Page:Strategy of the Communists - A letter from the Communist International to the Mexican Communist Party.pdf/7

 work out concrete proposals. This is a question on which you must force the laborites to follow suit. You must call upon Morones and Company to advocate our revolutionary proposals on the subject of labor legislation. Under no circumstances must the Party resort to compromise in this matter. We repeat that the entrance of your Party into the arena of the parliamentary struggle signifies a triumph of revolutionary class policy over the anarcho-petty-bourgeois ideology and tactics of the syndicalists; but bound up with this victory is the danger to which all the so-called revolutionary parties of Mexico have hitherto succumbed, i. e. of "reforming" a party, which is struggling for the class interests of the poor peasants, into a Party of "superior" proletarians and petty-bourgeois intellectuals, seeking for careers; a Party pursuing a policy of continual compromise with bourgeois democracy at the expense of the workers and peasants. The Communist Party must therefore exercise continual self-criticisms of the work and tactics of every worker in the Party. But, at the same time, every comrade, as soon as the Party has decided on a definite tactic and has resorted to action, must observe the strictest discipline, and as long as the need for action lasts, must renounce adverse criticism. A Party can fight only when it is united. The Communist Party will gain decisive political importance when it is able, within the frame-work of the nation, to work out a united class policy of the workers and peasants, and to organize a united struggle for the realization of this policy. The Party must be conscious of the historic role of the working class, which consists in supplanting the bourgeois social system by that of the proletariat, i. e., a communist system. The proletariat forms the overwhelming majority of the population and only when the Communist Party understands how to fight and pursue a policy on behalf of the daily needs and the class interests of this majority, will it become the leading party of the proletariat and of the proletarian revolution.

Mexico is approaching another presidential election. The whole political life of the next few months will be centered about this question. The results of the election will clearly show us the proportionate strength of the individual sections of the bourgeoisie in Mexico today. But it would be a mistake to infer that the Communist Party can confine itself to a policy of "watchful waiting." On the contrary, the Party must assume an unequivocal stand so that the simplest worker and peasant will see what the Communist Party is and what it is fighting for. Hence a detailed knowledge