By Gus Hall
Main report, 24th National Convention, CPUSA

In the minds of the people today there is a coming together of the two broadest concerns that involve the great peace and democratic majority:
1) the concern for the preservation of humanity and nature because of the threat of nuclear war, and,
2) the deep concern for the preservation of U.S. democracy, the democratic structure and democratic rights.
The danger in both cases comes from the same source: the most reactionary
militaristic, chauvinistic and racist, and anti-labor section of monopoly capital…
The broad forces reflecting overall democratic traditions and feeling include the working class, middle class, intellectuals, professionals and people in the mass media. This includes large numbers of Afro-Americans, Chicano-Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and other oppressed minorities.
How to tap the potential of this moment with initiatives that will lead to mass actions by the broadest democratic forces is the task at hand. Our task is to tap this potential so as to give rise to forms of political independence that will lead toward a new popular mass political party.
…There is a need for new initiatives, for the building of a people’s movement to establish a new democratic structure, a people’s democratic structure. There is a need for movements and struggles to strip the executive branch of much of its powers, to limit or repeal its war making powers and for constitutional reforms. In a nuclear world, no one individual should have such powers.
There is a need for people’s movements in the struggle to cut the military budget to the bone, to put an end to the war economy and the war budget.
It is possible to go on an ideological offensive against monopoly capitalism. It is a moment when millions can be made to see that monopoly capitalism is the root of all social evils, that it is associated with everything that is anti-democratic, corrupt, immoral, that hard rock of capitalist reality.

By James Thompson

I travelled to Cuba one year ago and met with Cuban doctors who are at the forefront of hurricane preparedness in that country. I was impressed with the organization and comprehensive plan that the Cubans have put together to protect their population from the ravages of hurricanes.

Their plan was based on scientific evidence which they gathered from previous experience in dealing with catastrophic storms. Their goal was to minimize casualties from catastrophic hurricane based disasters. They have largely succeeded in their effort.

For a great video documenting Cuban – U.S. cooperation, go to http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=7834855

By Raskonikov Radek

The university in capitalist society is a battleground for the class struggle. The struggle has become more intense due to the dramatic rises in the cost of a college education. The structures of capitalist societies are imposed on university faculty and students in a manner similar to that of the factory. The web of the influence of corporate and government (e.g. CIA and military) money is as intense as it is pervasive.

Michael Parenti in his book Against empire writes that in “colleges and universities can be found faculty and administrators…who argue with all seriousness that a university is an independent community of neutral scholars, a place apart from the immediate interests of this world, a temple of knowledge. In reality, many universities have direct investments in corporate America in the form of substantial stock portfolios. By purchase and persuasion, our institutions of higher learning are wedded to institutions of higher earning. In this respect, universities differ little from such other social institutions as the media, the arts, the church, schools, and various professions, all of which falsely claim independence from a dominant class perspective.”

Although the university produces no tangible commodities, it serves the interests of capitalism nonetheless. The university serves to train students in capitalist ideology as well as imparting some useful skills which the students use after graduation to promote themselves and fight for better wages. From the point of view of capitalism, the function of the university is to produce students who, once graduated, are highly trained workers that can influence the production process towards more efficiency and higher production rates. From the point of view of the students and faculty, the function of the university is to increase their wages. Herein we find the class struggle.

However, in the process of training, there are some twists in the road which are unexpected from the capitalist’s point of view. Some students in the process of training acquire important skills in organization as well as critical thinking. This can lead to unwanted (from the capitalist’s point of view) increases in the level of consciousness of the student.

Some students, infected with these intellectual skills and cognizant of their class membership, go on to organize and influence other students and workers by educating them in the nature of the class struggle. Such students use their university acquired skills to fight for a better world. This is, indeed, chilling to the capitalist.

The class struggle is recapitulated within the university at many levels. The drive to constantly increase profit inherent in the capitalist system is no stranger to the university. In recent years, tuition hikes have reached astronomical levels. The result is that only the wealthiest students, i.e. sons and daughters of capitalists, can comfortably afford to attend the university. The rest must mortgage their working lives to banks by taking out students loans that will leave them penniless while they serve their labor up to the corporations.

The corporations hire “the best and the brightest” to deliver sledgehammer blows to the wages of university trained and student loan burdened “professional” workers. It is no wonder that students and workers are so angry. We have seen their anger blossom recently in California over high tuition and in the last few days with violence erupting in London.

Why is all of this happening now? In the past, the socialist countries, led by the USSR, championed universal education. Capitalist countries fought against this, but eventually had to capitulate and provide some minimal structures to provide education to people of all classes who qualified for university education. Now the “evil empire” has been vanquished and capitalist countries have no such motivation to improve the lot of working people. They have chosen to get back to the business of the class struggle, which is to thwart the desires of working people to better themselves and their children. The hammer the capitalists are using is tuition hikes. The anvil is the students.

The class struggle is also carried out with a vengeance in the day to day operations of the university. There is a micro-class system which operates in the university itself. It is apparent at multiple levels. This microcosm of capitalist relations mirrors the relationship between the classes in general capitalist society.

Let’s start with the top of the heap. The university administrators are paid thugs whose job is to keep students and faculty in line and to appeal to the corporations and government for funding. They accomplish their mission by employing repression against the students, faculty and staff, much like the bosses in a factory. Faculty who do not toe the capitalist line are severely punished. This is documented and explicated in Michael Parenti’s book Against empire. He shows how faculty who deviate from the corporate line are marginalized and alienated from their work. Anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist faculty are typically passed up for tenure or not hired in the first place. Such faculty are punished in many ways to include exclusion from grant funding, less desirable teaching assignments and many other brutal assaults on their academic integrity.

The next level of class differentiation is between faculty and students. The faculty, fighting their own struggle against the university, typically embrace the illusion that they are superior to the students because of their position in the university, i.e. higher pay, greater privileges, and rank. Many students buy into this model and view themselves as inferior because of the factors mentioned above. Many students adopt a position of submission as a survival mechanism but this only serves to quash their creativity. They “go along to get along” and the system rewards mediocrity while punishing creativity.

There is another class of workers at any university. These include support staff, both administrative and custodial/maintenance. These workers are frequently ignored and forgotten but are what keeps the university running and comfortable for the faculty, administration and students. These workers have been subject to the pressures for wage suppression and often suffer the most at the hands of the hired guns in university administration and Boards of Regents. Some workers at the Texas Southern University, for example, have not had a substantial wage increase in 5+ years.

In reality, the faculty, administration and students objectively belong to the same class in that they do not own the university. The wages of faculty, students and administrators are comparable when contrasted with the profits garnished by the wealthy elite. If a student makes $5000 a year, a faculty member makes $40,000 a year and an administrator makes $250,000 a year these wages are closer than those wealthy elite who make $1,000,000,000 a year off of investments for which they do not expend a single hour of labor in a year (or many years).

The professors, just like other workers, are forced to perform the same job until their retirement or death. They might have a great, new, creative idea or desire to teach something else and find that the university administration does not allow it. After 20 years of giving the same old grades and reading the same boring papers, they become dull and bitter, and no longer approach their subject with the same passion. The university, because of its class structure, necessarily fights against those who oppose the class structure. Capital will crush anything it sees as dangerous and develop ideological restraints to opposition. Professors become submissive in order to survive in the repressive environment.

For students also, being submissive is the very essence of being-a-good-student in capitalist society. Subjectively one might be a hard worker and passionately engage a subject, but objectively only those who are submissive are good students in the eyes of Capital. In the classroom, especially in graduate school, the student learns how to put on a mask and please other people, namely the professor. If they do not learn this skill, they may not pass the course. Being very submissive in the classroom, never thinking for oneself and entirely submitting to the popular opinion prevailing in the classroom will get almost every student an A. Yet in getting a good grade, the student has been forced to give up their freedom and is thus in a relation of domination. In the capitalist university, the student is given their freedom of speech on condition that they do not utilize this freedom. The moment the student chooses to speak freely and openly, to express their creative potential and share their own ideas, they will be crushed by Capital and fail the course.

The university is an appendage of the State, for it reproduces the ruling class ideology in all its different forms. It enforces the entire prevailing class-based ideology and sustains its dominance. It is precisely the social relations created by a bourgeois dictatorship that are reproduced within the university. The reproduction of ideology already begins in grade-school, but does not exercise its full power until one begins studying at the university.

There is only one solution to the horrendous state of college education: a revolutionary process that abolishes the bourgeois dictatorship and establishes a new society based on common ownership of the means of production. Since there is currently no revolutionary situation, students must form unions and collectively fight against the university dictatorship. They must demand to be treated like human beings, not sheep who are not allowed to speak. They must fight against the injustices of a system which seeks to quash academic freedom. Furthermore, students must fight for universal education, so that both they themselves and their future comrades can go to college. However, the struggle must not be centered only around the university, but in the larger struggle against capitalism.

The struggle against the university is a struggle against the capitalist system and against the bourgeois dictatorship. To fight against the university means to join the struggle to build a larger movement that can end the oppression created by capitalism once and for all. Communist parties across the world must never abandon the revolutionary vision, for to do so is to directly attack working people and working class students. To abandon the revolutionary vision and instead fight only for reforms means sustaining the bourgeois dictatorship and the ideological relations which it creates. Abandoning revolution means sustaining classrooms where students are treated like sheep, and where only the submissive get good grades. To abandon the revolutionary vision means to sustain the system that allows only the few to get an education, while the rest are left to fend for themselves! We mustn’t abandon the revolutionary vision, for as long as capitalism prevails, no matter what reform is instituted, it will never end the oppression and violence within capitalist society. Students should unite and fight for every reform possible that is in the interest of working people, but also consider the long term strategy of abolishing the bourgeois State. Students should work together and fight for lower tuition, for more academic freedom, and demand to be treated like human beings. At the same time, however, they should consider the strategy of creating a system that will end the very need to struggle against the university dictatorship. Students are bound up in the class struggle, and therefore belong to a larger movement of working people fighting to bring about a classless society, and abolishing the class structure of society for good. Students must therefore go beyond reforms and fight for the revolution! Students of the world, UNITE!

By James Thompson

There have been many attempts to define fascism in an effort to understand it. Some maintain that fascism is the capitalists’ last option. Others ask, “What is fascism but the death throes of capitalism?”

Fascism has also been described as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” According to Georgi Dmitrov in a collection of his reports in 1935 and 1936 Against Fascism and War, fascism is “the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.”

He points out that German fascism, i.e. Nazism or National Socialism, has been the most reactionary form of fascism. He explains, “It has the effrontery to call itself National Socialism, though it has nothing in common with socialism. German fascism is not only bourgeois nationalism, it is fiendish chauvinism. It is a government system of political gangsterism, a system of provocation and torture practiced upon the working class and the revolutionary elements of the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. It is medieval barbarity and bestiality, it is unbridled aggression in relation to other nations.”

Fascism has manifested itself in many other nations, including most notably, Italy, where Mussolini declared that fascism should be more appropriately called “corporatism” since it represents the merger of the state and corporations. It also appeared in Spain under Franco and other countries. It is important to remember that fascism can be thought of as a logical extension of capitalism. It is one of the forms of rule that can take place under capitalism. It is not an economic system in and of itself. Fascism is a form of government intended to protect the interests of the capitalists through violence and oppression.

The capitalist press has been very effective in blurring the distinction between fascism and communism. Many people in the U.S.A. equate and confuse the terms. The main difference is that fascism is a form of government which safeguards and promotes the interests of the capitalists, whereas communism safeguards and promotes the interests of working people. Fascism is anti-democratic and only allows the political will of the capitalists to be expressed, whereas communism is pro-democratic and only allows the political will of the working people to be expressed.

There has been discussion among leftists in the U.S.A. as to whether the Bush administration was a fascist government. Many maintain that the policies of Bush and his cronies were fascist in nature. Others argue that the policies were different from those seen in fascist countries between the two World Wars. Norman Markowitz in his article “On Guard Against Fascism” published in Political Affairs (May, 2004) states “The domestic policy of fascism was to destroy the independent labor movement, all socialist and communist parties and all democratic movements of the people. The foreign policy of fascism was to completely militarize the society and organize the people to fight imperialist wars and accept and glorify such wars on nationalist and racist grounds…As both ideology and policy, fascism was the rabid response of a decaying capitalism threatened by the workers’ movement at home and anti-colonial movements abroad. The forms that fascism takes can change and be updated, but these are its essential characteristics.”

Gerald Horne, in his article “Threat Needs Study” in Political Affairs (July, 2004), calls for more study of the fascist movement in this country. He points out that there are organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center which track the activities of the extreme right. He also notes that the Center for Responsive Politics tracks political donations. He suggests that donations from certain sectors of finance capital could be tracked to political candidates and organizations.

Horne points out that many scholars maintain that fascism has historically developed as a reaction to the development of strong progressive movements which support the interests of working people. He goes on to note that some academics don’t think a fascist movement is likely to develop in the U.S.A. because there is no strong progressive movement currently. Whether there is a viable progressive movement in the U.S.A. is debatable, especially considering the mass movements which have been so conspicuous in 2006. As the right wing has mounted its assault on working people, the positive achievements of the twentieth century in civil rights, education, social security and health care become more apparent. One can conceptualize the recent actions of the right wing as a reaction to the gains of the progressive movement.

From a dialectical materialist point of view, we can see that the development of capitalist, fascist, socialist and communist movements are developments in the struggle between the owners of the means of production and the workers. As Marx pointed out, “All human history hitherto is the history of the class struggle.” The interests of fascism and communism are just as opposed and irreconcilable as the interests of working people and capitalists. As capitalism weakens, its options narrow and it is more likely that it will desperately grasp for fascist methods to sustain itself. Much as a wounded animal is more likely to bite, capitalism in its final stages is more likely to use direct violence against working people. However, just as the animal ensures its own destruction through violence, so it will go for capitalism.

It is noteworthy that there are similarities between the tactics employed by Bush and fascist movements in the past. Don Sloan, in his article “The ‘F’ Word” in Political Affairs (May, 2004) does a good job of comparing fascist tactics and those of the Bush administration. Sloan warns “It can’t happen here? It can happen here? It is happening here.”

It is easy to use the label “fascism or fascist” when trying to discredit our opponents. We, the people of conscience on the left, should be careful however when we apply labels. Applying labels tends to de-humanize people and is a tactic used in military training. Soldiers are taught to think of their “enemies” as subhuman thus making it easier to kill them. We must remember that a number of people apply labels to us. Do we really want to respond to mudslinging by mudslinging ourselves? People on the left use “fascist” far too easily these days to label people promoting policies they don’t like. It would be more useful and productive to attack the policies we do not like and explain that the reason we do not like them is that they are harmful to working people. Throwing around labels and failing to use a class analysis is counterproductive at best. Such tactics may actually hurt the credibility of progressive movements who engage in such behavior.

We do not like the “fascist like” tactics employed by our government, but it is important to remember that unlike Nazi Germany, we still have trade unions, opposition political parties such as the CPUSA, and a progressive press to include the People’s World and others. Writers such as Michael Parenti and publishing companies such as International Publishers are still publishing articles and books. We have not had book burnings and university professors are not clubbed and imprisoned. No Communist in the U.S.A. has been put in a concentration camp by the Bush or Obama administrations.

Nevertheless, it will be important for people on the left to keep identifying clearly those tactics and developments that are not in the interest of the working class and mount united struggles against each and every one of them. This is already happening in the case of the War in Iraq, immigration policy, and the struggle to save social security. These struggles will move our country forward and will help build a strong progressive movement that can bring about positive social change. We cannot forget and must not abandon the gains made in the last century. Indeed, it is time to start making new gains for this century.

Bibliography

Georgi Dmitrov, Against War and Fascism, (International Publishers, New York, 1986).

Gerald Horne, “Threat Needs Study,” Political Affairs, (July, 2004).

Norman Markowitz, “On Guard Against Fascism,” Political Affairs, (May, 2004)

Don Sloan, “The ‘F’ Word,” Political Affairs, (May, 2004).