Our world is a world dominated by capitalism, which has been the prevailing social system around the world for nearly two centuries. For over a century, capitalism has been in its more mature phase: imperialism. The imperialist epoch dawned with the turn of the 20th century, and was heralded by the entry of the United States into the group of Great Power countries.

    Imperialism, as opposed to capitalism’s younger phase, is an epoch of monopoly capitalism. The competition of the earlier epoch is replaced by merger and concentration, while at the same time expanding the division of labor to all corners of the globe. Industrial capital is merged with banking capital to create and export finance capital in order to expand credit and production around the world. Individual capitalists and their companies merge to create cartels and multinational corporations.

    Capital in the epoch of imperialism crosses borders and creates a worldwide system of credit, investment, production and distribution, creating a contradiction between the world market and existing nation-state borders. This, in turn, draws capitalist countries together into international cartels and competing camps that race each other to divide the resources and wealth of the world in their favor.

    With the rise of the global economy in the epoch of imperialism, the cycles of expansion, stagnation and contraction of individual countries become linked, with the spikes of boom and bust affecting all countries — allies and rivals alike — and presenting the possibility of united working class action in response to economic turmoil.

    In the global economy, the extension of the credit system around the world, combined with state regulation and intervention to modify the effects of overproduction, the period between expansion and contraction tends to grow ever wider with each broad cycle. However, in direct proportion to the height and duration of each expansion, the corresponding contraction proves to be ever more devastating and protracted. Once the boom begins to stall, and expansion turns to stagnation, seemingly permanent gains won by workers during the previous period become the targets of an all-sided attack by the capitalists.

    These cycles of expansion and contraction — of boom and bust — are an integral part of the capitalist social system itself, not simply its imperialist phase. Under capitalism, the production of commodities is not for human survival or need, but for its own sake. The capitalists’ drive for surplus value compels them to produce and overproduce, knowing no intrinsic limits to the exploitation of labor power. It is a system where dead labor turns against living labor, where money and profit are primary and need is incidental. It is a system of extreme alienation that de-humanizes every human relationship.

    The capitalist class accumulates more and more wealth at the expense of the working class, which is pauperized while continually pushed to higher levels of productivity. In comparison to capital, wages and benefits shrink. As the “world of things” becomes ever greater and omnipresent, the “world of people” becomes ever more marginalized, unstable and atomized. Capitalism, despite the abundance of its commodities and the wonders of technology, is unable to allow human beings to fulfill themselves as human beings. Work becomes a clock-watching torture — the “daily grind;” not a fulfilling and socially-honored act. At the same time, leisure is dehumanized; those fleeting moments of physical and mental recovery (vacations, weekends, etc.), hobbies and pastimes, and even relatively spontaneous moments of hedonism and recreational nihilism are exploited by capitalism as just another marketing opportunity.

    During periods of stagnation and contraction, through the imposition of mass unemployment, wage cuts, intensification of labor “productivity,” longer hours, temporary contracts, etc., capitalism assaults the existing cultural level of the masses — meager and impoverished though it is. Hard won gains are damned as economic heresy or “socialism” by the politicians, preachers and other officials, while workers are consciously distracted with “bread and circuses” entertainment through the media to keep them complacent, desensitized and ultimately obedient. In this way, capitalism threatens workers even as a slave class. The more capital accumulates, the more antagonistic it therefore becomes to humanity.

    The capitalist mode of production in the epoch of imperialism divides different countries into different roles. The Great Power imperialist states, such as the United States, are the centers of world capitalism in the imperialist epoch. They are the centers of finance capital, and the most powerful and dominant sections of the world’s capitalist class. While they often retain a degraded industrial or manufacturing base — those sectors of production moved to more peripheral areas — the Great Power imperialists have to maintain a large and potentially powerful working class to complete the circuit of production and distribution.

    On the other side there are states and countries that are economic colonies of the Great Power states. These neo-colonial countries, taken together, are the pools of raw materials, natural resources and low-cost labor each cartel needs to both provide needed commodities for itself and to expand its power.

    These countries are the powerhouses of capitalism, producing the products for billions of people around the world. The workers of these countries, due to the superexploitation and superoppression they face, allow the capitalists of the Great Power states to both maintain its own “middle class” of managers, bureaucrats, police/security forces, independent producers and professionals, and also bribe sections of the working class to be used as a firewall between the exploiters and the exploited.

    Distorted by relations of exploitation and the drive for profits, national economies become not only anachronistic but lopsided. In the Great Power imperialist countries, huge numbers are engaged in unproductive labor such as banking, insurance, advertising and marketing. In the neo-colonial countries, capitalism’s destruction of peasant agriculture has pushed hundreds of millions out of the countryside and into the growing cities, competing with each other for jobs, shelter and food.

    Even during its periods of “peaceful” development, capitalism can only advance productive forces in a grossly inefficient, wasteful and inhuman way — that is, only insofar as those advances enhance and improve the accumulation of capital and profit. The full development of humanity requires the common ownership, coordination and control of production, not merely on a national, but international scale.

    The growth and integration of the world capitalist system under imperialism has expanded the working class internationally. Today, the formerly so-called “backward” countries have large working classes, and in most of them the working class has become the majority, displacing the ancient peasantry as the largest social force in those states. As a result, the unity of the working class across national borders around common interests and under a common banner is not only possible, but objectively necessary in order to defeat capitalism on a world scale.

    The world capitalist system of more than a century ago rendered the idea of a “national road” to the classless, communist society unworkable. The imperialist epoch of this last century rendered it reactionary. While it is true that the workers of each country will begin their path to communism within those borders, it is impossible for this course to lead to communism without the defeat of world capitalism, most importantly, the defeat of the capitalists of the Great Power imperialist states on “their own” territory. Without the defeat and overthrow of the Great Power capitalist classes, any gains won by workers in other countries, up to and including the overthrow of “their own” ruling classes, are historically temporary.

    At the dawn of the 21st century, the imperialist epoch inaugurated its declining phase: corporatism*. The organic tendency of the imperialism toward merger and concentration reached its apex in the merger of political and economic power into a singular force. The capitalist state, which had hitherto attempted to mask its role as an instrument of coercion and oppression by the capitalist class against all other classes, became a naked agent of class rule and, in relation to the working class, a brutal police state.

    This “perfection” of capitalist rule is codified in the organization of the corporate welfare state, which further intensifies exploitation by, first, forcing workers to pay a disproportionately greater share of their collective wealth through direct and indirect taxation, and, second, using the public treasury to subsidize and financially prop up sections of the capitalist class. This economic breaking of the working class is enforced through a further “perfecting” of the repressive arms of the capitalist state: the organization, or enhancement and expansion, of an internal security force with broad powers to spy on citizens, arrest and detain without charge, and imprison indefinitely without the right of trial or open hearing of evidence.

    Further, corporatism uses war and the threat of war to regiment workers and young people, and prepare them to serve as cannon fodder. The threats of war and attack by an outside foe, punctuated by wars of conquest and aggression, are used to justify its organization and existence, as well as intensify repression of internal dissent, abridge democratic, economic and civil rights, and shift more and more of the wealth created in society into the hands of the corporatist capitalist class.

    In the epoch of imperialism, war is not merely the continuation of politics by other, more violent, means. It is a necessary and integral part of the cycle of expansion, stagnation and contraction — boom and bust. The Great Power imperialist cartels use war as a means of more favorably dividing and re-dividing the spoils of the world in their favor. The economic alliances and trade blocs become military alliances, with the trade routes becoming highways for the transport of military personnel and equipment.

    The periods of “peace” that occur from time to time are periods of reorganization and rearmament, where the capitalists of the previously defeated imperialist cartel strengthen old and establish new alliances, while using “diplomacy” and economic warfare to wrest new areas of resources, labor and markets from their rival cartels. These relatively “peaceful” periods of division and re-division can only end in either a worldwide inter-imperialist war or the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist rule by the working class.

    Today, in an age when the Great Power imperialists possess weapons that can wipe out all life on the planet, and we all live under a social system where war is a necessary and useful tool for resolving economic questions, ending war and the threat of war has to be synonymous with ending capitalist rule.

    In addition to the intensification of state repression, media diversion and institutionalized propaganda, the capitalist class uses various philosophies, ideologies and methods to maintain its control and dominance. In class society, all of these ideologies and doctrines have a definite class basis — that is, abstract ideas and principles are shaped and defined by the classes that promote them. Ideologies and philosophies like individualism, subjectivism, pragmatism, chauvinism and mysticism are promoted in various forms to keep workers tied to the exploiting and oppressing classes, and their social system.

    Among these various ideologies, pragmatism is the most pervasive and damaging to the working class in its struggle for liberation. Pragmatism is based on the simple idea of working within the framework of what exists. Among the exploiting classes, pragmatism represents the “natural” state of affairs. Since the exploiters and oppressors have no need or desire to enact fundamental changes to their own system, pragmatism develops organically as a way of functioning.

    Among workers, on the other hand, pragmatism represents a form of ideological suicide. Because pragmatism ties its user to the existing social system, workers who succumb to pragmatism voluntarily tie themselves to the very system that exploits and oppresses them. Whether it is voting for candidates of one of capitalism’s two major (or four minor) political parties, or going along with concessions on the job because of an economic crisis, or even accepting the practice of racism, sexism or heterosexism because other workers do it, pragmatism places an ideological straitjacket on workers and prevents them from organizing and fighting for their common class interests.

    Hand in hand with pragmatism, the method of opportunism is promoted by the petty-bourgeois “middle class” as a means of reinforcing pragmatism and providing a rear-guard cover for capitalist rule.

    Opportunism, the elevation of short-term or sectional interests over common and historic interests, is used to channel the anger and frustrations workers express at the conditions of capitalist society back into the system itself. Opportunism is especially targeted at those layers of the working class by through the profits reaped from the superexploitation of workers in neo-colonial countries in order to keep them as that firewall against workers’ uprisings and, when needed, “fifth column” in the workers movement.

    They are aided in this “fifth column” activity by the petty-bourgeois officials of the pro-capitalist labor unions. These loyal labor lieutenants of capitalism, along with appointed managers and professionals, bureaucrats and functionaries, the armed forces of the state and privately-organized security, various and sundry “pro-labor” capitalist politicians, self-appointed “community organizers” and “community leaders,” and elements of the “official left” (including some self-described socialists and communists), promote opportunism and represent the diverse layers of management of the working class preferred by capitalism.

    The need for a “fifth column” in the working class arises because of the character of the imperialist epoch as one of war and revolution, and because the central contradiction of the epoch is between declining and degrading capitalism, on the one side, and the historically imminent transition to communist society.

    The greatest fear of the capitalist class in this period is the development of a critically-thinking, self-organized and self-acting working class as a mass movement, free from the fetters of capitalist ideology and petty-bourgeois management. Capitalism is willing to unleash the depths of barbarism, in the forms of fascism and total war (including nuclear war), to keep the working class managed and contained. The more the working class organizes and fights for its own class interests, the more the capitalists and their petty-bourgeois managers will resort to naked violence and barbarism to hold onto control of society.

     The Workers Party in America seeks to strike that great fear into the hearts of the exploiting and oppressing classes by helping to build that mass movement of class-conscious workers and combat the attempts by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois “officials” and “leaders” to divert that movement back into the capitalist order. We as the working class have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

* Some people equate corporatism with fascism. While there are parallels between them, they are two different things. Fascism and corporatism share three common goals: 1) the stabilization and “rescue” of capitalist rule; 2) the destruction and atomization of the capacity of the working class to fight for its interests; and 3) the need to expand and re-divide the world along more favorable lines. As well, corporatism rises under conditions similar to that of fascism, in the wake of a failed revolutionary situation. However, corporatism differs from fascism in three key areas: 1) fascism is a mass movement based in the petty bourgeoisie, whereas corporatism is an organic consequence of capitalist rule under definite conditions; 2) fascism is used as the main weapon for breaking the power of the working class, whereas corporatism uses the forces of the capitalist state, and its connections within the petty bourgeoisie and working class, to carry this out; and 3) fascism is generally supported by only a section of the capitalist class, with the rest being dragged behind, whereas corporatism is the product of a consensus of the capitalist class at a given moment in history under definite conditions. Fascism in power looks similar to corporatism, and it can be argued that corporatism is, in effect, fascism in power, but without the fascists or their movement.

Working Draft adopted by the Central Committee, January 8, 2009