Points of Unity

The contemporary capitalist system at its most basic level is the exploitation of the labor-power of the working class—the vast majority of society who must work in order to meet their basic needs—by the capitalist class—the small minority of society including factory owners, business executives, real estate developers, and financial speculators who extract wealth from environmental resources and the labor of the working class. The inherent tension between the interests of the capitalists and the workers is the root of class conflict in our society. In this conflict, we identify wholeheartedly with the working class.

We stand for the political independence of the working class. In the electoral realm, the Democratic Party, while making overtures to the working-class and oppressed people, has always gotten in line to support wars for profit and keep the flow of money going to their Wall Street donors. As an institution of capitalist rule, it can never be anything else.

We fight for reforms of the US electoral process to displace the stranglehold of the two-party system and ensure the fullest range of democratic expression with in the current system—e.g., restoring voting rights to felons, ending gerrymandering, granting voting rights to non-citizens, and ending discriminatory voter ID laws—all while recognizing that the current system must be fully overcome to provide democracy for the working class in the economic realm.

Fighting for working class independence also means committing to a rank-and-file strategy in the labor movement against the narrow interests of the labor bureaucracy, which, as a stratum separated from workers on the job, develops its own interests in negotiating—rather than ending—exploitation and in defanging militant shop-floor action that could displace their power.

In the struggle for socialism, the working class needs a political party of our own which is rooted in the struggles of working-class and oppressed people of today while building a bridge towards a revolutionary alternative tomorrow.

We recognize that capitalism is dependent upon systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism, among others. Some forms of oppression—such as anti-Black racism and immigration controls—have been used to hyper-exploit particular sectors of the workforce while exerting a negative pressure on wages for all workers. Other forms of oppression—such as sexism, homophobia, and transphobia—have been used to enforce ideological cohesion around the nuclear family for social reproduction. Oppression is also used to provide a scapegoat for the ruthlessness of capitalist society, such as in the case of antisemitism.

Oppression has also taken on a life of its own beyond what is necessary to secure the continued functioning of capitalism and must be struggled against on its own terms. The working class has a common interest in replacing the capitalist system, but we must fight against oppression within our ranks in order to unify and successfully wage a struggle against the ruling class and the ruling ideas of society. Consequently, we fight for feminism, trans liberation, Black liberation, sanctuary for immigrants and refugees, and participate in all other struggles against oppression, regardless of which class it affects. We also support efforts by oppressed communities to self-organize, including forming separate organizations or developing caucuses within our group.

The capitalist system has drawn together the entire world into a common social system held together by exploitation and oppression. Therefore, we see our struggle in the belly of the beast of the US empire as deeply linked with the struggles of workers and oppressed people in all countries.

We oppose all forms of imperialism, colonialism, and settler-colonialism. As revolutionary socialists in the United States, the world’s foremost empire and a state built on settler-colonial foundations, we have a duty to resist the overt and covert imperialism of the capitalists of our country and to fight for the self-determination of Indigenous peoples under US colonial rule.

We understand that imperialism is embedded into capitalism, and it is imperative that revolutionaries struggle resolutely against the imperialists of our nation while offering support to movements from below against the capitalist classes of other nations. While imperialism often manifests in the explicit forms of war and violence, we also commit to struggle against more covert forms of imperialism: embargos, sanctions, neo-liberal trade deals, and coercive forms of economic aid. We oppose the intervention of imperialist powers in the affairs of other nations and the exploitation of the resources of underdeveloped countries and Indigenous lands by multinational corporations.

We fight for a world without borders, where the fundamental right of people to movement is secured and the rights of every individual, regardless of place of origin, are respected.

We understand socialism as the state of affairs whereby the working class maintains full democratic control of the means of production. In its essence, socialism is the struggle of the vast majority to attain full economic, social, and political rights in a world free of oppression and exploitation. We recognize that the working class can only achieve power through the revolutionary overthrow of the existing system. This means the abolition of all systems of oppression, inequality, and coercion—police, prisons, private property, wage labor—and their replacement by democratic structures run in the interests of people, not profit. Our goal is a stateless, classless society based on the principle: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.