>>2784743Many communists forget what Engels wrote about the United States where workers have to have their revolutionary socialist party independent of the bourgeoisie without being co-opted by republicans, democrats or libertarians.
<The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first programme of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement–no matter in what form so long as it is only their own movement–in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.
<Frederick Engels, “Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1886”, Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge In Hobokenhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/letters/86_11_29.htmNow with the quotes from Marx and Engels that it is necessary to remember:
<Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.
<Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1850, "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League"https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm
<Complete abstention from political action is impossible. The abstentionist press participates in politics every day. It is only a question of how one does it, and of what politics one engages in. For the rest, to us abstention is impossible. The working-class party functions as a political party in most countries by now, and it is not for us to ruin it by preaching abstention. Living experience, the political oppression of the existing governments compels the workers to occupy themselves with politics whether they like it or not, be it for political or for social goals. To preach abstention to them is to throw them into the embrace of bourgeois politics. The morning after the Paris Commune, which has made proletarian political action an order of the day, abstention is entirely out of the question.
<We want the abolition of classes. What is the means of achieving it? The only means is political domination of the proletariat. For all this, now that it is acknowledged by one and all, we are told not to meddle with politics. The abstentionists say they are revolutionaries, even revolutionaries par excellence. Yet revolution is a supreme political act and those who want revolution must also want the means of achieving it, that is, political action, which prepares the ground for revolution and provides the workers with the revolutionary training without which they are sure to become the dupes of the Favres and Pyats the morning after the battle. However, our politics must be working-class politics. The workers' party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy.
<The political freedoms, the right of assembly and association, and the freedom of the press — those are our weapons. Are we to sit back and abstain while somebody tries to rob us of them? It is said that a political act on our part implies that we accept the exiting state of affairs. On the contrary, so long as this state of affairs offers us the means of protesting against it, our use of these means does not signify that we recognise the prevailing order.
<Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Apropos Of Working-Class Political Action".https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/09/21.htmI would say that this means having a foreign policy of cutting all weapons, loans, money, and aid that maintain the domination of financial capital abroad, regardless of the consequences or how much you are demonized. This also means cutting off Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and everything else, for those unaware of what I am implying. This, along with cutting all indirect consumption taxes from workers to a heavy progressive tax against capitalists, nationalizing all banks with the suppression of private banking and the exclusive use of public companies for everything, cutting all contracts and subsidies to private companies. Retirement and insurance should be public, separate from any financial speculation or capitalist profit, with costs being transferred to all capitalists for any worker who sold their labor power. Any debt or bankruptcy will lead to occupation and expropriation as public and cooperative property of the workers. Workers' wages will be balanced with the price of food and consumption in a popular council of workers' statistics without economists, "apolitical" people, technocrats, or agents of financial capital using the state-owned national bank without financial speculation.