When Ayatollah Khamenei said that the Democrat midterm victory accelerated America’s collapse, he was speaking to a specific form of anti-imperialist hope. This is the hope that the hegemon will weaken itself from within through factional battles, which it absolutely will. The question is: what will these changes in our objective conditions mean for the subjective conditions? Will we be able to take advantage of the fights between our enemies, and build a cohesive working-class movement for America?
This is our part in the global struggle that’s being waged by the peoples of Iran, Yemen, Palestine, and all other nations which are fighting off the genocidal Washington banker regime. Without the success of our efforts, the regime will be able to keep assailing the world’s working class, even if it comes to exist in a fractured form; a balkanization of America would let the ruling class continue advancing its agenda of exponential suffering. No doubt this would weaken U.S. imperialism; but a scenario of pure chaos for America, without any political solution, would let the tech oligarchs accelerate their assault on the hemisphere’s workers. The wider world would also have to deal with nuclear-armed fascist splinter states that are desperate to regain control.
To stop our enemies from plunging us into a long-term dark age, we’ll need to bring the American communist movement to its next phase; the one where we go into the labor movement in ways that we haven’t up to this point, and take a leadership role within the workers struggle. These are our most important priorities at this stage, the tasks we must orient our efforts around if we want to reverse our present revolutionary retreat.
Because of the direction the system is headed in, where the workers are becoming ever-more declassed, the practical path to doing this will have to involve a synthesis between traditional labor organizing and a new mode of practice. A mode where we still treat organized labor as the main focus, but at every step of the way we build organizational power for those who’ve been pushed out of the workforce. If you’re familiar with the works of William Z. Foster, like his history of the Communist Party, it’s clear that such a practice is only “new” for the 21st century; during the Great Depression, the Communist Party’s members took a major role in leading the unemployed councils. Bringing these councils back should be treated as an implied part of “taking leadership in the workers movement,” the same way we would intuitively consider it our task to help organize strikes or form new unions for the unorganized.
There are countless forms of dogmatism that seek to draw us away from these missions, and their proponents find endless ways to poke holes in logic that should be self-explanatory. Many of them draw their reasoning from half-correct arguments, like that union organizing is not enough or that the declassed workers are the fastest-growing element. But when our movement is guided by a concrete idea of what the end goal is, we won’t be confused by these diversions. The goal, at least in the pre-revolutionary era, is to lead the workers to victory; which entails bringing in the workers who are already organized (as can be overwhelmingly found in the unions), as well as serving the people through community aid projects (which are almost as important as organized labor work). And when we have the confidence that we can build an independent strength for the workers, which comes with our other party-building activities, we won’t be scared that going into the unions will hinder our efforts.
It’s necessary to be so specific in countering the arguments against organized labor work because though the need for this work is readily apparent, the circumstances of the class war can very easily bring disillusionment which isn’t helpful. As the class enemy relentlessly advances, the movement’s members are at risk of mistakenly concluding that entire historic strategies should be abandoned. This problem directly relates to the errors people often make when talking about the question of multipolarity, which our movement also needs to adopt a synthesis on.
There are tendencies that treat multipolarity as if it were meaningless to the class war because they falsely view China as capitalist, as well as “multipolarists” who end up effectively treating geopolitics as the only relevant factor by neglecting the domestic class struggle. Overcoming both deviations is easy, if we have clarity in our direction. Our goal, as agents of the revolutionary cause, is to bring victory for the international workers struggle; ultra-lefts and reformists distort what this means by slandering the existing socialist countries, but those in our tendency won’t be swayed by such demoralization tactics.
We see that our third world war is a war against global working-class power, most prominently embodied in the PRC and its partnered political forces. And we see that to take away the advantage which capital enjoys at this moment, we’ll need to rebuild our own revolutionary institutions, however challenging this is. We embody the same position taken by Lenin in response to the first world war, and the opportunists who refused to support revolutionary defeatism towards their own government:
Those who stand for the "neither-victory-nor-defeat" slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of inter national revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian, the only socialist task. It is the proletariat in the most backward of the belligerent. Great Powers which, through the medium of their party, have had to adopt—especially in view of the shameful treachery of the German and French Social-Democrats— revolutionary tactics that are quite unfeasible unless they "contribute to the defeat" of their own government, but which alone lead to a European revolution, to the permanent peace of socialism, to the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing.
Since then, over a hundred years of history in the American working-class struggle have given us a map for what these tactics will need to look like. The main obstacle to their fulfillment is no longer lack of education among the masses, who’ve already gotten behind the essence of anti-imperialism’s goals. Now our biggest matter to address is the re-organization of the nation’s workers, which is a goal that our cause’s international allies clearly have hope for; the results of the midterms have conveyed to the whole world how angry Americans are about our government’s getting us into this war. If we take our fight to the next level, and apply the practices that have historically led to the organization of a discontented people, victory will come sooner than later.
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