The following presentation was given to the CPUSA National Committee on October 12, 2025 by Dee Miles on behalf of the Working Class Project and the National Education Commission.

I would like to thank the technical collective for the work put into making this meeting accessible at such a high quality online. I’m glad we are making the effort to perfect the online experience. I would also like to thank Joe and the collective for preparing the opening remarks. What a wonderful discussion sharing experiences in struggle on the ground we have had so far. I would like to speak on the party’s contribution to the growth of the resistance movement the work of the club, the Working-Class Project, and the National Education Commission.

As Joe said in his opening:

We need to grow organized labor at the workplace and grow organization in working class communities, including people of color communities.

We need to grow our connections on the ground and be the link through which ordinary working-class people can connect with the resistance movement. All the major organizations are moving, and we can help connect the masses of the people with the activity which is taking place. Even if it’s just to know there is a growing fightback with which they can connect through us, we can grow our tentacles with working-class people and the connections of ordinary working-class people with the resistance movements worthy of their time and consideration.

The club

As only one aspect of the club’s work, on the south side of Chicago — and don’t get me wrong, we know we have not done enough — we have continued to table, distributing the literature of major organizations concerning Know Your Rights, standing with, not against, the homeless, the Target boycott, and registering people to vote.

We have done enough to know that the work merits consistency and repetition and can be duplicated in every community where we want to grow our tentacles deep into the grassroots. We’ve done enough to know that the efforts in California and D.C. are even better examples of what can be done in many, if not all, working-class communities across this country.

The Working-Class Project

We have to answer the question: How can we help the whole of the working-class to see its interest in everything going on within every segment of the working class? How can we grow our sense of ourselves as a class, from the impoverished to the very well paid, knowing none of us can sustain having good things unless we fight for good things for all of us? How can we expose the relationship of unemployment and under-employment to the fight for higher wages, green union jobs in a peace-oriented economy, and workplace safety? How can we expose the relationship of homelessness to housing costs that are too burdensome on the family budget, the relationship of no healthcare coverage to healthcare costs that even with insurance are too burdensome on the family budget, the relationship of not enough food to food costs that are too burdensome on the family budget? It’s all related, all interconnected, and it all speaks to the crimes of capitalism.

Fascism says we cannot stand on the side of socialism; we cannot be communists. We say, we have no other choice but to stand up and fight for what is needed by our whole class to fully realize ourselves as human beings.

It is part of our job to deepen our understanding of what exploitation really means no matter how much money we do or don’t make. We have to paint the picture and share the narrative of the real history of the working-class in this country. We despise exploitation in all its forms, from poverty to high paying jobs which still produce privately hoarded surplus value and wage slavery. We have to help people see the interconnections between all forms of exploitation and oppression.

We have to cultivate working-class settings in our clubs and districts where the fundamental pillars of working-class culture across race, across nationality, across gender, and across generations — the working-class pillars of cooperation, collectivity, and democratic equality — reign supreme. We have to cultivate settings where working class culture rules in conscious opposition to the ruling class culture of capital — narrow self-centered competition, egocentric-individualism, and the purposefully dishonest perpetuation of inequality which drains us of our time, energy, and resources with the inability to produce long term sustainable results.

Nothing else but consciously building in the interest of the whole of our working class will produce what is needed; nothing else. That’s what we are challenged to do. What we are up against is us, as the conscious working-class movement, versus the agents of capital.

We need all of your talent, recognizing everyone has talent to give. Give us your paintings, your music, your poetry, your short stories, your novels, and your work in all of the realms of science for the purpose of strengthening our conscious working-class movement. We need and want it all to help us move forward.

The National Education Commission

The National Education Commission has the following asks:

Can all districts and clubs share the opening for this national committee meeting (both the video recording and the written document) with all club and district members and friends? Can all districts and clubs organize discussions — including with our friends and contacts — for the purpose of strengthening our work on the ground? We need in these discussions to be examining the analysis of what is going on and exploring how to advance implementation in our areas of concentration.

We will help you do whatever you think will be useful to your club and district. We want to hear of your experiences, and we want to work with you to figure out what we can do to strengthen your educational activities in a way which suits your needs and capacity. Please email us at dee@cpusa.org so we can be of use to your efforts. The goal of educational work is to help strengthen our activity on the ground. We are here to help you with whatever you want to do.

Lastly, we would like to ask that you help grow the participation of club and district members and friends and contacts in our upcoming schedule of classes. Upcoming, we have a two-session class series on imperialism, a class on housing and the environment, a book talk on Jesus Colon’s A Puerto Rican in New York on Sunday, Nov 23, and a National Marxist School Online, January 10 – 17, 2026.

Can we ask you to make sure your club and district members, along with your friends and contacts, know of these classes and that they register to participate? Can we ask each of you to take on the responsibility of growing the participation of your club and district members, along with your contacts, in our educational activities? Again, we see a direct relationship between upgrading our understanding of what we are doing to upgrading our ability to follow-through with implementation on the ground. Let us know how we can help your club and district; we are here to help. Thank you.

Image: “Striking Chicago Teachers Union members and their supporters west on Randolph Street in downtown Chicago on Friday, Oct. 25, 2019″ by Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune (Creative Commons).