Boycott the Elections! - Leaflet of the Communist Party of America, 1920

WORKERS:
It is the duty of every class-conscious worker in America to boycott the coming elections. A worker’s vote cast for any of the parties or their candidates standing for election — is a vote for reaction or reform! Whether it be the Republican Party and Harding or the Democratic Party and Cox — whether it be the Farm Labor Party and Christensen, the Socialist Party and Debs, or the Socialist Labor and Cox — a worker’s vote cast for any of these parties or their candidates IS A VOTE TO PERPETUATE THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM BASED UPON WAGE SLAVERY and the ROBBERY OF YOUR CLASS. IT IS A VOTE TO STRENGTHEN THE CAPITALIST GOVERNMENT — BY MEANS OF WHICH THE WORKING CLASS IS KEPT IN SUBJECTION BY LIES, FRAUD, DECEPTION, FORCE, AND VIOLENCE.

Do you workers want to perpetuate your own class slavery? Do you want to maintain and strengthen the capitalist government which has shown by its every act that it is nothing but the tool of the capitalist class and acts against the working class every time?
Then cast your vote in the coming elections! If you believe in capitalist wars in which the workers are called upon to lay down their lives for the profit of the master class — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in the high cost of living — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in being LOCKED OUT BY the BOSS — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in being clubbed and shot by the police and soldiers of the capitalist government — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in lynching — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in deportation of radical workers — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in NATIONWIDE RAIDS UPON REVOLUTIONARY WORKING CLASS ORGANIZATION — vote in the coming elections!

If you believe in DESTROYING SOVIET RUSSIA — vote in the coming elections!

If you believe in supporting REACTIONARY POLAND against the free workers and peasants’ government of Russia — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in sending arms, ammunition, and supplies to the enemies of Soviet Russia — vote in the coming elections!

If you believe in perpetuating prostitution, crime, child labor, and the thousand-and-one economic evils from which the masses in this country are suffering — vote in the coming elections!

A vote cast in the coming elections for any political party now in the field — is a vote in favor of the capitalist class and against the working class! The Republican and Democratic parties stand openly for the capitalist class — whose economic interests they represent. The Farm Labor Party stands for Government Ownership and Reform — which leads to State Capitalism — strengthens the capitalist system and keeps the working class chained in wage-slavery. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party pretend they are for the abolition of capitalism and the emancipation of the workers from wage-slavery, but actually, by adopting wrong tactics support the lies and deception of capitalist “democracy” and help to fasten these lies upon the workers — thus aiding the capitalist class in preventing the workers from taking independent class action for their own emancipation. These reform parties fool the workers by telling them that the capitalist system can be abolished PEACEFULLY. This is a lie! AN OUTRAGEOUS, DAMNABLE LIE! The capitalist system cannot be abolished peacefully — whether by the ballot box or any other method.

The present capitalist government is nothing but the concealed dictatorship of the capitalist class. Its army, navy, courts, police, bureaucracy, schools, press, church, etc. are the instruments through which the capitalist class perpetuate the lies of capitalist “democracy” and club and shoot you into submission when you wake up and attempt to resist their domination!
Every intelligent worker knows that so long as the capitalist class owns and controls the organs of publicity, of teaching and moulding the minds of the workers — the workers cannot free themselves.

Every intelligent worker also knows that no capitalist class ever gave up its power without a violent struggle. Look across at Europe and see how the ruling classes are striving by every possible means to keep the workers down! See how the German capitalist class combines with “yellow” Socialist to crush every uprising of the German workers! See how the Hungarian capitalist class, with the assistance of the “yellow” Socialist, destroys the workers organization, throws them into jails, places them against the wall to face firing squads, shoots, hangs, and slays without mercy!

See how the French capitalist class tried to destroy the workers organizations! How they suppress the revolts of their soldiers who are called upon to fight in Russia, Siberia, and Africa and who refuse — see how they shoot the workers down in strikes or demonstrations! Look at bloody England! One hundred thousand troops, fully armed, are sent into Ireland to suppress the Irish revolt. Thousands of soldiers are busy shooting defenseless Indian natives whose only crime is that they desire freedom from the rule of Britain. In Arabia, Turkey, wherever English colonies are rising up against the merciless rule of England — the English capitalist class uses FORCE to crush them!
And when the English workers themselves, who are beginning to think, act, make up their minds to destroy the capitalist government, the English capitalist class will use its troops and machine guns against them no less readily than it uses them against the natives of the colonies.
In Japan, Italy, Finland, everywhere the same thing occurs. Do you American workers believe that the American capitalist class is more tenderhearted than the European capitalist class?
Forget it! The American capitalist class is the richest, most powerful and reactionary class in the world. Just look at the history of the class struggle in the United States. At every step in the struggle of the workers to better their conditions the capitalist class and its government met them with persecution, repression, and oppression unequaled in all history. Homestead — Ludlow — Calumet — West Virginia — Paterson — Lawrence — McKees Rock — Seattle — Butte — these are only a few of the tragic milestones that mark the struggle of the American working class for BREAD — JUST BREAD! Or take the Longshoremen Strike — the Coal Strike — the Steel Strike — with its injunction, martial law, raids, deportations, and arrests — does this look as if the American capitalist class will ever give up its power without a bitter and violent struggle?

FORGET THIS FOOLISH AND CRIMINAL IDEA OF A PEACEFUL CHANGE! AWAY WITH THESE REFORM PARTIES THAT PREACH SUCH RIDICULOUS IDEAS TO THE WORKERS!
IT IS TIME THAT YOU AMERICAN WORKERS WAKE UP TO THE REAL FACTS!

THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS OF RUSSIA ARE SHOWING THE WAY! THE EUROPEAN WORKERS ARE LEARNING FAST FROM SOVIET RUSSIA AND WILL SOON THROW THE WHOLE GANG OF ROBBERS WITH THEIR “YELLOW” Socialist apologists and their capitalist governments into the garbage-heap!

Learn from your Russian and European brothers! The Communist Party of America — the only revolutionary working class political party — is the only party that stands for the emancipation for the working class from wage slavery! The Communist Party advocates mass action of the armed workers in an armed insurrection and civil war as the ONLY means of conquering political power for the workers, destroying the capitalist government, and establishing a Workers’ Government — A Soviet Government — the dictatorship of the Proletariat — as the ONLY MEANS OF ABOLISHING the capitalist system and emancipating the working class from WAGE SLAVERY. In order to bring this message before the masses of the American working class the Communist Party will utilize every weapon at its disposal for propaganda and agitation. It accepts participation in election campaigns and parliamentary activity as one of these weapons — but for revolutionary propaganda and agitation only. The Communist Party, however, will abstain from parliamentary activity whenever conditions make such a course necessary.

The Communist Party will have to boycott the coming elections, for reasons which are familiar to every informed worker. The Communist Party has been outlawed by the capitalist government and declared illegal in capitalist courts. Its leaders are all under indictment or in jail. Thousands of its members are held for deportation or trial. Under such conditions the Communist Party could not participate in the coming election and carry its revolutionary propaganda and agitation directly to the workers at shop meetings and hall meetings or debates with the “yellow” Socialists before the workers and show them up as a bunch of vote-seeking reformers.

The Communist Party will have to carry on its propaganda through its underground leaflets, literature, and press until the workers of America become class-conscious and compel the capitalist government to keep its hands off it. Therefore, because the Communist Party is the only revolutionary political working class party — and because this party has boycotted the coming elections — WE, YOUR FELLOW WORKERS AND COMRADES of the COMMUNIST PARTY OF AMERICA CALL UPON YOU THE WORKERS OF AMERICA to boycott THE COMING ELECTIONS!
- The Communist Party of America.

Save the Party

[This Document was part of the 2010 pre-convention papers submitted, which was, incidentally buried and forgotten in the comments section of Political Affairs. It's insightful analysis was apparently not considered important enough to include in the list of pre-convention documents in the article: http://cpusa.org/convention-discussion-2010/ -Ed.]

By Dean Christ, Kevin Kyle, and Joan Phillips

We think the CPUSA convention, postponed several times, cannot come soon enough. We believe the Party has been heading in a wrong direction in far too many ways.

What has happened the Party’s tradition of class struggle, anti-racism,anti-monopoly, anti-imperialism, political independence, international solidarity, and indeed Marxism-Leninism?

Instead of building the Party, the current top leaders (no matter what they think or claim they are doing) have been dismantling the Party piece by piece: eliminating the print versions of the People’s Weekly World and Political Affairs, giving away the Reference Center for Marxist Studies, keeping bookstores shut, abolishing the national Organization Department and several clubs in New York, not to mention cutting YCL funding instead of prioritizing it.

The June 2009 move to end the print edition of the PWW sent shock waves through the Party. Moreover, for top leaders to sweep under the rug the many letters of protest from individuals, clubs, and districts, constituted factionalism and a violation of democracy, for which there should be accountability. With some top officers of the Party now advising against the use of the word "Leninism" as "foreign," the word liquidation used by some comrades seems no longer an exaggeration.

How to Build the Party

While those of us opposed to the current direction may not wholly agree on the way forward, many would agree on the broad outlines:

* Put the class struggle at the center of our thinking and work. Organize the people's rage at Wall Street bailouts and mass joblessness by calling for nationalization and democratic control of the banks and basic industry, and by putting the Anti-Monopoly Coalition back at the center of our revolutionary strategy to win socialism.

* Put forth an anti-crisis program centered on job creation and call attention to the special suffering of youth, immigrants, and African Americans. Work in union rank-and-file movements, building unity, militancy and class-struggle policies.

* Organize the unemployed into a political force to be reckoned with by the ruling class. We need Unemployed Councils to fight politically for jobs at living wages.

* Resume our historically second-to-none role as a leading opponent of racism, national oppression and all forms of discrimination, and as an advocate and exemplar of Black-white unity. The conditions facing African Americans, Latinos and other nationally oppressed people are disproportionately bad and getting worse. Symbolic of the top leadership’s tone-deafness on national oppression, it was an affront to Latino workers, an increasingly important group of the specially oppressed, to dismiss the Spanish-language editor of the PWW.

* Build political independence ideologically and organizationally. Support progressive Democrats when they take the side of the people, and oppose them when they take the side of corporate and military interests. Support progressive independents. Run Communist candidates where possible and appropriate.

* Oppose in principle the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as predatory, unjust wars that must end at once. Oppose U.S. imperialism in all its manifestations.

* Build mass people’s movements with renewed energy, including the anti-war movement, the movement for women’s equality and movements against racist and political repression. Rebuild Party-related left organizations, including in the labor movement.

* Revive Marxist-Leninist inner Party education to enhance members' political development. Its neglect is evident in the party leadership's opportunistic collapseon so many issues under the ideological pressure of monopoly capital.

* Join unequivocally the fight against the impending catastrophe of climate change and link this cause to the class struggle.

* Heighten solidarity with the Cubans, Palestinians, and other peoples besieged by imperialism.

* Work with other Communist Parties, such as the Greeks and Portuguese, who have been confronting opportunism and promoting international Communist cooperation in recent years.

Most of us recognize that the Party’s practice in the recent period, sadly, has fallen far short of these aspirations.

The blame belongs squarely with the Party's general political and ideological line, and not, as some say, member lethargy. The political line, rendering us indistinguishable from the Democrats, makes recruitment hard, saps Party morale, and leads to chronic financial crisis.

All clear-headed Communists acknowledge that, in response to the greatest capitalist crisis in 70 years, President Obama has opened up some policy debates around health care, job creation, workers’ rights, environmental protection and nuclear disarmament. These issues were not -- and are not -- even on the agenda of the Republican Party.

Yet these positive openings do not cancel out the Administration’s role in the growing death and destruction in Afghanistan, the billions of dollars pouring into Wall Street banks and the corporations, the re-authorization of the blockade of socialist Cuba, or the refusal to reverse Bush’s policies of rendition and the abridgement of civil liberties.

These openings do not justify exaggerating the possibilities opened up by the Obama presidency or warrant fantasies about a social movement led by Obama.

More and more, the Party line subordinates everything to Democratic Party electoral work. It fails to grasp the centrality the sheer gravity and scope of this world capitalist economic crisis and the hardships the crisis is inflicting on the working class, and the corresponding need for a militant fight-back.

The line wildly exaggerates Obama’s progressive side and sows illusions about the Democratic Party as a vehicle for social change.

The Iraq War rages on. The President recently signed an all-time high $680 billion war budget, an obscenity, yet the Party voice is muffled. The line since the last convention has weakened our ties to the international Communist movement. Too many joint statements by the world movement on the Middle East and other burning issues go unsigned by the CPUSA. Our Party’s rosy "analysis" of the Obama Administration is rejected by the rest of a world Communist movement which is mobilizing against U.S. imperialism's current crimes.

Some top leaders push technological panaceas. Yet the over-reliance on technology is creating a party of people sitting alone in front of a computer screen. The Internet cannot substitute for direct mass contact with workers through print publications.

It cannot replace struggle in the streets, shops, and communities. Militant tactics measuring up to the desperate conditions created by this economic crisis are not pushed by the CPUSA. In practice, the current political line ignores the lessons of the 1930s and our Party’s finest legacies: the CIO, and the building of all mass movements from the grass roots.

Our Party publications have lost working-class common sense. Their pages lavish undeserved praise on the Administration, and downplay what really matters such as: an immediate end to the U.S. aggressions in the Middle East; a jobs program which is not a carbon copy of the AFL-CIO program, and which puts forth advanced demands such as a cut in the workweek with no cut in pay; equality for all nationally oppressed groups; an end to the blockade of Cuba and freedom for the Cuban Five; and health care reform worthy of the name.

The gap between reality and the current political line has rarely been greater.  We need a change. We want to restore a fighting Communist Party organization that leads struggle. Let’s make the most of our pre-convention discussion.

Tired Old So-Called Leftists Give Same Old Excuses For Supporting Obama in 2012

Written by Bruce A. Dixon

For more than four years now, we at Black Agenda Report have chronicled the self-silencing and growing irrelevance of black America and what calls itself "the left" in the age of Obama. Black America has arrayed itself as a veritable wall around the First Black President. But it's not a wall that protects him from racists or Wall Street predators or Pentagon warmongers. The truth has always been that when we stifle our own tongues and circle the wagons trying to silence critics of the White House we only protect the president and his party from accountability to their supposed base: us. Some African Americans and self-identified leftists relish their irrelevance so much they feel called to preach it. Early this week Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher published a 5,900 word screed at Alternet.Org with the clumsy and contradictory title The 2012 Elections Have Little To Do With Obama's Record ... Which Is Why We Are Voting For Him. 5,900 words is pretty long. Out of respect for our readers' precious time we here summarize its tired, recycled and profoundly un-original arguments in the order they were made, as 12 one-sentence bullet points. Some are repeated in whole or in part, because that's what Davidson and Fletcher did, for who knows what reason. Here they are: 1. The electoral system is pretty much broken. Give the authors credit for this brilliant observation. From standards of who can vote varying from state to state and county to county, with the US Senate giving disproportionate representation to states with lower population, with the Supreme Court affirming that corporations are people who get to vote with their money, and electronic voting which makes it audits impossible, it's hard to argue that US elections aren't a rigged game. 2. Historically, progressives either tail the Democrats, become anarchists, or use elections to expose the bad guys by attacking Dems as well as Repubs, all 3 of which they say "miss the point. " Tailing the Democrats is tailing the Democrats, period. Your votes and those you persuade and hustle count just the same, whether they are cast while holding your nose in a spirit of "critical support" or as a craven, tongue-wagging Al Sharpton-style bootlicker. And if the electoral processes are profoundly broken, what's wrong with using the election to expose the difference between what people want and deserve and what's actually being offered? Why is it better to let a Democrat cut Medicare and social security and privatize public education just because the Democrat isn't a white racist? 3.  Elections are about power, and the left not only has none, but possesses not even a plan to get any. The power of elections is symbolic — they symbolize the will of the people. Elections, even manifestly crooked ones, give a veneer of legitimacy to the "winners." And Fletcher & Davidson must be leftists themselves, because they don't have power or a plan to get any either. 4.  The Republican right is racist, irrational and often militantly ignorant. Wow. These guys don't miss much, do they? 5.  The 2008 Obama campaign was "movement-like" and some kind of "mass revolt", while Obama was always "a corporate liberal." Many like Carl and Bill who supported him were "measured skeptics." Back in 2008, Fletcher's term for "measured skeptic" was "critical support." Being a "measured skeptic" is sort of like being only slightly pregnant. Unless you believe the slogan on their poster, the Obama campaign was never a "movement." It was an marketing campaign, and won Advertising Age's 2008 award for the best brand of the year. Obama IS a "corporate liberal" but in the context of his campaign being a marketing effort masquerading as a movement, it's more precise to call him that — a brand, deliberately manufactured as objects to which folks can attach imaginary and desirable qualities like compassion, opposition to wars, and so on. 6.  Fletcher & Davidson credit Obama with taking the troops out of Iraq. This is an outright lie, as more than a hundred thousand US–financed mercenaries remain in Iraq indefinitely, and the Obama White House fought till the last minute to get its Iraqi client state to set aside the Status of Forces agreement negotiated under the Bush administration which required all official US forces to leave the country. 7.  The Republican right is attacking Obama cause they're irrational, misogynist and racist and because he's black. Same as point number 4. Keen and savvy observers, Davidson and Fletcher are, to have noticed this. 8.  Fletcher and Davis say "this is not a referendum on the 'America of Empire'", instead it's one that pits "'the America of Popular Democracy'... the changing demographics of the US... against the forces of... far right irrationalism..." so Obama's actual record is beside the point. This is almost too weak and shabby to poke fun at. If the discussion is about empire, Fletcher and Davidson can't win. The First Black President invaded and overthrew an African country, Libya, is launching daily drone strikes into the horn of Africa, possibly Mali, and certainly Pakistan and Yemen, and has carried out military adventures Bush and Cheney could only dream of doing without massive upheaval at home. The notion that Obama, the president who coordinated military-style assaults against the occupy movement nationwide last year is on the side of "popular democracy" is also laughable. Obama supporters desperately need his actual record in office excluded from any discussion, or they know they cannot win. 9.  Davidson & Fletcher say that progressive forces are too weak "to supersede or bypass the electoral arena altogether," don't have candidates that can "outshine" the two corporate parties, so voting for the lesser evil is a practical necessity. Such original insights. Who knows what it means to "supersede... the electoral arena," or what it means for a lefty candidate to "outshine" those of the two parties? If the "shine" is a function of corporate media attention, that's a done deal. Corporate media are key players in choosing the establishment candidates and building the narratives that say what the one-percenters want said and keep what they don't want said off the table. 10.  The Republican right is trying to turn back the "demographic and political clock," which electing Obama presumably advances. Davidson & Fletcher makes this "demographic" argument twice, so they must think it's really important. We're supposed to picture Repubs as foes of even arithmetic and the forward flow of time, which maybe they are. Can't have that, can we? 11.  They say that this really important election is about defending ourselves from the Republican right. Ever notice how every darn election is the most important one yet? Or how every election is about defending us from the Republican right. None of them are about defending ourselves from the equally if not more dangerous Democratic right. More Democrats than Republicans in Congress voted for the Bush bailout of September 29. When it lost, Bush called in Barack off the campaign trail. Obama worked the phones and whipped Democratic votes into line so that the Black Caucus for instance, which voted 34 to 8 against the Wall Street bailout on September 29 endorsed it 32 to 10 on October 3. That Bush bailout was only for $3 trillion. Once in office, Barack, according to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, handed out $15 or 16 trillion more. 12. Fletcher and Davidson claim progressives will have more room to operate under Obama, so again, complaining about what the Obama administration has or hasn't done is "of little help at this point." Again, they cannot win discussions about Obama's actual four year record, so Obama supporters have to either lie about that record or rule such discussions off the table. As for the notion that progressives have more "room to maneuver and organize" under a Democrat than under Republicans, the last four years should disabuse us of that. Carl's and Bill's nonsense about supporting "the America of Popular Democracy" by organizing independently on the ground while supporting Obama and presumably Congressional Dems as well didn't pass the smell test four years ago and stinks even worse today. To cite just one glaring example, in just about every state in the union there are pro-privatization, anti-teacher, anti-public education referendums, often binding or tied to state constitutional amendments on the November 2012 ballot that will enable the proliferation of charter schools despite the wishes of local communities. These are not abstract questions — they have immediate and far-reaching local and national implications for public education, for the cause of privatization, for the stabilization of communities and much else. The Obama administration, and usually Republicans as well as corporate Democrats on the ground are aggressive supporters of this stuff. Bill and Carl would have us organize to defend public education, at the same time that we get out the vote for a president and Democrats down the ticket to state legislators, county boards and city halls leading the attacks against teachers and public schools. You could make similar arguments that support for Obama actively directly undermines, subverts and contradicts local organizing against nuclear power, which Obama is a big fan of, or reining in the telecoms, or opposing wars in Asia and Africa, or standing up for the rights of prisoners or Palestinians or the immigrants who Obama has deported in record-breaking numbers, or the work to keep homeowners in their homes. How do Bill and Carl expect people on the ground to further any of this work while they make excuses for Obama who directly opposes them on all these fronts and more? In the end, Fletcher and Davidson are just saying the Republicans are racists and white supremacists, so we're obligated to circle the wagons around Obama, and this simply trumps everything else. Some of us don't really buy this. Economist Michael Hudson a couple years ago opined that the duty of corporate politicians is to deliver their voting constituencies to their campaign contributors, and this was why Republicans and Democrats sounded different when campaigning but governed in substantially the same way. The only good thing about Fletcher and Davidson's piece is that they didn't call names, like esteemed elder Amiri Baraka did when he said blacks who didn't support Obama four years ago were "rascals", or like cranky old Ishmael Reed when Jared Ball waved a microphone near him a little while back. So apart from calling them old and tired, which some of us here at Black Agenda Report confess to as well, we won't play the dozens here. But their excuses for supporting Obama are shallow, specious and profoundly un-original, the essence of lesser-evilism and tailing behind Democrats. They ought to, and might well be, ashamed to have to make them. August 15, 2012