The fight against the extreme-right, the fight against monopoly power as a whole, and the struggle for socialism outline the general direction of working-class struggle, our priorities, and our ultimate aims — socialism (ie the working class “organized as the ruling class”), and communism (a classless, stateless society of full equality and shared abundance).

This outline is useful for understanding the relationship between these struggles, and the alignment of social forces necessary to win them. It also provides a defense against attempts to pit the immediate interests of the working-class and all oppressed people against our long-term interests (eg “don’t vote for Democrats, fight for socialism”).

Our strategic outline contributes to the unity and organization of the working-class and its allies, which contribute to working-class leadership in the struggle for democracy and socialism. It also takes into account differing levels of class and socialist consciousness.

The fight against the extreme-right (or corporate right) must include the fight for the unity and leading role of all anti-monopoly forces. Within the anti-monopoly coalition, we need to fight for the unity and leading position of our diverse working-class in alliance with all oppressed people.

The Communist Party will earn the leading role in the working-class movement if we are able to develop the alignment of forces necessary to win the battle of democracy and establish working-class power. The demands we choose to raise and support will impact the development of the working-class movement.

Dividing our strategic outline into stages creates tendencies within our Party to passively wait and see how the anti-monopoly and socialist movements develop, rather than taking a proactive, leading role in developing them.

In real life, anti-extreme-right, anti-monopoly, and anti-capitalist struggles are already developing side-by-side. They are taking place alongside the irreversible decay of capitalism and imperialism, not to mention climate and biodiversity collapse. The political ascendance of particularly reactionary sections of monopoly capital is related to the overall decay of capitalism in its monopoly stage, which increases its reactionary nature.

The first component of our strategy relates to the fight for democracy and against oppression as a matter of strategic priority.

The democratic revolution and its relationship to the socialist revolution has been important for Communists everywhere, whether in Russia, China, South Africa, or elsewhere. It is important for us as well.

During Comrade Scott Hiley’s presentation on Lenin’s Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution he asked us, “What would a decisive victory over the extreme-right [ie corporate right] look like for us?”

It would have to include, at minimum, realization of universal suffrage — real, universal access to the ballot and to citizenship; establishment of the popular vote; complete desegregation of U.S. society and equitable school funding; ending mass incarceration, slave labor, and state-sanctioned police executions; universal access to safe abortions; equal pay for equal work; living wages; the right to form or join a union; rent control; gun control; military budget cuts; and redirecting fossil fuel and corporate agriculture subsidies toward renewable energy and smaller, sustainable food producers.

The ruling forces behind the Republican Party will not allow this, and we must fight against them. Looking at Democratic Party controlled areas like Chicago or New York City, it is also clear many of these tasks no section of monopoly capital is able or willing to complete.

That puts the anti-monopoly struggle in dialectical relationship with the democratic struggle.

We will continue to orient the political struggle primarily against Republican Party rule until the conditions have been prepared for another route to power, but that does not mean we should hold off on building the struggles also currently taking place within and around the Democratic Party, which will help prepare those conditions. We need to stay ahead of the curve with respect to these anti-monopoly trends as well.

The Democratic and Republican Parties operate less as political Parties and more as a split in the bureaucratic apparatus of the capitalist state. Each have different historical roots, constituting to some extent a prolonged struggle between bourgeois-democratic forces and remnants of the fascist planter class of the Confederacy. Somewhere in between stand the racist settler-colonial forces that formed the U.S. state, and which constituted the germ of U.S. imperialism today.

This split also corresponds to the struggle between Capital and Labor at the base of society; different tactics of capitalism in dealing with working and oppressed people, our movements and our demands; and different tactics of imperialism. There is a coalition of forces within each, including working-class and oppressed people’s forces working through the Democratic Party to protect and advance our immediate interests. At the same time, each are institutions of capitalist-imperialist rule, and each are controlled by various monopoly interests, according to the contradictions that exist between them.

We can objectively measure the power of the Republican Party by looking at the positions it controls at various levels of government. We cannot as easily quantify the power of the corporate right. The extreme-right sections of monopoly capital will increasingly attempt to operate through the Democratic Party as the Republican Party becomes less politically useful (eg landlords and real-estate in NYC). Simultaneously, liberal monopoly-capital forces within the Democratic Party will inevitably work to suppress the emergence of anti-monopoly and working-class power.

However, the more fear working-class and anti-monopoly struggles can strike into the heart of finance and monopoly capital, the more some sections will tail behind progressive struggles to avoid getting hit by any crossfire, while our democratic revolution keeps a watchful eye over them.

We cannot predict whether the struggle to isolate the Republican Party, to overcome the predominating influence of monopoly interests within the Democratic Party, and to build a labor and oppressed people’s Party capable of winning power, will occur at separate points in time in succession, or whether they will develop side-by-side. Each of these struggles are developing concurrently. Our job is to unite, guide, strengthen and advance them.

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