Introduction
Capitalism is devastating the working class on an international scale. We are experiencing massive and deepening income inequality; direct assaults on labor, unions, and working conditions; inadequate and grossly uneven access to health resources during a global pandemic; destructive resource extraction and climate disaster; and far-right, racist assaults on people of color and immigrants.
Going into the third decade of the 21st century, capitalism has produced two fundamentally different worlds for the global rich and the global working classes, poor, and oppressed. While trillion-dollar companies and billionaire investors divide the globe into their own political and economic fiefdoms, capitalism keeps working-class people in permanent crisis mode. State-managed bailouts and Wall Street bonanzas for the rich continue while the rest of us face persistently low wages, accumulating debt, lack of adequate housing, skyrocketing rents, eviction, and homelessness. The rich move across a borderless world and exist above the laws they impose on the rest of us. Migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and politically and economically displaced people are criminalized and hyper-policed at militarized borders, killed making dangerous crossings, persecuted by armed agents of the state, locked into concentration camps, and face the daily threat of deportation and family separation.
The crises of global capitalism have ushered in a period of war, revolution, and counter-revolution.
We stand in complete solidarity with the working class and oppressed across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe that have risen up in recent years against their ruling capitalist classes and authoritarian and dictatorial regimes.
The US ruling class continues to build up and deploy its military around the globe and is positioning itself for a new generational war for international supremacy against China, Russia, and its other regional rivals. US imperialism continues to serve as the primary force for international counter-revolution and neo-colonialism, and will increase its efforts as revolutionary movements develop and erupt over the next several years. We also oppose all other imperialist powers and bourgeois states and align ourselves with the workers and oppressed in all nations in opposition to “their own” bourgeoisies and the current system of inter-imperialist rivalry and conflict.
Meanwhile, the cancerous growth of fascist political parties and movements globally make this an especially perilous epoch. The crisis is particularly acute in the Global South, currently or formerly colonized countries, and oppressed populations within imperialist nations, where historical exploitations and oppressions engendered by imperialism have made the “wretched of the earth” even more vulnerable to capitalist predation and crisis, imperialist and inter-imperialist war, and ecological disaster.
We stand in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and other revolutionaries who committed their lives to this version of working-class self-emancipation.
These conditions are intensifying social polarization and class conflict on an international scale. Traditional and centrist bourgeois political parties are in varying stages of existential crisis and are being challenged by explicitly far-right, authoritarian, fascist, and neo-fascist formations. On the left, populist reformism and social democracy have reemerged as responses to social decline and destabilization within the narrowing confines of bourgeois electoralism, but these movements are incapable, unwilling, or too subordinated to bourgeois parties and politics to confront the capitalist roots of the crisis.
In this critical moment, Firebrand commits itself to a model of political organizing dedicated to overturning capitalism as an extractive, exploitative, and oppressive system of class rule. We seek to carry forward the best of the past, learn from mistakes and harm, and fight for a revolutionary party.
We declare the following foundational principles of our organization-building project as we launch a new revolutionary initiative open to all those committed to the same goal.
Working-class independence, struggle, and revolution
The Marxist principle of working-class independence means a clean break from the politics and parties of the capitalist class — the enemy class. The capitalist class uses both the Republican and Democratic Parties to impose their rule and advance their collective interests as a class, even if they have different methods. In this period, the Republican Party is instrumentalized as the base of white supremacist reaction and mobilization, neo-colonialism, authoritarianism, and unfettered capitalist accumulation through aggressive economic neoliberalism, i.e., class war.
The Democratic Party, as the other wing of capitalist class rule, also seeks to advance capitalist class interests while at the same time functioning to contain and mitigate the worst excesses of their Republican counterparts — without undoing, altering, or fundamentally opposing the trajectory of the right. The Democratic Party is no less committed to advancing US imperialist aims through military buildup, NATO expansion and other militarist pacts and alliances, invasion, intervention, coups, destructive free-trade agreements, and otherwise imposing its will and policies on other nations and peoples.
They are equally committed to neoliberalism and to shifting social wealth from the working class to the rich and to holding down wages and working conditions to increase the rate of exploitation, although they must also present themselves as an opposition during elections. To do this, the Democratic Party co-opts the language of movements of the working class, oppressed, and the left in general, in order to demobilize and defuse all forms of class mobilization, resistance, or opposition to capitalism and class rule. This enables them to suppress class consciousness and prevent the emergence and foundation of radical, independent, left-wing, and anticapitalist working-class movements and organizations.
All efforts to reform, realign, or utilize the Democratic Party to advance the interests of the working class have ended in bitter and categorical defeat for the working class and the left, rightfully earning the Democratic Party the nickname “the graveyard of social movements.” Revolutionary socialists look to working-class self-activity in the form of strikes, protests, uprisings, rebellions, and struggle in all social and economic spheres. We see this as the path to the formation of class-conscious and class-struggle-based organization, and ultimately to social revolution capable of abolishing the capitalist system and replacing it with socialism and worker’s democratic control of the means of production.
Socialism from below
The self-emancipation of the working class can only be accomplished by our class seizing power by and for itself through revolution and the construction of proletarian democracy. We reject all forms of top-down politics, including left populism, social democracy (socialist reformism), Stalinism, Maoism, and any other form that looks to existing states, bourgeois politicians or parties, bureaucratic classes, or small guerrilla bands to deliver “socialism from above.” We see our work as building from the best examples of the revolutionary socialist tradition.
We stand in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and other revolutionaries who committed their lives to this version of working-class self-emancipation.
Internationalism and anti-imperialism
We oppose exploitation and oppression on an international scale, regardless of which ruling class carries it out. We believe that US imperialism is the greatest threat to the working class and all oppressed people across the world. We also recognize that capitalism is a global system and the capitalist classes of all countries exploit and oppress their people as part of maintaining class rule. We reject any logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and we oppose both greater and lesser imperialisms. We are against all border and immigration restrictions. We unconditionally support the self-determination of all oppressed nationalities and populations. We support the continuation of global decolonization, as colonialism lingers on and is reproduced in old and new forms. We stand in principled solidarity with all people rising against conditions of exploitation and oppression and resisting colonization, capitalism, and imperialism.
Revolutionary abolitionism
Revolutionary socialists take an abolitionist stance towards the police, military, prisons, la migra, and national and colonial borders. We demonstrate the connection between oppression and exploitation and strive to unite the fights against them. We reject both class-reductionism and separatism as anti-Marxist impediments to working-class unity, solidarity, organization, and mobilization.
Class struggle and rank-and-file union orientation
We work within existing unions to increase rank-and-file organization, democracy, and militancy, and oppose the factors that oppose or undermine class-struggle unionism: bureaucratic conservatism, business unionism, and the subservience of class struggle to bourgeois electoralism. We recognize that the overwhelming majority of workers are not in unions. Therefore, we also support the creation of new unions where they don’t exist (or don’t function), and believe all working people should be in unions that are democratic, class-struggle-oriented, and accountable to the rank-and-file membership.
Anti-oppression
Revolutionary socialists develop a material analysis of all forms of oppression, including xenophobia, racism, national chauvinism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and all others. We dedicate ourselves to putting the fight against oppression at the center of the fight to end the capitalism system, which depends on and reproduces oppression to maintain class rule. We stand against the spread of new global fascisms, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, religious bigotry and chauvinism, and all attacks on reproductive rights and oppressed gender identities.
Collectivism and comradery
The role of the revolutionary party is to help unite and lead the working-class struggle forward. Therefore, we recognize that democratic and collective decision-making is the primary method of revolutionary socialist organizing. We commit to build a collective political organization dedicated to the Marxist principle “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” All members of a revolutionary socialist organization play an important role, contribute to the project in different ways, and should feel and be an integral part of a collective as an active, respected, and supported participant. We therefore focus on building an organization that fosters mutual solidarity, support, respect, and equality. We uplift each other and have each other’s backs in all aspects of organizing, and break down artificial hierarchies, cliquishness, and forms of toxic individualism that undermine the socialist collective.
United front
We commit to build a new united-front politics that will work with and alongside existing forces already engaged in working-class struggles both in the US and internationally. These include the Movement for Black Lives, the Palestinian liberation struggle, immigrant rights groups, organizations committed to reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ organizations and associations, anti-colonial and antifascist groupings, and labor-based organizations.
Revolutionary interventionist groups
In order to contribute to the rebuilding of a revolutionary socialist movement, we commit ourselves to building groups or collectives of Marxists where we are and stitching those together into a nationwide organizing project. We seek to develop revolutionary socialist organizers through theory, a firm commitment to revolutionary politics, and practical engagement in struggle.