We ARE Struggling Together

We Are Struggling Together: Viewpoints of the Left and Right Oppositions ​

Excerpts, “Proletarian Dictatorship and International Revolution,” published by the Workers’ Party (Internationalist Fraction), August 1936

(Formed as a merger of the previous Left Fraction and the formerly Trotskyite International Left Opposition (America), the Internationalist Fraction of the Workers’ Party is a mass organization within the party that seeks to regroup the party to the left communist line)

Communist theory holds that the political struggle of the proletarian class against the conditions of capitalist domination compels the formation of the class party. The class party unites workers regardless of sex, race or nation into a unified program of class struggle, and guided by the conscious application of communist theory, the communist programme unites the proletariat as a class for itself.

The class party is not a bourgeois political club. As communists, we refute the theory of the social-democrats, that it is possible to turn the executive and legislative machinery of the bourgeois state to the task of the socialist transformation of the economy. And equally, we refute the individualist-anarchist position that revolution may be achieved in a brief but decisive destruction of the state, and the immediate transformation of social relations in one country.

The struggles of North American workers in the Great Imperialist War and afterwards have refuted both these positions. As bourgeois society buckled under the very abundance it produced, the workers of North America took up the bayonet with hardened hand as class struggle ruptured into its hitherto highest stage: civil war. The formation of the class party, the loose duopoly between the Workers’ Party and the General Union of Anarchists, succeeded in its initial aims. It tore down the great bulwarks of bourgeois rule.

With the formation of the soviets and the defeat of the armies of reaction, the proletariat has organized itself as the ruling class throughout most of North America. Certain birthmarks of bourgeois society remain in the existence of separate workers’ republics in the former United States, Mexico, etc.

Nevertheless, the vitality of this revolution, an international and indeed worldwide revolt by workers against capital, is once more seriously threatened by retreat and degeneration.
[…]
The struggles beginning in 1933 constitute the formation of a new global revolutionary wave. Most North American workers will be intimately familiar with the struggles of liberation in the former United States, Mexico, and the ongoing fraternal worker-peasant struggles in South America.

But this revolution is not constituted of separate national proletariats in struggle with separate national bourgeoisies. It is constituted of an internationalised working class in struggle with an international bourgeoisie.

In the past year, workers’ and soldiers’ councils have formed in every nation and colony. The annual nationalist pageantry of Remembrance Day in London was last year rocked by the formation of worker and veteran relief councils, strikes and rioting, with hundreds of workers injured by the Metropolitan police’s clumsy attempts to restore order. In Paris, the mass actions of workers have punished the attempts by arms manufacturers to support the reactionary insurgents in Spain. The marches and spontaneous class uprisings have forced even the arch-reactionary government to maintain careful neutrality.

Even in reactionary Germany and Italy, the working-class has continued clandestine resistance to militarism. The so-called “leader” of Germany had his Olympic games soured by mass street violence, turning the stomach of even the bourgeois press.

These scenes are repeated in the colonial empires, from Somali dockworkers to Morrocan spice workers, from Indochinese fishermen to Indian salt producers. And even in the Soviet Union, the supposed proletarian fatherland, the Soviet workers are stirring in new resistance to the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution. The old soviets have stirred to life again, as resistance to harsh work quotas and military regimentation of labor has spurred mass spontaneous strikes from Leningrad to the Caspian Sea.

Why then is the central workers’ government busying itself with new rounds of concessions to the captive national bourgeois-remnant in our republic? The working class began its uprising in 1933 guided by the conscious theory of the class state, that the workers’ republic being built would be a tool wielded by one class in open class warfare for as long as classes exist.

The other classes have been abolished in law but not in fact. Here we find the crucial error being repeated again and again by Browder, Foster, Rivera, and Marmaduke. Their criticism of the Stalinist form, first implicit and now explicit, is skin deep and theoretically impotent when they reproduce it in state-capitalist economic strategy against the organs of working class power.

We see this tension developing here in the United Republics as the district soviets begin to lose their ability to directly manage production to a clique of bureaucrats and reconstructed national bourgeois. The proliferation of the cooperative form has succeeded in dividing the working-class against itself and reintroduced the anarchy of capitalist production. The technocrats, elected or appointed, in the state enterprises have begun carving caste privileges, a process which may yet be checked but could herald the total return to capitalist relations. Our whole revolution would have been for nothing if the exploitation and alienation of class society reasserts itself under a red flag.

We stand utterly resolute: the working-class, having seized power, can share it with no one. The other classes must be outlawed in fact as well as principle. Declassed bourgeoisie and intelligentsia will be welcomed into the working class if and only if they uphold unflinchingly to their organic relationship to the class. If not, they shall be met with our rifle butts.

All elements that do not integrate into the class are to be treated as social prisoners of war. We see it equally farcical to hang them as traitors to the worker’s republic, whose allegiance and oath we neither ask nor desire, as it is to integrate them into the bureaucratic apparatus.
[…]
The proletarian state is an open class dictatorship. We should not attempt to conceal or minimize this fundamental truth. The very existence of the Communist International is an open declaration of war against the bourgeois powers. And it is only this state of war that justifies the existence of the dictatorship. Like the Roman dictatura , our dictatorship is an emergency constitutional government. It is not the unrestrained rule of a separate party apparatus over the workers, and it is certainly not the autocratic personality cult of any man.

This class dictatorship must adhere to certain fundamental principles of workers’ power. But the form of this regime is not a stable, fixed relationship like the bourgeois state. Our constitution is not a set of alienated legal principles etched in stone, but rather the ongoing fact of working-class self-activity and the program of workers’ power. During its lifetime the working class state will continually evolve up to the point that it finally withers away: the nature of social organisation, of human association, will radically change according to the development of technology and the forces of production, and man’s nature will be equally subject to deep alterations always moving away more and more from the beast of burden and slave which he was.

Thus all attempts to concede to bourgeois constitutionalism are to be opposed as reactionary. The organized working class must always recognize its unlimited authority to change the forms of the class state. Its forms, the powers it wields, etc., can never be fixed in place, and we recognize no lawgivers to bequeath any legacy to us. We therefore oppose the rightist column’s attempts to entrench the existing constitution behind supermajoritarian requirements, or to annul the soviets’ existence as working bodies of dual legislative/executive power.

And while the use of democratic forms has historically served the North American workers’ movement, and the class democracy in North America must be protected from elements that seek to dilute it by enfranchising groups outside the class, we must equally oppose the naive moves towards absolute democracy made by the anarchists.

We must thereby oppose the utterly the political tendencies within the class that organize in opposition to the program of workers’ power. In the UASR, this means the legal existence of the Democratic Party and the Democratic-Republican Party. The final recourse of scoundrels and reactionaries, to hide behind the shield of “absolute democracy” must be unmasked for what it is: a bad faith exercise by class enemies to sow dissension among the working class.

Such groups may be tolerated their political freedoms on consequentialist grounds. It may indeed be not worth the trouble of squashing them like the cockroaches they are. But the proletarian state may only be animated by a single party, and that is the workers’ party. This workers’ party may exist as several separate fractions in opposition over the details of program, as is the present state in the United Republics, but all will be united in resolute defense of the class, just as all bourgeois parties unite in defense of the class in the bourgeois state.

But it must be recognized that there is no statistical contrivance which can ensure a satisfactory revolutionary solution; this will depend solely upon the degree of solidity and clarity reached by the revolutionary communist movement throughout the world. The workers’ party will rule alone, and will never give up power without a physical struggle. The existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat is not up for a vote.
[…]
What has been the most shameful in the past two years is that while our brothers and sisters fight on the frontlines of the class war, from China to Spain, for the most part we have limited our involvement to gestures of support.

The uprisings around the world paralyzed all attempts to aid the foundering bourgeoisie in the dying United States. Having taken this beachhead, the international working class must advance inland without delay, or it will die like Marines on the slopes of Gallipoli.

By some accounts, this pause to gather our strength may well have been warranted. The Red Army has grown from a rag-tag wartime militia to one of the largest and most powerful armed masses in the world. The engines of production in North America have been turned towards productive human uses rather than the anarchy of capitalist production.

How long can we delay the resumption of open class war? Every day that this war is delayed is another day for the international bourgeoisie to further prepare and unite for the struggle. The past year has seen incredible rapprochement in Western Europe, the once bitterly irreconcilable German revanchists now act in concert with the British and French imperialists to contain the threat of proletarian revolution. We must strike while the iron is hot, before these exhausted empires can gather their military strength and nationalist will.

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Excerpts, “The American Road to Socialism,” published by Independent Socialist Labor, June 1936

(Independent Socialist Labor is an entryist group in the DFLP, associated with the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, and the principal author of the economic sections of the New Orleans Programme)

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party holds to a tradition harkening back to the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, which has guided the democratic spirit of the American people through the ages. This Americanism has had many names. With the rise of Andrew Jackson and the breaking of the mercantile/planter grip on the republic, it was called Jacksonian Democracy, and it heralded widespread prosperity won by universal male suffrage.

With the coming of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, this spirit became known as Republicanism. In the turn of the century, the new struggle for freedom and prosperity was called Progressivism. Now the Americanism of the Twentieth Century is called Socialism.

What we mean by Socialism is the transformation of the economy from Industrial Feudalism to Industrial Democracy. The workers shall own the factories and the farmers shall own the land, free from the yoke of the banks or the greedy bourgeois parasites. No more shall they be ruined by land speculators or stock swindlers, nor see the hard-earned fruits of their labor go to lazy fat cats.

Socialism in essence, is the fulfillment of Abraham Lincoln’s wish that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth. It is of the people who make up the one hundred and fifty million cells of its body. It is by the people who collectively decide the paths that this body, richer than any other on Earth, shall take through its halls of democracy. And it is for the people by ensuring that the riches that have been produced by the people remain in the hands of those people.

The people, who have built this nation of nations shall now at last have every seat at the table they together have made. No more will we; the common man; be separated by the arbitrary barriers of the State from the government that we constitute. No more shall we; the working folk; be silenced by the bosses who would deny us our fair share. No more shall we; the gentle laborer; be subjugated to the corporate autocracy of the moneymen in our work.

Our new Americanism will not seek to be the Americanism of Empire or of National hatred. We seek not the Imperium Americanum, nor the creed of America above all else. We recognise that the modern Americanism must mean international brotherhood and the struggle for peace. We, who have seen the folly of the game of empires in the trenches of the old world must also in turn reject the creed of domination.

We do not advocate to lay ourselves defenselessly at the feet of those who would seek to undo our gains and destroy us, but we also do not advocate the commencement of a new war. If, despite our overtures to peace the fat cats of London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, and Rome still seek a fight then it is a fight they shall have. But we must never be the aggressors ourselves, by showing the crowned vultures of Europe and Asia the promise of what we have built we will inspire the oppressed people there to join us in turn.

And we must indeed be an inspiration now as we were in the past. The promise of America is not in our battleships and guns but in what America means and what the American people can offer. Just as we once showed the world that the future of men need not be decided by inbred royalty and aristocrats, we may now show the world that the future of men is not in the hands of the millionaire. That there is another way, and that we will help those who wish to take that path.

In light of this, we must oppose the extravagant excess of militarization proposed by those who believe that Socialism can be spread at the business end of a foreign bayonet. We must defend ourselves or face reaction on similar terms yes, none who have sense may deny that. But to turn our Internationalist Fraternity of governments devoted to the people into an armed camp is to prove the scaremongers of the Daily Mail, Der Sturmer , or Le Figaro right. And thus in doing so, delay their awakening as Napoleon once frightened so many away from Republicanism.

Revolution can only come to those who would seek to destroy us when the people ruled by those councils of the elite and the powerful seek it. If we are to seek to spread revolution by the tracks of a tank then we fall into the trap of the Imperialist who believes that he is spreading progress by conquering the poor folk in Africa and Asia. We must have a shield, but our offering to the frightened of Western Europe, South America, and Eastern Asia must be flowers, not a sword.

We must also seek to defend our gains from those who would seek to undo them, and ensure that sweeping transformations of society come when the people have in one voice demanded it and not a moment before or after. A People’s Constitution is a necessity, and one that our forefathers so wisely constructed to enshrine the protections that we cherish to this day. One that will make clear the duties and responsibilities of society and guarantee the gains of the people.

We thus reject demands for loose basic laws that would leave us vulnerable to congressional coups that might seek to reverse what we have worked for or impose drastic and unwanted transformations on a whim. We do not advocate for the total return to stagnancy of the old republic, but we do advocate for a clear process to provide certainty and order to the processes of the people so that their government never grows distant from them.

And in the spirit of George Washington who so wisely warned us against allowing political parties undue influence, we must be careful to not allow our government and the organs that we have constructed to manage that government be seized by divisive partisanship. However divided we are on the matters of our councils and congress, we must keep a close eye on the threat of party machines seeking to advantage themselves through seizure of civil service.

As we work to solidify our popular governance, we must ensure that we are free of the system of favours, patronage, and loyalty tests are replaced by the creed of the best man for the job. Those who would wish to wholly purge old enemies from such service must remind themselves that ours is a very young revolution, and we as we work to heal we cannot be too choosy with the doctors we seek. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation