The deepening worldwide capitalist economic crisis and the world imperialists’ unrelenting drive to wider and more lethal oil wars have hundreds of millions of workers questioning capitalism. This crisis will deepen, regional wars will give way to World War III and billions of workers unable to live in the old way, will not only question capitalism but will look for radical alternatives. Will they choose and fight for communism as the only solution to the capitalist-imperialist inferno?
No, this will only happen if revolutionary communists now wage a protracted, patient but determined effort to put communism on the agenda of the international working class. In order to do this, we must inject our revolutionary communist ideas in every piece of literature and every class struggle in which we participate. Our task is to win millions of workers to embrace communist ideas in order to guarantee that they will fight for, win and build a communist society. It is a monumental historical challenge. We have accepted it with responsibility, humility, confidence in our class and great revolutionary optimism by founding the International Communist Workers Party (ICWP).
Members and friends of ICWP in the US and other countries are determined to build our Party into the new Communist International. We are determined to destroy forever the bosses’ poisonous ideologies of racism, sexism, individualism, patriotism and nationalism. We are determined to fight for a world without borders. We are determined to win millions of workers, soldiers and students worldwide to fight for communism under the slogans of “one class, one flag, one political line and one Party.”
We are committed to building a communist world – a world without bosses where nothing will be bought or sold; a world where “from each according to his/her commitment, to each according to his/her needs” will be the universal rule.
It is not an easy task and it won’t happen over-night. However, history has recorded many instances in which our class has overcome overwhelming odds – has “dared to storm heaven” – and won. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Defeat of Hitler’s Nazi hordes during WWII and the Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1960s will stand as the last century’s greatest achievements.
Unfortunately, the old international communist movement lacked the confidence that the working class could be won to fight directly for communism. It fought for socialism – state capitalism administered by the working class – and inevitably turned into its opposite, that is, back to capitalism. Now Russia and China are imperialist countries rivaling US imperialism for world domination.
Today, standing on the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, we can see farther and clearer. We are forever grateful to the founder of Progressive Labor Party under whose leadership the PLP made tremendous contributions to the international communist movement. Nevertheless, we have left PLP to found the ICWP because we consider that the current PLP leadership has taken the revisionist road. We take with us the great lessons and experiences of PLP and its fight against revisionism, especially Road to Revolution published in 1982 which rejects stages and socialism and calls for fighting directly for communism.
RR calls for a mass party and for winning masses of workers, soldiers and students to communism before, during and after revolution. We take with us the PLP document Road to Revolution which confronted one of the main unresolved weaknesses of the international communist movement: understanding the contradictory nature of reform and revolution.
RR4.5 makes clear that it is not enough to say we fight for communism. It makes clear that communists must fight daily, shoulder to shoulder, with workers who are struggling against the bosses’ attacks. However, our main task in these struggles is to constantly introduce our communist ideas, fully confident that many workers can be won to see that communism, not reformism, is the solution to their problems. We undertake this task seriously, participating in class struggle, exposing illusions in reformism and reformist leaders, agitating massively for our ideas in leaflets, building networks to distribute our newspaper, organizing action-study groups and recruiting to our party.
Long term ties with our fellow workers are key to our work, especially among industrial workers and soldiers. Communists who see their main task as winning the reform will inevitably become reformists and end up revisionists, fake communists who destroy the communist movement. This is the road the PLP leadership has taken and they refused to have an all out party discussion of their reformist and revisionist errors. What’s more, they tried to silence the left.
We refused to commit the same error as the Chinese Red Guards who, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, fought for communism and against the Chinese Communist Party’s revisionism but failed to break with Mao and found their own party.
The road to revolution will have many ups and downs but the final victory shall be ours. We face the most murderous fascist ruling class in history: the capitalists and imperialists of the world. They boast the most lethal and destructive weapons ever developed. They arrogantly stride the world as if they were all powerful and invincible. Nevertheless, the capitalists are strategically weak.
More than other ruling classes in history, their economic and military might are dependent on their gravediggers, the workers of the world. The rulers’ ideology among our ranks is the main obstacle preventing us from carrying out our historic task. The sooner we in ICWP replace it with communist ideology the sooner the international working class will be on the road to communist revolution and communism.
Dare to struggle, dare to win. The future shall be ours. Fight reformism! Fight for Communism! Join Us!
Join the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP)