Unlike most of its worldwide competitors, the United States began its existence with capitalism firmly in place. Even its colonial-era birth saw pre-industrial capitalism as the dominant economic system.

    At the same time, however, the mercantile and early industrial capitalism of the northern states faced internal competition from the agriculturally-based capitalism in the southern states, which relied on slave labor to extract superprofits from their commodities.

    From the birth of the American republic in 1776 until 1854, this competition between two competing economic forms of exploitation was held in check, as the capitalist class, both North and South, believed there to be enough room and resources for both systems to co-exist. However, this arrangement, codified in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, began to break down following the defeat of Mexico in 1848 and the establishment of the California and Oregon territories.

    The workers’ movement in the U.S. grew along with American capitalism itself. The Shays Rebellion of 1786-87 was the first uprising by working people in the new American republic, and prompted the calling of the convention that was to establish the Constitution of the United States.

    The first labor strikes in the United States occurred in Philadelphia, at that time one of the centers of American political and economic power. The first unions emerged from the craft guilds that came to the U.S. prior to independence. Carpenters, riverboat pilots, shoemakers, bookbinders, tailors, textile workers and mill workers, men and women alike, staged strikes and organized local unions in the years following the end of the First American Revolution (1783) and before the beginning of the Civil War, the Second American Revolution (1861).

    The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 ended the compromise and set the stage for the four-year war between the growing industrial capitalism of the North and slaveholding capitalism of the South.

    The Civil War (1861-1865) and Reconstruction (1864-1877) represented a revolutionary transformation of the United States. The destruction of the slave system and establishment of industrial capitalism as the singular dominant economic power in the U.S. unleashed a wave of industrial and technological development.

    The boom of industry, begun in 1861 to provide weapons and equipment for the Union Army, including the development of thousands of miles of railroads, the birth of the steel industries in the Midwest, and the hegemonic power of Wall Street banks and investment firms, was now turned toward growth and expansion of the national economy.

    The initial bringing together of industrial and banking capital in the Civil War now fueled the “Gilded Age” of American capitalism. Expansion into the Great Plains, and the conquest of the Native American nations and imposition of capitalist social relations on them, opened up vast regions of natural and labor resources for American capitalism.

    In 1866, the first major labor organization was formed in the United States, the National Labor Union. The NLU was formed by workers in the industries and trades that sprang up during the Civil War, as well as by workers who returned home after fighting to find conditions no better than the battlefields they left. The NLU included both employed and unemployed workers, and many of its leading members were also involved in the U.S. affiliates of the International Working Men’s Association.

    Three years later, the Knights of Labor was formed. After the NLU collapsed in 1873, the K of L became the dominant labor union movement in the U.S., and was peripherally involved in the Great Upheaval of 1877. After the formation of the American Federation of Labor in 1886, the K of L began to contract and collapse, struggling on into the 20th century with only a handful of members.

    The Great Upheaval of 1877 represents the high-water mark of the American workers’ movement. Beginning in the railroad yards of Maryland, the strike that initiated the uprising spread across the country, culminating in the taking of power in St. Louis by the Executive Committee of the local labor movement and the brief existence of a working people’s government for two weeks: the St. Louis Commune.

    The Commune brought together all of the workers of the city: African American, Chinese, Latino and white, men and women. Armed workers’ self-defense was organized to patrol and keep order, while the Executive Committee took control of municipal services, and organized distribution of necessities for local residents and workers. It would take Washington’s deployment of thousands of soldiers brought up the Mississippi River from the South to restore capitalism’s control of the city and suppress the Commune.

    Into the 1880s, workers in the U.S. reorganized themselves and turned their attention to fighting against the terrible working conditions they faced in the “Gilded Age.” In 1886, the newly-named American Federation of Labor called for a general strike on May 1 to secure an eight-hour day. Upwards of half a million workers participated in marches and protests on that day. A few days later, workers in Chicago rallying in support of locked out molders were attacked by the police, leading to the Haymarket Massacre and trial of eight anarchist workers’ leaders.

    In the last decade of the 19th century, the focus of the labor movement shifted away from the craft professions that were organized into the AFL, and toward the relatively unskilled railroad, steel and mining industries. The Homestead, Pullman and Bituminous Coal strikes of the decade, as well as the march of Coxey’s Army of unemployed on Washington in 1894, showed that the defeats of the previous decades had not broken the back of the working class, and that America’s entry into the imperialist club would be met with greater organization and struggle by working people.

    By the end of the 19th century, American capitalism had advanced to the point of being a world economic power. The growth of industry and financial power after the Civil War had accelerated the development of the United States, bringing it in the space of less than a century to the level that it took its new rivals like Britain, France, Germany, Spain and others at least twice the time to achieve.

    Washington’s initiation of a war with Spain in 1898 over colonial territories in the Caribbean and Pacific was the announcement of the entry of the United States into the ranks of world imperialism.

The 20th century was, in many respects, the “American century.” Emerging from its victory over Spain, the United States began a rapid climb to the top of the imperialist order, and nearly as quickly began to descend and face ruin at the hands of its rivals.

    The concentration of finance capital amassed by the American capitalist class in the latter half of the 19th century was now exported around the world, primarily to its fellow imperialist powers. When the World War broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States, for the first three years, played the role of chief creditor and served as an arsenal for both the Entente and Central imperialist cartels. It was not until there began to develop a real threat to the ability of Entente countries like France and Britain to pay back loans from American banks that Washington and Wall Street pushed the country into war.

    The war, and specifically the patriotic propaganda war waged against American citizens in the period before and during the war, succeeded in cutting off the development of a mass radical workers’ movement in the U.S. for the time being. At the turn of the century, the two main political parties of the working class, the Socialist Party and Socialist Labor Party, had memberships in the tens of thousands, and their candidates for public office had the support of hundreds of thousands. This radicalization had also spread to the broader labor movement, with a growth in unionization and rise in militant strikes.

    In 1905, this pre-war radicalization led to the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World, the first economy-wide industrial union organization in the U.S. The IWW competed directly against the AFL, contrasting its industrial-union structure and class-struggle orientation to the AFL’s craft divisions and method of “business unionism” (running unions like a business). The IWW was successful in organizing among miners, lumber workers, textile workers and marine transport workers, but gained much of its pre-war attention with its public fights for “free speech:” the right to speak about and organize unions.

    By the time the U.S. entered the First World War, the capitalists had become concerned about the combined power of the IWW (and its “pro-politics” split, the Workers’ International Industrial Union), SLP and SP, and their combined efforts (usually carried out separately) against the draft and entry into the war. Sedition and espionage laws were turned on the working class, with hundreds of IWW and Socialist workers imprisoned, and dozens of immigrant workers deported to their countries of origin.

    The workers’ revolution in Russia in October (November) 1917 breathed new life into the radical and revolutionary workers’ movement in the U.S., especially following the end of the First World War. In 1919, open conflicts between the American Legion and IWW led to the Centralia Massacre, police in Boston went on strike for better wages and the right to organize, steel workers struck across the country, and workers in Seattle, Washington, staged a general strike and organized a workers’ council.

    At the same time, the development of a Communist movement aligned to the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) provoked splits in the IWW and SLP, and a series of mass expulsions in the SP. At the same time, Washington began a series of raids on suspected “Bolsheviki” in the U.S., which targeted not only the newly-organized Communist Party and Communist Labor Party, but also radical labor organizers in and out of the IWW. This first “red scare” decimated the ranks of the American labor movement, ultimately pushing down the level of unionization in the U.S. to a private-sector level of 7 percent.

    As the 1920s opened, the radical workers’ movement had been defeated, with many of its key organizers and leaders dead, imprisoned or deported. For the capitalists, however, the “roaring ’20s” were a period of boom and expansion, due in no small part to the combination of bankrolling the reconstruction in France and other European countries, the reparations received from the defeated Central Powers (which were repayment of loans made prior to 1917), and economic expansion in Asia made possible by the relative weakening of French and British imperialism.

    In addition, the U.S. again found itself leading a technological boom, with the expansion of the automobile industry. The development of Taylorism and application of the assembly line to industrial production was the conduit for the further growth of American capitalism on the world stage.

The stock market crash of 1929 was the opening salvo of the Great Depression in the United States. American capitalism, which had ridden the wave of speculation and credit, now had to find new ways of doing business. For the most part, they succeeded — but not without assistance.

    During the “Gilded Age,” it was still possible for capitalists to be individual owners of industries (even monopolies and trusts) and directly manage their companies. With the rise of Taylorism and the development of national (and transnational) corporations, and the monopoly of credit in the hands of finance capital (banks, credit and investment firms), the power of the individual capitalist was replaced with the power of the capitalist class as a whole. As more and more corporations became “publicly-traded,” direction was concentrated in the hands of interlocking boards of directors, with representatives of the capitalists serving on multiple boards along with representatives of banks and other creditors.

    By the 1920s, this removal of the capitalists themselves from direct management, and their replacement by layers of professional “business administrators” and managers, technicians, consultants and professionals, led to a growing power among the petty bourgeois “middle class.” Buoyed by the stock market boom of the period, the “new” sections of the petty bourgeoisie quickly outpaced the “old” sections: small shopkeepers, independent producers, artisans and craftsmen.

    The onset of the Great Depression threatened the continued existence of the “new” petty bourgeoisie, which in turn jeopardized the capitalist class. In addition, the rise of working-class militancy in this period, and growth of the “official” Communist movement and rebirth of the organized labor movement, further put at risk the growing world prominence of American capitalism. The result was an agreement struck between the capitalists and the petty bourgeoisie; the expression of this compact was the New Deal.

    In exchange for the petty bourgeoisie’s continued loyalty, American capitalism agreed to turn over day-to-day administration of the state and economy to their managers and professionals, and allow them to implement “reforms” that would, at once, alleviate some of the most brutal social conditions found among working people and secure minimums for the standards of living of workers (through the establishment of a minimum wage, the right to organize labor unions and social welfare programs) and the petty bourgeoisie (through tax breaks, subsidies for farmers and “small businesses,” and expansion of public education).

    The New Deal was the American version of a worldwide development. The conditions of the Great Depression pushed the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie closer together around the world. But the forms (and sometimes the content) taken in these new coalitions were to differ from country to country, based on material conditions. In several countries, such as Germany, it was to take a decidedly reactionary road in the form of the Nazis. In countries like Britain, the coalition would eventually lead to what was called the “social-democratic consensus,” where piecemeal nationalization and a greater political role for social-democratic and labor parties were to become the norm. In the Soviet Union, the coalition was with the world capitalist class, since there was no indigenous bourgeoisie left in the country, on the basis of staving off world revolution in favor of “influence” and increased trade, later leading to the 1945 Yalta Agreement.

    With this agreement, the petty bourgeoisie carried the development of American capitalism “to its logical conclusion:” the “liberal-democratic republic,” whereby both the capitalists and petty bourgeoisie would benefit from the exploitation of the mass of the working class in the U.S. and other countries along the lines of the axiom, “a happy workforce is a productive workforce.” The rise of the CIO and industrial unionism, a progressive and militant act by workers in most of the major sectors of the American economy, was co-opted by the capitalist-“middle class” coalition, in the political form of the Democratic Party, which cultivated the development of a pro-capitalist bureaucracy chosen to take leadership of the new unions.

    These officials would use the self-described socialist and communist labor organizers who developed in the early 1930s, and led struggles such as the Minneapolis Teamster, Toledo Auto-Lite and West Coast Longshore strikes of 1934, the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37, and the organizing of the entire auto industry, to build powerful industrial unions, then use their resources to install their chosen officials in leadership, where they could tie the newly-organized workers to the capitalist system and entrench the bureaucracy as a new and more effective crop of “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.”

   As well, by developing this new bureaucracy as an entity with little organic connection to the workers organizing, they would remain a part of the petty bourgeoisie and their agent within the broader workers’ movement, while also themselves cultivating workers from the more privileged layers that could be groomed as replacements or offered the chance for “social mobility” and entry into the petty bourgeoisie.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, American capitalism once again assumed the role of chief creditor and arsenal of world capitalism, both for the Allies and the Axis. The capitalist class was initially split over which imperialist cartel to support; the expanded alliance between France, Britain and the Soviet Union further fueled tensions within the exploiting and oppressing classes.

    These tensions were not resolved until soon after the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked U.S. colonial military outposts in Hawaii, the Philippines and on other Pacific islands in December 1941, and Germany, fulfilling its obligations as part of the Axis, declared war on the United States.

    America’s arsenal of world war now became the “arsenal of democracy,” as the propaganda war presented the Second World War as a battle between “democracy” and “totalitarianism.” American capitalism asked for and received a blanket no-strike pledge from organized labor (a pledge supported by the “official” Communists, who were fervent supporters of the new “war for democracy”).

    During the war, millions of workers were drafted to fight in Europe and the Pacific, with their places in the factories and shops taken by women. Women workers, Black and white, formed the backbone of the wartime working class, but were paid less than men in the same jobs. African Americans and poor whites from the South not drawn into the military also migrated north to get jobs in the factories and plants converted to wartime production. The capitalists used racism and sexism (and the power of the AFL and CIO union officials) during this period to derail efforts to raise wages and improve working conditions.

    The United States emerged from the Second World War not merely as one of the victorious Allies, now reorganized and established as the United Nations, but as the pre-eminent imperialist power in the world. This is because, as the war against the Axis was coming to an end, American capitalism started a new war: an economic war against its fellow Allies ... and imperialist rivals.

    From 1944 to 1946, the U.S. strangled the economic power of Britain and France, making it impossible for them to maintain their colonial power. As French and British capitalism declined, American capitalism grew, to the point that the capitalists of Wall Street and Washington could impose a division and organization of the world’s resources and labor power along lines they considered most favorable. “De-colonization” in the post-war period represented the neo-colonization of the world by the United States.

    The rise of American capitalism on a world scale was possible because of the alliance between the capitalists and petty bourgeoisie, and as a reward for their loyalty the capitalists agreed to support the basis for the perpetuation and relative self-maintenance and reproduction of the “middle class,” ultimately codified in the “Fair Deal” in 1949. At the same time, however, the exploiting and oppressing classes now found it necessary to place restrictions on the growing power of the working class.

    As workers returned from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, having fought for four years for “democracy” and the “Four Freedoms,” they found that they had few rights as working people on the job, and that the wages and working conditions had, at best, remain unchanged since before the war. From 1945 to 1947, a strike wave roared across the U.S., with millions of workers demanding a better standard of living. Over half of the strikes staged by workers around the world in the 1940s took place in the U.S. during these years. The power of the American working class was directly threatening capitalism’s ability to grow on a world scale, and the capitalists blamed the unrest on its new enemy: “Communism.”

    In 1947, Republicans and Democrats in Congress came together to adopt the Taft-Hartley Act, which not only banned many of the tactics used by workers to organize unions and win strikes, but also banned “Communists” from leadership positions in labor unions. Even then-President Harry Truman agreed with union officials who called it a “slave-labor law” and vetoed the legislation, which was soon after overridden with bipartisan support in Congress. Passage of the Taft-Hartley Act initiated a second “red scare” and witchhunt of alleged “Communists” in the labor movement, culminating in the hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

    After the passage of Taft-Hartley, American capitalism went forward with its worldwide expansion while workers retreated and consolidated itself. In 1955, the AFL and CIO merged into a single organization, with its unified bureaucracy wholly committed to capitalism and the capitalist-“middle class” coalition in the form of the Democratic Party. In that same year, Congress passed the Landrum-Griffin Act, which, among other things, restricted the right of unions to directly participate in the political process — effectively banning the efforts of some radical unions and union officials to organize a labor party.

    During this period, officially called the “American century,” the main competitor to American capitalism was the “socialist bloc” of the Soviet Union and its allied “people’s democracies” in Central Europe, the Chinese and Korean “people’s republics,” and the growing “non-aligned” and revolutionary-nationalist movements developing in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The “Cold War,” the propaganda and economic war between the U.S. and Soviet Union, dominated the political landscape of the latter half of the 20th century, both inside and outside of the United States, including in the workers’ movement.

    The 1950s, especially after the death of Josef Stalin in 1953, saw the workers’ movement further splinter along doctrinaire lines. The end of the 1920s saw splits in the “official” Communist movement, with doctrinal factions supporting one or another of the “oppositions” in the Russian Communist Party organizing internationally. Smaller splits and splinters occurred at the outbreak of the Second World War. In the 1950s, the “official” Communists suffered more splits and splinters, this time by currents supporting the Chinese, dissident Hungarian and Cuban leaderships. The previous splits and splinters also suffered divisions of their own, as changing events outstripped their ability to understand and analyze them.

In the 1960s, the post-war order imposed by American capitalism on the world began to break down. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, guerrilla movements fighting for “national liberation” succeeded in defeating colonial governments and junior partners of the U.S., and among the leading imperialist countries of the “free world,” the arrangement that had existed since 1945 was becoming too difficult to maintain.

    In 1944, as the Second World War entered its final phase, the leading capitalist powers came together to sign the Bretton Woods Agreement, which was designed to stabilize the world financial system and set up rules and procedures for capital and credit movement following the war.

    Bretton Woods was used by American capitalism to defeat its allies in the economic war of 1944-46 and establish itself as the leading imperialist power. However, the Agreement ran into problems almost immediately after the war, since massive amounts of credit and capital were now needed to rebuild Europe and Japan, and America’s allies did not have the financial means to pay back loans. The result was the Marshall Plan, which gave grants to countries like France and Britain, as well as to the regimes in Greece and Turkey to fight off revolutionary movements, while exporting billions of dollars of capital and credit.

    Throughout most of the 1950s, the U.S. financed the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, and encouraged them to develop their production and export abilities, while opening their markets to American-made goods. This set up a “golden triangle” of international credit and trade: The U.S. would use the system to trade with its new neo-colonies, expanding industry and acquiring raw materials while reaping superprofits. The surplus created through this trade would allow American capitalism to finance Europe’s reconstruction and make the U.S. the market for their goods. This would then allow Europe (and later Japan) to import commodities from U.S. neo-colonies, which reinforced America’s position as world economic leader.

    By 1960, this economic arrangement began to collapse. The world’s supply of gold stayed relatively constant, while more and more dollars were needed for capital and credit movement. The European and Japanese capitalists, in the nearly two decades following the Second World War, had rebuilt their economies and regained much of their status as imperialist powers (albeit still in the shadow of the U.S.), and had begun competing against their American rivals in the world market.

    During the 1960s, efforts were made to adjust the Bretton Woods arrangement to maintain the American-led world capitalist system, but events inside and outside the U.S. caused a complete breakdown, ultimately leading to the scrapping of the agreement and world financial arrangement in 1973. The political events that facilitated the end of the post-war capitalist order were themselves a breaking down of the arrangements made between the capitalists and petty bourgeoisie, and a rise in the class struggle.

    The opening of the “liberal-democratic” phase of the Second American Republic in 1934 had left many questions of formal and social equality unresolved. While the New Deal created the basis for the social “safety net” and welfare programs, poverty and social inequality continued to exist and dominate in certain areas. While the principles of capitalist “democracy” were being promoted and allegedly fought for around the world, the rights of women, African Americans, homosexuals and young people were denied or marginalized. The rise of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s had kicked open the door of possibilities for sections of the Black community, and the rest of society learned from their experience.

    By the 1960s, the effects of the Cold War on political thought and consciousness had begun to wane. The “chilling effect” of McCarthyism and the second “red scare” had subsided, and self-described socialist and communist political thought found new supporters and areas of growth on college campuses. By 1959, workers, forced into retreat after the passage of Taft-Hartley, once again took to picket lines and struck for better wages and working conditions, joined in their struggles now by workers in new fields: merchant seamen, script writers for television and movies, newspaper workers, transit workers, and, most importantly, migrant farm workers, mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

    This sharpening of the class struggle, occurring alongside growing movements for social equality, led the capitalists to the conclusion that many of the concessions given to the petty bourgeoisie, for the purposes of creating a “happy workforce,” were now becoming too costly. American liberalism, a hybrid of classical liberal capitalism and petty-bourgeois democracy, along with elements taken from reformist European Social Democracy, had to be brought to a halt or else the ruling classes might lose control.

    The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 brought American liberalism back into control of the capitalist state after eight years of moderate-conservative rule under Dwight Eisenhower. Many capitalists believed Eisenhower’s administration itself had been “too liberal,” primarily because of his unwillingness to deal ruthlessly with the “socialist bloc” internationally and support for using American soldiers to enforce Civil Rights decisions to desegregate schools in the southern states. Kennedy’s support from labor union officials and for the pacifist wing of the Civil Rights movement, as well as his view, following the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, of improving relations with the “socialist bloc,” jeopardized the leading role of American capitalism domestically and internationally. The situation had to change.

    The assassination of Kennedy in November 1963 effectively ended the leading role of American liberalism in the republic. Regardless of whom one thinks was behind the assassination, it is clear that the capitalists benefited most from Kennedy’s replacement by Lyndon Johnson in the White House. This brutal decapitation of American liberalism was followed two years later by the assassination of Malcolm X, a leading figure in the growing militant wing of the Civil Rights movement, and three years later by assassinations of Robert Kennedy, who took up the banner of American liberalism after the death of his brother, and Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the pacifist wing of the Civil Rights movement.

    The capitalists now felt free to return to the course laid out in the wake of the Second World War, but the barbaric end met by the leaders of the petty bourgeois political movements pushed elements of that class in more radical directions.

The period in the United States from 1963 to 1974 is a time that could best be described as an objectively revolutionary situation — a time when the conditions for workers’ revolution were ever-present.

    The capitalist class, reaching the limits of the Bretton Woods system and facing increased competition from its European and Japanese rivals, had realized they could no longer continue to rule in the old way (that is, in the form of the “liberal-democratic” capitalist republic). The working class, after more than a decade of retreat and uneven movement, had themselves realized they no longer could live under the old arrangement; this was especially true for African American and women workers, who now began to fight for their democratic and civil rights. Initially, these movements stayed within the confines of “respectable” capitalist politics. However, as the 1960s progressed, these movements took on more and more of an independent character, ultimately turning against what was perceived as capitalism itself.

    These three conditions for a revolutionary situation —first, the inability and/or unwillingness of the exploiters and oppressors to continue to rule in the old way; second, the inability and/or unwillingness of the exploited and oppressed to continue to be ruled in the old way, under the hitherto existing social arrangement; and, third, a political independence from the old system that polarizes society and creates a movement for an alternative (even if it is not necessarily well-defined) — prevailed in this period.

    All that was lacking was the subjective condition: a political movement among the exploited and oppressed that can organize and mobilize those masses on the basis of a clear platform and course of action, which has as its goal the overthrow of the current exploiters and oppressors and its social system. Historically, this has been called a communist party — a political party of the working class (though not a party in the capitalist or petty-bourgeois sense of the term) based on communist principles and a communist platform, expressing those politics consistently, applying them in action consistently and continuously.

    Within the working class, the period of retreat decimated its political organization. Those self-described socialist and communist organizations that had participated in the workers’ organizing of the 1930s and 1940s had their ranks depleted, and most of those who remained were not workers at all. The IWW had dwindled to a few thousand members nationally, and most of them were not organized into industrial union segments. Within the working class itself, small political currents, mostly connected with college-based organizations, or focused on daily or internal union struggles, were all that remained.

    However, the rise in strikes and growing participation of the working class in the Civil Rights and, to a lesser extent, women’s rights movements, as well as in the fledgling antiwar movement, threatened to lay the basis for the development of a mass workers’ movement on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The initial break in the “liberal-democratic” coalition between the capitalists and petty bourgeoisie led some elements to join in the growing independent struggles on their own class basis. These elements sought to use the growing militancy and activity of the working class as a battering ram for their own ends.

    Having learned bits and pieces of radical and revolutionary thought during their years in college, these petty-bourgeois elements, mostly young people whose rejection of capitalism’s “new course” pushed them on to the independent road, now cobbled together those pieces along with the more romantic depictions of guerrilla movements in Latin America, Asia and Africa, and began to assemble their own political perspectives.

    These perspectives had common principles, such as a rejection of the working class as the only really revolutionary class and force for revolutionary change, leading to a contempt for workers and their being counterposed to “new mass vanguards” of the social movements, and a belief that “the enemy of my enemy is my ally,” leading to alliances with reactionary elements in other countries as well as political union with one or another of the competing trends within the “socialist bloc.” The “New Left” was born.

    The rise of the “New Left” effectively drowned out the small and struggling currents within the working class, using the media attention and mass protests of the period to present themselves as the only fundamentally-different alternative to the existing capitalist order. Most of the smaller workers’ organizations of the time either capitulated to the “New Left” or attempted their own convoluted “turns” to match the development of these petty-bourgeois political currents.

    At a time when workers’ independent action was reaching a higher, more militant phase, the self-described “workers’ organizations” had left the stage. And when workers attempted to form their own organizations (the Black Panther Party, Brown Berets, Motor City Labor League, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, etc.), they were set upon by the “New Left” (and the older left organizations that capitulated) and either forced to capitulate or destroyed. Thus, from the Watts and Detroit rebellions of 1965 and 1967, respectively, to the uprising over the assassination of Martin Luther King in August 1968, to the U.S. Postal Service and General Motors strikes of 1970, the only political alternative to capitalism was that presented by disaffected “r-r-r-revolutionaries” in the “New Left.”

    The destruction of the liberal and radical left in the latter half of the 1960s did not, however, prevent the objectively revolutionary situation from developing farther. From 1970 to 1974, strike action took on a scale not seen since the CIO organizing of the 1930s. As in 1919, even the police took to picket lines. In 1971, police in New York City refused to enforce capitalism’s “law and order” until their salaries were raised. Three years later, cops in Baltimore joined with other city workers in a four-day strike that brought the city to its knees. These splits in the core of the capitalist state foreshadowed the political crisis to come.

    The re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972 put into motion a series of events that threatened to pull down the entire political structure of American capitalism. It was not so much the Republican-organized break-in at the Watergate Hotel or the surveillance of the Democratic Party by Republican operatives or even the “dirty tricks” employed by the Republicans to undermine Democrats in elections that was the issue, it was the constitutional crisis created when the White House refused to comply with the subpoenas issued by Congress in the wake of investigations into these activities.

    In addition to the strikes and mass social movements of the time, including a cracking of the brick wall that was the capitalist state, it was revealed in 1971 that the U.S. government had been infiltrating and disrupting leftwing political organizations through the COINTELPRO program run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The documented evidence of surveillance and provocation inside dissident political organizations in the U.S. provoked a shift in “public opinion” away from supporting the besieged government. The allegations surrounding Watergate, and the subsequent conflict between Congress and the White House over what was covered by “executive privilege” brought tensions to a breaking point.

    Because of the failure of a revolutionary workers’ movement to emerge in the period between 1963 and 1974, combined with the collapse of the “New Left” after the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the dying down of the Civil Rights, women’s rights and, after 1969, lesbian/gay rights movements, and capitulation by many of the “New Leftists” to the rump liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency was seen as the end of the crisis — the “long national nightmare,” as incoming President Gerald Ford put it.

    In a sense, it was the end of the “nightmare” for American capitalism. With the re-stabilization of the American capitalist political order after 1974, the revolutionary period came to a close. A new period had opened up in the development of American capitalism: the slide into corporatism.

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