The battle for complete democracy is an essential part of the fight for socialism. Test your knowledge of this issue below.
1. Marx and Engels saw the state or government in any society as:
a. An agent of oppression;
b. An impartial arbiter of the law;
c. An instrument of the dominant or ruling class in a society;
d. A symbol of authority.
2. Marx and Engels from the Communist Manifesto on called upon Communists to fight the battle for democracy in order to:
a. Win elections to parliaments for their trade union leaders;
b. Support capitalist parties like the Liberal Party over the Conservative Party in Britain;
c. Establish socialism by winning elections;
d. Gain and use political rights and power to advance economic rights and power for the working class.
3. Communists have in United Front coalitions sought to identify themselves with the democratic currents and forces in their national cultures. Which one of these statements was not an example of a major Communist united front slogan:
a. Mao Tse-t’ung’s call for a New Democracy program during WWII to unite the Chinese people against Japanese imperialism and their own reactionary landlord class;
b. Georgi Dimitrov’s call for Communists to end “the fatal isolation of the working class from its natural allies ….in the struggle against fascism;”
c. Huey Long’s comment that when Fascism came to America it would be called anti-fascism; (correct)
d. CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall’s advancing the proposition Bill of Rights Socialism” in the 1990s (recently re-affirmed at the CPUSA 2005 national convention) to connect the struggle in the U.S. for socialism with the most important codification of citizens rights produced by the American Revolution.
4. Today, the struggle to advance the working-class movement requires the highest and most militant level of center-left unity and struggle because:
a. The right and ultra-right control all three branches of the federal government;
b. The Trump administration is committed to a program of military interventionism and aggression” using both slogans and tactics reminiscent of the the Fascist states before WWII;
c. The Bush administration is aggressively advancing a domestic program that threatens both the living standards and social protections of all working-class people and the civil rights and civil liberties of all people under the Bill of Rights and subsequent civil rights and civil liberties legislation and protections;
d. All of the above.
5. For Communists the following are essential components of the battle for democracy:
a. Global free trade;
b. A national program of full employment,restoration and expansion of the civil rights of minorities and women, national public health care, restoration and expansion of environmental protection, restoration and expansion of progressive taxation;
c. National right to work legislation.
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The Communist Party USA is a working class organization founded in 1919 in Chicago, IL.
The Communist Party stands for the interests of the American working class and the American people. It stands for our interests in both the present and the future. Solidarity with workers of other countries is also part of our work. We work in coalition with the labor movement, the peace movement, the student movement, organizations fighting for equality and social justice, the environmental movement, immigrants rights groups and the health care for all campaign.
But to win a better life for working families, we believe that we must go further. We believe that the American people can replace capitalism with a system that puts people before profit — socialism.
We are rooted in our country's revolutionary history and its struggles for democracy. We call for "Bill of Rights" socialism, guaranteeing full individual freedoms.
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