The enactment of fascist labor, education, tax, and energy reforms demonstrate the nature of a capitalist system, designed to benefit the bosses and attack the working class. There are no legal ways to enact changes for workers’ benefit.
The bosses’ mass media tells us that the majority is in charge and the laws are just, but in reality the electoral process is completely controlled by the business, financial and political oligarchy. Therefore only those in this oligarchy can get access to power through the vote. Similarly, the rule of law is an illusion, when the same minority of millionaire parasites determines what’s legal, and can change laws to benefit their businesses, as with structural reforms here in Mexico.
When the electoral farce and bourgeois legality are not enough to control working-class rebellions, the bosses resort to the police and military to repress, jail, and murder dissenters. Capitalists use fascist terror against the working class to violently impose their interests on the majority.
The bosses believe that the illusion of bourgeois democracy and fascist terror can prevent the unity of the working class, but they are mistaken. Eventually, millions of workers will unite to build an international communist movement to abolish capitalist oppression and exploitation.
During the last century, the working class made significant advances in the Soviet Union and China by putting into practice its strategy to take power from the bosses. Essential to this strategy were the organization of a revolutionary communist party, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But, its achievements, the old communist movement also had shortcomings. The most important was that even when the workers held political power, revolutionaries limited themselves to the administration of a capitalist economy: Salaries and money were never eliminated, and production was mainly focused on responding to the needs of the market instead of responding to the needs of the working class. The ideological base of this error was the lack of confidence in the working class — that had struggled for the socialist transformation of Russia and China — to accept communist ideas and practices. These errors led to the return of capitalism.
Understanding the failures and successes of the old communist movement are the key to improving our practice in the struggle against capitalist oppression. Revolutionaries believe and practice criticism and self-criticism, as inheritors of the communists of the last century. The members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) call on the workers of the world to once again raise the communist red flag.
We have learned that the struggle should not have stages, must go directly to communism. We must forge a single worldwide communist party, the PLP, as there is only one international working class. We need only one party. The revolutionary struggle to defeat our oppressors cannot be an electoral process or an alliance with a boss or a progressive politician; revolution is necessarily violent and involve millions of workers, students, and soldiers.
Currently, imperialists are readying for global war. The fall of the old communist movement left the working class at a disadvantage to face this period, but the sharp struggle against reformism and revisionism (capitalist ideologies in red clothing), along with our commitment to free our class from capitalist exploitation, eventually will bear fruits.
While the bosses get ready for war, we workers must prepare for a communist revolution. Read and distribute CHALLENGE! Organize our circles of study action!