or revisionism--such as a crisis-free and monopoly-free "new capitalism" in the form of a perfected "Welfare State," or some mixed society which is neither capitalist nor socialist.

However, the Marxist view that intermediate stages of society are impossible in the United States establishes only the long-range perspective. Marxists must recognize the need for stages or levels in the development of the mass movement during the entire period before socialism which are related to the concrete economic, social and political issues for which the people fight in present-day soci1 ety. They should also fully appreciate the role of actual and developing struggles for social and structural reform by the working class and the popular forces as they seek to secure peace, defend and extend democracy, achieve Negro freedom and safeguard living conditions.

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Accordingly, a distinction must be made between the immediate program, which pertains to the entire period of struggle against monopoly, and the long-range program, which relates to the future transition to socialism. No wall exists between the two, either in theory or in life. A definite relationship exists not only in time (immediate and long-range), but integrally. The way in which the struggle against monopoly proceeds, the role of the working class and its success in forging and leading strategic alliances, the political form in which the antimonopoly coalition or united front against monopoly is expressed--all this affects the particular approach toward working-class rule as well as the manner and the shape of the socialist solution. The way in which this country embraces socialism will be decided not only by the particular social crisis in the future from which socialism will emerge and by the world situation at the time, but also, and perhape decisively, by the progress of the struggle for peace and democracy, and the political form this assumes, in the period now before us.

The central objective of the immediate program of the Communists is related both to the immediate struggles and to the long-range goal. It arises from an outstanding characteristic of the American development. This is the historic lag in the class, political and socialist consciousness of the working class as compared with the very high level of material readiness of the country for socialism (the high productivity of the economy combined with the complex social integration of labor). The overcoming of this lag is a process, and it would be entirely shematic to see it as a series of stages culminating in the final stage of socialist awareness. The level of maturity of the working class is a product of diverse factors acting simultaneously: changes in the objective situation at home and in the world, the initiative of monopoly, the struggles of the workers and popular forces against offensives of reaction, the influence upon them of socialist progress and national liberation in the world, the strength and the capacity for leadership of the working class party. The unity of the working class and its emergence as an independent force are achieved in struggle, in the course of which the workers get rid of various illusions about capitalism, overcome opportunism in the labor movement, mature their political vanguard party, and move into leadership of the entire nation. But this cannot take place all at once. It is more or less a lengthy process, and is necessarily closely linked with the tasks and issues of the period.

The tasks and issues of the present period revolve around the questions of peace, democracy, Negro rights and economic security, with peace as central to all others. These tasks are democratic in content because the struggle for their realization involves as a common denominator the defense and extension of democracy and can result in significant social progress under present-day conditions. Such advances can be made, providing the working class leads the struggle, Joining in action and alliance with the Negro people, the mass of farmers, and the urban middle strata. In the Communist view, the interaction and merging of such struggles move in the direction of a united front against monopoly, which is the main barrier to peace and social progress, and the prime source of reaction and the war danger. Such a united front is necessary, for monopoly can and will be curbed and its strength undermined only if it is confronted with a powerful united front movement deeply rooted in the working class, which is the leading social force. Such a democratic united front against monopoly, the Communists believe, would have to act politically, and it needs a party new in substance, independent of monopoly. Such a people's party, embodying the leading role of labor and giving political expression and direction to the common anti-monopoly struggle, would strive to win political power and move toward a people's government. Such is the comprehensive objective of the immediate program of the Communists, corresponding to the democratic tasks of the period.

The objective of an anti-monopoly people's government certainly sums up the fundamental movement for peace, democracy and social advance in the period ahead. Its achievement would amount to a radical shift in class relations favorable to the working people and to the realization of their democratic and economic sime. At the same time, it could open the way to the basic shift of state power to the working class, as leader of the nation, and to the establishment of socialist society.

In the scientific Marxist sense, the ultimate strategic aim of the working class is historically determined by the inevitability of socialism and by the role of the working class in its achievement. New features and forms will no doubt arise in the course of the hard struggle against monopoly, and may be of utmost importance in determining the manner and shape of the basic transfer of political power. However, the substance of such a change is that the working class in the end must emerge as leader of the nation -- that is, it must become the ruling class in order to establish socialism. At one or another phase of social advance and in such forms as vill be created by the struggle itself, the working class will be faced with the necessity of leading the nation in the establishment of a socialist government in order to defend and consolidate the people's gains. Thus, the advance toward a people's anti-monopoly government and the socialist goal are interlinked in their development, just as the democratic tasks, broadened and extended with the progress of the struggle, flow into the socialist tacks.

Seen in this historic perspective, the process of anti-monopoly struggle in the period ahead and the forms of alliance and political action produced by it, including the advance toward a people's government, prepare the way for the basic shift in class relations which will permit the working class, together with its allies, to solve permanently the general crisis of capitalism. In relation to this long-range objective, the struggle to curb the monopoly power and the demands raised with respect to this immediate aim are of a transitional character. They are transitional because the curbing of monopoly to be effective and lasting must lead to the elimination of monopoly. As experience haar shown, even significant social reforms and advances cannot be considered as permanent gains as long as monopoly retains its power. Such gains under certain circumstances may even serve to safeguard the outmoded social system against more fundamental change. Even if monopoly is momentarily restrained politically, it seeks to regain whatever economic positions it may have lost and full political power at the expense of democracy and peace. Therefore, in the end monopoly will have to be removed from both its economic and political positions, thus opening the way to some: form of working class rule and the socialist transformation of society.

Such an approach to the relation between the anti-monopoly struggle andthe socialist aim is basic to the position of the Communist Party, as the party of socialism, as the party which stands for the fundamental transformation of society. It provides the perspective for a successful struggle against monopoly under present-day conditions, as distinguished from the old middle class dream of a return to free competition or the reformist Utopia of collaboration with monopoly to remake capitalism, both of which must end in futility.

In the period before us, the democratic transitional demands are uppermost and decisive, and the struggle for them can lead to significant social advance. In this period, the fundamental task of the working class is to build the democratic united front against monopoly, that will fight for peaceful coexistence and will oppose U.S. imperialist intervention abroad, apply and defend the Bill of Rights in all its aspects, strengthen and enrich the representative institutions within the Constitutional system, put an end to Jim Crow, restore and strengthen full trade union rights. Such a democratic front, sparked by the labor movement, would fight for full employment in a peace economy, defend the positions of the small and medium farmers and urban middle classes, and seek the extension of social legislation in all fields. It would seek basic structural reform aimed at completing the democratic revolution in the South and at subjecting large private industrial and financial monopolies to the democratic controls of the people. It would have to rely upon the large mass organizations of labor, the Negro people, the farmers, the youth and all working people, and must win the allegiance of all middle sectors by defending their interests against monopoly. It will have to be a movement around which working men and women, all the underprivileged and victime of discrimination can rally with confidence.

Certainly, the possibility for a dynamic democratic revival and for progressive changes can be realized by such a united front of the popular forces. Such democratic struggles for social and political reform will mature the class forces and alliances capable of defending the people's gains and of carrying the movement forward.

Commists seek to participate in all struggles, united actions, and coalitions which seek to curb the monopoly power. Broad sectors of the people, including labor, may for some time retain faith in capitalism as a system, from which they divorce monopoly, although they correctly see it as the main enemy. As labor begins to lead the united struggle against monopoly, joining forces with the Negro people, farmers and urban middle strata, the forces and alliances are built that in their development tend politically to isolate monopoly from the nation. This development can create a new relation of class forces in which the working class emerges in its independent and leading role.

The Corrmiste seek to place the democratic demands for curbing monopoly in such a fashion, and fight for them in such a way, as will advance the unity of the workers and their leading role in the united front against monopoly. This is the prerequisite for a successful struggle for the immediate common program of peace, democracy and economic security.

COMMITTEE EXHIBIT NO. 7

5. Defence and Extension of Democracy

The Communist Party advocates a democratic road to socialism through the political and economic struggles of the American people within the developing and revitalized constitutional process.

Capitalism cannot be reformed into socialism, the transition from one to the other being a social revolution -- that is, a basic change from capitalist to socialist relations of production. The Communist Party fights for conditions that will lead to a peaceful transition to socialism because this is the preferable and the least painful method of basic social transformation, and because it believes that a peaceful road to socialism can be opened by the struggles of the people under the new conditions that have emerged in the world.

The possibility of realizing such a road to socialism depends upon a complex of inter-related factors, domestic and international. The most important, at this time, in creating the conditions for peaceful transition is the struggle for the defense and extension of democracy. Commists see this as the crucial theme of the period before us. The progress of this struggle affects most immediately and directly the prospects for peace and for economic well-being, and it can be the basic factor in establishing and defending the conditions for a peaceful transition to socialism in the future.

The reactionary tendencies which have come forward in the United States since the end of World War II are a warning that once again powerful monopoly circles seek a fascist-type solution. The Cold War has led to the rapid militarization of the state, marked by an almost total fusion of very top monopoly with government administration and of high military circles with the big corporations. An almost imperceptible change in the inner functioning of the state is occurring, expressed principally in the mushrooming of power in the executive branch, where peak nonopoly is firmly entrenched, and moreover with ever mounting secrecy on government operations under pretect of "defense." In this protected domain, there is a proliferation of new groups and agencies which are subject to very little congressional control and more and more take over the governing of the country. Far from challenging this wholesale usurpation of its powers, particularly in the crucial decisions affecting war or peace, Congress itself launched assaults upon the democratic liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. This trend, sustained by continuing concentration of monopoly power in the economy and in government, threatens by the gradual process of undermining and encroachment to deprive the representative institutions and the Constitutional process itself of any real democratic content.

Defense of bourgeois democracy is itself becoming the issue leading to great social and political struggles. Democratic legality is under attack from the Right sometimes hidden, sometimes open -- and this attack has to be repulsed and the trend toward a fascist-type state has to be blocked if the democratic road to social progress is to be kept open in the United States.

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Thus, it is incorrect to view the fight for democracy merely as a tactic, and this was never the Marxist view. It is true that democracy is limited under capitalism, because bourgeois democracy is based on class exploitation which severely restricts the democratic rights of the workers, the Negro people, and other unpropertied or oppressed groups. It is also true that the complete and manifold realization of democracy can come only with the abolition of class exploitation and the establishment of real majority rule under socialism, while universal equality will be established only when all classes disappear under communism, the higher stage of socialism. But this does not mean that Commists have a negative or neutral view with respect to democracy or the form of state under capitalism. Our form of bourgeois democracy and of republican government has provided a particularly free and wide basis for the class struggle, in the course of which the people have been able to win significant social gainst against the resistance of entrenched wealth and reaction. Monopoly domination of the state now threatens to choke off these freer forms of struggle, by replacing the democratic content of the system with an authoritarian content, while retaining only the outward shell of the democratic institutions. Communists consider the struggle against this entire reactionary trend and the need for the revival and extension of democracy, as an integral part of their immediate program for peace and better living conditions, as well as for socialism in the United States.

The struggle for the democratic vay is a multi-class question, requiring an all-sided, vigorous opposition to the authoritarian trend. Labor is thrust into the very heart of the struggle by the monopoly attack upon its rights and condi

tions, while the Negro people in their battle for rights granted by the Con- .. stitution. impart a powerful stimulus to the fight for democracy in general. The leading social forces in the fight to preserve and broaden the democratic road are the working class, the working farmers, and the Negro people -- their tendency is to fight for democracy without limit because they need it to obtain economic security and freedom. But as the monopoly power grows it seeks to convert the state more and more into its own exclusive domain, from an organ of the bourgeoisie as a whole into a total monopoly state. The farmers, the urban middle strata and other non-monopoly sectors of the capitalist class, are thus shut off increasingly from significant participation in government, and with an effective united front struggle by labor many of these sectors will also fight for democratic advances.

In the Communist view, the fight to preserve and enrich the democratic way in the present society has a direct bearing upon the form and functioning of the socialist state that will follow. It is irrelevant to take as a model for socialist democracy in the United States the experiences of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union during its first decades, when surrounded by a hostile capitalist world it had to industrialize from a very low economic level or die. The United States will go socialist under different conditions. The remarkable progress made by the USSR, despite the unfavorable circumstances demonstrates the strength and vitality of socialism. But the advances to be made by the Soviet Union in the decade ahead, when its material conditions and standard of living will approach and then exceed those now prevailing in the United States, will provide a more comparable situation. Certainly, the full flowering of socialist democracy upon a high economic level should indicate more directly the real potential of socialism in the United States as well.

Whether this country, which has been so unusually well favored by historical circumstances over a long period, will be as fortunate in the future, depends essentially upon the ability of the working people, the great mass of the nation, to preserve and carry forward our rich democratic tradition, giving it a new revolutionary content and perspective.

In the past, Marxists thought that the forms of the bourgeois state and of bourgeois democracy would have to be discarded by a socialist state. But recent experience has shown that many of these forms, with appropriate structural change, can be taken over by the socialist state, and imbued with a new class content. It is therefore entirely possible that the American Constitution and the governmental system based on it, if these are preserved, improved, and enriched with greater democratic content by the struggles of the people, will provide the form of the American socialist state, once power has passed into the hands of the working class and its allies. In fact, the separation of powers and the Federal structure, once they are made completely responsive to the popular will, may be very well suited to the needs of majority rule, direct democracy, and encouragement of popular initiative, side by side with Federal planning under socialism. The checks and balances provided by our Constitutional form and Federal-state relationship, thoroughly democratized by socialism, may provide an effective means of preventing bureaucratic abuses and overcentralization of powers.

In the period ahead, the fight for democracy can well lead to important structural reforms in the governmental system. Originally, the triangular system of checks and balances was devised primarily to prevent the capture of government by popular majorities. As a rule, the system worked, except in times of crisis and popular upheaval when a combination of the President and a popular Congress registered important democratic and social advances -- as in the years of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, and also for a brief time at the beginning of the second New Deal of F. D. Roosevelt. At certain times the Supreme Court, at others Congress, and sometimes the President played the major role in stemming the popular tide. As a day-to-day tactic the popular forces must perforce oppose the policies of one or another of the three branches, depending upon which at the time is obstructing progress. But a more fundamental perspective is required if labor and the people are to revive the democratic content of the Constitutional form and make it serve their needs.

Certain structural reforms in the governmental system which have been proposed before are still valid, such as the popular election of all judges, elimination of the electoral college in favor of the direct election of the President, and possibly the abolition of the Senate or at best depriving this presently unrepresentative body of the power of veto over the House. Other measures which would strengthen the democratic procedures include proportional representation, the referendum and the power of recall, reform of the committee and seniority system and democratization of the rules in both Houses. In the Federal relationship, the States should be deprived of the power to nullify national social leg