Women comprise 51% of the working class. No party building strategy which does not explicitly put forth praxis on the women question will succeed.
Working women under capitalism are severely exploited and oppressed, more so than men. Many industries won’t hire women and there are very few training or apprenticeship programs which include them. The jobs working women usually find are the most menial and unskilled and the pay is extremely low. While all working class women are severely exploited under capitalism, national minority women are the most exploited in general. They work in the worst lowest paying jobs such as sewing, laundries, hospitals and domestic work and their pay is generally hundreds of dollars less per year than Anglo-American women.
As the basis for women’s oppression is the contradiction between labor and capital, the full emancipation of women is possible only through the proletarian class struggle to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and the building of socialism. In this struggle for socialism, it is necessary for women to take a leading role, for as Lenin said, “No socialist revolution can occur until the vast section of women take part in it.” Lenin, The Woman Question, International Publishers, 1951, p. 42.
Along with specific and conscious struggle against male supremacy within the workplaces, we completely support study and cultural work on the women question. This should include party-related groups, conferences, forums. Party cadre should actively participate in mass organizations of women in order to bring them under party leadership.
We completely support absolute democracy on the women question including
1. support for absolute democracy and equality and participation in all aspects of social production from wages to occupation to decision making,
2. the responsibility of the proletarian dictatorship leading in the organization of household labor into socialized labor, social responsibility for children and young people, and complete democracy in individual sex-love.
3. the responsibility of the party for taking the leading role in the struggle for equality by:
a. the existence of a political line
b. criticism and self-criticism within the revolutionary party on the basis of the line
c. putting forth the line in mass work, consciously training
and encouraging women to become proletarian fighters and proletarian leaders; and conscious efforts to involve women in the study of Marxist-Leninist theory
d. including the book The Women Question as a part of the MCLL study.
As an organization, we unite with the criteria Joseph Stalin put forward concerning the requirements for the existence of a nation:
A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up, manifested in a community of culture. Stalin, Selected Works, Cardinal Publishers, p. 53
We believe that there is a Negro nation within the boundaries of the United States of North America. The analysis of the Third International establishing the existence of the Negro nation is one with which we unite.
We have no evidence of a sufficient scientific basis to in any way dispute the fact that the Negro nation continues to exist. Clearly the struggle for the national liberation of the Negro nation and the territory of Puerto Rico as a nation are part of the class struggle.
As communists within the USNA, where there exists an Anglo-American majority, we uphold our absolute responsibility to support the right of secession of the Negro nation and the Puerto Rican nation.
The weight of emphasis in the internationalist education of the workers in the oppressing countries must necessarily consist in their advocating and upholding freedom of secession for oppressed countries. Without this there can be no internationalism. It is our right and duty to treat every Social-Democrat of an oppressing nation who fails to conduct such propaganda as an imperialist and a scoundrel. This is an absolute demand, even if the chance of secession being possible and ’feasible’ before the introduction of socialism
be only one in a thousand...
...
People who have not gone thoroughly into the question think
there is a ’contradiction’ in Social-Democrats of oppressing
nations insisting on ’freedom of secession,’ while Social-
Democrats of oppressed nations insist on ’freedom of union.’
However, a little reflection will show that there is not, and
cannot be, any other road leading from the given situation to
internationalism and the amalgamation of nations, any other
road to this goal. Stalin, Foundations of Leninism (Peking Edition) pp. 80, 81
On the question of whether there is a Chicano nation in the Southwest and whether we have the responsibility to support the right of regional autonomy for the Southwest, we have amassed insufficient information to presently take any position. We understand that we have the absolute responsibility to begin that investigation and will unite with other communist organizations at the moment we have come to understand the scientific basis for that conclusion. A specific addition passed in our convention includes some specifics of the analysis of the Third International.
It is, however, another matter if it is not a case of the right of the oppressed nation concerned to separate or to maintain governmental contact, but if the question is treated on its merits: whether it is to work for state separation, whether it is to struggle for this or not. This is another question, on which the stand of the Communists must vary according to the concrete conditions. If the proletariat has come into power in the United States, the Communist Negroes will not come out for but against separation on the Negro Republic from federation with the United States. But the right of the Negroes to governmental separation will be unconditionally realized by the Communist Party? it will unconditionally give the Negro population of the Black Belt freedom of choice even in this question. Only when the proletariat has come into power in the United States the Communists will carry on propaganda among the working masses of the Negro population against separation, in order to convince them that it is much better and in the interest of the Negro Nation for the Black Belt to be a free republic, where the Negro majority has complete right of self-determination but remains governmentally federated with the great proletarian republic of the United States. The bourgeois counter-revolution, on the other hand, will then be interested in boosting the separation tendencies in the ranks an the various nationalities in order to utilize separatist nationalism as a barrier for the bourgeois counter-revolution against the consolidation if the proletarian dictatorship.
But the question at the present time is not this. As long as capitalism rules in the United States the Communist cannot come out against governmental separation of the Negro zone from the United States. They recognize that this separation from the imperialist United States would be preferable, from the standpoint of the national
interests of the Negro population, to their present oppressed state, and therefore, the Communists are ready at any time to offer all their support if only the working masses of the Negro population are ready to take up the struggle for governmental independence of the Black Belt. At the present time [1928] however, the situation in the national struggle in the South is not, such as to win mass support of the working Negroes for this separatist struggle and it is not the task of Communists to call upon them to separate, without taking into consideration the existing situation and the desires of the Negro masses. Negro National Colonial Question, Communist League, pp. 117, 118
The Motor City Labor League takes Marxism-Leninism as the theoretical basis guiding its thinking and action.
The organizational principle of the Motor City Labor League is democratic centralism.
The whole organization must observe unified disciplines: The individual is subordinate to the organization, the minority is subordinate to the majority, the lower level is subordinate to the higher level, and the entire organization is subordinate to the Central Committee.
We have heard that a significant part of the organization under the leadership of TZ and XY has now switched its position on whether the MCLL should participate in the continuations committee. We welcome these kind of changes in that they represent real political change and a breakdown of small group mentality. But it is inadequate to say that therefore the political questions are eliminated. We must continue to press for political clarity. “Elastic resolutions” which in any way gloss over the fundamental questions which face revolutionaries at this time must be totally eliminated.
The political line which must be developed has 3 aspects: the primacy of party building, anti-revisionism, and the necessity for the study of Marxism-Leninism which demands a pull back from many programs and activities. The failure of any one of these tasks will represent a failure of “revolutionary will” and inevitably take us back to old patterns and habits.