Speech at the Third National Conference of the Marxist-Leninist Party, USA
Fall 1986
(From The Workers' Advocate Supplement, vol. 3, #2, February 15, 1987)
Excerpt:
The factories and other work places are the most important everyday arenas of the struggle between the classes. Here the workers are concentrated, disciplined by the production process, enlightened, and welded into organization by the more or less constant struggle with the employer.
Factory experience and the economic struggle are important for mustering the proletarian army and placing it on the threshold of a struggle for state power. Much can be learned in the industrial struggle: that capitalist society is based on exploitation; that underneath the fine words, there is a thinly concealed war between the classes; that the workers have the power to at least partially impose their will on the employers if they are united and organized; and a thousand and one other things.
But, while important, the factory experience is also inherently narrow. The working class will never be able to launch a determined struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, and to establish a new, socialist society, without a prior period of participation in all the important oppositional political movements in society at large, i.e., outside the work places. There are many reasons for this; let's just touch on four of the most important.
Subheads:
- Taken by Itself, Economic Struggle Is Inherently Narrow
- Imbue the Working Class with Revolutionary Theory and Communist Convictions
- Leader of All the Oppressed
- Skeptical But Not Politically Active
- A Typical Example
- A Contradictory Situation
- Mass Working Class Participation Strengthens the Oppositional Character of the Struggle
- What Kind of Participation?
- How Is the Giant To Be Awakened?
- The Objective Situation Is Maturing
- The Spontaneous Factor Can Not Substitute for Organization
- Bring Politics into the Factories
- The Anti-Racist Movement and the Building of the Pro-Party Trend
- In the 1980's
- Unceasing Political Agitation
- An Anti-Apartheid Action
- In Support of the Nicaraguan People
- Independent Contingents in Reformist-Dominated Actions
- Use Every Occasion to Develop the Political Interest of the Workers
- Bring the Movement to the Workers
- Pressures to Downplay Political Agitation
- Conditions Always Exist for Political Agitation
- Combining Anti-Imperialist Agitation with the Economic Struggle
- It Is Communism That Gives the Working Class Its Political Voice
- Utilize All Actions with a Mass Character
- Soweto Day 1985 in Seattle
- In Closing