First Published: The Guardian Sustainer, July-August 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
The Guardian has put forward in its party-building supplement 29 principles which we believe constitute a sound basis for the ideological unity of Marxist-Leninists today in building a new communist party. We believe that those principles should be fought for within the party-building movement. In our view, the principles of unity for Guardian Clubs do not have to encompass all of the 29 principles. We have therefore concentrated the political essence of those principles in the following 10 points which provide the basis for the political unity of Guardian Clubs.
1. Guardian Clubs take the theoretical principles of scientific socialism as the ideological foundation for their unity.
2. Guardian Clubs are organized to take part in and help give leadership to the struggle against U.S. imperialism, the system of monopoly capitalism which rules in the U.S. and is the principal enemy of the working class and oppressed peoples and nations throughout the world.
3. Guardian Clubs hold that the contradiction between U.S. imperialism and its imperialist allies on the one hand, and the oppressed and exploited peoples and nations on the other, is the principal contradiction in the world at the present time.
4. Guardian Clubs hold that the multinational U.S. working class is the only revolutionary class in U.S. society and that the struggle to overthrow monopoly capitalism and establish socialism must proceed on the basis of its own emancipation and under working class leadership.
5. Guardian Clubs believe that U.S. Marxist-Leninists have the following strategic tasks:
• The building of a new, multinational, antirevisionist vanguard communist party.
• Making Marxist-Leninist theory into a material force in the class and political struggles of the present period by fusing that theory with the already existing spontaneous struggle of the working class and thereby developing the revolutionary class consciousness of the working class.
• Working to build the revolutionary alliance between the multinational U.S. working class and its firmest, most reliable allies, the oppressed nationalities and national minorities of the U.S.
• Working in and giving leadership to mass movements of the people in defense of democratic rights, against imperialist war, in solidarity with national liberation movements throughout the world.
6. Guardian Clubs see the struggle against racism, national oppression, white supremacy, great nation chauvinism as the foremost democratic task confronting the working class. The key to working-class unity rests in winning white workers to take up the special democratic demands of the workers of the oppressed nationalities. Guardian Clubs work with and give support to the democratic struggles of the Afro-American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Latino, Native American and Asian-American peoples in the U.S.
7. Guardian Clubs see the emancipation of women from the superexploitation of capitalism and the institutionalized system of male supremacy as completely bound up with the cause of proletarian revolution; the working class will not be able to defeat monopoly capitalism unless it becomes the foremost champion of women’s emancipation.
8. Guardian Clubs are firmly committed to the struggle against revisionism as the chief form of opportunism within the working class and progressive movement in our own country and internationally. The Soviet Union is today a hegemonist superpower and the chief ideological center for revisionism internationally.
9. Guardian Clubs are based on the principle of proletarian internationalism, understanding that the cause of the emancipation of the U.S. working class and oppressed peoples throughout the world is one. The following are particular expressions of proletarian internationalism which are paramount at this time:
• Active support and solidarity with the peoples of southern Africa in the struggle for majority rule and national liberation against colonialism, white supremacist regimes, apartheid, neocolonialism and U.S. imperialism.
• Independence and self-determination for Puerto Rico.
• Solidarity with the just cause of the Palestinian people.
• Support for the struggles of the people of Chile, Western Sahara, Oman, East Timor, Northern Ireland and other peoples and nations fighting for their democratic rights and national liberation.
• Solidarity with socialist and newly emancipated countries, such as Albania, Angola, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Laos, Mozambique and Vietnam.
10. Guardian Clubs support the general political line and world view of the Guardian and work to build its influence through public forums, promoting circulation, fund raising and other activities.