Comrades and Friends,

We stand here today celebrating the success of the seventh Convention of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America. Eighteen years ago marked the beginning of the LRNA. We understood then that the revolutionary movement was leaping into a new quality of struggle.

We have seen struggle before. But this struggle is different. It is the subjective or political expression of the revolution in the economic foundation of society. It is emerging as a response to something new – the alignment of the political superstructure to protect the obscene sanctity of private property as the economic foundation of capitalism is crumbling.

The process will go through a number of quantitative stages. At each stage the revolution will have to regroup on new foundations.

Stages of struggle

The immediate first stage is clear. As workers are permanently replaced by computerized robotic production, a transformation is taking place from a highly organized, highly paid reformist core of the industrial working class to the emergence of a new class increasingly pushed out of capitalist relations of production. This first stage will see the new class becoming aware of itself and articulating a program for its survival. Its political reflection must be an organization that accurately reflects that stage – a league of revolutionaries – a non-sectarian organization formed on the new basis of the objective process, with its mission to make that class aware of itself as a class.

Over the years, we witnessed many struggles – the rise of the struggle around homelessness and the development of homeless unions on a national level. Our efforts helped to end the isolation of the homeless population and stamp it into the consciousness of the American people.

We witnessed the massive attacks on the welfare recipients, and General Assistance programs as state by state programs were eliminated, throwing another section of the working class into the streets, followed by the Clinton administration’s “welfare reform.”

This administration also passed NAFTA to allow the free flow of capital across our borders while closing them to human beings in search of a better life.

We witnessed our youth under attack on all fronts: lack of jobs, massive closing of schools, increasing tuition costs for higher learning, new private prisons being built, schools privatized across the country.

And we witnessed families without water and other utilities as the struggle for survival intensifies, drawing broader sections of the working class into battle.

In the past the capitalist class attacked one section of the working class at a time, using the age-old tactic of divide and conquer. Now as the dictatorship of the corporations is gripping every state and town across this country, budget cuts are hitting a broad spectrum of the working class at once. The budget battles are placing school teachers in the trenches with students, fire fighters and corrections officers with janitors, and nurses and social workers together with destitute patients.

Battle for consciousness

Clear lines of demarcation are being drawn, but objective economic polarization does not inevitably translate into subjective understanding and political polarization. The broad social response provides the conditions for revolutionaries to enter into battle for the minds of the American people – to win them to consciousness and clarity about who they are and what is actually in their interests.

The ruling class will use this moment to dredge up every rotten and racist thread of American history to derail and confuse the thinking of the American people. Our responsibility is to win them to some sense of their basic interests.

There’s a growing understanding that corporate control of political power makes the ruling class incapable of governing in the interests of society. That sense that something is wrong cannot move forward without the awareness of actual interests — the understanding of whose interests government should serve, whether the public is going to control the corporations or the corporations control the public.

This moment pushes to the fore tens of thousands of people who are looking for a way to contribute to the forward progress of humanity, who want to politicize and educate people in their actual interests, and who need an organization to do that. During the past 18 years the League has laid the foundation to be the organization they need. We are prepared to take full advantage of the budget battles that lie ahead to carry out the League’s mission to unite these scattered revolutionaries on the basis of the demands of the new class, to educate and win them over to the cooperative, communist resolution of the problem.

The battle over budget cuts will find fertile ground for the growth of working class consciousness and clarity. As we see in the social response to the budget cuts in the Rust Belt, the polarity over who controls society is becoming clearer. These cuts can be seen as a cover for increasing corporate control over society. In Michigan, battle plans are focusing on the new Emergency Financial Manager bill known as Public Act #4 – the financial martial law. The state has already used this law to take over the cities of Benton Harbor and Pontiac and the Detroit School Board. The level of mobilization is teaching us the hard reality that we have to imbed our propaganda tools into the heart of this movement.

Moving forward and outward

The League is firmly rooted in the history of the revolutionary movement. Although the revolutionary movement has never faced a situation like today, we draw strength from the continuity of scientific understanding and principles of revolutionary politics and strategy. We rely on that history in order to step up to the tasks and responsibilities of this moment.

We are clear about the present. The adoption of the documents of this Convention confirms our grasp of the underlying content of this time, the “why” behind the profound and frightening changes taking place in this country and the world.

And with this, we can seize the future. Out of the emerging social struggle, we can build and consolidate the League as an organization of revolutionaries ready for the next stage of the revolutionary movement in this country.

 

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Comrades, this meeting marks some 43 years of struggle for a revolutionary party that would be a continuation of the best in American history – a party worthy of the American people.

It has been a long and difficult journey from the time five of us sat down in Watts, California and voted to create an organization that would participate in the struggle to reconstruct America, that would be of, by, and for its people.

During those years many organizations have come into and gone out of existence. Ours has remained stable, preparing for this moment in history. This Convention, like those before it, will reaffirm our commitment to our foundations, our strategy, and tactics. These are the indispensable elements that stabilized us while others withered and died.

What are the elements that make the League different from other organizations? What has allowed us to remain stable and on track?

The fundamental division between organizations arises from their different bases and their different goals. One type of organization arises from the mass movement. They are guided by theory that arises from practice. Their actual goal becomes the goal of the spontaneous movement, which can be nothing but reform.

The other type of organization arises from an intellectual grasp of the significance of the contradiction between society’s productive forces and its productive relations. This group is necessarily guided by philosophy – which is the study of the processes governing all thought, principles, and laws.

The organizational predecessors of the League were formed during the great upsurges of the national liberation movement. We did not base ourselves on that movement; rather we tried to use that upsurge and transformation to expose and exacerbate the contradiction between productive forces and relations. We clearly understood that this was the only force that could create the conditions for a transfer of political power from the capitalists to the working class. This is why we did not collapse with the relative completion of the national liberation movement.

Later, our philosophical approach allowed us to understand the revolutionary significance of the electronic revolution in production, the emergence of a new revolutionary sector of the working class, and the beginnings of an objective communist movement. What do we mean by an objective communist movement? Such a movement arises when there is such an intense antagonism between private ownership of the necessaries of life and the social character of distribution and consumption that the entire social order begins to collapse. At this point communism – society’s ownership of socially necessary means of life – moves from the ideological level to the actual or objective.

This historic leap in the economy presents us with a huge and difficult problem. This expanding objectively communist movement is subjectively – that is intellectually – anticommunist. Clearly, nothing can be done except through the process of changing peoples’ minds as they struggle for the basics of life. This is the task of an organization of propagandists.

We can proudly point to our accomplishments in building such an organization. We have a solid cadre core. We have our own theoretical and political line. We have an excellent press.

Essentially our foundation is built. The next stage - the stage this Convention must grapple with - is the outward motion of the League. This outward motion can be accomplished only if the League is clear as to its mission. Each member must have a mission. Every member in some way must contribute to our propaganda effort. We must become an army on the march – with purpose, discipline and clarity.

Comrades, the ice of fifty years is melting. Tides are beginning to flow. The moment we prepared for is upon us. Let this convention again raise the International’s battle cry “To the forge, Comrades! Strike where the iron is hot!”

June.2011.Vol21.Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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