WORKERS, OPPRESSED NATIONS AND PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
NEWSPAPER OF THE CENTRAL ORGANIZATION OF U.S. MARXIST-LENINISTS
Volume 9, Number 5
June 1, 1979 25ยข
P.O. BOX 11942 CHICAGO, IL. 60611
[Front page:
Carter's Fake Gas Shortage - More Robbery of the Masses by the Oil Billionaires;
Build the Marxist-Leninist Party Without the Social-Chauvinists and Against the Social-Chauvinists;
SALT II - A Warmongering Plot of the Two Superpowers Against Revolution;
Skyrocketing Inflation Shows the Necessity to Defy Carter's Wage Controls]
IN THIS ISSUE
U.S. Nuclear Energy Program.......................................... | 2 |
100,000 at Anti-Nuclear Demonstration........................... | 2 |
Oppose Imperialist War Preparations With Mass Revolutionary Struggle.................................. | 2 |
Rubber Workers on Strike................................................ | 3 |
Airline Mechanics Defy Wage Controls........................... | 3 |
9-Year No-Strike Pact is Rejected.................................... | 3 |
Shipyard Workers Fight Productivity Drive..................... | 4 |
Denver: Resist Wage-Cutting Program............................ | 4 |
Carter's "Cost Containment" is an Attack on the Hospital Workers................................................... | 4 |
Louisville: Oppose Racial Discrimination in the Schools................................................................... | 5 |
0th Anniversary of Founding of ACWM(M-L).............. | 6 |
May Day Meetings........................................................... | 7 |
Solidarity Messages to the May Day Meetings: CPSG, EFLNA, FISUS, TSA....................................................... | 8 |
Britain: Vigorous Fight Against Fascists.......................... | 5 |
Canadian Elections........................................................... | 5 |
Long Live the Palestinian Revolution.............................. | 9 |
Iran--The Voice of the Revolution................................... | 9 |
Eritrea in Brief.................................................................. | 9 |
Venezuelan Defence Committee...................................... | 9 |
The Struggle in El Salvador.............................................. | 9 |
Song: Eternal Glory to J.V. Stalin..................................... | 12 |
Carter's Fake Gas Shortage - More Robbery of the Masses by the Oil Billionaires
Build the Marxist-Leninist Party Without the Social-Chauvinists and Against the Social-Chauvinists
SALT II - A Warmongering Plot of the Two Superpowers Against Revolution
Skyrocketing Inflation Shows the Necessity to Defy Carter's Wage Controls
On U.S. Imperialism's Nuclear Energy Program:
A History of Frantic War Preparations
100,000 Demonstrate Against U.S. Imperialism's Nuclear Energy Program
Oppose U.S. Imperialist War Preparations With Mass Revolutionary Struggle
Rubber Workers Strike Against Uniroyal Capitalists and Carter's Wage Controls
United Airline Mechanics Defy Carter's Wage Controls
Tobacco Workers Reject 9 Year "No Strike" Pledge
SHIPYARD WORKERS FIGHT PRODUCTIVITY DRIVE
DENVER FACTORY:
Resist the Company's Wage Cutting Program!
Carter's So-Called "Cost Containment" Is An Attack on the Hospital Workers
BRITAIN
CONTINUING STRUGGLE AGAINST NAZISM AND FASCIZATION OF THE STATE
CANADA:
Elections Fraud of the Rich - One Set of Exploiters Replaced by Another
LOUISVILLE:
The Issue Is Not Busing, But to Oppose Racial Discrimination in the Schools
Build the Marxist-Leninist Party Without the Social-Chauvinists and Against the Social-Chauvinists
ENTHUSIASTIC DEMONSTRATIONS AND MEETINGS HELD IN CELEBRATION OF MAY 1st
"The working class is the gravedigger of capitalism and the hope of the future"
Solidarity Messages at the May 1st Meeting in New York
Support the Palestinian Liberation Struggle Against U.S.-Backed Israeli Zionism
Iran - The Voice of the Revolution
Statement of the Venezuelan Committee in Defense of Human Rights
Violence and Terror Will Not Subdue People of El Salvador
The current gasoline shortage is a new criminal outrage against the working class and people perpetrated by the oil monopolies and the Carter administration. Once again the working masses are being held for ransom with a phony energy shortage only to be bled white with skyrocketing energy costs. The high price of energy, with gasoline selling for over a dollar a gallon in many areas and rising at a 60% annual rate, is leading the way in the soaring cost of living which is devastating the working people. The masses are being squeezed to the wall for the fabulous profits of a handful of oil billionaires.
President Carter, that smiling flunkey of the big monopolies, has openly called for and given his blessing to the oil monopolies' fake gasoline shortage. Speaking at a news conference in Iowa on May 4th, Carter declared that, "We're going to have to have... a few demonstrable shortages as are now being faced in California to show that this (his policy of oil price decontrols and soaring energy costs -- ed.) is necessary." Furthermore Carter promised "periodic gasoline shortages" and "heating oil shortages" in coming months and years. His Department of Energy Director, Schlesinger, has also hailed the present shortage as "necessary" and has projected "many more worse shortages over the next decade" which will "end the previous years of cheap energy" and bring about even more unprecedented price gouging on the part of the oil monopolies. The tyrannical plunder of the masses by the oil monopolies through artificial shortages and astronomical price increases is the heart of the Carter administration's "National Energy Program".
THE GASOLINE SHORTAGE IS A BLATANT HOAX TO DEFRAUD THE WORKING PEOPLE
That the gasoline shortage has been deliberately imposed by the oil monopolies and the Carter government is a well-known fact. It is a fraudulent shortage being used as a lever to jack up prices and defraud the working people. Every one of the contradictory explanations given by the oil monopolies, the government and the bourgeois media for the so-called gasoline shortage are transparent lies. The principle explanation given for the shortage is the alleged shortage of crude oil supplies as a result of the Iranian revolution. But in fact there is no oil shortage whatsoever and more oil is being imported into the U.S. than ever. Even the oil monopolists' American Petroleum Institute admits in a recently released report that "overall world output is about the same as before the Iranian revolution" and that "actually both imports of crude oil and domestic production are up over last year. " Combined imports to the U.S. of both crude oil and refined petroleum products, according to the API, are "considerably higher than last year", up by 7% in April and 5.2% in May over April-May of 1978. While Energy Director Schlesinger and the oil corporations claim that U.S. oil stockpiles are 20 million barrels short of last year's stockpiles, a recent congressional report claims that stockpiles are actually 60 million barrels above last year. In either case, whatever figures are used, 1978 stockpiles were at record levels and current levels are well above the levels of other previous years.
Besides these facts, the claim of an "oil shortage" is particularly outrageous in regard to California where the gasoline shortage has taken on drastic proportions and where it is well known that over the last several years a severe oil glut has been created with the opening up of the Alaskan oil pipeline. At this time 400,000 barrels a day of Alaska's 1.2 million barrels of daily oil production are being shipped past California ports and around the Panama Canal to the Gulf Coast for a lack of a market on the West Coast. Just last month Carter was again lobbying congress to enact legislation to export the excess Alaskan oil to Japan!
The second explanation for the gasoline shortage, given in the face of all the evidence that there is in reality an oil surplus in the U.S. and especially in California, is the claim by various corporations and government officials of an alleged shortage of refinery capacity. To make this claim that the gasoline shortage stems from a lack of refinery capacity and not a shortage of crude oil, means,,of course, to openly admit that the other cries of "oil shortage" are a lie. Nevertheless this claim is equally fraudulent. According to the same API report: "U.S. oil refineries are running at only 83.5% of their normal production capacity. Total capacity is about 17.4 million barrels a day. As of May 4th, the refineries were producing slightly more than 14.5 million barrels a day. " Ordinarily at this time of year refineries are operating at somewhat above 90% of their capacity. However, this year in order to create an artificial shortage, the oil monopolies have sharply curtailed refinery production and products shipments. Gasoline production was cut back from 7.3 million barrels in January to 6.7 million barrels in March and April, just as the heavy driving season was getting under way. These cutbacks have been particularly drastic in California.
And the third explanation for the gasoline shortage which has been given by the magnates of Standard Oil of California and others is the claim that there is neither a problem of supply nor of refinery capacity but a crisis brought on by a rapid increase in consumption. However, here again the oil monopolies very own API figures show an actual decline in demand in the U.S., that demand for all petroleum products including gasoline was at a lower point in April than in any month over the last two years. Gasoline demand by itself is barely above the 1978 level. In California, where gasoline consumption has increased by 7% over the last year, gasoline production also increased and actually outstripped the pace of increased demand. But between January and April production was severely cut back, according to some press reports, by as much as 17%, which shows that it was production cut backs and not increased demand that brought on the shortage. In desperation to hide the actual cause of the shortage, the government agencies and the oil monopolies have even gone to the extent of attributing the shortage to "panic buying", to those people who fill up their gas tanks too often. Carter's press office has even blamed the situation on "shortage psychology"!
Clearly the hoax that "rapidly rising consumption" is the cause of the gasoline shortage is an equally transparent lie as the "oil shortage" hoax and the "refinery shortage" hoax. The present gasoline shortage is so fraudulent that even the government agencies, the Federal Trade Commission, two congressional subcommittees and the White House, are "demanding an explanation" and "calling for investigations" into why refiners "cut back suddenly on the production of gasoline despite the sufficient supplies of oil" -- investigations of course for the sole purpose of covering up the criminality of the government and the oil monopolies in engineering the shortage in the first place.
THE OIL MONOPOLIES AND THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION ARE THE ENGINEERS OF THE GASOLINE SHORTAGE
The source of the present gasoline shortage is to be found in the insatiable greed of the Rockefellers, Mellons and a handful of other multi-billionaires for maximum capitalist profit. A small number of giant multinational oil monopolies -- Exxon, Texaco, Mobil, Gulf, etc., -- are using their monopoly of the oil and energy industry to impose yet another energy shortage, to simply refuse to produce and deliver the gasoline needed by the working people. In this way, by throttling the masses with a shortage of such a basic necessity as gasoline, the oil monopolies are brutally imposing terrific price hikes to further plunder the working masses.
The current gasoline shortage is but the last in a series of such shortages since the "oil shortage" hoax of 1973-74. These shortages of heating oil, gasoline, natural gas, diesel fuel, etc., have brought about severe hardships and a doubling and tripling of energy costs for the working people and have brought a rain of gold of fabulous profits for the oil billionaires. In the case of the present shortage, as gasoline prices soar out of sight and the masses wait in endless lines for insufficient supplies of gasoline, at the same time the oil corporations' profit figures have reached new record levels. The first quarter net profits of the Exxon Corporation were up 37.4% over last year to $955 million; Texaco's profits were up 80.9%; Gulf Oil, 60%; Marathon Oil, 107.8%; Mobil, 81.8%; etc. Despite the conditions of economic crisis, industrial stagnation, etc., the oil monopolies' profit figures show that through the creation of a series of energy shortages and engaging in an orgy of price-hiking the oil tycoons have been able to protect and expand their enormous profits at the expense of the masses.
For its part, the Carter administration is pursuing down the line the oil billionaires' policy of fake shortages and skyrocketing prices. Carter, the smooth talking "friend of labor and the minorities", is working feverishly to implement to the hilt the oil monopolies' ruthless plunder of the working masses -- what he calls his "National Energy Policy". On behalf of the oil monopolies the Carter administration has been directly administering the present gasoline shortage. In April, to hide and serve this so-called shortage, Carter issued an order for refineries to cut back gasoline production under the hoax of there being low heating oil stockpiles for next winter. The Department of Energy has imposed a series of arbitrary gasoline allocation cutbacks of up to 20% of deliveries to some states causing spot shortages and long gas lines in many areas across the country (shortages have even been forecast in Texas!). Furthermore, the White House along with the congress and local government authorities are drafting harsh repressive measures against the working masses in the name of coping with the shortage, including rationing plans, driving bans, heavy fines for such "offenses" as topping off gas tanks, etc.
The role of the Carter administration, the various regulatory bodies and the other institutions of the capitalist state apparatus in engineering (and covering up) the gasoline shortage clearly exposes the state machine of the rich as an instrument of the tyranny of the capitalist monopolies. Nevertheless, from various quarters a hue and cry has been created to the effect that "the government has failed to intervene" in the situation and has given the oil monopolies a free hand to exploit the working people, etc. But this noise is simply deception. The entire state apparatus in the U.S. has long been subordinated directly to the capitalist monopolies, and the Carter government is a government of the capitalist offensive against the working class. The government has in fact massively intervened in the situation but in the interest of the bloodsucking oil monopolies to squeeze the masses to the wall.
THE ONLY SOLUTION TO THE TYRANNICAL PLUNDER OF THE MONOPOLIES IS REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE
The energy crisis is a sharp manifestation of the all-round crisis of the U.S. monopoly capitalist system, further weakening its financial, economic and strategic positions. This energy crisis, however, is not a crisis stemming from a natural shortage of energy resources in that the U.S. has more than ample resources of oil, natural gas, coal, hydroelectric and other energy supplies. Rather it is an energy crisis stemming from the decay and parasitic nature of monopoly capitalism and from U.S. imperialism's predatory, militarist and aggressive policy of world plunder. The energy monopolies produce energy not to satisfy the needs of the people but solely for the purpose of the securing of maximum profits from the exploitation of the working masses at home and from the plunder of the labor and natural resources of the peoples abroad. Challenged by the revolutionary forces, and the inter-imperialist contradictions, particularly the rivalry of Soviet social-imperialism, U.S. imperialism is intensifying its scramble for the seizure and control of world oil resources and markets. For this purpose it is importing massive quantities of oil while suppressing domestic production. This has resulted in a ballooning outflow of tens of billions of dollars. It has led to the situation where the U.S. warmongers lack energy self-sufficiency for waging war. Thus, U.S. imperialism's predatory policy has been caught up in its own contradictions, resulting in a profound energy crisis for the big bourgeoisie.
Carter and the U.S. ruling circles have no solution to the energy crisis. Their only solution is to carry out further aggression and intervention abroad to protect the multinational oil corporations' super-profits, and to squeeze the American working people to the wall with fake shortages, rationing plans, and soaring prices -- to make the people pay for the dollar outflows, for the securing of maximum profits for the oil billionaires, and for the stockpiling of oil and the development of energy resources such as a dangerous nuclear energy program for waging aggressive war.
The energy crisis, which is taking on ever greater proportions in the midst of a country that is literally overflowing with energy resources, shows that the monopoly capitalist class is totally unfit to rule. The current gasoline shortage, which has been engineered by a handful of giant monopolies, shows that the contradiction between the small number of rich parasites and the broad masses of people is intensifying to the extreme. The working masses are stirring in struggle against the tyrannical plunder of the monopolies. The workers are developing their strike movement against the soaring cost of living in defiance of Carter's 7% wage guidelines and are resisting the all-sided attacks of the capitalist exploiters. A broad movement is emerging against U.S. imperialism's nuclear energy program and war preparations. The fake shortages and outrageous plunder of the masses by the oil billionaires -- robbery on an unprecedented scale which is being enforced by Carter's "human rights" regime -- can only further arouse the working class and people to rise in mass revolutionary struggle against the bloodsucking monopolies and their state power.
It is only the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and working people which can make the exploiters pay for the energy crisis and the economic and all-sided crisis of the monopoly capitalist system and sabotage the warmongers' plans for war. And it is this struggle which will bring about the expropriation of the monopolies and the overthrow of the man-eating capitalist order and usher in the new order of socialism under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only with the political supremacy of the working class can shortages of the basic necessities of life, soaring prices and economic crises be eliminated under the socialist system.
Call of the National Committee of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists
May 12, 1979
To all Marxist-Leninists, class conscious workers and revolutionary activists: The Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists calls upon you to participate in the historic work to reestablish the revolutionary vanguard party of the proletariat through the founding of the MARXIST-LENINIST PARTY OF THE U.S.A.
(See centerfold supplement)
On May 10th, after nearly seven years and hundreds upon hundreds of sessions of "consultations" and "negotiations", the U.S. State Department and the Kremlin chieftains came to an agreement on the terms for their second "Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty", SALT II. The signing of this warmongering agreement has initiated a new round of debate among the "pro-SALT" and "anti-SALT" imperialist politicians, a debate to stir up war hysteria and justify and conceal the war preparations of the imperialists and social-imperialists. This so-called debate is generating a new barrage of war incitement -- both propaganda for imperialist pacifism, concealed warmongering to throw dust in the eyes of the masses, and open propaganda for war. And the social-chauvinists, the revisionists and opportunists of all hues are in the van of this campaign of ideological confusion which is aimed at denying the revolutionary struggles of the peoples and serving the superpowers' preparations for war.
The new SALT n agreement has been hailed by the U.S. imperialists, Soviet social-imperialists and reactionaries, militarist generals and warmongers all over the world as an alleged "triumph for peace". President Carter, a tear in his eye, is hypocritically billing this treaty as the solution to the "nightmare of unrestrained arms competition" and a guarantee of "a more peaceful world". However, in reality, SALT II is but another plot of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperial- ism against the people and the revolution on their unalterable course of imperialist aggression and preparation for a devastating war.
Just like SALT I, the provisions of SALT II do not provide for any "nuclear arms reduction" whatsoever. To the contrary, they allow for the constant perfection and expansion of the nuclear stockpiles of the two superpowers -- for the rearming and modernizing of their nuclear arsenals with the most up-to-date and deadliest means of nuclear slaughter. Under SALT II, "peacenik" Carter will continue to sign record military budgets and the Pentagon generals will continue to build more Trident submarines, develop the Cruise missile and MX ICBM missile system, and multiply the number of warheads, the throw weight and accuracy of existing missile systems. The Soviet new tsars will continue to build up their nuclear arsenals in like fashion. SALT II is a big smokescreen which reeks of gunpowder, under which the superpowers are arming to the teeth to drown the revolution and socialism in blood -- for an inter-imperialist slaughter of the peoples to redivide the globe to determine which superpower slave master can get more slaves and more markets.
Furthermore, SALT II shows that Washington and Moscow are continuing to work hand in hand against' the revolution. Through such means as arms agreements the two superpowers are striving to ensure their undivided position of "leadership" of world imperialism and reaction. Through their secret plotting and collaboration they hope to block any challenge and maintain themselves as the two nuclear blackmailers on a world scale. U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism want to preserve a situation where they are allowed to trample on the sovereignty of the peoples at will and play the role of the two world policemen in the name of "maintaining the balance of power" which is presented as the only alternative to the nuclear devastation which the superpowers alone may unleash. Thus, just as when the superpowers quarrel, their agreements and joint plots are not a factor for "peace and security" either, but for counter-revolution, for imperialist and social-imperialist intervention and preparations for war.
To hide and serve their war preparations, the imperialists and social-imperialists are subjecting the world to an unprecedented campaign of propaganda and diversion. Their aim is to promote fatalism, to put the people in a passive position and ensure that the people do not rise in revolution against the warmongers.
The imperialists' propaganda mills are working overtime producing two types of propaganda to disarm and confuse the masses. On the one hand they are promoting imperialist pacifism. Sweet lullabies are sung about "peace" and "human rights" and a big fuss is made about "disarmament" in order to create illusions about the possibility of a "peaceful" imperialism, to cover up imperialist aggression and war preparations. A fatalism is preached that the people must hold their breath and beg on their knees before the "peacemakers", the Carters and Brezhnevs, whose "negotiations" and "SALT agreements" are allegedly the only alternative to a nuclear holocaust. On the other hand, open warmongering and war hysteria are promoted. A real war psychosis is created with newspaper scenarios of Soviet missiles raining in on U.S. cities, and the people are told they have no choice but to climb aboard U.S. imperialism's war chariot for their "security" and strive for a U.S. imperialist victory in the "impending war". In this ideological campaign to promote confusion' and fatalism in the ranks of the working masses, the imperialist warmongers are assisted in the first place by the social-chauvinist class traitors, the revisionists and opportunists of all hues.
The modern revisionists of the "C"PUSA have long ago betrayed the working class and abandoned the struggle against imperialist war in favor of imperialist pacifism. They advocate the Khrushchovite road to socialism through "peaceful transition" peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition" and "detente", which means that the people of the world must remain "peaceful" while the superpowers and reactionaries arm to the teeth against the people and the revolution. Under this yellow banner the revisionists have renounced revolution and instead advocate only a more "peaceful", "humanitarian" and "reasonable" imperialism. The "C"PUSA revisionists consider the revolutionary struggle against the warmongers as "insane", "crazy" and "provoking war". According to the revisionist jackals, if the working masses beg hat in hand for "detente", the "ratification of SALT", etc., the benevolent chieftains of imperialism and social-imperialism may not only grant the masses "peace", but also some "human rights", "full employment", "an end to racism" and a heaven on earth under the brutal regime of the monopoly capitalist exploiters. The revisionist propaganda is a mere echo of the imperialist pacifism of the warmongers in Washington and Moscow. They are painting sweet opium dreams of a U.S. imperialism and a Soviet social-imperialism that will "engage in an unalterable process of disarmament" and "convert to peace" at a time when imperialism and social- imperialism are engaged in aggression all over the globe and are arming to the teeth.
An equally counter-revolutionary and fatalist propaganda is being preached by the ''CP(M-L)'' social-chauvinists, the followers of the "three worlds" theory and Chinese revisionism. The "three worldists" are feverishly engaged in creating war psychosis and war hysteria. They are trying to scare and intimidate the proletariat with the mighty arsenals of the superpowers, covering their newspapers with photographs of sophisticated missiles and submarines. According to the "three worlds" theory of the social-chauvinists, "the war is inevitable" and the revolution is therefore out of the question. And it is on this basis that they denounce the imperialist-revisionist propaganda about "detente", not from the position that "detente" promotes fatalism and denies the revolutionary struggle against imperialism and social-imperialism, but from the viewpoint that "detente" denies "reality". And their ultimate "reality" is, as the social-chauvinist chieftain Klonsky puts it: "As long as the two superpowers continue to contend for world domination, one must defeat the other or be defeated by the other. (See "Political Report" from "Documents from the Founding Congress of CP(M-L)".) Thus "realism" is to deny the prospects of revolution, hence leaving the proletariat only one choice, to choose sides in this contention for world domination! And this is exactly what the social-chauvinists have done, calling on the U.S. proletariat to "direct the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism". And furthermore, these class traitors are openly preaching to the masses that the U.S. imperialist state and the further strengthening of its colossal military machine is their only salvation in "the inevitable war".
Thus, in their "expose" of the recent SALT II agreement (see The Call, May 21, 1979) the volunteer State Department advisors of the "CP (M-L)" declare that there is a "major inequality in the treaty", "that this is important because it is a major factor contributing to the 'vulnerability' of the U.S. land-based missile system to Soviet attack", which means that "the Soviet Union will have by the early or the mid-1980's the capability to destroy most of the U.S. ICBM force." "Horrors!" shriek these lap dogs of the Pentagon generals, "just think of the consequences if U.S. imperialism's arsenal of thermonuclear extermination became vulnerable to a Soviet attack ? What a disaster would befall mankind!" (Among the countless other lies and distortions of the social-chauvinists, it might be noted that their military speculations are also absurd. In their eagerness to support imperialism and create war hysteria, the authors of this article conveniently "forget" that in U.S. imperialism's strategic nuclear arsenal, land-based missiles are being cut back and a more sophisticated nuclear submarine fleet and cruise missile system are rapidly being developed, systems which are more advanced means of slaughter than those in the Soviet arsenal. In reality, the social-chauvinists' nightmare of "inequality" is only another social-chauvinist bogeyman.)
These so-called "socialists" and "Marxist-Leninists" have overlooked onfy a trifle -- that the enormous U.S. military apparatus of mass murder is the apparatus of the U.S. imperialist financial oligarchy to suck the blood and crush the working masses. It is the vehicle of mass slaughter and oppression of the people the world over to serve the maximum profits and super-profits of a tiny handful of billionaire monopoly capitalists, just as the Soviet military apparatus serves the profits of the new imperialist-revisionist bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union.
Like the "C"PUSA revisionists, the "three worlds" social-chauvinists, too, are creating illusions that the fate of the peoples is determined solely by the leaders of imperialism, or more precisely, whether the so-called "pro-detente" or "anti-detente" politicians prevail in the Senate. Whereas the revisionist party favors the "pro-detente forces", those imperialist politicians who are particularly prone to lying demagogy about "peace" and "disarmament", the "CP (M-L)", however, favors the "anti-detente forces", the most rabid warmongering and militarist politicians who are allegedly a roadblock to war!
The Call states:
"Today, opposition forces within the U.S. ruling class who argue that SALT II gives nuclear superiority to the Soviets, have gathered enough strength to possibly override the treaty.... The pro-SALT wing argues that this arms agreement gives the Soviets a vested interest in maintaining a stable world and that it will, therefore, curb and restrain the Soviets from aggression.... Anti-SALT forces among the imperialists, however, maintain that the Soviets are not interested in stability but are out for nuclear superiority in the form of being able to launch a first strike and survive retaliation. While anti-SALT forces are being dubbed 'warmongers' for wanting to keep the USSR from developing a significant nuclear edge, in fact it is the pro-SALT appeasers of Soviet aggression who are heightening the war danger by allowing the USSR the opportunity to gain first-strike power."
Thus, The Call openly subscribes to the views of the Ronald Reagans and Henry Jacksons and the most militarist politicians who The Call demands must not be "dubbed 'warmongers'". The social-chauvinists' position is crystal clear: U.S. imperialism must arm itself even more rapidly in order to prevent "the other side" from "developing a nuclear edge" and "the opportunity to gain first strike power". Anything short of U.S. "nuclear superiority" will only "heighten the war danger". The Pentagon must arm to the degree that the Soviet Union would not "survive retaliation" and the greater glory of U.S. imperialism could triumph in the face of whatever challenge through the thermonuclear extermination of the peoples.
What utter fascism! What fiendish warmongering these social-chauvinist diehards have been reduced to! Down with social-chauvinism and class treason! Uphold Marxism-Leninism which demands that the people must not fall into fatalism and be turned into passive slaves and cannon fodder of the warmongering designs of imperialism and social-imperialism. Marxism-Leninism holds that the working class and people must rise in revolutionary struggle against the warmongers, with U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism at their head, and against their war preparations in order to prevent the war. And if the war cannot be prevented it must be turned into a liberation war for the overthrow of the source of aggressive war, the man-eating imperialist-capitalist system.
The brutal exploitation of the working class by the monopoly capitalists is clearly shown by the recent statistics on inflation, profits and real wages. These statistics show that inflation is soaring at an astronomical rate and that capitalist profits are rising to record levels, while the real wages of the workers are declining. They show that inflation is a tool of the monopoly capitalists to enrich themselves enormously at the expense of the workers, who are being driven deeper into impoverishment.
Inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 3.3% in the first three months of 1979 according to figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This amounts to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 13. 9%, which is a big jump from the already soaring 1978 inflation rate of 9%. The price of the major necessities which consume over 70% of a worker's family budget -- food, shelter, energy and medical care -- increased at the still more rapid annual rate of 16.4% in the first quarter of 1979. In March alone, the price of beef and veal rose 3.6%. Gasoline has increased in price at the incredible annual rate of 60% from January to May and is now over a dollar a gallon in many places. These facts have compelled the Carter administration to revise its earlier prediction of 7.4% inflation in 1979 to an 8. 5% prediction. But anyone with two eyes can see that even this "official optimism" is out of accord with reality and that the present annual inflation rate of over 13% shows no sign of diminishing. The recently released figures on the rise of the CPI in April further confirm this. The CPI rose 1.1% last month which is a 13% annual rate. And the 6% jump in the price of gasoline was the largest monthly increase since March 1974.
Skyrocketing inflation is a product of the decay of the monopoly capitalist system. All of the advanced capitalist countries are experiencing high inflation rates including, in the first quarter of 1979, West Germany (9% annual rate), Switzerland (8%), France and Britain (10%) and Italy (over 20%). The monopoly capitalists utilize the inflation of the currency to jack up prices and to thus increase their profits, regardless of any increase or decrease of production. In the U.S., as inflation has soared to dizzying heights, corporate profits have posted record gains for the last three years in a row.
The Commerce Department recently announced that corporate profits rose at an annual rate of $226. 9 billion in the first quarter of 1979, which was yet higher than the record figure of $224. 9 billion set in the fourth quarter of 1978, When compared with the first quarter of 1978, profits rose 32%. Once again, just as prices rose the highest for necessities, profits in these sectors also skyrocketed. For example, profits in housing (including real estate) were up 40% and fuel profits increased 36% over the first quarter of 1978. The oil monopolies continued their gluttony with Shell profits gaining 16%, Exxon up 37%, Gulf up 60%, Texaco up 81% and Mobil also garnering a "modest" 82%.
These fantastic profits are directly connected to the soaring rate of inflation. Due to the inflation of the currency, the monopoly capitalists are able to impose higher and higher prices on the market, while the wages of the workers fall further and further behind. It is much more difficult for the workers to achieve an increase in their wages than it is for the monopolies to jack up their prices, the workers having to wage determined struggles and bitter strikes to achieve higher pay. The soaring cost of living results in the workers receiving an actual wage cut, which in turn results in higher profits for the capitalists.
From 1972 through 1978, real wages were cut by 5%, 3% in 1978 alone. (These official government figures minimize the loss in purchasing power because they are based on the CPI, which does not properly reflect the soaring prices of the basic necessities. And of course, the workers who don't wage a struggle for higher wages suffer more of a drop in their real wages than those who do, while poor people on fixed incomes suffer utter ruin.) And this process of impoverishing the masses shows every sign of increasing. According to government figures, real weekly earnings, that is, the amount of money available to a worker to spend on goods, services and taxes once inflation is taken into account, declined by a record 2.6% in April alone! This is wage-cutting with a vengeance! (This 2.6% figure reflects a decline due both to inflation and to a decrease in hours worked due to recent industrial stagnation.)
Long ago Karl Marx correctly explained the relationship between capitalist profits and workers'wages: "Since the capitalist and workman have only to divide this limited value, that is, the value measured by the total labor of the working man, the more the one gets the less will the other get, and vice versa.... If wages fall, profits will rise; and if wages rise, profits will fall." (Wages, Price and Profit) The wage received by a worker is the price of his labor power, which is the commodity sold by the worker to the capitalist on a daily basis. This wage is not equivalent to the full value created by his labor in a given day's work, but only to a portion of this value. The value received by the worker in wages is in general only enough to sustain him and his family. That portion of value not returned to the worker in the form of wages is called surplus value and is realized by the capitalist as profit (industrial profit, financial profit for the creditors, and taxes). Thus it can be seen that the lower the workers' wages, the greater the capitalist's profit. This explains the constant attempts of the capitalist to reduce wages to the minimum so as to raise profits to the maximum. And this also explains the continual attempts of the workers to achieve the opposite and to resist the wage-cutting of the employers.
Inflation is a special device of the monopoly capitalist class to impose a general wage cut on the working class as a whole so as to reap maximum profits. The monopoly capitalists are able to achieve a general devaluation of the workers' wages on a class-wide scale by inflating the currency, jacking up prices, restraining wages and thus achieving a corresponding increase of profits for the entire class of monopoly capitalists. These criminal exploiters benefit tremendously from inflation, and find it to be very useful in saddling the workers with the burden of the economic crisis.
The bourgeoisie exerts much effort to confuse the source and cause of inflation and to escape the blame for it. The basic lie promoted by the capitalists is that inflation is caused by workers' wage increases, which allegedly set off a "wage- price spiral". Therefore, the workers must sacrifice, tighten their belts and restrain their wages to supposedly end inflation. This is falsely called "equality of sacrifice" because the bourgeoisie puts on a show of restraining prices as well. But this is simply a fraud to trick the workers into giving up their struggle against wage cuts.
Furthermore, the capitalists have now cooked up their fascist program of wage controls to assist them in suppressing the workers' movement. The "voluntary" controls are the preparatory stage to fully mandatory controls where strikes are banned outright and wage cuts are simply dictated to the workers. But even the current "voluntary" stage is marked by the government's use of coercion against the workers, whether one speaks of the federal government employees who were dictated a mere 5.5% wage "increase" last fall, or the recent Teamsters' strike where the government "subtly" issued threats against the truck drivers including the threat to ban their strike through the use of the Taft-Hartley Act.
But the workers' movement can not be destroyed either by the lies and deception of the bourgeoisie or by the threats and outright violence of the government. More and more the workers are rising up to resist the decline in their real wages due to inflation. This is shown by the vigorous development of the strike movement, including the recent strikes of the truck drivers, airline mechanics, rubber workers, and many others.
The huge increases in the cost of living coupled with the record high levels of profits being reaped by the big monopolies have served to intensify the burning anger of the workers and their hatred for the rich and the capitalist system. And with inflation an inherent feature of monopoly capitalism, and with the bourgeoisie forcing wage cuts onto the workers, it follows that the working class must wage a stern struggle to combat the effects of inflation. The vigorous struggle of the workers to resist the decline in their purchasing power due to inflation and to fight for higher wages is the only barrier to the capitalists reducing the workers to complete degradation and slavery. Carter's desperate attempts to saddle the workers with the wage controls demonstrate the fear held by the rich for the workers' movement. The workers must defy Carter's wage controls, overcome the obstructions of the labor traitors in alliance with the capitalists, and wage a stern fight against wage cuts. In this struggle, the workers not only defend their immediate interests but also accumulate experience and organization. They develop their class forces to wage mass revolutionary struggle under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Party to accomplish the socialist revolution. Only the socialist revolution will eliminate inflation and its ruinous consequences for the masses of people once and for all.
Today a vigorous movement is protesting the U.S. nuclear energy program. Massive demonstrations are being held against the nuclear electric power plants. The movement against the power plants is closely connected with the movement against U.S. imperialist war preparations. Demonstrations have taken place against nuclear weapons plants, against the launching of the Trident nuclear missile launching submarine, etc. Right from the start, the history of the nuclear energy program has been a history of frenzied war preparations. The U.S. monopoly capitalist dictators use the development of the nuclear power reactors to push forward their weapons research to provide nuclear plutonium for bombs, in order to stockpile energy for war, and in order to monopolize world energy supplies and strengthen the enslaving chains of the vast U.S. neo-colonial empire.
Historically the U.S. nuclear energy program began as a program of nuclear war. Before atomic energy's war potential was recognized by world imperialism, nuclear research was restricted to small scientific circles. In World War II, however, the U.S. government became aware of the destructive potential of nuclear energy and the possibility of producing atomic bombs. Under the direction of the Department of War (now hypocritically called the Department of Defense), the Manhattan Project was set up to produce atomic bombs. At that time the world's people were fighting hard to defeat German, Italian and Japanese fascism. But the U.S. big bourgeoisie had no intention of restricting the use of atomic bombs to the struggle against fascism. On the contrary, they stepped into the shoes of the defeated Axis and sought to use the atomic weapons for the purpose of establishing U.S. world hegemony. To this end, they dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the only two atomic bombs to have ever been used in war. The U.S. imperialists dropped them on the civilian populations despite the fact that Japan was already defeated and on the verge of surrendering. These bombs were not dropped as part of the anti-fascist struggle, but in order to initiate the policy of atomic blackmail. The U.S. imperialists wanted to intimidate the then-socialist Soviet Union and to stop the anti-fascist upsurge resulting from the victory over the fascist Axis. The U.S. imperialist criminals hoped to make up for lack of popular support by the use of weapons of mass slaughter.
After World War H, the U.S. set up the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to continue the development of nuclear weapons. Under its direction, nuclear reactors were set up to produce plutonium for atomic bombs. Since World War n the vast majority of nuclear scientists and technicians were employed or funded by the A EC or with other government grants for nuclear weapons work and related research.
Scared of the massive opposition of the American and world's people to nuclear war, the U.S. monopoly capitalist dictators attempted to cover over their wild and frenzied preparations for nuclear war by shouting themselves hoarse about the "peaceful uses of atomic energy". A wonderful dream world of nuclear capitalism was painted, where even locomotives would be powered by economical nuclear reactors. To this day we are still surrounded by the propaganda for the virtues of irradiated potatoes (which are supposed to last longer without sprouting) and the "cheap" nuclear power which causes endless utility rate hikes. But the actions of these warmongers speak louder than their lying words. The "peaceful uses" are a mere byproduct of the frenzied war research. It was not until the late 1950's, after more than 15 years of war research, research that had already produced the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb and the nuclear submarine, that the first American nuclear power plant for electric power generation went into operation. And indeed, the first nuclear power reactor was modeled after the nuclear reactor that powered the atomic submarine Nautilus. To this day, research and development of nuclear reactors is closely connected with military research.
In 1974, again attempting to clean up the image of U.S. imperialism's nuclear power program, the CIA directors, nuclear reactor builders and Pentagon generals who have run the A EC from its inception decided to make some cosmetic changes. They were faced with the rise of opposition to the nuclear power reactors. The long-hated A EC was disbanded and an "official" separation made between the regulation, financing, subsidizing, licensing and whitewashing of nuclear power reactors and that of nuclear weapons research and production. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was set up for the "peaceful" side of the nuclear energy program. This deception has been eagerly taken up by the social-democrats, Democratic Party politicians and other people seeking to blunt and liquidate the movement against the nuclear energy program -- who now shout to the skies about further improving the NRC.
Today, U.S. imperialism is continuing the frantic production of nuclear weapons as the mainstay of its strategic forces. Since 1972, the U.S. capitalist warmongers have more than tripled their stockpile of nuclear warheads, from about 3,600 to nearly 12,000. They have developed a whole variety of new nuclear weapons and delivery devices, from the neutron bomb, the cruise missile, the Trident submarine to the Minuteman HI intercontinental missile. As well, imperialist war maneuvers are taking place. Under the code name "Global Shield", the U.S. imperialists are planning to hold a nuclear war exercise later this year. This is to be a series of mock air battles and nuclear bombing rims over Canada and other countries. Various "allies" from the reactionary pacts and military alliances are also participating. The Strategic Air Command is gathering more than 280 nuclear bombs, 600 tanker aircraft, and 120,000 troops to participate in this militarist exercise.
Besides direct weapons research and production, the U.S. imperialist nuclear energy program serves the maintenance of the U.S. neo-colonial world empire in other ways as well. The U.S. imperialists are exporting power plants in order to monopolize world energy supplies and to further tighten the chains of U.S. imperialist domination. U.S. monopoly corporations are building or planning to build nuclear reactors in 15 countries. U.S. imperialist chieftain Carter has made statements calling for nuclear power to provide 35% to 45% of the world's electricity by the year 2000. When a country switches to nuclear power, the U.S. exercises its domination in the following ways:
1) the U.S. imperialists and Soviet social-imperialists control the process for the "enrichment" of uranium ore, and all countries must have their uranium ore "enriched" by one of the two superpowers;
2) the U.S. imperialists generally maintain control over the technology of the exported nuclear reactors, usually only lease the reactor core to foreign utilities, and control the servicing, repairs and refueling of the reactors; and
3) the extremely expensive reactors tie the host country with many financial strings, just as any other imperialist "investments", "credits" or "aid" does.
The U.S. nuclear energy program is also poisoning the people with radioactive wastes. Like other military programs, it provides high rates of profits. The U.S. nuclear energy program is a program of war preparations, of neo-colonial enslavement, of wild profiteering and of criminal poisoning of the people. It is a program intimately tied up with imperialism and imperialist war. This exposes as nonsense the schemes of various elements and government reformers who are proposing that the solution is to improve the NRC or to provide a safe, humane and reasonable program of nuclear war preparations. These schemes are simply glorifications of the presently existing state of affairs or points of advice to the government on how to blunt and liquidate the developing mass movement. The truth is that there cannot be capitalism without profiteers, imperialism without militarists. Even more absurd are those suggesting that the problem is that the nuclear energy program is unregulated or that the solution is the nationalization of the nuclear power industry. The nuclear energy industry has right from the start been highly regulated and subsidized by the government. It was given all the attention of any key weapons program. Better regulation is simply the slogan of the government, while nationalization under a government of imperialism and the oil billionaires would at most simply reshuffle the boards of directors a bit.
The only real solution is the development of the mass struggle. It is only the development of the mass demonstrations that has extracted some promises of concessions. And it is the development of the movement onto the road of mass revolutionary struggle against imperialism that can strike serious blows at the U.S. imperialist nuclear energy program. It is imperialism that is at the root of the U.S. nuclear energy program.
In Washington, D. C. on May 6th 100,000 people demonstrated against the U.S. government's nuclear power programs. The masses denounced both the criminal profiteering and the poisoning of the masses by the government and the nuclear monopolists. This was the largest of the growing wave of anti-nuclear protests against the U.S. government's nuclear energy program.
The COUSML vigorously participated in the demonstration holding aloft a bold red banner declaring "NO" TO U.S. IMPERIALISM'S NUCLEAR ENERGY PROGRAM!" The COUSML comrades distributed thousands of leaflets among the demonstrators which exposed U.S. imperialism's nuclear energy program as a program of preparations for nuclear war, of neo-colonial enslavement, of wild profiteering and criminal poisoning of the people. The COUSML banner sparked great enthusiasm from the masses. During the course of the afternoon large numbers of demonstrators, including many young people who had countless questions to ask the COUSML comrades, gathered around the COUSML banner and participated in lively discussions on all aspects of U.S. imperialism's nuclear energy program.
This demonstration in Washington, DC is part of a massive wave of anti-nuclear demonstrations across the U.S. involving tens of thousands of people. In recent weeks, 500 people demonstrated in Buffalo, NY to denounce the transportation of nuclear waste products through that city. In New York City, 400 students called for the dismantling of the Triga Reactor on the Columbia University campus, hi Grants, New Mexico, 500 people demonstrated at the site of the Gulf Oil Mount Taylor Uranium Mine calling for the immediate end of uranium mining there and denounced the criminal activities of the oil monopolists and the U.S. government which has led to the lung cancer deaths of 25 Navaho Indian miners and the disability of 20 other Navaho miners now dying from lung cancer. In Charlestown, Rhode Island, more than 2,000 people demonstrated at the site of a nuclear power plant. In addition, demonstrations are being planned across the U.S. for the weekend of June 2nd and 3rd.
The anti-nuclear movement is closely linked with the movement against the frenzied war preparations of the U.S. imperialists. Along with the protests against the nuclear power program, massive demonstrations have taken place denouncing the production of nuclear weapons to be used for mass slaughter in imperialist wars. In Rocky Flats, Colorado, more than 10,000 people demonstrated at a nuclear weapons plant. In Groton, Connecticut, more than 3,000 denounced the launching of the first Trident missile launching submarine. At the launching, "Mrs. Warmonger" Rosalynn Carter spoke about "strategic arms limitation". This speech by Rosalynn Carter only further exposed the fraud of the Carter administration's imperialist pacifism: sweet phrases about disarmament while frantically arming to the teeth. There have also been recent demonstrations against the reintroduction of the draft, against armaments production, against the formation of the aggressive U.S.-China alliance, and against other war preparations of U.S. imperialism.
These numerous demonstrations and actions show that the American people oppose the U.S. imperialists' nuclear energy program and have a burning hatred for U.S. imperialist aggression and war. Furthermore these events show that the big bourgeoisie and its flunkeys are doing everything they can to divert this movement and liquidate any genuine opposition to the monopoly capitalist warmongers. For this reason, numerous Democratic Party politicians and their allies, various social-democrats and other opportunists have climbed aboard this movement in order to subvert it from within. In Washington, Tom Hayden and other Democratic Party hacks tried to use the mass demonstration to advance the electoral ambitions of Kennedy and other leaders of their monopoly capitalist party, and even Governor Brown was put up on the stage, only to be loudly booed by the demonstrators. The Democratic politicians, the social-democratic lap dogs of the big bourgeoisie from the Institute for Policy Studies and numerous other opportunists and reactionaries, have latched onto this movement in an attempt to divest it of any militancy. They want to reconcile the masses with the monopoly capitalist enemy and to tie the movement to the coattails of one section or the other of the bourgeoisie. They are striving to limit the aims of the movement to the perfecting of the various nuclear regulatory bodies, a demand which the government itself is promoting to pacify the anger of the masses, and similar "reforms". And they are suggesting that such fraudulent measures will in some way change the criminal nature of U.S. imperialism's nuclear energy program and war preparations. In this way, these elements are creating maximum illusions about the possibility of a charitable monopoy capitalism which can "put people's safety before profits" and of a "peaceful" U.S. imperialism without deadly war preparations.
The only genuine opposition to the U.S. imperialists' nuclear energy program and war preparations is the mass revolutionary struggle, the revolutionary activity of the broad masses of working and progressive people. And it is only the proletarian socialist revolution that will overthrow the monopoly capitalist order, allow the proper development and regulation of nuclear energy and smash the Pentagon warmongers' preparations for nuclear war.
[Photo.]
Recently the RCYB (youth wing of the "RCP, USA") organized a series of conferences across the U.S. to incite war hysteria., These conferences were universally a big flop. Below are excerpts from a leaflet from the Detroit Branch of COUSML which was distributed at the conference at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This leaflet shows that the real issue is not "Is WORLD WAR 3 Coming?" as the "RCP,USA" proclaims in glaring letters, but the path and orientation for the development of the mass revolutionary struggle. The leaflet also indignantly denounced the "RCP, USA" for taking part in all the reactionary campaigns of the "three worlders". Whether it is gangster attacks against socialist Albania, anticommunist agitation against Comrade Stalin and the scientific theory of Marxism-Leninism, writing off the world revolution or creating war hysteria, today the "RCP,USA" has emerged as the most shameless hatchet man and commando squad for the decrepit Klonskyite social-chauvinists and "three worlders".
* * * * *
Today, faced with all-round crisis, the U.S. monopoly capitalist rulers are trying to get out of the crisis by squeezing the working masses with soaring inflation, inhuman speedup and mass unemployment. Simultaneously, bloodstained U.S. imperialism is preparing for new wars of imperialist aggression. The U.S. imperialists and Soviet social-imperialists, the two superpower leaders of world imperialism, are working hand in hand to prevent the revolution, while they are also fighting with each other for a bigger share of the world....
The American people are not sitting idly by, allowing the monopoly capitalist ruling class to develop its program of wild and frenzied war preparations in peace and quiet.... In recent months, tens of thousands have participated in protests across the country against the war preparations of U.S. imperialism.... It is only the mass revolutionary struggle of the people which can combat the wild and frenzied war preparations by pushing forward the revolution of the American people. The path of the movement against war preparations is mass revolutionary struggle. The goal is the socialist revolution to overthrow the monopoly capitalist warmongers.
The revolutionary mass movement is directly confronted with the various political deceptions of the imperialist warmongers. The capitalists prepare for war not only with bombs and missiles, but with reactionary propaganda to disarm and confuse the masses. The world imperialists have two basic types of such propaganda. On the one hand they promote imperialist pacifism. Through SALT agreements and sweet talk about "detente", they try to hide the war preparations and preach fatalism, that the world must hold its breath and beg hat in hand for the benevolence of the two superpowers. On the other hand, open warmongering and crude chauvinism is promoted. Each country must be on top, with the biggest nuclear arsenal. Both these types of propaganda attack, first and foremost, the revolution, both are aimed at writing off the revolution and putting the people into a passive position, at converting the people into fatalist slaves and cannon fodder.
The reactionary propaganda of the imperialists is echoed by the social-chauvinists -- those who are socialists in words but chauvinists in deeds. One section of social-chauvinists and revisionists echoes the imperialist pacifism about "detente" and SALT. They are "socialists" who are not for revolution but for a more refined, humanitarian imperialism, "socialists" who are for capitalism. They include both followers of modern Soviet revisionism and various brands of social-democrats and "left wings" of the Democratic Party. They paint sweet opium dreams of an American capitalism that can "convert" to peace, dreams of capitalism without profiteers, imperialism without militarists and warmongers.
On the other hand, the theorists of the "three worlds" and the whole international opportunist trend based on Chinese revisionism are straight-out warmongers. The "three worlders" are pushing fatalism and war hysteria to try to liquidate the revolutionary struggles of the masses. They say that revolution is not on the agenda, that war is inevitable. They preach fatalism and try to whip up a war hysteria even better than Carter by putting banner headlines across the front pages of their yellow rags reading "World War III Looms". Starting a few years ago they began to create big debates on how inevitable is the next war. For these social-chauvinists, since they write off the revolution, there is only one question -- "which imperialist power should we ally with?' Their answer is that the American working class should line up behind its own bourgeoisie and "strike the main blow at the foreign threat. " These "three worlders" are just the "left" wing of the Pentagon. They have openly come out for U.S. imperialist war preparations including the building and production of the B-l bomber, the Trident submarine, the neutron bomb and for the development of the warmongering U.S.-China alliance.
The "RCP, USA" claims to oppose the open social-chauvinism of "striking the main blow at the foreign threat. " But in fact they too are just "three worlders" and followers of Chinese revisionism, who support all the basic theses of social-chauvinism. That is why the "RCP,USA" has taken up all the wild war hysteria and fatalism of the Chinese revisionist leaders and the U.S. "three worlder" sects. The "RCP" has issued the call for conferences across the country under the hysterical signboard of "WORLD WAR 3 - IS IT COMING?" The "RCP" asks questions like "Would the next war snuff out the human race?" The "RCP" has written off the world revolution. They attack the socialist bastion of world revolution, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. They say that the world is simply divided into "two rival blocs headed by the superpowers", and they leave out the question of revolution (See Revolution, November 1978, p. 15).
In reality, the world today is divided between on one hand world imperialism and reaction, led by U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, and on the other hand, the forces of revolution, including the world proletariat, socialist Albania and the national liberation movement. The mass revolutionary struggle against war preparations demands that one throws overboard the "three worlder's" hysteria on war and bases one's whole outlook instead on the development of the forces of revolution, on the division of the world into the forces of revolution fighting the forces of capitalist reaction.
The question facing us today is... how do we develop the movement against war preparations ? The path forward is mass revolutionary struggle. The issue today is not "whether war will wipe out humanity", "is World War III inevitable", etc., but the path forward for the revolutionary struggle -- how to mobilize the millions of working masses to the utmost. In waging the revolutionary struggle against imperialist war and in mobilizing the masses, the revolutionary movement must oppose all the reactionary propaganda of the imperialists and their lapdogs, the social-chauvinists. In particular, they must oppose the war hysteria of the theorists of the "three worlds". Not "three worlds" theory, but Marxism-Leninism, is the only revolutionary theory. Not war hysteria, but unceasing development of the revolutionary movement against the monopoly capitalist dictators, is the path forward for the people.
DOWN WITH U.S. IMPERIALIST WAR PREPARATIONS !
DOWN WITH THE "THREE WORLDS" THEORY AND ALL SOCIAL-CHAUVINSIM!
WAGE MASS REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE AGAINST STARVATION, FASCISM AND WAR!
FOR REVOLUTION, AGAINST WAR!
Eighty-three hundred rubber workers of the United Rubber Workers Union are currently waging a just strike for higher wages, improved cost-of-living allowance and job security against the Uniroyal Tire and Rubber Company. Sixty-one hundred workers walked out on May 9 at four Uniroyal tire plants in Detroit; Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; Opelika, Alabama; and Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Also struck were eight non-tire plants with 2,200 workers in Chicago, Indiana, Connecticut, and Painesville, Ohio. The workers are fighting both the Uniroyal monopoly capitalists and the Carter administration's wage controls.
During the decade prior to their 1976 contract the rubber workers had suffered real wage cuts of more than 11.5% due to inflation combined with the URW leadership's treacherous capitulation to Nixon's wage controls in the 1973 contract. In fact, while rubber workers in 1965 made 22ยฃ an hour more than auto workers for example, by 1976 they had fallen behind by $1.35 an hour. To make up for these wage cuts, in 1976 over 68,000 rubber workers fought a militant and determined 141-day long strike against the Big Four rubber companies (Goodyear, Firestone, Uniroyal, and B.F. Goodrich). They won a substantial wage increase and, for the first time, a cost-of-living allowance. Their tenacious and arduous struggle badly hurt the capitalists and inspired and encouraged the whole working class. Today the bourgeoisie is again trying to use wage controls to cut the workers' wages. Fearing a recurrence of the vigorous struggle of 1976, the capitalists, their government, and their bought and paid for labor traitor, URW President Peter Bommarito, have been working overtime to try to sabotage the workers' struggle.
When the contract with the Big Four expired April 20, Bommarito kept the 55,000 rubber workers on the job. He swore that he had reached a pattern-setting verbal agreement with Uniroyal, but that the government had "pressured" Uniroyal into backing out so as to abide by Carter's "voluntary" wage controls. Yet with all his talk about a "guideline-busting" agreement, Bommarito never revealed concrete facts and figures on what the union was demanding or the capitalists were offering. Thus he refuses to mobilize the workers to fight for the maximum wage increase possible. Ever since Carter announced his guideline for a combined wage and benefit increase of 7%, the labor bureaucrats and capitalists have been collaborating to hide actual dollar figures. Their aim is to cause confusion among the workers, put them in a passive position, and disintegrate their ranks so as to impose a wage-cutting settlement.
To "oppose" the Carter administration's "intervention" in negotiations, Bommarito turned to the courts of the rich and begged them for an injunction to make Carter stop "interfering". At the same time he fired off a sharp telegram to Carter "militantly" insisting that Carter get congressional authority to make wage controls mandatory. This apparent contradiction between denouncing government "intervention" while demanding more rigorous government intervention is really no contradiction at all. Labor bureaucrats like Bommarito want mandatory wage controls because they dream that then wage-cutting contracts will be easier to impose -- just throw up their hands and tell the workers "there's nothing we can do", just as Bommarito did with the Nixon controls in 1973.
After losing his court case, Bommarito still delayed the strike because of his extreme concern for Uniroyal's "delicate financial situation" -- a steep drop in net income in 1978 due to closing a number of plants and throwing workers into the streets! Then, fussing and fuming that Uniroyal wouldn't be "reasonable" and settle, Bommarito declared he would "punish" the capitalists by withdrawing certain concessions he had promised them. Finally, when-his stalling tactics could continue no longer, a strike was called -- not against all of the Big Four as the workers had vehemently demanded in 1976 -- but only against Uniroyal, the company with the smallest number of workers under contract. These despicable efforts by Bommarito to sabotage the rubber workers' struggle starkly expose the role of the labor bureaucrats as the trojan horse of the bourgeoisie within the workers' movement. Nevertheless, despite his treachery, the rubber workers have persisted in their strike against Uniroyal.
Today the monopoly capitalists are trying to shove the burden of their economic crisis onto the backs of the working class and in this way maximize their profits. Through inflation across-the-board pay cuts are inflicted on the workers while capitalist profits soar. Wage controls, which Bommarito so ardently supports, are part of the fascist offensive of the rich against the workers. The controls aim to suppress the workers' strikes, cut their wages and increase profits. Carter's wage controls program further serves to try to pull together the capitalists and stiffen their backbone in opposition to the just demands and struggles of the workers, as in the Carter administration pressure on Uniroyal. But the bourgeoisie has been experiencing many difficulties in trying to impose their "voluntary" wage controls on the workers, and today they are nervously watching the rubber workers. Barry Bosworth, director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability, admitted that if the rubber workers get an agreement over the guidelines It would "damage" the "anti-inflation effort" and "encourage other workers" to "go beyond appropriate pay levels".
In these conditions, Bommarito and his fellow labor traitors refuse to mobilize the workers for struggle but instead try to undermine the workers and restrict their struggle every step of the way. This is criminal activity. The bourgeoisie concedes nothing to the working class without a bitter fight. For the workers to defend their vital interests, to prevent themselves and their families from being reduced to utter impoverishment and starvation, the only path is to break with the anti-working class line of the labor bureaucrats and wage vigorous mass struggle against the capitalist exploiters and Carter's wage controls.
Eighteen thousand six hundred United Airlines mechanics ended their 53-day strike on May 23, the longest strike ever waged against this airline company. The workers have been fighting for higher wages to combat the ruinous effects of soaring prices on their real income. The strike began on March 31, after the workers had twice rejected tentative pacts reached betweep the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Union and United Airlines on February 2 and March 19. It completely shut down the airline's flights for the duration and cut deeply into its revenues.
The airline mechanics' new contract reportedly contains provisions for a 30% increase in the base wage over the three years of the contract, raising the average wage rate from $10 to $13 an hour. The workers also won an improved COLA clause, improved pension benefits and better mealtime pay provisions.
The Airline mechanics' wage settlement alone is considerably higher than President Carter's combined wage, benefit and COLA limit of 7%,to which the bourgeoisie is demanding that the workers submit. The capitalist government is downplaying this fact claiming that the workers did not really defy Cartel's wage controls, because settlements above the wage limit are supposedly exempt from the controls if they match other settlements in the same industry reached prior to the announcement of the 7% guideline last fall. This includes the TWA mechanics' settlement of October 1978. However, the terms of the United Airlines mechanics' contract also exceed this pact according to officials of the airline industry. These facts are sufficient to show that the American working class, in this case the airline mechanics, are in a fighting mood and are not intimidated by the "voluntary" wage controls of the government of the rich. The recent strike against United Airlines shows that the workers are determined to resist the efforts of the bourgeoisie to saddle them with the burden of the capitalist economic crisis.
(Following is an excerpt from a leaflet issued by the Louisville Branch of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, May 22, 1979.)
On May 9, 1979, the Philip Morris workers in Louisville, as well as the workers in Richmond, voted down the anti-worker proposal of the Philip Morris capitalists for a nine-year "No Strike" pledge. This is a victory for the tobacco workers and a defeat for the capitalists and all their a- gents in the ranks of the workers. It is to the credit of the Philip Morris workers that they have stopped this attack and defended their class interests. The defeat of the "No Strike" pledge shoots holes in the plan of the capitalists to further outlaw strikes and have a legal excuse to justify using the full force of their government in attacking the workers when strikes do break out. In voting down the "No Strike" pledge, the Philip Morris workers have taken up the line to "DEFEND THE RIGHT TO STRIKE" and "VOTE DOWN THE 9- YEAR 'NO STRIKE' PLEDGE". This is a victory not just for the Philip Morris workers' struggle, but for the city wide workers' movement. Now, when the Philip Morris bloodsuckers are licking their wounds and trying to get back on their feet by dressing up their rotten "No Strike" proposal with new bribes, the workers must continue to defend their right to strike. They must be vigilant against the maneuvers of the Philip Morris moneybags in order to defeat the capitalists' attacks. DENOUNCE PHILIP MORRIS' MEAGER BRIBES! and PREPARE TO VOTE DOWN THE 'NO STRIKE' PLEDGE AGAIN!
(Taken from a leaflet issued on May 14, 1979, by the Seattle Branch of the Central Organization of Uo S. Marxist-Leninists.)
The Todd shipyard capitalists are unveiling the hideous "Absenteeism-Tardiness Guidelines" against the workers. These guidelines establish rules and regulations even more vicious and arbitrary than before, and will be used to spread the atmosphere of intimidation and harassment and to fire militant and class conscious workers. They are also another attack on the health and safety of the shipyard workers0 The Todd monopolists have instituted these guidelines as part of their program to "increase productivity", that is, to exploit the workers to the bone and thus secure maximum profits.
The guidelines state that there is no such thing as "excusable" absences or tardiness, leaving the matter entirely in the hands of the leadmen, quartermen, and foremen. It is now up to them to grant absences for severe injury, illness, death in the immediate family, and so on. The Todd bosses are quick to remind the workers that they have no "right" to absences or tardies, but only "privileges" bestowed on them by the moneybags. A worker can be fired "if unexcused absence or tardiness exceeds three (3) occurrences in a six (6) month period."
The Todd moneybags are trying to justify these guidelines with the old song and dance about the workers being lazy and irresponsible, thereby forcing the poor struggling moneybags to take such measures. But anyone who has worked in a shipyard knows that it is the atmosphere of harassment and intimidation, and the rotten working conditions which cause absenteeism. Shipyard workers face some of the most dangerous and unhealthy conditions in any industry, conditions for which the shipyard capitalists themselves are responsible. According to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, one out of four shipyard workers suffers work-related illnesses or injuries in the course of a year. The numerous fatal and near- fatal injuries at both the Todd and Lockheed shipyards also testify to the man-eating nature of the shipbuilding industry. The new guidelines are an outright attack on the health and safety of the workers by pressuring them to go to work and face the dangerous conditions, even if they are ill, injured or exhausted, etc. These facts expose the vicious anti-worker campaign of the capitalists against "absenteeism-tardiness".
This campaign is nothing but another attack on the job rights of the shipyard workers as part of the company's intensifying productivity drive. Since Todd's guided missile frigate (FFG) building program has become a real gold mine, their bloodthirsty appetite for more gold is only expanding. By forcing the workers to come to work under all conditions, and by denying them breaks during both shifts, etc., the capitalists are hoping to rake in more profits out of the hides of the workers. The recent attacks also include the rule prohibiting the workers from leaving their specific work area, even during the typical slack time, which used to at least partially compensate for the lack of breaks. Women workers are even being timed on their trips to the restroom. The workers are under constant surveillance. This outrageous harassment is not only designed to increase the intensity of labor, but also to provide a pretext for firing workers who dare to resist the vicious exploitation of the shipyard slavedrivers and war merchants. In the eyes of the rich moneybags, the workers only have the so-called right to come under the dictate of the owners and obey their every order -- such as to breathe the poisonous air and to work in unsafe tanks and enclosed areas. Todd is even trampling into the dirt their own bourgeois laws which supposedly give the working class, certain minimal rights, including the right to work breaks. The recent attacks at Todd are part of the nationwide productivity drive of the monopoly capitalist class and its state machine, to shift the burden of the capitalist economic crisis onto the backs of the working class.
The Todd bigshots are still smarting from the boilermakers' work stoppage last February and want to take revenge against any resistance of the workers, who daily stand up for their rights. In addition, our leaflets have completely exposed Todd's lies and deception about the future of their FFG building program being "in danger". Under this hoax Todd has been yelling that in order for it to remain competitive with other shipyards and to continue to receive FFG contracts, the workers must "increase their productivity" and sweat more. Our last leaflet pointed out that the Navy and Todd had arranged in advance that Todd-Seattle would receive contracts for as many as 12 more frigates. Sure enough, on April 27, it was announced that Todd-Seattle would immediately receive two more frigates and the Seattle Times reported on that day that Todd-Seattle would receive a large portion of the 59 FFG's to be built. This revealed Todd's propaganda about "remaining competitive" as a lie, a ''scare tactic" designed to increase productivity and further inflate Todd's already fat bank account. So Todd's cheer-leading-style hubbub about "8 for 8 to Make Our Frigate Future Great" went sour. Now the company has switched tactics, dropped their deceptive smiles, and is applying outright coercion through their big club -- the "Absenteeism-Tardiness Guidelines".
The workers must prepare for struggle to resist these attacks of the rich. To be successful, the workers must defeat the obstructions of the labor aristocrats who always try to tie the workers' hands. Now that word of the guidelines has spread throughout the yard, the workers are demanding that the trade union bosses come to the yard and explain why the company is getting off scot-free in launching these attacks. The workers well remember that it was the labor traitors who sabotaged the boilermakers' struggle over job rights in February -- threatened the workers and ordered them to "abide by the Master Agreement" -- which is nothing but a no-strike, sellout pact.
In the preparations for struggle against the moneybags, the workers are also facing a stepped- up campaign to split the workers through the use of hysterical racist propaganda. The company and its agents are trying to divide and rule over the workers by saying that the problem in the yard is the black workers and the Korean immigrant workers. An attempt is even being made to pit the Afro-American workers against the Korean workers. Todd is trying to have the workers fight one another while the most vicious attacks are carried out against the workers as a whole. But this racist propaganda will fail because the workers are developing their struggle against the attacks of the company.
The issue in front of the workers is to oppose and denounce the "Absenteeism-Tardiness Guidelines" and all of the other attacks of the company, including their racist propaganda. The workers must prepare for struggle against the capitalists' attempts to strip them of all rights and further exploit them.
(Leaflet issued on May 29, 1979 by the Denver Committee Against Social-Chauvinism and distributed to a factory in that city.)
In the last two weeks the top company officials have held meetings announcing to the workers that they will not receive a cost of living raise this June but instead will receive a meager 3% "productivity increase raise". According to the company to "earn" the raise the workers will be expected to each produce more.
Through these meetings the capitalist owners of the factory have arrogantly announced their intention to maximize their profits by slashing the workers' real wages and by speeding the workers up. A 3% "raise" at a time when the cost of living is rising at an annual rate of 15% is absolutely ridiculous. Since the workers last raise in December of 1978 the cost of living has risen almost 7%. This means that even with the company's meager 3% "raise" the workers have suffered a 4% pay cut since December. It means that even with the "raise" a worker who was making $6.00 per hour in December has suffered a 24ยข an hour cut in the purchasing power of his wages. But not only has the company found inflation a convenient tool to cut the workers' wages, it is now expecting the workers to work even harder than before for less. That is why they are calling it a "productivity raise".
To add insult to injury the company has set in motion certain of its flunkeys to spread the lie that the problem is certain "lazy workers who cheat on scrap" etc. This is turning truth upside down. It is the workers who produce everything that goes out the door while the rich capitalist owners who do none of the work accumulate millions in profits from the work of the workers. It is also these same rich capitalists who are trying to cheat the workers on their already miserable wages by paying them with dollars that buy less each week. At the same time they sell the goods the worker produces for more. The slanders that are spread against the workers are meant to put them on the psychological defensive so that they cannot organize to defend themselves from the attacks of the company.
The vicious wage cutting policy just announced by the capitalists also provides a valuable lesson to the workers. In 1978 when a powerful trend was developing among the workers in the factory to get organized and to wage a mass struggle to defend their interests, the capitalists pretended to be oh so generous and concerned. They granted wage increases of about 10% (3.5% in June and 6.5% in December). These wage increases were almost enough to keep up with the rise in the cost of living which also went up 10% last year. But in 1979 when the cost of living is going up at a rate of 15% and when the capitalists think that the workers have let their guard down, the company is telling the workers that they must be satisfied with a meager 3% wage increase. This shows that the company's propaganda about its concern for the well being of the workers is just a trick to keep the workers from the path of active resistance. It also shows that only by the most stubborn mass struggle can the workers even maintain their current standard of living.
In their propaganda to justify their attacks on the workers' wages, the company owners claim that they are limiting the wage "increase" to 3% because they are forced to do so by Carter's "anti-inflation" program. This is a ridiculous argument. Since when do capitalists have to be forced to maximize their profits by keeping their workers' wages as low as possible? The fact of the matter is that the company is very happy with the assistance that the government is giving it in keeping the workers' wages down.
Carter's "anti-inflation" program is also a big fraud. It has nothing to do with combatting the skyrocketing prices which are ruining the masses of people. Anyone who has watched the price of gas go up with Carter's blessing can tell you that. Carter keeps pushing the big lie that price increases are caused by the workers' wage increases but this is not the case. Wage increases have nothing to do with inflation. Wage increases only cut into the profits of the capitalists. The skyrocketing prices and inflation are caused by the speculation and price gouging by the big financiers and monopolists and by the enormous expenditures of the government on the bureaucracy, army, police, etc. A government which is tied to the rich by 1,000 strings and which is in fact a dictatorship of the rich will never do anything about the real causes of inflation. Carter only talks about fighting inflation to justify the vicious wage cutting program which the whole capitalist class and its government is carrying out against the whole working class.
In the situation of the current deep economic crisis, the capitalist class is preparing for even bigger attacks on the workers. The workers must step up their resistance struggle against the capitalists and prepare for mass revolutionary struggle to make the rich bear the burden of all the crises which they have created and to overthrow the dictatorship of the rich altogether.
(The following article is reprinted from the Rhode Island Worker, newspaper of the Providence Branch of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, April 15, 1979.)
The Carter administration introduced legislation March 6, 1979 for national "cost containment" requiring all states to have a program of hospital cost controls similar to the system in Rhode Island. This legislation was hailed as a "centerpiece" of Carter's "battle against inflation" and was highlighted in the State of the Union message as a major step toward "quality health care at reasonable cost." This is a vicious fraud. The centerpiece of Carter's "battle against inflation" has always been wage controls. "Cost containment" is part of the government's program of "wage-price controls" -- to shift the burden of the continuing economic crisis onto the workers and realize maximum profits for the capitalist class. "Cost containment" blames the people for the high cost of medical care while the profits of the monopoly capitalists in the health care industry continue to soar. Its aim is not only to cut the wages of health care workers but to speed up and intensify their labor and reduce the quantity and quality of health services for the people. This is justified under the hoax of "eliminating waste", "unnecessary operations", "excess hospital beds", etc.
The state of Rhode Island is being cited as a model of "cost containment" in the U.S. by Carter and his administration. Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano visited Rhode Island last October to praise the state's "prospective reimbursement" or MAXICAP system of controls. This visit was a slap in the face to the hospital workers who were given a 6% "cost of living" raise at that time and only 5% the year before, while inflation has been more than double that amount, particularly for the immediate necessities such as food and fuel. These "raises", in percentage amounts of the notoriously low wages already existing in Rhode Island, are in reality pay cuts. They are a real measure of the "success" of cost controls which have been imposed since the Nixon administration.
"Prospective Reimbursement" began in 1970 as a system of negotiation between the state's largest hospitals and Blue Cross officials, to determine the yearly budget in advance and announce to the workers that there was simply no money left for them because the budget wouldn't allow it! This agreement was followed by the freeze on wages imposed by Nixon in 1971-74. Late in 1974, after the expiration of Nixon's 5.5% controls in June, at the height of double digit inflation, the workers received a 5% average raise with the stipulation that "third parties" would not allow more than that. This was the outcome of MAXICAP. The "prospective reimbursement" was negotiated jointly with representatives of 16 major hospitals, Blue Cross financiers, and the State Budget Office, allowing an overall increase of 13.8% in operating expenditures for the coming year, with each hospital's budget then set by this body.
The Federal government sat in on the negotiations and was delighted with the outcome. It saw in this a "voluntary" method of "fighting inflation" without imposing the mandatory wage controls which had earned fascist Nixon the hatred of the working class. It funded a three- year program for MAXICAP to be studied as a model for national controls. At that time President Ford also announced his illfated WIN program (Whip Inflation Now) which called on citizens to turn off lights, lower thermostats, save paper bags, plant gardens, and put the tremendous savings in the bank! As well, he told business not to raise prices "more than costs or services absolutely require. " The program resulted in a huge stock of unsold WIN buttons, not to mention a huge rate of inflation.
MAXICAP did nothing to slow the increase of hospital rates, anymore than the controls of Nixon, but they increased the booty of the capitalists by a large amount. The cost of a room at Rhode Island Hospital had doubled from 1964 to 1969. It was set at $71 (minimum) in October 1969. A hospital accountant blamed this on "rising wages and benefits". He complained that the hospital "can't make profits" because "starting wages... have risen anywhere between 54% and 72% in the same period", and that "wages and benefits made up more than 76% of the cost!" Simple arithmetic will show that the cost of a room did not double because of the rise in workers' wages. The year 1970 saw an increase to $80 under the "prospective reimbursement" agreement. The MAXICAP in 1974 allowed this rate to rise to $114, or 60% more in five years. By 1978 it reached $149, or 110% more in nine years. Emergency room service, which in 1974 was $24 a visit, by 1977 had increased 75% to $42. In 1978 it was replaced with a sliding scale of charges ranging up to $135!
These skyrocketing prices for the most commonly used hospital services are representative of the prices charged for hospital services to the masses. They indicate how profitable the field of health care has become under cost controls, especially when it is considered that the restraint has been placed on workers' wages, not the overpriced drugs, supplies, equipment, insurance, construction, etc. The overall result of the system used in Rhode Island is that the rate of increase in expenditures for the last four years has been 14.2%, 12.5%, 11%, and 10% in the 16 Rhode Island hospitals covered by MAXICAP. Given that the major part of the expenditure, workers' wages, has been held virtually constant by means of wage freezes and staff reductions, we can see that the amount handed over to the capitalists, financiers and bureaucrats who run the hospitals has more than doubled, increasing their profits beyond their wildest dreams ! At the same time, any reduction in the rate of increase of expenditures, at most 3-5% has come out of the workers' pockets and out of the decline in services provided to the sick.
One part of the state's plans to "contain costs" is the reduction of actual services and their use by the sick. A draft report of the Statewide Health Coordinating Council recommended that "the state eliminate one of every four hospital beds, stop the increase in the number of physicians and divert millions of dollars from inpatient hospital care to develop home care and ambulatory services." For example, the state tried to prevent Kent County Memorial Hospital, where occupancy often exceeds 100%, and other hospitals, from increasing bed capacity. Advertisements for "cost containment" show a patient happily eating chocolates, "unnecessarily" taking up a hospital bed. A more accurate picture would show the patients in the corridors lying in their beds waiting for a room! The aim of reducing "unused" hospital beds is speedup of staff, not providing better care. Similarly, they try to shorten the stay of patients in the hospital to the limit, in order to overwork the nurses, etc., and have the sick drag themselves into the over-crowded clinics, where the most profitable tests and procedures can be done on an assembly line; where the staff is pushed to work at maximum speed and has no time to think; where the patients are rushed through so fast that only one thing is certain -- their pockets are empty on the way out.
Another aspect of "cost containment" in this state is that the hospitals attempt to enlist the workers' help in enforcing their own speedup through the Buck A Day (BAD) campaigns carried out at many hospitals in Rhode Island. Coffee mugs with cartoons of the BAD guy were given out to the workers whose "BAD" ideas would save a Buck A Day. This campaign was aimed at convincing the workers that "cost containment" is in the "public interest" and that the workers should "voluntarily" suggest ways to make health care more efficient in their work area. That is, to blame the workers for "loafing" and being wasteful. This program backfired as the workers recognized that it is monopoly capitalist control of medicine, through the government and its bureaucracy, which is the cause of rising costs and waste. The workers suggested instead that the hospitals cut costs by throwing "BAD" and all the other trash put out by the hospital hacks into the garbage bins, hire more staff and raise wages while reducing the overwork of employees. Capitalist medicine is inherently wasteful and is only efficient in ways that serve to maximize profit, as with job combinations and speedup.
With the failure of the BAD campaign to fool the workers, the hospitals are devising further schemes for extracting higher productivity from fewer workers in the hospitals, in accord with the government's plans. Califano said in his report to the congress that, "productivity of health care providers and the services they render must be improved if the nation is to receive better care and keep costs from continuing their alarming rise. " The government of the rich, behind honeyed words of concern for the "human rights" of the sick, is planning to bleed the masses white to pay for health care through skyrocketing prices and bigger subsidies to the capitalists. A plan for national health insurance, to be introduced later this year, "will be based on passage of the cost containment bill", according to Califano. Through centralization of control over the health care industry into the hands of the government, Carter's legislation for "cost containment" aims at further exploitation of the working class and more direct suppression of resistance to "cost containment" and wage controls. The experience of the working people in Rhode Island with the controls already in force is living example of the offensive of the Carter administration to make the people pay. The brutal anti-working class wage controls now being implemented by the monopoly capitalist dictators with the smiling preacher Carter at the head of their state is Nixonite fascism without Nixon. The issue facing the hospital workers and the whole working class is to denounce and continue resistance to this scheme of the rich.
This issue of The Workers' Advocate reprints one article on the developments in the glorious struggle of the British working class and people to FIGHT BACK AGAINST NAZI AND GOVERNMENT-ORGANIZED RACIST ATTACKS! Especially over the last year this movement has intensified with thousands and thousands of anti-fascists engaging the nazis and police in very militant battles under the slogans of DEFEAT THE HITLERITE NATIONAL FRONT! and NAZIS HAVE NO RIGHT TO ORGANIZE! On April 23, for example, 10,000 anti-fascists demonstrated to smash a nazi rally and for over eight hours pitched battles raged throughout the Southall area against the 4,000 police who were sent by the British government to protect the 60 nazis at the rally. This struggle, and the others reported in the following articles, demonstrates that despite all attempts by the British bourgeoisie to escape their all-round crisis by intensifying the exploitation of the workers and stepping up their fascist suppression of all resistance, the British working class and people continue to rise up in ever greater mass struggles. These struggles are a great encouragement to the American working class who are also fighting against growing fascism organized by the U.S. monopoly capitalist dictators. The Workers' Advocate vigor- ously hails this struggle of the British working class and people and militantly supports our close fraternal party, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), who with courage and wisdom is in the forefront of this fight. This anti-fascist struggle is a component part of the overall struggle of the proletariat and its allies for the overthrow of the state of the rich and for the establishment of socialism. Under the leadership of the RCPB(M-L) it will undoubtedly be capped with complete victory.
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(The following article has been reprinted from Workers' Weekly, Organ of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Parly of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), May 5, 1979, under the title "Continuing Struggle Against Nazism and Fascization of State''.)
During recent days the upsurge of the working people against racism and fascism has continued to gain strength.
MILITANT DEMONSTRATION IN SOUTHALL
On April 28th 15,000 people marched through Southall to denounce the racist and fascist attacks of the hitlerite National Front and the state on the working people. The demonstration was held five days after the mass anti-fascist battle in Southall against the attempt of the state to organize a meeting of its nazi party in the town, in the course of which the police savagely murdered one anti-fascist, Blair Peach, and arrested over 300 others.
The murderous attack on Blair Peach, a true martyr of the anti-fascist struggle, was simply the most vicious of countless unprovoked beatings carried out by the police throughout the day and night of April 23, part of a deliberate campaign of intimidation organized by the state against the local working people, particularly the youth and the thousands of anti-fascists who had rightly come to Southall to protest against the nazi meeting.
The massive turnout of police against the demonstration on April 28th completely failed to intimidate the working people and almost the entire Southall community militantly turned out to join the demonstration. Time and again participants pointed out that the nazis and the police work hand in glove to launch racist and fascist attacks on the people, and upheld the path of active resistance to fight these attacks.
Contingents of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the South London People's Front, East London People's Front and the Indian Defense Committee militantly participated in the demonstration doing extensive propaganda and holding extensive discussions with the people during the course of the demonstration. The Party comrades widely disseminated the statement issued by the London Branch of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). At the end of the march the Party contingent held a vigorous mass democracy meeting on these questions leading to further militant and vigorous discussions on the way forward for the anti-fascist movement. The comrades pointed out that the ferocity of the police attacks on April 23rd shows the rapid and all-round development of fascism by the ruling class in this country: firstly, by nurturing and protection of the open nazis; secondly, by the rapidly increasing fascism of the state apparatus itself. Such developments as the rapid building of police terror units such as the Special Patrol Group in London, and the vicious use of dogs against the anti-fascist demonstrators in Leicester on April 21st, bear witness to this. Faced with the growing resistance of the working people against the attempts of the rich, the ruling monopoly capitalist class, to make the people pay for the economic crisis, the government and state of the rich are gradually letting slip their "democratic" mask, and preparing open fascism to hold down the struggles of the people. The present election campaign shows this clearly. Police chiefs talk of protecting "democracy" and "free speech", then deploy thousands of policemen to protect the nazi meetings and allow the nazis to propagate their fascist and racist policies, the very denial of democracy. Fascist gangs are encouraged and protected by the state to carry out murderous attacks on our communities, such as the recent killing of the student in North London Polytechnic and that of Altab Ali last year. They say that "we fought two world wars to protect free speech", when every thinking person knows that millions of the world's people fought and gave their lives in the 1930's and 1940's, not to give nazis free speech, but to wipe them out. And at the same time what democracy and free speech is there for those who protest against nazism? Forty arrested in Leicester on April 21st; 340 arrested in Southall on April 23rd; 16 arrested in East London on April 25th. In Southall the streets were forcibly cleared of even the most peaceful protesters. Whenever the working people organize to fight back against racist attacks it is they and not the nazis who are arrested, beaten up and imprisoned as was seen with the Virk brothers. In speeches later in the week, all the main spokesmen of the bourgeois political parties -- Conservative, Labor and Liberal -- supported the action of the police, supported the nazis' "right" to propagate their hitlerite policies, condemned the just protest and resistance of the people, and called for more "law and order" -- that is, more attacks on the people, more vicious prison sentences, and so on.
STATE "BAN" ON ANTI-FASCIST DEMONSTRATION
The all-round fascization program of the state was further in evidence when over 1,500 people demonstrated against fascism on the following day, April 29th, in East London. On this occasion not only did the state send in its squadrons of police, mounted police, police dogs, etc., to seize control of the streets and arrogantly strut around the community and attack the anti-fascists, but it also invoked its reactionary Public Order Act to ban the demonstration from going near Great Eastern Street where the nazi headquarters is situated.
Thus the state has even thrown away its pretense of "banning both left and right", a hoax which is used in practice to attack and ban the right of the working people to oppose fascism. Now the state uses its reactionary laws to ban anti-fascist demonstrations and is quite open about the fact that this is directed solely at the anti-fascists, while it equally openly spends millions in the hope of ensuring that a handful of nazi thugs will be able to continue their murderous fascist activities and avoid just retribution at the hands of the working people.
NAZI MEETING IN WEST BROMWICH SMASHED
On April 28th the working people also waged another vigorous anti-fascist struggle at West Bromwich, in the West Midlands, against another attempt by the state to hold a nazi election meeting. Well over 1,000 people, including a contingent of the Party, rallied in Handsworth, Birmingham, and marched to West Bromwich, gathering forces on the way, to oppose the nazis and the police, shouting anti-fascist slogans including "Death to Fascism!" and "Fight Back against Nazi and Government-Organized Racist Attacks!"
Once more the state sent in over 2,500 police, from nine different forces, including mounted police, to protect its nazi meeting. This did not prevent anti-fascist workers and youth from clashing with the reactionary police outside the meeting hall on numerous occasions through the afternoon.
When the nazi meeting began a section of the anti-fascist forces succeeded in entering it. The attempted speech by nazi chieftain Tyndall was entirely drowned out with anti-fascist slogans. In a vain attempt to rescue their meeting the 40 or so nazi thugs viciously attacked the audience, hurling chairs at it. This was militantly repulsed by the anti-fascist masses who dealt heavy blows to the fascists using chairs and other weapons. In a short space the nazi thugs were thrown into disarray and many were seen to bolt, ripping off their armbands as they went, being saved only by the intervention of the police who savagely attacked the anti-fascists, arresting 17 of them. The nazi meeting was successfully broken up. This represents a further victory for the line of militant active resistance to fascism and a further defeat for the bankrupt opportunist line of "peaceful opposition".
THE WAY FORWARD
The events in the present upsurge of the antifascist struggle show clearly the way forward for the anti-fascist struggle in Britain. They show that in the face of the intentions and policies of the ruling class, its government of whatever Party, and its state agencies, the road of "peaceful protest" is the road of suicide. They show that no reliance can be put on the state to curb the nazis, to curb the so-called "excesses" of the police and to see that "justice is done", as some are asking. The state is behind the nazis, is deliberately organizing the so-called "excesses" of the police and has no intention that its courts should have any even remote connection with real justice for the working people.
Events show that the working people can only defend themselves against the fascism of the nazis and the state by relying on their own strength, by developing the just and militant resistance shown at Southall on April 23rd in concrete organized forms, by setting up their own organizations to mobilize the whole community to fight back against all attacks by the nazis and the state, to make every factory, street, community, etc., a conscious center of anti-racist, anti-fascist struggle. The anti-fascist struggle has to be led by the working class and its vanguard political party. The Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) has led the setting up of such organizations in the form of the People's Fronts and the local defense committees, such as Indian Defense Committee, to organize the antifascist struggle on a protracted and systematic basis, developing all the necessary forms of struggle to seriously and effectively deal with the growing racism and fascism that the capitalists are developing in society.
The only possibility of genuine democracy and justice for the working people is for them, led by the working class and its Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist- Leninist), to organize step by step for the overthrow of the present system, the establishment of socialism and the suppression of the present ruling class under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The anti-fascist struggle, the organizing of the people themselves against fascist and racist attacks by the nazis and the state, is a vital part and preparation in the process of developing proletarian socialist revolution.
[Photo: A section of the mass anti-fascist demonstration near London.]
[Photo: Anti-fascist youth go into action against nazis and police.]
(The following article is reprinted from People's Canada Daily News, organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), May 23, 1979.)
The elections fraud of the rich is just over. One set of exploiters led by Clark has replaced the other set of exploiters led by Trudeau but the contradictions amongst the rich are such that they are at each other's throat and blaming one another for the bankrupt capitalist system. None of the parties of the rich received a majority of the seats in their rubber-stamp parliament, not to speak of receiving a majority of votes from the masses.
The elections were a fraud from the word go. The rich stage-managed the elections in such a way that only their representatives could participate and through this method they tried to sort out the contradictions amongst themselves, while, at the same time, creating maximum confusion and clouding every issue. The social-democrats and the revisionists and opportunists of all hues were lined up to assist the rich in their elections fraud.
Our Party participated in the elections to present its Political Program to the working masses and it was extremely well received all over the country. Over one-and-a-half million pieces of literature were distributed all across Canada and the Party members and supporters actively participated in engaging the masses of the people in discussions about the sham democracy of the rich, about the necessity to MAKE THE RICH PAY as the only solution to the crisis and also carried vigorous propaganda and agitation against the two superpowers, U.S. imperialism and Soviet social - imperialism, and all other imperialists, including the Chinese social-imperialists. Vigorous discussions broke out throughout the elections period about the real and only socialist country, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, and the broad masses of the people attentively listened to the comrades exposing the social-imperialism of the Soviet Union and China as well as opposing the revisionists and opportunists of all countries. The election campaign of the Party was received with utter hysteria by the rich, and besides their news media and the police, they also mobilized the so-called "Communist" League and "In Struggle", who served their masters well through their basest lies against the Party as well as through their confusion-making. The so-called "Communist Party" of William Kashtan exposed itself as the most bankrupt and revisionist party and talked about "democratic principles" and the "peaceful road" in order to serve the rich. But the Party vigorously carried out its campaign in spite of many arrests and clearly pointed out that the only way out of the crisis is to MAKE THE RICH PAY!
Our candidates received just over 100 votes per candidate on the average, which is a victory for the work of the Party and clearly shows that the Party has a definite base amongst the working masses. Considering the most vile campaign waged by the rich and their hirelings and the reactionary propaganda that to vote for our Party was a "waste" because we won't "win", etc., as well as the arrests of the comrades and the campaign of outright hysteria and lies, our Party firmly stood its ground and made a definite advance in its work all across Canada. For our Party, elections are only one form of struggle and we participated in them for the purpose of disseminating our Political Program as well as for opposing the reactionary propaganda of the rich and in this respect we have been completely successful. Just as the rich will use their Clark government to carry out further attacks against the working people and shift the burden of the crisis onto the backs of the people and prepare for war and fascism, our Party will participate actively in the mass actions and organize and lead the workers against the aims of the rich. Our Party is organizing the masses to battle with the rich and their government and the work is already under way to further bolshevize the Party, improve its links with the broad masses of the workers, develop its fighting capability, defend the purity of Marxism-Leninism and march on the revolutionary road.
(For the program of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada see Proletarian Internationalism, Volume 1, Number 3, page 61.)
(Based on a leaflet of the Louisville Branch of the COUSML issued on May 12, 1979)
Now that the fascist anti-busing movement has lost its mass character here in Louisville, the government is raising the question of the busing of first graders solely for the purpose of giving new life to this racist movement. The rich and the anti-busers are saying that the black people should oppose busing, on the grounds that the "quality of education" of the black students has not increased since cross district busing began. The real situation is that the government continues to enforce racial discrimination against the black students through such means as the prison-like conditions created in the schools and the large numbers of suspensions which are used to suppress the black students. The conclusion to be drawn from this is not that black people should join the racist anti-busing movement, but that racial discrimination in the school should be vigorously opposed.
The anti-busers are advocating that black students attend schools in the West End, which would allegedly be of "better quality" because the money spent on busing would supposedly be spent on better quality education for blacks. But in fact what they are advocating is nothing but outright racist segregation. The experience of the black people in Louisville and throughout the U.S. shows that the rich and their government have always segregated the schools in order to discriminate against the black people by giving them an inferior education. Hence, the issue is not "busing", nor "quality education", but for the black people to continue to oppose racial discrimination and to continue to oppose the government-organized fascist anti-busing movement.
The anti-busing movement raises much demagogy that it opposes the "tyranny of the government". This is a fraud. In none of the practical activities of the anti-busing movement was any of their venom directed against the government, but it was all directed at the democratic and revolutionary black and white masses. In fact, these anti-busing organizations came into existence at the call of the U.S. government. On a national level, it was President Ford himself who gave the call for the racists to unite into a movement "against busing" and for "quality education". And here in Louisville, the government representatives, such as Dot Priddy and others used the government apparatus to promote the anti-busing propaganda and used government buildings to hold anti-busing meetings. The local police departments had the literature of the KKK flowing through their inter-office channels, and many of the local police pushed "Cops Against Busing" as well as belonging to the KKK. The fact of the matter is that the fascist anti-busing movement is government organized from start to finish.
The anti-busers always talk about how the busing plan is so inconvenient for people. But the facts are that the "liberals" in the government, such as Gordon and Maupin, organized busing in the most deformed and mutilated way on purpose, precisely to allow the anti-busing movement leaders to cry about the inconvenience and long bus rides, etc., as a way to mobilize people for their racist movement. Experience throughout the U.S. shows that the government only carries out busing plans where it thinks it can successfully organize a racist anti-busing movement, and in those cities where it is unsuccessful in doing so, the government stops its plans for busing!
It is important not to be deceived by the "concern" of the racist anti-busing movement leaders about the lack of "quality education" of the black students and their propaganda that black students need their own "community" schools. People of Louisville: oppose this racist scheme to trick people into supporting segregated schools as another way to attack the Afro-American people, another way to try to take back the gains of the glorious struggle of the black people against racial discrimination, another attempt to force Jim Crow segregation on the blacks. The issue is for all progressive people to oppose the vicious racial discrimination against the Afro-American people and in particular the youth in the schools. The experience of the black people both here in Louisville and across the U.S. shows that active resistance is the correct response to the government-organized fascist anti-busing movement and to all forms of racial discrimination.
Speech Delivered on May 5, 1979 at the Public Meetings to Commemorate International Working Class Day
Comrades and Friends,
It is very exciting to be holding this great rally today, not only because we are celebrating May 1st, International Working Class Day. Not only because we are rallying in solidarity with the great working class throughout the world, holding high aloft the revolutionary banner of Comrade Marx: "WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" But we have also gathered to hail the 10th anniversary of the founding of the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist), and this makes us doubly festive, doubly excited. Because comrades and friends, if today we can rally with such determination, with such optimism for the future, if today we can hold our heads up as a contingent of the mighty international communist and workers' movement, it is because ten years ago, on May 12th, a small group of revolutionaries stood up to defend Marxism-Leninism right here in the United States. Because 10 years ago a small group of revolutionaries defied imperialism and reaction, defied revisionism and opportunism of all hues, and unfurled the great banner of the international struggle for the emancipation of the working class right here in the United States, right here in the heartland of the most criminal and bloodstained imperialism of all times. So comrades and friends, when we celebrate May 1st this year it is quite just, it is quite correct, that we are also celebrating this small group of revolutionaries who with courage and foresight ten years ago founded the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist).
It is very important to understand the significance of the founding of ACWM(M-L), to understand and learn the lessons of the work and struggle of the ACWM(M-L). Because the founding of the ACWM(M-L) was a turning point in the Marxist-Leninist movement in America., ACWM(M-L) came onto the stage of history when various forces had been accumulated for a change. And the first thing that comrades and friends should understand about ACWM(M-L), is that even though it was only a handful of revolutionaries, it was these comrades and this organization that was the active agents of that change. We have always held that a revolutionary is one who actually advances revolution. Now in 1969 there was no shortage of those who called themselves revolutionary. There were the Jerry Rubins and the Abbey Hoffmans who called themselves revolutionaries. And there were also the Klonskys, the Avakians, the Nelson Peerys. And all of them called themselves revolutionaries. But it was only the ACWM(M-L) which stood up and declared that the Marxist-Leninist Party had to be reestablished. And only the ACWM(M-L) sacrificed everything to actually organize the national Marxist-Leninist center to carry out the work to build the vanguard party of the proletariat.
It is very important to understand this question. Because this stand and this work of the ACWM (M-L) has been the central theme, the shining red thread, that has run through the last ten years of turmoil in the Marxist-Leninist movement. It is this Marxist-Leninist line and practice which has stood against the constant neo-revisionist splitting and disruption, and which has constantly forged ahead against the neo-revisionist faction- alization of the movement. And because of this struggle, after ten years we have reached another turning point in the Marxist-Leninist movement. After a decade of arduous and complex struggle, of bold and unhesitating sacrifice, the principles for which the ACWM(M-L) fought have been proven correct. Today, the forces have been accumulated for a further advance and history demands that this advance must be the founding of the Marxist-Leninist Party. Comrades and friends, the COUSML declares to you that now is the time for a large scale campaign to reestablish the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party of the American proletariat.
II.
It has been pointed out that we are again at a turning point, that the forces have been accumulated for a further advance of the Marxist-Leninist movement and that history demands that we now found and build the Marxist-Leninist Party of the U.S.A. So what is meant that the forces have been accumulated, that history demands that we advance?
The first thing to understand on this is that neo-revisionism has gone bankrupt. For the last ten years there has not been one, but in fact two trends in the Marxist-Leninist movement in the U.S. There has been the trend of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists which has continuously advanced in struggle against the modern revisionists and the monopoly capitalist class enemy. But there has also been the anti-Party trend of neo-revisionism. And for the last ten years these neo-revisionists have frustrated the repeated attempts of the Marxist-Leninists to unite into a single communist party. They have continually disrupted the efforts to reconstitute the Marxist- Leninist vanguard. This neo-revisionist trend claimed to be Marxist-Leninist. It claimed to be opposed to revisionism. But in fact, and history has proved this, this trend conciliated with modern revisionism. It fought tooth and nail against the building of the vanguard party of the proletariat. And it factionalized the Marxist- Leninist movement. Today, after a decade of struggle by the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, this neo-revisionist trend has gone bankrupt. It has degenerated into open social-chauvinism, into an open alliance with the U.S. capitalist moneybags against socialism and revolution, against the people of the world.
It is very interesting to notice that neo-revisionism has jumped out as open social-chauvinism today when world imperialism is in crisis, when this crisis is deepening and extending. This crisis of imperialism is not only an economic crisis, but also a political crisis, a cultural and social crisis. Imperialism is in deepening and all-round crisis, and to deal with this crisis they are stepping up their exploitation of the workers, fascizing society and preparing for another imperialist world war. And it is at this time that the neo-revisionists have jumped out to assist imperialism. To help save it from its crisis these social-chauvinists are calling on the workers to climb aboard the U.S. imperialist war chariot to direct their "main blow" against the foreign threat. They are demanding that the bloodstained monopoly capitalists step up the production of the Trident submarines, build more B-l bombers and make other imperialist weapons of war and mass destruction. These social-chauvinists are promoting the anti-Leninist theory of "three worlds". And whether they do this openly or covertly, their support for the "three worlds theory" is to justify the aggressive U.S.-China warmongering alliance. For the last ten years these social-chauvinists have claimed to be great communists, but today they have even come out against the land of socialism, Albania. They have begun their anti-communist polemics against the glorious Party of Labor of Albania and against the great Marxist-Leninist Comrade Enver Hoxha. And why are they doing this ? They are telling U.S. imperialism that they will support these monopoly capitalist butchers in an inter-imperialist world war with the Soviet social-imperialists. They are trying to mobilize the American workers to become cannon fodder for imperialist aggression against the workers of other countries, against the revolutionary peoples and socialism. At this time of crisis for imperialism, they are openly consummating their long standing alliance with the imperialist bourgeoisie in order to support its diabolical efforts to save the imperialist system.
So the point, comrades and friends, is that for a decade the neo-revisionist leaders have done tremendous damage to the Marxist-Leninist movement. Through their disruptive activities they have succeeded in preventing the reconstitution of the Party for years. And what has been the political content behind this decade of disruption of the Marxist-Leninist movement? It is the content of an alliance between the neo-revisionists and the monopoly capitalist dictators. Formerly this alliance was hidden and secret. Today it has come out into the open. And while the social-chauvinists' promotion of "striking the main blow" at the foreign threat and their public opposition to socialism and the glorious Party of Labor of Albania is the open consummation of a longstanding alliance between the neo-revisionists and the bloodstained monopoly capitalist dictators; it marks, at the same time, their exposure and degeneration. It marks the political bankruptcy of this anti-party trend. Marxism- Leninism teaches that to defend the interests of. the proletariat, above all else the Marxist-Leninist Party must be built and constantly strengthened. History shows that today the reconstitution and building of the Marxist-Leninist Party must be to carry through to the end the struggle against neo-revisionism and its concentrated expression, social-chauvinism.
The second thing about the present situation is that the Marxist-Leninist trend has created a definite, objective force that is slowly growing and strengthening itself. The cause of socialism is again taking root in the workers' movement. In the last few years a great movement has unfolded against social-chauvinism, and with the leadership of the COUSML the main trend of this movement is taking up Marxist-Leninist positions to fight "three worlds-ism", neo-revisionism and to expose and rid the movement of the liberal-labor politics of Browderite revisionism. But these forces which have been created and are growing in the course of struggle, must be welded into a powerful, organized fighting force. And for this the founding and building of the Marxist-Leninist Party is essential. The Marxist-Leninist Party is not only the advanced detachment of the proletariat, in the sense that it is based on and guided by the most advanced revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism, but it is also the organized detachment of the proletariat which welds the advanced revolutionary elements of the proletariat into a disciplined fighting force. Through its unity of Marxist-Leninist thought and action, by its very disciplined pursuit of the single Marxist- Leninist line, the Marxist-Leninist Party is the only force capable of training the masses in revolutionary struggle and diverting the workers from the path of liberal-labor subservience to the bourgeoisie, into becoming an independent political force. This is the second point, that through the movement against social-chauvinism and the all-round work of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, a powerful trend for Marxism-Leninism and socialism is now emerging among the class conscious workers and revolutionary activists. But this trend must be welded into an organized, fighting force and this requires the founding and building of the Marxist-Leninist Party.
The third thing to understand is that the 1980's will be the scene of great class battles. And the Marxist-Leninist Party is essential to keep the revolutionary forces from getting diverted onto the path of reformist compromise and to keep the advanced revolutionary elements from being scattered and frittered away by the opportunists.
Already the workers are throwing themselves into struggle. They are fighting increasingly intense strikes against the monopoly capitalists' shifting of the burden of the economic crisis onto their backs. They are standing up to defy Carter's wage guidelines and are resisting the violent attacks against them by the capitalist government. Through the 1970's the workers have been gaining experience in mass struggle and have been tempering themselves for even greater battles in the future. Today the workers' movement has become the inspiration and center of strength for the struggles of all sections of the American toiling masses.
Other sections of the people are fighting too. The Afro-Americans are militantly resisting racial discrimination and the terrorist attacks by the bourgeois state power. With their fraud of "reverse discrimination" and their attempts to build a fascist anti-busing movement, and in many other ways, the monopoly bourgeoisie is intensifying its oppression of the black people. These capitalist moneybags are trying to turn back the clock, to obliterate the gains of the revolutionary rebellions of the 1960's and to bring back the barbarous outrages of the system of "Jim Crow" segregation. But the Afro-American people and the working class are fighting against this. And in some cases, in the struggle that has unfolded against the anti-busing movement in Louisville, Boston, Seattle and elsewhere, the Afro-American people's movement has again begun to reveal its powerful sweep, heralding a new revolutionary upsurge in the future.
These struggles of the Afro-American people, of the working class, and all of the mass struggles which are developing today against the bourgeoisie and its program of starvation, fascism and war; these struggles are but the first signs of even greater class battles which will emerge in the 1980's. And so for these battles to reach their true stature, for them to advance to the proletarian socialist revolution, the Marxist-Leninist Party must be built.
This question should be seen clearly. In 1976 the COUSML initiated struggle against social- chauvinism in the Marxist-Leninist movement. The COUSML ruthlessly exposed the hysterical warmongering of the neo-revisionists; fought against their attempts to divert the working class from the path of revolution onto the path of becoming cannon fodder in the U.S. imperialist aggressive war machine; and the COUSML discredited them and revealed for the whole movement to see their open alliance with the bloodstained imperialist bourgeoisie. Now after several years of struggle, a broad mass movement against the frenzied militarization and war preparations of the imperialist bourgeoisie is starting to develop. Militant demonstrations against the production of the Trident submarine and other military hardware of imperialist aggression and war are growing. Mass struggle against the reintroduction of the draft, against the nuclear energy plants, against the U.S.-China warmongering alliance, all of this struggle is taking on mass proportions and intensifying. And the issue is that while the social-chauvinists have been discredited in the Marxist-Leninist movement, they are entering the movement against imperialist war preparations and are trying to sabotage it. They are entering into all of the revolutionary mass movements to try and extinguish the flames of the revolutionary indignation of the masses.
So comrades and friends, what is arising today is that the struggle against social-chauvinism, against revisionism and opportunism of all hues is now beginning to take on mass proportions. This struggle must be extended and intensified. The revolutionary masses must be trained in revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie and must be guided to defeat the sabotage of social-chauvinism and opportunism. And for this the decisive question is to reestablish and build the Marxist-Leninist Party in the midst of the revolutionary mass movements. The Marxist-Leninist Party is the highest form of class organization of the proletariat. It is only through its continuous building and strengthening that all of the revolutionary struggles and movements can be merged into a mighty torrent that can bring down the decadent capitalist beast and build the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism. So this is the third point, that great class battles are in the offing. To ensure that these battles have correct leadership, to ensure that the advanced revolutionary elements from the mass movements are welded into a disciplined fighting force, and to ensure that the sabotage and disruption of the social- chauvinists and opportunists are defeated, it is essential that the Marxist-Leninist Party, the vanguard party of the working class is founded and built as the conscious leader and organizer of the working class and revolutionary masses.
The final point that has to be made when we are discussing the accumulation of forces for a further advance in the Marxist-Leninist movement, when we are discussing the question of the creation of the conditions of a turning point in the movement, is that from the founding of the ACWM(M-L) in 1969 to the present leadership of the movement against social-chauvinism by the COUSML, the genuine revolutionary Marxist- Leninist nucleus has been built up and strengthened, the centralized Marxist-Leninist leadership has been created. And if we look over the last decade of struggle it becomes evident that this has been the decisive element in creating the present conditions for the founding of the vanguard party of the proletariat.
Comrades and Friends,
We have reached the situation where the neo-revisionists have degenerated to open social- chauvinism, have openly exposed the basis of their years of disruption of the Marxist-Leninist movement, and have gone bankrupt; where the Marxist-Leninist forces have become a definite, objective trend which is taking root in the working class movement and is slowly growing and strengthening itself; where the current revolutionary ferment and mass struggle against starvation, fascism and war is the beginning stirrings of great class battles in the future; and where the Marxist-Leninist nucleus has been built and strengthened through a decade of revolutionary struggle. Such a situation demands that we advance the revolution, and such an advance can only be made through the founding and building of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the U.S.A.
III.
Comrades and Friends,
We have reached a turning point, and at times like this, when we are preparing to take the next step, it is important to look back over the history of the struggle that led to this point. To remember and hold fast to the lessons of this history.
The comrades who founded the ACWM(M-L) were ordinary activists in the revolutionary mass movements of the 1960's. They had fought against the U.S. imperialist aggression in Southeast Asia, in the draft resistance and the GI movements. They had fought against the barbaric racial discrimination and violent repression of the Afro-American people by the monopoly capitalist dictators. These comrades had participated in the student movement, the workers' movement, in the women's movement and were active in many mass struggles against the capitalist moneybags. And it was from their experience in these revolutionary mass movements that the comrades learned to hate revisionism and opportunism. It was from their own experience with the revisionist sabotage of the struggle of the masses that the comrades began to rebel against revisionism and to take up Marxism-Leninism.
In early 1969 these comrades, who had formed the Cleveland Workers' Action Committee, came in contact with the Canadian Internationalists led by Comrade Hardial Bains. The comrades were inspired by the Internationalists and learned many lessons from them on the struggle against modern revisionism and the truth of Marxism-Leninism. And for 10 years ACWM(M-L) and later COUSML have fought together shoulder to shoulder with the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) against our common enemies, imperialism, social-imperialism and revisionism and opportunism of all descriptions
And so it was in 1969, with their burning hatred for revisionism and opportunism, with Marxism- Leninism as a guide, and with the fraternal assistance of the Canadian Internationalists, that on May 12, 1969, these ordinary activists from the revolutionary mass movements established the national Marxist-Leninist center in the U.S. with the founding of the ACWM(M-L).
The ACWM(M-L), which represented the nucleus of the Marxist-Leninist Party, worked on the basis of taking up the decisive tasks facing the American revolution on a nationwide basis. And when it was founded in 1969 the principal problem was to organize the widescale dissemination of Marxism-Leninism. Because in 1969, after decades of the propagation of modern revisionism, after years in which every kind of bourgeois and opportunist ideology had grown up unchecked, all of the questions of the orientation of the revolution had been mystified and the revolutionary masses were looking for the way forward. The widescale dissemination of the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, the propagation of the Marxist- Leninist principles in a living way in the midst of the revolutionary mass movements, was a powerful force for the combatting of revisionism and opportunism and to nurture and build up the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist movement.
And so, in 1969, ACWM(M-L) took up this decisive task. And following this at every stage, whether the issue was to organize the resistance movement or to build the national organs and local branches of the Marxist-Leninist nucleus or to launch a major campaign to unite the Marxist-Leninists, at every stage the ACWM(M-L) took up for solution the most decisive problems and actually advanced revolution. The ACWM(M-L) was always marked by this communist quality, by this determined struggle to solve the practical problems to advance revolution. And through this resolute struggle it consistently defended the purity of Marxism-Leninism.
To get a better picture of this uncompromising struggle to defend the revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism and to build the vanguard party of the proletariat, it is significant to go into a few of the questions of principle on which the ACWM(M-L) fought.
For example, Marxism-Leninism teaches us that the working class is the only consistently revolutionary class. That in our modern epoch, the epoch of the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism, it is the proletariat which stands at the center of the world revolutionary process. Marxism-Leninism teaches this, and the revolutions carried out in the twentieth century prove this to be the case. But in the 1960's opportunism had completely written the working class out of the picture. For example, New Leftism, the bastard offspring of revisionism and social-democracy, propagated the theory of the consumer society, of the technological revolution, etc., to say that the working class had been bought off. They promoted the idea that the working class is no longer revolutionary, and therefore you should look to the intellectual windbags and revisionist social workers as the main force of revolution. And no sooner was New Leftism criticized than neo-revisionism jumped out. It adapted Marxist-Leninist terminology to its New Left stance, and began to propagate the Chinese revisionist theory that the third world is revolutionary, but not the proletariat in the capitalist countries. Neo-revisionism held that perhaps some "third world" lumpen proletarians were revolutionary, but not the American workers. And when this neo-revisionist myth began to collapse the neo-revisionists had another thesis that the working class is, after all, revolutionary, but just not today. And of course, comrades and friends, these theories of New Leftism and neorevisionism are in essence no different than the liberal-labor politics of the trade union bureaucrats and the social-democrats of the Democratic Party. For example, Coleman Young, a vice- chairman of the National Committee of the Democratic Party, and mayor of the city of Detroit, said: "I don't see what I'm doing as any contradiction at all. I'll tell you very frankly that I do not believe, as some people who are Socialists and radicals believe, that at this point the American people are ready for any revolution. And if there's not going to be any revolution, what am I to do ? What are the people to do ? Life goes on, and just because I believe that another form of government might be superior to the one we have has nothing to do with the realistic possibility it's going to take place..." This is the same thesis that is held by the neo-revisionists. The working class is not revolutionary. There is no prospect for revolution. And therefore, there is no point to revolutionary work. "Life goes on" they say. Since revolution is not possible, since there is no revolutionary force, we must organize something else, some reformism, some "united front against imperialism", that is consistent with the so-called "realistic possibilities". With these opportunists "life goes on" with the same old barbarous capitalist exploitation, with the same old bourgeois trade unionism, and the same old liberal-labor politics by which the workers' movement is kept as nothing more than a "special interest group" in the big Rooseveltain type coalition of the Democratic Party. So for revisionism, New Leftism, neo-revisionism to propagate these theories meant to write off the working class, to write off organizing for revolution.
Comrades and friends, the working class is revolutionary or it is nothing. It is revolutionary or it is forever a mindless, broken down slave, to be used and thrown away by the capitalists. When ACWM(M-L) was founded it went straight against the entire liberal-labor politics. It disseminated that Marxist-Leninist theory that it is the working class, and no other class, which is the leader of the world revolution in our modern epoch. It explained that in the U.S. the working class is the leading and the main force of revolution. But ACWM(M-L) did not stop at disseminating the Marxist-Leninist theory. Because ACWM(M-L) actually believed that the working class is the leading and main force of the socialist revolution in the U.S., so it straight away began to disseminate revolutionary propaganda broadly among the working masses, to involve the workers in the political affairs from a proletarian revolutionary perspective. With its national paper, The Workers' Advocate, the ACWM(M-L) began to train the workers in Marxist-Leninist theory and to take a revolutionary outlook on all of the most important questions then coming up in the United States. In this way the ACWM(M-L) gave the working class its own voice. It provided the workers with the possibility to split from the liberal-labor politics and it sought to make them conscious of the proletariat's historic mission. And so, with its revolutionary agitation and all-round work, the ACWM(M-L) fought to raise the working class to its true revolutionary stature and to organize it into an independent revolutionary force.
In this same way the ACWM(M-L) fought to instil in the working class a revolutionary attitude to the state. Marxism-Leninism teaches us that the most important question of the class struggle is the question of the state power. That for the working class to destroy capitalism and establish socialism, it must smash to smithereens the state power of the capitalists, and establish the state power of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat. And the proletariat must wield this state power in order to suppress the capitalists and ensure genuine democracy for the working masses.
All of the revisionists and opportunists have complete reverence for the bourgeois state, they stand in awe of this machine of violence and terror against the working masses. And there is an entire bribed strata of the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy which thinks this way. With the tremendous expansion of U.S. imperialist domination in the world after World War H, and especially with the rise of the revolutionary mass movements in the 1960's, the U.S. bourgeoisie made use of its imperialist super-profits to tremendously extend its bribery of the labor aristocracy and a strata of the petty bourgeoisie. It created a huge section of people, of poverty pimps, social workers, lawyers, etc., who are completely tied to the bourgeois state for their existence. And it is no wonder that this strata takes up and propagates all manner of revisionist and opportunist theories to justify their loyalty and reverence for the capitalist state. They assure the workers, for example, that there are two aspects to the state. One aspect which is supposedly progressive and is the friend of labor and the Afro-American people. And another aspect which is supposed to be the real source of all the violence and exploitation of the toiling masses. With this revisionist theory, the opportunists claim that the U.S. is a glorious "democracy" if only the workers come under the domination of the "progressive aspect" of the state to oppose the reactionary section. In practical terms, these opportunists have such touching faith in American "democracy" that they actually call out the police to allegedly "protect" the people. And militant resistance to the reactionary violence of the bourgeois state machine they denounce as "provoking the police".
ACWM(M-L) broke entirely with this opportunist reverence for the bourgeois state. It propagated the Marxist-Leninist teachings that the state is a capitalist instrument of violence and terror against the working class, and consistently pointed out the necessity of the violent overthrow of the rule of the capitalists and for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In its revolutionary agitation, ACWM(M-L) constantly encouraged in the masses resolute hatred for the bourgeois state and inspired in them the spirit of revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order. But the ACWM(M-L) did not rest content with this revolutionary propaganda, but combined this with revolutionary action against state-organized fascist attacks. Whether it was in the struggle against the state-organized fascist hard hat movement in 1970, or the defense of the William Z. Foster center where an ACWM(M-L) comrade continued to shout revolutionary slogans even after the police put a gun to his head, or whether it was in the defense of the distribution of revolutionary literature among the masses, the ACWM(M-L) consistently waged the resistance movement against the state-organized attacks. The ACWM (M-L) always held that the interests of the masses cannot be defended, the revolutionary movement developed, or the Marxist-Leninist Party steeled and tempered without uncompromising resistance to the reactionary violence of the capitalist state. Through this uncompromising struggle and through its revolutionary propaganda and agitation the ACWM (M-L) showed the masses the way to break out of the confines of bourgeois legality and opportunist capitulation. Thus, right from ;ts founding, the ACWM(M-L) maintained a revolutionary attitude to the state and through its agitation and revolutionary actions it fought to train the masses in revolutionary struggle and prepare them for insurrection.
Comrades and Friends,
From the first day of its existence, the ACWM (M-L) also waged a persistent struggle for the party principle. It fought for the principle that the decisive question for the organization of the socialist revolution is the building and constant strengthening of the Marxist-Leninist Party. It fought for the first principle of Marxism-Leninism, that all Marxist-Leninists must unite and build the single Marxist-Leninist Party. That there is only one proletariat, one Marxism, and there can be only one Marxist-Leninist Party in each country. The ACWM(M-L) disseminated the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the party, did propaganda widely among the workers and oppressed masses for the party concept, and right from the beginning ACWM (M-L) approached all of those organizations and individuals who claimed to be Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary and called on them to unite. But the neo-revisionists, for all their claims to be genuine Marxist-Lenin- ists, fought tooth and nail against the building of the Marxist-Leninist Party and consistently disrupted and factionalized the Marxist-Leninist movement. The neo-revisionists and other opportunists concocted every possible precondition to uniting, and created all manner of anti-Marxist theories in opposition to the building of the Party. They began by openly attacking the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the Party and advocating instead the "pre-party situation" and that the Party spontaneously emerges from the mass movement. They demagogically counterposed building the mass movement to building the Party and set one up against the other. They did their best to factionalize the Marxist-Leninist movement and scatter the revolutionary forces through their agitation against the Party concept and their theories of "pre-party collectives" and of "developing their own trend" (that is, "many Marxisms"). After the vigorous work of the ACWM(M-L) (and then the COUSML) discredited the open agitation against the Party, the neorevisionists shamelessly deepened their splitting and wrecking activities through the founding of a multitude of social-chauvinist and "three worlds-ist" "parties".
It was against this prevailing opportunist practice that the ACWM (M-L) fought. Through its revolutionary propaganda, its resistance struggles, its all-round work to take up the decisive tasks to advance the revolution, the ACWM(M-L) built up a fighting disciplined organization on the national scale. The ACWM (M-L) built up a principled organization, an organization that did not just fight at random, that did not shift and turn with every breeze, but that insisted on adherence to the Marxist-Leninist program, to the Marxist- Leninist perspective of the revolution. The ACWM (M-L) upheld that the whole organization must fight to implement the line of the Party, the Marxist-Leninist line. And because of this staunch Marxist-Leninist stand, all of the opportunists would moan "How come you all sound alike" and complain that the members and supporters of the ACWM (M-L) were "robots" and "parrots". And why did the opportunists complain? Aside from their constant anti-communist agitation, the reason was because with their loose Browderite educational associations, they were unable to take a principled or even consistent stand on any question. But the ACWM (M-L) was just different from the opportunists. To be a member of the ACWM (M-L) you could not just agree in general with "revolution" or "Marxism- Leninism", you could not just phrasemonger about this or that, but you had to be a revolutionary fighter. You had to fight the bourgeoisie and the opportunists. You had to dare to stand up in the face of the bourgeois terror and the police, jails and courts; and to dare to stand up in the face of the opportunist sneers and backs tabbing; to dare to work day in and day out in arduous, protracted struggle; to dare to sacrifice everything in the interests of the proletariat and oppressed masses. That was why the ACWM(M-L) was respected and loved by those who wanted the revolution, but hated, despised and called "Cleveland crazies" by the budding labor bureaucrats and those who cast eyes on cushy jobs in the fringes of the state apparatus. That was how the ACWM (M-L) understood the Marxist-Leninist norms, how it repudiated those for whom "democratic centralism" was just a phrase to prattle on about, for whom Marxism-Leninism was just the most resonant phrase to cover reformist, opportunist practice. And that was how the ACWM(M-L) built up and tempered a disciplined, fighting, principled organization and established the Marxist-Leninist nucleus of the Party.
And so, comrades and friends, whether it was the question of upholding the revolutionary aspirations of the working class, the question of organizing irreconcilable opposition to the bourgeois state, the question of building the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party of the proletariat, or whether it was some other question like ACWM(M-L)'s consistent loyalty to the international Marxist- Leninist communist movement or its utter hostility to revisionism and opportunism of all hues, the ACWM (M-L) remained always a revolutionary fighter for Marxism-Leninism. It is to its merit that at a time when modern revisionism, New Leftism, Castroism, cultural nationalism, trotskyism, anarchism and bourgeois ideology of every variety was running rampant through the revolutionary movement, the ACWM(M-L) stood up to defend Marxism-Leninism, stood up to defend the revolutionary interests of the proletariat, stood up to build the Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the American proletariat.
Comrades and Friends,
It is a full decade from the founding of the ACWM(M-L) to this May 1st celebration which we are holding today. This has been a decade of an extremely complicated struggle in the Marxist- Leninist movement. This has been ten years of continual attempts to unite the Marxist-Leninists into a single Marxist-Leninist Party on the one hand, and constant disruption and splitting up of the Marxist-Leninist movement by the neo-revisionists on the other hand. But today, when neo-revisionism has degenerated into open social-chauvinism and gone bankrupt; today, when the Klonskyites have hitched themselves up to the U.S. imperialist war chariot and are calling on the American workers to unite with the rich U.S. moneybags to strike the "main blow" at the foreign threat; today when the Avakianites have come out as the hatchet men for the anti-Leninist "three worlds theory" and openly sling mud at the glorious Party of Labor of Albania and its great leader Comrade Enver Hoxha; today when the Nelson Peery-ites continue to serve as "left''-sloganeering agents of Soviet revisionism and as a phrasemongering fringe group for the official revisionists of the "C"PUSA; today, when these neo-revisionist big shots have openly shown that when they were slandering ACWM(M-L) and COUSML and disrupting the Marxist-Leninist movement they were doing this not for some revolutionary principle, as they claimed, but out of their love for the monopoly capitalist dictators and for the Chinese or Soviet revisionists; today, comrades and friends, what stands out particularly clearly is that the principles for which the ACWM(M-L) fought were correct. The struggle begun by the ACWM(M-L) to reestablish the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party was a correct struggle. And to be loyal to these principles, and to carry forward this struggle, today we must found the Marxist-Leninist Party without the social-chauvinists and build and strengthen it against the social-chauvinists.
[Photos:
1. Activists of the Cleveland Draft Resistance Union participate in the march on the Pentagon in 1967. Comrades of the Draft Resistance Union later formed the Cleveland Workers' Action Committee and under the inspiration of the First Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists in Regina, Canada founded the ACWM (M-L) in Cleveland, Ohio on May 12, 1969.
2. Comrades of the ACWM(M-L) march against fascist Agnew, June 20, 1970.
3. ACWM(M-L) militant wages resistance struggle against the fascist police in the anti-hard hat demonstration, July 1970.
4. Louisville comrades of the COUSML participate in march against the government-organized fascist anti-busing movement, January 15, 1976.
5. Mass rally organized by the COUSML in New York City to denounce the warmongering U.S.-China alliance as part of a nationwide Day of Revolutionary Protest, January 27, 1979.]
Call of the National Committee of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists
Adopted on May 12, 1979, the 10th Anniversary of the Founding of the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist)
To all Marxist-Leninists, class conscious workers and revolutionary activists: The Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists calls upon you to participate in the historic work to reestablish the revolutionary vanguard party of the proletariat through the founding of the MARXIST-LENINIST PARTY OF THE U.S.A.
Today a revolutionary ferment is growing among the working masses. The American proletariat is now preparing for great class battles in the 1980's. The reconstitution and constant strengthening of the genuine Communist Party of the proletariat is absolutely indispensable to the successful advance of the proletarian revolutionary movement. The advanced section from the revolutionary activists of the 1960's and 1970's took up Marxism-Leninism, the most powerful and scientific revolutionary theory of all times. But for a decade the anti-Party trend of neo-revisionism has frustrated the repeated attempts of the Marxist-Leninists to unite into a single Communist Party in resolute opposition to the modern revisionists and the monopoly capitalist class enemy. In this decade the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists have advanced and strengthened themselves in the course of the struggle for the Party. Meanwhile the anti-Party trend of neo-revisionism, on the contrary, has degenerated to open Browderite great-power social-chauvinism. They have brought forth the warmongering thesis of "directing the main blow at the foreign threat". They are all, whether openly or covertly, fervent supporters of the "three worlds" theory. They have all come out to attack the land of the dictatorship of the proletariat, glorious People's Socialist Republic of Albania. In short, the neo-revisionists are now openly revelling in a most shameful alliance with the monopoly capitalist moneybags and the bloodstained U.S. imperialist state. Social-chauvinism is neo-revisionism and opportunism in finished form. It has matured to such an extent that the continued existence of this malignant tumor within the healthy body of the U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement cannot be tolerated. For the interests of the proletariat's struggle for power, a struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie, this disease must be removed. Now is the time to found the Party without the social- chauvinist class traitors and against the social- chauvinist class traitors.
I.
Today the American proletariat is preparing for a great revolution to put to death the decadent American capitalist system and to build a bright red future of the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism. U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism are the two most bloodstained aggressive imperialist powers known in history. Together, these two superpowers are the leaders of the camp of world imperialism and reaction and are the most deadly enemies of socialism and of freedom and genuine independence. They are the greatest exploiters of the proletariat and the world's peoples and it is their struggle for world domination which threatens to hurl mankind into a third world war. At this time of deepening all-round crisis of the world imperialist system, the U.S. monopoly capitalist dictators are cynically preaching the "merits" of "American democracy" while frenziedly fascizing the state and preparing dark forces of terror to suppress the proletariat and working masses. They are using massive unemployment, never-ending inflation and the most inhuman intensification of labor in order to shift the burden of the crisis onto the proletariat and toiling masses. Under the fraud of a fight for "human rights" the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie is spreading its tentacles to enslave and oppress the world's peoples and to contend for world domination. The continued rule of the monopoly capitalist moneybags can only mean fascism, starvation and war. The current economic crisis of the U.S. monopoly capitalist system has once again demonstrated that the basic contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is at a bursting point. It shows that the U.S. monopoly capitalist class is unable to solve any of the basic problems of society; and that only the proletariat, through the forcible overthrow of the existing social conditions, can end the crisis and usher in the bright future offered by socialism.
Already today the workers are throwing themselves into struggle, waging ever more intensive mass strikes, defying Carter's wage controls, resisting the violent attacks against them by the capitalist state machine. It is the workers' movement which is inspiring the other revolutionary movements and is the center of strength for the other struggles. The Afro- American people are today developing a militant resistance to racial discrimination and violent repression by the bourgeoisie and its state power. Other oppressed peoples including the people of Mexican nationality, the Puerto Rican people, the Native Americans, etc., are also rising to the struggle. A movement is now emerging against the imperialist militarization and war preparations, against the U.S.-China warmongering alliance, against the restoration of the draft, against stepped-up building of the Trident submarine and other modern weapons of imperialist aggression and war. Broad discontent and mass actions continue to grow among the rural proletariat', the small farmers, the youth and students, the working women and other sections of the people. This increasing discontent and these growing mass struggles are all signs of the general revolutionary ferment that is sweeping American life. They are the beginnings of and the preparations for great class battles in the 1980's.
II.
To organize the revolution the decisive question is the formation and building of the Marxist- Leninist Party in the midst of the revolutionary mass movements. The strength of the working class lies in its consciousness and organization. Only Marxism-Leninism can direct and orient the revolutionary movement of the workers. Only through the organization of the advanced detachment of the proletariat in its vanguard Party can Marxism-Leninism be applied to bring the antifascist proletarian socialist revolution to victory. For this reason the monopoly capitalists especially seek to destroy the Party, to suppress its organization and to corrupt its revolutionary ideology. To this end the monopoly capitalist dictators have employed modern revisionism. Modern revisionism is a retrograde bourgeois trend of thought and action which arose from within the communist and workers' movement. It aims to ensure class conciliation and social peace between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, to subordinate the interests of the proletariat to the interests of the bourgeoisie, to undermine the revolution and perpetuate capitalism in the bourgeois-revisionist countries, and to restore capitalism wherever genuine socialism is under construction. While claiming to be loyal to the Marxist-Leninist teachings, the modern revisionists empty Marxism-Leninism of its revolutionary content and transform it into a theory of opportunist social reforms. Modern revisionism is the main danger within the communist and workers' movement. For over 40 years the central issue in the American proletarian revolution has been the struggle to defend the purity of Marxism-Leninism and build the revolutionary Party of the proletariat against the corruption and sabotage of modern revisionism.
In 1919 the American proletariat gave birth to its vanguard Party with the formation of the CPUSA. But in the mid-1930's Browderite revisionism, the first sign of the development of modern revisionism, arose and began to corrode this Party from within. Claiming certain "American exceptions" Browder negated the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism and robbed it of its revolutionary and mobilizing essence. He increasingly wiped out the accomplishments of the Party, eliminated its revolutionary political line, and finally in 1944, liquidated the Party altogether. Although the CPUSA was reestablished it never fully repudiated Browder ism. It fell easy prey to the fully elaborated modern revisionism developed by the Khrushchov clique in Russia. Just as Khrushchovite revisionism undermined the great Communist Party of Lenin and Stalin, so modern revisionism corroded the CPUSA. Just as the Khrushchovite revisionists turned the Soviet Union from the bright red bastion of world revolution and socialism into an aggressive capitalist, social-imperialist superpower, so also the modern revisionists turned the CPUSA into a counterrevolutionary Party of the bourgeoisie, a traitor to the proletariat which had given it birth.
III.
With the degeneration of the CPUSA the American proletariat found itself in a difficult position. Under sharp attack from the brutal monopoly capitalist exploiters and without its revolutionary vanguard Party, it suffered also from enormous ideological confusion. It is in this situation that the great mass movements of the 1960's broke out. The great movement of the Afro-American people grew to a nationwide rebellion; the movement against U.S. imperialist aggression in Indochina swept the country in a mighty torrent; the youth and students rose up in these struggles and also waged powerful battles against the imperialist cultural aggression and the decadent bourgeois educational system. These and many other mass movements of the tumultuous decade of the 1960's shook the monopoly capitalist system to its foundations.
Inspired by the great international struggle against modern revisionism, and in the conditions of a growing mass revolt against the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie, activists began to split from the revisionist CPUSA. In 1962 the Progressive Labor Movement, later called the Progressive Labor Party, was formed as a new center of the U.S. Marxist-Leninists. But like the CPUSA before it, the PLP failed to settle accounts with the social- chauvinist liberal-labor politics of Browder. It soon stopped fighting revisionism and opportunism altogether and quickly degenerated into a trotskyite sect.
But the Marxist-Leninist elements in the U.S. refused to accept this revisionist betrayal. They refused to capitulate to the monopoly capitalist dictators. Out of the revolutionary mass movements of the 1960's the advanced section of the revolutionary activists rose up once again to fight modern revisionism, to once again raise high the banner of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, to once again shoulder the great task of building the Marxist-Leninist Party as the conscious leader and organizer of the working class. In 1969, the First Conference of North American Marxist- Leninists was held in Regina, Canada, convened by the Canadian Internationalists, the predecessors of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist- Leninist). Inspired by this momentous conference, the comrades of the Cleveland Workers' Action Committee took the historic step to form the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist) and to build it as the single nationwide center for the U.S. Marxist-Leninists. The ACWM(M-L) consisted of activists deeply rooted in the revolutionary mass movements.
Right from the beginning it contacted all of the main organizations and individuals who claimed to uphold Marxism-Leninism and to oppose revisionism, and it sought to unite them into a single Marxist-Leninist center. The ACWM(M-L) built one center in order to reconstitute the genuine Marxist-Leninist Party, to fight revisionism and to lead the revolutionary movements. At this crucial turning point, when the revolutionary principles of the theory of the working class were being emasculated and the aims of the revolution obscured, the ACWM(M-L) took up the decisive task of the widescale dissemination of Marxism-Leninism. It consistently fought against the pervasive ideological confusion spread by the bourgeoisie; against New Leftism, Castroism, cultural nationalism, Trotskyism, anarchism, modern revisionism, and opportunism of all hues. It conducted consistently revolutionary agitation in the midst of the mass movements. It waged the resistance movement against the criminal repression by the bourgeois state. And it built a disciplined fighting organization with monolithic unity based on the single Marxist-Leninist line. In all of these ways the ACWM(M-L) defended the purity of Marxism-Leninism by applying it in practice to advance the revolutionary movement. In 1972 the ACWM(M-L) launched another broad campaign to unite the Marxist-Leninists. This campaign led to the formation of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, the Marxist-Leninist nucleus, the center to further rally the Marxist-Leninists to fight modern revisionism.
IV.
But there were those who claimed to be Marxist-Leninists and claimed to oppose revisionism, yet who refused co follow the first principle of Marxism-Leninism that all Marxist-Leninists should unite into one Party. This was the anti- Party trend of neo-revisionism. They factional- ized the movement and scattered the Marxist- Leninist forces through their concocted theses of the "pre- Party situation" and the "pre-Party collective". In opposition to uniting and building one Party on the basis of Marxism-Leninism they promoted the theory that the "Party will arise spontaneously out of the mass movements" and the "Party will arise spontaneously out of the united front". Instead of fighting revisionism and defending the purity of Marxism-Leninism, the neo-revisionists sought special sectarian principles and peculiar revisionist theories in order to distinguish themselves as a separate trend. Faced with the widespread work of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists in favor of the Party, the neo-revisionists shifted from their anti-Party theory of "pre-Party collectives" to another anti-Party theory, that of "many Marxisms" embodied in "many parties". Thus the neo-revisionists intensified their splitting and factionalizing activities and congealed into a definite trend, into diehard wreckers of the Marxist-Leninist movement and conciliators of revisionism.
For a decade the neo-revisionist leaders and organizations have done tremendous damage to the Marxist-Leninist movement. Through their disruptive activities they succeeded in preventing the reconstitution of the Party for years. Instead of fighting revisionism, they conciliated revisionism and opportunism. Instead of defending the interests of the working class, they have continually fomented splits and have sabotaged the workers' struggles. They have finally succeeded in distinguishing themselves as a distinct trend, and it has proved to be the trend of alliance with imperialism, the trend of "three worlds-ism" and social-chauvinism. History has proven that the Marxist-Leninist Party can only be founded on the basis of carrying the struggle against neo-revisionism and its concentrated expression, social- chauvinism, through to the end.
History shows that the mainstream within the neo-revisionist trend was encouraged, given ideological direction, financed and in an all-round way fostered by the Chinese revisionists. Although the neo-revisionist trend includes within it a left sloganeering front of Soviet revisionism, U.S. neo-revisionism is in the main an American expression of Chinese revisionism. For the last decade, following the lead of the Chinese revisionists, the neo-revisionists have promoted a whole system of the most degenerate anti-Marxist theories and practices on every question and in every field. They advocate the theory that revisionism and opportunism are allegedly "middle .forces to be united with". In this way they attempt to deny the life and death character of the struggle of Marxism-Leninism against revisionism. They try to blunt the edge of this struggle in order to conciliate the revisionists and opportunists who are nothing more than counter-revolutionary agencies of the bourgeoisie within the revolutionary movement. Under the signboard that "objective conditions are not ripe for revolution" the neo-revisionists deny the Leninist teachings that this is the epoch of imperialism and the social revolution of the proletariat, the epoch of the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism, and in this way they try to justify their liberal- labor politics. The sole criterion that they advance to prove that "objective conditions are not ripe" is their claim that the "working masses are backward" or are not in a "revolutionary mood". With this theory they in practice oppose any revolutionary mass actions and call any militant resistance "provoking the bourgeoisie". These neo-revisionists have always claimed that the so- called "third world peoples" are more revolutionary than North Americans and Europeans. In this way they have tried to demoralize the American proletariat and to denigrate its role as the leading and main force of American revolution. With this revisionist theory they completely wrote off proletarian revolution in the West. They in fact deny that it is precisely the proletariat which is the center of this epoch and the leader of the world revolution. These and other anti-Marxist theses which form the ideological premises of Chinese revisionism and its "three worlds theory" were propagated since the late 1960's and have served the neo-revisionists in their conciliation with modern revisionism and their disruption of the U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement.
Neo-revisionism has also borrowed heavily from the counter-revolutionary arsenal of Browderite revisionism. Its essence has proved to be Browderite liberal-labor politics, reformism and flimsy conciliation to all opportunism and any fashionable deviation. Browder's liberal-labor and social-chauvinist politics liquidates the revolutionary mission of the proletariat and is the most corrupt, reformist, and American big-pow- er chauvinist doctrine. Browderite liberal-labor politics fights the revolution and communism by reducing the working class movement to a "left- wing" to the "liberals", a trade union caucus or "special interest group" inside the big "Rooseveltian" coalition of the Democratic Party. The Browderites give the leadership of the workers' movement to the trade union bureaucrats, the lawyers and the "liberal" demagogues among the imperialist politicians. The Browderites oppose any revolutionary mass action and any spirit of resistance and struggle. Under the guise of fighting for reforms, they make it their job to fascize the government apparatus, to praise the NLRB and work for new forms of 1abor-management-government cooperation. They similarly betray all of the revolutionary movements. They deprive them of proletarian leadership by reducing the Party to a loose "educational association" and by reducing the communist and workers' movement to bourgeois trade unionism, legalism and parliamentarianism. The neo-revisionists cling to this Browderite revisionist "American Marxism" in their struggle against the universally applicable, revolutionary teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.
While the essence of neo-revisionism can be found in the Browderite liberal-labor politics, it also has a rather thin "left" veneer, which is an eclectic broth of special sectarian principles, anarcho-syndicalism and straight-out idealist sophistry. Neo-revisionism finds its typical theoretical expression in a series of infamous, anti-Marxist dichotomies such as: the Party is counterposed to the mass movements and vice versa; the economic struggle is counterposed to the political struggle; the alternatives are given of bourgeois trade unionism or of denouncing the economic struggle as economist; bourgeois intellectualism and idealism are given as the alternatives to pragmatism and utter mindlessness and usually both are combined. Over a period of time, neo-revisionism developed a whole series of anti-Marxist doctrines and spread confusion on every issue. But its essence is most clearly expressed in the social-chauvinist liberal-labor politics of Browder.
Today neo-revisionism has degenerated into open social-chauvinism. It has brazenly called for the American working class to ally itself with the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie to "direct the main blow against the Soviet social-imperialists." It has openly climbed aboard the U.S. imperialist war chariot and is demanding that bloodstained monopoly capitalist dictators must produce even more weapons of death and mass destruction which are used against the world revolution and for contention with the Soviet social-imperialists for world domination. The neo-revisionists hold to the theory of "three worlds", which is a theory that writes off revolution and socialism and defends the U.S. imperialist neo-colonial empire. In their opposition to revolution and socialism, the neo-revisionists have sunk to slinging the most filthy anti-communist mud at the glorious People's Socialist Republic of Albania, the bright red bastion of the international proletariat, and against the Party of Labor of Albania and its leader Comrade Enver Hoxha. At this time of deepening all-round crisis of the international bourgeoisie, a time of frenzied militarization and preparations for inter-imperialist world war, the neo-revisionists have jumped out to become super-patriot defenders of U.S. imperialism in particular, and the world imperialist system in general.
Social-chauvinism is the highest form and typical result of a decade of corrosion of neo-revisionism within the Marxist-Leninist movement. For a decade the alliance of the neo-revisionists with the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie has been hidden and secret. Today it is open and disgusting. The political content behind their years of disruption and factionalization of the Marxist- Leninist movement is now clearly revealed for all to see. Social-chauvinism is neo-revisionism in finished form. And their degeneration to open social-chauvinism marks the complete bankruptcy of the neo-revisionist trend.
V.
The disgusting betrayal of the neo-revisionists, their open alliance with the imperialist bourgeoisie, has called forward a great movement against social-chauvinism in the U.S. Under the leadership of the COUSML, this movement has further rallied the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, has brought up a section of class conscious workers to the cause of the Marxist-Leninist Party, and has enlivened revolutionary activists in the defense of socialism. The further extension and deepening of this movement is creating favorable conditions for the founding and building of the Marxist-Leninist Party without the social-chauvinists and against the social-chauvinists.
The struggle against social-chauvinism is a component part of the struggle of the international Marxist-Leninist movement against Chinese revisionism. The international Marxist-Leninist communist movement has consistently fought modern revisionism right from the first signs of its development with Browderite revisionism, and it has continually exposed the emergence of each new variant of modern revisionism. It has waged irreconcilable struggle against Yugoslav revisionism, Soviet revisionism, "Eurocommunism" and Chinese revisionism. The struggle to build the Marxist-Leninist Party in the U.S. has always advanced with the deepening of the repudiation of the anti-Marxist theories and counter-revolutionary role of revisionism. It was the great international polemics against Khrushchovite revisionism in the 1960's which inspired an entire generation of revolutionaries to stand up for the defense of the purity of Marxism- Leninism. And it is the struggle against Chinese revisionism which is today fostering the further building and strengthening of the Marxist-Leninist communist parties in every country. It is to the honor of the Party of Labor of Albania with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, that it was the first Party to expose Khrushchovite revisionism in all of its features. And it is further to their everlasting glory that the Party of Labor of Albania and its leader Comrade Enver Hoxha have led in exposing Chinese revisionism, its "three worlds theory", its superpower ambitions, and its roots in the anti-Marxist-Leninist and revisionist "Mao Zedong (Mao Tsetung) Thought". The U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement is a contingent of the international Marxist-Leninist communist movement. And the struggle against social-chauvinism in the U.S. must be waged as a component of the great international struggle against modern revisionism and especially against its Chinese variant.
The struggle against social-chauvinism is irreconcilable. It is a struggle between the path of revolution and the path of collaboration and alliance with the bourgeoisie. Social-chauvinism and the Browderite liberal-labor politics find their support among an entire stratum of the labor aristocracy and the petty bourgeoisie. Social- chauvinism finds its strength in an alliance with the monopoly capitalist moneybags and their U. & imperialist state. The struggle against this politics and this stratum will not lessen, but will grow even more intense with the approach of the proletarian revolution. There can be no lasting victory in the struggle against social-chauvinism apart from the reconstitution and constant growth and strengthening of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the American proletariat. The great movement against social-chauvinism has mobilised a whole section of class conscious workers and revolutionary activists to break completely with the social-chauvinist class traitors. And this has created favorable conditions to reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Party. And this in turn will further intensify the struggle against the social-chauvinist liberal-labor politics.
VI.
Indispensable to the growth and flourishing of the movement against social-chauvinism has been the work and struggle of the COUSML and its predecessor the ACWM(M-L). Only the COUSML grasped the significance of the emergence of the open social-chauvinist betrayal and only COUSML had the maturity and organization to foster the great nationwide struggle against the social-chauvinist traitors and to lead it to sweep away the opportunist theories and habits which had been accumulating for decades in the U.S. movement. It was possible for the COUSML to play this role only because through ten years of a most arduous and complicated struggle the COUSML, and the ACWM(M-L) before it, has been building the Marxist-Leninist nucleus of the vanguard party of the proletariat.
Right from 1969 the ACWM(M-L) fought to build the Marxist-Leninist Party and with this party spirit always fought to defend the interests of the Marxist-Leninist movement as a whole. For this reason, at a time of prevailing ideological confusion and of local groups and "pre-party collectives", the ACWM(M-L) was built as the national Marxist-Leninist center and took up the decisive work to organize the widescale dissemination of Marxism-Leninism. For this reason the ACWM(M-L) and the COUSML constantly sought to unite the Marxist-Leninists. They worked hard to train the proletariat in the party concept which had been corroded through decades of liberal-labor politics. Only with the Marxist- Leninist Party can the proletariat be united into a powerful independent revolutionary force. The COUSML and the ACWM(M-L) before it always fought for the party concept and for ten years waged consistent battles against all disruption and sabotage to build the proletariat's vanguard party.
From its founding the ACWM(M-L) took up the organization of agitation and propaganda which was national in scope and held to consistently revolutionary principles. It developed its agitation to systematically explain to the masses, both theoretically and practically, the revolutionary point of view on all the most important questions. And it used this agitation to oppose the liberal- labor politics of the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy which dominates the political events and mass movements in the U.S. Through ten years of struggle the COUSML has built up its national press and numerous local leaflets and papers. Through this network it does consistent agitation to inspire in the working class complete opposition to the bourgeoisie and its state power. And through this agitation it seeks to orient and guide every step of the struggle of the masses, welding the economic and political struggles into a single revolutionary torrent. The COUSML, through this protracted agitation and propaganda, is training the class conscious workers and revolutionary activists unswervingly for revolution and is organizing the proletariat to become an independent political force at the center of all the revolutionary mass movements.
The COUSML has not only developed its network of agitation to guide the mass movements onto the revolutionary path, but has also carefully organized revolutionary actions to inspire and train the masses at each step of its history. Whether it was the battles which eventually defeated the fascist "hard hat movement" in 1970, or the recent fights against the state-organized fascist anti-busing movement, the COUSML has consistently organized well-planned revolutionary struggles. It trains the masses in active resistance to the reactionary violence of the bourgeois state and shows them the way to break out of the legalism, pacifism, defeatism and capitulationism of the opportunists. The resistance movement is crucial to the training of revolutionary Marxist-Leninist fighters. There is no way the interests of the masses can be defended, a revolutionary movement developed and a steeled Party built without uncompromising resistance to the fascist attacks of the bourgeois state. It is with this kind of spirit and leadership, through its agitation and revolutionary actions, that the COUSML has given a conscious and systematic aspect to the struggles against the fascist anti-busing movement. These struggles have shown that where there is a Marxist-Leninist vanguard, there the democratic enthusiasm of the masses to fight fascism can be mobilized into a powerful fighting force.
The comrades of the ACWM(M-L) had learned to hate revisionism from their direct experience in the revolutionary mass movements of the 1960's, and they founded and built the Marxist- Leninist nucleus to wage irreconcilable struggle against the revisionists and opportunists of all types. Despite untold pressures to give up their Marxist-Leninist principles, the ACWM(M-L) remained completely loyal to the international Marxist-Leninist communist movement and to the great international struggle against Khrushchovite revisionism. It is because of this revolutionary firmness that the COUSML came up in struggle not only against Khrushchovite revisionism, but also against those who wanted to conciliate with revisionism, the neo-revisionists. Because of its ten year struggle to unite the Marxist-Leninists against the sabotage and disruption of the neo-revisionists, the COUSML was able to expose and criticize the roots of neo-revisionism in the pseudo-theories of the Chinese revisionists and the liberal-labor politics of Browder.
The ACWM(M-L) and COUSML have always laid great stress on proletarian internationalism. They have firmly maintained that the American proletariat is one part of the world proletariat, and the American Marxist-Leninists one contingent of the international Marxist-Leninist communist movement. They have enthusiastically supported the revolutionary struggles for national liberation and socialism in other countries and tirelessly mobilized the proletariat to support all struggles against the imperialist domination of "our own" U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie. They opposed philistinism, moralism and opportunism and placed the issue of internationalism on the revolutionary Leninist basis of solidarity based on pushing forward the common struggle against world imperialism and reaction, on advancing the struggle at home for revolution and supporting the revolutionary line in all other countries.
The ACWM(M-L) was an organization which, right from the start, demanded that all of its members had to actively participate in arriving at the revolutionary decisions and had to imple- nient those decisions in practice. And because of this its organization and members were always marked by a high degree of both Marxist-Leninist consciousness and revolutionary activity. The constant struggle to build the organization where every member is a soldier of the party, sacrificing in the interest of the proletariat and where there is a high level of unity of Marxist-Leninist thought and will, insured that COUSML and ACWM(M-L) before it were fighting, disciplined organizations with monolithic unity based on the single Marxist-Leninist line. Through ten years of struggle, the COUSML has built up the centralized leadership and the self-moving basic organization in the local areas which has the initiative to respond to the day-to-day struggles of the masses and the political strength and unity to train the workers in the revolutionary Marxist- Leninist line of the COUSML.
Ten years of all-sided and wide-ranging struggle has gone into the building of the Marxist- Leninist nucleus of the vanguard party of the proletariat. It is now time to reconstitute that party through the founding of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the U.S.A.
VII.
Today the Marxist-Leninist Party is being reestablished in the midst of a deepening struggle against social-chauvinism, revisionism and opportunism of all types. Neo-revisionism has degenerated into open social-chauvinism and has gone bankrupt. The revolutionary Marxist-Leninists have unfolded a great movement against social-chauvinism and revisionism, and are advancing in revolutionary struggle against the monopoly capitalist dictators. The proletariat and working masses are rising up and great class battles are imminent. All Marxist-Leninists, class conscious workers, and revolutionary activists, the COUSML calls to you: NOW IS THE TIME TO REESTABLISH THE MARXIST- LENINIST PARTY OF THE AMERICAN PROLETARIAT. Now is the time to vigorously participate in the historic work to found the Marxist- Leninist Party of the U.S.A.; work closely with the branches and basic units of the COUSML to organize public meetings, distribution networks, committees against social-chauvinism, study groups, etc.; and carry out the main tasks:
1) Study the classic teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Defend the purity of Marxism- Leninism. Wage irreconcilable struggle against social-chauvinism, "three worlds-ism", neo-revisionism, and all the main variants of modern revisionism including Soviet revisionism, Yugoslav revisionism, "Eurocommunism", and Chinese revisionism.
2) Study, discuss and widely distribute the important political documents for the founding of the Marxist-Leninist Party, The Workers' Advocate, and other literature of the COUSML.
3) Defend the People's Socialist Republic of Albania with the Party of Labor of Albania and its leader Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head. Mobilize support for Albania, the great inspiration and bright red bastion of the world revolution and socialism.
4) Denounce the social-chauvinist theories including: the theory of allying the American proletariat with U.S. imperialism to "direct the main blow against Soviet social-imperialism"; the "three worlds theory" and its support for neocolonialism and opposition to socialism and revolution; etc.
5) Develop the struggle against the militarization, war preparations and aggression of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, of the other imperialists and all reactionaries. Oppose the aggressive, warmongering U.S.-China alliance. Use these struggles to expose the utter vileness of the social-chauvinist liberal-labor politics.
6) Participate actively in the revolutionary mass movements. Inspire the working class and masses with the spirit of the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Mobilize the advanced elements of the proletariat into the Party work. Work hard to expose and defeat the revisionists' sabotage of the revolutionary mass struggles.
BUILD THE MARXIST-LENINIST PARTY WITHOUT THE SOCIAL-CHAUVINISTS AND AGAINST THE SOCIAL-CHAUVINISTS!
UPHOLD MARXISM-LENINISM AND PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM!
VIGOROUSLY PARTICIPATE IN THE HISTORIC WORK TO FOUND THE MARXIST-LENINIST PARTY OF THE U.S.A.!
May 12, 1979
On May 5, 1979 the COUSML conducted two demonstrations and held public meetings in four cities to celebrate May 1st, the revolutionary holiday to commemorate the international struggle for the emancipation of the working class. The May Day meetings also commemorated the tenth anniversary of the founding of the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist), predecessor organization of COUSML, which was founded on May 12, 1969. At these historic meetings, COUSML proclaimed in the keynote speech that ''Now is the time for a large-scale campaign for the reestablishment of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the American proletariat." This proclamation was greeted with very enthusiastic applause, shouting of slogans and other joyous expressions in all of the meetings, which were held in Seattle, Oakland, Chicago and New York City.
For several weeks prior to the May 5th events, revolutionary activists distributed thousands of leaflets imbued with the revolutionary spirit of "Workers of All Countries, Unite!", the clarion call issued over 130 years ago by Comrade Marx. This revolutionary literature was enthusiastically received by the working masses in factories, schools and communities from coast to coast. The American people are seething with indignation at the brutal exploitation and oppression of the monopoly capitalists. They are searching for a revolutionary alternative, and are eager to receive the clear and truthful analysis presented by the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists. The leaflet elaborated on the following slogans: Workers of All Countries, Unite! Defend Socialist Albania, Bastion of Socialism and World Revolution! Wage Mass Revolutionary Struggle Against Starvation, Fascism and War I Defy Carter's Wage Controls! Oppose the Aggressive U.S.-China Alliance and All Imperialist War Preparations! Build the Marxist-Leninist Party without the Social-Chauvinists and Against the Social-Chauvinists! Socialist Revolution Is the Historic Mission of the Proletariat!
In Chicago, birthplace of International Working Class Day stemming from the great struggle for the eight-hour day over 90 years ago, a militant demonstration of 75 people was organized at the plaza of the Federal Building. The large red flags of the demonstration billowed in the Chicago wind, presenting a striking picture. Hundreds of leaflets were distributed on the spot and many people stayed in the vicinity for long periods of time, many excitedly taking snapshots, reading the placards, or just admiring the demonstration, while some stopped to raise their fists and shout revolutionary slogans along with the demonstrators.
A similarly militant demonstration was organized in New York, where 125 people marched down Broadway Avenue through various communities. The warmest reception to the march came from the working class district, as numerous revolutionary people raised their fists and called out slogans from apartment windows above the street, while some people enthusiastically joined the march en route. The two demonstrations were afloat with red flags and with placards containing the above listed slogans -- in both English and Spanish -- and were headed up with large red banners, one proclaiming "Hail May 1st, International Working Class Day!" and the other bearing the name of COUSML. The New York march also raised high the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.
In the four public meetings, attended by 400 people, two well-received speeches were presented by COUSML. The first was on the theme of International Working Class Day. (Excerpts of the speech delivered in the New York meeting are published in this issue of The Workers' Advocate.) The second, entitled "Hail the Tenth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist)" is reproduced in full in this issue. The meeting in Chicago, attended by 100 people, was also addressed by a representative of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), glorious fraternal party to COUSML. In his remarks, the speaker hailed the ten years of struggle since the founding of ACWM (M-L) and the decision of COUSML to found the Marxist-Leninist Party. He declared that the founding of the Marxist-Leninist Party in the U.S. will mark another turning point in the revolutionary movement and proclaimed that the ten years of close cooperation between the two Marxist- Leninist organizations in struggle against our common enemies would surely continue to flourish. The comrade of CPC (M-L) was greeted with vigorous applause both at the beginning and at the end of his speech. In the New York meeting, the audience listened intently to speeches presented by the Federation of Iranian Students in the U.S., Caribbean Progressive Study Group, the Turkish Students Association and Eritreans for Liberation in North America, the latter organization also presenting a message in Seattle. The messages, also published elsewhere in this issue, present analysis of the development of the revolutionary movement in several countries, and are brimming with revolutionary fervor and the spirit of proletarian internationalism.
In addition to being a day to sum up the achievements of the past and to chart the course of the future, May 1st is a day of festive celebrations for the new world, the world of the proletariat and socialism, which is being born. In Oakland, this was symbolized by a beautiful photograph display of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. And in all of the meetings, numerous revolutionary songs were sung, including several songs recently written by COUSML comrades, including "Build the Marxist-Leninist Party", "Proletarians, Unite!", and "Eternal Glory to J.V. Stalin". The latter song is a tribute to J.V. Stalin, whose life and work are being commemorated by the international Marxist-Leninist communist movement in this year of the 100th anniversary of his birth. In Chicago, revolutionary songs were also sung at the meeting by the Indian Progressive Study Groups as well as by EFLNA and the Association of Eritrean Women in North America. In New York, the songs of FISUS, EFLNA and CPSG contributed to the jubilant spirit of the celebration of International Working Class Day.
[Photos:
1. Militant demonstration of over 125 people marched down Broadway to hail May 1st, International Working Class Day, in New York City.
2. Revolutionary masses in a working class district of New York City enthusiastically greet the May 1st demonstration.
Vigorous celebrations of May Day and the tenth anniversary of the ACWM(M-L):
3. New York
4. Seattle
5. Oakland]
(Excerpts from the speech delivered by a representative of the COUSML on May 5, 1979 in New York City to the public meeting to "Hail May 1st, International Working Class Day!")
Comrades and Friends,
May 1st is the great day of celebration of the international struggle for the emancipation of the working class. For over 130 years the working class has united under the revolutionary banner of Comrade Marx: "Workers of All Countries, Unite!" On May 1st, this banner is held aloft by the proletariat in every country as the workers throughout the world jubilantly celebrate their past victories and prepare for even greater class battles in the future. May 1st is a day of proletarian internationalism, a day when the proletariat declares that in its great historic struggle with international capital, the workers know no nation; that they are firmly united and acting in unison to unite and lead the vast majority of the world's oppressed and exploited to overthrow and obliterate the tiny handful of gangsters and bandits who oppress them. On May Day the proletariat celebrates the fact that everywhere, in every country and in every corner of the globe the workers and oppressed masses are in battle with world reaction. The proletariat militantly declares that these innumerable battles are merging into a single mighty torrent, led by the Marxist-Leninist Parties, the torrent of the world proletarian socialist revolution.
Comrades and friends, May 1st is not simply a day of celebration of past victories, nor simply a day of preparation for future battles. May 1st has been and remains a great day of class battles itself. This May 1st, 1979, found the working class throughout the world on the barricades of the class struggle. And this is how it should be. For May 1st itself is a product of and was proclaimed in tribute to the great battle of the working class for the eight hour day, which swept the globe and united the workers of all countries in struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state powers.
This great tradition of the international proletariat, of uniting in struggle for their common aims, was demonstrated with tremendous vigor by the events of May 1st, 1979. In the United States, Iran, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Ireland, in countries throughout the world, the proletariat came out to the streets to celebrate May Day and to use the occasion to advance their demands, to wage struggle against the shifting of the economic crisis onto their backs, to fight against starvation, fascism and war. And often they were forced to battle simply to defend the tradition of May Day, to defend their right to demonstrate their internationalist spirit against the vicious attempts of the bourgeoisie to banish May Day itself.
Just to take an example, comrades, in Iran on May 1st, hundreds of thousands of workers, peasants and revolutionary masses demonstrated in the streets of Tehran and other cities, celebrating their great victory over the fascist Shah and expressing their determination to defend the victories of their revolution and to carry it through to the end. They showed that the Iranian revolution is inexorably linked to the world revolution as they stood with their class brothers in the forefront of the struggle on International Working Class Day.
In Ireland, France, Portugal and many other countries, the working class used the occasion of May Day to advance their struggle in defense of their basic interests against the effects of the deepening economic crisis, which has gripped the entire imperialist world. In unison they demonstrated in protest and raised their voices against the skyrocketing cost of living, the cuts in pay and growing impoverishment of the workers, and the mass unemployment in their countries. In Dublin, 80,000 workers staged a May Day strike, bringing a complete halt to construction, auto production and shipping throughout Ireland. In these and many other countries the workers waged militant battles with the police on May Day. Hundreds of thousands of marchers in cities across Spain fought pitched battles with the police and the fascist gangs sent by the state to crush their May Day demonstrations. The bourgeoisie and fascist reaction, terrified of the revolt of the proletariat and of the great spiritual and moral weight of May Day, desperately tried to crush May 1st, and in Chile and Turkey banned outright any May Day demonstrations or meetings. Of course they failed completely.
In Chile, all May Day activities were banned, except the farce organized by the fascist Pinochet himself. These quivering fascists were so desperate that in Santiago the police posted guards in every square of the city, while detectives prowled the streets in unmarked cars calling in riot police whenever groups of workers tried to assemble. Despite these desperate measures, demonstrations and meetings formed continually on a wider scale than ever before and numerous clashes with the police took place. Hundreds were arrested defending the heroic tradition of May 1st.
In Turkey too, the government banned all May Day demonstrations, using the fascist martial law. In utter desperation they declared a 29-hour curfew! Undeterred, the workers came out and thousands were arrested defying this fascist ban. These are only a few of the May Day battles which took place this year. But they show that the spirit of May Day in the proletariat can never be crushed and in fact is growing even stronger. In New York City itself, May 1st saw a demonstration of 15,000 city workers and community residents protesting the massive cuts in the city budget ordered by Mayor Koch in order to guarantee the profits of the finance capitalists on Wall Street.
Thus May 1st, International Working Class Day, is itself a day of revolutionary struggle throughout the world. A day when the working class is united in actual struggle against their common enemies, a living testimony to the general revolutionary ferment sweeping the entire capitalist-revisionist world.
Comrades and friends, summing up the victories of the international proletariat on this May Day, 1979, it is abundantly clear that the working class has irrevocably marched onto the stage of world history as the leading force in the social revolution, destined to unite all the toilers and exploited around itself in the revolutionary struggle. The proletariat is the greatest revolutionary class. Its destiny is to completely destroy the forces of exploitation and reaction, led by U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. Its historic mission is to usher in socialism, to end wage-slavery and all exploitation of man by man. The working class has its own revolutionary theory, Marxism-Leninism. The working class is building its revolutionary leadership in the Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations in each country. The working class has seized power already and is building genuine democracy and socialism in the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, a bastion of revolution and tremendous inspiration to all workers. With such a revolutionary theory, with such a revolutionary leadership and with such a reliable base area as Socialist Albania, the working class stands at the center of our modern epoch as the gravedigger of capitalism and the hope of the future!...
The imperialists, terrified, quaking in their boots at the growing strength of the working class and the Marxist-Leninists, their liberal-labor demagogy and deception failing, their savage repression yielding only greater resistance on the part of the workers, are relying heavily on the opportunists of all hues, their traitorous dogs within the communist and workers' movement to do their dirty work. But these charlatans too are losing their cover. It is extremely interesting to note that while May Day 1979 found the working class everywhere at the barricades of struggle against the capitalist dictators, it was reported that in Beijing (Peking), for the second year in a row, all government-sponsored celebrations of May Day were cancelled "due to austerity measures". Instead, Beijing, it was reported, was filled with picnickers. So here is yet another example of what is the status of the class struggle of the proletariat, of the historic mission of the international proletariat and the international communist movement in the eyes of the Chinese revisionists and the "three worldists"! Their desire (foolish dream) is to simply cancel May Day and turn it into a mockery, like the U.S. imperialists and labor aristocrats have attempted to do with their phoney Labor Day in September.
The Chinese revisionists and their lackeys in the U.S., the neo-revisionists and social-chauvinists, greatly fear the connotations of May Day and rightly so, for they are in the camp of imperialism and will be dealt with in kind. While the puppets of Chinese revisionism in the U.S. are still talking about May Day, temporarily, they are fooling no one. Today the entire neo-revisionist trend has gone over to an open alliance with the capitalist moneybags. They are openly supporting the U.S. imperialist war preparations, sabotaging the workers' struggles, attempting to disrupt the formation of the Marxist-Leninist Party; they are slinging anti-communist mud at the Party of Labor of Albania and Marxism-Leninism.
Comrades and friends, the day is not far off when far from these characters banishing May Day, the working class and its Marxist-Leninist Party will banish them and their open social-chauvinist alliance with the rich, from May Day and from the whole revolutionary movement.
Comrades and friends, all the desperate schemes of the imperialists and their lackeys are falling apart at the seams. Nothing can save them. The proletariat is building its Marxist-Leninist Party without the social-chauvinists and against the social-chauvinists on the barricades of the class struggle. This Party will organize and lead the growing mass revolutionary struggles of the working class against starvation, fascism and war, until final victory. Socialist revolution is the historic mission of the working class. We have nothing to lose but our chains, we have a world to win.
HAIL MAY 1st, INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS DAY!
WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
"Workers of All Countries, Unite!" is the clarion call around which the international proletariat rallies to demonstrate on May 1st in its militant revolutionary tradition, closing its ranks against the world imperialist system. May 1st International Working Class Day is a day of festive and militant celebration of the past victories of the world proletariat, a day to commemorate the heroic battles of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie since the time of the Paris Commune.
The proletariat -- the most revolutionary class in history has the historic mission of smashing the system of exploitation and ushering in socialism on a world scale. The great October socialist revolution, which ushered in a new era of proletarian revolution with the national liberation struggles of the oppressed masses in the colonies and neo-colonies as its reliable ally, is a great monument to the international proletariat whose path is still illumined by the glorious lessons of the October revolution. Despite the treachery of the Khruschovite revisionists who usurped state power in the Soviet Union, the lessons of the great October socialist revolution remain to this day the correct path forward for the oppressed people.
Today, the two hostile camps -- the camp of labor with the land of socialism, the international proletariat and the national liberation struggles as its component parts, and the camp of capital including imperialism, revisionism, its local lackeys and all reaction -- are locked in fierce struggles. Throughout the globe the revolutionary situation is maturing. The working class movement in the capitalist countries is increasingly on the upsurge led by its Marxist-Leninist parties. The proletariat is taking up the task of organizing revolution as the only solution to the deepening crisis of the capitalist system.
In the U.S., the imperialist heartland of the vicious enemy of the world's peoples, the working class is intensifying its resistance to the unbridled exploitation and violent attacks by they monopoly capitalist class. The Afro-American people and other oppressed people in the U.S. are militantly rising up against the racist attacks perpetrated by the monopoly capitalist state. The U.S. proletariat has the historic mission of destroying the monstrous imperialist superpower, the hated enemy of the U.S. and world's people.
The proletariat is at the center of the revolutionary movement not only in the capitalist countries but also in the countries where the oppressed peoples are waging the national liberation movement against the forces of reaction led by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The proletariat organized in its Marxist-Leninist party, as the most revolutionary class, is the leading force that can insure the victory of the national liberation struggles and emancipate the entire oppressed masses.
The experience of our people's national liberation struggle, which has suffered severe setbacks from the betrayal by the collaborationist line of non-proletarian leaderships, testifies to the historical truth -- that it is only the proletariat led by its Marxist-Leninist party that can lead the national liberation movement to complete victory. The century old struggle of the Eritrean people against successive colonial occupation and domination is testimony to the deep patriotic sentiments of our people who have made enormous sacrifices for the cause of freedom and liberation.
Ever since its birth with the advent of Italian colonialism in 1889, the Eritrean working class has been imbued with the revolutionary and patriotic spirit of resistance to the brutal colonial exploitation and oppression. Aroused by the vicious exploitation at the work place and by the injustice of the entire colonial system by racist and fascist suppression, the Eritrean working class embarked on the road of resistance, began to organize in unions and to vigorously participate in the patriotic independence movement in the 40's and 50's. With the annexation of Eritrea to Ethiopia in 1952, the imperialist-backed Ethiopian occupationists immediately set out to break the backbone of our people's independence movement by smashing the trade unions, closing down factories and attempting to disperse the small but militant Eritrean proletariat. Its active resistance to the imperialist-backed Ethiopian domination through mass strikes etc., and later in the armed national liberation struggle, attribute to the Eritrean working class along with other oppressed Eritrean masses the heroic and patriotic tradition. With a vanguard proletarian party, the Eritrean working class and people will definitely emerge victorious in the ongoing national liberation struggle against the present war of aggression of the Ethiopian fascist occupation backed by Soviet-led revisionism.
On the occasion of International Working Class Day, EFLNA and AEWNA, reflecting the sentiments of our fighting people, express their solidarity and hail the struggle of the international proletariat and oppressed people around the world. On the occasion of today's celebration we hail in particular the struggle of the proletariat and the oppressed people of the U.S., and express our enthusiasm at being honored to participate in today's May Day celebration and the tenth anniversary of the ACWM(M-L) by our fraternal organization the COUSML.
LONG LIVE PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM!
WORKERS AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE OF THE
WORLD, UNITE!
Comrades and Friends,
Good evening and greetings from the Caribbean Progressive Study Group. We are extremely pleased at the opportunity to speak in solidarity with this important meeting celebrating both the day of the international working class, May Day, and the tenth anniversary since the formation of the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist).
May 1st all over the world is the day of jubilation for the workers of all countries, a day of preparation for the future class battles against the bourgeoisie and reaction of all sorts. Jubilant, because despite the tyranny and oppression of capital, the proletarians declare that they are going to crush by force all exploitation and reaction, and usher in the bright red system of socialism under the dictatorship of the proletariat such as they have achieved in Albania -- the bastion of socialism and world revolution. Of this the proletarians, their Marxist-Leninist Parties have no doubt -- let the speculators, opportunists, revisionists, trotskyites sneer and scoff and tremble with fear. On May 1st in every country the workers celebrate in grand militant demonstrations, massive rallies, the brilliant call of Karl Marx -- "Workers of All Countries, Unite!"
The ordinary West Indians have always looked forward to and cherished May Day and these brilliant words of Comrade Marx, and have always cursed and called shame on the reactionaries and labor traitors who try to convert May Day into a day of declaration of peace between the opposing classes, a day which would be acceptable to the bourgeoisie. But this meeting shatters the hopes and criminal efforts of the traitors. The West Indian community is an integral part of the American working class and people and takes pride in manning the barricades alongside its class brothers.
It is the proletariat, and the proletariat alone, that provides sustenance, the agency for the freedom-loving and just aspirations of all sectors of the American working masses, including the West Indian community. The proletariat stands at the center of all the revolutionary currents in American society because it is the proletariat alone which is capable of and whose mission it is to defeat the dictatorship of the monopoly capitalist class and usher in the bright red future of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, based on the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.
The patriotic West Indians are taking up the work of organizing and defending their community against the racist attacks of the state of the rich. The developing situation is very good in the West Indian community because the will of the working class has found definite expression. It was only with the assistance and guidance of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists that the patriotic and ordinary West Indians are being armed to properly cope with the obstacles and attacks which the rich rulers have thrown at the community.
Comrades and Friends,
The deepening crisis of the U.S. monopoly capitalist system is bringing increasing misery and deprivation on the heads of the working masses. The monopoly capitalists and the state have no solution other than more suffering, more misery, fascism, starvation and war. The working class and people will never accept this. It is with the great class battles facing the proletariat that the social-chauvinist scum have jumped out to call on the American people to prostrate before the aggressive and bloodthirsty ambitions of the rich, to see their enemy not in the U.S. bourgeoisie but in an "external threat", to direct their blows externally, to come to the defense of U.S. imperialism which the social-chauvinists preach has lost its teeth and is on the decline. The proletariat does not accept this utterly cowardly, sellout position of the social-chauvinists and other neo-revisionists who want to send the struggle of the working class down a blind alley. It is the COUSML that has unfolded and led the struggle to expose, and soon to bury the social-chauvinists and opportunists of all description. And this is not without reason or accidental. The past ten years or so in the U.S. has seen an uphill battle of Marxism-Leninism versus revisionism and opportunism. The reactionary state has floated all sorts of bogus nonsense as Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary, in order to bewilder and disorient the working class and revolutionary activists and in order to discredit Marxism-Leninism in the eyes of the ordinary people, with the wishful hope of wiping out revolution. But, the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie, the social-chauvinists and neo-revisionists have miscalculated their blow. With the founding of the ACWM(M-L) in 1969, the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists have had to fight hard for every advance in the defense of the purity of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, and to build the Marxist- Leninist Party in this country. It is because the COUSML, and its predecessor the ACWM(M-L), have waged the consistent struggle against revisionism and opportunism and in defense of Marxism-Leninism, that the COUSML has initiated and is leading the struggle against social-chauvinism and to reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Party of the proletariat in the U.S. It is this struggle against social-chauvinism waged by the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists that is driving the neo-revisionists into utter panic, to the point where they have been coming out revealing their ugly anticommunist nature for all to see. May Day 1979 is marked by the ever greater successes of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, and the seething of the storms of revolutionary struggle of the 1980's,, Nothing can stop the remorseless vengeance of the American proletariat and broad masses against the reactionary monopoly capitalist class and their state, against the revisionists, trotskyites, opportunists and trade union bigwigs.
Comrades and Friends,
It is May Day! The day to celebrate the international solidarity of the working class. The day that reminds us it is the class contradiction and class struggle which is the determinant factor in the life of mankind. The day that reminds us it is neither geographical nor artificial borders, but the class stand which indicates who is a friend, and who is not. The day that reminds us it is the working class who is the most revolutionary and will be revolutionary until the end of the exploitation of man by man. The day that reminds us, revolution is the only way to achieve this end. The day that reminds us that the enemies of the working class, particularly those with socialist masks, celebrate this day. You may not know even the deposed Shah's regime, one of the worst anti-worker regimes of our time also celebrated May Day! The working class of Iran, however, through militant strikes, celebrated May Day in the Shah's era.
This year, May Day was celebrated in Iran but this time for a real celebration, the first after almost 30 years.
This was possible due to the heroic struggle of millions of masses which in the last two years, in its dimensions, its bravery and its continuity went beyond many's expectations.
Workers played the major and decisive role in the victory of the Iranian revolution against the imperialists and the comprador bourgeoisie. It was the proletariat who marched into the streets in their millions and fought and defeated, up-to-the-teeth armed mercenaries named the Iranian army. It was the strikes and particularly the oil workers' strike which broke the backbone of the fascist regime of the Shah.
The Iranian revolution is a learning experience. Once more it proved the correctness of the scientific theories of class struggle, the needed militancy in overcoming imperialism, the need for subjective factors and particularly for revolutionary ideology and the party to pursue a revolution to the end.
While the Iranian revolution was a big step forward, it is short of achieving many of its goals. The national bourgeoisie, taking advantage of a vacuum of power, stepped on top of the democratic movement and controlled the government and its institutions. All social reforms done or promised by the government since then, are to protect and help the national, traditional, commercial and small capitals. It has tried to disarm the masses and rely on the imperialists' made and trained army of the Shah. It has no respect and tolerance for the democratic rights of the revolutionary classes, their organizations and party. It has not accepted equal rights for working women in the factory or in the social life. It has been unable to rescue the domestic rights of nationalities and minorities in Iran. It has tried a very mild and reactionary policy toward the ex-regime's, officials and SAVAK agents. It has threatened the basic rights of workers and has tried to oppress their revolutionary movement and spirit. It has increased a policy of oppression toward the poor peasants and prevented them from taking over their extorted lands. It has tried to defuse and diverge the revolutionary mood and spirit of the masses by introducing differences between communism and Islam. It has not nationalized belongings of the multinational vampires, nor has it cancelled many of the imperialistic and exploitative contracts signed by the Shah's regime. In short it is a government of the collaborators; anti-worker and anti-revolutionary. What else could you expect from the bourgeoisie?
The most positive achievement of the Iranian revolution is the awareness of the working class of its importance and role in the society. They realized that without them it is impossible to advance any step forward. They are also realizing that in order to achieve the basic goals of the revolution, they should gather in their own party. And this is happening with such a speed that it seems unbelievable. May Day was an example.
There were two calls for May Day celebrations one by the progressive, anti-imperialist organizations and movements, the so-called "left" in the form of a coalition; the other by the government, with all the help and propaganda of the government agencies, the religious leadership and the anti-communists. Despite all this they could not mobilize more than 30 thousand in Tehran, mostly small merchants, shopkeepers and non-workers. While the coalition of the left, by itself a worthy act of cooperation, gathered over 100,000 workers. This is a clear sign of the increased maturity of the working class, added to the incapability of the bourgeoisie to do any good for the proletariat, which prospects a very bright future for Iran. May Day should be celebrated for this if for nothing else.
The workers and revolutionaries of Iran, having the experience of Iran's revolution, and the rich experience of the international revolutionaries, are more and more realizing the correct line, the one that guides them toward the final victory. They are gathering more and more in their Party, the Workers' and Peasants' Communist Party of Iran. The Party, armed with the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, in a righteous manner, has put emphasis on mobilizing the working class. The early signs of this correct line of the Workers' and Peasants' Communist Party of Iran already are visible.
Comrades and Friends,
It was mentioned that May Day has also been used by the enemies of the workers to confuse the international working class. Be they the new Tsars of Russia in Moscow and their showoffs, or the social-chauvinists and imperialist dreamers of Beijing (Peking) and their conciliators or many other imperialists and reactionaries, they came out demagogically about May Day and the working class. Their agents and lackeys all around the world shamelessly managed rallies on behalf of the working class. The traitorous central committee of the Tudeh Party, agents of the Soviet social-imperialists in Iran, and the reactionary anti-revolutionary "Revolutionary Organization", the lackeys of the Chinese social- chauvinists, are the talking examples. They talk of May Day while giving full support to the anti- worker, anti-communist policies of the new regime in Iran.
Comrades and Friends,
Let the social-imperialists and their lackeys all around the world bark as much as they want. The international working class and its genuine parties and organizations headed by the Marxist- Leninist Party of Labor of Albania are leading the world toward what it should look like: A classless society.
Comrades and Friends,
Today we also celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the ACWM(M-L). This timing is by no means an accident. Ten years of revolutionary struggle of ACWM(M-L) is one of the achievements that should be celebrated on May Day...
DOWN WITH THE COLLABORATORS AND OPPORTUNISTS OF ALL HUES!
DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM, RACISM, ZIONISM AND REACTION!
LONG LIVE THE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY OF THE WORKING CLASS!
HAIL MAY 1ST, INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS DAY!
HAIL THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING OF ACWM(M-L)!
Comrades and Friends,
We, the Turkish Students Association and Turkish Women Study Group, convey our militant revolutionary greetings to the participants of the May 1st -- International Working Class Day celebration organized by the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists.
International Working Class Day is a day of unity, solidarity and struggle for the world proletariat. The celebration of May Day ha&a great importance in our epoch which is the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. The celebration of May Day is an inseperable part of the struggles of the workers and oppressed peoples of the world against their own bourgeoisie, the fascist-reactionary regimes, to forward the revolution for independence, democracy and socialism.
It is exactly this reason why the imperialists, their lackeys and all hues of reactionaries have been hopelessly attempting to ban or suppress the May Day celebrations so that the glorious internationalist spirit of the international working class could be extinguished. However, no matter how oppressive they are in their attempts, they are doomed to failure. The proletariat and peoples of Turkey, as well as other countries, have proven once more this historical fact this year by upholding the internationalist spirit of the world proletariat.
Comrades and Friends,
May Day celebrations have been banned in the provinces where martial law was in effect in Turkey. The military administration declared a curfew for 29 hours, starting on April 30 at 12:00 p. m., noting that those who do not obey the curfew will be shot on the spot. Ecevit, the prime minister of Turkey, has said that the warning of the officers was quite plain, and that he trusts the "common sense" of Turkish workers, that those who disobey the "warnings" will be faced by the authority of the state. However. the proletariat of Turkey took to the streets and closed down factories in several cities.
On May 1, 2,000 people people have been arrested for disobeying the curfew, just in Istanbul and Ankara. Among those who are arrested, are the officers of the Revolutionary Workers' Unions Confederation, militants of the Turkish proletariat. In Izmir, seven workers have been wounded during clashes with the police. Despite the brutal oppression of the fascist dictatorship to ban the international proletariat's day, May Day was celebrated in several regions led by Marxist-Leninists.
These are not the first signs of brutal repression in Turkey, nor do they appear to be the last. Two years ago, on May 1, 1977, 40 workers were killed during May Day celebrations in Istanbul where 500,000 persons gathered together. The instigators of the crime were later proven to belong to a secret police organization, a counter-guerrilla organization linked to the army and the National Intelligence Agency. Since the declaration of martial law on December 25, 1978, the suppression of the democratic forces has reached a new plane.
Martial law was declared following the massacre of 150 townspeople in the city of Maras, instigated by organized groups of the fascist party of Turkey, the Nationalist Movement Party. Initially in effect in 13 provinces, the martial law was extended to six other provinces a few weeks ago.
The military administration, rather than moving against the instigators of the crime, has systematically begun to suppress the existing limited civil liberties. The fascist party and its paramilitary killing squads have continued their activities with near impunity. With almost 1,000 murders to their account, barely a couple hundred of their pawns have been arrested. They are charged with common, individual crimes, leaving the organization intact.
On the other hand, the military administration has arbitrarily detained at least 10,000 progressive individuals, students and workers in three months. Most of them have been beaten and tortured for days before being released without charges. The number of political prisoners has begun to exceed the capacity of the prison system; most prisoners are tortured. Several progressive newspapers have been banned by military decree; their editors and writers are being hunted down, arrested and tried with charges requiring penalties up to execution. At least ten people have been shot and killed in cursory roundups and searches. Truckloads of striking workers have been jailed. Shantytowns have been turned into virtual battlegrounds by the military "searching for leftists". People have been killed for keeping a copy of the "Communist Manifesto" at their home.
Beginning with the early 1970's the ruling class of Turkey has been faced with a growing threat to its rule. The people have begun to organize and fight for their democratic rights; millions have joined their forces in democratic and socialist organizations and unions; huge numbers have participated in strikes, demonstrations and land reform agitation. The Ecevit government was inaugurated in January 1978 with the mission to overcome this "crisis". His solution was systematic repression of democratic forces and the gradual militarization of the regime.
Draconian laws establishing special political tribunals and abolishing basic constitutional rights were proposed. The Maras massacre was no more than a pretext for the final step. Faced with the demands for a real democracy, the possibility of the people really beginning to rule, the actual rulers of Turkey do not hesitate to scrape away even the semblance of democracy that exists, regardless of the party in power, or the name of the regime.
The Turkish government cannot carry on this internal repression by itself; it is dependent on Western support to exist and to rule the country. In fact, Prime Minister Ecevit is now making a gigantic effort to raise international funds for his government. For this effort is has been essential to have the Western media portray Ecevit as "the last chance of democracy in Turkey" and the disturbances as the work variously of "terrorists" or "religious sects".
After the defeat in Iran, the U.S. administration seems determined to make sure that the Turkish people do not venture too far into democracy. Already in July 1978, the Congress made a major decision to give military aid to the Turkish regime. In November, two giant American financial corporations decided to help it economically. At the Guadeloupe summit of January 1979^ President Carter agreed to a large-scale rescue operation for the Turkish government. U.S. aid to the government of Turkey (in fact any international aid, as the Soviet Union too has shown perfect willingness to finance the Ecevit government) means aid to suppress democratic forces in Turkey.
Despite the fact that the ruling classes of Turkey agree upon the suppression of the struggle of the peoples of Turkey, coinciding with the demands of their imperialist masters, the working class and peoples of Turkey are staunchly resisting the fascist dictatorship. To give a few examples would be sufficient to illustrate this course.
At the end of December, in 13 provinces, people had organized demonstrations against repressive laws and worsening living conditions and unemployment. Martial law generals, hand in hand with representatives of different factions of the comprador bourgeoisie and landlords, issued statements to prevent the working class from taking an active stand against exploitation and oppression. Yet, in several cities in many factories, workers are not obeying the rules of the martial law generals. They participate in strikes for economic, social and political demands. In the countryside, landless peasants raise their struggle for their demand, land to the tiller. Petty commodity producers struggle against low floor price levels for their products. Youth and students actively participate in resistance against anti-democratic new educational legislation of the martial law by boycotting classes, organizing demonstrations in almost every high school and university of Turkey.
The peoples of Turkey, under the leadership of a genuine Marxist-Leninist party will be victorious. Independent, democratic socialist Turkey will be established.
HAIL MAY 1st, INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS DAY!
DEATH TO IMPERIALISM AND SOCIAL-IMPERIALISM AND ALL REACTION!
(The following leaflet was issued by the Detroit Branch of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists on May 14, 1979.)
May 15 is Palestine Day. On this date in 1948 the artificial state of Israel was set up on the basis of robbing the Palestinian people's land by force of arms, murdering tens of thousands, and driving millions more Palestinians into refugee camps in neighboring countries. The Israeli colonial state is nothing but an outpost of U.S. imperialism to plunder and dominate the Middle East. Every May 15, the Palestinian people and their supporters hold mass demonstrations to strengthen their resolve to drive the imperialists and Zionists from their historic homeland. The freedom loving Palestinian people have never accepted Zionist occupation. They have persisted in armed actions, mass demonstrations and strikes in defiance of the racist and fascist repression of the Zionist police state of Israel.
This heroic struggle enjoys the strongest revolutionary solidarity from all the freedom-loving peoples of the world. The Palestinian revolution is part of the contemporary world revolution, part of the world of labor in struggle for national liberation and socialism, in battle with the old world of imperialism and slavery. The Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists and the American working class and oppressed people resolutely support the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people.
Presently, the U.S. imperialists have imposed a ''peace treaty" between Egypt and Israel. Carter's so-called ''peace treaty" is in fact a monstrous act of aggression against the Palestinian and Arab peoples, having nothing whatsoever to do with bringing peace to the Middle East. On the contrary, it aims at consolidating U.S. imperialism's savage plunder and domination of the Arab peoples, at strengthening its aggressive puppet, Zionist Israel, and at countering the influence of the rival superpower in the area, Soviet social - imperialism, which also seeks to exploit the Arab people. This so-called ''peace" treaty is also part of U.S. imperialism's response to the glorious Iranian revolution that has overthrown the puppet of U.S. imperialism, the fascist Shah of Iran. Carter has found a close ally in the arch-traitor Sadat who is eager to take the place of the puppet Shah of Iran and turn Egypt into a base of U.S. imperialist aggression in the area as the "peace" treaty calls for.
The true nature of this treaty is illustrated by the fact that while the imperialists and Zionists are talking "peace", in actual practice they are launching further aggression to expand their territory and carry out genocide against the Palestinians. During the negotiations for the "peace" treaty, the Zionists launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. Before the ink was dry after the March 26 signing, the Israeli Zionists carried out bombings and raids on Palestinian villages, and now that the treaty is in effect, Israel continues to launch further atrocities like the new raids on Palestinian refugee villages in southern Lebanon, and even bombing Beirut in the past week! While Carter, Begin and traitor Sadat are full of sweet promises about the treaty giving land back to the Palestinians -- someday off in the distant future -- in fact the Zionists are still openly, with full U.S. backing, setting up more settlements and new military camps on Palestinian land. Carter's "peace" plan in the Middle East is in fact nothing but a plan to exterminate the Palestinian people!
The Palestinian people have not been fooled by this "peace" treaty. In answer to this "peace" fraud, the Palestinian people have organized massive demonstrations and a broad strike movement on the West Bank and are intensifying the armed struggle. Only in this way will they establish their genuine national authority, through their legitimate representative, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Palestinian people will never put down their guns until final victory. The Palestinian and Arab peoples will surely defeat their enemies, the Zionists, the U.S. imperialists, the Soviet social-imperialists, and all the other imperialists and reactionaries to achieve complete liberation.
Driven from their homelands by the imperialists and Zionists, the Arab immigrants in the U.S. militantly defend the liberation struggle of their people. Furthermore, in this country the Arab immigrants face savage exploitation and brutal racist attacks by thp rich and their government and they have shown their revolutionary spirit in the struggle against this oppression too. The Arab immigrant workers are part of the American working class and are fighting against the common monopoly capitalist enemy.
SUPPORT THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE'S NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE!
DOWN WITH CARTER'S "PEACE" TREATY -- AN ACT OF AGGRESSION AGAINST THE ARAB PEOPLE!
DEMONSTRATE ON PALESTINE DAY!
[Photo: "LONG LIVE THE PALESTINIAN REVOLUTION" declared the banner of COUSML in the May 15 Palestine Day demonstration in Dearborn, Michigan.]
(The Workers' Advocate has received the publication entitled "Iran -- the Voice of the Revolution", comprised of news briefs transmitted by the Workers' and Peasants' Communist Party of Iran. The news published below was transmitted from Tehran on March 28, 1979, and translated from the French by The Workers' Advocate staff.)
In Turkmenistan as well as in Kurdistan, that is in the regions of the northeast and northwest of the country, a just struggle of the peoples is developing for the defense of their national rights. The people have taken up arms and in some places have created Soviets. Some comrades have gone to these regions to do work. The government propaganda wants to give the idea that it is the monarchist forces and armies which are active there, but this is false.
* * * * *
For the referendum organized by the government the Workers' and Peasants' Communist Party of Iran is calling for a boycott.
Before, the government was saying that there wasn't any choice: it was either for the Islamic Republic or for the monarchy. Then they said that there was a choice and everyone could vote as he wished. In reality this is false; there is no possibility of doing any different propaganda. On television and on the radio only religious figures have the right to express themselves and to do propaganda for the Islamic Republic. The bourgeoisie is maneuvering and trying to give the impression that there are two camps: those who are for the Islamic Republic and those who are for the monarchy. But a large front has formed for the boycott. Besides the Party it is made up of the left and democratic non-religious elements. The bourgeoisie is still very divided. The popular movement which till now has been very marked by religion is progressively freeing itself from it, especially in the west and northeast. The revolution took place particularly in Tehran, and the provinces had participated only slightly. Today it is in the provinces that the revolutionary movement is developing. Tomorrow, Thursday the 25th, there will take place in Tehran a demonstration to support respecting the rights of the nationalities. In Tehran itself the mobilization is not as active but latent.
In the working class the situation is good. A council has been constituted for the reconstruction of the trade union which groups together representatives of 40 factories.
The links between the Party and the masses are growing stronger. The masses have confidence in those who act.
* * * * *
On March 23, 1979, three days after the Iranian new year, the Workers' and Peasants' Communist Party of Iran commemorated the anniversary of the death of two martyrs of the Party: Mehei Eghtedar-Manech and Djavad Orfani.
Both were workers and long-standing members of the Party. They fell on the first day of the revolution when they were leading an assault on a military base. They had formed a small group of fighters and thus immobilized tanks and jeeps of the Shah's army. They fell while taking by surprise the first tank that they had vanquished.
Forty days after their death (actually 43 days because their parents had organized a ceremony for the fortieth day of mourning) the city of Tehran was covered with posters in their memory. There were press communiques to make it known everywhere that two members of the Party had fallen as heroes on the first day of the revolution in Iran. In the afternoon there was a ceremony in the Cemetery of Martyrs in Tehran. A comrade spoke in the name of the Party to pay homage to the comrades. There was a very impressive security force to discourage the religious elements from speaking or trying anything. Many people were present. The song of the martyrs was sung by all the participants and slogans were shouted.
[Photos: Comrade Djavad Orfani. Comrade Mehei Eghtedar-Manech.]
(The following is a statement from the Venezuelan Committee in Defense of Human rights, requesting the support of The Workers' Advocate for the Venezuelan national campaign for freedom of political prisoners and general amnesty.)
Caracas, April 8, 1979
Sirs,
The Workers' Advocate
We are writing you, in the name of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, to inform you that in our country there is currently developing a national campaign for freedom of the political prisoners and General Amnesty.
In Venezuela, of the more than 200 political prisoners which existed in the recent past, a large number of them have succeeded in winning their freedom thanks to the lasting denunciation and mobilization of the popular movement. Connected to this is the fact of the existence of a new government which has come out playing demagogically with the enlargement of democratic freedoms amongst which the liberty of the political prisoners plays a prominent role. From there, what this committee has proposed jointly with the Pro-Amnesty Committee, is to develop a campaign which, transcending national scope, might succeed in recovering from the prisons absolutely all the political prisoners.
From among approximately a hundred compatriots who are found locked up for political reasons in different jails of the^ country, we want to emphasize the names of Ernesto Virla and Antonio Arias, both leaders of the Bandera Roja Party. The first of these is enduring four years of seclusion in the San Carlos Barracks of Caracas, accused of military rebellion, and the second, with the same charge, formed part of the group of indicted political prisoners who staged an escape from the Penitentiary "La Pica" in the east of the country, and were recaptured and submitted to barbarous torture fourteen months after this escape.
We are aware that persons with the level of revolutionary involvement of Ernest Virla and Antonio Arias, will only be able to achieve their freedom with the development of a powerful mass movement that relies on the support and solidarity of all progressive and revolutionary people and organizations of the whole world; this is the reason we are writing to you.
We will be highly grateful for whatever measures you can take on the national scale of your country to demand the freedom of these compatriots, such as public statements, gestures before international bodies, demanding their freedom before the President of the Republic of Venezuela, etc.
Sincerely yours,
For the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Venezuela,
Maria Jose Parada, National Director
[Photos: Antonio Arias, photo taken in the mountains of Venezuela after he escaped from prison. Ernesto Virla.]
(The following article is reprinted from the Albanian Telegraphic Agency, May 14, 1979.)
The dictatorial regime of El Salvador revealed its inhuman and entirely anti-people character in recent days when it killed 40 people and wounded dozens of others. However, the savage violence and terror prevailing today in that country, where a dictatorial regime is in power, will not extinguish the powerful protest movement which is rapidly spreading throughout the country. The funeral ceremony of the victims caused by the arms of the regime was transformed into a powerful demonstration of protests, in which ten thousand inhabitants of the capital participated. They turned out early in the morning with large placards in their hands and marched through the streets heading for the burial grounds of the city shouting numerous slogans against the dictatorial regime. Hundreds of policemen and soldiers supported also by armored means, were employed to disperse the demonstrators. The forces of the dictatorial regime made numerous arrests among the demonstrators.
Everywhere in El Salvador prevails a situation of savage repression, through which this anti-people regime seeks to preserve its rule. According to foreign press reports, since 1972 the regime in power in El Salvador has killed over 5,000 political opponents while it keeps in prisons and concentration camps thousands of others.
But, despite this savage oppression exercised by the police and army forces, the broad masses of the people of that country of Central America continue to be involved in the broad protest movement, which is directed against the internal anti-people policy and against the foreign policy of close collaboration with American imperialism, to which the reactionary regime in power has sold out the national interests.
(The following article is excerpted from Eritrea In Struggle, newsletter of Eritreans for Liberation in North America, Vol. III, No. 3, February-April 1979.)
The characteristic features of the present political and military picture in Eritrea are that while on the one hand, the Ethio-Soviet aggression goes on unabated, on the other, the so-called leaders of the Eritrean revolution continue on the road of open capitulation to the Soviet revisionists, and this in spite of the deep hatred the masses have and their unshakable will to drive the Soviet aggressors out of the homeland.
Having accomplished the target of their second offensive (the recapture of the city of Keren and the Asmara-Massawa highway) by December 1978, the Ethio-Soviet aggressors have since been conducting their third offensive with the aim of recapturing the major towns in the Sahel province and hence to drive the liberation fighters out of the main base area. Thus, lately they have concentrated their main military activity in this area. Repeated attacks are being launched from both the city of Keren and the Red Sea. Soviet transport and warships have been busy landing heavy weapons and thousands of troops along the northern coast of the Eritrean Red Sea. Aerial bombardment by Soviet and Cuban flown Soviet MIGs in this area has also become increasingly intensive. As a result of these barbarous actions of the enemy, thousands of people forced out of their dwellings are taking refuge in the hills and thousands more are crossing the Sudanese border.
In the towns and villages they have recaptured, the Soviet and Ethiopian aggressors have tightened their fascist grip on the people. Through both deceptive and suppressive measures, they are trying to pacify the masses. In Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea, in particular, fascist reprisals against the civilian population is mounting. Dead bodies of innocent persons are found scattered in the streets of Asmara and other cities every morning. The Ethiopian occupation troops have made the raping of Eritrean women their daily practice. Another tactic through which the Ethiopian and Soviet aggressors are enforcing their fascist rule on the people is by forcing them into so-called mass organizations similar to those fascist organizations set up in Ethiopia. All the people are literally herded into the so-called Kebelle associations of their respective zone where they are intimidated. Thus it is under such a horrifying condition of Ethio-Soviet aggression that the Eritrean people are living today.
Not surprisingly, however, the imperialist press has conspired to collude with the Soviet revisionists in suppressing information of the unprecedented Soviet aggression. Further, the failure of the so-called leaders of the Eritrean revolution to expose the Soviet and Ethiopian aggressors has facilitated this conspiracy. Today, the Ethiopian occupationists are flatly declaring that "there is not as such an Eritrean problem. '' Applauding to the "big Ethiopian victories in Eritrea" are also the revisionist press with those of the Soviet Union in the forefront. The bourgeois press in the West is also echoing this counter-revolutionary propaganda by reporting that the Eritrean struggle is "crushed".
At a time when the Eritrean revolution, confronted by such multifaceted attacks of multiple enemies is passing through such a difficult stage, what are the "leaders" of the revolution doing? Except the hypocrite statement condemning Soviet aggression issued by the EPLF leadership, all the press statements, official organs and resolutions of the so-called leaders are still prettifying the revisionist Soviet Union and its puppets as socialists and strategic allies. The Cuban mercenaries, instead of being condemned as aggressors are defended as innocents. During the height of Soviet aggression in December 1978, which saw active Cuban participation, the EPLF leaders stated "no Cuban presence had been observed. We are not denouncing their presence, because we have not seen them, even though they were indeed present in the first offensive, in the summer" (L'Unita, December 1978). They made this astonishing statement while at the same time they were admitting that there were over 3,500 Cuban troops in Eritrea (Liberation News Service, January 12, 1979). And now they praise the Cuban mercenaries for pulling out of Eritrea. And Michael Kahsai, member of the EPLF's central committee told Reuters on March 2, 1979 "all Cuban forces have been pulled out of Eritrea." How can such an apology for an enemy which has committed untold crimes on the people be explained ? Is this what is expected from someone who claims to be the leader of the people ? No sober minded person can respond in the positive. This is how the so-called leaders are obstructing our people's struggle against the primary enemies.
Today, the Eritrean people are confronted with enormous difficulties in their just cause for national independence and democracy. While the external enemies have deployed all their forces to crush our people's just struggle, the traitors are giving a helping hand to the enemies by working from within. Notwithstanding these difficulties, however, our heroic people persist on their undaunted resistance. A hatred against the Soviet revisionists is growing strong among our people. Despite their repressive measures, the Soviet and Ethiopian aggressors have been unable to easily rule our people and are meeting stiff mass resistance. Defiance to the capitulationist line of the so-called leaders is beginning to take a mass character. Thousands of fighters have already rejected the leaderships of the two fronts. Several opposition forces are also coming to the fore. The number of underground publications denouncing Soviet revisionist aggression and the treacherous leaders is also increasing. The spirit in Eritrea is therefore the traditional and militant "we will fight to the end. " The statement the Eritrean Independence Block made 30 years ago in front of the United Nations that "the Eritrean people will never accept Ethiopian domination" remains imprinted in the mind of every Eritrean.
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