Sunday, May 5, 2013

USA - From the Founding Congress of the New Communist Party (Organizing Committee)

Adopted by the Founding Congress of the New Communist Party (Organizing Committee)
For release on May 1, 2013
The text below is a brief summary of our organizational line on the current global conjuncture and by extension a basis for the formulation of our strategic perspective in the years ahead. Fundamentally, it is clear that the dynamics of the world imperialist system are creating the objective conditions for global revolutionary power seizure by the proletariat. The matter in question is the development of the subjective forces of the World Proletarian Revolution.
We hope this text can contribute to the process of organization of a proletarian vanguard in the United States through the coalescence of the dispersed advanced elements of the class into a revolutionary party that is capable of diffusing communist politics practically among the masses, and organizing and directing the people’s hate against imperialism, revisionism and all reaction.
Central Committee, NCP (OC) May 1, 2013


Global Situation:
Globally, the principal contradiction remains more than ever that between imperialism and the oppressed nations and peoples. The competing blocs of imperialist monopoly capital and the entire social formations of the imperialist countries feed off the super-exploitation and continuing dispossession of the proletariat and the popular masses in the semi-colonial countries.
The global dichotomy between the imperialist and semi-colonial countries is reproduced inside the imperialist countries by the super-exploitation of immigrant workers. The imperialist countries also contain oppressed nations and nationalities within them. The following general tendencies are observable in the development of the imperialist system:
-Over-production of capital: The pace of accumulation of capital exceeds any outlet in production resulting in a bloated financial sector and a tendency towards speculative bubbles as the only viable engine of “economic growth”.
-Escalating plunder of the semi-colonial countries: More and more material production is being relocated to the oppressed countries, where the people are increasingly proletarianized, resulting in a massive new source of value transfer to the imperialist countries and their monopolies, while fueling the growth of the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) and service sectors in the imperialist societies.
-Massive development of capitalist production and escalating proletarianization in the semi-colonial countries: Dispossession of small producers, agrarian ruin, and the accumulation of massive reserve armies of labor in the urban centers is the rule of development in the oppressed countries, leaving semi-feudal relations ever more thoroughly subordinated to comprador capitalist economies locked in dependence upon the imperialist world market.
-Development of new expansionist powers and poles of accumulation: US imperialism remains the main enemy of the world’s people. It is in growing contention with the imperialist countries of Western Europe and Japan. At the same time, the monopoly bourgeoisie of Russia and China increasingly assert themselves as imperialist powers in their own right, while continuing to provide cheap labor and raw materials within the global market. Regional expansionist powers such as India extend their influence. The response of US imperialism to this “rebalancing” raises the possibility of a Third World War and motivates its aggression throughout the world.
-Tendency towards expulsion of living labor from the production process: Technological advances rendering living labor increasingly unnecessary, not only in production but also in circulation and reproduction, make a long term reduction in the total employed labor force inevitable, at the same time as subsistence producers continue to be dispossessed by ongoing primitive accumulation.
-Capitalist production encountering its limitations in the biosphere and geosphere: Climate change, mass extinction, and soil degradation are only a few examples of the way in which the irrational imperatives of capitalist production come into contradiction with the maintenance of an environment suited to the stable reproduction of human society. These tendencies will serve to exponentially compound already explosive social contradictions in the coming decades.
-Termination of the social-democratic compacts between capital and labor in the imperialist countries: The 2008 financial crisis only served to further develop the decades-long breakdown of the social-democratic compacts between the imperialist bourgeoisie and sections of the working class in the imperialist countries, through slashing of the social wage and the restructuring of production.

Regional Situations:
In Africa, contention develops between US imperialism with its drive towards military domination of the continent and China’s search for raw materials. Spontaneous movements of the proletariat and the popular masses erupt continually from South Africa and Uganda to Sudan and Kenya to Nigeria and Ghana against super-exploitation in production, land seizure by foreign capital, and the marginalization of urban masses in the “informal sector”.
In the Arab countries and West Asia, the Arab Spring shocked the reactionary regimes of the comprador bureaucrat bourgeoisie, but in the absence of proletarian leadership, its momentum was seized upon by US-NATO imperialism and Islamist reaction to wage wars of aggression first in Libya and now Syria in pursuit of the US regional agenda of sectarian balkanization.
US imperialism and Zionism continue their aggressive maneuvers against the Iranian people, who also face the clerical bureaucrat capitalist regime. US aggression continues against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq as well.The workers’ movement advances to a high point of economic struggle in Egypt, while the national resistance struggles in Palestine, Kurdistan and Western Sahara remain a great source of explosive social material.
In Europe, the southern half of the continent is pushed to near semi-colonial status by massive austerity, leading to strike waves, riots and disorganized elements of armed struggle, while in the north, the rollback of the “social state” continues. Fascist currents take advantage of the weaknesses of the proletarian movement to make gains among the masses.
In South Asia, a true “weak link” of imperialism, where capitalist development coexists with the most backwards semi-feudal relations, People’s War under the leadership of the CPI (Maoist) advances and develops in India and armed Red Power is organized in rural districts across a broad swath of the country. In Nepal, after ten glorious years of People’s War, the parliamentary betrayal after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement is finally being challenged by the CPN-Maoist.
In Bangladesh, the garment workers have led extremely fierce struggles in recent years, while the communist movement remains weak and factionalized. In China, there have been great waves of worker and peasant struggles over wages and land tenure, but the task remains the organization of a revolutionary Maoist party to struggle for state power against the revisionist bourgeoisie.
In Southeast Asia, the National Democratic movement continues to advance its position in the Philippines, while the workers and peasants develop strike movements and wage militant struggles against eviction in Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam. In Latin America, the mass resistance against US imperialism over the past decade has been led onto the electoral road under bourgeois leadership, e.g. “21st-century socialism,” and resulted in new regional alignments of capital oriented to Russian and Chinese imperialism, while Brazil has further asserted its expansionist position.
All in all, with the exception of a few semi-colonial countries where proletarian parties are leading the popular masses in struggle for New Democratic Revolution, the upsurge of the masses at best is appropriated by elements of the national bourgeoisie (destined to play its part in inter-imperialist contention) and at worst by fascist reaction. The objective conditions demand the reconstruction of the international communist movement on the new basis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as formulated in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and further developed in the People’s Wars around the world.



Domestic Situation:
The proletariat and the oppressed masses in the United States have not yet recovered from the decisive defeat of the 1960s-1970s wave of class and nationality struggles. The New Communist Movement, unable to produce a genuine proletarian revolutionary party or at least set the course for the construction of such a party, was co-opted into the left-wing of the state apparatus and dissolved into today’s brokers of capital in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Fragments of the New Communist Movement also ended up in self-marginalization, as a result of their lack of a mass line practice.
Other leading elements of the nationality struggles, as well as groups of anti-imperialist guerrillas, without a clear guiding theory, proletarian party, political strategy for revolution, practice of mass line, and military strategy for People’s War were separated from the masses and easily smashed by the state, leaving in their wake only a scattering of prisoner support committees.
US society has been comprehensively restructured for preventive counterinsurgency against the internal oppressed nations, on the one hand through the unprecedented level of genocidal mass imprisonment of oppressed nationalities and the thorough militarization of the police, and on the other hand, multiculturalism, identity-based electoral politics, “affirmative action” policies, and most recently “America’s first black president”.
Resistance at the point of production has been shattered with the restructuring of production and deindustrialization. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union bureaucrats “represent” only a small proportion of workers. Since the 1980s, white right-wing populism has been a more dynamic force of antagonism against the imperialist state and its neocolonial restructuring than the marginal and isolated proletarian left. What is called the “left” today is dominated by the NGO system and its role as a bulwark of soft counterinsurgency in the mass movements and in petty-bourgeois anarchist counterculture.
There is no objective base for the “regroupment” of the left today. Because quite simply, there is very little to regroup. The class struggle in the US develops at the level of sporadic and spontaneous mass action, including prison hunger strikes, high school walkouts, the brief upsurge of the immigrant rights movement, and the rise and decline of the Occupy movement; the latter developing largely as a manifestation of the discontent of petty-bourgeois youth pushed down by the crisis. What we do see however is the existence of objective conditions for developing revolutionary politics and building revolutionary organizations among the masses.
These conditions include worsening living and working conditions for the proletariat, genocidal state assault against the internal oppressed nations, and the impending intensification of austerity. Though the relatively large size of the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie is indicative of the parasitic character of US society in general, there exists a lower proletarian stratum numbering in the many tens of millions, the core of which is derived from the internal oppressed nations and nationalities and immigrants from the oppressed countries, as well as substantial semi-proletarian strata involved in part-time waged employment, casual labor, and petty self-employment. This is the social base for the development of a protracted struggle in this country as a part of the World Proletarian Revolution, a base which during periods of acute crisis will be able to organize many intermediate strata into a United Front against the US imperialist bourgeoisie.

No comments:

Post a Comment