My loyalty is only to the working class. Capitalism is the cause of our suffering. “Capitalism sucks”, as I tell my co-workers. Capitalism cannot be reformed in a deep way. Surface reforms are lost in each inevitable downward cycle. Capitalism must grow to survive. Because we live in a finite world, unlimited growth is impossible.
Capitalists (esp. heads of multinational corporations) have money, influence over culture, the government, and organization on their side. They have unlimited access to education. They will stop at nothing to get what they want and keep same. Hitler and Pinochet are examples of this ruthlessness. We, U. S. workers must not forget that American capitalists sympathized with Hitler and traded with the Nazi government during the war to the detriment of the Allies (OUT OF YOUR POCKET, Pamphlet Press, 1949). Every government that the CIA advises, tortures their people. (Not satisfied with torturing the innocent, old, and young, they have even devised ways of getting to the unborn.)
Knowing these things about our class enemy means that we must have powerful tools to win back society and the fruits of our own labors. With the destruction of the ozone layer and the rain forests, our very existence as a species is at stake. There are many tools available to the working class: terrorism, anarchism, liberation theology, democratic socialism, reliance on the good will or humanism of the capitalists (or liberalism), dependence on becoming capitalists ourselves (or conservatism), new ageism, radical feminism, matriarchy, libertarianism, trotskyism, etc. After looking at and trying the alternatives, I’ve decided that M-L and Mao provide the best tools for the liberation of my class. My interest in any organization or theory is: “How useful is this to the working class?”
Marx provided with a indispensable weapon in analyzing history and society. To deny that we are Marxists is silly. The extent that the socialist governments ignore the teachings of Lenin, is exactly the extent that they caused the problems that they are facing now. Now we need more Leninism not less. If their mistakes give communism a bad name, we need to expose the errors not dump a word.
I agree with most of the minority view as expounded in the June packet. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. We can make many of the requested changes without dissolving or becoming DSA. With the ruling class on the offensive, let’s not disembowel ourselves and then try to sew the pieces back together with ideologies that were repudiated years ago. We can shift emphasis to mainly legal and open work now without rejecting preparations for underground work.
I think that the proposal by the majority is based on an emotional reaction. When I have asked in writing for specific criticisms of Lenin or Mao they could not provide these. How can they say that we can function as effectively without democratic-centralism, when they haven’t even learned to handle the democracy that we have now?