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DEFEAT THE BUSH AGENDA — THE PEOPLE CAN WIN! DRAFT MAIN POLITICAL RESOLUTION 28TH NATIONAL CONVENTION, COMMUNIST PARTY USA (ISSUED FOR PRE-CONVENTION DISCUSSION FEBRUARY 2005)

The 28th National Convention of the Communist Party USA takes place at a dangerous time in our nations history. Twenty-five years of right-wing dominance of the nations political agenda has reached a qualitatively new level of reaction in the aggressive, extremist, lame-duck administration of George W. Bush. This administration represents the interests of the most reactionary section of U.S.-based transnational capital, especially in energy, finance and armaments.

With its control of Congress and the courts, its access to vast corporate resources and its dominant ideological influence in the media, private think tanks, and sections of organized religion and academia, the Bush gang seeks to implement an extremist agenda that the American people never voted for and do not support. This agenda would savagely undermine our democracy, the living standards, rights and social security of the American people and our multiracial working class and give carte blanche to naked, imperialist confrontation and aggression throughout the world.

Currently waging a murderous intervention and occupation of Iraq, where the civilian death toll has already reached a level comparable to that of the disastrous South Asian tsunami, the Pentagon is not seeking to make the world safe from terrorism. Its aim is to enforce U.S. imperialism’s goal of controlling the vast oil resources of the Middle East and its attempt to dominate the world militarily, politically and economically.

In fact, the U.S. military is over its head in Iraq and its presence there has dramatically sharpened tensions in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world. The Bush administrations policy of using nuclear weapons as a first-strike option greatly increases the danger of terrorism and nuclear, chemical and biological war.

The imperialist aims of the Bush administration block the demands for an exit strategy. They have isolated our country and outraged the vast majority of the world’s people who reject the policy of unilateral-preemptive-perpetual war. This administration has open contempt for international laws and treaties including the International Criminal Court and the Geneva Conventions protecting the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. With its drive to develop mini-nukes and bunker-busters and its concept that nuclear arms are useable, the administration has started a new nuclear arms race.

Not content with the quagmire it has created in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration looks to expand its military adventures to Syria and Iran, to provoke confrontation with North Korea and Cuba, to interfere in the internal affairs of Venezuela. It is only restrained by the fact that the U.S. military is over-extended and cannot rely on allies. Its policies face strong opposition in the United Nations and most of the worlds capitals. The time- honored bullyboy tactics of U.S. imperialism in Latin America must now take into account the emergence of progressive governments throughout the region. U.S. economic dominance is challenged by the emergence of the European Union and the new economic power in China, India, South Africa, Brazil and elsewhere.

We live in a world whose main socioeconomic and political operation is dominated by capitalism and imperialism. The horrific problems of war, poverty, hunger, unemployment, racism and disease cannot be blamed on socialism or communism. These conditions that entrap the worlds billions in misery, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America, were created by and continue to exist because of world colonialism and imperialism. The leading imperialist country is still the U.S. This is who is responsible and where the struggle for real freedom begins.

AGGRESSION ABROAD AGGRAVATES PROBLEMS AT HOME

The policies of aggression have aggravated severe problems in the U.S. economy, including trade and budgetary deficits, a falling dollar and an unprecedented national debt. While obscene wealth has accumulated in the hands of a tiny minority, a crushing burden is falling on the backs of ordinary families. Working class communities, especially in the ghettoes and barrios as well as rural areas and family farmers, face a growing crisis of everyday living as they are increasingly being forced to assume soaring costs for education, health and other basic needs. Small businesspeople, professionals and middle income people are overwhelmed with personal debt. Foreclosures, personal bankruptcies, poverty, homelessness and unemployment are on the rise especially among the racially and nationally oppressed, as millions simply cannot make ends meet. Wages are stagnant and job growth is slow. Real unemployment remains high. In many cities, half the African American men are unemployed. Youth see their very futures being stolen. There can be little surprise at the rise in use of drugs and the fact that the vast U.S. prison system, where two million languish with little hope, is bursting at the seams.

Driven by the need to pay for the war and its huge tax cuts to the rich, the Bush administration is out to destroy all social programs and shift the entire tax burden to the working class and low-income people. In its budget and fiscal proposals, it seeks to defund and privatize Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and public education, to obliterate the New Deal and the 70 years of vitally needed social safety net programs begun in the 1930s. These policies are having a devastating impact on states, counties, local governments and school systems which face continual budget crises and must cut vitally needed services and personnel.

The Bush administration is bankrupt when it comes to solving the real problems of the people. It is reduced to selling its attack on long established social programs with the snake oil of privatization and the swindle of a so-called ‘ownership society.’ The administrations Faith-Based Initiative goes down the same privatization road, while undermining the separation of church and state.

The Bush gang and its right-wing corporate backers are at war with civil rights and civil liberties. They seek to abolish affirmative action and encourage racial profiling. They hope to undermine the equality of women, gut programs to plan and nurture families and abolish women’s reproductive rights. They seek to increase surveillance of civilians and suppress dissent. The Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act are being used more to silence dissent and spread hysteria than to stop terrorism. They hope to end the separation of church and state, legitimize fear and bigotry, and target minorities, especially gays, Muslims and immigrants as a means to undermine the U.S. Constitution and democracy itself. They would like to silence all political opposition. The direction of their policies is towards a new more dangerous authoritarian form of rightwing capitalism.

While the Bush regime cannot be described as fascist, it is also no ordinary bourgeois democratic government. It operates only reluctantly within the margins of democracy. The danger it presents to democratic governance should not be underestimated. Never before in the history of our country has the specter of fascism been so palpable in the top circles of our government.

The Bush gang and its corporate allies are at war with labor. They seek to destroy the right to organize, break existing unions and outlaw their political activity. After decades of sharp attacks against private sector workers and their unions, they are making a special target of public employee unions, now the largest U.S. labor organizations. They are creating a new third class status for immigrant workers.

The Bush administration seeks to relieve the corporations of responsibility to provide pensions and retiree health care. It works to gut occupational health and safety standards. In its dream of returning to the good old days of Robber Baron capitalism it hopes to eliminate environmental protection laws, abolish all taxes on big business and the rich, deregulate the corporations and absolve them of liability to consumers, and establish trade agreements that promote capital flight abroad so as to undermine wages and working conditions at home.

The right-wing thugs are at war with science. For the first time since the 1920s biology teachers in many areas are afraid to teach the science of evolution. Vitally needed research on medical use of stem cells has been outlawed. Despite a narrow window of opportunity to avert environmental disaster, administration bureaucrats ridicule the universally accepted dangers of global warming and ozone depletion, reject the Kyoto Treaty and spurn international efforts to preserve our planet for human life.

The right-wing swindlers are at war with the truth. The deregulation of media monopoly, ending the fairness doctrine, the information technology revolution, the explosion of media outlets and intensification of marketing techniques create an illusion that greater freedom of expression exists. But instead, these developments have led to larger and larger media conglomerates encompassing all forms of media, under the monopoly control of a handful of companies. This geometrically increases their ideological power and their ability to orchestrate public opinion both overtly and subliminally.

Smart propaganda beamed from satellites invades different demographic sectors with targeted messages, information and psychology. The conglomerate media can bypass the democratic, shared values of the people as a whole and pit one group against the other out of common sight. The ability to create wedges among the people in myriad ways has given demagogues like Karl Rove a first-strike capability with monopoly media support, and the potential to fool more of the people more of the time.

Bush promotes the militarization of space, abrogating the ABM Treaty. He actively subverts the United Nations in pursuit of unilateral policies to promote the profits and dominance of U.S. transnational corporations.

It is all the more frightening that the Bush administration is peppered with individuals who justify their recklessness with the belief that they have a divine mission and that there is a coming apocalypse.

THE PEOPLE CAN WIN!

The American people have a different idea. Bush won the 2004 election by a very slim margin. He used extreme demagogy, false patriotism and religious dogma to hide his real positions. Racism, anti-gay bigotry, fake morality and war hysteria were used by his campaign to deceive the voters. In a throwback to the days of KKK-run elections in the Deep South, the Republican Party in many areas worked actively to suppress the Black and Latino vote. Bush cynically exploited the continuing anxiety over 9/11 and the honest concern for the well-being of the troops he sent to face injury, psychological damage and death in Iraq.

The reason for this dirty, deceptive campaign was that Bush could never have won by running on his real program. Under the circumstances, it is very important that 55 million voters rejected the lies, prejudice and fear-mongering and voted to remove Bush from office.

The narrowness of his victory and the basis on which it was won has not prevented Bush from arrogantly claiming he now has ‘political capital’ and even ‘a mandate’ for his extremist agenda. While the election has heightened the right danger, the vast majority of the American people did not make a shift to the right with this election. Although the 2004 vote shows many are still confused and misguided by right-wing demagogy, the blue state/red state divide does not tell the real story.

A large and growing majority of the U.S. people do not want to destroy Social Security. A majority does not think the war in Iraq was worth starting, does not want to continue the slaughter, the waste of precious lives and treasure in an endless quagmire which primarily benefits a few giant oil companies, military suppliers and corrupt reconstruction firms. They now know there were no weapons of mass destruction and no ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. This majority, which now includes growing numbers of soldiers and military families, would welcome replacement of U.S. troops by United Nations or other international peacekeepers, with the fundamental principle being the most rapid possible transition to building Iraqi sovereignty.

The people want relief from the crises in education, health care and the economy. They want good schools, not more jails. They want good paying jobs with benefits and they do not want to crush labors rights. They want to preserve the Constitution, the environment, civil rights, reproductive rights and the right to dissent. They want honest elections with no disenfranchisement.

The voters could not defeat Bush at the polls in 2004 but his program can and must be defeated through mass struggle in the course of the next four years.

At our 28th National Convention the Communist Party faces the historic challenge to do all we can to help defeat the Bush program and bring our nation and the world back from the abyss. Our party has a role to play in this great struggle for peace, economic and social justice. That role is first and foremost to help to build a broad all-peoples, multiracial, labor-led post-election coalition to defeat the Bush agenda.

NO MANDATE, NO SURRENDER!

That is the new slogan for the post election fight-back. A mighty struggle has begun between the extreme right and the majority of our people, between the powerful financial/corporate/militarist interests and the working class majority of our people. Paradoxically, at a time when right-wing forces strengthened control in the federal government, the labor, left and people’s forces made enormous gains in numbers, organization, deeper understanding and experience. In fact, there is a widespread growing radicalization and an emerging mass anti-imperialist consciousness. An intense discussion is unfolding in organized labor over how to maintain and build on the level of mobilization achieved during the election. In the leadership and among the rank and file a widespread anti-corporate consciousness has emerged and an even deeper anti-capitalist consciousness is growing.

Much is at stake. The outcome of this historic struggle will affect the political direction of our nation for many years to come.

Many Republicans are worried and showing signs of breaking with Bush’s insane program. They know what the polls say. They know those who opposed Bush’s election, far from giving up, are mobilizing for battle. And, while Bush may be a lame duck, other Republicans face elections for Congressional and state offices in less than two years. They would prefer to avoid a reckless confrontation with an aroused people.

But that is exactly where the Bush administration is headed. Its first clearly defined objective is to begin the dismantling of Social Security with false claims that this most successful of all government programs is in crisis, ‘headed for an iceberg’ and should be replaced with a system of private stock market accounts. No less than Karl Rove, the architect of Bushs election victory, is in charge of selling this scheme and the vast array of corporate campaign donors, lobby groups, right-wing think tanks and trade associations has been reassembled to raise $100 million or more to bribe a skeptical Congress and bamboozle the public.

The attack on Social Security has already galvanized massive opposition. Led by the AFL-CIO, the Alliance of Retired Americans, the AARP, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women and many others, including the Communist Party, a powerful coalition has surfaced to resist this brutal assault on the lives and well-being of virtually the entire population.

At the same time the broad faith-based community is regrouping and re-emerging. Outraged at the Bush administration’s hypocritical abuse of so-called ‘moral values’ to hide its attacks on the most vulnerable and its rewards to the most powerful, warlike and corrupt, these mainstream religious and ethical forces recognize the serious and imminent danger that Bush’s alliance with fundamentalist extremism poses to democracy. They are becoming a key factor in a revitalized peace movement demanding an end to the occupation and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. This movement can be vastly strengthened if it unites with the growing movement for peace among soldiers and military families and if it links the war to the domestic crisis and unites with labor, minorities and other sectors of the progressive movement.

While the main battles may center around Social Security, ending the war in Iraq and other agenda items before the Congress, the people’s forces must be ready to resist the corporate rightwing offensive on many fronts. Big Business and its allies, especially where Republicans control state governments, believe they have the green light to plunder and pillage with impunity and attack every social protection the people have.

In all struggles special focus must be given to upcoming local and state elections and the all important 2006 midterm Congressional elections when the right-wing majority in Congress could suffer a major defeat. We need to actively support the growing efforts to reform and democratize the election process.

UNITY IS THE WATCHWORD

The watchword of this moment is UNITY first and foremost, Black, Brown and white unity against all forms of racial discrimination. We need more expressions of Arab-Jewish unity, and a strengthened alliance between labor and Asian-Pacific Island communities. We need greater solidarity between immigrants and native born. We need greater expressions of unity between young and old, gay and straight, women and men as the Bush administration uses every trick to divide and conquer. Our aim must be to mobilize wider and wider forces, no matter who they supported for President or if they voted at all, into the battle to save our democratic rights, defend our standard of living, and preserve humanity.

Organized labor is critical to this effort. Its unity in the face of unprecedented assault is the bulwark of our democracy. Labor has the resources, numbers, experience and structure to be the nucleus of an effective peoples coalition. Organized labor can be proud of the role it played in 2004 as the grassroots core of the anti-Bush coalition. It operated on the basis of its own growing independent political organization and showed a consistent policy of outreach to all allies.

Labors interests are not special: they are general and universal. It was natural for labor to attract around it all community forces minorities, immigrants, women, seniors, disabled people, youth and students, gays and lesbians, professionals, small farmers and businesspeople, environmentalists, consumer advocates and peace activists all regardless of creed or party who value democracy and our common humanity.

At the same time the AFL-CIO leadership has shown growing commitment to broader social issues of civil rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights and democratic rights generally. It has become more active internationally, in solidarity with unions across international borders, particularly in fighting sweatshops and vicious global exploiters like Wal-Mart. More and more, labor leaders are speaking out against the Iraq war while supporting those forced to serve in the military and fighting for full benefits for veterans.

As part of the deepening radicalization, new independent, progressive organizations mushroomed in the course of the 2004 campaign. MoveOn, ACT, Working America and others worked closely with labor and mobilized millions in an unprecedented door-to-door, one-on-one, dawn-to-dusk grassroots effort. The youth and students played an outstanding role in these new movements. African American, Mexican American and Puerto Rican, Arab-American, Jewish and youth voters, who strongly opposed Bushs re-election, came to the polls in large numbers. Turnout was also high among women, a majority of whom opposed Bushs re-election.

The Communist Party and the Young Communist League can also be proud of the role we played as participants in that effort. We were tireless, reliable and responsible. We won widespread respect and broke down barriers and prejudices left over from the Cold War. Looking ahead to the elections of 2006 and 2008, we need to think how we can become still more immersed and strategically placed together with our sisters and brothers among labor and its allies, so that our tactical and ideological contributions can be more effective. We need to study how we can be more effective in building the coalition, especially at the grassroots, and carrying out our role and responsibility as revolutionaries. And, how we can do more to expose the systemic class roots of the ultra-right and build greater understanding of Bill of Rights socialism which guarantees and builds upon the best traditions of American democracy.

These are questions that revolutionaries must ask at every stage of the struggle as we self-critically evaluate our work. Other parties must do likewise in terms of their own goals. Unfortunately some on the left pursued a sectarian policy and pulled themselves out of this historic battle for democracy.

These weaknesses can now be overcome as the post-election anti-Bush coalition grows to include voters and non-voters, Kerry supporters, independents and the many who mistakenly acted against their own self-interest and supported Bush.

The Democratic Party, despite its own interest to win the election, demonstrated some very serious weaknesses as it did amazingly little to mobilize its grassroots structure and base. Its leadership continued to drift to the right and avoided embracing the clear demands of labor and the people’s forces. Many are now working hard to revive the Democratic Party from the ground up and hope to make it into a more effective voice in defense of the people. At the same time the labor-led progressive political movement is continuing to grow largely outside the framework of the Democratic Party and it operates independently. This movement is still not strong enough to establish its own political structure and continues for the time being to support Democratic Party candidates as the only realistic hope for defeating the ultra-right at the ballot box.

The AFL-CIO now has 2,500 of its members in public office and has called for rapidly doubling this number. Others, representing peace, environmental and women’s groups, are also running and electing candidates, some as Democrats, some as independents, some in allied groups like the New York-based Working Families Party. As this process continues, the possibility emerges for a new, labor-led all-people’s party with the ability to represent the great majority of the American people and to actually move the struggle to a new stage — an anti-monopoly people’s government. At the same time we cannot exclude the possibility that the Bush administration, with its ideological blinders, will make serious tactical blunders.

BUILD THE MOVEMENT, BUILD THE CPUSA

As we move forward from this years 28th National Convention we must rededicate ourselves as untiring builders and supporters of the labor-led all-peoples coalition. The battles ahead will take many forms including street heat, mass demonstrations, strikes, elections, lobbying and sit-ins. As an organization whose basis in Marxist-Leninist science helps us understand more deeply the class roots of social issues, we have a special responsibility to immerse ourselves fully in the battle, side by side with our sisters and brothers in organized labor and all its allies. More than ever, our contributions are needed to combat the destructive ideological arsenal of the far right. We must do this while also maintaining and building our independent outlook and organization and that of the fraternal Young Communist League, and sharing our vision of an anti-monopoly peoples government and a socialist future.

We see the necessity to deal a decisive defeat to the ultra right in order to move forward toward a progressive America. Our vision socialism helps Communists commit for the long haul, through the ebbs and flows of struggle and the many battles of the class and democratic struggles. A bigger Communist Party helps build class, internationalist and socialist consciousness — a necessary ingredient for social progress and a socialist transformation of society — especially in the grassroots, in neighborhoods and workplaces.

There is every reason to have confidence in the American people and our multi-racial working class. It is rising to the new post-election challenge. The battle in 2004 opened many doors and many new hands of friendship have been extended. There is a growing appreciation of the role of our Party and YCL, the People’s Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo, Political Affairs and Dynamic. Way beyond our far too limited ranks there has emerged a desire to see a much bigger, more influential U.S. Communist press and movement. There is a growing understanding that, if the people are to defeat the right-wing corporate thugs, then larger, more active and more effective Communist Party and YCL clubs are needed and should be warmly welcomed. We must respond to this call! We must greatly increase our numbers and the circulation of our press, and expand our internet presence. We must make every Communist club an organizing center for the labor-led, all-peoples movement!

No Mandate, No Surrender!

Unite the Broad Movement against the Bush Right-Wing Corporate Agenda! The People Can Win!

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