Section 1: Brief Overview of the Labor Movement in the Americas
The class-oriented trade movement in the Americas is largely fractured and disjointed. In the main, there is a very weak true class-based and revolutionary trade unionism, and the lack of their independence as fighting organizations of the working class.
While the WFTU has played a major role in campaigns such as “Our America” as well as international congresses in Quito and Sao Paulo there is a great need to convince the peoples of the Americas that there is another way of development. In this period, there are illusions created in the consciousness of people by the “progressive” and social democratic governments. These include those of Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Even in the US, unions like the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, which correctly identify the issues of the two-party system, are persuaded by the “apple” of social democracy. The popular masses disaffected by the anti-labor policies of the right-wing governments and the shock policies of the neo-liberal management packages are trapped and place their confidence in social democratic political forces such as Morena, Boric, PSUV or PT to name a few. They promise much they cannot deliver, in most cases continuing the anti-labor policies of the right-wing governments. For decades, under the guise of “Leftism” or “socialism”, these social democrats alternate with the right-wing but keep in tact capitalist exploitation, even strengthening it. The one depending on the other to keep the people trapped, much like in the US where the two-party system continues to dominate. By a simple change in the President or government positions, the anger and indignation of the workers and people is supposedly vented and social control under a new title, “conservative”, “liberal”, “leftist”, “socialist”, etc, is continued.
In this political game, the parties of the ruling class strategically prioritize the labor movement, taking advantage of the lack of a unified strategy as the main weakness facing the class-oriented labor movement. Other issues include the excuse that “specific conditions”, such as policies on social security, labor laws, and trade union securities, of each country warrant different approaches in each case. While we should not question these particularities, it is important to emphasize that in every case we can derive the same basic causes, that is, inside the capitalist system. In all cases, regardless of the title of the government in power, there are anti-labor policies. The movement consistently demonstrates that those forces which define their strategy and tactics on the basis of special characteristics of their country will sooner or later go down the path of concessions and compromises leading to confrontations, splits, disagreements, etc. An example being the FNT of Nicaragua leaving the WFTU to join the ITUC.
The stifling of unions and their disaffiliation from or rejection of the WFTU has been carried out with the help of the subversive ITUC which continues its pro-imperialist program in the Americas. The ITUC and its role as a servant of capital dates back to the split in the WFTU which was a plan prepared by the US State Department and the CIA to fracture the world trade union movement. The US trade unions CIO and the AFL were part of these plans, utilizing the Marshall Plan, to strengthen the collaborationist forces within the global trade union movement. Following the split of the WFTU, the AFL worked on the plan designed by the US State Department and the CIA to establish the ICFTU. The ICFTU until its renaming in November 2006 as the ITUC would closely associate itself with the choices of the US State Department and its allies, with the multinationals and monopolies, with the secret services of the capitalist states, with the buying off and briberies of trade unions and their leaders and with the complete aim of breaking the unity of the working class. This legacy would pass on to the ITUC which is very active in the Americas today, buying off union cadres, spreading pessimistic messages that everyone is corrupt, and have aided in supporting the labor aristocracy who live richly in all countries of the Americas. As a result of these practices, many workers have disaffiliated with the trade unions becoming disgusted with even the word “union”.
The U.S. government has bolstered the role of the AFL across the Americas, using state funds and the CIA to influence executives and organizations through “workers’ advisors” embedded in U.S. embassies. This approach was evident in the AFL’s involvement in the division of CTAL in Latin America. The overarching goal of this policy has been to transform unions into compliant tools for upholding the capitalist system—a strategy consistently employed by capitalist governments throughout the Americas. Examples include the AFL in the United States, Peronist unions in Argentina, charrismo unions in Mexico, and Vargist unions in Brazil.
The ITUC currently represents approximately 71 unions across the Americas. Its Deputy President, Cathy Feingold—who also serves as the AFL-CIO’s International Department director—has been a key figure in both the Biden and Trump administrations. In 2022, she was appointed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and in 2020, by Nancy Pelosi to the Independent Mexico Labor Expert Board established under the T-MEC. This board enforces Mexico’s designated role in the maquiladora system and advances the anti-worker labor reforms tied to the treaty. These developments underscore the AFL and ITUC’s function as instruments of U.S. monopolistic interests in the region.
The AFL-CIO, both in the U.S. and across the Americas through the ITUC, has played a key role in promoting employer-based trade unionism under the guise of “free” unionism. In Paraguay, for instance, the ITUC—acting in line with State Department and CIA directives—positions itself not as an adversary of the employers but as an anti-communist force. It has dominated Paraguayan unions, installing pro-employer and conciliatory leadership. Similar tactics are employed in the U.S., where unions drag workers to the feet of the Democratic Party, as union leaders frequently collaborate with employers on “solutions” that leave the monopolies unscathed. This approach limits the strikes, prioritizes “social dialogue,” and undermines rank-and-file democracy by centralizing decision-making within union staff and leadership, effectively sidelining the membership.
Even unions labeled as “independent” are pulled into the orbit of employer-driven and government-aligned trade unionism. For instance, the UAW’s joint initiatives with Ford and its endorsement of Kamala Harris exemplify this dynamic. Similarly, the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) reflects a push for social democracy, as seen in its endorsement of Bernie Sanders in 2020 and its collaboration with the Democratic Socialists of America through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC). In Mexico, unions like CATEM and CROC, which also claim “independence,” further illustrate this trend.
Unions can ultimately be defined by their actions. In all cases, these unions uphold a reverence for bourgeois legality, even as employers—such as Amazon and Starbucks—break labor laws to prevent collective action. Union leaders often treat the contract as an inviolable document that workers must adhere to in every detail. Moreover, the widespread anti-strike laws in the U.S. prevent labor leaders from even mentioning strikes. The increasing concentration of executive powers in countries across the Americas, including the U.S. and Mexico, has entrenched a pattern of presidents intervening in workers’ struggles to side with employers. Today, most unions are reluctant to fully strike, if at all, viewing strikes as inherently unwise. This dynamic shifts the balance of power in favor of the state and the monopolies, which exploit every legal loophole to undermine union efforts, dissolve unions, or transform them—such as many teachers’ unions in the U.S.—into merely “collective bargaining units,” rendering them toothless.
In 2023, 16.2 million workers in the United States were represented by a union—an increase of 191,000 from 2022. But while the unionization level increased, the share of workers represented by a union—the unionization rate—declined from 11.3% to 11.2%.
The union membership rate—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions—was 10.0 percent in 2023, little changed from the previous year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.4 million, also showed little movement over the year. Unionization is much lower in the private sector than in the public sector—in 2023, 6.9% of private-sector workers were covered by a union contract, compared with 36.0% of public-sector workers. The higher degree of unionization in the public sector is a common trend in the Americas. This is due to the interventions of the capitalist governments on behalf of the employers allowing the businesses to defeat any efforts by workers.
Despite popular support for the victories of union drives, workers have not been able to translate popular support into a widespread resurgence of a class-oriented trade union movement. In combination with the deep issues affecting the trade union movement as a whole, a significant obstacle are the laws which favor employer and business interests while stifling the struggles of workers (i.e. Taft-Hartley, right-to-work states, etc.). There is a need for a modification of forces within the unions, to combat these anti-worker laws, to depose the union leaders that subordinate the interests of the unions to capital. Without this, victories as a class will be minimal. In clearing these obstacles, all forms of struggle should be utilized, raising the economic and political demands to a level that aims to end exploitation at its roots.
In the US, over the past 50 years, union density has consistently declined, with it being much lower than when the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935. This is further facilitated by attacks of the bourgeois state against workers, especially in the public sector. Rights to collective bargaining are continuously a target of the state.
In addition, the state has sided with the employers over preventing wage increases, shifting more surplus value into the pockets of executives.
When considering the Americas as a whole we can utilize the following figure (most recent data):
These numbers reflect a general weakness in the labor movement. However from 2023-2024, there has been an uptick in social protests and strikes which signal that the revolutionary movement will sprout even if it’s covered by the brutality of capitalism. The contradiction between labor and capital is inevitable.
Section 2: Brief Overview of the US in the Imperialist System
The US is a country full of capitalist development which maintains a dominant role in the imperialist system, vying with China for the precipice. It is ranked #1 in the world economy and is part of the G20 and G7. It maintains 139 companies in the Fortune Global 500 surpassing China’s 128. Just as Marx described regarding the concentration of capital, the share of the US economy dominated by the top 1% of companies has increased to nearly 90%. This demonstrates that US monopolies are dominant in nearly all branches of the economy and maintains relations of interdependence.
The recent elections in the US have highlighted the deep divisions within the ruling class and the growing sentiment of a significant section of the bourgeoisie to reclaim the ground it has lost to Chinese capital. The struggle between China and the US is between the two largest economic powers of contemporary capitalism for dominance in the imperialist system. The escalating confrontation between the two global powers, unfolding simultaneously across multiple regions, extends its influence to international and multilateral organizations and agreements; reflecting how the interdependence of capitalist economies can go hand-in-hand with intensifying inter-imperialist contradictions.
The US policy of containing China through multilateral agreements with countries in Central and South America and the Pacific, pursued by pre-Trump administrations, failed to deliver the anticipated outcomes. This approach was later supplanted by the Trump administration’s more rigid stance toward China, a strategic direction which saw no changes under the Biden administration which has even set the table for the new Trump administration in the last few weeks of his presidency with heightened economic confrontations with China and funneling billions in aid and weapons to Ukraine. This struggle affects the relations of cooperation and competition with other imperialist centers leading to the outbreak of various war fronts. The threat of a generalized war and nuclear confrontation is knocking at the door. The four years of a Biden administration oversaw the proliferation of new war fronts, skyrocketing inflation, huge packages of subsidies to the monopolies and the enrichment of the same business groups which received huge breaks under the previous Trump administration, the crack down on popular mobilizations for the liberation of Palestine, and intervening on behalf of the railroad companies to render strikes illegal – all demonstrating the anti-worker, anti-popular, and imperialist nature of the Democrats.
The United States has been actively reshaping its global strategy to maintain dominance within the imperialist system. For several years, it has focused on realigning alliances, revising agreements, reorganizing international institutions, and sidelining those it no longer deems useful. A clear example of this is its use of the Organization of American States (OAS) as a political instrument in the region. As part of its broader agenda, the Trump administration initiated a review of the USMCA (T-MEC). Additionally, the U.S. has withdrawn from a range of treaties and organizations, including the ABM Treaty, UNESCO, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), while halting negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). It replaced NAFTA with the USMCA and even resumed nuclear testing. These actions underscore the fallacy of the belief that a so-called “multipolar” world would foster peaceful resolution of global conflicts..
The confrontation between the two capitalist powers is also heating up in the Americas, with the recent visit of Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, to Peru. Xi met with the Peruvian coup leader, Dilma Boluarte to inaugurate the Cosco Shipping megaport in Chancay. This represents a step in the expansionist policies of Chinese capital under its Belt and Road Initiative to strategically confront US monopolies in the region as well as another development in the imperialist alliance grouped under the banner of multi-polarity.
Since 2022, China has been the main trading partner for most countries of Latin America. The region has strengthened economic ties with China which is increasing its role in the region, especially in South America. The penetration of Chinese capital into Latin America continues in fierce competition with US, European, and other countries’ capital. This dispute is over profits, natural resources, cheap labor, trade routes, etc. States with ties to Chinese capital and its increasing enmeshment in the Americas will certainly be in the cross hairs of US capital, especially with the selection of Marco Rubio as the selected secretary of state which signals a greater emphasis on the region. Thus, as signaled by an event early November hosted by the America First Policy Institute (Trump’s transition policy group) in Mar A Lago, allies such as Argentina under Milei will be seeking the influence of a Trump presidency to secure the economic plan of the IMF in Argentina. Milei, along with El Salvador under Bukele in lock step with the interests of the US in the region, will help sustain the profit accumulation of US capital. The governments of Latin America will come under great pressure to decouple from Chinese investments in ports, telecommunications, and electric grids.
In all, these plans will only take place with the continued shedding of the blood and exploitation of the workers.
The hostile treatment directed at Mexico under the implementation of the USMCA is likely to resurface, especially within the context of its negotiation and planned tariffs. The Trump administration is planning to increase pressure on Mexico and other countries to adopt stricter immigration policies, tighten measures to prevent Chinese companies loopholing products into North America, and continue efforts to defend the technical, economic, and social strengthening of the value chains that support the USMCA. Mexican companies will be expected to meet their obligations, particularly in the supply of auto parts for automobile manufacturing, one of the largest and most influential sectors in the US and of course Mexican workers will be under the boot. A new Trump administration, with the presence of Mike Waltz and JD Vance, have also considered the use of drones, cyberware, intelligence services, and naval assets within Mexico under the pretext of combating drug trafficking – likely a step to control and limit Chinese capital benefitting from its established links with organized crime groups in Mexico. China has also been cornering the raw materials market in the region, a potential sphere of greater confrontation between the two imperialist powers.
The US economy is currently a ticking time bomb, on the rails of a new looming crisis. The clear deterioration of the US and the loss of its global influence combined with the questioning of its primacy in the imperialist system has set the stage for the incoming Trump administration. Due to the fact that the US refuses the route of controlled destruction of over-accumulated capital as well as refusing to surrender its dominant position leads to the strengthening of the protectionist trend. The Trump administration assumes the mantle of finding new outlets for the vast accumulation of capital, demanding dependent countries to bear the costs.
The escalation of confrontation between China and the US is a fight for the division of new markets, a fight which requires force and thus the turn towards militarism,the war economy, as a solution to the issue of over-accumulated capital. Imperialist interventions and wars offer a lucrative exit for accumulated profits. Such is the case with the arms race and the vast profits of the arms manufacturers who have benefited from the war in Ukraine and the Middle East. So it is not a coincidence that a new Trump presidency gears up to continue the orientation of the US towards a war economy – not just its surge in military spending but also the orientation of its economic policy. The greater shift towards militarism and protectionism necessarily brings to the fore the reactionary rhetoric underscoring the Trump presidency.
In the coming years, we can expect an all-out assault against the working class – real wages to continue to plummet, the class gap to continuously widen, monopolies and business groups consistently subsidized and granted privileges, planned tariffs which will only lead to costs passed off to the workers and people, rampant exploitation and barbarous treatment of immigrants by the relaunching of the Asylum Cooperative Agreements and pressuring the governments of Latin America to curb migration to the US as a symptom of managing the surplus labor for capital, and expansion of economic, commercial and financial blockade measures against Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
The skyrocketing cost of living continues to erode real income for ordinary people, under successive governments, Democrat and Republican alike. A new Trump administration continues the policies of Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton and Bush with its cabinet of billionaires and warhawks and a heightened emphasis on the Americas will undoubtedly position itself for the reclamation of the pinnacle of US imperialism in the region.
Section 3: Overview of the Communist Movement in the USA
There can be no escaping the hard fact that the communist movement in the United States is in a protracted state of crisis. A series of errors within the movement over the past century has brought the movement to a position of weakness under the capitalists’ ceaseless onslaught. Our movement is now mired by inaction and plagued with ideological confusion. We revolutionaries are faced with an intense struggle on every front: organizationally, politically, and ideologically. Without a robust struggle on these fronts, our effort to make a revolution will be smothered in the cradle.
The ideological enemies our movement must confront are diverse in form yet, in general, are identical in essence. In one way or another each of these trends denies the necessity of the working class revolution in word or deed. They accomplish this deception with their rejection of the working class seizure of power, flawed understanding of imperialism, erroneous policies of alliances, abandonment of the Bolshevik party form of organization, ignoring the class-character of the state, or any other of these central points of revolutionary strategy. At this moment, the most pervasive form of distortion in the socialist and communist movement is found in the Democratic Socialists of America and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. These two organizations are direct spawns of the Trotskyist lineage, a deep-rooted tradition among the “communist” circles.
To begin with DSA, founded in 1982 this organization existed for three decades as a relatively small and stable grouping of a few thousand members. DSA witnessed a meteoric rise in membership following Bernie Sanders’ run in the 2015 Democratic presidential primary race. Sanders campaigned openly as a “democratic socialist”, popularizing the concept of socialism in the US for the first time since the Cold War. Decades worth of Cold War anti-communist propaganda had driven the once-powerful name of socialism out of the popular lexicon. But this setback proved temporary. Following the 2008 financial crisis and the worsening of conditions for the working class and the youth were primed for a class conscious organization that articulated the undeniable antagonisms at the root of the growing misery. This is the context Sanders’ launched his campaign in. While his campaign was defeated by the Democratic party machinery, the momentum found a home in the DSA. Tens of thousands thus found a political home in DSA between 2015 and 2019, propelling the organization to a position of national influence by the time the 2020s began. The rapid rise of this organization further popularized socialist politics in the US but drove that fervent energy into the abyss of its social democratic organization.
The DSA has thus functioned as a repository for the popular strata, an effective vehicle for the ruling class to neuter the development of revolutionary consciousness. DSA prides itself on being a “big tent” or “multi-tendency” organization, housing within itself self-described Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, neo-Kautskyites, open social democrats, and many others. These tendencies have formed themselves into national caucuses to consolidate and coordinate their faction within the DSA. The glaring stupidity of this approach is impossible to ignore. How would the DSA provide the revolutionary working class movement any ideological clarity or direction when it has institutionalized factionalism within itself as a point of pride. The effect of this is to have subsections of the broader movement fight each other for control over an impotent organization. DSA is organized along bourgeois geographic lines, into local chapters based on regions. There are little to no workplace cells to speak of, few if any mass organizations, and no intelligible strategy for making the working class revolution. Much more can be said about DSA’s bankruptcy as a purported organization of the working class. From our point of view, the DSA represents a serious roadblock to the development of the revolutionary movement for the ideological confusion it spreads and the influence it retains—owing almost exclusively to its membership size—amongst sections of the working class and popular strata.
As conditions for the working class in the US deteriorate yet further and the DSA proves itself wholly sterile, the movement searches for an ever more radical option. The Party for Socialism and Liberation sells the snake oil to those disaffected with DSA. Founded in 2004 from a split from the Workers World Party, the PSL has seen a steady rise in its national presence, organizing large demonstrations through its “Action Network”, most notably the half a million strong march in DC for Palestine in November 2023. PSL is a more insidious manifestation of social democracy, adopting a more “revolutionary” aesthetic and deeming themselves Marxist-Leninists. In practice, the PSL is organized along geographic lines with even less presence in the trade unions and workplaces than the DSA. Most insidiously, PSL and its media arm Breakthrough News openly supports the multi-polarity line, deeming the emergence of BRICS a precursor to socialism in some form or another. Their public figures more or less openly uphold the People’s Republic of China, the PSUV in Venezuela, and the Sheinbaum government of Mexico as paragons of socialist construction. Their embrace of market socialism makes a mockery of scientific socialism and precludes the development of a successful socialist project. There are glaring common variables between the PSL and DSA. 1) the social democratic form of organization, the total absence of the Bolshevik form of organization, of democratic centralism, of a structural link between the vanguard party and the working class, and 2) the support for social democratic governments across the world 3) support for interstate alliances which have a clear capitalist class content: ALBA, MERCOSUR, CELAC.
The “patriotic socialist” or “MAGA communist” trend is a nefarious and pig-headed line. Formerly nested alongside other bankrupt ideologies within the Party of Communists USA, this perversion has now found a consolidated refuge in the newly-formed American Communist Party. While this formation has received considerable attention within the communist movement at home and abroad, this is out of proportion with their actual organizational presence within the working class. However, engaging on the ideological front, our party cannot underestimate the influence of any of these formations and the political lines they represent. ACP and their “MAGA communist” orientation are chauvinistic in their approach, doing a violence to the noble struggle of national liberation by absolutising it over the class struggle. Their brutalizing of the national question is taken to extreme conclusions, characterizing the USA as the sole imperialist hegemonic power in the world – a common trend in modern opportunism. Therefore, any act of resistance or competition with the US is considered mechanically from the standpoint of “national liberation”. This absurd, metaphysical approach leads to chauvinistic conclusions of supporting Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s regional ambitions, the Bolivarian Revolution, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and of course the advancement of BRICS’s plans to compete with the G7. In its most sophisticated form this chauvinism is justified by the Maoist conception of contradictions wherein the “primary” and “secondary” contradictions change places based on the political considerations rather than economic bases. Hence the struggle against imperialism (ie, exclusively US-NATO-EU imperialism) supersedes the struggle between workers and capitalists—the class struggle. Their bastardization of the national liberation struggle leads them to embrace reactionary movements that are diametrically opposed to the communist movement, notably the Baathists in Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In a similar vein, an emergent refrain that has seen much purchase among the student and popular movements is the “decolonial” line which posits that colonialism is the primary struggle. Rooted in academia and postmodernism, this tendency has seen widespread support, bolstered by the present genocide in Gaza. The opportunist organizations (PSL, DSA, CPUSA) have paid lip service to this trend in one form or another. Amongst the broader movement of the popular strata, an anti-colonialist posturing has become pervasive. The decolonization movement is itself recent, with the first and second generation beneficiaries of the independence movements of Asia and Africa only just now entering the upper echelons of the bourgeois order. This tendency has no concrete organizational form, but instead permeates most of the larger socialist and communist organizations in the US. Parties such as PSL and (factions within) DSA that have an uncritical view of the Maoist tradition parrot slogans denouncing “settler colonialism” and imperialism without an analysis of the political economic basis for these phenomena. They categorize the United States as a “settler colonial” state. At best, world systems theory provides a theoretical backing to this deviation. This line leads logically to the concept of “neocolonialism” wherein formerly colonized countries are now considered neo-colonies subject to domination by the imperialist powers of US-EU-NATO. In this way, the decolonial line arrives at a similar conclusion to the “MAGA communists”, both posit that the United States is the great evil that must be defeated. Their solutions for achieving this are incoherent and outlandish, the “landback” proposal appears as a bastardized form of the national question already addressed by the Soviet Republics and their right to self-determination guaranteed within the USSR.
It is clear to see then, that the communist movement in the US has found in its isolation only eclecticism and rehashed forms of opportunism, a historical amnesia that has yet to be overcome.
Section 4: Brief Reflections on the History of the US Communist Movement
The regrouping of revolutionary forces across the Americas necessitates a critical reflection on the history of the communist movement. We recognize that the current era is marked by imperialism, positioning socialist revolution as the essential step for societal transformation. The 1999 victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela sparked a wave of progressivism throughout Latin America, influencing countries such as Honduras, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This wave brought with it concepts like “21st-century socialism”, anti-neoliberal strategies, etc. all rooted in maintaining the capitalist system.
Progressivism ultimately revealed itself as another form of bourgeois class domination, an effort to humanize capitalism rather than abolish it. These ideas also gained traction in the United States, influencing not only social democratic forces but also the communist movement. This strengthened opportunist tendencies and fostered support for replacing U.S. imperialism with Chinese imperialism. The resulting ideological eclecticism has, over the years, coalesced into a variety of forces centered around the notion of “multipolarity.”
The spread of such ideas is not new, nor is their practical application. In the Americas communist parties have historically accumulated substantial experience in addressing the challenges posed by progressivism.
In the United States, these concepts gained traction primarily due to the mutation of the historic CPUSA and the resulting absence of a genuine communist party.After its reconstitution at the Emergency National Convention in 1945, the CPUSA only formally rejected Browderism.
Between 1945 and 1947, the CPUSA adopted a center-left strategy that effectively reduced the party to an auxiliary role, supporting groups committed to maintaining capitalist relations and promoting the idea of a peaceful transition to socialism. In 1948, the CPUSA critiqued this earlier approach and attempted to shift further left by backing Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party and fostering a labor-progressive alliance through its electoral campaign. However, these efforts ultimately reinforced social-democratic influence within the working class.
The CPUSA’s alliance strategy was grounded in the two-stage theory, advocating for the so-called democratic people’s government or “People’s Front Government” which was reinforced in the closing of the 1950 Plenary Meeting of the National Committee of the CPUSA by its General Secretary, Eugene Dennis. This Plenary Meeting also re-emphasized the need to build the third-party movement around the Progressive Party and a number of supposedly pro-peace tickets and coalitions.
At the 15th National Convention in 1951, the CPUSA did not correct its position but instead reinforced it by consistently labeling the bourgeois state’s assaults as fascism. The party continued prioritizing the struggle against fascism, aligning its tactics and strategies with the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence” and emphasizing the fight for peace as the central issue. This approach was particularly evident in the reports and documents from the National Election Conference in 1954, which fostered illusions that imperialism could renounce war and military methods, allowing capitalism and socialism to coexist peacefully. At the same convention, the CPUSA persisted in advocating political action through front parties or multi-class fronts. These actions reflect the lingering influence of Browderism, whose underlying principles were never fully abandoned by the Party.
At the CPUSA’s National Conference in 1956, the party mirrored the broader attitude of the International Communist Movement by adopting a strategy that divided social democracy into left and right wings, seeking unity with the so-called “Left.” This approach represented a significant political and ideological setback.
The CPUSA was unable to fully overcome the impact these factors had on communist forces. This was further compounded by a persistent misinterpretation of imperialism and the rise of opportunism following the 20th Congress of the CPSU, as well as the subsequent counterrevolution in the USSR and other states of socialist construction. These events accelerated the CPUSA’s political and ideological decline, leading it to subordinate its activities to the defense of bourgeois democratic freedoms and its nation within the framework of the imperialist system.
Today, similar ideas are promoted by many who identify as socialists or communists. Examples include the collaboration of the Green Party, PSL, and other third-party representatives ahead of election day, endorsements of the Green Party by groups like the PCUSA, and persistent advocacy for an intermediary stage of government between socialism and capitalism.
This brief and admittedly insufficient reflection on the history of the CPUSA highlights the need for a more thorough analysis. The dissolution of the Communist International left a void in unified strategy, hindering the development of a cohesive communist approach across the Americas—a challenge that persists to this day. Examining and developing the ideological confrontation against the rise of utopian perspectives since then is essential for devising a unified strategy. Such efforts will strengthen revolutionary forces, positioning them to lead the working masses toward emancipation.
Section 5: Communist Strategy in the US
- Need for A Party
In our program, we state “We observe that there is now no proletarian organization, schooled in the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism, to lead the momentary struggles of the working class in preparation for the revolutionary seizure of power and construction of socialism in this country.” As elaborated in the overview of the communist movement, the state of our movement is wholly backwards. Absent the party, there will be no revolution in the US, thus the urgent need for a vanguard party arises as the indispensable first step in the socialist revolution in the United States.
Plagued by social democracy and opportunism, our movement has no leading center to combat the ideological poverty of the movement and imbue the working class with revolutionary class consciousness. This is at a moment wherein the competition between imperialist powers is intensifying. Following the counterrevolution in the USSR, the imperialist powers of US-EU-NATO experienced a brief moment of unchallenged dominance in the imperialist system. Following the financial crisis of 2008 and the development of capitalist markets such as China, India, and Brazil (the generalization of the imperialist system throughout the entire world), the North Atlantic bloc is now facing a grave challenge for predominance in the imperialist pyramid.
The global conflict is not simply a China-US or East-West divide but a tangled web of competing interests clashing over resources, markets, and trade routes. In Asia, tensions escalate in the South China Sea as China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines vie for control of this vital sea route. The Middle East remains volatile, with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran carving up the region to secure profits for their respective monopolies, all amid the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In Sub-Saharan Africa, conflicts like the Congo crisis are fueled by foreign-backed groups, such as Rwanda’s support of M23. Meanwhile, in Europe, Russia and NATO’s clash has driven the years-long war in Ukraine. With death tolls in the hundreds of thousands, these conflicts continue to make workers bear the cost of the ruling classes’ wars, threatening ever greater global confrontations.
Within the US, the immiseration of the working class has proceeded at a certain and steady pace for decades. Rising costs of living and declining real wages crush the hopes and dreams of the entire working class. It is now common for parents to expect their children and grandchildren to have worse lives than they did. While the bourgeoisie increases its profits and ships billions of dollars of arms overseas to advance their interests, rent and education are more expensive than ever before. The price of basic food items has increased. This is all without the US engaging in a much larger war. Racism and bigotry remain pervasive, with tens of millions of predominantly Latino and Black workers living in neglected neighborhoods or worse yet, priced out of their current homes to make way for luxury developments that maintain high vacancy levels. The routine murder of Black people by police in the US continues to be a flashpoint in the centuries-long struggle against racist oppression that only serves to divide the working class against itself. Other forms of racism and bigotry fomented by the working class, particularly against Latinos in the border states with Mexico, sharpen the divisions within the working class. And yet, popular movements in support of Palestine, against the racist murder of Black people by police, have seen hundreds of thousands of workers and the popular strata take to the streets. Further, the trade union movement that has suffered decades worth of blows from the state and a total capture by business unionists has seen the embers of revival with the new Amazon unions and the nationwide Starbucks organizing drive serving as leading examples.
Thus we see that the stage is set for the rise of class consciousness in the United States. The Communist Party does not arise spontaneously, it is not organized in the heat of the struggle, but rather emerges out of a recognized necessity of the establishment of socialism and is then constructed, steeled in battle between workers and capitalists, for the ultimate aim of building a fighting organization of the working class capable of seizing state power. Absent this vehicle, the working class will be left vulnerable to the wolves of opportunism. These wolves are well-poised to sink their fangs into the movement and hinder any development towards the revolution. Organizations such as the DSA and PSL are well-positioned to syphon off would-be militant workers towards their fruitless efforts. Business unionists have demonstrated their willingness to adapt to changing circumstances, such as with Shawn Fain putting on a fantastical show as a fighter in the “class war” while selling out the workers in his union, the CWA, to an abysmal concessionary contract.
The laws of motion of capitalism generate perpetual crises, leading inevitably to wars. In the age of imperialism, these wars are waged on massive scales. Wars exacerbate crises, creating ruptures and cracks in the ruling classes’ grip on power. In some cases, a revolutionary situation develops, the opportunity for the exploited class to exercise its organizational might and numerical superiority to depose the ruling class. This has happened in a number of cases, most memorably in October 1917 in the Russian Empire. While these crises are inevitable and a revolutionary situation is a practical certainty, the victory of the revolution (what we refer to as the subjective factor) is not guaranteed. Without the vanguard party having cut its teeth in the class struggle, an organization capable of leading the class, these moments will pass into failure, misery, and in extreme cases (as with Germany following 1919) into the darkest forms of reaction. Only a communist party, with Marxism-Leninism as its foundation, can provide the ideological clarity to end capitalism. Only a communist party can liberate the working class and set about the task of building the new society free of exploitation and oppression. Without the party, liberation is impossible. History has proven this and provided our movement today with the roadmap to revolution.
Thus, with the risk of wider war rising, the predominance of social democracy and business unionism and the total absence of a vanguard communist party it is impossible to look away from the necessity of building the party. As arduous and titanic a task as this may seem, there is no other choice if we wish to make revolution. We reject cowardice and laziness and choose to build the communist party.
Democratic centralism, a cornerstone of the Leninist party model, facilitates the process of leading and coordinating the actions of the party’s units and members. Our country is vast in both geographic size and population. It is therefore essential that a strong leading center concentrates the activity of the entire party while members concentrate themselves within the party base organizations. With a strong leading center and effective communication lines between the PBOs and the center, the party can effectively devise a strategy to carry out the class struggle, concentrating on the most economically (which is to say, strategically) significant industries. Concentration will allow our party to exercise the organized power of the working class in the most effective manner, amplifying our ability to combat the capitalist class and launch offensives against them from positions of strength. DSA, PSL, CPUSA and others do not adopt this method of organization, this strategic and precise approach to making revolution. They cannot. Their organizational structures, based on anti-Bolshevik forms, inhibit this process and preclude the concentration of forces. The communist party, organized along Bolshevik lines, can concentrate the forces of the working class to engage actively and lead in the everyday struggles of their fellow workers.
- Development of the Program
The development of our program is the most important step in reaching and maintaining ideological unity. Admittedly, this has been a challenge for our organization (lacking experience and the ideologically developed cadre to take on such a task), a common theme in the history of the US communist movement – development of a revolutionary program. Without ideological unity, the actions of our party will be sporadic, chaotic, and ultimately self-destructive. It must continue to be a priority for our organization to set about developing the program. This entails outlining that our epoch is one of the overthrow of capitalism and the Socialist revolution, without intermediate stages, and the centrality of the working class. Such a program, through the Marxist-Leninist scientific lens, must correctly outline tactical and strategic policies which reject alliances with the bourgeoisie and social democracy, reject participation in governments of capitalist management, and correctly characterize the position of our respective countries through a firm understanding of imperialism. It must advance and continuously update its analysis of the class structure in our countries as well as reflect on the experiences of the history of the communist movement. A vital issue is also that of a reflection on socialist construction in the USSR. The program should be a bridge to the unified revolutionary struggle of the communist parties in the Americas and the world-over. Its concrete demands must include the breaking of imperialist interstate agreements, withdrawal of military bases and forces, a struggle against monopolies – foreign and national -, an unyielding and ruthless confrontation with opportunism, reformism, revisionism, etc.
By developing our program, we further solidify the political guidance our party aims to provide in the struggle. As our organization continues to grow across the country, the cohesion and revolutionary character of the party must be maintained, with the program as the bedrock of all of our activity, it acts as a critical safeguard against revisionism and opportunism within our ranks.
- Socialism and its necessity in the US
Capitalism creates the conditions for its own destruction. Just as the laws of the feudalist mode of production before it provided the basis for the bourgeois class to emerge as the revolutionary, so too does capitalism generate the social force with a material interest in overcoming the relations of production under capitalism. This social force is the proletariat, the working class. Under capitalism, society is organized around commodity production, that is production for exchange value. The object of production is to generate surplus value, profits to be reinvested into production for the purpose of producing yet more profit. Marx summed this process up in the formula Money-Commodity-Money’ (MCM’). In order that more value can be created in this process, a special type of commodity must exist in this process that has the quality of producing more value when it is purchased and used. That commodity is labor power, which only the working class provides. Capitalism therefore requires the existence of a market for free labor power. Capitalism thus in its development sought out the creation of ever larger markets for labor power, demolishing any fetters the old world had put in its path to acquiring ever more of this special commodity. In the United States presently, capitalism has thoroughly completed this process of development so that labor is now free from sea to shining sea—free to be bought and sold by the capitalist class, that is.
In the course of development, capitalist enterprises competed with each other on ever grander scales, with ultimately one or a handful of corporations emerging as the winners, as monopolies. These monopolies, not content with profits only within the US, have expanded outside the national boundaries of the US, bringing about the imperialist stage of capitalism’s development in the country. This now fully developed capitalism in its imperialist phase has long-since reached the pinnacle of development. Production is almost entirely socialized (as in, small producers have by and large been vanquished and play no significant role in US society) and concentrated in a handful of monopolies. The country is cleanly divided into bourgeois and proletarian, capitalism is fully developed. Capitalism continues to wreck its periodic crises on the working population. The deteriorating conditions bring the conflict between the relations of production and the productive forces to an ever sharper clash. The material basis for socialist production exists in abundance. Central planning for the extended satisfaction of social needs is more possible than ever before, the elimination of commodity-money relations is within the reach, if only society were to be liberated from the bourgeois dictatorship standing in the way of this transformation. Monopolies such as Walmart and Amazon have developed planning and distribution methods to a massive extent. Advancements in computer technology amplify the capacity for planning with greater precision than in prior socialist construction projects.
With the introduction of nuclear weapons and the climate crisis, the stakes for each successive round of capitalist crisis are dangerously high. Each new war has a frightening potential to involve the use of nuclear weapons that would see unimaginable death and destruction. Regular extreme weather events are a direct result of the climate crisis, from flooding to more frequent hurricanes and other catastrophes. Capitalism has demonstrated it will not address these crises, as doing so would violate the sanctity of the law of value, production for profit. It is only under socialism, with the establishment of a workers’ state, that the needs of the whole people can be met and these great crises addressed.
- Where are the class forces based where the communists must intervene?
To win this struggle, our communist party must focus on the workers in primary industries. While we must recognize a dogmatic focus on these industries cannot be the extent of our strategy. Where there are viable opportunities to organize workers or take the lead on a particular issue, it would be a reasonable use of the party’s resources to take on these struggles. A notable and present example is the struggle around Palestinian liberation. The cause of a Free Palestine is a powerful area of struggle that has drawn in thousands of workers and sections of the popular strata, making them receptive to revolutionary propaganda.
Importance must be placed on the key industries, which will likely necessitate growing the party in other workplaces where the cost of failure is relatively low and the long-term effects will be to bolster the party practically, preparing its forces to tackle ever larger campaigns and struggles.
