Our program sets forth the tasks and goals of the entire Party for a definite stage of development in the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie. The class struggle is ultimately a political struggle, a struggle for political power. Simply stating this historical inevitability, however, accomplishes nothing. The program of the Communist Labor Party declares what we intend to do in order to develop the struggle from one stage to the next.
Only through agitation and propaganda can we complete the stages of development of the working class. Within the confines of capitalism, we cannot alter the ruthlessness of the capitalists or the level of concentration of industry or of the proletariat. Nor can we create the historical forms in which the basic contradictions of capital manifest themselves and are fought out. Guided by our understanding of the objective situation and the historical and political particularities that shape the revolutionary process in the USNA we can and must ensure the consciousness of the working class through its definite stages of development.
The emergence for the first time in the USNA of an objective communist movement makes this program possible. By government standards, which are low, there are 6 million homeless people in this country. Forty million people are hungry or malnourished, while mountains of ”surplus” food fill warehouses and caves in order to keep prices high. Thirty-three million people have no access to medical care in case of severe illness or injury; meanwhile, hospitals are closing for lack of patients with the money to pay for services. Undocumented Mexican workers live in caves and cardboard boxes in order to work in back-breaking, below-minimum wage jobs. These are not simply social problems that are peripheral to the course capitalism must take today. These are all manifestations of the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production and of capital’s turn inward on the national proletariat.
Because capitalism can no longer use these workers, it can no longer feed or house them. Their strivings for survival constitute the objective communist movement because there is no way to reform capitalism to meet their demands. Their demands cannot be met until the working class takes political power in this country. Our Program points the way to rooting the Party within this most destitute section of society.
What is the next step in the struggle of the working class in this country? It is for the greatest possible number of workers to take to the streets, fighting in their own interests and against capital. This is the basis upon which we develop consciousness. The interrelationship between activity and consciousness developed on the basis of this activity is a progressive, mounting process: impulses awaken struggle; agitation and propaganda develop consciousness; conscious leaders expand the struggle and direct it against capital; agitation and propaganda develop class consciousness on the basis of this broadening struggle directed against capital.
The consciousness of the workers is changing. A recent Harris poll found that 81 percent of the people believe that in this country the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, as opposed to 40 percent twenty years ago. This mass perception of the polarization between wealth and poverty creates a favorable environment for revolutionaries. It is not, however, class consciousness. Nor is it fully developed social consciousness, which drives workers into battle in their own class interests and against the capitalists. This perception is, however, a beginning.
Our Party’s Program aims at completing what is already starting to happen spontaneously. The current stage of development cannot be completed without the intellectual development of the working class. We ensure that this stage of development is completed by carrying out our role of agitation and propaganda. To see the significance of what is starting to happen today, we should refer back to our Third Congress. Six years ago, the first decisive step was to throw the blow at the middle, at the misleaders of the working class. The misleaders’ ability to constrain the struggle of the working class then and now rests on the Negro national colonial question. A decisive section of the working class was already beginning to confront and isolate the misleaders. At that time it was not possible to draw millions into a broad social struggle against the capitalists because the grip of the misleaders was secure.
Although the misleaders are not entirely exposed and isolated today, the situation is changing. The past few years of economic crisis have produced a core of leaders in all currents of struggle who are clear on the role of the misleaders and are drawing the masses of workers into a fight in their own interests. A broad social struggle is breaking out. This social struggle encompasses far more than the relatively few battles with which we have had direct connection. Throughout the country, workers are battling the police in isolated strikes, communities are protesting the police murder of their youth; the homeless are occupying abandoned buildings and fighting the police who try to evict them.
In a letter written in 1890, Engels described the type of struggle we aim for today:
It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat than that it should start and proceed, from the beginning, on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than to learn by one’s own mistakes. And for a whole large class, there is no other road, especially for a nation so eminently practical and so contemptuous of theory as the Americans. The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class.
Such a struggle is the stage of development that the working class is now entering. It will take different forms today, when capital has nowhere to expand. But, as in 1890, the next step is to get millions of workers into the streets, fighting in their own interests – for food, for homes, for education for their children – whether they understand it theoretically or not. As the workers are drawn into the fight for their basic economic demands, the Party carries out its political tasks to develop consciousness. Agitation, propaganda and recruitment within each particular current of discontent and destitution are directed at winning the mass of workers to the morality of socialism and the vanguard of the proletariat to the cause of communism. We aim our agitation and propaganda at expanding the social struggle, developing class consciousness, and elevating the social struggle to the level of class struggle.
What then is the class struggle? The class struggle is more than the workers defensively fighting the capitalists, a fight which goes on every day with or without communist agitation. Lenin described the class struggle:
The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. (Lenin, Our Immediate Task)
Developing and expanding the social struggle is the next step toward raising the struggle to the level of class struggle, as Lenin described it.
A program means nothing unless it is implemented. We do not have a separate program for each current of social struggle or section of the working class. All Party members carry out the same program, even though it may be carried out differently in different fields of struggle. A few examples illustrate how comrades on different fronts of struggle carry out the same Party program.
What, for example, does our Party program mean for the comrades who are in the streets, fighting for homes for themselves and their families? Our tasks flow from the reality that people are starting to fight in their own interests. They are organizing and are ready to confront the capitalists and the State that protects the capitalists’ properly. To keep that motion on its objective course, we have to understand its root causes.
If we see homelessness as the leading element in the antagonism between social production and private accumulation, then we can see the importance of the greatest number of homeless engaging in battle in their own class interests. We accomplish that by participating in unions of the homeless and other forms of organization and struggling to draw the greatest possible numbers into the streets, for homes. This fight will inevitably confront the State.
Millions of homeless organizing and fighting in their own interests can expose the capitalist system to millions more who live at the edge of survival. The homeless are kicking open the doors to a massive social struggle.
Political agitation is the nature of our participation in the struggle. Agitation that draws millions into the political struggle, clearly formulates the demands of the workers, and points the struggle against the capitalist system is essential to making the Party the subjective expression of the objective communist movement.
Revolutionaries cannot create historical forms. We, however, like the bourgeoisie, make use of what history hands us. The political forms in which the basic contradictions are fought out in this country rest on the history of slavery and national colonial oppression of the Negro Nation. The daily struggle in the Negro Nation today is a struggle for survival: below-minimum wages are prevalent; education and health care – when provided at all – are far below the level provided in the Anglo-American nation; unemployment ranges (officially) from 7 percent in Georgia to 14 percent in Alabama and 15 percent in Louisiana. This struggle for survival is simultaneously a struggle against capital and against colonial oppression. The revolutionary struggle in the Negro Nation is the foundation for a powerful movement of the most exploited and oppressed workers in the North. Our agitation and propaganda reflect that reality.
Our Party’s Program points the way for communists working in the trade union movement and in the factories. How do these comrades fight to build the broadest possible social struggle and to develop class consciousness? The trade unions have abdicated their social responsibility; they have turned their backs on the homeless, the unemployed, and the unorganized. If we are to steer the employed, organized workers into the political struggle, if we are to work toward getting the greatest mass in motion in their own interests, one elementary step is to fight for the unions to take on social responsibilities: to organize the unorganized, to fight for equality of Southern wages with those in the North, to defend the hungry, to assist the homeless in their fight to organize in their own interests. Fighting for higher wages for the more bribed workers without fighting for the unions to organize the unorganized, without in some way drawing the workers into the political struggle, is not agitation. Agitation and propaganda are the means by which we expand the motion, keep it on course, develop class consciousness and recruit into the Party.
The degeneration of capitalism exacerbates a wide range of social problems. The historical oppression of women, for example, worsens as capitalism takes its last gasps. Greater proportions and numbers of women are in poverty; violence against women increases. Inevitably the most destitute of the women are drawn into battle. To keep this motion on its objective course, we have to understand its objective basis. The growing impoverishment of women and the breakup of families (the burden of which falls principally on the women) have their roots in capital in crisis and not in some subjective ideas of men or of the ruling class.
Our program points the way. We participate in the struggles of women to bring to the fore the class interests, to direct their wrath against capital, to build a broad and powerful movement of women against capital, and to elevate the social struggle to the level of class struggle.
The youth today feel some of the sharpest effects of the crisis of capital: slim job prospects, with a youth unemployment rate of 19 percent (38 percent for black youth); decent education only for a select few, because of the small number of jobs requiring a decent education; communities saturated with drugs. The youth have no future under capitalism. The striving of the youth today is not for the “freedom” that the youth of the 1960s sought. Their goal today is survival. Our program directs our comrades to draw the youth into the struggle in their own interests, against the capitalist class; to bring to the fore their class interests; to build a powerful communist movement of youth, a movement against capital.
Our program defines how we intend to carry out our tasks. Only if we conduct agitation and propaganda can we carry out our tasks of drawing millions of workers into a fight in their class interests and guarantee the workers’ intellectual development.
Lenin’s descriptions of agitation and propaganda guide us in carrying out our role at this stage of the development of the class struggle.
The socialist work of Russian Social-Democrats consists of propagating the doctrines of scientific socialism, of spreading among the workers a proper understanding of the present social and economic system, its foundations and its development, an understanding of the various classes in Russian society, of the mutual relations between these classes, the struggle between them, of the role of the working class in this struggle, the attitude of this class towards the declining and developing classes, towards the past and the future of capitalism, of the historical task of international Social-Democracy and of the Russian working class. Inseparably connected with propaganda is agitation among the workers...
Agitating among the workers means that the Social-Democrats take part in all the spontaneous manifestations of the struggle of the working class, in all the conflicts between the workers and the capitalists over the working day, wages, conditions of labor, etc. Our task is to merge our activities with the practical everyday questions of working class life, to help the workers to understand these questions, to draw the attention of the workers to the most important abuses, to help them to formulate their demands to the employers more precisely and practically, to develop among the workers a sense of solidarity, to help them to understand the common interests and the common cause of all the Russian workers as a single class representing part of the international army of the proletariat. To organize study circles for workers, to establish proper and secret connections between these and the central group of Social-Democrats, to publish and distribute literature for workers, to organize correspondence from all centers of the labor movement, to publish agitational leaflets and manifestoes and to distribute them, and to train a corps of experienced agitators – such, in the main, are the manifestations of socialist activity of Russian Social-Democracy. (Lenin, Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats)
In What is to Be Done?, Lenin outlined the scope of operation of propaganda and agitation.
A propagandist, dealing with, say, [the] question of unemployment, must explain the capitalistic nature of crises, the reasons why they are inevitable in contemporary society, describe the need for its transformation into socialist society, etc. In a word, he must present “many ideas,” so many indeed that they will be understood as an integral whole only by a (comparatively) few persons. An agitator, however, speaking on the same subject, will take as an illustration a fact that is most glaring and most widely known to his audience, say, the death from starvation of the family of an unemployed worker, the growing impoverishment, etc., and utilizing this fact, which is known to all and sundry, will direct all his efforts to presenting a single idea to the “masses,” i.e., the idea of the senselessness of the contradiction between the increase of wealth and increase of poverty; he will strive to rouse discontent and indignation among the masses against this crying injustice, and leave a more complete explanation of this contradiction to the propagandist.
Our agitation politically shakes up the proletariat and draws the workers into struggle. We bring to the fore the class interests in every battle and rouse the workers’ anger against the capitalists. We use specific cases to expose the capitalist system as the source of their misery.
Our Party seeks battle. We do not go into battle assuming defeat for the workers. Concessions can be won or lost by either side, even when imperialism has to turn inward, against its own proletariat. Up to the time of seizure of political power by the working class, the workers have to struggle for concessions from the capitalists.
At this stage, if our participation does not engage workers in battle or if we simply speak to a relatively few workers, we will lag behind the struggle. The decisive form of agitation is to draw the greatest possible number of workers into a fight in their own interests. Our Party agitates to break the constraints imposed by the misleaders on the workers’ struggle against capital and to take it to the streets. We fight for forms of organization and forms of struggle that draw the maximum number of workers into action in their own class interests.
The workers’ experience will not, by itself, ensure their intellectual development. Without intellectual development they will not be able to complete the step they are already starting to take. A communist party must guarantee intellectual development through propaganda. Propaganda goes beyond exposing the obvious. The workers know their lot is worsening. They need to know why. They need to know the way out.
Communist propaganda goes beyond recognition of the class struggle. It shows how the production relations of any social system rest on the material foundation of the level of development of the productive forces; that capitalism is characterized by the appropriation of unpaid labor through the buying and selling of labor power as a commodity; that society can be organized to meet the needs of the majority of the people only if the working class as a class assumes political power to organize the socialist reconstruction of society.
The social struggle begets a core of practical leaders. Through propaganda, this core achieves its intellectual development, is prepared to meet the counter-offensive by the bourgeoisie, and is equipped to lead the working class from one stage to the next toward its seizure of political power.
The decisive means for propaganda today is the widespread development of study circles. In study circles, the leaders of the struggle gain their scientific, theoretical, political education. Out of every skirmish should come a study circle, until study circles increase and multiply throughout the country.
Growth proceeds through definite, quantitative stages of development. To accomplish anything, one must identify the necessary stages of development it has to go through. A communist program rallies the efforts of all comrades to take the struggle of the working class from one stage to the next.
The Communist Manifesto describes the communists’ responsibilities in regards to these stages of development. “In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” In a Preface to the Manifesto, Engels explained what it is we rely on to implement a program, to accomplish these stages. “For the ultimate triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto Marx relied solely and exclusively upon the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action and discussion.”
Our program sets us on a course of attack. Our Party recruits on the basis of this simple program. Through action, we recruit people who have to fight in order to live. We recruit people who want to make an organized contribution to changing society.
We recruit people and hold them in the Party through activity to implement this program – agitating to draw millions into a fight in the streets in their own interests, propagandizing to ensure the political education of the combatants. The Party holds every comrade responsible for activity to implement this program.
Capital today cannot find common ground with the fight of over 50 million for the basic necessities of life. The fight for the basic necessities of life is the foundation and starting point of our activity today. Program spells out our political role in this struggle, how communists steer this motion along the proper strategic path.
The crying demand for the basic necessities of life has thrown millions into battle against capital. Capitalism today can no longer satisfy their demands. To all who seek to wield their diverse efforts into a victorious struggle against capital, to the millions who have to fight capitalism in order to survive, the Communist Labor Party says, This is your Party. We call on you to join and to make possible the fulfillment of this Program.