All politics and all ideas flow from the class struggle -- from the exploitation of the working class and the workers' fight to oppose this exploitation.
A person who grasps this fact possesses the key to understanding history, and how to act in it. As Marx and Engels put it, every government is run by the exploiters, against the interest of the exploited. Therefore, "working people have no country." Nationalism, patriotism, etc., are just so many methods exploiters -- capitalists -- use to get the working class to fight for THEM, and against their own interests.
Recently the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, both newspapers that express the interests of the exploiters (the former is "conservative," the latter "liberal"), reviewed a new book on the old Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) by anti-communist researcher Harvey Klehr. The WSJ called it "One Book on Communism That Should Shake the World." Why? Because the book supposedly "proves" that the CPUSA acted more or less as a section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It had "spies" in the U.S. Government who tried to steal secrets like those of the atom bomb.
Klehr shows that members of the CPUSA "collaborated with Soviet intelligence and placed loyalty to the Soviet Union ahead of loyalty to the United States..." "The short word for such activities is treason," according to Roger Kimball, the WSJ's reviewer.
We in PLP -- and EVERY class-conscious person who opposes exploitation and supports the struggle of the working class -- say, "Good for them!" "Loyalty to the United States", or to ANY government except a communist government, means only one thing: loyalty to the exploiters, and TREASON TO THE WORKERS!
We in PLP have many criticisms of the old communist movement. Our party was born out of the realization, in the late '50s and early '60s, that the Soviet-led Communist Party had by that time, abandoned the struggle for communism, for the working class, and become a party of exploiters of the working class itself. PLP was founded by militant leaders of the old CPUSA who realized that a new communist movement, dedicated to class struggle, no compromise with the exploiters, total devotion to the working class, had to begin by breaking with the Soviet-led movement. Many of our party's writings have analysed the weaknesses and betrayals of the old communist movement (those interested should write _Challenge-Desafio_ for more information about those writings).
Whatever their weaknesses, however, for several decades the CPUSA was a part of the most effective, dedicated, international organization in world history; one that fought for workers and the exploited everywhere. Naturally it was "disloyal" -- "treasonous" -- to the bosses' governments. Why should any American worker, or ANY decent person, have been "loyal" to the U.S. government when it
Communists are internationalists. The working class owe NO loyalty to any boss, including their own exploiters. Workers must organize internationally, overcoming the ideas of patriotism, nationalism, racism and religion that the capitalists use to divide them from each other and win workers to fight for exploitation.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks set up the "Communist International" to co-ordinate the working-class struggle world-wide. The CPUSA was a part of that effort. By the mid-1930s, however, the Communist movement had begun to waver in its commitment to fighting the capitalists. Fascism was on the rise -- a direct attempt to smash communism, and workers' struggles, everywhere. The Communist movement made the strategic error of trying to ally itself with "anti-fascist" capitalists -- those who had contradictions of their own with the fascists. This led to the weakening, and finally the abandonment, of working-class internationalism and the fight for communism.
In other words: the only problem with the old communist movement is that IT WAS NOT "TREASONOUS" ENOUGH to the capitalists! PLP is buiing a new international communist movement. . There is no other way to liberate the working class -- and the "middle classes," too -- from the horrors of capitalist exploitation and the racism, starvation, poverty and war that capitalism inevitably brings.