The heart and soul of this Program of the University of the Poor is the unity and organization of the poor: the still-emerging, most exploited and oppressed section of the working class. This most revolutionary section is being created by an unprecedented revolution – the application of labor-replacing technology to every sector of the economy. Their unity is indispensable for the self-emancipation of the working class from all of the exploitation, poverty, and dehumanization brought by global capitalism. The first necessary step in organizing this working class army is the development of a united group of generals, the building of a political party of revolutionary leaders inseparably connected to the growing political struggles of the poor and propertyless masses of the United States. This Marxist Program sets out this revolutionary objective and main task of the University of the Poor.
Introduction
The capitalist system worldwide – Global Capitalism – has entered a structural, systemic economic crisis. The digital technology revolution – the application of the microchip to the process of production – is fundamentally different from prior periods of technological change: These technologies are labor-replacing, rather than simply labor-saving. This has led to the emergence of a new section of the working class at the bottom of society: a growing segment of the population that is unable to secure a survival wage, or any wage at all. The poor, those with the least ties to capital, today represent the most revolutionary section of the broader dispossessed (proletarian or property-less) majority: today’s working class.
Locked in a life and death battle for economic survival with the capitalist class, the working class, and especially the poor, is facing the most destructive and dangerous force in modern history: the U.S. state apparatus, which is the main political instrument of Global Capital. The struggle of the impoverished and dispossessed masses in the United States and around the world is necessarily a fight to win political power to abolish capitalist private property, as the means to creating socialism.
The U.S. working class is confronting this situation without generals, without an organization of revolutionary cadre. This network of leaders in the struggles of the poor and dispossessed everywhere, must be capable of providing strategic political leadership toward fundamental transformation. Under these conditions the University of the Poor is committed to playing its part in laying the basis for a cadre organization that is inseparably connected to the current class struggle of the poor and dispossessed masses.
Present Situation
The working class in the United States today finds itself in a unique and objectively revolutionary period in world history – a new epoch of social revolution. At the heart of this new epoch is the digital technology revolution, which began in the latter decades of the 20th Century. It has already transformed whole areas of social life through its application to production, transportation, energy, communication, science, politics, and culture.
This technological revolution is closer to its beginning than to its end. Within a different economic system, it could make our world’s abundance available for all. Today, society has the objective technological capacity to feed, house, clothe, and care for everybody.
Instead, under the dictatorship of the capitalist class, this new technology is concentrating wealth and power into the hands of a few, rather than being used to meet the needs of the planet’s billions of hungry, inadequately housed, homeless, sick, and environmentally displaced and impacted people. The world is now facing ever-worsening abandonment in the midst of abundance, poverty next to unprecedented plenty. Unable and unwilling to usher in an era of real freedom for everybody, this small ruling minority has chosen a path of economic stagnation and financial speculation, theft, widespread impoverishment, war, political authoritarianism, and climate chaos.
In 1859, in the middle of an earlier technological revolution, the theorist, organizer, and educator Karl Marx wrote:
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production…within the framework of which they have operated until now. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their chains. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.”
We are living in such an epoch today. The transformation from industrial and electrical-mechanical production, which required human labor, to digitally-controlled production based on electronic technology, requiring less and less human labor, is defining and disrupting all aspects of social existence. The direction of this new technology is labor-replacing, bringing it into antagonism with the social relations within which it has developed, based on the mass exploitation of labor. This is making it increasingly difficult for the capitalists to extract greater surplus value from the production process. Under these conditions, the capitalist economic system is entering into a systemic crisis, different from the periodic, cyclical crises that have characterized its whole history.
There are distinct stages of capitalist development. At each stage, different sections of the working class emerge as a potentially revolutionary vanguard in the fight against the conditions produced by capitalism at that stage. In the 1930s, during the “industrial” stage of capitalist development, the primary center of class struggle was the massive factories. Today, with production based in electronic technology, there are very few large factories and the center of the class struggle is shifting outside of the workplace.
While this new epoch of technological revolution and systemic economic crisis has intensified the uneven development of nations – of developed and underdeveloped countries – it has globalized and deepened the antagonism of the two basic classes at the foundation of the entire world capitalist economy. In other words, it has globalized the two hostile camps of capital and labor, the bourgeoisie and the proletarian working class, that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described in their Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848:
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.” (Friedrich Engels, note to the 1888 English edition)
These two hostile camps are the class of global capital on the one hand, and class of the globalized proletariat, led by the poor, on the other.
In one camp, there is the ruling property owning class, dominated by global capital, which includes Wall Street and the world’s other financial centers, and the major technology companies. With the globalization of the capitalist economic system, this camp’s capital is increasingly mobile and penetrates every corner of the world.
In the other camp, there is the globalized proletariat – the dispossessed – led by its impoverished section. They are increasingly superfluous to the production process and part of an international workforce that is now caught in a race to the bottom in terms of low wages. They are in competition with each other, and with the lowering production costs of computers, robots and artificial intelligence. In the United States, the poorest section of the working class is over 140 million people strong, and includes low-income workers and the structurally unemployed and underemployed.
The poor today are not an “identity” group, but the most revolutionary section of a larger and growing dispossessed section of the world population which has no property in the means of production and exchange. Just as the application of the steam engine to mass production created an industrial working class that replaced the existing small-scale manufacturing class, the digital technology revolution is creating a poor today unlike the poor of yesterday.
The economic, social, and political conditions that the poor and dispossessed face can’t be separated from all of the other major social issues of our times, such as the oppression of women, gender-based violence and discrimination, the climate crisis, attacks on migrants and refugees, the realities of racism and white supremacy, and the rise of religious nationalism and authoritarianism. In these struggles, the poor and dispossessed directly come up against the capitalist state and its various apparatuses of cooptation, misdirection, force, and violence. None of these social evils can be dealt with apart from the whole struggle of the poor and dispossessed for political power.
Under today’s conditions, the poor are compelled to engage in a variety of daily struggles for their very survival. They are the most revolutionary section of the working-class, which through their life-or-death struggles can rally the entire working-class.
The poor and dispossessed has historically been the most disunited, disorganized, racially segregated, incarcerated, and disenfranchised section of the population in the United States. This basic political fact is no accident. The disunity and disorganization of the bottom economic section has long been the cornerstone of the ruling class’s political strategy of control and cruel manipulation. Therefore, the purpose and political strategy expressed in this program of the University of the Poor is a direct counter to the ruling class’s U.S. domestic and international strategy.
History and Characteristics of the U.S. Revolutionary Process
In the history of the United States, the attempts to mobilize, organize, and unite the working class around its own interests have been met with extreme violence from the capitalists and their police, soldiers, courts, and hired thugs of all kinds.
Included among these efforts are the Underground Railroad resistance of enslaved Black workers along with the resistance of poor whites in the North, South and West, against the ruling power of the U.S. slave system; the political leaders of Reconstruction, drawn from the ranks of the former enslaved black workers and poor whites; the labor militants of all colors in the mines, factories, and fields; the fighters against Jim Crow fascism; the street rebellions of 1960s Watts, Detroit, and hundreds of other cities; the young leaders of the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, the American Indian Movement and the Brown Berets; the mothers of the welfare rights movement; the prescient leadership of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Poor People’s Campaign; the organizers of the National Union of the Homeless; and more.
These are all leaders, organizations, and movements whose efforts have threatened the capitalist class with a revolutionary transformation of society under the direction of its poor, exploited, and oppressed majority.
Each was subjected to violent suppression, in one way or another, for the crime of showing that poor people could move together across lines of historic division, that they could think and fight for themselves, and, even more, that poor people could lead the rest of the country in a revolutionary direction. The rule of the capitalist class, throughout US history, has relied on the cooptation of the middle income strata – its political and ideological support for the capitalist order, and its opposition to revolutionary change. To keep the middle siding with the rich has been the main goal of attempts by the US state and other instruments of the bourgeoisie to suppress, demobilize, absorb, and divide independent motions of the more revolutionary sections of the working class. This combination of violence and cooptation, aimed at different sections and movements of the working class, is the basic pattern of bourgeois democracy, in the US and around the world.
In 1967, months before his assassination, Rev. Dr. King described the impact of the poor taking action together, its ability to disrupt the ideological stranglehold of the middle strata by the ruling class, as a “new and unsettling force” for the entire country.
In the United States, as everywhere, there are particular parts of our country’s culture, mental terrain, and political life that have played decisive roles in the outcomes of class struggles. The path to power for poor people runs through the battle for the Bible, the fight for the full meaning of the country’s founding creed, the struggle in the electoral arena, and the U.S. South. When the revolutionary working class in U.S. history has fought to free itself from exploitation and oppression, these are the props of ideological and political control that they’ve had to contend with and turn into levers for their own unity, organization, and influence over other sections of society.
The Bible, and religious institutions more broadly, have been used by the capitalist class throughout U.S. history as cover and justification for their violence, exploitation, and depravity. At the same time, the revolutionary working class has found in the Bible and other faith and spiritual traditions an indispensable means of articulating its own morality, humanity, and aspirations. The working class has wielded these traditions to facilitate unity within its own ranks and to exercise leadership over other sections of society opposed to the existing order.
The contest over the meaning of the founding creed of the United States has been a major defining feature of its social struggles down through the stages of its history, and continues to occupy such a position today: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [human beings] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Limited from its inception, this creed was based upon the invasion, genocide, stolen and colonized lands of indigenous peoples, the exploitation of stolen and enslaved black labor from Africa, the violent suppression of poor white workers and farmers and the total inequality and disenfranchisement of women. The evolving life and death struggles of the capitalistically exploited and excluded have fought to give extended and deeper meaning to this creed. Their notion of the inalienable rights has brought them into conflict with the prevailing rights of private property in land, slaves, education, and the means of production and exchange.
The electoral arena has been one of the primary means of pre-empting, controlling, containing, and splitting up the independent political organization of the working class. And it’s also through the struggle for the ballot and through electoral campaigns that the proletariat has been able to put their agenda in front of the whole country and compel, and even at times lead, a realignment of political forces. In the electoral arena, the progressive sections of the bourgeoisie in particular have sought to manipulate and instrumentalize the working class to fight their battles for them under one version or another of the banner, “Unite to Fight the Right.” On the other side, the working class has fought to turn the electoral arena into a vehicle to advance its own vision for society, build its own practical political unity, and establish its social leadership. This fight is not to take over the Democratic Party and make it “more progressive” but establish the political independence of the working class.
As a base of white supremacy, racism and reaction, the U.S. South has served the bourgeoisie as a powerful political reserve. The mass disenfranchisement of the working class, and especially of Black workers, along with the broader denial of political rights to the Southern proletariat through official and unofficial terror of all kinds, has allowed the capitalists to throw the region’s political weight against the efforts of the revolutionary working class in other regions of the country. On the other hand, throughout U.S. history the determined agitation, organization, and mass mobilization of revolutionary working class leaders and organizations in the South has inaugurated whole epochs of struggle, moving those opposed to the existing order into action all across the country.
The ability of the working class to contend in these areas – to turn them from sources of power for the capitalists into means of their own organization and leadership – depends on the relentless effort to unite our class across every line of division promoted by the bourgeoisie. When the proletariat moves in its struggle for survival, and when the poor get together across the color line, they pose the greatest threat to the power of the capitalists. It was the Underground Railroad, centered on the rebellion of runaway slaves, and later the practical unity of these enslaved workers with the poor whites of the Union Army and with those who defected from the Confederacy, that brought down the slave power.
The movement of the poor today – arising from its life-or-death struggles against the dictatorship of global capital – once again must contend against the bourgeoisie’s domination of the pulpits and other institutions of religious life, against their attempts to narrow the full meaning of the nation’s founding creed, against their use of political parties and electoral campaigns to maintain control, and their Southern reactionary reserve. It’s through their ability to contend in the battle for the Bible, the struggle for fundamental rights, in the electoral arena, and the South that the poor can cement their unity as a class, and transform that unity into national political leadership – winning over the middle strata of society to the side of the most revolutionary section of the proletariat and undermining the political and ideological position of the capitalists in both the US and internationally.
The Unity of the Poor
The current structural global crisis of capitalism has placed a death sentence on the poor today. The growing mass of the propertyless poor are being compelled to enter into life and death struggles for survival. They are confronting the organized violence of the various apparatuses of the state, which protect the poverty-producing system of capitalism. In other words, the poor are being placed in an economic and social position where they must kill the capitalist system to stop it from killing them. This new position at the bottom of the economic ladder of society is transforming the poorest section of the dispossessed into the new and leading revolutionary social force.
To maintain power, the ruling capitalist class must ensure that the poor and dispossessed remain the most disunited, disorganized, racially segregated, disenfranchised, and imprisoned section of the entire U.S. population. The unequal and disproportionate assaults on the poor people of color, poor women, poor gender nonconforming or trans people and poor immigrants have been used to maintain this disunity and cruelly manipulate especially this section of the propertyless masses of the United States.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. clearly saw this ruling class tool when he stated,
“You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”
Uniting the poor across color lines and all other lines of division, like the urban/rural divide, is the number one political threat to the economic status quo inside the United States. It is such a threat because the poor occupy the bottom economic layer of society, and they embody at once all the major social ills and pains. It is such a threat because their unity and organization around economic and social issues would provide a powerful rallying point for winning a critical mass of the “middle-income” strata. The majority of the middle-income strata, like the impoverished, are dispossessed or propertyless and are therefore increasingly being subjected to the same excruciating ills and issues. The US’s middle-income strata have historically served as the social base for the state power held by the ruling capitalist class. Winning this middle-strata weakens the social base of the state apparatus and isolates the minority capitalist class of rulers, opening the door to the abolition of all poverty and the emancipation of all of humanity.
This parallels what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels pointed out in their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party,
“The proletariat [the propertyless poor], the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”
The first and indispensable step in uniting the most exploited, excluded, and oppressed is the identification, education, and uniting of its newly emerging leaders, teachers, and organizers.
Facilitating this first and indispensable step is precisely the main task of the University of the Poor.
Tasks of Revolutionaries in the U.S.
Our Program defines this current epoch of social revolution, shaped by qualitative technological advances, as basically the battle between two opposing classes. The University of the Poor is part of the most impacted and impoverished section of the dispossessed global working class – the revolutionary Global Poor. Our enemy is Global Capital.
The poor and dispossessed around the world are in a situation where we have to kill the system to stop it from killing us. This position has placed before us the historic task of leading the struggle to abolish the poverty and abandonment that exists in our world of undeniable abundance. Faced with the determined opposition of the bourgeoisie, we will only succeed to the extent we are able to achieve and maintain practical political unity, while moving out from under the political and ideological domination of the ruling class.
That unity is impossible without the identification, training, testing, organizing, and uniting of revolutionary political leaders inseparably connected with the struggles of the poor and dispossessed. These leaders must be drawn especially from the ranks of the poor, and from every other section of society as well. Their primary responsibility is to be the most active part of the different fronts of struggles of this revolutionary section of society, and to turn those struggles into schools of revolutionary class consciousness and political organization while resisting the efforts of the bourgeoisie to turn them to their own ends or destroy them. Revolutionaries in these struggles must help point these struggles toward the necessity of uniting the poor all over the world, while avoiding the dead-ends of sectarianism and syndicalism.
The main task of the University of the Poor is to fight for the unity of the poor, domestically and globally, by fighting for the unity of their leaders as revolutionaries. Training and organizing a corps of cadre within the struggles of the poor is the heart of this process.
Without a study of revolutionary theory, which is the summation of the practical experiences of the working class movement, leaders are unarmed in the face of the obstacles placed in the path of the poor and dispossessed and in the face of the sophisticated opposition of the ruling class. The study of revolutionary theory begins with leaders seeing the necessity for it in the limitations of their own leadership.
Indispensable to our training is a study of the revolutionary theory of Marxism, which can only be mastered through its testing, application, and enrichment in practical revolutionary work.
The University of the Poor has taken up a number of basic texts which we use to introduce leaders to revolutionary theory and its role as a guide to practice: The Communist Manifesto, Capital, Vol 1, the Bible, Black Reconstruction in America, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks).
In connection to this study, and given the particular historical characteristics of the United States, the University of the Poor is committed to establishing its Bible Institute. Revolutionary leaders in the United States need an understanding of the battle for the Bible as a central feature of class struggle in this country, as well as an appreciation of the revolutionary tradition contained within the Bible and through the movements of the poor and dispossessed that have taken up the Bible in different periods of US history.
Most Americans think everyone should have basic rights, especially economic human rights. Revolutionaries need to elevate this to a class question: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Our immediate political task is to unite the poor as the most revolutionary section of the working class. We understand that the struggle for the class unity of the poor and dispossessed across color lines and all other lines of division necessarily involves the struggle against all forms of social oppression, including racial and gender-based oppression and the oppression of immigrants.
Our Program clearly expresses the Right to Not Be Poor, which cannot be realized except through the abolition of the rights of capitalist private property in the means of production and exchange. In the struggle to carry out the goals of our Program, we fight mainly for those immediate demands which represent life or death for the poor and dispossessed, demands which the current system has no ability to fulfill. The fight for these demands must be carried out in a way that strengthens the unity and political independence of this revolutionary section of society, and clarify their historic mission:
Right to quality healthcare for all
Right to decent housing for all
Right to healthy food for all
Right to clean air, water, and a livable climate for all
Right to fully funded public education for all
Right to voting rights for all
Right to not to be criminalized and incarcerated for being poor
End to wars against the poor around the world
