At 02:00 PM 4/5/01 -0400, you wrote:
>OPENING TO NATIONAL BOARD
>
>MARCH 1 2001
>
>
>Discussion on Strategy and Tactics
>
>
>By Sam Webb, National Chair, CPUSA
>
>INTRODUCTION
>
>For the past week and a half I have been asking myself what on earth
prompted me to wade into a discussion on strategy and tactics. Was it one
of those moments that all of us occasionally have when we make a rash
decision that we come to regret later?
>
>Actually, I can't place the blame on a rash decision or poor judgement.
The genesis of this opening lies elsewhere.
>
>Collectively we have, in fact, been mulling over this question for the
past year, wondering if our strategic and tactical policies correspond with
the changing terrain of US and global capitalism. To be sure, capitalism is
still capitalism, but enough has changed in the lay of the land at home and
worldwide that warrants a close interrogation of our strategic and tactical
policies.
>
>At recent meetings of our National Board and National Committee, we did
this - but in the context of a more comprehensive examination of our work.
A few comrades, however, complained that we altered our strategy and
tactics without adequate discussion in the Party.
>
>I don't agree with that position, but since it is a concern, I thought
that we should take full advantage of the preconvention period to discuss
in a more focused way our strategic and tactical concepts.
>
>After all, the purpose of the preconvention period is to engage the whole
Party in an examination of questions where easy answers are not always
ready at hand. To my mind anyway strategy and tactics fall into this
category.
>
>Now some comrades worry that a fresh look at our strategic and tactical
policies may land us on a slippery slope leading away from our fundamental
class moorings. We're moving to the right, they say.
>
>That's always a danger, I suppose, when we take a look at fundamental
questions. But, to be perfectly honest, it doesn't worry me at all. I am
convinced that we are proceeding on good solid ideological ground and are
moving in a good political direction. And hopefully when comrades who
express such a concern read this opening, it won't worry them either, but I
won't guarantee that.
>
>For now all of us should bear in mind the following: our Party has always
adjusted its concepts of struggle - strategic and tactical - to the
shifting contours of political and economic developments. We in this room
are not pioneers in this sense.
>
>Sometimes the adjustments have been substantial, other times minor. In the
early 1980s, for example, we correctly adjusted our strategic and tactical
policies at Gus' prodding to the emergence of the extreme right danger.
>
>With the ascendancy of a new leadership of the AFL-CIO, we further
adjusted our concepts of struggle, which by the way will be reflected in
our new labor program.
>
There was an overestimation, even a wrong estimation, of the "direction" of
the AFL-CIO, in the mistaken assessment that a shift from a conservative
AFL-CIO to a liberal one, that the AFL-CIO was becoming a real force. In
fact, whole numbers have stagnated, and the "new direction of the AFL-CIO
has stayed firmly within the bounds established by the National Labor
Relations Act. The CP has ben tailing the AFL-CIO, which I believe is a
mistake. The People's Weekly World, their newspaper, has for some time
read more like a trade union paper than a communist paper, and that was an
indicator.
>And over the past year, we have further fine-tuned our strategic and
tactical policies with an eye to deepening and extending our participation
in mass struggles, movements, and coalitions.
>
>So our strategic and tactical policies are not set in stone, but rather
are pliant and elastic. Lenin counseled the early communist movement to
display the "utmost flexibility in their tactics" (Left Wing Communism, p.
82).
>
While there is much to learn from LWC, the Party has for quite some time
taken it out of context to nip the heels of their own and others' left,
based on specific criticisms Lenin had of the German communists that did
not apply to the situation inthe 90's and in the US/world. In fact, the
emphasis on the chimera of a "mass Communist Party of millions" was the
epitome of "infantile leftism," substituting the wish for a revolutionary
conjuncture for the reality of a stable and competent bourgeoisie and a
thoroughly complacent US working class.
>I have tried to bring this approach to this opening.
>
>General Observations
>
>I would like to begin with some general observations about strategic and
tactical concepts of struggle.
>
>Parties across the political spectrum think in strategic and tactical
terms. It isn't our exclusive preserve. The Democrats do it; the
Republicans do it; the Greens do it; other independent political formations
do it; the trade unions do it; the organizations of the racially oppressed
do it; women's organizations do it; and other social movements and left
organizations do it. Thus, the domain where strategic thinking takes place
is crowded and contentious. A whole range of political and social groupings
are vying for their strategic views to be embraced by millions.
>
>To be sure, we don't agree with the ideologues of the right. And we don't
always arrive at identical conclusions on a strategic and tactical level
with forces occupying the center and left on the political spectrum, which
is not entirely surprising.
>
>After all, our conceptual and methodological framework through which we
examine the world is different from their framework. We draw from the
classical writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
>
and not often enough from the actual conditions
>In our view, the multi-racial, multi-national, male-female working class
has an objective interest in, and the strategic social power to lead, a
broader revolutionary struggle against capitalism. The struggle against
racism and for full racial equality is at the core of the struggle for
democracy and class unity. Imperialism, and US imperialism in particular,
is an inherently aggressive reactionary and parasitic force. And our
fundamental, longer-term strategic aim is Bill of Rights socialism.
>
Until the Party divests itself of this particular bit of social demcoratic
foolishness, and reclaims the DOTP, which it forbade us to even say in
public, it will remain a very small pressure gourp on the left.
>These differences in ideological views, however, should not wall us off
from finding many areas of agreement on a strategic and tactical level with
our coalition partners. On the level of combating the power of the extreme
right and the transnational corporations for example, there is notable
convergence of views between the broader movements and our Party.
>
>We welcome this development. Indeed, we would make a huge mistake if we
failed to note and act on the new opportunities issuing from this broad
mass concern in the labor movement and elsewhere regarding the need to
restrict the power of the extreme right and the monopoly corporations.
>
It is this preoccupation with the "extreme right," which they identify
wholely with the Republican Party, that has caused them to stagnate into a
near-permanent alliance with the Democratic Party--an alliance that the
Democratic Party will neither acknowledge nor welcome.
>In last year's elections, for instance, our policy to defeat Bush and the
extreme right was nearly identical with the strategic policy of the labor
and people's movements.
>
>Of course, it should be added that we did not see eye to eye from a
strategic standpoint with the majority of our counterparts on the left,
largely because they reached a different assessment of the gravity of the
right danger than we did. We said that it constituted a clear and present
threat to democratic rights, understood in the broadest sense, and that the
outcome of the presidential and congressional elections would have a major
bearing on the terrain of class and democratic struggles in the post
election period.
>
>By contrast, many of the left minimized, even dismissed, the right danger,
arguing that it mattered little who occupied the White House, gathered in
the halls of Congress, and sat on the US Supreme Court in 2001.
>
But muting Party criticism of Democrats has continued to be the result of
this pragmatism, and it has alienated much of the left, that might be
interested in a Marxist party. So the left didn't want them, and the
center certainly didn't want them.
>Thus there were competing strategic and tactical approaches to the
elections. I thought then that our view was on target. And everything that
has happened in the election's aftermath - the theft of the elections in
Florida, the gag order prohibiting the counseling of poor women in third
world countries on issues of reproductive rights, the Cabinet appointments,
the bombing of Iraq, the anti-labor executive orders, and, only two days
ago, Bush's State of the Union speech - offer unassailable evidence that
our concern about the right danger was sound. This is now acknowledged by
some on the left with whom we had differences with during the elections.
>
>Yes, we made mistakes in the course of the 2000 elections, but not the big
ones that some of our friends on the left made. Correcting the small
mistakes, I would argue, is much easier than correcting the big ones.
>
>Strategy and Tactics
>
>Strategy and tactics do matter. They count for a lot. While people make
history, the political boundaries that they cross, the political
breakthroughs that they make, the political walls that they climb over
depend in no small degree on the strategic and tactical concepts that guide
their actions. Although social change and social revolutions have a large
spontaneous element, they don't just happen.
>
>Nor do strategy and tactics materialize out of thin air. To the contrary,
they are a derivative of a strictly scientific, materialist, and dynamic
analysis of the stage of development and the overall balance of political
and class forces at a given moment and in a given country.
>
This is precisely the two-dimensional analysis that drove me out of the
Party. Read on. There is no real depth in the specific analysis of the
actual conditions.
>The point of departure in elaborating strategic and tactical policies must
be a concrete and exact assessment of the objective situation. Strategy and
tactics are bound by time, place and circumstances. They take into account
what is happening on the ground.
>
>Or to put it a little differently, strategic and tactical policies evolve
from a specific political and economic matrix. Change the matrix and the
strategic and tactical policies should correspondingly change. When they
don't, there is sure to be trouble in River City. (You have to be a "Music
Man" enthusiast to appreciate or regret my reference to River City.)
>
>To attempt to derive strategic and tactical concepts from either abstract
propositions or mass moods alone is a recipe for political mistakes.
Militancy and moral outrage enter into our political calculations - and
perhaps we haven't accorded them adequate weight - but they are not primary
determinants of our strategic and tactical policies. In developing such
policies, Lenin always cautioned that we should not yield to moods of a
small group.
>
>In Left Wing Communism, he wrote,
>
>"In many countries of Western Europe the revolutionary mood, we might say,
is at present a "novelty," or "rarity" which had been too long waited for
vainly and impatiently; and perhaps that is why the mood is so easily
succumbed to. Of course, without a revolutionary mood among the masses and
without conditions favoring the growth of this mood, revolutionary tactics
would never be converted into action; but we in Russia have been convinced
by long, painful, and bloody experience of the truth that revolutionary
tactics cannot be built up on revolutionary moods alone. Tactics must be
based on a sober and strictly scientific objective estimation of all the
class forces in a given state as well as the experience of revolutionary
movements" (p. 46).
>
>Were there a direct path to social progress and socialism, strategic and
tactical considerations would be afterthoughts, of small significance to
either broader forces or us. But there is no direct, smooth, easy road to
social change, let alone to socialism, as evidenced by the history of the
20th century.
>
>Instead the revolutionary process passes through phases and stages; it's
messy and chaotic, the political tides of one or another class ebb and
flow, reversals occur, unforeseen events change everything, alliances are
unstable and shifting, and the outcome is seldom certain.
>
>This understanding of the complexity of the revolutionary process was
missing to a large degree in the early years of the communist movement. It
was what led Lenin to take the time from, I'm sure, a very busy schedule,
to write, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
>
>He challenged leading representatives of the nascent communist movement in
Europe who were looking for a direct path to socialism without any
intermediate stages, without any compromises, without any maneuvers, and
without any retreats.
>
>"To carry on a war", Lenin observed, "for the overthrow of the
international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult,
prolonged and complicated than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between
states, and to refuse beforehand to maneuver, to utilize the conflict of
interests (even though only temporary) among one's enemies, to refuse to
temporize and compromise with possible (even though transitory, unstable,
vacillating and conditional) allies - is this not ridiculous in the
extreme? (Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, p. 52)"
>
>Lenin, by the way, didn't make a fine distinction between strategy and
tactics in his writings. In fact he never used the word strategy at all.
Tactics then had a broader meaning than they presently have.
>
>It was only after Lenin's death that the term strategy entered the
vocabulary of the communist movement and came to be understood as a
scientifically constructed, longer-range concept while tactics acquired a
narrower meaning.
>
>Thus strategy delineates to millions the intermediate stations and
transitional forms in a larger mass revolutionary process. It provides a
political path from one stage to another stage in the course of which the
working class and its allies gain in experience, understanding and unity.
>
>In some cases, a strategic policy may aim to supplant one social system by
another; in other cases, it may aim to bring about a qualitative shift in
the political balance of forces in a more protracted process leading up to
a revolutionary change; and in still other cases, it may aim to organize an
orderly retreat, such as Lenin did when he proposed the New Economic Policy
in the aftermath of the civil war in Russia.
>
>In contrast to strategy, tactics focus more on the issues, demands, forms
of struggles, slogans, etc. that are required at any given moment in order
to mobilize and unify masses of people. They have a more transitory
character.
>
>Tactics came to be the dependent variable in the equation with strategy
the independent one. In its modern usage, tactics are conditioned by
strategic choices. Much more than strategic policy, tactics are influenced
by mass moods and the level of class consciousness.
>
>Let me try to illustrate this point with a single example: our strategic
approach in present circumstances isn't identical with our approach, say in
the late 1950's and early 1960's, but it hasn't changed greatly either. Its
thrust then and now is against corporate domination of our nation's
political and economic life.
>
>Our tactics, on the other hand, are distinctly different compared to our
tactics during the early decades of the Cold War, in large measure because
the mass movements, and particularly the labor movement, are on a much
higher level today.
>
>Having said all of that, I would add that sometimes distinguishing
strategy from tactics is a bit of a crapshoot. For example, is our policy
of left center unity a strategic or tactical policy?
>
>Assembling of Broad Mass Forces
>
>A scientifically constructed strategic policy pinpoints the main social
force(s) hindering progressive development at any given moment while at the
same time indicating the main class and social forces that have an
objective interest in moving society to a higher stage of development.
>
It has remained a "scientific" anlaysis, that show little real science. No
numbers, no trends, no inter-relations, no dialectical explication...
>In determining where the main blow is to be struck, a strategic policy at
the same time establishes the material/objective grounds for a broad policy
of alliances against a common foe.
>
>In the late 18th century, British colonialism was the main obstacle to our
country's independence and democratic advance while the colonists and their
allies were the social forces who saw the revolutionary process through.
>
>Less than a century later it was chattel slavery and its grip on the
federal government that hindered the country's democratic progress and the
equality of four million of its Black citizens brutally exploited on
southern slave plantations. In response to the growing political and
economic power of the slave owning class over our young nation, a broad
anti-slavery coalition, driven by its objective interests, emerged -
slowly, hesitatingly, on many levels, but ultimately amassed the strength
to defeat the slaveholders and their allies in the civil war.
>
>Decades later in the depth of the Great Depression, a debate erupted over
fundamental strategy of the US labor movement. On one side AFL President
William Green and his allies argued that industrial workers could not be
organized. On the other side, CIO President John L. Lewis and his
supporters, including the communists, said that the organization of the
basic industries was a strategic precondition to curbing the political and
economic power of the big economic trusts.
>
>We know who won that argument and what a difference it made in subsequent
struggles.
>
>In the 1950's, Martin Luther King's strategic vision was to bring down the
walls of legal segregation, codified into law nearly 60 years earlier and
denying for all that time elementary human rights to African American
people in the southern states.
>
>Not everyone agreed with either King's strategic goal or his tactical
approach, but after bitter and bloody mass struggle stretching over a
decade, legal segregation was outlawed and civil rights laws were enacted.
In the popular sense, it was a social revolution and brought the struggle
for racial and national equality to a new stage.
>
>Interestingly, King, who himself was evolving politically in the course of
the struggle to dismantle Jim Crow racism, was the first to recognize that
one stage had been reached and that a new stage in the struggle for full
economic, political, and social equality for the African American people
and other racial minorites awaited. Unfortunately, an assassin's bullet
stole from our nation its greatest mass leader of the 20th century as he
was about to embark on a new mission on freedom's road.
>
>In 1980's and 1990's, the ascendancy to power of the extreme right in the
past two decades compelled strategic and tactical adjustments by the
broader movement and ourselves.
>
>Strategic policies, as you can see, vary greatly across time and space.
Indeed, there is as much variation in strategic policies as there is
variation in the stages of development from country to country. One size
does not fit all.
>
>This too Lenin emphasized:
>
>"Everywhere we observe that dissatisfaction with the Second International
is spreading and growing, both because of its opportunism and because of
its instability, or incapacity, to create a really centralized, a really
leading center that would be capable of directing the international tactics
of the revolutionary proletariat in its struggle for the world Soviet
Republic. We must clearly realize that such a leading center cannot be
built up on stereo typed, mechanically equalized and identical tactical
rules of struggle. As long as national and state differences exist among
peoples and countries - and these differences will continue to exist for a
very long time even after the dictatorship of the proletariat has been
established on a world scale - the unity of the international tactics of
the Communist working class movement of all countries demands, not the
elimination of variety, not the abolition of national differences, but such
an application of the fundamental principles of Communism as will correctly
modify these principles in certain particulars, correctly adapt and apply
them to national and national-state differences. The main task of the
historical period through which all the advanced countries are passing is
to investigate, study, seek, divine, grasp that which is peculiarly
national, specifically national in the concrete manner in which each
country approaches the fulfillment of the single international task" (Left
Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, p. 73)
>
>Revolutionary Process Proceeds through Stages
>
>Even the building of socialism proceeds through stages with their own
specific features. Marx made this point in the Gotha program.
>
>Since then, socialist societies have gathered vast and not altogether
positive experiences in the construction of new societies. Needless to say,
the experience suggests that the construction of a socialist society is a
exceedingly complex process that passes through stages of development,
conditioned in the last analysis by the specific political and economic
features of the country.
>
>Attempts to skip and leap over stages before the material conditions and
mass thinking for a transition have matured can result in major setbacks.
Indeed, departures from this method of analysis have led to grave and
harmful mistakes, as occurred in China, for instance, during the Great Leap
Forward.
>
>At the same time, there are no pure stages in which we are able to observe
a distinct and unmistakable line of demarcation separating one stage from
another. We find pure forms in textbooks and at higher levels of
theoretical abstraction, but seldom in life.
>
>Indeed, socio-economic life is complex, diverse, and contradictory.
Historical experience shows that political and economic stages overlap,
thus making the elaboration of a strategic and tactical line in a timely
way difficult.
>
>Thus, projecting new strategic and tactical shifts is as much an art as a
science. At such moments, mass experience, connections to mass movements
and struggles, and a keen nose for mass moods counts for more than
scholastic theorizing.
>
>A revolutionary party has to pierce through the sometimes gray and
contradictory nature of political processes in order to unearth, plumb,
excavate, and mine the more apparent as well as the more imperceptible,
subtle shifts in the balance of class and social forces that signify that a
new stage is emerging.
>
>At such moments, new strategic polices not only have to see the light of
day, but also capture the political imagination of millions if the
transitional moment is to give way to a new stage of class and social
struggle. Objective conditions alone won't do it. Political agency and
struggle is necessary. A new stage of struggle doesn't materialize by the
inexorable workings of the historical process.
>
>At a distance from historic events, it may seem that the necessity of new
strategic and tactical policies is obvious to all but the politically deaf
and blind.
>
>But inside an episode of history with its swirling events, unstable allies
and shifting mass moods - most of which are beyond control of any political
party - it's much more difficult to discern with utmost certainty when one
stage has been passed and a new stage is being entered.
>
>Lenin's own comrades on the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, for
instance, had grave doubts about his appeal for an immediate insurrection.
In fact, the resistance was so stiff that Lenin threatened to resign from
the Central Committee if it did not adjust its strategic policy to the new
circumstances.
>
>When you're an actor in the historical process, the strategic and tactical
choices are seldom crystal clear. They are anything but a "no-brainer." How
to proceed is much less obvious to makers of history, like for example, the
Paris Communards or the late Chilean President Salvador Allende, than to
history's bystanders, living in a different country and era.
>
>Present Day Strategy and Tactics
>
>For decades we have pursued an anti-monopoly strategic policy. According
to one article that I read this policy dates back to the early 1950's.
>
>Its theoretical roots can be traced back even further to the writings of
Lenin and Georgi Dimitroff while its political origins are located in the
popular front experience of the mid-1930's to the mid-1940's.
>
>The policy rests on the fact that large corporations and banks dominate
the political and economic life of our country as well as form the
structural underpinnings of the system of capitalism. With their economic
and political power, these corporate behemoths determine the fate of
hundreds of millions of people at home and around the globe.
>
>Stagnating wages and income, high energy costs, rising unemployment,
skyrocketing rents, privatization of public services, the wage gap, strike
breaking, persistent racism and discrimination, the corruption of our
political process, the erosion of our democratic rights, anti-immigrant
bashing, environmental degradation, persistent and growing poverty, and
militarist aggression - all of this and more can be traced in one way or
another to monopoly corporations and banks and their relentless search for
maximum corporate profits. That's their bottom line.
>
>This long shadow of class exploitation, racial and gender oppression,
reaction in all of its forms and imperialist plunder hangs over the full
length and breadth of the country and the world. It cuts a wide swath
across nearly all sectors of the American people and brings in its wake
hardship from sea to shining sea. Even some segments of the capitalist
class feel the pinch of its policies.
>
>This is one side of our anti-monopoly strategy. On the other side,
anti-monopoly sentiment is evident among millions who increasingly see a
connection between the difficulties, hardships and crises attending their
own lives and corporate control of our nation's political and economic life.
>
Center-left coalitions. Anti-monopoly strategies. While conditions have
changed dramatically in the last 25 years, the Party's line has not.
>Moreover, this sentiment among the American people is growing, sometimes
seemingly overnight, especially among the exploited and oppressed, and
under the impact of capitalist globalization. It is behind the emergence of
a broadly based labor-led people's coalition in the late 1990s.
>
>The anti-monopoly strategy is our path to socialism. It aims to unite
millions of our nation's working people and their allies to radically curb
the political and economic power of the biggest monopolies. It is at once a
class and a democratic struggle.
>
>We believe that in the course of this struggle to reign in corporate
economic and political power, the working class and its allies will not
only gain in experience, unity, and organization, but also come to see the
necessity of socialist transformation of society. Of course, whether that
happens, how it happens and at what speed depends on many factors, most of
which cannot be foreseen in advance.
>
>As in other countries, there is no direct road to socialism in the US. The
struggle goes through stages and phases. And we have to adjust our
strategic policy to correspond to each specific stage of economic and
political development of our country, to each stage of the class struggle.
>
>Furthermore, we have to find and seek out those features that are
peculiarly American and that have to be taken into account in elaborating a
strategic path to anti-monopoly democracy and socialism. Communists are not
national nihilists.
>
>It is difficult to imagine, however, moving to a new stage of
anti-monopoly struggle without the formation of a labor-led all people's
party. It seems like an inescapable requirement for radical advance.
>
>Such a party, in contrast to the Republican and Democratic parties, would
be independent of monopoly control. Its constituency would be the victims
of monopoly exploitation and oppression. Its political program would be
consistently anti-coprporate. The multi-racial, multi-national, male-female
working class and its strategic allies would be at its center. And our
Party would be an active participant.
>
So the solution lies in participating more effectively in bourgeois
democracy, to achieve Bill of Rights Socialism. Gus Hall was saying years
ago, that we can now hope to achieve socialism through the ballot box.
>A labor-led people's party would be an instrument of struggle against the
extreme right and the corporations on the political, economic and every
front. It would make the struggle for full equality and multi-racial unity
a strategic task.
>
>Such a party would seek to become the governing party at the federal and
other levels of government. We used to say that the formation of an
anti-monopoly government would be short-lived and rapidly give way to the
struggle for socialism. But I'm not so convinced of this view now.
>
>Transnationals
>
>In my report to the NC in March of last year I indicated that our
anti-monopoly concept has to be adjusted to the shifts and changes in the
global capitalist economy. Since the early 1950's when we first projected
this concept, vast economic changes have taken place.
>
>The level of internationalization and concentration of capital has reached
new levels, currency and financial instruments move around the globe at
breathtaking speeds, production networks spread across regions, and to a
lesser extent the globe, supra-national organizations have assumed a new
role as the economic thugs of US and world imperialism, and the military
might of the Pentagon has no counterweight, to name some of the more
dramatic changes on a global scale.
>
>This new state of affairs has led some to conclude that national economies
and nation states no longer matter. I think that they do, but it is also
true that capitalist globalization and technological changes have altered
political, economic, and class relations on a national and international
scale in the favor of the transnational corporations for the moment.
>
>Thus, we have to adjust our strategic vision to this new reality. I
believe that we have to speak now of an anti-transnational strategy. And,
more importantly, discuss what the full implications of such an adjustment
are.
>
>At the same time, we have to be careful not to go overboard.
The fear of the left is tangible.
>Given the global dynamics of the world capitalist economy, some say, for
example, that local and national struggle have little consequence in the
present day world, that only on a global level can battles be won. This in
my opinion is a mistake. Most struggles, in fact, will be local and
national. While struggles will increasingly have an international
dimension, the class struggle will still be fought out and won or lost on
national soil.
>
>External factors will influence it more and more, but in most cases they
won't be decisive in determining the outcome. What do you think?
>
>Fighting the Extreme Right
>
>As I mentioned earlier, we adjusted our strategic and tactical policies in
the early 1980's because of the growth of reaction and the extreme right.
What impelled us was the fact that the most anti-labor, anti-women,
anti-people, racist, and militarist sections of monopoly capital and their
political representatives in our nation's capital were in ascendancy.
>
>Indeed at the time, there were clear and present dangers to peace and
democratic rights. Moreover, this assault on democratic rights struck a
deep chord among the American people who felt the effects of the extreme
right's reactionary and anti-democratic policies.
>
>Similar dangers, though greater, exist today. Thus, there is absolutely no
reason to change our policy now. Indeed the task is step up the struggle
against the Bush administration and the extreme right. As I said in my
recent report to the National Board, this administration's policies will
greatly sharpen the struggle on all fronts. They will heighten class
exploitation, aggravate racial and gender oppression to the extreme, and
curtail democratic rights all along the line.
>
>That is already apparent. In cynical and deceptive fashion, the Bush
administration is attempting to exploit people's concerns regarding the
economy, high taxes, rising energy costs, public education, social
security, medical care, and so forth to impose its reactionary
political/legislative program on the country.
>
>Bush's State of the Union address was clever, but thoroughly right wing.
To quote The Wall Street Journal, "When George W. Bush's budget blueprint
comes out today, it will provide the most detailed evidence yet of his
governing style: he talks to the middle but governs from the right."
(3/28/2001).
>
>With their control of all three branches of the federal government and the
backing of major sections of transnational capital, the extreme right
intends to wield its political and economic power to shift the balance of
political forces decisively to the right.
>
>In these circumstances, trade union and working class unity,
labor-racially oppressed unity, multi-racial, multi-national unity,
male-female unity, left-center unity, young and old unity, immigrant and
native born unity, farmer-labor unity, gay and straight unity, left unity,
and all people's unity combined with mass militant action is paramount.
Large people's majorities must and can be assembled in order to beat back
Bush and the right wing. And labor's role as a coalition builder and leader
is crucial.
>
>The prospects for launching struggles on a broader basis in the election's
aftermath are far more favorable. The elections cleared away some of the
debris inhibiting broad working class and people's struggles. The struggle
against the Bush administration and the economic crisis is beginning on
different fronts and levels. More advanced demands are beginning to surface.
>
>The left should become fully engaged in these struggles. It should work
closely with the center forces in the labor movement
!!!!!!!!!!
and elsewhere, understanding that the most advanced demand of the center is
the starting point of broad mass unity and action. It should give more
attention to grassroots and rank-and-file mobilization. It should take
broad initiatives with others.
>
>In doing all this, the Party and the broader left will grow and take on a
more organized character.
>
>Even sections, sometimes substantial sections, of the Democratic Party
will oppose Bush's policies, although we should not rely on the Democrats
nor be reluctant to take issue with them. Nor should we always defer to
leaders of the labor and people's movement when we disagree with them. How
we express our differences, of course, is of utmost importance.
!!!!!!!!!
>It should always be done within the framework of building broad unity
against the extreme right and the transnational corporations.
>
>The left and the wider movements should take advantage of divisions within
the capitalist class as well.
>
>By the same token, narrow political concepts and appeals to move to higher
stages of struggle should be rejected. To skip the stage of combating the
extreme right in the name of some higher form of struggle is a recipe for
isolation and political irrelevance.
>
>The struggle against the extreme right is the main form of the class
struggle at this moment. This view accords with the views of the
progressive forces in labor and other struggles. Without rebuffing the
extreme right, higher stages of struggle are simply impossible.
>
>Granted it is not a frontal assault on corporate power. But it is a
necessary stage to move through in order to confront the TNCs and their
hold on the levers of political and economic power more directly.
>
>Does that mean that we are putting our anti-monopoly strategy in
hibernation? By no means, both concepts will guide our work. There are no
clear and distinct boundaries separating one from the other, but the
extreme right's grip on our nation's political apparatus will be the
framework for everything that we do in every arena of struggle.
>
>And this will remain in place until a shift in the political balance of
forces occurs nationwide.
>
>With regard to the role of the working class, the takeover of our
country's political structures by the right wing extremists imposes added
responsibility onto its shoulders. Its task is to lead a broad alliance,
beginning with its strategic allies, into the battle against the right wing
and transnational corporations.
>
>At the center of such a struggle is the battle for democracy. There are no
clearly marked walls between democratic and class struggles. Nearly every
issue has a class and democratic aspect.
>
>Class oppression combines with other forms of oppression, particularly
racial, national, and gender oppression, and we cannot and should not
separate them. Racial and gender relations were entwined with the emergence
and growth of class relations in our country's historical development. In
fact, they were a constitutive element of class relations and vice versa.
While we say that class relations are the main constitutive element of the
social relations of capitalism, we should not take that to mean that they
gobble up other social relations.
>
>By the same token, the working class movement does not swallow other
social movements. People, including workers, walk under many banners. In
this era, the working class movement and the general democratic movement
grow in tandem with the labor movement through dint of effort and its
coalition approach, earning a leading role in this many-sided process. This
is an extraordinary development that will challenge our strategic and
tactical skills.
>
>But I'm confident that with effort, collectivity, and "utmost
flexibility", we will measure up to the new challenges and promise of this
era of class and social struggles.
>
As the old woman used to say, "Where's the beef?"
And where's the biosphere?
"Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom"
Psalm 90
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