
The Puerto Rican people inside of the U.S. are recently arrived as a result of direct colonial domination of Puerto Rico, as direct results of the industrialization of Puerto Rico and forced immigration to the United States. On one side it has seen a positive thing that the Puerto Rican people have worked in the United States. Our international consciousness has risen. But the principal aspect of this has been more suffering, pain and oppression for our people.
As long as there are Puerto Ricans living under exploitation in the u.s. for not being allowed to sustain themselves in Puerto Rice, there are Puerto Ricans that live under heavier oppression – colonialism.
The responsibility of the northamerican proletariat is to demand the liberation of all colonies, and self-determination for all oppressed peoples. It is the particular responsibility of the Puerto Rican sector of the working class in the United States to support the liberation of their homeland and the establishment of socialism.
Our primary task in the United States is to create the conditions to build a multi-national party of the proletariat, at the same time that we fight the national oppression of Puerto Rico. This means that we will have to find ways that will unite the different multi-national sectors of the proletariat in the United States so that a party will arise that fights in their interests.
Educating the multi-national proletariat of the United States of the struggle for national liberation and socialism, in Puerto Rico, and uniting with other workers in our daily struggle against yankee imperialism. This is our secondary task.
In the united states, nationalists will say we are for ”integration” or that we do not see our people’s national as well as class oppression; in Puerto Rico, the dogmatists say we are “Neoyorkquinos.” In both countries, the opportunists do not understand the dialectical relation between the anti-imperialist struggle in Puerto Rico and the anti-imperialist struggle in the United States.
The development of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement in the United State fortifies the struggle for national liberation and socialism in Puerto Rico, like the struggle for national liberation and socialism in Puerto Rico fortifies the anti-imperialist and socialist struggle in the United States.
The imperialist yankee, decadent and in crisis, can’t maintain itself with a socialist Puerto Rico, and if yankee imperialism is destroyed, that opens the road to socialism in Puerto Rico. These struggles are dialectical and complimentary.
In Puerto Rico, the large proletariat which has been firm, with about a 200 year-history of struggle, has sufficient strength to direct the struggle for national liberation and socialism.
Being a capitalist colony, Puerto Rico is confronted with socialism as the next stage of struggle.
In many countries the similar struggle against imperialism–first stage, and for the socialist revolution–second stage.
The differences are the concrete conditions that one country is the colony and the other country is the colonizer.
In the United States, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organizations have to develop among Afro-Americans, Chicanos, Asians, Native Americans, and North Americans to analyze their work and experiences with the proletariat of their nationality to create a base for a multi-national proletarian party in the future.
As the world revolution grows, the base will be created in the development of the struggle, a communist party of the United States, part of an international communist movement capable of directing the world struggle against imperialism and social-imperialism.