Comrades and Friends:
We of the August 29th Movement would like to welcome you to this forum on party building and its key importance to Chicano liberation and proletarian revolution within the U.S.N.A. We felt that it is most appropriate to hold this forum to discuss this urgent question at this time in order to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the great anti-imperialist Chicano Moratorium Demonstration of August 29th, 1970 held in opposition to the U.S.N.A. imperialist war of aggression being waged against the Vietnamese people which ended in defeat for the aggressors.
The historical significance of this Anti-Imperialist Demonstration with the vicious attack launched upon it by the Bourgeois state which resulted in over 400 people being hurt and 3 being murdered, and the ensuing rebellion, was a significant turning point in the liberation struggle of the Chicano national movement in general, and the working class in particular.
This attack by the bourgeois mercenaries on those present at this national moratorium, which included other nationalities such as Puerto Ricans, Blacks, and whites, was but a historical continuance of the oppression and political attacks suffered by the Chicano people at the hands of the imperialists.
Within the Southwest region, the Chicano and Indian peoples have historically evolved under the distinct material conditions of slavery under Spanish colonial rule, and then under feudal relations of production and oppression by Spanish feudal landlords under both the rule of Spain and Mexico.
This oppression, exploitation, and historical development was continued and intensified with the seizure of Texas in 1836, and the rest of the Southwest and California in 1848 by the aggressive and expanding colonialism of U.S.N.A. capitalism. This seizure was made easier by the traitorous collaboration of the Spanish feudal landlords within the Southwest with whom the young U.S.N.A. bourgeoisie made an alliance against the native peoples.
The period from 1848 to 1883 was one of open terror against the peoples of the Southwest by U.S.N.A. colonialism through use of the army, Texas Rangers, Vigilantes, and lynchings. The peasantry, peones, small artisans and miners were left to the plunder and murder unleashed by the U.S.N.A. bourgeoisie who justified it through its class ideology of national chauvinism which took the particular form of white chauvinism and white supremacy against the native peoples. The source of this aspect of bourgeois ideology – national and white chauvinism must be analyzed from a materialist standpoint as emanating from the material base of colonialism, imperialism, and the subjugation and plunder of the oppressed nations and peoples of the world by the imperialists.
The year 1848 saw the degenerate Hacendados – the feudal landlord class of Mexico represented by General Santa Ana – give away to the U.S.N.A. bourgeoisie California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and part of Utah. Taken together with Texas, this constituted over half of Mexico’s best and richest territory, and an area larger than France and Germany combined.
In the war of 1848, the Mexican bourgeoisie was as yet too small and weak to play a major role against U.S.N.A. colonialism, so the Mexican ruling class comprised mainly of Hacendados capitulated rather than mobilize and arm the oppressed Mexican masses which would have had the effect of destroying their own privileged class position and perhaps furthering the bourgeois democratic revolution, (which was carried through within the southwest by the U.S.N.A. bourgeoisie).
Property relations within the Southwest region began to undergo, at first slowly, then at a quickening pace, radical changes under U.S.N.A. colonialism with the massive influx of poor Anglo-American settlers encouraged by the white chauvinist ideology of the bourgeoisie and the lure of gold and land.
The feudal economy of the Southwest, geared to barter, and small scale trade and production only large enough to satisfy local needs, represented an obstacle to the greedy designs of the encroaching capitalists and the liberation of the productive forces in general, and the native peoples in particular.
The bourgeois colonialists invaded under the slogan of freedom, which of course meant the freedom of the bourgeoisie to subjugate and exploit on a higher level the propertyless and laboring masses, and plunder the raw materials of the region.
The U.S.N.A. colonialists took possession of the means of production – the land, mines, forests, water and mineral resources – and began to lay the primitive infrastructure for a capitalist economy and wage-slavery. The native, peoples were driven off on massive scales by force, with homes being burned down, herds of sheep slaughtered, and terror used against those who resisted. Peasant plots and sheepland was converted into grazing land for the new capitalist cattle ranchers, while the native peoples were forced to become wage-slaves.
The discovery of gold in California touched off an orgy of plunder and violence rarely equalled in human history. This, coupled with the discovery of copper and silver in New Mexico and Colorado unleashed a human tide from the East fleeing the capitalist crises of 1847 and 1857 and its resultant unemployment. Their desperation and rabid white chauvinism pushed on them, enabled the U.S.N.A. bourgeoisie to use these poor Anglos as shock troops to colonize and consolidate their economic hold over the Southwest region. The political consolidation was accomplished by the use of the bourgeois state through judicial fraud by the courts and implementation of anti-Mexican laws all of which violated the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo which stated that the economic, political, and cultural rights of Mexicans within the Southwest region would be respected.
One particular example of this use of the state against the native peoples was a land act that was passed which required all grantees to appear before the Board of Land Commissioners to prove their ownership, while colonizing squatters were given land outright and not even questioned as to legal title.
Laws, courts, police, and taxes, were used to try and wipe out resistance, pauperizing the peoples of the Southwest and enabling the new owners of the means of production to freely exploit the land and labor of the region. To increase the accumulation of capital and technology, the colonialists adopted the mining, grazing, and farming techniques of the Mexican and Indian peoples.
Thus an extensive new state apparatus was being set up and a new ideology – that of the bourgeoisie – was forcefully being disseminated, while the economic base was being transformed. All this came into direct conflict with the masses within the Southwest region.
There is an objective law which states that where there is oppression, there is resistance. The year 1848, when the Southwest was seized by advancing U.S.N.A. colonialism, witnessed the heroic struggles of the French and German proletariat in the revolutions occurring in Europe, and this same year there began to commence the resistance against colonialism and later imperialism by the Chicano and Indian peoples within the Southwest.
Courageous fighters came forth to wage an intense guerilla struggle against the colonialists; men such as Tiburcio Vasquez who was eventually executed, and Joaquin Murietta who, when finally captured by the bourgeois state, had his head cut off and paraded from town to town as a warning to those who would resist.
In Texas, there was Juan Cortina, who with his volunteer army re-conquered much of Southern Texas; and also the struggle led by Sostenes Archeveque. In New Mexico, Elfego Baca struggled back; while the secret organization called Las Gorras Blancas waged armed struggle against the colonialists and imperialists up until the 1920’s.
With the advent of the Civil War and the confrontation between the developing bourgeoisie and the slave-owning landlords of the south, an important historical turning point was arrived at. Either the U.S.N.A. would progress into an industrialized and bourgeois-democratic society at this point, or it would face the domination of the southern landlords as the ruling-class, and an extension of slavery, and the restriction of the productive forces.
From a Marxist-Leninist standpoint, the Civil War had a profound historical significance, not only for the developing Afro-American nation within the Black Belt, but also for the development of the Chicano people within the Southwest region. The victory of the bourgeoisie in the Civil War meant that the aim of the Southern landlord class, which wanted to expand slavery into the Southwest and northern Mexico, was defeated and thus was a historically progressive step.
The capital accumulated during the war was the basis for building the capitalist-industrial foundation for imperialism and its penetration of the Southwest through the export of capital to the sources of raw materials and cheap labor within the region. This was to have the effect of creating the conditions necessary for the proletarian-socialist revolution.
The penetration of capital into the Southwest began to change the feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production through the creation of the necessary economic infrastructure of communications, railroads, capitalist mining and agriculture, and a money economy based on trade between town and country.
This imperialist penetration brought about a progressive change in the relations of production as new classes began to develop out of the spontaneous but uneven development of capitalism, with pockets of semi-feudalism still co-existing to this day.
The imperialists, as in Latin America and most underdeveloped countries, made an alliance within the Southwest with the Spanish feudal landlord class who saw this as a necessary tactic by which to keep their privileged class position and carry on their traditional exploitation of the working masses through the patron-peon system.
The old ruling-class families such as the Sepulvedas, Picos, and Figueroas in California, whom the imperialists named our streets after, and the Oteros and Archuletas in Mew Mexico, found it expedient and profitable to form alliances with the imperialists. In return for controlling the peons, local peasantry, and Indians under their influence through the exercise of economic and political pressure, they were allowed to share political power on a local basis.
In the period after the 1880’s, the export of capital by U.S.N.A. imperialism began to penetrate the Southwest region much more heavily as the Southern Pacific Railroad in conjunction with the banking group of Wells Fargo and Crocker-Citizens, which based itself in San Francisco, began to seize control of much of the land of California as did the Bank of America after the turn of the century.
The mines in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado began to come under the control of the Rockefeller and Morgan groups. Much of the land in New Mexico was seized from the Chicano peasantry and the Indian peoples by the bourgeois state and turned over to the Arizona and New Mexico Land Company, and the St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad, both controlled by the Rockefeller group. The land and resources in Texas began to come under the control of the ruling class group based in Houston. The result of this imperialist penetration was a swift change from feudal relations of production to capitalist relations as an industrial proletariat began to develop in the railroads, mines, canneries, and textile industries; and a rural proletariat from the expropriated peasantry.
In addition, the old Spanish feudal landlord class was being transformed into a comprador bourgeoisie which acted as a middleman for the imperialists in selling the region’s resources and people’s labor such as the Otero family of New Mexico whose members now developed into capitalist businessmen who traveled to the East in order to attend ruling class schools to be groomed as puppet politicians and to induce imperialist corporations to exploit the resources of New Mexico. Today, we still have their sucessors in New Mexico, such as the Chavez’s and Mondragons.
With the objective spontaneous development of capitalism within the Southwest, the Chicano people labored under the crushing weight of imperialist exploitation in the mines, fields, and factories, but at the same time they learned a new discipline that developed through their collective exploitation and unity based on the conditions of socialized labor under capitalism.
Chicano workers – both urban and rural – now began the historical task of organizing themselves against exploitation. These conditions of capitalist exploitation existed already in the eastern portion of the U.S.N.A. multi-national state, and Anglo workers themselves began to struggle back as in the Carnegie Steel Strike and the Haymarket Affair.
The first attempt by Chicano proletarians to take an organized stand was in 1883 by forming a union of agricultural workers in Texas and going out on strike–a strike which was brutally repressed.
In 1903 sugar beet workers comprised of Japanese and Chicano workers formed a 2,000 member union in Ventura, California and won a bloody strike.
One of the most far reaching strikes occurred just south of the 58 year old imperialist border in 1906 and was provoked by the same U.S.N.A. imperialist exploitation. The U.S.N.A. who owned Consolidated Copper Company of Cananea, Sonora closed down several mines after a drop in the price of copper. Thousands of Mexican miners, who were being paid only half of what Anglo miners were paid in the same mines, were thrown out of work. Ten thousand Mexican miners went out on strike. The reaction by the imperialists was swift and ruthless as a small army of rangers from Bisbee, Arizona rode in and opened fire on the miners, killing 30. In retaliation, the miners burned down company stores and administration buildings. The participation by the semi-feudal Diaz government in the attack on the miners enraged the Mexican nation and was instrumental in bringing about the completion of the bourgeois-democratic and anti-imperialist revolution of Mexico in 1910 under the leadership of revolutionary nationalists like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, (who were later assassinated by the Mexican bourgeoisie).
1910 also saw striking Chicano railroad workers dynamite the L.A. Times building for its anti-labor stance. 1915 saw the copper miners of Clifton, Morenci, and Metcalf, Arizona strike only to have the National Guard called out to repress them and jail their leaders.
In 1915 the Plan de San Diego, an anti-imperialist program was formulated by Aniceto Pizano, Luis de la Rosa, and other members of the Chicano revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie made up of lawyers and small businessmen in Texas. This plan called for an armed insurrection and the establishment of an autonomous republic.
This plan included clauses for the freedon, autonomy, and rights of Indians, Blacks, and Asians; on the negative side, it also stated that every white male over the age of sixteen was to be executed. The armed insurrection did not take place as 28 of the top leaders were arrested, tried for treason, and terror against Chicanos accelerated all along the border.
In 1917, 1,000 Arizona copper miners were left to die in the desert by rangers in order to break a strike, and miners at a Rockefeller owned mine in Ludlow, Colorado were massacred by a private army and the state rangers.
In analyzing the objective spontaneous mass movement and its ebb and flow, the period from 1900 to 1920 was one of intense proletarian class struggle against the imperialists by Chicanos. The predominant ideological force was anarchism – the ideology of the radical petty-bourgeoisie as disseminated by Ricardo and Enrique Magon in their newspaper “Regeneracion” printed regularly in Los Angeles during this period, and Chicanos who were members of the International Workers of the World – the anarchist Wobblies.
The Bolshevik Revolution, scientific communism, and the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, on the Marxist-Leninist theory of the State, the National Question, the necessity for the leadership of the Leninist proletarian party, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, had not been brought as yet to the Chicano proletariat and peasantry and was a task yet to be fulfilled and which to this day has only been partially fulfilled.
World War I hastened the dominance of U.S.N.A. imperialism internationally. In 1923 the imperialists closed the political border with Mexico and created the immigration service to regulate the flow of labor. This had the effect of politically re-affirming the inclusion of the Southwest region into the U.S.N.A. multi-national state and creating a set of distinct material conditions from that of Mexico.
1927 saw the creation of the Confederacion de Uniones, Obreras Mexicanas, and the first strike called in 1928 resulting in an attack by the state and the killing, jailing and deportation of the leaders.
The collapse of the capitalist world market in 1929, the shifting of the burden of the crisis onto the shoulders of the working class, and the advance of Fascism brought on a new spontaneous upsurge from the Chicano sector of the labor movement – strikes, strike support committees, unemployed workers committees, however what was not brought to them was the science of the proletariat – Marxism-Leninism, nor a Bolshevized party such as that of Lenin and Stalin to guide them to proletarian revolution.
Tens of thousands of workers struck in the agricultural and canning industries, in berry, onion, celery, cotton fields, and in the railroads and mines. The vicious class nature of the bourgeois state struggling to preserve monopoly capitalism was blatant as troops were used against strikers, imprisoning the most advanced and class conscious elements, or murdering them. Over one million Chicanos, citizen and non-citizen alike, were deported by the imperialists in cattle trains and trucks during the depression with the feeble excuse that they were swelling the relief rolls.
What was needed at this point was not more agitation, unity of strikers, nor to build the mass movement which is something that exists objectively and develops independently of our will. What was needed was to bring the spontaneous mass movement during the 1930’s under the direction of revolutionary strategy and tactics based on a Marxist-Leninist program, and guided by a Bolshevized and steeled party based in the proletariat and under proletarian leadership. This was not done, instead we had the economist, revisionist, and white chauvinist leadership of the CP.U.S.A. under the leadership of the petty-bourgeoisie and the class collaborator, Earl Browder.
The only way for U.S.N.A. imperialism to get out of the crisis they found themselves in was by another re-division of the world through another imperialist world war. The rising world-wide militancy of the working class was met by the most aggressive forces and tactics of finance capital during the 1930’s. Waves of fascist terror and the open dictatorship of reactionary and chauvinist finance capital swept Europe, made easier by what Georgi Demitrov called the treacherous class collaboration of the revisionist social-democratic parties who disarmed and split the ranks of the working class and facilitated the fascist takeover.
As the second imperialist world war developed, Chicanos were sent off to fight overseas under the lure of the bourgeois propaganda that they were Americas and it was their duty to go. Well, as their reward they were given the pieces of painted rag called the Medal of Honor, while in Los Angeles, the bourgeois press, looking for a scapegoat after the internment of the Japanese, began to stir up a vicious anti-Chicano campaign zeroing in on the issue of gangs, violence, crime, etc., and stating that Chicanos are biologically prone to violence and carrying knives. Backward sectors of the Anglo population were egged on to action and violence against Chicanos along with the police, sailors and soldiers resulting in the so-called “zoot-suit riots” and martial law.
The demand for increased labor brought about an agreement between the U.S.N.A. and the now neo-colonial government of Camacho which was steering Mexico to the right. In 1944, Mexican Braceros harvested over $432 million worth of crops.
With the end of the Second Imperialist World War and the brilliant victory of the anti-fascist United Front led by the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik Party and Josef Stalin, full employment in the U.S.N.A. began to fade and a recession set in along with an offensive against the working class ushered in by the McCarthyite period. The bourgeoisie was able to do this as the revisionist leadership of the CP.U.S.A. had liquidated the party in 1944 stating that there was no longer any class struggle and that the U.S.N.A. bourgeoisie was still a progressive bourgeoisie. Thus the working class and the trade unions were left ideologically and politically disarmed, leaderless, and open for attack. Although the Party was later reconstituted, its line remained basically the same.
The end of the second imperialist war also saw the rise of the Chicano civil rights movement and the struggle for democratic rights led by the petty-bourgeoisie. Petitions, voter registration drives, running candidates, etc. were initiated by such organizations as The League of Latin American Citizens, Community Service Organization, and the G.I. Forum.
In 1947 the farm workers struck in Arvin against the DiGiorgio Fruit Company only to have the strike broken by the bourgeois courts, while hundreds of thousands of workers were deported to Mexico.
With the war of aggression against the Korean people and the subsequent defeat of the U.S.N.A. imperialists and their lackeys by the Peoples Army of Korea with the aid of volunteers from the Peoples Liberation Army of the Peoples Republic of China, Public Law 78 was enacted by Congress in order to import workers from Mexico once more.
With the end of the Korean War, the imperialists launched “Operation Wetback” which deported another million citizens and non-citizens alike to Mexico; again, the working class being left politically disarmed and leaderless by the reformist CPUSA, who, after the death of the great leader of world communism for 30 years, Comrade Stalin, now took an outright revisionist stand siding with the bourgeoisie and the Trotskyites in attacking Stalin which, as the Party of Labor of Albania states “was but a cover for the revisionist attack on the need for a proletarian party, armed struggle, and the dictatorship of the proletariat”.
With the imperialist war of aggression in Viet Nam beginning with Eisenhower, the inherent contradictions of the imperialist system intensified which has brought it to the general imperialist crisis we see today.
To finance the Vietnamese War, millions in paper money was printed which caused rampant inflation, and the exploitation of the colonies and neo-colonies for superprofits was intensified, as was the drive for maximum profits at home. The Vietnam War made the tide of protest swell to greater proportions against the rising war costs and the slaughter of the Vietnamese and the sons of workers sent to fight there, especially Chicanos, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans who took the brunt of the slaughter on this side of the war.
Rebellions broke out everywhere as ghetto and barrio residents attacked bourgeois stores and their immediate oppressors, the police.
The Chicano National Movement, historically led by the petty-bourgeoisie was now being challenged by organizations like the Brown Berets, based in the lumpen proletariat, and the intellectuals based in the Mechas. Within the Brown Berets, the line of reactionary nationalism held sway while being opposed to Marxism-Leninism in general.
Within the Mechas, two lines were pushed, the predominant one being cultural nationalism and the “white man’s the enemy theory”, and Marxism-Leninism, or a distorted version of it, which saw the campuses as the centers of revolution rather than the factories, and intellectual students as the vanguard rather than the proletariat. These two lines were manifestations of petty-bourgeois radicalism and in essence an anti-working class line; and the line that intellectuals must subordinate themselves to the leadership of the proletariat and the proletarian party.
The Chicano peasantry during the 1960’s found its spokesman in Reies Tijerina and the Alinza Federal based in northern New Mexico, which at its peak grew to a membership of 60,000. The objective of the Alianza was to re-take their lands expropriated by the imperialists through armed struggle, if necessary. Their splintering was due to the arrest and frame-up of Reies Tijerina, and his disuniting presence upon release from prison.
The Chicano proletariat, urban and rural, has now moved into a position to take leadership of the national movement from these other classes due to its role in social production, especially basic industry within the Southwest region and the West Coast, and historically, since it is the most revolutionary and advanced class of all due to its relation to the most advanced form of production.
Under rising capitalism within the Southwest, since the turn of the century, the Chicano proletariat has increased tremendously as has its political role in the national movement. For instance: from 1900-1950, out of 18 major railroads within the Southwest and elsewhere, with over 35,000 workers employed, 90% were Chicano workers.
In this same period, Chicanos began to comprise over 60% of the proletariat in the mines, and in the canneries and packing sheds.
From 1900-1929, over 50% of the nation’s crops were being grown within the Southwest region and over 80% of this rural proletariat was made up of Chicanos.
The forced underdevelopment of the Southwest region and of Mexico by U.S.N.A. imperialism has pushed hundreds of thousands from the rural areas to urban industrial areas where the process of integration into the multi-national proletariat has taken place.
In Los Angeles, for instance, Chicano proletarians make up a majority in the meat packing industry, furniture, construction, garment, and railroads, and are reaching a majority, if not already, in the steel, rubber and auto industries.
Thus the struggle by the Chicano sector of the proletariat for leadership of the national movement has brought a frantic last minute effort by the Chicano comprador bourgeoisie, and the petty-bourgeoisie through the liberal Democratic Party and the La Raza Unida Party, to retain leadership.
The La Raza Unida Party was organized in the late 1960’s by Jose Angel Gutierrez and the Mexican-American Youth Organization in Crystal City, Texas. The party which soon spread throughout the Southwest and beyond was a multi-class party with a general anti-imperialist line and pushing for independent political action to draw the Chicano masses away from the two major bourgeois parties.
Two major lines came out in struggle, that of the reactionary nationalist sector of the petty-bourgeoisie headed by Jose Angel Gutierrez, who sided with the imperialists and received money from them and tried to lead the national movement into narrow electoral politics, reformism, and a compromise with imperialism within the framework of bourgeois legality.
The other mass line, that of the Marxist-Leninists was that the party had to base itself, organize and participate in the struggles of the proletariat, and that liberation would not come about through bourgeois electoral politics, reformism and accommodation with the imperialists. In addition, there were the sincere and progressive nationalists, whom it was important to win over to the side of the proletariat and Marxism-Leninism. This two-line struggle led to a split and the left pulling out while drawing the most politically conscious elements to undertake the urgent taks of building a new Marxist-Leninist Party.
Today we see these puppets and colonial administrators for the imperialists, Jose Angel Guitterez in Crystal City, and Esteban Torres in East Los Angeles, push the reactionary line of “local community control” which is tied to imperialist capital. These bribed agents and their ideological bed-partners from the revisionist CPUSA, and the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party view the Chicano national movement, not as a general and international problem which is part of the general question of proletarian revolution, but from a reformist point of view, as a question independent of, and having no relationship to, the general question of the power of monopoly capital, the overthrow of imperialism, proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
We have seen the Trotskyites tail the cultural nationalists with their reformist line, while the line flowing from the revisionists CPUSA is that imperialism is not the enemy of the Chicano people and the peoples of the world, but the monopolies and the immigration department; and that if we form an anti-monopoly coalition and send petitions and demonstrate against the immigration service the imperialists will stop attacking workers without papers.
Comrades, Lenin made it quite clear that imperialism – let’s not be afraid to say it – is the principal enemy of the oppressed nations and peoples of the world. Nowhere did he write that the principal enemy is the immigration department, or the Internal Revenue Service, or the Veterans Administration. The root of the problem is imperialism, and we must wage ruthless struggle against the revisionist line which pushes the question of imperialism to the background and confines the struggle to a narrow one of reforming the immigration department.
Comrades, we are communists, and according to Marxism-Leninism, as long as there is imperialism there will be oppression and wars of national liberation. The ultimate solution to national and class oppression and the one we must concentrate on is the smashing of imperialism, and as Lenin stated this struggle must be carried on in conjunction with the struggle against the right opportunists of the revisionist social-democrats who would lead the oppressed masses down the path of reformism and slaughter as in Chile.
In summation, the 126 year old struggle by Chicanos against U.S.N.A. capitalism and imperialism has taken many twists and turns, and as part of the objective spontaneous factor has had its ebbs and flows.
The mass movement has historically been strong, and is now growing stronger, and will grow or decrease independent of our will and according to the objective economic laws, contradictions and oppression inherent within capitalism.
What has been lacking historically, comrades, has been the subjective factor, Marxist-Leninist political consciousness, to win over the vanguard of the proletariat; organization in the form of a steeled and truly Bolshevized Marxist-Leninist Party, and a revolutionary political program, strategy and tactics in order to arm and lead the proletariat and the Chicano people to victory in the proletarian revolution. This subjective factor, the building of a Party of a new type, is the most urgent and central task facing us.
So, forward Comrades, to build the Party of a new type and drive the imperialists off the face of the earth.