1) Central Task: Party-building is the central task of Marxist-Leninists in this historical period. What this statement means is that all our other primary and secondary tasks as communists are directly or indirectly tied together like so many threads leading ultimately to one center, i.e., the construction of the party as the vanguard of the class.
The building of a Bolshevik Party constitutes the key strategic task to be fulfilled at this time in order to move the working class towards the goal of seizing state power and building socialism. Whether or not to form a party is not a tactical question, dependent on the ebbs and flows of the revolutionary mass movement, but a major historical task that the strategy for proletarian revolution demands must be accomplished as soon as it is feasible.
Before communists can seriously consider building a genuine revolutionary movement, they must construct the vanguard to guide this movement. The first historical period of the revolutionary movement, in which we find ourselves today, involves winning the vanguard to communism, mustering cadre, and building the Party as the organized detachment of the class. Once consolidated, the Party can concentrate on winning the masses to revolution and organizing mass struggles leading up eventually to armed insurrection.
2) Winning the Advanced: In this first period, our primary practical task in the working-class movement is to win the advanced to communism. It is the advanced who will constitute the key bridge between the communist movement and the working-class movement.
It is primarily the advanced who will take the political line of the Party into the thick of class struggle and help to solve the day-to-day problems of the class, strengthen its fighting organization and consciousness, and explain concretely how workers’ immediate needs are connected with the ultimate solution of communism. The communist movement must move full-speed ahead to build factory nuclei, and recruit advanced workers to them in the course of struggle and the development of propaganda and agitation.
In this period in the United States, advanced working-class people, as they are found in the factories and communities, are people who take an active leadership role in the struggles of the class, are able-to win the respect and confidence of other working-class people through their consistent, unselfish leadership, are quick to link their own exploitation and oppression with the oppression of other classes, strata, and nationalities, actively seek out socialist solutions to the problems of their class and the people as a whole, and are eager to take up the study of Marxism-Leninism usually after having come in contact with communists.
There are few advanced workers now who consider themselves communists or elaborate independent theories of socialism. But their numbers will surely increase as Marxists-Leninists seriously strive to develop deep roots among the class and tirelessly provide consistent communist leadership of the political and economic struggles of the masses.
3) Fusion: The essence of party-building is the effort to fuse the communist movement and the working-class movement into an integral revolutionary whole.
To understand the importance of fusion, we must recognize very clearly that a Bolshevik Party represents the dialectical merger of the communist movement and the working-class movement. A Bolshevik Party does not stand apart from the working class, but Is its most advanced detachment integrally tied to the rest of the class. By fusion we do not mean the submerging of the communist movement in the workers movement, with real communist independence and leadership being given up for the sake of getting involved in short-term struggles for reforms. This error carries integration with the masses to an economist extreme.
It would be more accurate to say that the masses of working class people need to be integrated with communism, In the sense of being integrated with an ideology which represents their most vital needs and following the leadership of the organization which embodies that Ideology in practice, i.e., the Communist Party. This fusion of communism with the working class does not end with the formation of a communist party. The party is the vehicle which can best carry on this fusion, win the masses to the side of revolution, and lead them in seizing state power and establishing socialism.
4) Marxist-Leninists, Unite: Unity among Marxist-Leninists, primarily around political line, is one of our tasks of the highest priority; it must be built patiently, methodically, and systematically. This unity cannot be built in the abstract, in an idealist fashion. Given the petit-bourgeois base of the communist movement, idealism on this question will only lead, independent of people’s will, to further divisions and splits.
Unity among Marxist-Leninists is an especially important task for a smal1 circle because of its own isolated status. But all communist organizations, whether small circle, pre-party organizations, or party, are bound by the strategic orientation of fusing the communist movement and the working-class movement.
The formulation which assigns uniting Marxist-Leninists as the primary task and winning the advanced as secondary, and ignores fusion as the basic framework in which these tactical tasks are carried out, is a narrow, subjective, and idealist approach to party-building.
In every country, communism first finds root among elements of the educated sectors, intellectuals who break away from their bourgeois and petit-bourgeois backgrounds and take up the world outlook of the proletariat. It is critical for these communist intellectuals to bring Marxist-Leninism to the spontaneous working class movement, and win advanced workers to revolutionary ideology. Failing this task, these intellectuals will at best be able to build a party of the petit-bourgeoisie and for the petit-bourgeoisie.
What must be remembered is that it is not in the class nature of the petit-bourgeoisie to unite; on the contrary, it is in its nature to jealously guard its independence, split, and compete. This kind of opportunism will be weeded out, not in the process of endless polemics, but in the process of seriously taking up the task of building a base for communism in the working class.
In other words, unity among Marxist-Leninists will be able to develop simultaneously with, and as a result of, the unity developed between Marxism-Leninism and the working class–not before and not as a substitute.
5) Party Formation: Although party-building is the central task in this historical period, the actual founding of a Bolshevik Party at this time would be premature. In essence, there has not yet been an adequate fusion of the communist movement and the working-class movement to organize a party that has the potential to operate as the real vanguard of the class.
The political line of any Communist Party formed at this time would necessarily be primitive, both because the communist movement has done little serious theoretical work and because it has been mostly unable or unwilling to put its political line into practice in the day-to-day struggles of the working class. The communist movement is still weak in terms of being based on shop nuclei in large-scale factories and solidly rooted in the industrial proletariat.
The communist movement, as a result, is still basically petit-bourgeois in composition, with many of its cadre having come from the student strata or intelligensia. A sufficient number of advanced workers, the bedrock upon which any Bolshevik Party is founded, have not yet been won to communism. In addition, the communist movement is still struggling to develop real multi-national unity and base itself in the struggles of the oppressed nationalities for democratic rights and self-determination.
Wracked of late by sectarianism and ultra-leftism, communist organizations have spent more time battling against one another than against the bourgeoisie. Until this “left” sectarianism has been substantially eliminated, the basis for broad, principled unity among Marxist-Leninists will be lacking.
6) Local Marxist-Leninist Organizations: A locally-based Marxist-Leninist organization can be a valuable way-station on the road to building a nation-wide Bolshevik Party. But a local organization can make a valuable contribution to this process only to the extent that it takes scattered individuals and welds them into an organizational core which can develop political line, provide clearer guidance in mass struggles, help win over advanced workers to communism, and unite at a higher level with other Marxist-Leninists. This way-station is not to be treated as the final destination, but it can signify substantial progress past the state of individualized communist work and small collectives concentrating on specific areas of work. It provides the organizational framework in which cadre can be raised to a higher political and theoretical level and make progress towards breaking out of backward localism and small circle mentality.
To ensure that such a local organization does not promote localism as its main orientation, ft must actively seek out contacts with national pre-party formations and other local collectives, carry on energetic struggle with them around political line, develop practical means to carry on common political work, and constantly strive for unity at a higher political and organizational level.
There are too many pre-party organizations already frantically striving to set themselves up as the core of the Communist Party. A local Marxist-Leninist organization should steadfastly seek unity and aim to liquidate itself into a higher political and organizational form.
7) Right Opportunism: Within the communist movement right opportunism represents the strongest bourgeois force which must be resolutely and consistently corn-batted. Right opportunism has always been the gravest danger for communist organizations in the U.S., where the imperialist bourgeoisie has been effective in utilizing the trade unions and the electoral arena to trap the revolutionary movement in reformism.
Illusions that bourgeois-democracy works to give people freedoms and rights and that capitalism works to raise the people’s standard of living are still relatively strong among the masses. Any communist organization or party which actively carries on political work among the masses will be barraged with these illusions and pressures.
Within the working-class movement, the labor aristocracy, which is the class base for right opportunism, has been able to maintain itself in power in the trade union movement for decades. This privileged position has been in no small part caused by the relative advantages seized by U.S. imperialism since World War II, which has used its increasing exploitation of the Third World to dole out bribes to a small elite of workers and use this stratum as representatives for the whole class.
Right opportunism is especially dangerous in the current period when the once-proud Communist Party USA has degenerated into a revisionist clique, and a new Marxist-Leninist Party, has to be built from the ground up by mostly young and inexperienced communist forces, in the long run, the kind of revisionism that the CPUSA promotes will be the most dangerous enemy of the revolutionary movement. As the masses rise in revolutionary struggle and the working class topples the reactionary labor aristocrats from power, the revisionists will be called upon, as the last stop-gap measure, to turn the proletariat away from seizing state power and lead it down the path of class collaborationism and concl1iation.
8) “Left” Opportunism: In the present period, when the Marxist-Leninist movement has substantially broken with revisionism on the ideological plane but has to consolidate this break at a higher level by developing a sound political line embodied in a programme and forging a Bolshevik Party on firm working class foundations, “left” opportunism has stood as a major roadblock.
Having concentrated on breaking with Revisionism in its principal and most dangerous form, right opportunism, many Marxist-Leninists have fallen prey to “left” opportunist Revisionism revising the science of Marxism-Leninism into a sterile dogma and an ideology of a petit-bourgeois sect. This failure indicates remaining weaknesses at the ideological level among Marxist-Leninists.
These “left” errors by Marxist-Leninists constitute opportunism because they sacrifice the goal of proletarian revolution to the temporary advantage of a petit-bourgeois circle and cater to this group’s feelings of superiority and self-importance.
Typically, “left” opportunists inflate their own importance as the movers of world history. Disdaining to link communism with the spontaneous working class movements, they fall prey to vanguardism, absolutizing the subjective factor. This error constitutes opportunism of a petit-bourgeois variety since such people insist on casting themselves in a heroic mold and strive at all costs to keep themselves detached from and above the working class and its day-today struggles. They bow to their own spontaneous urges to move ahead as a small sect without concern for the disposition of the masses, without getting their hands “dirty” in patient, revolutionary work to win the advanced to communism through mass struggle.
“Left” opportunism has been a major and recurring problem for the Marxist-Leninist movement because of its overwhelmingly petit-bourgeois class base. Too often, communist organizations have taken on the outlook of small producers, isolated from social production and collective struggle.
As the communist movement builds support among the working class, the base for “left” opportunism will be eroded; and the quicker its pernicious influence is defeated, the sooner wi11 the communist movement and working class movement be merged and the vanguard party built.