For a People, Peace, and Planet Before Profits agenda

 
BY:Cameron Harrison| August 23, 2024
For a People, Peace, and Planet Before Profits agenda

 

The Communist Party’s role in the all people’s front and our principled unity in action can help weaken and ultimately block the fascists from seizing our country. Now is the time to get out there, organize and mobilize for the immediate and fundamental interests facing our working-class and build a broad-based movement on its behalf — for a People, Peace, and Planet Before Profits agenda!

On one hand, the current political situation in our country is rife with danger — specifically the drive by the most reactionary sections of monopoly capital towards fascism and war. The crisis we are facing is characterized by aggressive militarism, particularly in the support for Israel’s war on Palestine and involvement in the proxy war in Ukraine. It is the policy of waging Cold War 2.0 against China abroad and building “Cop Cities” at home.

It is expressed by the attacks on immigrant workers, women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals. Big-business and their agents are utilizing the reactionary Supreme Court to go after organized labor and our unions, attempting to declare the NLRB unconstitutional. The fascists and their courts are legislating from the bench in a constitutional coup hellbent on rolling back all the gains and rights won by the people over the last century.

They are attempting to roll back policies to address the environmental crisis at the behest of Big Oil. The crisis also expresses itself in the attempts to dismantle our already limited democratic structures, including the right to vote. Their goal is to completely overthrow the gains of the 20th century and strengthen the divisions among the working-class.

Project 2025 is the playbook for implementing, by executive orders, a fascist agenda, that would completely alter the balance of forces in our country in a regressive way.

Project 2025 is the playbook for implementing, by executive orders, a fascist agenda, that would completely alter the balance of forces in our country in a regressive way. Fascism is not the ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but bourgeois rule by open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, imperialistic elements of monopoly capital that seeks to supplant bourgeois democracy in general.

On the other hand, the political situation is also opening up new possibilities. The broad people’s democratic movement is developing rapidly. The trade union movement is expressing its burgeoning political independence against the ruling class’ drive for war and support for Israel’s war on Palestine. Major unions and over 200 locals have come together to form the National Labor Network for Ceasefire and seven major trade unions have come out for an arms embargo against Israel. Strike activity is up and concessionary contracts are down. Monopoly’s assault on living conditions, rent, and food prices are being fought by the working-class and its allies with labor-community coalitions that bridge the gaps between the workplace and the neighborhood.

Movements and organizations are forming to oppose the military budget and call for moving the money from the Pentagon towards people’s needs. The broad women’s movement is continuing to make its mark on the democratic struggle for reproductive rights and the right to equal pay for equal work. The political and cultural struggles against racism and national chauvinism have become important fixtures of the fight against division and oppression, expressing themselves in both legislative and demonstrative ways.

The Communist Party is a politically independent force but is not separate from this emerging all people’s front in the battle for democracy.

The Communist Party is a politically independent force but is not separate from this emerging all people’s front in the battle for democracy. Our role is to advance the leading role of the working-class, the most revolutionary force in history, to ensure it’s mark is on all the day-to-day struggles for social progress and the struggle against fascism.

Our position is to reinforce the democratic, pro-peace, and anti-monopoly demands of the people and promote a fighting, working-class leadership. We must continually fight against, and expose, elected representatives’ complicity in Wall Street’s drive towards war and the establishment of a fascist dictatorship.

The Communist Party continues to fight to ensure working-class leadership in all movements and coalitions because liberals will move to the right under pressure. Therefore, the all people’s front needs working-class backbone, vision, and organization that center the demands of workers and democratic forces.

Communists fight for a consistent, working-class policy that combats every single fascist and war-mongering maneuver. Our role in the all people’s front means exposing all ruling class ties to fascism and militarism, including the political forces complicit with its growth. Our demands include breaking those ties and making the rich pay for the crisis. Our movement must effectively undermine the social and economic basis of the fascist menace.

We must first go all out in the 2024 elections to block the fascist candidates at all levels, from school boards, to local and state governments, to the federal level. We have to mobilize in support of the issues and exploit the divisions in the ruling class, support initiatives to field and elect communist and progressive candidates, and demand voting rights for immigrants as well as support progressive ballot initiatives. We must also build the progressive movement and the Communist Party by advancing a popular people’s agenda.

A People, Peace, and Planet Before Profits agenda would give the working-class and our allies a clear perspective on the class nature of the crisis

A People, Peace, and Planet Before Profits agenda would give the working-class and our allies a clear perspective on the class nature of the crisis, the necessary program to block the imminent danger of fascism, and create the embryonic form for an anti-monopoly movement to curb the power of monopoly capital. Indeed, this struggle is not a struggle for the status quo — but a struggle to deepen and expand democracy and the best traditions of our working-class. It is the only path to socialism in our country.

Our Party’s resolution on the elections calls for a rapid acceleration of a green energy transition based on good paying union jobs. We call for a slashing of the military budget, closing the military bases, and abolishing NATO. We demand an end to the sending of weapons to Ukraine, Israel, as well as other places, and instead fully fund housing, healthcare, schools, and utilities and make these truly public institutions that serve everyone. We call on the working-class and our allies to mobilize for sweeping democratic demands that involve expanding voting and union organizing rights, a national right to reproductive healthcare, protecting LGBTQ rights, approving D.C. Statehood, and implementing community control of the police in every jurisdiction.

The drive of the most reactionary and chauvinistic section of the ruling class towards fascism does not mean that fascism is inevitable.

The drive of the most reactionary and chauvinistic section of the ruling class towards fascism does not mean that fascism is inevitable. The people are the makers of history and the progressive, democratic movement under the leadership of the working-class must fight to guarantee that “what can be done, is done.” The Communist Party must demonstrate in action that we are champions of peace, democracy, and social progress for the overwhelmingly majority of people in our country.

 

Images: End the Occupation by CPUSA (Creative Commons); CWA Rally in Baton Rouge by AFL-CIO America’s Unions (CC BY 2.0).

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