LOS ANGELES, USA Excerpt from a speech at the May Day Dinner
For our revolution all the sections of our class are important: teachers, street vendors, students, professionals, homemakers, unemployed and others. But there are two sectors of the working class to which the Party has to pay special attention: the industrial workers and the soldiers.
The industrial workers because they are in the factories where hundreds and even thousands are concentrated, because they are a disciplined sector, because they produce most of the goods and weapons that sustain capitalism. Millions of them know how to handle arms because they have been part of the bourgeois army. Maybe they are most especially important because with communist ideological struggle they then learn to become bourgeois society’s gravediggers.
And the soldiers: because they already have the weapons, know military tactics and strategy and are part of our class, and also because with communist ideology they will be willing to fight for their class and turn their weapons against the bosses.
Can this goal be achieved? Of course it can. Our class brothers and sisters achieved it in other countries and were capable of taking power from the bourgeoisie. And they fought against all odds to maintain it. But their political line was doomed to failure: socialism is reformed capitalism and will never reach communism.
We have great respect for those communist comrades because without them we would not have the political line that we have today. They were mistaken, true, but who doesn’t make mistakes when undertaking a major project? Their previous experiences provide a textbook based on experience.
That’s why the political work in the factories, in the shops, where the workers are, is very important.
The party must also have a plan for the barracks, to find out who has relatives in the army, in the navy. Where there are soldiers, visit them, make friends, share and gain their confidence to fight for communism.
I am now a mechanic, but before that I was a soldier, and I also worked in factories. I led groups of soldiers to pro-worker positions. Most of them are not patriots by conviction. And in the factories where I have worked I have always found workers who are winnable to our ideas.
Where I now work we constantly have study groups to discuss dialectics, political economy, and the history of the class struggle. Those workers who today learn our ideas are the future of communism.
Forward comrades, the future is bright if we do the political work!
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