The beginning of publishing a revolutionary newspaper for the US working class demands we say a few necessary words about what we intend to do.
We are initiating this newspaper on May 1, International Workers’ Day, a revolutionary holiday that commemorates the struggles of the working class. This holiday has its origin in the international struggle to establish the 8-hour workday and events that took place in the US. It was declared by the communist movement under the leadership of the great Friedrich Engels and celebrated by workers, progressives, and revolutionaries since. It is a holiday that commemorates all that the militant working class has won, and at the same time, promises continued struggle for our demands, centrally the conquest of power. This is the tradition upon which we are founding The Worker.
We are in a time of great upheavals and struggle in the US and internationally. For the past few decades, and especially in the current economic crisis, the working class in this country has been increasingly discussing the question of socialism; we seldom encounter a large factory in an urban center in which the name Marx is not found on the lips of at least a few workers. In our assessment this is a wonderful thing and the direct result of class struggle becoming more acute in spite of great efforts from universities, media, courts, police, and management to relegate this great name to pages of the history books. The concept and desire for socialism are even more broad—our task is to bring cohesion to these ideas and make them a force.
The advanced sections of the American working class already struggle for socialistic aims with disorganized explosiveness. This means a demand for revolutionary and scientific literature already exists in the drumming hearts of workers. This sets our marching pace. As this trend continues and unfolds in response to worsening economic and political crises, the working class requires a publication of its own in order to cut through the fog of lies and half truths conjured up by their exploiters. The entire history of this country guarantees a great reckoning with the forces of exploitation, oppression, and injustice—it could be no other way. A system built on the back of the world’s people is headquartered here and the US working class has a world historical role in carrying out socialist revolution against it.
The main feature of the revolutionary movements in the US is temporary disunity. There are numerous and dispersed nuclei of revolutionaries whose character is, at this stage, disorganization and amateurishness; this must be overcome with cohesive theory and practice, with revolutionary tradition and adherence to the only scientific doctrine of the working class.
The state of the revolutionary left, as it exists today, fails to meet the demands of the objective conditions and lags behind many other parts of the world, especially the third world. What is concerning and demanding of attention is this discohesive state which falls short of struggling appropriately for the daily demands of the working people and thus cannot fuse these with revolutionary actions, principally the conquest of power which is fundamental. Fusing the struggle for daily demands with the struggle for political power is critical for the advancement of class consciousness of the working class,
The working class requires its own Party. The ruling class parties face growing polarization, petty feuds, and scandals, and resort to all manners of tricks to sell themselves to the working class to no avail; the vast majority of workers put no stock into the elections of these parties.
However, the revolutionary movements and increasingly the workers themselves fall prey ideologically to a certain decadent rot of the ruling class. Serious struggle is called for to fight this influence so that workers in the US can rid themselves of rationalized counter-revolutionary ideas and embrace their own ideology, their ideology that emerged in 1848 with the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party1 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, subsequently developed in great leaps by Vladimir Lenin and Chairman Mao Zedong. This scientific ideology tempered in the flames of class struggle is all-powerful because it is true; it is the guarantee of victory for the working class which means the freedom of all humanity—we speak here of Marxism- Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism, with the contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo.
It goes without saying when considering the general state of dispersal and disorganization of the revolutionary movement in this country that most of our readers have no familiarity with this concept; we ask that you keep reading nevertheless. Our purpose is to bring clarity on the matter with every issue. This is necessary to the reconstitution of the Party of the working class—the Communist Party of the USA, which alone can lead the fight for socialism here as one front in the world revolution.
We have no interest in spreading pessimism about the state of the revolutionary movement in the US; on the contrary, by looking at the situation soberly and taking action to overcome this state we are filled with optimism. It is this optimism with which we wholeheartedly encourage the Left to publish its views, or to continue publishing them so that we can begin discussion of what is correct while carrying out systematic struggle against the revision, distortion, and vulgarization of socialism and its higher stage, communism. Communism is our unalterable goal.
The practical conclusion which we draw from all this is that revolutionaries of the American working class must unite under Maoism to reconstitute the Communist Party, which must posses a single will under a single banner. The party existed before it was transformed by our enemies into another party of the ruling class, effete and powerless except in diverting the energies of revolutionary workers and shoring up a few votes for the imperialist Democratic Party.
We align ourselves with the militants of the Communist Party hailing all the way back to its revolutionary days, and as such, we raise the question of immediate and direct tasks, what kind of activity is necessary to this stage of the Reconstitution Effort.
The development and consolidation of the effort to reconstitute the Communist Party relies upon the clarity provided by the ideology and the advancement of the struggle on this basis. This means a necessary pivot away from the universities and academics and toward the working class which has generated us, so that the former groups can come into their service. This means a real effort to define the specific character of the working class, focusing on those whose labor alone creates value—the proletarians. This also means taking into account the specific history of this country which has created our very particular conditions.
Unity of the revolutionary nuclei cannot be brought into being by desire alone; it will not come about on the basis of goodwill and nothing else; it cannot be an empty declaration or announced by decree. It is unrealistic to call together all forces, or even just the most advanced forces and hold an election for unity. Unity requires hard work and hard struggle. The first order of business is to struggle for solid ideological unity. The ideology already exists and we struggle for unity around it. Of the next order of importance is the development of a program for the reconstitution of the Party. Such a program is absolutely necessary to consolidate unity and to penetrate deeper into the ranks of the working class. We must work to achieve an organization designed from the very start for the purpose of establishing and maintaining contact between the revolutionary class conscious workers, the workers in struggle, and all the nuclei of the dispersed revolutionary ranks. Such an instrument of socialist revolution, vital to our class, can only come in the form of a revolutionary newspaper. Such an organ must construct all manner of media around itself and branch out into all avenues of working class life. We intend to muster all strength and effort to this task.
Before unity is ever possible, we must draw lines of demarcation. We have no interest in the preservation of discohesion, dispersal, and muddled confusion. Because of this our publication will not be a basket of all different views; it will maintain strict adherence to Marxism-Leninism- Maoism, principally Maoism, with the contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo. This means that we follow the doctrine produced by Marx and Engels and developed by Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao including the definition of Maoism produced by Chairman Gonzalo of the Communist Party of Peru—including all his universal contributions. Adherence to this doctrine in an honest and earnest manner shuts out the various static and noise of revisionism and other bourgeois thought.
We reject so-called corrections to our ideology which essentially arise from the bourgeoisie. Ours is an organ for Maoism. This does not mean we oppose providing space for contending views, open battle with other trends, or disagreements on strategy and tactics—far from it. Such exchange, struggle, and debate when carried out before the workers can have a remarkable educational effect. Cohesion is impossible when those devoted to a certain position conceal their views.
We embark upon this work with the goal of making our publication become that of every working man and woman, so that all working people in this country come to regard The Worker as their own. Like all new things, we fight for the life of our publication against what is old and refuses to die. In this fight we face great odds.
We stand with all those who are oppressed by the ruling class of this country, no matter where they reside, one of our goals is to link their struggles with the struggles of the working class of the USA through our articles and the education we can provide by the exposure of the atrocities of this imperialist system and a scientific approach to understanding how to confront it at the present stage. Such a goal is no less radical than it is realistic.
Only through the struggle for Reconstitution can unity be achieved, and only through accomplishing reconstitution can the victory of our class be achieved on the US front of the World Proletarian Revolution. The size and frequency of our publication will increase with the fruits of struggle. This first issue of The Worker is an advanced agent of the resumption of The Daily Worker.2
1: The Manifesto of the Communist Party is the program for revolution and will be a flag even in Communism.
2: The Daily Worker was established as the Central Organ of the Communist Party USA in 1924.
