1) Historic Mission of the Working Class: In the era of Imperialism, the proletariat is the only thoroughly revolutionary class. Its exploitation brings it face-to-face with the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society – the contradiction between the private ownership of the means of production and the social character of production. It is the only class which can carry the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie through to the end and replace it as the ruling class.
Simply stated, the proletariat (or working class) is defined as all those who:
1) Do not own the means of production;
2) Have to sell their labor-power to the capitalist class to make a living;
3) Directly, or indirectly, create surplus value... which is expropriated by the capitalist class.
This exploitation, or expropriation of surplus value, creates an irreconcilable, antagonistic class contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Only the emancipation from capital itself can liberate the working class. Its mission, therefore, is to overthrow the bourgeoisie, establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and replace capital ism with socialism which will lead eventually to a classless society, communism.
We are living in the era of world proletarian revolution and the transition from capitalism to socialism. It is only under the hegemony of the proletariat and its Marxist-Leninist Party that this revolutionary process will come to fruition. It is thus a fundamental principle of Marxism-Leninism to recognize the world historic mission of the working class as the grave-digger of capitalism and the bearer of the new socialist and communist social order.
The working class is not a small, narrow class. In developed capitalist countries like the United States, the working class constitutes the majority of the population. The working class is composed of the industrial proletariat, agricultural workers, and non-production workers such as clerical, transportation and service workers.
Communists must do political work among the different strata of the working class in order to build a strong and united class. A thorough class analysis will enable Marxist-Leninists to target those key proletarian strata among which to concentrate their forces.
As the general crisis of capitalism intensifies, contradictions will develop between the bourgeoisie and other classes besides the proletariat. A thorough class analysis will determine who are the fundamental allies of the proletariat, who will support it in seizing state power and establishing socialism. These allies will most likely come from the strata of the petty bourgeoisie closest in objective conditions to the proletariat and from the more progressive strata of the lumpen-proletariat, those least removed from the working class.
In addition, the proletariat will find powerful reserves among the oppressed nationalities and among women, both of whom suffer special oppression.
The question of a class analysis is critical to the strategy and tactics of the communist movement and must be taken up as one of the tasks of highest priority. It is fundamentally important that, in the class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, we have clarity about who are the friends and reserves of each class.
2) Industrial Proletariat: Within the working class, the industrial proletariat is the key, strategic strata for carrying through proletarian revolution to the end.
Although this strata is not growing proportionally with the population base of the United States, it is still growing numerically and now numbers approximately 10 million people, with increasing proportions of women and oppressed nationalities in its ranks. This strata is highly concentrated in urban areas and highly unionized. Objectively, it lies at the heart of the capitalist system because it has the potential to paralyze the U.S. economy through strikes in key industries such as auto, steel, rubber, and chemical.
Concentrated in large factories, mills, and mines, this industrial proletariat has the greatest ability to grasp revolution and maintain discipline and organization. They work under conditions in which socialization of labor is highly developed and thus are quick to understand the importance of collective work and collective struggle. It is from this strata that a majority of advanced workers will be developed.
As communists we must understand the strategic importance of this strata and concentrate our forces among them, in the large industrialized centers of the country such as Detroit, Chicago, Houston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. These areas represent the heartland of U.S. capitalism and also the heartland of proletarian revolution.
The communist movement must root its work among the industrial proletariat, building stable and permanent factory nuclei in the large mines, mills, and plants. Through such organizational units, which are basically conspiritive, communists can carry on day-to-day propaganda and agitation and lead the political and economic struggles of the workers.
With factory nuclei as the organizational foundation, communists can build a revolutionary movement within the trade unions. Their strategic goal should be to defeat the influence of the labor aristocracy, break the hold of the trade union bureaucrats, and transform the trade unions into organisational reserves of the Communist Party. Through the work of Marxist-Leninists, the trade unions can become “schools of communism” and support the revolutionary movement to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
3) Armed Insurrection and the Bourgeois Military: In a developed capitalist country like the United States, proletarian revolution will take the form of an armed insurrection by the working class and its allies, led by its Party, against the state power of the bourgeoisie. At that point the bourgeoisie will turn to the armed wing of the state, the U.S. military, police, and prisons, to save them. Throughout U.S. history the ruling class of this country has never hesitated to call out the troops when they felt their rule threatened by the working class and movements of oppressed nationalities.
As communists, our task is to subvert and destroy that military; to win over as many military people (especially enlisted) as possible to the side of the revolution, and to neutralize or defeat the rest. The success or failure of the armed insurrection will in many ways depend upon our ability to carry out this key task.
Subversion of the bourgeois military is not possible without systematic propaganda and agitation being carried out on a consistent basis by Marxist-Leninists, and without the building of communist cells within military units to carry on day-to-day mass work. This critical work cannot wait until the formation of the Party; indeed, the development of military cells is part of the process of party-building. History does not stand still: the bourgeoisie will not call a truce until we form a party, and the sooner we start the formation of military cells, the more chance there will be that the military will be used with, instead of against us.
The overall neglect of military work by Marxist-Leninists in this period indicates a shortsightedness and amateurishness that can lead to great harm to the revolutionary movement. In failing to orient itself practically and theoretically around the strategic task of bringing about armed insurrection (learning the use of firearms, building up stores of weapons, subverting the military, etc.), the communist movement is failing to move beyond bourgeois reformism and pacifism.
4) Class Analysis of the Military: In terms of class composition, the military is a microcosm of society at large, having people in it from all the class backgrounds in U.S. society. A great majority of enlisted people come from the working class, with the rest being made up of people from the lumpen-proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie. The officer caste is made up mostly of people of petit-bourgeois origin, although some are from the bourgeoisie or the working class.
Many working class youths look upon the military as a kind of “vocational school,” training for their future jobs in the working class. Military advertising concentrates on these people (“I got my skill in the Air Force,” etc.). Most of these enlistees serve only one term in the military. These men and women do not escape their class background or become declassed just because they happen to be in the military for a few years.
Enlisted people are not members of the working class because of the function they serve within the military. They have much more relationship to the means of destruction than to the means of production. Moreover, they are not exploited in the sense of creating surplus value which is appropriated by the capitalist class. There are some similarities since enlisted people do not own the means of production and have to sell their labor-power, although they sell it in two to six-year blocks instead of by the hour and sell it to the capitalist state rather than to individual capitalists.
Although enlisted people are not proletarians themselves by virtue of their military job, they are, as a whole, a direct reserve of the working class for socialist revolution. Being overwhelmingly made up of people from the working class and/or oppressed nationalities, and having direct contradictions with the bourgeois state due to the oppressed condition in which they exist, many enlisted people can be won to “turn the guns around” and help bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat in this country.
The class origins and working conditions of most enlisted people put them in conflict with the basic mission of the U.S. military, which is that of “Empire Police,” keeping the U.S. Empire in order and expanding it wherever possible. As well as being used to smash national liberation movements in the colonial and neo-colonial countries, the U.S. military also serves as a domestic maintainer of capitalism, thereby putting it in direct contradiction with the struggles of the working class and oppressed nationalities in the U.S.
Imperialism is necessarily an aggressive, expansionist system, and has brought with it the conflict of different capitalist countries on a worldwide scale. Because of this, the imperialists have had to build up huge military machines in a state of permanent war mobilization.
As military technology has been developed, more and more jobs in the military have become servicing, maintaining and repair of the complex modern machines of war. The percentage of military people in actual “trigger pulling” combat jobs is shrinking, while the greatly increased division of labor within the military makes individual jobs more and more come to resemble those in the civilian world.
Because of these conditions, many of the embryonic forms of struggle that characterized the working class movement before the development of Marxism (destroying machines, spontaneous strikes, etc.), have found their way into the struggle of enlisted people against the officers. The task of communists is to link up with this on-going class struggle, and to develop this embryonic consciousness into a clear understanding of who are the enemies and who are the friends of enlisted people, that is to say, into a Marxist-Leninist consciousness.
In many ways, the conditions of labor for enlisted people are much worse than for their civilian working class brothers and sisters. Low pay, long hours, unsafe working conditions unchecked by any pretensions to “health and safety standards,” the lack of civil liberties, all add up to conditions for spontaneous explosions of rebellion. However spontaneous and unconscious this struggle may be, objectively it is the struggle of the enlisted people, overwhelmingly working class in origin, against their role as the armed wing of the state. For communists to continue to ignore this class struggle in the military is suicidal.
5) The United Front: The United Front Against Imperialism cannot be the strategy for proletarian revolution in a developed capitalist country like the United States of America. Historically, the world communist movement has always considered the united front a tactic designed to achieve goals short of proletarian revolution, and not a strategic plan for the disposition of forces for the revolutionary seizure of capitalist state power.
For the most part, the great majority of communist organizations in the United States uncritically accept the United Front Against Imperialism as the strategy for revolution, and do not recognize its real value as a tactical orientation to mobilize class forces around a minimum programme which will serve to hasten the accomplishment of the proletariat's maximum programme – dictatorship of the proletariat and the building of socialism leading to a classless society.
This error results from a basic confusion between tactics, such as the united front, the nature of which changes with the ebb and flow of the revolutionary movement; and strategy, which is the plan for the disposition of the revolutionary forces, the proletariat and its reserves, and remains unchanged throughout a whole historical period. In an imperialist country like the United States, there can be only one stage of the revolution with its direct goal being the dictatorship of the proletariat. Those class forces which will support this goal, when revolution is on the order of the day, are the reserves of the proletariat and its vanguard party.
The real danger in seeing the UFAI as a strategy for proletarian revolution is that it muddles short-term, transitional goals with the maximum objective of the dictatorship. Secondly, it opportunistically guts the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat itself. The proletarian dictatorship is not a sharing of power with other class forces, but it does institute basic political, social, and economic changes which will ensure the alliance of other classes with it. In united front tactics, the proletariat strives to gain leadership through its communist party, but that leadership is a goal, not a necessary condition or guarantee for initiating the front. The dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other hand, has no meaning unless the proletariat is the unchallenged leader. No other parties are allowed except the party of the proletariat under this dictatorship of the great majority over the minority.
It would be a Trotskyist mistake to fail to take into account the class allies of the proletariat and build up these reserves, but this kind of left-opportunist deviation which tends to isolate the proletariat has not been the predominant error of Marxist-Leninists. Their deviation has consisted mainly of making a mechanical application of the UFAI, which has some strategic value only in a national revolutionary movement in a colonial or semi-colonial country, to an imperialist country in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is the direct goal of the revolutionary forces.
With this kind of orientation, strategy becomes lowered to the level of tactics. Maximum programme is confused with minimum programme. Tactical allies are mixed up with strategic allies. Reformist goals become interchangeable with revolutionary goals. The revolutionary alliance of the proletariat with its reserves becomes confused with temporary united fronts forged for short-term common goals. The world-historic mission of the proletariat, the only really revolutionary class and the majority class in a developed capitalist country, becomes confounded with tactical compromises and agreements anchored in the ebbs and flows of the revolutionary movement. In the end, without a clear strategic perspective, this world-historic mission is downgraded for the sake of these ebbs and flows, for the sake of the interests of other classes, none of whom can be thoroughly revolutionary or stand on a par with the proletariat either in leading the revolution or holding state power.