Dearil Mercier offers the following response to the Draft Platform for the Virginia Working Class
There is no doubt that the aims of the draft platform are rooted in the absolute need for the Virginian working class to recognize its own political power through careful organization around the international class struggle; this is objectively true for the whole of the proletarian class to develop it’s consciousness and carry through to completion it’s struggle for dictatorship.
But even that word, dictatorship, itself rattles the core of the average worker. Marxists should know that they are currently not the popular voice of the masses even though they advocate the strongest, most developed theories for the liberation of all classes from the choke-hold of capital and provide a genuine path away from the impending barbarism of societal collapse.
For numerous ideological and historical reasons, the masses still find their reasoning with the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and thus find their “consciousness” realized in bourgeois parties like the Democrats and Republicans, reproducing the social and economic relations of bourgeois society and remaining mostly disorganized as a class body; this is simply the way it is.
Only among the most developed strata of the working class and isolated academics do we find any claims at a return to scientific socialism and an open embrace of the tradition of “Marxism”, even if it’s often in the most vulgarized forms. Indeed, there is no shortage of political parties that ascribe to the various “-isms” of this-or-that great man of history, all claiming to be the true inheritors of the tradition of Marx and Engels and you can easily find traces of many of these parties in the state of Virginia.
What then, distinguishes a Worker’s Party of Virginia from the bourgeois parties and the reformist parties that make up a majority of the working class, and the “revolutionary” sects of “leftists” that, as a total aggregate, make up a minority of the working class, and even more so are basically negligible independently?
If the aim of the party is to form some sort of united coalition of “leftist” workers, than the majority of the party will be bourgeois or reformist, reflecting the logic of the majority of workers; the revolutionary wing would have to consolidate into a genuine organized body with a principled program or else find itself just as ineffective as it currently is and further isolated from the majority.
Any attempt to encompass a full spectrum of “leftist” workers would immediately put the most revolutionary workers on a defensive back-foot and put the already dominant reformists and liberal opportunists right at the wheel of the party. Such a consolidation of the numerous revolutionary factions of the working class seems, to the author, to be nearly unimaginable, and therefore makes this conception of a “Worker’s Party” seem rather inadequate; what then, other than a vehicle for bourgeois electoralism, could a Worker’s Party of Virginia be, if it is forced to reduce to nothing its most revolutionary elements?
The class cannot approach its party realization by accepting compromises as a foundational strategy, such as aiming to simply increase wages(as opposed to elimination of the wage system entirely) or expanding the “democratic” systems of bourgeois dictatorship(as opposed to creating new systems of worker dictatorship). This confusion of mixing up tactical compromises with strategic compromises has all but removed the actual goal of class dictatorship and dulled the revolutionary edge of Marxism.
Strategically speaking, a return to the original theses of Marxism(that is, the scientific methods of analyzing class society as established by Marx and Engels that only formally take their name to distinguish their work’s historical and epistemological rupture from bourgeois political-economy and utopian socialism)and a shedding of the “traditions of the dead” great men that haunt the Marxist tradition could set the revolutionary wing of the working class back on the right track. Otherwise, the draft’s proposed principles of anti-reformism, an end to the wage-system, and internationalism have their fates all but sealed in the hands of the bourgeoisie and reformists. What we need is a sincere communist political organization.
Not a Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, etc., etc. ad nauseam party, but a local organization that can embrace the inner party struggle and the outer class struggle; recognizing that the class and the party are delicately knotted together and require a careful examination for successful unraveling- not an aesthetic reification of bygone eras, vague moral platitudes, and surface-level interpretations of secondary sources of theory. This is a qualitative issue.
The eclecticism of “leftism”, with its skepticism and unprincipled impotence in distinguishing actual, material knowledge from the bourgeois idealism that radiates from liberalism only clouds our vision and should be rejected. The party must be narrow to only the workers that genuinely understand the historic position of the proletariat and we mustn’t let the relic of bourgeois “democracy” of the majority take precedence over a scientific minority. We must adopt the most precise program for establishing a party that can realize the centuries of work dedicated to understanding the forces of history and the relative laws of material society and build upon these theses, not in a vulgar aesthetic way, but with serious intent.
What of the vast majority of the workers that are not Marxists and are far from becoming one? This is why the party and the class, although delicately tied, require different strategies and tactics for organizing. The class precedes the party through historical conditions and the latter only begins to emerge when the class begins to understand itself as a class in active struggle, understands its political aims, and consequently moves in class unity towards these aims. The proletarian class struggle has been fought through the union struggles for wages and the length of the working-day.
Even to the most reactionary unionist, wages are the basic level of understanding of the struggle for survival, and the frequent economic crises that arise from the anarchy of capitalist production will continuously create the conditions that demand the necessity for labor organization, if even merely for survival of the worker. No political party alone can win economic struggles; it is through the power of militant worker actions(like strikes) that have the most success in moving the economic aims of the class and is at best only defended, analyzed, and promoted by the party.
As much as we desire to realize the party, we must equally continuously strive to improve on the organization of labor into assemblies and similar organizations that link the various unions(and non-union workers) into a true militarized force capable of serious economic power. The party will prove itself to be a real voice of the working masses when it alone becomes synchronized with the class struggle through these worker-groups, anticipates the tasks at hand, and reveals the irreconcilable contradictions of bourgeois society through careful analysis and eventually bringing on more workers into its revolutionary program(our quantitative issue)- a program, that announces and theorizes the actual goal of party dictatorship, of communism.
So while the formations of a Worker’s Party is of the utmost importance in the historical conquest of the proletariat, it is with a careful hesitation that we should be quick to assume the conditions are correct for building a large, usable political body that can both [1]accurately represent the current consciousness of the working class and also [2] principally set forward on the required path towards proletarian dictatorship without eventually resting in the abysses of reformism and electoralism.
Our first steps should be gigantic leaps away from the reformists and compromisers if we wish to distinguish ourselves from their dead ideas, for if we are building towards a “party” form it is only the embryonic formations of a truly communist party that must gather itself together and reestablish a principled foundation that is absent of the errors of a century of counter-revolution, the moral chauvinism of liberalism, and aesthetic vulgarities of sectarian Marxism that has the revolutionary working class historically locked in time.
Our party must stand out by genuinely offering a legitimate return to scientific socialism and realize the proletariat class and its goals- not confusing ourselves with class collaboration and the eclectic nonsense of “leftism”; they already have their “parties”.
The Virginia Worker 
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