Workers World, Vol. 1 No. 1
We are living in an epoch of convulsions and catastrophes. It is characterized by a race between imperialist wars and proletarian revolutions. Twice in a third of a century, imperialist has launched world wars that took the lives of millions, maimed and crippled countless millions of others. This is not to count the innumerable “little” wars that predatory finance capital unleashes from time to time on the helpless colonial and semi-colonial people.
Not a single world issue dividing the Great Powers of this planet has been resolved in the past fifty years except by force. Yet the statesmen talk peace and plan conference after conference, but in truth they are lulling the people to sleep while the preparations for war feverishly move on. The peace talks grow louder. The armaments grow bigger. And the worst role of all is played by the bourgeois pacifists who provide a smoke screen to cover the war moves.
Marxism has always taught that social convulsions, catastrophes, war and revolution are the inevitable qualitative changes after the cumulative, quantitative growth of years if not decades of “peaceful” development and sharpening of irrepressible class antagonisms.
Our task is to prepare the masses for these eventualities, not to sing them to sleep with pacifist lullabies. But that’s just what the petty bourgeois pacifists, “Socialists” and “Communists” of all varieties are doing now. We say: without a proletarian revolution, imperialist war is inevitable. That is the Leninist teaching on the subject and that teaching is still valid.
The other “Socialist” and “Communist” groupings cannot face up to this reality. They are either gutless and spineless, or befuddled by bourgeois pacifist propaganda. On the eve of great crisis, they yield before imperialism.
We aim to re-establish the rightful position of Marxism as the independent class ideology of the proletariat in mortal combat against all these other tendencies, who seek to degrade Marxism to the level of an ideological category within the framework of bourgeois thought.
American workers need a new party. The reason is clear. All the old radicals, socialists, semi-socialist and so-called communist organizations in this country are completely bankrupt. Twelve years of capitalist repression and phony prosperity have broken their will, corrupted their class consciousness and reduced them to an impotent conglomeration of warring groups united only in their disdain for and renunciation of the Bolshevik principles of Lenin and Trotsky.
There can be nothing worse for the advanced socialist-minded workers in America than to abandon the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party in favor of an eclectic hodge-podge “socialist” organization. There can be nothing worse than to preach “socialist unity” at a time of complete theoretical chaos and confusion in the ranks of the advanced socialist workers. The clarification of revolutionary ideas must always take precedence over organizational combinations in the building of a genuine Marxist-Leninist party.
Away with the Horse and Buggy
The Khrushchev revelations on which some groups banked so much did not begin a revolutionary renaissance in the labor and radical movement. Instead, there began a retreat (which has now become a rout) to pre-Marxian, non-class-struggle socialism.
To saddle the American workers with such “socialism” is to ask them to use Stone Age methods for the solution of Space Age problems. We, on the other hand, want to go forward with the revival and development of the Marxist-Leninist principles. We are the moderns. The “new” revisionists are throwbacks to the distant past.
Our outlook is global in character. That means we defend the socialist interests of the proletariat and its revolutionary allies everywhere on the globe. In this modern epoch, it means also that we are class patriots, not only of the working class of the country where we happen to live, but the working class of every country, in every land.
The Russia, Chinese and East European proletariat, having overthrown the rule of the capitalists and landlords, have established states of their own, no matter how deformed. And it is our bounden duty to defend them with all our might.
The rise of Sputnik and the fall of the stock market in October 1958 were dramatic symbols of the raging struggle between two world social systems that are based on diametrically opposed class structures – one, the dying system of capitalism, and the other, the nascent system of socialism. In this struggle, there can be no neutrals. We take our side wholly and completely with the new social system.
In any war of the imperialist countries against the Soviet Union, China or Eastern Europe – or any colonial countries – we stand firmly and unequivocally on their side, which is the side of the working class.
Following the classic position of Lenin, we are defensist in relation to the workers’ states, and defeatist in relation to imperialism. We are proud to have advanced this principled position under the acid test of the Korean War, when most groups were either equivocal, half-hearted, or downright capitulationist.
A New Party Needed!
Today, all the other socialist and communist groups show an abhorrence and dread of the oncoming world struggle. Peace-lovers at their best, and peace-mongers at their worst, they are akin to the ancient Catholic priesthood, which peddles indulgences to befuddle the masses.
All the more is it necessary to have a party which will call a spade a spade – a party that will not hide class truth in the interest of narrow, sectarian organizational gain – a party that does not worry first about bourgeois public opinion and only secondly about its principles – a party that is fearless in the face of an imperialist witch-hunt, and can say what it is, whether it be in Pittsburgh or Moscow, in Oshkosh or Vitebsk.
The necessity for such a party does not flow from mere abstract principle. It flows from the fact that class deception aids class oppression, whereas class truth leads to class liberation.
It was not without reason that Marx and Engels, more than a hundred years ago, proudly proclaimed on their banner, “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
Last updated: 11 May 2026