I try to keep it straight and simple and take from both Marx and Lenin and Mao (whom we have in the past not taken as seriously as a revolutionary theorist as we should) and others.
First we are a vanguard party, meaning a party of activists who practice what we preach. Our goals are to work to educate and organize the working class and to do that we work to coordinate the struggles the working class, which means also the struggles of the trade unions and the progressive organizations Gene talks about, so capitalists can’t pick them off and or buy them off.
We are not anarchists because we don’t believe that fighting and destroying government, all institutions and organizing society around voluntary collectives is possible or even worthwhile. We are not social democrats because we don’t believe that more and more reforms within the capitalist system will lead to socialism–which the social democrats pretty much don’t believe anymore themselves.
We have big mistakes in the past and can’t say we won’t make them in the future but it was our movement and our parties in the world which played the central role in defeating fascism in WWII, bringing down the colonial empires through the world and making possible the reforms that social democrats and liberals take credit for and often see as ‘alternative’ to ‘communism’.
Maybe in the future socialist societies will be established by non-Marxists and non-Communists, but so far only Communist parties have established socialism on our planet. As an old friend of mine, Harry Haywood, the author of Negro Liberation (1948) said to me when I knew him in the 1970s, we (meaning the Communists) “have the franchise” for socialism.At the time he was talking about the former colonial regions called the Third World. Today, we, the Communists, “have the franchise” for socialism in the U.S. and through the world.
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