Preface

The Road to Socialism USA is the Program of the Communist Party USA, adopted in 2005 and updated by our 100th Anniversary Convention in 2019 in Chicago. It offers our view of the path from the struggles of the present all the way to socialism, a strategy of struggle, unity, reform, and revolution.

All of humanity is faced with multiple, interlocking crises–in the economy, in our shared environment, in extreme weather disasters, in the growing danger of pandemics. These crises expose the rampant income inequality, the disparate impacts of these crises on those facing

exploitation and oppression, and, in the U.S. especially, the inhumane lack of health care for all.

These are crises of capitalism, an inhumane, exploitative, oppressive economic system of greed. In the present we struggle to improve the lives of workers and poor people, in our country and around the globe. Ultimately, to solve the challenges facing humanity, we need to replace capitalism with socialism, a system of cooperation, democracy, and equality.

The world is changing around us. As we adopted this program, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic exploded around us. This pandemic has laid bare the economic weakness of capitalism. The system is unable to adequately compensate workers for lost income, unable to deal with the economic devastation for both small businesses that crash with only a few weeks of being shut down and the workers who are laid off as a result, unable to take the necessary concerted collective action when saddled with a financial system geared only to endless profit-taking instead of prioritizing the health of the entire population.

An economic system that demands death for seniors in order to “restart the economy” is a system that is morally and economically bankrupt. The immediate crises of health care and the economy are intertwined with the long-range crisis of climate change and the need for fundamental transformation. Capitalism is a cause of much of the problems we face, and is also the main obstacle to finding real and lasting solutions. We need a system that prioritizes the needs of the people before the greed of the few, the 1%.

The ultimate results of the pandemic, in lives lost, in economic devastation for billions of workers, in massive political repercussions for the ineptitude and criminality of the Trump administration’s response, will not be understood for some time. We don’t yet know enough to adequately address the crisis and its effects in this program. We will amend the program to account for those changes as both the total impact of the problems and the struggles to address and solve them become clear.

We stand with the workers of our country, and the working class of the whole world, for health care for all, for an end to income inequality, against racism, sexism, and all injustice. Join with us!

The Road to Socialism USA: Unity for Peace, Democracy, Jobs, and Equality

I Introduction

II Capitalism, Exploitation, & Oppression

Present Features of Capitalism

Capitalism Versus the Environment

III The Working Class, Class Struggle, and Forces for Progress

The Working Class and the Trade Union Movement

Special Oppression & Exploitation

The Complexity and Interconnection of National and Racial Oppression

Multiracial, Multinational Unity for Full Equality and Against Racism—Core Forces for Progress

African Americans

Mexican Americans

Puerto Ricans

Native Peoples

Other Indigenous Peoples

Immigrants

Muslims and Middle Eastern Peoples

Asians and Asian Americans

The Struggle for Full Equality for Women

Youth and Students

Additional Social Forces for Progress

LGBTQ Community

Farmers and the Rural Population

Seniors

The Jewish Community and Anti-Semitism

Social Movements for Progress

Progressive Culture

Health Care Struggles

Progressive and Democratic Religious Movements

IV The Democratic Struggle

V Unity Against the Extreme Right

The Extreme Right

The Other Capitalist Camp

Defeating the Extreme Right

VI Building the Anti-Monopoly Coalition

An Anti-Monopoly Program

A Labor-led People’s Party

The Left in the Anti-Monopoly Coalition

VII The Revolutionary Transition to Working People’s Power

VIII International Capital versus International Solidarity

Capitalism in the Era of Monopoly and Imperialism

The International Front for Peace and Progress

International Working Class Solidarity

IX Socialism in the USA

X The Role of the Communist Party

I Introduction

A better world is both possible and essential for human survival. Working class people around the world need a future without war, racism, exploitation, inequality, environmental destruction, and poverty. Through growing consciousness and experience in struggles on the job and in our communities, we strive to build a brighter future based on democracy, peace, justice, equality, cooperation, a healthy environment, and meeting human needs. That future is socialism, a system in which working-class people control their own lives and destinies. The Communist Party USA is dedicated to the struggle for socialism in this country and peace throughout the world. This is our program.

Millions of working people have the power—if organized and united—to govern this country and create a government of, by, and for the people. The people of our country, suffering from an exploitative, oppressive economic system, have the right and responsibility to alter or abolish it. We can remove corporate financial donors from the election process, throw the speculators out of the banks, breakup or nationalize “too big to fail” banks, eject CEOs from their golden parachutes, and elect honest working people to represent us in government instead of corporate lawyers, multimillionaires, and billionaires.

What socialism could look like

Socialism, with the active participation of millions, will usher in a new era. The great wealth of the U.S. will for the first time be used to benefit all people. Democratic rights will be guaranteed and expanded. Racial, gender, and social equality will be the basis of domestic policies and practices. Foreign policy will be based on mutual respect, peace, and solidarity. Socialism is not a dream but rather a necessity to improve working class people’s lives and ensure the survival of developed human civilization. Only socialism has the solutions to the problems of capitalism. The working class, the vast majority of the population, will have full political and economic power with socialism.

We, the working class and people of the United States, face tremendous problems: exploitation, oppression, racism, sexism, a deteriorating environment and infrastructure, huge budget deficits to pay for tax cuts for the 1%, and a government dominated by the most vicious elements of big capital and its political operatives. We face the problems of everyday living, making ends meet, and having a voice at work and in our communities.

We, the working people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, need socialism—a system based on people’s needs, not on corporate greed. A radical critique of capitalism and the vision of socialism form the basic ideas of the Communist Party, USA.

Our Party’s history

The United States has a rich history of radical and revolutionary struggles. Mass movements have demanded and won economic and social programs to meet some basic needs of the people, of protecting and expanding democracy, and of uniting to overcome obstacles with initiative, energy, and innovation. The Communist Party is a proud part of our country’s radical traditions. Since our founding in 1919, we have participated in the historic struggles of our class and people: for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the right to unionize, racial equality and justice through the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, peace through the anti-Vietnam War and other anti-war movements, restoring a struggle orientation to labor, and many other struggles.

Over our history, the Communist Party has helped bring dedicated working class and other progressive forces together in united action. We understand that the battles for reforms, to protect and extend democracy, and to protect hard fought gains constitute the field upon which class and socialist consciousness will be built, laying the foundation for more advanced struggles.

Problems of Inequality, Exploitation, and Oppression

Our current class divide is characterized by extreme inequality, between the CEO “earning” $10,000 per hour and the minimum wage workers who must work multiple jobs to provide for their families—all while suffering discrimination, sexual harassment, and loss of the right to unionize. Workers are losing rights due to new restrictions on voting, attacks on unions and other organizations, and eroding living standards. Working class people, as individuals, have little power in the face of the elite corporate class that controls the banks and other large, multinational corporations.

The working class, all those who depend on a payroll check—the vast majority of the people—face a relentless, vicious, opponent: the capitalist class, embedded in an amoral system: capitalism. The U.S. working class and people are oppressed by one of the most controlling, entrenched capitalist ruling classes ever, concentrating enormous political, economic, and military power in the hands of a few transnational corporations, led by global finance banks and the politicians who do their bidding. They exploit workers on the job and at the checkout counter, as renters and homebuyers, and as taxpayers. In addition, these corporations seek to steal, embezzle, extort, and scheme more wealth from tens of millions of working people, from small businesses and family farmers, from men, women, and children, from seniors and youth, and from the employed, underemployed, and unemployed. Barbaric methods are used to divide workers and achieve excess profits. Their foremost weapons to maintain their dominance are racism, sexism, ultra-nationalist anti-immigrant hysteria, and anticommunism. The most backward corporate and wealthy elements work hard to extend the control of the political extreme right over the government and government policy.

Every movement for change and progress challenges the power of the corporations. Workers confront corporate power daily in their workplace and in every contract negotiation. African Americans, Mexican Americans and other Latinos/Latinas, Native Americans, Asian Americans, the LGBTQ community, and women all confront corporate power when they fight for equality on the job and in their communities. Youth confront corporate power when they fight for free quality education and relief from the student debt crisis. Environmental organizations confront corporate power when they try to stop global warming, pollution, the dumping of industrial waste, or the ravaging of the remaining wilderness areas for profit.

The threat of nuclear war, which can destroy all humanity, grows with the spread of nuclear weapons, space-based weaponry, and a military doctrine that justifies their use in preemptive wars and wars without end on behalf of corporate profits. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been constantly involved in aggressive military actions both big and small. These military actions have cost millions of lives and casualties, huge material losses, as well as trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. “Defense” costs are a cash cow for the armaments industry and eat up more than half the federal budget, draining money desperately required for social needs.

Capitalists have been working for decades to reverse working-class gains, such as those won during the New Deal, as part of a global attack on workers, unions, and progressive movements and organizations.

The last decade has intensified the fight for dominance by the most reactionary section of the capitalist class. The only way to defeat this extreme right domination lies in building the broadest, most inclusive unity among our multiracial, multinational, multigender, multigenerational working class, along with the major progressive forces that are its allies. This starts with the labor movement unifying its diverse working class base and building alliances with the whole of the racially and nationally oppressed people, women, and youth. We must unite lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight people; professionals and intellectuals; seniors; the disabled; and the mass people’s movements. These include the peace, environmental, health care, education, housing, and other movements. In limited instances, splits in the ruling class appear and the less reactionary segments of the capitalist class will join the fight against the more backward sections. This all-people’s front to defeat the extreme right is in the process of developing, learning, and being tested in giant struggles: for peace, to address environmental crises, to protect social programs and services, to win health care for all, and to wrest control of all three branches of government from the stranglehold of the extreme right.

The extreme right is led by the most reactionary, militaristic, racist, antidemocratic sectors of the transnationals. They gain support for their extreme right agenda from other backward political trends, most of which are misled as to their real interests, sometimes blinded by the propaganda of fear and scapegoating, by racism, sexism, right-wing nationalism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

Our people, our country, and our environment are being destroyed by the greed of a few obscenely wealthy capitalist groupings. Our world is threatened by relentless efforts to drive wages down to the lowest level, attempts to destroy unions and all protections won by workers, the spread of toxic wastes and greenhouse gases, and imperialist war. Global capitalist trends have resulted in more child poverty, higher infant mortality rates, less health care, less quality public education, higher income inequality, epidemics of drug use and depression, and the rise of Donald Trump and other neo-fascists.

Reform and Revolution

Another world is possible. It is our job, the job of the U.S. working class to help win it. We need radical solutions, expanded democracy, and broad unity. We, the working class and our allies, need to take power from the hands of the wealthy few, their corporations, and their political operatives. We need real solutions to real problems, not the empty promises of establishment politicians and corporate bosses. We need peace, justice, and equality. We need socialism.

In constant battles over issues large and small, the working class learns that more fundamental changes are necessary to have a truly humane society. The struggles for the immediate demands and reforms needed by working people today are essential steps toward our ultimate goal of the revolutionary transformation of society and the economy, toward socialism and then communism—an even higher stage of social and economic development. Communism will be a society without exploitation, without social classes, without war, without constant attacks on our shared environment, and without any coercive apparatus, and with only such administration required to meet people’s needs, create the conditions for full democratic freedom, and for the humane development of society and the individual—for human happiness.

The appeal of a communist society is a response to the real human needs of the masses of people. Communism will enable people to set aside worries about health care and education, about losing their livelihood and their dignity. Communism will eliminate the economic insecurity of the masses of working people. Instead, it will offer us the opportunity to reach our full human potential.

Fighting Division

Racism remains one of the most potent weapons to divide the working class. Institutionalized racism provides hundreds of billions in extra profits for the capitalists every year due to the unequal pay that racially oppressed workers and women receive for work of comparable value. All workers receive lower wages when racism succeeds in dividing and disorganizing us.

In every aspect of economic and social life, African Americans, Latinas/Latinos, Native peoples, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Arabs and Middle Eastern peoples, all people of color and other nationally and racially oppressed people experience conditions riddled with the effects of racist discrimination. Racist violence and the poison of racist ideas affect all people of color no matter to which economic class they belong. Attempts to suppress and undercount the vote of African Americans, Latinas/Latinos, Native peoples, and other racially oppressed people affect the very foundation of our country’s democracy and thereby have an impact on all.

Racism permeates the police, the courts, and the prison system, perpetuating unequal sentencing, racial profiling, discriminatory enforcement, police brutality, police killings, immigrant deportations, and separation of immigrant families—even to the extent of ripping babies from their mothers’ arms.

These attacks also include growing massive government surveillance, including of activist social movements and the Left; open denial of basic rights to immigrants; and violations of the Geneva Conventions up to and including torture of prisoners. These abuses serve to maintain the grip of the capitalist class on government power. They use this power to ensure their continued ideological, economic and political dominance.

The democratic, civil, and human rights of all working class people are under constant attack. These attacks range from increasingly difficult procedures for union recognition and attempts to prevent full union participation in elections, to the absence of the right to strike or even to unionize for many public workers. They range from undercounting communities of color in the census, diluting the vote of people of color through gerrymandered political boundaries, voter suppression through voter ID laws and other means, and disenfranchisement through mass incarceration. These attacks make it difficult for working people to run for office because of the domination of corporate campaign financing and the high cost of advertising.

Working class women continue to face a considerable differential in wages for work of equal or comparable value. Women confront barriers to promotion, physical and sexual abuse, a continuing double workload in home and family life, and male supremacist ideology perpetuating unequal and often unsafe working conditions. The constant attacks on social welfare programs severely impact single women, single mothers, nationally and racially oppressed women, and all working-class women and their children. The reproductive rights of all women are continually under attack. The extreme right hypocritically projects an ideology of faux-Christian fundamentalism, promoting restrictions on the role and activity of women in society. Violence against women in the home and in society at large remains a shameful fact of life in the U.S., and a threat to the wellbeing of all.

These attacks are being met with fierce resistance. Women are not only rallying by the millions, they are running for office and winning in record numbers at all levels of government. The 2018 midterm elections resulted in the most diverse incoming group of representatives in history, including record numbers of women of color.

Youth, especially working-class and racially and nationally oppressed youth, are often subjected to segregated education and inadequately-funded public education, and increasingly priced out of higher education. Youth face school gun shootings, police harassment and violence, racism, sexism, and attacks on civil liberties. Poverty and lack of opportunity compel large numbers of young people to enter the military to face possible loss of life and limb in one war after another. Escalating environmental crises threaten their very existence. Taken together, these constitute the denial of a future for our youth.

Youth are fighting back, including the voter registration efforts led by the victims of the Parkland school shooting working against gun violence, demanding action in the streets and in the courts against climate change and the oil companies, demanding relief from crushing student debt, and supporting the rights of immigrant youth.

The crisis of the cities is chronic and growing and embraces all aspects of life. Financial burdens are steadily transferred from the federal government to the states and then to the cities, causing crippling budget deficits. As the majority of racially and nationally oppressed people live in urban areas, the crisis of the cities also reflects institutional racism. There is a chronic and growing shortage of affordable housing across the country, and a deterioration of public education, health care, mass transit, and infrastructure.

Capitalist Globalization

By the 1980s, transnational corporations dominated economic and political life in the U.S. and around much of the globe. At the same time, the conditions that capital has created contain the seeds of the destruction of the capitalist system.

Combined with capitalist globalization, there has been a series of merger and acquisition waves, forming oligopolies or monopolies in almost every industry. As a result, there is an increase in the chronic relative overproduction of commodities, unused capacity, and currency imbalances and speculation. This has led to increased levels of unemployment and underemployment in all the major capitalist powers, as well as greater instability in most developing countries. The gap between rich and poor is growing both internationally and within the major capitalist countries, rising to unprecedented levels.

The transnationals have become increasingly intertwined with the governments of the leading imperialist powers. Multistate capitalist institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and others, are dominated by the U.S. ruling class. Instead of promoting the welfare of all people, they work to politically and economically dominate developing countries and extract outrageous interest for the international banks.

Disproportions in the world’s highly interdependent economy spread and are harder to control because of the transnationals’ dominance. Regulation by any single country has less effect. International trade agreements in some cases even overrule national sovereignty in favor of the transnationals. Economies are therefore more vulnerable to supply and currency manipulations. Relative overproduction—while millions starve—and gross trade and currency imbalances are among the causes of the chronic volatility in the world capitalist economy. The result is greater instability, more severe boom-and-bust cycles such as that in 2008, and prolonged stagnation. Therefore, the contradiction between the increasingly international social character of production and distribution on the one hand and the concentration of capital among fewer and fewer of the obscenely wealthy on the other hand sharpens economic and social problems and contradictions.

This also sharpens the class struggle. The globalization of economic and social life, dominated by the transnational monopolies, requires higher levels of environmental protection, education, health care, culture, housing, and family care to produce the quantity and quality of labor now needed.

This is in contradiction to the greater quantities of capitalist profit needed to sustain the growth of the transnationals. This can only come from higher rates of exploitation of existing workers and from the exploitation of growing numbers of workers worldwide. Intensification of the class struggle and sharper attacks on the living conditions of the working class are inherent in the dominance of the transnationals. The increasing merger of the transnationals with the state in the main imperialist countries means that capitalist globalization is both an economic and a political process.

In some developed and developing capitalist countries, the labor movement has become a more militant force in both economic and political arenas. There is some renewed strengthening of socialist and other Left forces—including the communist movement—associated with the international and regional progressive social and economic forums in recent years. The movement leftward is not a simple direct movement toward socialism, Marxism, and Communist Parties. It is a multifaceted and wide-ranging process, with new left parties and political formations rising quickly in several countries.

Peace versus U.S. Imperialism

There is growing worldwide resistance to U.S. military action and to military action by other imperialist powers. There is growing recognition that U.S. policies threaten not only world peace and the environment but the very existence of humanity.

The peace front consists of overwhelming world public opinion against war and for peaceful solutions, along with organized peace and social justice movements working directly to accomplish these aims. It includes the existing socialist countries and developing countries that maintain some degree of independent policies. The U.S. extreme right defies the existing world balance of forces for peace at the expense of weakening its general international influence. The peoples of the world don’t hate the people of America, they hate the actions of U.S. imperialism.

There is also a growing resistance to U.S. international economic actions in international, bilateral, and multilateral relations, and an alliance of developing countries which resists the worst aspects of economic imperialism.

On the world scale, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa are developing as major economic and political players, providing at times a partial counter-balance to U.S. imperialism, and in some cases leading to new inter-imperialist rivalries. China’s economic growth provides an alternative to trade with imperialist countries for developing and socialist countries, including Cuba and other progressive Latin American countries.

U.S. imperialism is home to the bulk of the dominant transnational corporations. It seeks control over the entire world, including over other imperialist powers. Under extreme right political leadership, U.S. imperialism has immense instruments for winning its aims—ranging from its direct military power to its various means of economic domination and political pressure, from sanctions to bribery to ideological attacks. But even with all of these instruments, U.S. domination is slowly weakening.

The need for international working-class unity is more important than ever. We cannot rule out the danger of war between imperialist powers in the future, though the destructive effects of modern nuclear and space weaponry, the overwhelming military superiority of the U.S., and the certainty of internal political opposition all serve to discourage ambitions for direct military inter-imperialist conflict. Working people are the victims on both sides of all imperialist wars and military adventures.

The absolute and relative exploitation of the working class of modern capitalism are at unprecedented levels and continue to grow rapidly. Each transnational corporation now exploits not only its own workers in many countries and the working class of its home country, but the working class of the entire world.

The development of modern capitalism and its exploitation, oppression, and imperialist ambitions requires the strengthening of the economic and political organizations of the working class and all working people both within our country and internationally.

The global working class has common interests in or mutual understanding of, solidarity, liberation, peace, environmental sustainability, and development. We share common enemies: world imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism, its reactionary transnationals, and the governments they dominate. We support the broadest possible unity of the international working class. We also support international solidarity with other forces, peoples, and movements struggling for liberation worldwide.

A Better World

The peoples of the world need a new economic order, one which helps countries develop at the expense of imperialism, the transnationals, and the super-rich. This will require replacement of the current capitalist international economic institutions with ones led by anti-imperialist countries.

The problems facing humankind—of exploitation, oppression, environmental degradation and human survival—can only be solved, ultimately, by the elimination of the exploitative system of capitalism. Our survival depends on a transformation to socialism. The U.S. working class, with a long revolutionary history of powerful mass movements and organizations, will be the main force making this transition in our country. That means building unity for peace, for protecting and expanding democracy, for sustainability, for living-wage jobs, for universal health care, for real equality for all those who are nationally or racially oppressed and for all women, for an end to the control of the extreme right over our political institutions, and for an end to the economic rule of the transnational corporations. Building and strengthening organizations of the working class and unity with its allies, winning real unity in the course of struggle, is the path from our current struggles toward socialism.

The Communist Party USA is an organization of working class people dedicated to the fight for a better world. Our basic principles are rooted in today’s struggles, informed by our history and experience, and guided by our scientific Marxist outlook and vision of socialism. Our bedrock principles include the leading role of the working class in the struggle for social change. Working class unity is a necessity. Fighting against racism and sexism and for immigrant rights is essential to build that unity.

Members of the Communist Party work to strengthen the labor unions, civil rights, peace, youth, student, religious and other community organizations and social networks in which they participate. They promote the voice and effective participation and leadership of the working class in all struggles for progress. They promote unity with the allies of the working class in the course of fighting for the interest of the working class and common goals shared with a majority of the people of our country. Our members organize to build activism and leadership at the grassroots level.

Our Communist Party is both a political party and the organized expression of a broad political movement, and we welcome all who accept our program. Our Party brings science into the struggle for socialism—an understanding based on an examination of real life and history and brings a history of organizing action based on that understanding. The Communist Party is guided by Marxism-Leninism, the theory and practice of scientific socialism. We seek to build a powerful majority movement to transform society and put working class people in charge.

We pledge to work with everyone fighting for a better world. Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” The Communist Party USA is about changing the world.

As W. E. B. DuBois stated in his application to join the Communist Party USA, “Today I have reached my conclusion: Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism, the effort to give all men (and women) what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute; this is the only way of human life. I want to help bring that day.” for

We hope you will join with us to bring that day!

II Capitalism, Exploitation, and Oppression

The capitalist class owns the factories, agribusiness, financial institutions, distributive infrastructure, and retail giants—the means of production and distribution. This, not personal possessions, is what we mean by private property. Workers are the creators of all wealth and value not found directly in nature. Workers sell their ability to work in order to acquire the necessities of life. Capitalists buy the workers’ ability to labor but pay them only a portion of the wealth they create. Capitalists keep the surplus wealth created by workers above and beyond the cost of workers’ wages and other costs of production. This unpaid labor is appropriated by capitalists and used to achieve ever-greater profits. This surplus is the source of profit, interest, and private accumulated wealth. These profits are turned into capital, which capitalists use to further exploit the sources of all wealth—nature and the working class. Exploitation of workers for profit is inherent in capitalism and causes or exacerbates all the major social and environmental ills of our times.

Capitalists are compelled by competition and greed to seek to maximize profits. They do this by extracting a greater surplus from the unpaid labor of workers, by increasing exploitation—what capitalists often call “increasing productivity.” Under capitalism, economic development happens only if it is profitable to the individual capitalists, not because of social need or benefit.

Exploitation of workers for profit is inherent in capitalism and causes or exacerbates all the major social and environmental ills of our times. Economic globalization and advanced technology have enabled increased exploitation. With the rapid advance of technology and productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed to maximize profit and exploit new markets. In our globalized economy, capitalists export factories and even entire industries to other countries in a relentless search for the lowest wages and highest profits. This drive for profit fuels imperialism, as capitalist powers appropriate raw materials, maximize dependency, and export capital to exploit cheaper labor wherever it can be found around the globe, instigating a global race to the bottom.

Inherent in the laws of capitalism are periodic crises that cause millions of workers to lose their jobs, homes, health insurance, and pensions, as happened in 2008. Periods of stagnation and slow “recovery” from these crises drive the standards of working-class pay and conditions ever lower. After World War II the norm was one breadwinner per household, but now capital forces multiple household members to work, with parents often working second and third jobs to make ends meet. Retirement-age workers are often forced to continue working to provide food, medicine, health care, and housing for themselves and their families. Tens of millions live below the poverty level; many suffer homelessness and hunger. Public and private programs to alleviate poverty and hunger do not reach everyone and are inadequate even for those they do reach.

Capitalism uses ideological poisons to maintain the status quo. Racism remains one of the most potent weapons to divide, disarm, and confuse the working class. All workers receive lower wages when racism succeeds in dividing and disorganizing them. Racism permeates the police, judicial, and prison systems, perpetuating unequal sentencing and mass incarceration, racial profiling, discriminatory enforcement, police brutality, police killings, immigrant deportations, and the forcible separation of immigrant families.

Another potent weapon in the capitalists’ arsenal is sexism. All women are subjected to gender inequality. The constant attacks on social welfare programs, limitations on health care and reproductive rights, and wage differentials based on gender severely affect all women, but especially single mothers, nationally and racially oppressed women, and all working-class women. The reproductive rights of all women are continually under ideological and political attack, removing women’s autonomy over their own bodies and disadvantaging them in the labor market.

Capitalism uses other ideological poisons to divide the working class and allies from each other: national chauvinism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism, spread in part by huge capitalist media conglomerates, and in its most vicious forms by right-wing websites. Capitalist ideology promotes false beliefs: that capitalists rightfully earned their wealth, everyone has an equal shot at the “American dream,” poor people are merely lazy, discontent with injustice is an adolescent phase, nature takes care of itself, and capitalism is the freest and most humane economic system. The divisive ideology of individualism has a particularly strong hold in our society.

The legal system is thoroughly racist and anti–working class. U.S. prisons are bursting with millions of prisoners and “detainees,” many in for-profit prisons. As many as two-thirds of prisoners are poor people accused of non-violent crimes; many cannot afford cash bail and must rely on underfunded and low-paid public defenders. Prisoners face widespread abuse and are often forced to work for subminimum wages, replacing organized labor. Many prisoners are subject to abuse, solitary confinement, and the threat of the death penalty.

At the same time, prosecution of “white collar” capitalist criminals is at a twenty-year low, despite the damages they caused working people during the Great Recession of 2008. Billionaire criminals are not apprehended, prosecuted, or punished. Corruption, speculation, fraud, market manipulations, and theft on a massive scale are all increasing, with the approval of, and increasingly with the participation of, high ranking members of the government.

Present Features of Capitalism

A thorough understanding of capitalism, its essential features and durable conditions, and of the political balance of forces are key to guiding class and democratic struggles for progress. Exploitation of the working class has increased quantitatively and qualitatively. Automation and robotization using computer control and artificial intelligence, the “gig” or freelance economy, the looming possibility of a national right-to-work law, and the surreptitious gathering of vast amounts of data about individuals are all new weapons that monopoly capital has in its class warfare arsenal. At the same time, greater capitalist profits, which sustain the giant transnational corporations, come from the exploitation of growing numbers of workers worldwide, at the same time as they lay off workers in the U.S. and export jobs. These developments have reversed many of the gains made during the New Deal when the influence of the CPUSA was at its height, and have left workers with even less chances for healthy, dignified, and fulfilled lives.

Meanwhile, monopoly capital is doubling down on its privileges, accruing vast amounts of wealth and gaining ever greater control over the movement of capital throughout the world. Lately, the most backward elements of the capitalist class have funded, promoted, and built populist far-right white- and male-supremacist ultra-nationalist movements that attempt to divide and disable the working class. Monopoly capital strives to promote a culture of cynicism, low expectations, fatalism, violence, and distraction to hinder the working class from uniting and fighting for its own interests.

At the same time, the objective conditions that monopoly capital has created contain the seeds of its own future destruction. The grotesque economic inequalities are getting harder to hide and to rationalize; new means of communication developed by capital can be harnessed by the working class and used for its own purposes; more and more people are outraged by the links between monopoly capital and far-right-wing populist movements of nativism and white supremacy. In short, the working class is fighting back through the trade union movement and struggles for democratic and civil rights.

Capitalism versus the Environment

We cannot have a healthy humanity without a healthy natural world. Humans are part of nature and rely on the resources of nature for our very existence. We can’t continually harm major parts of the natural world without suffering the consequences.

Climate change is the most far-reaching symptom of the broader imbalance between humanity and the rest of nature. There are many environmental challenges: polluted water, air, and soil; respiratory and reproductive health problems; and disappearing animal and insect habitat, to name but a few. We are facing major adjustments to the balance between humanity and nature, which we can plan to address and ameliorate or suffer the brutal consequences of runaway CO 2 levels: rising seas, more frequent and damaging weather events, and more droughts.

Capitalism is both the major cause of these environmental challenges and the major obstacle to solving them. Environmental struggles rapidly run up against the rule of private property over our collective health and well-being. Communities faced with powerful companies dumping toxic waste into their sources of drinking water must wrestle directly with private interests. They run up against both the capitalist economic system and the politicians beholden to corporate interests.

As activists learn that the economic system must be fundamentally altered to meet the growing environmental crises, environmental activism provides a new pathway to socialist consciousness. Fixing environmental challenges requires social decision making based on the needs of society as a whole and the environment on which we depend. Private property “rights” and profits must be discarded as the main determinants on which decisions are based. In addition, if capitalism sufficiently degrades the environment, that will destroy the material basis necessary to build socialism.

Environmental issues will grow in importance and play an ever-larger role in electoral, legislative, and public policy struggles. Communities faced with powerful companies dumping toxic waste into their sources of drinking water must wrestle directly with corporate power. They run up against both the capitalist economic system and against politicians beholden to corporate interests.

Just as our politics and economy need fundamental transformation, so too does the entirety of the intersection between humanity and the rest of the natural world. We need a transformation of not only energy production but also agriculture, industrial production, transportation, distribution, waste disposal, and construction. We need immediate changes that can be won or begun under capitalism. However, permanent solutions require an environmentally conscious socialism.

We need to make personal changes as well. First and most important is for millions more people to become organized environmental activists, building alliances between the environmental movement and all other progressive movements they are part of—community groups, religious groups, unions, and more. Personal changes are most effective when part of mass campaigns that help change the habits and practices of millions of people. We are not chasing a short-lived personal purity but working for basic changes to the systems affecting all of us. Individual changes in consumption and diet can make a major contribution only when linked to changes by millions of people, and linked to changes in our systems of production, construction, and agriculture.

The environmental movement is one key element of the massive coalition that must be built to defeat the extreme-right stranglehold on too much of U.S. governance and public discourse. Environmental issues will grow in importance and play an ever-larger role in electoral, legislative, and public policy struggles. Youth especially have a vested interest in finding real solutions for their future, the kind that only socialism can permanently institute.

III The Working Class, Class Struggle, and Forces for Progress

The Working Class and the Trade Union Movement

Workers always seek to solve the chronic exploitation and oppression they face. Whether individual workers are conscious of it yet or not, the ultimate outcome of this struggle is socialism. To determine the strategy and tactics required for immediate progress and more basic change, it is necessary to be clear about what propels progressive change, and about which struggles, classes, and social forces have the potential to play decisive roles. The history of our country confirms the Marxist assertion that the struggle of our multi-racial, multi-national, multi-gender, young and old U.S. working class against the capitalist class is the chief driving force for fundamental progressive change.

The working class is compelled to resist increased exploitation. It seeks to improve living conditions by increasing workers’ share of the new value they create, at the expense of the capitalists. This class struggle takes place in the workplaces where goods and services—commodities—are produced. This is a crucial part of the economic side of the class struggle.

The class struggle is not only the fight over wages, hours, benefits, working conditions, job security, and jobs. It also includes an endless variety of other forms for fighting specific battles: resisting speed-up, picketing, negotiating contracts, waging strikes (even general strikes), demonstrating, boycotting products, lobbying for pro-labor legislation, and working on elections. When workers struggle against the capitalist class or any part of it on any issue with the aim of improving or defending their lives, it is part of the class struggle. In every area of workers’ lives, the fight is to defend themselves and their families from corporate assault.

The class struggle also takes place in the political arena. It plays out in struggles over governmental action or inaction, over social spending and tax policy, over elections, and ultimately over which class or formation of class and social forces becomes dominant in holding and exercising political power. The class struggle also exists in the realm of ideology, between social and political ideas and values that justify the political and economic policies of the contending classes.

Workers struggle to sustain themselves and their families. Every wheel that turns, every product produced, every service provided, is done by workers. Workers produce all wealth, but much of the value they produce is taken, in the form of profit-taking or exploitation by the capitalist class. Workers can run society without capitalists, but capitalists cannot function without workers. The working class is our society’s only revolutionary class able, with its allies, to establish a new, better, more just society for all: socialism.

The working class is made up of all who must labor to make a living and their families. It constitutes the great bulk of the country’s population and is continually growing. Some are low-wage workers, others have won higher wages through struggle; some are contingent workers, freelance workers, or part-time workers, but all are workers. Service workers, transportation workers, highly-trained workers, teachers, and laid-off workers and retirees are all part of the working class. The working class is being joined by some who were once independent professionals—including doctors and engineers—but are now employees of vast corporations. Everyone who must make their living from wages and salaries, except for the CEOs and managers “earning” exorbitant salaries, is part of the working class.

The working class is diverse. It includes skilled and unskilled labor, white-collar and blue-collar workers, people of all ages, the organized and unorganized, and the employed, underemployed, and unemployed. Our working class is almost evenly composed of men and women. Most nationally and racially oppressed communities are more heavily working class and together constitute a major segment of the working class, one that is rapidly increasing in number.

Ours is a single working class, a class whose unity is growing and deepening as its consciousness of itself develops and strengthens. It reaches full class and socialist consciousness only when it understands itself as the central social force that in alliance with other social forces can and must win power and construct socialism. In the words of the Communist Manifesto, the working class is “the only truly revolutionary class” because only the working class has an interest in ending capitalism and replacing it with socialism. These qualities and experiences make the working class fertile ground for the ideas of socialism and Marxism, and for Communist Party membership.

The working class’s large size and experience of collective labor and collective struggle prepare it to lead the struggle for progress along with its allies. The working class and its allies are the only force capable of becoming the general leader of the struggle for full social progress and socialism. It is the workers who turn every wheel, manufacture every product, and provide every service. In doing so, they produce all wealth, but the majority of value they produce is taken, in the form of profit by the capitalist class. The capitalists depend on workers to create the wealth they appropriate, giving the workers not only a strategic role in the production process but also great potential power.

Marx declared, “Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” From the smallest of class struggles to the largest, unity within the working class is key to victory. The experience of working people in their workplaces and neighborhoods demonstrates that only by joining together to fight for their common interests and demands can they win. This is the guiding principle of all unions and people’s organizations: in unity is strength.

As united as the working class itself needs to be, it cannot be the sole force in these struggles, because its opponents at each stage are powerful, with great resources at their command. Many of the key needs of working people cannot be won by the trade union movement or the working class alone. There are other major social forces whose interests substantially parallel those of the working class. Unions must engage in coalitions with community, civil rights, women’s, student, seniors’, and other organizations to increase their combined ability to win against a powerful enemy. From strike struggles to legislative initiatives to the fight for the White House, labor must build unity with these forces to achieve progress. Building unity requires relationships of equality, trust, mutual respect, and understanding. There is a constant need to reinforce and defend this unity.

The new stage of capitalist globalization makes unity even more imperative. As in the past, when capital’s production expands to new, wider forms, labor’s organization must do so as well, or lose its leverage in the fight against capital. Globalization demands a new level of labor internationalism to unite workers worldwide, regardless of nationality or ideology, to jointly confront our common enemy. In the U.S., the common struggle against capitalist globalization has ushered in an advanced phase of working unity between the labor movement, civil rights movements, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the student movement, and others.

Workers organizations ranging from unions to labor-community coalitions bring to the people’s movement their strength, experience in the struggle, infrastructure, context, and a fighting orientation. In turn, the wider people’s movements bring a much-needed infusion of youth, enthusiasm, and optimism, as well as a history of fighting for equality and the advancement of democracy. Organized labor increasingly recognizes the strength and experience brought to the table by the movements of the racially and nationally oppressed, women, and youth.

When all sectors of the people’s movement come together with labor’s militant leadership, huge gains in the fight against corporate control can be made, as in the New Deal during the 1930s. Our nation’s people are still enjoying the benefits of the gains from that period. Unity with the active multiracial, multinational, multigender, young and old, gay and straight, native and immigrant working class will position us to fight successfully for state power to establish a more just society: socialism. Only by joining together can the working class and its allies win the larger struggles for dignity, rights, and power. This principle is true not just in struggles in the workplace, on the campus, or in neighborhoods but also at the ballot box, in larger political and social struggles, and in the battle for the hearts and minds of the public.

Unity is not a given. One of the major obstacles to working class unity is racism, which is promoted by the capitalist class and must be fought by all. Unity depends on substantial numbers of white workers participating in the fight for full equality and against racism, based on an understanding of how racism injures and lowers the wages and living conditions of all workers. Another major obstacle to working-class unity is capitalist class–promoted misogyny and male supremacy. Misogyny, the hatred and disrespect of women, wage discrimination, employment segregation, and male supremacy must be fought by all—full unity will be built only when substantial numbers of working-class men participate in the fight for full equality and against misogyny and male supremacy based on an understanding of their self-interest and the interest of the whole of the working class in real class unity.

The labor movement is the organized sector of the working class and is the key strategic factor to achieving fundamental social change. The diversity of the labor movement is growing in composition and leadership. The labor movement is no longer limited to “pure and simple” trade union struggles. It plays a major, often leading role, in legislative and electoral struggles and has developed a large and increasingly independent labor electoral apparatus. Labor has increasingly become one of the leading forces for progress on many social issues. It has developed ongoing relationships with organizations of the nationally and racially oppressed, women, students, and others. It is increasingly seeking forms of international labor cooperation. Especially since the election of Donald Trump, many unions are encouraging and training their members to run for political office at all levels of government to represent the interests of working-class people. A related development is the large number of women and youth of many racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds, including those who support the idea of socialism, stepping forward to run for public office. New forms of working-class organization, such as the Fight for Fifteen and Internet-based organizing efforts, mobilize workers in different ways than the union movement of old and add to the organized power of the class.

Unions have lost membership due to massive corporate and government attacks. Speeding up the organization of unorganized workers is one of the most important challenges to labor and all progressive forces. For nation-wide success in new organizing, unity of the labor movement is crucial, overcoming narrow and sectarian interests in the interests of the working class as a whole. Organizing the unorganized by itself, however, is not sufficient—continuing to win unions and their memberships to class-struggle trade unionism and to broad trade-union unity is also required. The broad people’s movement is dependent upon organized labor’s ability to rebuild its strength.

Nearly a century ago, in times of tremendous struggle, communists and socialists, working with allies, helped bring the modern union movement into being, playing key roles not only in organizing but in helping workers then win victories that benefit all. Communists have a special responsibility to help labor win the fight to save and rebuild our nation’s labor movement, the first line of defense for our nation’s workers.

To this end, the activities of the Communist Party aim to:

Build broad unity to achieve the strategic and tactical goals of the working class.

Bring forward working-class leadership and the interests of the working class in all progressive movements. National progressive coalitions, community-based organizations in working-class communities, and student-labor coalitions are all forms that bring working-class leadership to the broader movement.

Build full class and socialist consciousness. It is the job of Communists, while engaged with others in active struggle, to show how all struggles have common aspects and common interests, to show the interests of organized labor and all the people’s movements in uniting against our common capitalist enemies.

Special Oppression and Exploitation

The most important allies of the working class are those who suffer special oppression due to capitalism and are also overwhelmingly members of the working class. Special oppression is discrimination, extra-exploitation, and social domination based on race, nationality, gender, and/or age. The racially and nationally oppressed, women, youth, and immigrants all face types of special oppression, as do seniors, the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer (LGBTQ) community, and the disabled and mentally ill. All specially oppressed social groups are in their majority working class, but also include some members of other classes. Those who are part of the working class suffer the exploitation and social problems of all other workers and, in addition, suffer from special oppression that is not solely based on class, such as racism, national discrimination, and male supremacy. Some people experience triple and quadruple oppression, since they face multiple layers of intense exploitation, discrimination, and social domination.

Many features of special oppression cut across class lines and affect to some degree all members of each oppressed social group. Oppression affects not only those who are workers or part of professional and small business groups but to some extent even those from sections of the capitalist class. This common experience of oppression creates a wide basis for unity within each oppressed social group and among all groups facing discrimination and social domination.

Capitalists directly gain from special oppression. Extra profits to the tune of many hundreds of billions of dollars per year are extracted by the special oppression and exploitation of the working-class section of each group and from the disunity caused among the entire working class. Capitalists and their apologists use ideological poison to justify and cover up both the special oppression and the exploitation of all workers. Working-class members of specially oppressed peoples and groups play a key role in building alliances between the working class and oppressed groups, since they are an important part of both.

The Complexity and Interconnection of National and Racial Oppression

Our discussion of national and racial oppression is not intended to be comprehensive or limiting. These are complex issues, intertwined with each other and with class exploitation and oppression. There are variations in national oppression, not just broad categories—for example, different Native Indian nations have distinct histories, cultures, languages, resources, treaties, and territories, so within Native Indian communities there are many different national questions, not one. Within groups, too, there are variations—for example, people of Japanese descent whose ancestors came to the U.S. during the latter part of the 1800s do not face identical issues as those who came following World War II. People from Caribbean countries who have English as their first language have different issues than those from the Caribbean whose first language is Spanish or French. We can’t ignore or reduce these complexities, we have to understand, appreciate, and respond to them in order to create a solid basis for strong working class unity and to advance the power of the working class with its allies.

People of many nationalities face special oppression related to their national origins—issues of language, culture, history, immigration rights and status, professional status or lack thereof, historical and colonial oppression, the various reasons and pressures for their immigration, and more. Another complexity is that though most of the discrimination following the terrorist attacks on the U.S is directed at Arab and Middle Eastern peoples; many Latinos/Latinas face racial profiling due to claims that they “look” like people from the Middle East. African immigrants have their own specific nationality issues but also face the generalized racial discrimination directed against African Americans due to skin color. Mexican Americans whose families have been citizens for centuries face harassment from immigration authorities due to racist assumptions based on skin color.

We can’t ignore or reduce these complexities, nor do we artificially separate discrimination and oppression into either national or racial categories. Instead our purpose is to understand the interconnections of these categories and the different oppressions faced by individuals and peoples. Understanding, appreciating, and responding to these categories will help create a solid basis for strong working-class unity.

Multiracial, Multinational Unity for Full Equality and Against Racism—Core Forces for Progress

Some of the foremost allies of the working class, through the various stages of struggle all the way to socialism, are the nationally and racially oppressed peoples. They live and work in every region, in every state, and in every major city. Likewise, the working class is the most multiracial, multinational entity in our society. Among the nationally and racially oppressed are African Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and other Latino peoples, Native peoples, Muslims, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Arabic and Middle Eastern peoples, and many groups of immigrants and their descendants.

Racism is one of the most important weapons the ruling class uses to weaken the unity within the working class itself and the relationship between the working class as a whole and nationally and racially oppressed peoples. A classic divide-and-conquer tactic, racism is used to spread division and weaken all movements and struggles. Against this division, we must build multiracial unity—with the struggle against racism and the fight for full equality at its core.

Racism in its many forms continues to play a negative but central role in every aspect of U.S. life, including keeping the extreme right in power, producing extra profits, and developing, justifying, and maintaining institutionalized discrimination and oppression.

From its inception, the United States was built on racism. From the displacement and near genocide of Native people, to the enslavement of Africans, to the theft of huge sections of Mexico, to the racist exclusion of Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants, to the current xenophobic hysteria against Latinas/Latinos, Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians, racism has been a convenient tool for the maintenance of power and extra profits by the ruling class at the expense of oppressed people and all workers.

The working class must fight against racism, for full equality of all nationally oppressed, and for affirmative action, if it is to unite internally and form lasting alliances with the organizations and movements of racially oppressed peoples. Similarly, the nationally and racially oppressed groups must support working-class demands in order to unite internally and to ally with labor.

Racism affects the unity of the working class at all levels. Racism is a tool that not only exploits racially oppressed people but also aids in the exploitation of white workers. Racial discrimination in hiring, racist wage and salary policies, and racial stratification of various industries and trades has resulted in the lowest-paying, most dangerous jobs generally being held by workers from nationally and racially oppressed groups. This undermines the interests of all workers. The ability of employers to pay workers differently based on skin color, country of origin, immigration status, or hire date in two-tier wage systems exerts downward pressure on the wages of all workers. It allows bosses to extract even higher profits from racially oppressed workers. Racism is good for business but bad for working people of every race. White workers have a powerful self-interest in fighting racism—they will gain greater victories to the degree that they unite with nationally and racially oppressed workers. Multiracial unity in the workplace and on the shop floor is key to lifting wages and improving working conditions and honoring the dignity of every worker.

The workplace is not the only place where building multiracial unity is essential. Multiracial unity is necessary at all levels of class and democratic struggles. This is the reason for the long-standing coalition between the labor and civil rights movements. Not only do these movements have common enemies, they have a common agenda of expanding economic, social, and civil rights. The working class and racially oppressed people have common interests in housing, employment, education, voting rights, the environment, world peace, and other areas.

Members of the working class who are white must take an initiating and leading role in combating all instances of racism and national oppression wherever and whenever they occur and provide support to people of color who are in leadership of movements and organizations. Such acts are the building blocks of grassroots unity and trust. They prove that the struggle against racism is not for racially oppressed people to combat alone. It is in the self-interest of all workers, leading to greater unity, respect, and strength, for the labor movement and all other movements.

The depression of wages, the suppression of voting power, and the oppression of culture and language all hurt the working class. An essential aspect of class and socialist consciousness is for the working class to have a deep understanding of exploitation and national, racial, and gender oppression.

To fully understand its own exploitation and oppression as a class, the working class has to understand the extra-exploitation and special oppression of its component parts and allies. This means understanding the historical experience well enough to develop an organic allegiance to the specific democratic demands for equality of each. This includes taking action as a leading, solid advocate of those demands. The working class cannot win without the collective class achievement of an understanding of the complexity of its natural allies and of building multiracial, multinational working-class unity. This understanding must be utilized to guide action. Racially and nationally oppressed people have a history of being subjected to oppression on the one side and resistance and fightback on the other, all of which contribute to the collective wisdom and range of action of the entire working class.

African Americans

Historically and continuing today, African Americans and their organizations play a tremendous role in democratic and class struggles, and in building alliances with progressive movements, especially the labor movement. An exceptionally high percentage of African Americans are members of the working class. In addition, the struggle for equality and against racism in relation to African Americans has played a central role in the entire struggle for democracy and progress. The labor movement and the African American people have achieved a significant level of coordinated struggle.

Today, forms of extra-exploitation and oppression against African Americans include voter suppression, criminalization and mass incarceration, police brutality including murder, wage inequality, continued segregation, and cultural domination.

The African American people play a major role in national politics. Their concentration in large urban centers and the South, high working-class composition, heavy concentration in the labor movement, and high level of political/social organization including churches and mosques, civil rights organizations, and social and fraternal organizations, all make it possible for these groups to politically mobilize millions, including many beyond the African American community. From the historic NAACP, to the Civil Rights Movement led by Rev. Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., to the more recent Black Lives Matter movement, African Americans have a long history of resistance and struggle, beginning with the fight against slavery. The Poor People’s Campaign that grew from the Moral Monday demonstrations in North Carolina is playing an important national role in struggles for racial and economic justice.

In national elections, African Americans, especially African American women, vote overwhelmingly against the extreme right. There are thousands of Black elected officials nationally; almost all run as Democrats. In many areas, the Black vote is decisive for victory against more backward candidates. Recent elections revealed that the only way the most backward candidates can win, even in the deep South, is through voter suppression and vote theft directed especially against the African American community. Because they vote almost unanimously as a block in most elections, African Americans have a level of influence beyond their numbers.

Mexican Americans

Mexican Americans together with African Americans are the two largest nationally oppressed peoples in the U.S., with Mexican Americans being one of the fastest growing sections of the population. The Mexican American population is concentrated in the U.S. Southwest, land that was originally stolen from Mexico, with U.S. domination being imposed on the many Native and Mexican American people living in those areas. With the entrance of Mexican Americans into the agricultural, industrial, hospitality, and service industries, Mexican American communities exist in most major cities and in small towns throughout the country.

Among the problems faced by Mexican Americans are racial and national oppression, language discrimination on the job and in schools, cultural suppression, anti-immigrant laws and abuses, lack of full political representation, police brutality, and hate crimes.

Mexican Americans have played an important part in U.S. history, from resistance to U.S. imperialist annexation to struggles for full civil rights for immigrants, from resistance to cultural domination to the struggle for a holiday honoring Cesar Chavez and his groundbreaking leadership organizing farmworkers, from community battles for bilingual education to struggles for voting rights and full participation in the electoral process, among many others. The historic Chicano Moratorium broadened the peace movement in the fight against the Vietnam War.

Mexican Americans mainly vote against the extreme right and have a major and growing impact on national elections. They have emerged as perhaps the most decisive group of voters in California and the southwestern states. Nationally, there are thousands of Mexican Americans holding public office, most elected as Democrats. The Mexican American people are overwhelmingly working-class and are a major force in the trade union movement nationally. There are also many large national, regional, and local mass organizations among the Mexican American people that have a big impact on the U.S. political scene, especially with the increase in the Mexican and Mexican American population all over the country.

Puerto Ricans

There are more than five million Puerto Ricans in the U.S. Puerto Ricans are the second-largest Spanish-speaking Latin American population in the country, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans being the largest. While concentrated in New York, especially New York City, Puerto Ricans are found in every state of the union.

The overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. are an integral part of the working class. Puerto Ricans have a higher rate of union membership than the general population. Puerto Ricans unite with other Latinos, as well as with African Americans, to fight against national and racial oppression. In fighting for their self-interests on the important issues that affect them, Puerto Ricans fight for all peoples.

The features of the Puerto Rican people in the U.S. cannot be completely understood without taking into account that Puerto Rico is a U.S. colonial possession. Puerto Rico is an oppressed colonial nation. Colonial oppression takes many forms, from control of the economy by subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to imposition of U.S. death penalty laws on Puerto Ricans.

This colonial oppression is the main reason Puerto Ricans have been forced to immigrate to the U.S. The horrific conditions experienced in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria exemplify the subordinate status that U.S. right-wingers constantly try to impose. This left the island to suffer from the destruction of most infrastructure for much longer than necessary, and ignored the debt which has been saddled on the government of Puerto Rico. Inadequate and incompetent actions by the Trump administration exponentially increased the suffering of Puerto Ricans, forced many to move to the mainland U.S.

The first step to freedom from this oppression is the acquisition of their internationally recognized right to independence and self-determination for Puerto Rico.

U.S. colonialism has forced Puerto Rico’s economy into dependency. For Puerto Ricans to exercise their right to independence they must be able to break with the colonial dependency forced on them by the U.S.; otherwise independence would be a sham. We support the full transfer of all powers to the Puerto Rican nation and monetary compensation with no strings attached to Puerto Rico to make up for the super-exploitation of Puerto Ricans and for colonial oppression. Usage of those funds is to be wholly decided by Puerto Ricans so that Puerto Rico can develop freely.

A free and independent Puerto Rico would not mean that all Puerto Ricans in the U.S. will go back to Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans in the U.S. are an historically constituted permanent community.

Native Peoples

There are many unique features to the national struggles of Native peoples in the U.S. Issues of sovereignty and treaty rights, language and cultural rights, fishing and hunting rights, land rights, health care, and education, give a different character to these struggles, which vary from Indian nation to Indian nation. The kidnap and murder of Native women is also a major issue. In addition, the abuse and mismanagement by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), as well as tribal government issues, impact Native American Indian forms of organization and struggle. Native peoples have played an important role in the ironwork, construction, and other industries in some regions of the country, and have a long history of struggle for survival and democratic rights.

The genocide against Native peoples must be recognized and acknowledged by honoring treaties and tribal sovereignty, by reparations and affirmative action for Indian nations as well as urban Indians, and by the replacement of the BIA by a body composed primarily of representatives of Indian nations.

Native peoples are playing a vigorous role in the electoral process. The struggle against the suppression of their vote is intense and expansive. This growing political clout contrasts with the most vicious effects of racism on the living conditions, education, employment, health, and survival of many, who on some reservations are subjected to the worst possible living conditions and the highest rates of infant mortality, disease, suicide, unemployment, and murder at the hands of the police. The growth of gambling casinos on many reservations has not alleviated conditions for the large majority of Native peoples and is not a solution to the racism and national oppression they face.

Other Indigenous Peoples

Other indigenous peoples, including Aleuts, Inuit, and native Hawaiians, have their own cultures and traditions. Hawaii, one of the most multiracial states, had its independent monarchy overthrown by an invading army, and was a colony of the U.S. for many decades. Native Hawaiians face national oppression with distinct language, cultural, and economic issues, in addition to the problems faced by Hawaii as a whole.

The U.S., contrary to myth making in many U.S. histories, maintains several colonies around the world. To hide this fact, the government uses the term “protectorate” or “commonwealth” to describe the occupied nations. The U.S. maintains colonies in Guam, the Virgin Islands, and Samoa, whose populations have no vote and no sovereignty.

Immigrants

The labor movement has in recent years embraced the importance of unity between immigrant and native-born workers. Not only did anti-immigrant sentiment and racist repressive laws allow bosses to relegate immigrant workers to near-slavery conditions with no recourse, but also undercut the attempts by native-born workers to organize unions and win concessions from management. Attacks on immigrants in farm fields, at the borders, at their workplace, and by law enforcement lay the basis for undermining everyone’s rights. Raids purportedly against undocumented immigrants often also impact family members who have been citizens for many generations.

The U.S. has large communities of immigrant workers. These workers are often violently exploited, working in the most unhealthy, non-union conditions. Each immigrant group faces its own oppression based on nationality, and many face racial oppression as well. Basic human, civil, and labor rights are often denied. Thousands of undocumented workers crossing the border with Mexico are subjected to the murderous policies of the Border Patrol and racist vigilantes. They are hounded and chased down like criminals. Hundreds have tragically died or been murdered, especially in border areas, for simply trying to unite their families or find a better life. Many immigrants come with advanced degrees but are relegated to the lowest-paid jobs. Wage theft against immigrant workers is common.

Latinos/Latinas are extremely diverse culturally and in terms of national origin. Common use of Spanish or Portuguese and shared experience of discrimination in the U.S. are forging unity among most Latino peoples. At the same time, some immigrants from Latin America speak an indigenous language as their first language or do not speak Spanish at all. Over half of all Latinos in the U.S. are foreign-born and face discrimination as immigrants, including Brazilians whose main language is Portuguese.

Mexican Americans and newly immigrated Mexicans are increasingly targets of xenophobic, racist hysteria. The extreme right (including neo-fascists and white nationalists) is manufacturing a political climate of fear against immigrants of color. Mexican immigrants are verbally attacked as “criminals” and “rapists” and as national security threats. These racist attacks are meant to scapegoat Mexican immigrants as the cause of low wages and a lower standard of life for U.S. workers in general, and for supposedly “draining” social benefits. The extreme right weaves a false story of illegal voting by undocumented immigrants to help justify voter suppression. These xenophobic attacks blame Latino immigrants for unwelcomed cultural changes, as though non-white immigrants are not quite American. The extreme right combines these racist attacks with nationalism and the politics of fear.

The extreme right opposes comprehensive immigration reform. Millions of immigrants are denied equal protection under the law and denied a clear path to citizenship with voting rights. They are taxed without representation and excluded from government programs supported by their taxes. Refugees fleeing Central American violence are denied due process and refugee and asylum rights in violation of international human rights laws. The children of detained refugee immigrants have been separated from their parents and placed in detention centers, a euphemism for concentration camps. The extreme right is deporting Dreamers—young undocumented children whose deportation was deferred by government programs called DACA (Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals). Dreamers were brought to the U.S. by their undocumented parents as very young children, and many currently attend institutions of higher learning or serve in the armed forces. These racist attacks have met with broad united resistance, including the creation and defense of sanctuary cities and civil disobedience.

Many people come to the U.S. as a result of wars due to either direct U.S. military involvement or military campaigns by surrogates financed and trained by the U.S. For example, many flee repression caused by U.S.-supported death squads in Central America. In response, many received Temporary Protected Status, a program the Trump administration is trying to eliminate. People from many countries emigrate to the U.S. because of dire economic situations in their home countries, in many cases caused by U.S. banks and U.S.-led international monetary institutions.

Backward forces use such immigration to bolster their claim that the U.S. is a beacon of freedom. Being forced to leave one’s homeland is most often a result of U.S. transnational corporations and their intensive exploitation abroad, backed up by U.S. foreign and military policy. Many people who immigrate to the U.S. looking for economic survival are refugees from the economic policies of U.S. imperialism and the neocolonial, neoliberal “free trade” exploitation experienced around the world.

Many refugees flee their countries due to right-wing dictatorships and death squads supported and trained by the U.S., such as those in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and elsewhere in Central America.

Many immigrants from the Caribbean are trying to escape the U.S. stranglehold on their home countries. Dominicans, Haitians, Jamaicans, and others play vital roles in many communities in the U.S. Haitian immigrants, from the poorest country in the hemisphere, have experienced U.S. support for dictators and death squads, have witnessed U.S. attempts to subvert and co-opt popular democratic movements, and have been subjected to direct exploitation by U.S., French, and other transnational corporations. Once in the U.S., they face continued impoverishment, health crises, racism, and discrimination.

Increasing populations of immigrants from countries in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe have come to the U.S. in recent years, fleeing economic oppression, war, decreasing living standards, lack of opportunity, famine, and genocide.

Muslims and Middle Eastern Peoples

Three and a half million Muslims of various backgrounds live in the United States. An estimated five million people of Middle Eastern descent live in the U.S., including 3.7 million Americans of Arabic descent, a half million from Iran, and substantial populations from Syria, Iraq, Armenia, Turkey, and others. People of Middle Eastern descent are concentrated in communities in Michigan, Illinois, California, and New York. Most are workers, with many active in the labor movement and in organizations fighting for civil rights and for a more humane foreign policy. People of all these nationalities have been citizens of the U.S. for generations; at the same time, many are recent immigrants. Under the Trump administration, the number of immigrants from these areas has been deliberately decreased through the so-called Muslim ban and limits on the number of refugees.

As a result of U.S. aggression throughout the Middle East, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, a substantial majority of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asian peoples in the U.S. have become active opponents of the extreme right. The U.S. has close relationships with the most reactionary forces in the region, supports Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, refuses to accept the rights of the Palestinian people to form their own autonomous state, and demonizes Muslims. Islamophobia and discrimination have dramatically increased in the last two decades, first in the immediate wake of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center when Muslim men and boys were required to register with the federal government, and in the intervening years, when open hostility toward and discrimination against Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent became widespread. Despite the fact that the majority of acts of random violence and political terrorism are not committed by foreigners or non-whites, the label “terrorist” is reserved for people of color, especially Muslims. Since the election of Donald Trump, racist violence against Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent has increased substantially, including racial profiling by government agencies and brutal attacks by Islamophobes inspired by right-wing rhetoric. There are more restrictions on freedom of religion, and more voter intimidation, imprisonment without due process or legal counsel, and mass deportations.

The demonization of Arabs, South Asians, and all Muslims does not make anyone safer. It is in reality a support for the aggressive military policies of U.S. imperialism and a racist justification of oppression. Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent have been mobilized by groups fighting discrimination and Islamophobia, struggling for rights through the courts, lobbying, education, organized protests, and in the electoral arena. In the 2018 mid-term elections, the first two Muslim women were elected to Congress.

Asians and Asian Americans

Asian Americans come from many different nations, with different cultures, histories, languages, and politics. The widely varying conditions in their homelands have a big impact on the consciousness, level of organization, and integration into U.S. society of the different Asian immigrant groups. While a large number of Asian Americans are foreign-born, millions of Asian Americans are from families that have been living in the U.S. for generations.

The timing and conditions of immigration are important factors in the political consciousness of Asian American communities. During World War II, many Japanese Americans, most of whom were citizens, were wrongly incarcerated in internment camps. They have a different life experience and political history than the Vietnamese who immigrated during the turmoil of the defeat of U.S. armed forces in the mid-1970s. Filipinos whose parents or grandparents came to the U.S. in the 1920s to work in the agricultural fields of California have different national issues than South Koreans who immigrated following the Korean War. Cambodians, Laotians, Indonesians, and nationalities from within those countries endure virulent racism, discrimination, and forced exclusion from major parts of society.

Pacific Islanders come from countries and lands with widely varying political and economic conditions, from colonies of the U.S. like Guam, to independent nations like Fiji, to hundreds of smaller islands which are struggling to create and maintain their own national identities. Samoans, Fijians, Micronesians, and other Pacific Islander nationalities all face national discrimination and particular forms of racial discrimination.

As more recent immigrants from Asia live in this country for longer periods, they increasingly face and understand the racial and national discrimination rife in the U.S., and increasingly struggle against that oppression.

The Struggle for Full Equality for Women

The ideology of gender inequality and misogyny is another potent weapon against unity within the working class and between the working class and the people’s movements. Sexism causes working-class women to suffer additional forms of oppression and exploitation. Capitalists gain extra profits as a result of the gender pay gap—hundreds of billions of dollars each year. They also gain greater profits when male supremacy helps capitalists divide male and female workers, weakening the struggle for all workers’ rights. As a result, working-class women, men, and families suffer reduced incomes.

Although women now make up almost half of the workforce, the gender stratification of the job market ensures that many women are relegated to the lowest-paying, least secure jobs. As a result, more women and children are pushed into poverty. Cuts in social welfare programs and rapidly increasing health-care and housing costs hit single mothers and their children especially hard. Women of oppressed groups, including LGBTQ and women of color, can be hit even harder.

Working-class women of color are subject to extra-exploitation on the basis of gender as well as race and class, which adds to individual and collective suffering. Race and/or sexual orientation can become a dividing factor among women, and gender and/or sexuality can divide communities of color. The working-class and people’s movements must work to bridge such divides, respecting differences and participating in the struggle for the democratic and civil rights of all. In the movement, we have to ensure that all voices are heard and the participation of women, including in leadership, is encouraged.

Women continue to be compelled to shoulder, on an unpaid basis, most childcare and domestic labor (work in the home). Access to quality, affordable day care remains extremely limited. Changes in domestic arrangements have not kept pace with the increased prevalence of women working full-time, which has added to the difficulties of and demands on women’s lives. Women face special challenges in balancing family and work, especially when managing the added responsibilities that come with being an activist. It is especially important for childcare to be provided so that women can participate fully in activities and play leadership roles.

Additional forms of oppression women experience are attacks on their reproductive rights and domestic and sexual harassment and violence. These forms of oppression are valid reasons for immigrant women to request amnesty. The extreme right has launched an ideological attack on women’s roles in society and the family. The extreme right is trying to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term and to revert back to a submissive role. It wants women to be limited to taking care of the family and children and seeks to assign blame for the high rates of divorce and poverty on women. This “blame the victim” approach seeks to divert attention from the system that oppresses women along with all workers.

The treatment of women as sexual objects brings additional profits to the capitalists. A misogynist culture, which includes pornography, violent video games, and human trafficking, demeans all human beings, but especially women, and contributes to sexist and abusive attitudes in the home, workplace, and online. Courageous women have launched the “#Me Too” movement to draw attention to the widespread prevalence of sexual harassment, assault, and the embrace of rape in capitalist culture. In addition to the personal harm they inflict, such behaviors limit women’s freedom and effectiveness in the public sphere and warp the full development of both men and women.

The special oppression of women cuts across class lines. This cross-class oppression means that women play a progressive role as a social group. Partnerships between national women’s organizations, the labor movement, and other progressive organizations are important in building the all-people’s front against the extreme right.

Today, more women are accepting leadership roles and running for political office—and winning on issues of broad appeal, such as jobs and housing, and their special experiences as women are increasingly valued. Women of all ages are playing creative, important, high-profile roles in the struggle for democracy, including robust movements for equality and against gun violence, police brutality, and racial profiling. Women are leading fights for public schools, public unions, free universal childcare, and for the rights of all.

Working-class men must realize that childcare, domestic work, and equal wages are not just women’s issues; they are issues that affect everyone. They have an important role to play in leading other men to combat gender discrimination and inequality. They should speak out when they see gender discrimination and advocate in a way that wins other men to the fight for gender equality. They should take an initiating role in combating all instances of sexism and male supremacy in the labor and people’s movements as well as in the family. Women need and deserve an equal place as elected officials, and in the ranks and in the leadership of the labor movement, the people’s mass democratic movements, and in the Communist Party.

Working-class men have a strong self-interest in this project. Whether subtle or overt, the capitalist culture of male supremacy and misogyny is a barrier to collective activity and struggle. This culture creates an environment in which especially working-class men experience pressure to conform to ruling-class ideology.

The effort to develop equality, full respect, and trust gives men the opportunity to understand how women’s experiences under capitalism promote mutual interests and a stake in a better world. The working class otherwise loses the valuable contributions women make. Half of all human potential is lost when women are excluded or when their participation is limited or stunted. Also, people whose thinking is clouded by male supremacy, misogyny, and racism cannot have clear, reliable insights into the dynamics of social inequality, oppression, and exploitation. In addition to hurting women and limiting human progress, such attitudes hurt the men whose thinking and behavior they distort. Greater principled unity between working-class men and women means greater victories for the whole of the working class. A working-class conscious of and aligned with the fight for women’s equality is a working class that can unleash its full power in every arena.

Youth and Students

Today’s youth face unique and unprecedented challenges as a result of capitalist exploitation, class stratification, and climate change. Youth are acutely aware that the planet they live on will be drastically changed unless we reduce carbon emissions. Under capitalism, youth and students experience special oppression and exploitation. Capitalists gain from pitting generations of workers against one another. Capitalism gains extra profits using two-tier contracts imposing lower wages for new hires and through extremely low minimum wages. Both have a devastating impact on young workers.

Capitalism deprives youth of free access to quality education, of cultural and sports activities, of living-wage jobs and entry-level training and apprenticeship programs. Poverty and great uncertainty in the job market compel large numbers of young people to enter the military and face possible loss of life and limb in one war after another. Youth are highly impacted by the opioid crisis, which benefits big drug companies at the expense of the rest of society. Youth also face additional racism, sexism, and attacks on their civil liberties.

Youth, especially working-class youth and racially and nationally oppressed youth, are subjected to inadequate, underfunded, and segregated public education. The ruling class is ensuring its own survival across generations by crippling public education and profiteering off substandard charter schools that under-educate kids in the inner cities, while the children of the wealthy are provided the best education money can buy. Austerity programs at the state level have shifted more and more of the costs of higher education to students and their families. Those who are not priced out of higher education often begin their working lives with heavy debt burdens—totaling $1.5 trillion as of 2018—that tie them to the big banks for decades, narrow their choices, stifle their creativity, and start their adult lives on a stress-laden footing.

The forces of extreme right reaction attempt to appeal demagogically to the young generation, especially on college campuses and in the military. Simultaneously, the extreme right wages an ideological war on our youth by criminalizing them, attempting to pit them against seniors, and blaming them for various social ills such as drugs, crime, and sexually transmitted diseases. This assault especially affects black and brown youth, who are disproportionately incarcerated and thrown into the school-to-prison pipeline. Simultaneously, there are efforts to mobilize youth to support the extreme right, especially on college campuses and in the military. Capitalism seeks to use youth as cannon fodder in its imperialist adventures.

Taken together, these challenges constitute a complete denial of a safe, clean world and a secure future for our youth.

Working-class youth and students of today are in a powerful position to act as a key link between the overall working class and youth; they are the core element of the labor/youth alliance. The youth who experience special oppression in addition to generational oppression can act as a link to ally youth with other core forces in the struggle for social progress and change. The increasing desire of today’s young people to secure a safe future for themselves and upcoming generations encourages the ongoing alliance between themselves and the labor movement. Further, today’s youth are more open to socialism than their parents. They are on the march, whether against gun violence or for a sustainable environment and clean planet. All these factors are advancing the youth movement in a leftward direction.

Additional Social Forces for Progress

LGBTQ Community

As do all other people, LGBTQ Americans demand and deserve full and equal civil rights, including the right to marry. The LGBTQ community consists of people from all classes and all sections of the country and economy, and it increasingly votes against the extreme right. LGBTQ organizations play an important role in many coalitions and are increasingly allied with many progressive organizations and the labor movement.

Members of the LGBTQ community face discrimination in housing and employment, lack full legal and civil rights, and are frequently subjected to hate crimes. Hiring discrimination is so pervasive as to condemn large numbers of LGBTQ people to long periods of joblessness, forcing them into dangerous situations.

The extreme right uses homophobia, transphobia, and attacks on gender non-conformists, gays, and lesbians as wedges to split the working-class and people’s movements. Using false notions of “morals” and “family values,” the right attempts to use homophobia to gain allies for its corporate agenda among the working class and other social forces. The real threat to working families is not LGBTQ civil rights but the extreme right agenda of maximum profits and war. 