First Published: Workers Viewpoint newspaper, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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It seems like everything capitalist is coming up in red, white and blue these days. The capitalist politicians, radio and papers have been running endlessly about Uncle Sam, pushing the glories of “American democracy,” “liberty,” “national pride” and even “hard work”! They’ve even got Ray Charles trying to pump some soul into “America the Beautiful,” singing how “God done shed his grace on thee.”
This giant sales pitch for U.S. monopoly capitalism is part and parcel of the ruling class preparations for fascism and world war. It’s part of their work among the U.S. working class and masses to numb and disarm us ideologically to prolong their rule.
With their pitch for “American democracy,” they’re trying to shore up their bourgeois (capitalist) democracy and lay the groundwork for fascism. With their appeals to “national pride” and anti-communism, they’re trying to whip up national chauvinism for war, put down the working class resistance and stifle communist leadership in the struggle.
But for all the work and money the ruling class is putting into it, they aren’t getting over. The vast majority of U.S. workers have no faith in this garbage, and many see right through it.
In the past decade, the U.S. working class has struggled against the imperialist war in Vietnam and a series of economic crises that have landed us in the deepest crisis of monopoly capitalism since the ’30s Depression, and has seen the ruling class exposed in political crises like Watergate. All these lessons clearly show the reactionary content of their jive capitalist “national pride,” “democracy,” and “hard work.”
The workers’ total disdain for this barrage of capitalist lies is a tremendous show of resistance and the strength of our class. It shows how the masses learn from their own experience in class struggle. It also shows that communists must use these mass lessons to bring the need for socialism to the workers, especially the advanced, and the need to build the genuine communist party of the working class.
The revisionist lies of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and the “Communist” Party, USA, leaders of the July 4th Coalition demonstration in Philadelphia, serve the capitalists well in their campaign to smother proletarian revolution with illusions of bourgeois democracy and appeals to national chauvinism.
This mixed-hag of reactionary social movements, including “gay liberation” and petty bourgeois “socialist feminist” groups, calls on us to “Continue the American Revolution” by “the universal application of those rights proclaimed to the world from Philadelphia two hundred years ago.” One of their main slogans is for “Democracy and Equality.”
Ignoring the scientific principle that there can be no democracy, equality, or rights except those of a particular class, these revisionists appeal to the masses’ illusions in the bourgeois heaven of capitalism under a thin veil of “anti-Imperialism” and “socialism.” By spreading these bourgeois democratic illusions among the masses, they attempt to stifle class struggle.
The bourgeois democratic revolution can never be continued or finished. Bourgeois democracy turned reactionary long ago. Even when it was progressive, it took its strength from the exploitation of the working class. It has had the blood of profits on its hands from the jump. These revisionists will never point out the reactionary nature of bourgeois democracy, because they stand with the monopoly capitalists in their fear of proletarian revolution.
The only way out for the working class is to make proletarian revolution to smash the capitalist state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The need to smash the capitalist state is the most fundamental Marxist lesson on the state. Following Marx, Lenin put it this way:
...all the revolutions which have occurred up to now perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.
This conclusion is the chief and fundamental point in the Marxian teaching on the state. (Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917. Peking edition)
Faith in bourgeois democracy is particularly deep here in the U.S. where capitalism perfected its “best political shell” to maintain its rip-off system. These illusions inevitably lead, in the communist and working class movements, to revisionist concepts of the capitalist state as neutral, and capable of “peaceful transition to socialism.” All this is reflected in PSP’s latest hustle on the working class: “A Bicentennial without Repression.”
We aren’t surprised when the “C”PUSA-PSP never once raise the necessity of class struggle and the revolutionary role of the working class. They raise only various economic demands and thoroughly reformist calls for liberation, divorced from the leading role of the working class in wars of national liberation and revolution.
The PSP-“C”PUSA-Guardian slogan for a “Bicentennial without Colonies” tries to cash in on the worst patriotic chauvinism among the U.S. working class. They beg the ruling class to celebrate 200 years of exploitation and almost 100 years of imperialist plunder, without colonies! But imperialism can’t exist for a moment without colonies and oppressed nations.
Like the notorious Kautsky, renegade from the communist movement during the first inter-imperialist war in 1914, these modern-day revisionists separate imperialist politics from imperialist economics, separating imperialism’s political exploitation of them. Like Kautsky, they treat national oppression as nothing but a “preferred policy” of the imperialists which they can change if we ask them.
They are no different from the outright petty bourgeois appeal of the Peoples Bicentennial Commission Rally for Economic Democracy (PBC), demonstrating in Washington D.C. and also supported by the “C”P, which calls for “Independence from Big Business” and “The Second American Revolution for a Democratic Economy.” Both celebrate two hundred years of capitalist exploitation and yearn for the return to a never-never yesteryear when capitalism was clean and huge monopoly giants didn’t straddle the globe, when every small-time capitalist had a [text missing in original – EROL]
Independence is a tremendous step forward in anti-colonial struggles. Countries want independence, nations want liberation, people want revolution!! It is our proletarian internationalist duty to support the just struggles of the colonies and oppressed nations as our own, and to support them against the oppressor nations, particularly against “our own” U.S. imperialists. But the PSP-“C”PTJSA try to make us believe that formal independence for colonies in-and-of itself can free the working class and oppressed masses of the world from the yoke of imperialism. In fact, most of imperialism’s bloody plunder today comes out of nations which are independent countries, but whose politics and economy actually remain dominated by imperialism. Haven’t PSP-“C”PUSA ever heard of the U.S. imperialists plundering pre-liberation Vietnam or the Dominican Republic?
In the Puerto Rican independence struggle, we must expose the dangers of both U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, and the treacherous role of revisionists like PSP.
PSP, like all revisionists, line up wholeheartedly in support of the other imperialist superpower, the Soviet social-imperialists. The PSP-“C”P-Guardian slander and distort the stand of the People’s Republic of China and the leadership of the correct line of the CPC under Chairman Mao Tse-tung. These revisionists sell out the revolutionary struggle of all Third World peoples, including the Puerto Rican masses, against hegemony and imperialist domination. They add to the imperialist bag of tricks by trying to deceive the masses as to the true nature of the thoroughly social-imperialist USSR. They try to cover up Soviet social-imperialism’s growing plunder in Cuba, Malaysia, Egypt, Angola, and other Third World and Second World countries.
It’s true, it is hard to tell where the crass bourgeois eulogists of the arch-imperialist Kennedys and Khruschevs and their like, of the brutal oppressors of the Afro-American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Asian and all oppressed masses ends, and where these common philistines, who from sheer stupidity or spinelessness drift with the bourgeois winds, begin. Nor is that distinction important. We must defeat in our movement an extensive and very deep ideological trend, whose origins are closely interwoven with the interests of the capitalists. Not only during the Bicentennial year, the bourgeoisie every year spends billions for the propaganda of just such national chauvinist and reactionary ideas as these revisionists of the PSP and “C”PUSA are appealing to among the masses. In this the bourgeoisie are getting a good deal, since such reactionary propaganda among the working class comes free of charge! These revisionists are truly “better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie itself!”
All appeals to U.S. patriotism in this era of imperialism and the eve of proletarian revolution are reactionary and breed chauvinism. Is this to say that we have no heritage, no national pride? Certainly not!
We love our languages and our country, and we are fighting all-round every day to raise our working class struggle to the level of proletarian revolutionary consciousness. We take pride in the tremendous resistance and revolutionary spirit of the multi-national U.S. working class and oppressed masses of the past and present. With equal enthusiasm, we support and are proud of the great heritage of struggle of the world’s people, especially the great struggles against U.S. imperialism and for national liberation of the Palestinian, Azanian, Kampuchean, Vietnamese, and all other Third World peoples. We are full of pride because the U.S. working class and oppressed masses also have created a revolutionary class, because we also have struggled to create great models of the class struggle for proletarian revolution.
In every country, there is a dominant ruling class culture and ideology, and the elements of socialist ideology. The U.S. working class, together with the entire international proletariat, holds aloft only the revolutionary traditions, which are the answer to the starvation, torture, exploitation, maiming, and degradation, to the oppression and brutality of imperialism. This is our answer to the capitalists’ Bicentennial barrage, and the revisionists fear such an answer.
We say that the only way to correctly uphold this great heritage is to call for proletarian revolution, for revolutionary war against the monopoly capitalists in their Third Century of plunder. We must expose all appeals to reactionary patriotism. Imperialism not only oppresses the U.S. working class economically and politically, but also tries to demoralize, degrade, dishonor and prostitute us by teaching us to oppress other nations and to cover up this sham with hypocritical and chauvinist patriotic phrases. Such appeals continue to hamstring the communist and working class movements, and we must fight these reactionary appeals on July 4th and in the struggles to come.
Unlike these traitors to the working class, communists understand that this build-up for capitalist “American democracy” and “national pride” is a lot of jive, and we have to answer it from the stand, viewpoint, and method of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought! With the ruling class spending so much time and effort, twisting the revolutionary traditions of the U.S. masses to meet their ends, communists and workers have to take a scientific look at U.S. history. We must define exactly what we uphold, and what we condemn.
The focus of the whole Bicentennial campaign is 1776, the War of Independence against British colonialism. The ruling class is doing everything they can to twist and distort the history of the class struggle of this first and revolutionary epoch in capitalism’s history, in order to build up U.S. monopoly capitalism today.
The foundations of capitalism were steeped in the blood of class oppression. The slave trade and the slave system was used to build up profits by the northern merchants, ship owners, and manufacturers. They used slavery until it got in their way of their requirements for a pool of free laborers – free to sell their labor and become wave-slaves. Early economic development was on land stolen from Native Americans, who were almost totally wiped out by the capitalists. And as the capitalists built up their hold, they encouraged immigrant workers to slave at low wages in-their shops, farms, and factories and to blaze the trails and bust the sod of the frontier.
The capitalists used the peasants and workers from Europe as their shock troops in expanding their control across the continent. Besides Africans, other non-European immigrants – Mexicans and Chinese – were cruelly exploited in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, and then forced into menial jobs, and even run out of the country. The rise of capitalist rule, in its progressive stage, meant forced labor, starvation and sickness for the U.S. workers, and inflamed national oppression and chauvinism on the oppressed nationalities. Capitalism arose on this. This brutal reality of capitalist rule was and still is covered over with talk of “freedom and equality,” “justice for all and so on.
This was the background for the U.S. War of Independence. As Marx said, capitalism comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
From the proletarian standpoint, the bourgeois democratic revolution against British colonialism was historically progressive because the consolidation of capitalism opened up the broadest field for the growth and political development of the working class and its class struggle to overthrow capitalism. Lenin wrote:
...we have no illusions about the significance of broad democracy. No democracy in the world can eliminate the class struggle and the omnipotence of money. It is not this that it makes the class struggle broad, open and conscious. (Lenin, “The Successes of the American Workers”, 1912. Collected Works, Vol. 18. Lenin on the USA, p. 47)
The War of Independence was, as Lenin said, “...one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars...That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery...” (“Letter to American Workers”, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28). The war was fought by the American people to win independence. The leaders, and those who took power, were the merchant capitalists of the North and the big slave, plantation-owning class of the South. They used the words “freedom,” “equality,” and “inalienable rights” to draw the masses into battle for bourgeois democracy, as well as to hide the true nature of their rule, the rule of capital.
The War of Independence was a bourgeois democratic revolution against the reaction and oppression of feudalism and colonialism. It was a violent revolutionary war waged directly by the masses. Workers, small farmers, and handicraftsmen were its main force. Women and Afro-American slaves also made great contributions to the struggle. Despite the capitalists’ and plantation owners’ strict prohibitions against their fighting in the war, 5,000 Afro-Americans fought for independence.
Ruling colonialist England held down the growth of American capitalism, restricting and monopolizing the growth of manufacture, land settlement, and trade, as well as the politics and culture of the emerging nation.
By the middle of the 18th.century, the battle was sharpening between the British colonialists and the rising capitalist class in North America, which demanded the development of the national economy.
The masses spontaneously built many revolutionary independence organizations. Handicraftsmen, small farmers, small shop owners, seamen, and fishermen organized the Sons of Liberty, which carried out revolutionary activities such as the storming of the British Governor’s mansion in New York. The Daughters of Liberty spearheaded the widespread boycotts against British goods.
After the Boston massacre on March 5, 1770, where 5 American protesters were shot down by British troops, mass protest and rallies were held in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Georgia. This marked a turning point in the formation of nationwide resistance organizations, since up until then they had been isolated in the separate colonies. Counties and towns throughout the colonies began setting up revolutionary headquarters and militias, often with the troops electing their own officers.
In response to the struggle of the masses for political rights, all thirteen colonies established the bourgeois representative system. Because the capitalists and landowning classes had the economic power over the embryonic working class, the Congress was overwhelmingly composed of these classes. By the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the only representatives in Philadelphia were bourgeois attorneys, big merchants, some plantation slave owners and a few petty bourgeois professionals. “The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was an extension of bourgeois property rights, the right to invest and make a profit.
But as Engels taught: “The demand for equality in the mouth of the proletariat...[in one of its aspects] has arisen as a reaction against the bourgeois demand for equality, drawing more or less correct and far-reaching demands from this bourgeois demand, and serving an agitational means in order to stir up the worker, against the capitalist’s own assertions... (Engels, Anti-Duhring)
It was the revolutionary masses in almost every case who pushed for the organization of the rebellion against colonial oppression and who fought and paid for it with their lives.
Again, hesitancy on the part of the merchant capitalists and landowning class was1 overcome by the resoluteness of the masses in building revolutionary organizations at the local level, such as the committees of correspondence and security.
Lexington and Concord are examples of the swift organization and revolutionary fervor of the people, who in two days’ time massed 20,000 militia, armed and ready. Time and again, the swiftness with which mass strikes and shop closings were organized against the British demonstrated the power of unity of the workers, craftsmen, peasants, and slaves. Nationwide reaction to the colonial administration’s Acts of Intolerance against the port of Boston saw Boston laborers refuse to build quarters for British troops, New York workers refuse to scab, and the whole nation sending supplies into the besieged port.
The War of Independence greatly sharpened the class struggle in the U.S. During the War and in the following recovery, the ruling classes stepped up their exploitation of the masses. Resistance increased in the rise of grassroots rebellions among workers, small farmers, handicraftsmen, and slaves.
This came out sharply in the passage of the Constitution itself, which was a tool of the ruling classes to consolidate the state machinery and their rule. The Constitution recognized slavery, denied women the right to hold property or vote, and above all consolidated capitalism.
The original draft in 1787 didn’t even include the Bill of Rights, saying nothing about freedom of speech, press, belief, etc. Only because of the widespread and strong protest of the masses and the influence of the French bourgeois revolution was the Bill of Rights added later. The amended Constitution was historically progressive, and the amendments were one of the partial gains of the U.S. masses in the Independence War.
By the mid-nineteenth century, there were still feudal remnants within capitalism – the brutal slave trade and plantation system of the South. The development of U.S. capitalism to a large extent was dependent on the enslavement and trading of Afro-Americans. As Chairman Mao says:
The evil system of colonialism and imperialism rose up following the enslavement and trading of Afro-American people, it will also end with the complete liberation of Afro-American people. (“Statement in Support of the Just Struggles of the U.S. Black People Against the Racial Discrimination of U.S. Imperialism,” People’s Daily, 1963.8.9)
While in the 1770’s, the U.S. and the world’s working class was small, new-born, and politically inexperienced. By the Civil War, the U.S. workers and masses were far more organized and class conscious. At that time, Marxism, the working class science, the theory of scientific socialism, was being developed by Marx and Engels.
By then, the working class was organizing into trade unions, and many entire unions signed up into the Union Army. In fact, workers made up almost half of the Army. Workers in Britain fully supported the North and demanded that the pro-slavery British government stop its support for the South and stay out of the war.
Communists played an active, leading role. Marx and Engels and the First International they organized were leading many workers’ struggles in Europe and the U.S. During the Civil War, they issued the slogan “Death to Slavery!” and demanded uncompromising struggle, criticizing the vacillations of the northern U.S. capitalists. Joseph Weydemeyer, a German immigrant to the U.S. and a communist and member of the International, served as a colonel in the Union Army.
The Afro-American masses played a tremendous role. They organized hundreds o slave revolts behind the lines, along with the Underground Railroad. Over 200,000 Afro-Americans fought in the Union Army, against the suppression by the capitalists. These few examples show the tremendous political advances the U.S. masses have made since the 1700’s, because of their heroic resistance to oppression.
After the consolidation of bourgeois democracy in the Civil War, capitalism entered the second epoch of leveling off and transition to its decline. After the Civil War the capitalist class was firmly in control. Toward the end of the 1800s, the economic system developed from ordinary capitalism to monopoly capitalism, or imperialism. The last of the Indian wars was in 1890. And by this time, too, the freed slaves in the South had been forced back into the semi-slavery of the share-cropping system. Big depressions in the 1870s and 1890s showed the weakness underlying the growth of big monopolies, or trusts, in steel and other basic production.
It was during this epoch that the historic struggle for the eight hour day began and was carried to victory by the U.S. working class. The rise of the Second International, giving communist leadership to the sharpening working class struggle mark this transitional stage, in which bourgeois democracy was turning reactionary.
The third epoch of bourgeois democracy – imperialism and the eve of proletarian revolution – exposes the thoroughly reactionary character of capitalism.
Due to the crisis of overproduction, monopoly capitalism was forced to seek new markets. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the entrance of the U.S. bourgeoisie as an imperialist power on the world scene. By World War I, the U.S. had the most powerful economy in the world. And by the end of World War II, the U.S. ruling class was the leading center of international monopoly capitalism. The European powers – Britain, France and Germany – and Japan were ruined in two world wars. The colonial empires of these old powers came under the control of the U.S. ruling class. Based on their economic and political rule over the workers and oppressed nationalities here at home, the U.S. monopoly capitalists had moved to a point of world domination. Or nearly so.
Nearly so, because the world’s peoples rose up everywhere to fight the monopoly capitalist vultures. The progressive days of capitalist rule were long gone. When imperialism became established on a world scale at the turn of the century, the historic yet bloody and brutal role of capitalism had come to a close.
The First World War lead to the first successful proletarian revolution, the creation of the first socialist state, and spurred national liberation struggles.
The Second World War led to the creation of the socialist camp and to the world-wide spread of national liberation struggles.
And so, over against the rule of imperialism has grown the rising, victorious struggles of the world’s workers and oppressed peoples. Throughout this century revolutions and national liberation wars have cut down the area on which imperialism can feed, thereby lessening the danger of world war. But in recent years, since capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union, we are faced with a new and dangerous situation. New in form, but in reality it’s the same inter-imperialist rivalry that led to World Wars I and II. The Soviet Union is now the rising imperialist power. Seeking to expand wherever it can, like Nazi Germany in the past, it is the most dangerous source of a new world war. The two superpowers contend and stir up trouble everywhere.
Before, American patriotism was progressive because it was aimed against the British colonialists. Today, it is nothing but imperialist chauvinism. It is an ideological weapon of the monopoly capitalists for preparing for war against the oppressed nations and world war against the Soviet Union, an imperialist super-power.
Before, bourgeois democracy was progressive because it was aimed against feudalism, colonialism, and slavery. Today, it is a stranglehold on the workers’ movement. In today’s situation of two contending trends, of proletarian revolution and the trend toward fascism and world war, bourgeois democracy is nothing but a dead weight to hold revolution down while providing soil for the growth of fascism.
Just because bourgeois democracy once was progressive, the ruling class can try to use it to fool people today and smother the workers’ movement.
Lenin said:
Without parliamentarism, without an electoral system, this development of the working classes would have been impossible. That is why all these things have acquired such importance in the eyes of the broad masses of people. That is why a radical change seems to be so difficult. It is not only the conscious hypocrites, scientists and priests that uphold and defend the bourgeois lie that the state is free and that it is its mission to defend the interests of all; so also do a large number of people who sincerely adhere to the old prejudices and who cannot understand the transition from the old capitalist society to Socialism. (Lenin, The State, 1919, Peking e. p. 22)
Working in the Rich Off Our Backs-July 4th Coalition, the Revolutionary Communist Party is also holding its own demonstration in Philadelphia under the main slogan, “We’ve Carried the Rich for 200 Years – Let’s Get Them Off Our Backs!”
This “rich off our backs” slogan reflects the rock-bottom, right opportunist politics that the RCP is trying to build on. Their whole Bicentennial campaign is solid economism.
The call for their demonstration by the Rich Off Our Backs Coalition completely ignores the existence of chattel slavery in the history of the U.S., the existence of a world-wide system of imperialism, one of whose centers is the U.S. superpower. The call is pure anti-rich, anti-monopoly populism.
Yet with this, and with declarations like their “rich off our backs” slogan, the RCP says they are out to build a “conscious movement of the working class against capital.” (Revolution, 4-76). We just want to ask, what kind of consciousness? Communist consciousness or militant economism?
Lenin wrote:
Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected - unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic [communist] point of view and no other. (Lenin, What is To Be Done?)
Coming from their solid right opportunism, the RCP isn’t doing any real communist propaganda around the Bicentennial.
In Revolution they repeatedly claim that the demonstration will “point the finger of blame at the capitalist class and indict them for their crimes,” “saying No! – saying that the rule of the rich doesn’t cut it – saying ’Get off our backs,’” throwing the bourgeoisie’s lies of ’common interests’ back in their faces,” waging the battle “against capital” and “against their system.”
But they never raise the communist solution, for they never once even mention the task of making proletarian revolution to smash the capitalist state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is not only tailing what the masses already know, but also objectively pushing the same garbage as those petty bourgeois hippie-radicals and right-wing populists who are with the PSP-“C”PUSA. This is their unbridled, right opportunism!
In place of politics, the RCP are trying to get over with a bunch of flashy stunts and gimmicks. This is what their Statue of Liberty takeovers and numbers-game approach to their demonstration are all about. A bourgeois publicity campaign!
Instead of moving forward to higher level political workers’ demonstrations in 1976, openly led by Communists, they are moving back to the 196O’s anti-war, “anti-establishment” level politics. Without communist politics, their July 4th demonstration will be nothing but a throwback to the tradition of anti-war moratoriums and radical student demonstrations.
In raising the question of imperialist war to the masses, the RCP’s imperialist chauvinist character is exposed to the bone. Throughout their economist propaganda, like “On the Slogan ’We Won’t Fight Another Rich Man’s War’” (Revolution, 6-76), never do they uphold the proletarian internationalism of supporting Third World liberation movements.
The two superpowers’ preparations for world war and the war itself will mean tremendous suffering for workers and oppressed people around the world. The Third World countries will be the battlegrounds for much of those preparations, just as the superpowers are contending today in the Middle East and Angola. There is also the danger of imperialist attack on socialist countries, like the danger of Soviet social-imperialist attack on socialist China. Workers in all capitalist and imperialist countries will suffer greater exploitation and political oppression, especially in Europe, which is the focus of superpower contention for the workers in other communist countries.
U.S. Communists must raise our support for socialist countries and for national liberation struggles in the oppressed nations as an integral part of our struggle here against the growing danger of war. Victory and unity of the national liberation movements will lessen the danger of world war and create more favorable conditions for us to overthrow our bourgeoisie.
This is what RCP liquidates, as expressed in their main slogan: “We Won’t Fight Another Rich Man’s War”. This is their unbridled imperialist chauvinism!
* * *
The massive campaign the ruling class is doing around the Bicentennial shows that communists must expose thoroughly-bourgeois democratic and chauvinist ideology among the U.S. working class and the masses. This is a long-term struggle on the ideological front and an essential preparation for proletarian revolution.
Communists must cut through all the ruling class and revisionist lies about “American democracy” and “national pride” to find and promote the really revolutionary traditions of the U.S. workers, the traditions of the workers, Afro-American slaves and working people in the traditions of the War of Independence and the Civil War, and in the fight for the eight hour day.
We must use these traditions to bring communist propaganda to the workers especially to the advanced, educating them to the nature of bourgeois democracy and U.S. imperialism, and the need to smash the capitalist state.
The economism and chauvinism of the RCP and their failure to draw a clear line against the ruling class’ and revisionists’ bourgeois democratic and chauvinist lies, shows the bankruptcy of this right opportunism in the anti-revisionist communist movement.
The workers’ spontaneous disdain for the ruling class Bicentennial shows their tremendous strength and the essential weakness of capitalist rule. Through communist propaganda, Marxist Leninists will raise this beginning consciousness to win the advanced to communism and build the genuine anti-revisionist communist party of the working class!