Build the Struggle Against the Ultra-Right and Corporate Power!

Why YOU Should join the Communist Party.

The Communist Party USA is an organization of activists in labor and all the people's movements with three main political aims:

1. Defeating the right-wing agenda of the Bush Administration.
2. Winning a wide-ranging program of reforms that put the well being of the people before private profits.
3. Eventually replacing big business with labor and its allies as the dominant power so as to insure that the rights, economic security and expanding needs of the people become the overriding concern of society.

The purpose of this pamphlet is to explain these goals and ask you to join us in working to achieve them.

The taking of power by the Bush Administration may have been peaceful but it was nonetheless a coup d'etat. It was a desperate act by big business and its ultra-right-wing allies to thwart the will of the majority of voters who over the past 20 years have come to reject the program of Reaganism and the "Contract On America."

Bush's extremist agenda

Despite its lack of popular support, this illegitimate Administration is charging full steam ahead with its extremist agenda. Its aims are clear. They include:

• Breaking unions and ending their political activity
• Eliminating occupational health and safety standards
• Destroying affirmative action and weakening civil rights
• Ending women's reproductive rights
• Gutting environmental protection
• De-funding and privatizing Social Security, Medicare and public education
• Ending separation of church and state
• Promoting guns and giving the green light to
armed right-wing militia
• Expansion of the death penalty and abuse of
police power
• Corporate deregulation
• Tax cuts for the super-rich
• "Free Trade" policies to promote corporate flight overseas and undermine U.S. wages and working conditions
• Militarization of space and subversion of peaceful international relations everywhere

A united fightback by the American people is the only answer to this massive assault on our rights and security.

For some time now, organized labor, the largest and most powerful democratic force in our country, has taken the lead in resisting the corporate, right-wing assault. It has gathered around it a broad coalition of people's organizations – civil rights groups, women's organizations, retirees, environmentalists, immigrant workers, consumer advocates, community and religious groups, peace organizations.

Since the mid-1990's this coalition has been rapidly gaining in strength and was responsible for the defeat of many right-wing congresspeople in the1998 elections and for Gore's popular vote majority in 2000.

It is the growing strength of this labor-led coalition that frightens big business and its extremist allies and caused them to resort to unprecedented extra-democratic means to take power.

That is why everything possible must be done to unite and strengthen the people's forces and broaden the coalition. It means reaching out and working with all opponents of the extreme right – Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans. It means combatting all go-it-alone tendencies and all efforts by the Administration to isolate or divide the coalition. It means fighting every obstacle to unity, such as racism, male supremacy, homophobia, anti-immigrant prejudice and nationalism.

It means working to mobilize all the resources and talents of the people – organizational, cultural, intellectual – to join with labor in resisting the right-wing, corporate assault and blocking the threat of fascism and war.

It means solidarity with every target of the right-wing assault, recognizing the truth of the basic trade union principle that AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL – UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL!

You don't have to be a Communist to be part of this effort or make important contributions to it, but it helps!

That is because the Communist Party is an organization of activists in every part of the expanding labor-led coalition and can therefore help unite and strengthen the overall movement against the ultra-right danger. It is also because the Party has a rich experience and history, a deep understanding of the long-range forces that are at work and a clear vision of what is possible if the corporate-right-wing coalition is defeated and labor and its allies are able to take the offensive.

In this case, long-standing pent-up needs of the people can be addressed. Unions can get the same freedom to organize that exists in Canada and most of western Europe. Discrimination against minorities and women can be sharply curtailed. Massive public works programs with affirmative action can be established to create jobs, revive basic industry, rebuild our cities and crumbling infrastructure and clean up the environment. Quality, integrated public education can become available to everyone from nursery school to graduate school. National health care, social security, housing and necessary utilities can be guaranteed as basic human rights.

The wealth and resources for these and other programs are abundantly available in our country but are monopolized in the hands of a tiny group of billionaires whose sole, overriding aim is to maximize private profits.

The struggle for the rights of the people takes place in many different arenas – economic, intellectual, cul-tural and political. But the result of the growing unity and mass mobilization, is that the privileged few will be defeated.

Labor and its allies will become the dominant force in our country and will establish the structures needed to guarantee the rights and security of the people.

To facilitate this revolutionary change and to make it as peaceful and painless as possible is the ultimate aim of the Communist Party.

The outcome will be a society with social ownership of the means of production built on the progressive and democratic gains that our people have won in over 200 years of class struggle and on our own unique multi-racial, multi-ethnic culture, traditions and history.

We call this vision Bill of Rights Socialism.

To achieve this goal, we are guided by the rich experience of our working class and people who overcame British colonialism and Southern slavery, gained suffrage for women, established unions, won the programs of the New Deal, including social security and unemployment compensation, and contributed mightily to the defeat of Hitler fascism. This great heritage has also included overcoming the period of McCarthyite repression, building the historic movement for Civil Rights, ending the war in Vietnam, working for nuclear disarmament and creating a revitalized labor movement. Our Party takes great pride in the contributions it has made to all of these key struggles since its founding in 1919.

We are also guided by a social science, Marxism-Leninism, which summarizes the experience and lessons of the age-old struggle between working people and those who have exploited them as slaves, serfs or wage laborers. That experience includes both triumphs and setbacks, correct policies and mistakes of the working-class and revolutionary movements throughout the world and we stand in solidarity with the fight of workers and progressive forces everywhere to secure civil, democratic and trade union rights, peace and socialism.

• We encourage young people under the age of 30 to join the Young Communist League.
• The Communist Party’s newspaper, the People’s Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo, is available for $20/year ($10 low income), $1/two month trial.
• The party’s monthly journal, Political Affairs, is $18/year. Send for each publication at: 235 W. 23rd St., New York, NY 10011.
• Videos, books and pamphlets are also available through the National Office.