Note: This letter was sent to the National Office of WPA earlier today. We did not solicit this endorsement of our views, but are both pleased and honored to read how others view our politics. We are proud to include the two comrades who wrote this letter as supporters of our Party. We are truncating the comrades' names for the sake of security.

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The Revolutionary Movement Today and the Need for a Workers' Communism


By Marlon P. and Mari A.


We write this open letter for several reasons: first, for self-clarification on important problems plaguing the left that we have wrestled with in my modest three years as a revolutionary, and second, to provide to anyone who is interested a rationale for our support of the Workers Party in America and the perspective of working class communism.


Isn't workers' communism a redundant title? At a glance this may seem to be the case. Communism, or the “doctrine of the liberation of the proletariat” in the words of Friedrich Engels, is in itself a movement of the working class for the abolition of exploitation, oppression, and class society itself. In practice, however, not all branches of the communist movement are what we would call workers' communism at all. In this we do not only refer to the monstrous bureaucratic machine of Stalin's USSR, but the modern-day practice of left groups with a petit-bourgeois outlook, structure, and even at times composition.


The influence of the petit-bourgeoisie in the communist movement can be felt in many ways. The practice of “democratic centralism”, quite alien to the democratic centralism of Lenin, discouraging even internal criticism of the “party line”, Executive Committees that produce political positions on their own and expect the members to follow that line without any input on their part, the idolization of Lenin and Trotsky even when they committed grave mistakes owing to their own petit-bourgeois political methods (the dissolution of the Factory Shop Committees, institution of one-man management, etc.), reliance on a strategy of “burrowing from within” the official business unions and the refusal to consider the question of a new union movement – all of these political mistakes are symptoms of alien forces penetrating the workers' movement, freezing it in time while the class struggle races by.


It is important to remember that the revolutionary workers organization must not only consider questions of history, but also questions of the present. While we still consider ourselves Leninists and Trotskyists, we are not prepared to make apologies for every action these men took in their political lives. Both of them, owing to their class origin, utilized that outlook after the Bolshevik Party was thrust into power in the course of the Russian Revolution.


But instead of further criticism of such organizations, aptly characterized by the Workers Party as the “middle-class left”, we will conclude this open letter by outlining the positive features of the workers' communism that the WPA upholds. Taken as a whole, these reasons represent why in our ultimately modest opinion we consider this organization to be the correct vehicle to carry forward the struggle for the liberation of the working class.

• A new union movement is needed. Inside the bureaucratized business unions, class-conscious workers should form groups with the perspective of revolutionary industrial unionism to win our brothers and sisters from the bleak outlook of subservience to pro-capitalist politics and the inevitable austerity that those politics entail. Where no union exists, workers should organize themselves with a revolutionary perspective that will be a consistent fighter for their conditions, both present and future.
• In the era of capitalist decline where the need for a workers' republic is more urgent than ever, unions should serve as militant defenders of the workers in the day-to-day struggle, educational vehicles for the running of society, and perhaps most importantly, the skeleton of the future economic order.
• Workers should organize politically in the party of their class, a party free from foreign class elements and methods, rather than wait for the official union movement to form a social democratic labor party. Social democracy offers no way forward for the working class today, in the era of capitalist decline. Just like the “official” communist parties (PCF, KKE, etc), such parties are an obstacle rather than a vehicle for revolution.
• The transition from capitalism to communism must not be envisaged in a vague way, or worse, as nothing more than a new system of management over the working class. Without a conscious plan on the part of the Party and the movement as a whole for how to forge workers' power in the community and in the workplace, the transition to classless society will be stillborn, resulting in nothing more than a system of “red” managers shouting orders at an oppressed an exploited proletariat.
• Communists should recognize the new stage of American capitalism, corporatism, and all that it entails. The destruction of the last vestiges of bourgeois democracy, concentration of executive power, the firm establishment of the petit-bourgeoisie as the junior partner in the ruling class coalition with the bourgeoisie proper, are theoretical problems that must be grasped in order to move forward.
• Not only must a healthy workers' party be composed of, created by, and lead by workers in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, the workers' movement must expand beyond the purely political front, even beyond the economic front (revolutionary industrial unionism), but must be indeed all-encompassing, with the creation of workers' organizations for immediate day to day relief (charity organizations), culture and recreation, self-defense, etc.

These are bold tasks indeed, but we must not shy away from them. It is time for us to take the future into our own hands and build the firm footing we require for the emancipation of our class and the creation of a truly free society: a third American Republic, a workers' republic, where from the bottom to the top it is the producers of wealth who are the masters of that wealth.