Click here for the Spanish version / Indíque aquí para la versión en español
In October of 1996, the League's National Committee met to assess the current situation and set policy for the League's work in the next period of time. Also, in November, the League held a very productive national conference on aligning the work of the comrades in the mass movement to the current situation. Everything is telling us that it's time to move past the ideology, politics and scattered organizational efforts of the past period. It's time to rally the revolutionaries to the immediate as well as the long-term tasks.
The challenges and the opportunities before us today call for League spirit and unity. There are tasks to be done, and it's time for the revolutionaries to rally as one to accomplish them. A revolutionary esprit de corps rests both on a common estimate of this moment and the ideology of the revolutionaries.
What is this moment in our country?
The formation of the Labor Party signals the beginning of political polarization, just as the L.A. rebellion of 1992 signaled the social polarization based on the economic revolution. The Labor Party is a political party putting forward a class program to solve the immediate needs of the majority of the American people. It can be the vehicle for the development of class identity. We revolutionaries have to be part of building the Labor Party.
This is the moment we have been preparing for, when the real fight for a people's party can begin. What was before historically inevitable is now politically possible. Political polarization is a necessary and unavoidable stage of the revolution. It's time for all League members to focus their energies at pushing this stage through to completion. This is the first real political struggle the League has had to take on. Never before have the objective conditions been so favorable for advancing the actual revolutionary movement such a decisive step forward and toward the actual resolution of the communist reorganization of society.
To be sure, this moment holds serious danger as well as hope. If the American people don't take their future into their own hands and unite around their actual interests, our country is bound to suffer the grip of a cruel and powerful police state. The November 1996 elections consolidated the hold of southern reaction on the federal government and confirmed the urgency of this danger.
If the American people are going to be able to resist this danger, the movement is going to have to get off the defensive. There is no way to stop the police state if only the immigrants fight for the immigrants and only the unemployed fight for the unemployed and only the youth fight for the youth. To take any effective steps against a police state, the movement has to first take steps toward political unity, that is unity based on class interests.
When the people the capitalist system is abandoning do unite, that unity will unleash a movement that holds the power to overturn this rotten and corrupt economic system. To prevent the ruling class from manipulating the American people into demanding their own police state, to prepare for the future stages of the movement, we must aim everything toward the unity and clarity of interests of our class.
What is our ideology?
The unity of our class calls for the unity of the organization of revolutionaries unity of purpose and focus, revolutionary and League spirit, unity of ideology.
Our ideology is revolutionary, independent and hostile to our enemy class. It is developed and deepened by scientific education and revolutionary activity along a strategic line of march. It is our commitment to the aspirations, the ideals and historic mission of our class. Our ideological convictions are expressed as a commitment to the League, the organization we collectively built, to carry out its indispensable role in the fight to secure the goals of our class. It is rooted in the ideological outlook of the millions of American revolutionaries whose sacrifices have stayed the hand of slavery, fascism, and reaction and created the possibility for our victory.
It is our ideology that gets us through the difficult times of change and confusion. We need to prepare our League and its members for new tasks and new methods of organization. The National Committee reports and decisions have set our course in this new stage of social development. It is going to take the whole of the League to change its work and activity to adapt to this new historical moment. The People's Tribune and the Tribuno del Pueblo have started to change. We must also use them to stabilize the League ideologically, to hold us together and help guide us in our search for solutions to our political and organizational problems.
How do we start?
The League must instill in those in and around us a sense of mission, of what time it is, and that the fate of our country depends on building this organization, the League. With this ideological foundation we can politicize and educate our members. With this unity of purpose we can adjust our plans and carry out our tasks in the real world. It means taking the next concrete step in building an organization of revolutionaries.
The first step is taking the social struggles we are working in from local and scattered ones, into a powerful, national, independent political movement. The Labor Party is an organizational form for that movement. Many of our comrades have spent years heroically digging into the actual struggle on important fronts. Now that the political struggle has begun, it's time for all comrades to proceed from the standpoint of the overall movement and not from the standpoint of those scattered struggles. It's time to stand on the hard work of the past years and help the American people take their next step ahead, uniting the movement into the Labor Party and building it into the party that can serve as the organizing and educating center for the struggles of the class.
The second step is preparing and restructuring the League to accomplish our propaganda tasks. As we achieve step one, we will have a larger and larger arena in which to educate the American people with an understanding of the revolutionary process. We will grow as we gather the revolutionaries into an organization inseparably connected to this motion towards political independence, educate them with a vision of the actual resolution to the immediate reforms: the communist reorganization of society.
The organizational form to accomplish the first task is the committee. What is a committee? It is a grouping of League members who take on specific agreed upon tasks and make plans to accomplish League goals in the mass movement. A committee is defined by and responsible to a higher body. We have now begun forming committees responsible to the National Office so we can start getting experience with a committee system which has a unity of purpose.
The organizational forms to accomplish the second task are chapters that can provide a public presence of the League, as well as a policy to consolidate our members, new and old, about the revolutionary process. Area Offices must plan how to make the transition in our tasks, and organizational policy. We need political discussion groups and study circles to prepare our members and friends for our propaganda tasks.
The revolution needs an ideologically clear and united organization of revolutionaries that can guide our class along the line of march toward achievement of its revolutionary goals. Now is the time for the League to rally as one.
© 1997 by the League of Revolutionaries for a New America