PAN-CARI: Proposals on the Fundamental Principles and Tasks (April 4, 1973)
This historical document is evidence of the Caribbean Federation from Below that was being organized in the 1970s. Some called this the search for a Pan Caribbean International (Pan-Cari). This vision doesn’t mention CARICOM, that gathering of Caribbean states and ruling classes that was founded the same year, for Pan-Cari was the mortal enemy of everything CARICOM represented.
Pan-Cari’s vision, found in an obscure archive appears never to have been circulated as a public facing pamphlet, and was an internal document. The organizational formation was clearly inspired by CLR James’s political thought. However, knowledgeable scholars understand that the direct democratic tendency in the Caribbean New Left (1968–1983) though inspired by James, and key organizers had studied and dialogued with him, they often acted independent of what he thought was possible for this era. Just as sometimes we cannot hesitate to leap forward after conversing with revered elders now who may have taught us much.
CLR was based in Washington DC at this historical moment, as an elder mentor to the Black Power and Black Studies movements, and was on a visa; his first American sojourn ended in 1953 after state coercion and a stay in immigration prison. And so his vision of a Caribbean federation from below, as articulated in public statements, though he popularized the idea, could be toned down. What he said in public was muted compared to this document which he surely was aware. It should be clear there is no evidence it was written under his direction.
Pan-Cari’s principles — in 1973 — were based on a historical and political perspective that class struggle has always been central to Caribbean life, and fifty years ago, in their view, the confrontation with the Black political class was not simply near, it was unfolding before their eyes everywhere. If emancipation from slavery created new class relations, independence from colonialism did so as well. Who proposes that this is not the case fifty years later?
The document chronologically outlines certain insurgent events across the region in this historical period — this was meant to dramatize what was a very real social motion. Contemporary activists can also recognize and record the rebellions and class struggles in our own place and time. Don’t allow apparently learned people in politics to tell you that nothing is happening.
It is crucial to pay attention to how Pan-Cari discussed state power, party politics, coalition building, nationalism, state planning, parliamentary politics, reformism, and how the evolving economic material circumstances impact what is possible — do not memorize or mimic, think it through.
Look closely, their historical conception of slavery is totally different than contemporary advocates of reparations, who sell images of damaged Black people to the state and capital.
Pan-Cari’s analysis of women’s burdens somehow resonates with expressions of the popular will struggling to clarify itself found in the social media of the Age of the Internet.
It may be that one cannot pursue organizing Caribbean politics, especially coalition work and raising awareness, in the same manner in territories of 2,000 people, 200,000 people and 2 million people. Technology has somewhat changed this and in other ways it poses new challenges.
Pan-Cari was organized before personal computers, smart phones, low cost or free long distance phone calls, and expensive postage on parcels traveling the globe perhaps stuffed with a lot of materials that were stenciled, cyclostyled, if not photo-copied. Ideas were spreading across the region and globe in a manner that sometimes could not be verified if they arrived at their destination after much exhausted effort. Now the problem is do we have a sense of purpose to take advantage of the easy technological opportunities provided by our epoch?
We see this statement as a profound vision and in some ways a forerunner of what Clash! stands for. However, both as a result that politics above and below society reconvert themselves through bloody and wearisome struggles, and certain Marxist and Black nationalist views, however advanced, allow for justification for historical retrogression, we must be alert.
We must face the facts not just of where the Caribbean is in 2023 but the mess “progressives” have left the region over the last thirty to forty years. It is a crime against Caribbean people, really humanity, to say we live in an epoch where Caribbean revolution is impossible.
It really is a thought crime that Caribbean people have imposed on themselves. A whole generation or two does not pass without unfolding radical democratic prospects. If people refuse to teach, learn, and organize properly that is another matter altogether.
We unapologetically advocate a Caribbean federation from below very much aware that the previous generations for various reasons didn’t find this sustainable, especially after the collapse of the Grenada Revolution.
If in 1973 the Black political class in the Caribbean, from a certain point of view, lost all justification for its legitimacy and existence — even as CARICOM was being founded also to defend this class and nothing more — only through a discarding of this document’s political philosophy and philosophy of history could one conclude Caribbean states and party politics have any credibility today. They have none.
Pan-Cari spoke of the movement to seize state power as related to the means of Caribbean federation. Clash! says we abolish state power by supporting impending confrontations with it but also not thinking about power as aspiring “progressive” rulers do.
Though Pan-Cari had a vision of class struggle, direct democracy, and workers self-emancipation, they did not fully grasp that state power was never a neutral phenomenon but always the monopoly of the means of coercion, the police, army, prison, and surveillance. It does not change because of the program of those who govern above society. The working class cannot hold state power as it cannot lead an electoral political party — if a ‘mass party’ is a contradiction in terms so is a ‘workers state.’
This must be said even as Pan-Cari was led by people who in many ways were in the forefront of the most radical democratic vision the Caribbean has ever seen. Though the most dynamic leaders of Pan-Cari taught the region the liberation politics that the Grenada Revolution claimed to stand for initially, contradictions found within may have allowed for blind spots to fester and take hold — separate from Caribbean Stalinism that Pan-Cari opposed.
Nevertheless, Pan-Cari was not a political party or revolutionary organization it was an aspiring projection of Caribbean federation from below. In other words it was projecting forms of politics and government for the gathering of forces to bring the new society closer. The authors of this document and the visionaries intending to organize this didn’t confuse themselves with the actual cross-currents of the Caribbean popular will they aspired to cultivate.
Clash! does not believe any minority should seize state power above society — if we believed so, we would tell you. Whoever is begging for a piece of state power under any and every circumstance is flat out an undemocratic thinker.
Some political educators must make it plain what they actually believe, what they think is required — in public — to take part in cultivating the popular will so it can arrive on its own authority. We share historical information and political experience, keeping the questions before the public so as they organize themselves they can decide. Meanwhile we learn about the prospects and obstacles toward popular self-government from our conversations with those trying to figure things out. This was the basic disposition of Pan-Cari.
The search for “working class state power” was mistaken, an impossibility — however the search for working class self-organization, self-emancipation, and self-directed liberating activity is very real. Nevertheless, history unfolds with everyone having limited knowledge and partial awareness no matter how hard one studies to politically educate oneself and one’s community.
An impending confrontation in our time is unfolding. We should aspire to abolish all states above society — the state is not a realm of academic criticism. You either work with it and for it or you do not. In fact almost every ancient and modern political ideology — across the spectrum — concedes how despicable state power is, its tyranny, its bureaucracy, and threat to liberty. Some of the most conservative political philosophers have even likened it to the devil — they are not wrong if inconsistent and insincere in opposing it. Most use these insights on state power to beautify the restricted visions actually proposed in the name of pragmatism, reason, economics, or faith — that is what “smart” people like to do. The state, minority rule above society, cannot be separated from the exploitation of capitalism.
There are only a handful of people in the world, individuals and small groups, who in the final analysis take this insight about state power seriously. With historical research we know the organizers of Pan-Cari debated this question as rigorously as they could given the knowledge they had available to them.
Few have shown they can successfully facilitate coalitions with people who do not think exactly as they do without capitulating every principle they hold dear, or misrepresenting what they are organizing for.
The way to do this in short is to work together to oppose the minority who rules above society. We cannot pursue equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy and call this democratization of society with members or advisors of the government you are fighting in the coalitions you are building.
In 1973 Pan-Cari decided this outlook was dead. Who proposes to revive and defend it fifty years later? The new forms of freedom and popular self-government are workplace councils and popular assemblies. They are not decorations or subordinate bodies of a new state. Neither are they invisible or not functional when people actually advocate for and organize them.
They can be organized as deliberative bodies or fighting formations and with unfolding forms of modern communication all necessary coordination can be carried out through federation. We may call this Caribbean unity for action against the common oppressor. It means nothing if Caribbean ordinary people don’t directly form their own government and hold the reins of society.
Just as Pan-Cari stood on the shoulders of CLR, Clash! stands on the shoulders of Pan-Cari. The coalitions that fight for Caribbean federation from below will necessarily have debate and disagreement — we wish for a future where the Caribbean multitudes are inquiring about the strengths and limitations of these historical perspectives and our contemporary ones. That is what cultivators of the popular will do. We pave the way for the founding of the new society — we don’t position ourselves to govern it.
Until, richer conversations come closer through struggle, we will have to suffer through the chatter about “neo-liberalism” and the “poorer nations” and the great deliberations some have behind closed doors about whether we can even ask the question is CARICOM a fraud on a flyer. Whoever fears such questions being advertised (and everyone taking part in such coalitions to be sure do not) are funded by or advise states and ruling classes and their parties. We will not only advertise but publish any one who wishes to debate this question in Clash!
PAN-CARI: Proposals on the Fundamental Principles and Tasks (April 4, 1973)
Transcribed by Matthew Quest.
The whole history of the Caribbean people from slavery to today has been a history of open class struggle.
At the very beginning of European colonization of the Caribbean, Monarchy, Church and infant bourgeoisie, joined in a Holy Alliance on earth to accumulate capital for European economic, political, and military power on the bloody slave labor of native Indians (Caribs, Arawaks, etc.), white European outcasts, Black Africans, and after emancipation on the indentured labor of East Indians from India.
When the native Indians rebelled against their subjection to slave labor, the Holy Alliance conquered Caribbean soil soaked with the blood of Caribs and Arawaks, and launched on the modern world Black slavery. From Africa, through the middle passage onto the Caribbean sugar plantation, a bitter and open class struggle was fought for over 200 years between the black slaves and the white Holy Alliance. Among the Black slaves themselves there developed distinct class interests and consequently class conflicts. The heroic and victorious struggle of the Black Jacobins in the Santo Domingo slave revolution of 1791–1804 brushed aside the cobwebs of race and color, and exposed the fundamental social class relation and class conflicts between the plantation field slaves, and the house slaves and the free coloreds or mulattoes.
The Santo Domingo [Haitian] Revolution showed that the Caribbean slave society consisted of two basic antagonistic and hostile social forces — European capital and slave labor — entangled in a life and death struggle. More than that, all Caribbean slave rebellions and revolutions have shown that the section of exploited labor working in large numbers in a co-operative manner and on a socialized basis in the day-to- day process of capitalist production constitutes the vanguard of the social revolution.
In Caribbean slave society, the slaves, neither owned nor controlled anything. The land was owned and controlled by the rising European bourgeoisie (except the mountainous land controlled by the Maroons and runaway slaves, particularly in Jamaica and Surinam). The economic base of the society was owned and controlled by the European bourgeoisie. State power was in the hands, first, of the Monarchy, and later of the European bourgeoisie. The very being of the slave was the property of the planters and creditors. Consequently, the great struggles of the slaves were for freedom from bonded slavery and for wage-labor. (Not only was this objective reality, but there is a wealth of historical evidence to prove it.)
Emancipation created new class and social relations in Caribbean colonial society. Wage-labor replaced wage-less slave labor. An independent peasantry emerged. New ethnic ingredients, particularly the East Indians, were introduced into the production process. But the state remained essentially the same as before.
Whereas before emancipation the class struggle took the open form of armed uprising of slaves, after emancipation strikes, marches, and destruction of colonial bourgeois property became the main weapons of the new infant working-class. The history of the Caribbean people in the 19th century after emancipation was the history of the readjustment of ex-slaves to the new class and social relations in Caribbean colonial society and the working out through experience of new forms of class struggle by exploited labor for social emancipation.
In the 20th Century, the Caribbean people, born of the greed of European colonizers for the then precious commodity, sugar, to expand, capitalist production and accumulate European capital, inevitably became entangled in the expansion of the world market and the development of modern industry. A new economic power — American Imperialism — the modern vanguard of the international bourgeoisie, entered the Caribbean class struggle. A new modern working-class, not tied to the land as their predecessors, but concentrated, at first, on the docks, and later in modern industrial and manufacturing units of production, emerged in many Caribbean countries. The working-class exploding ever so often in open class struggle found themselves more and more beaten down under the brutal oppressive whip of the imperialist bourgeoisie and the colonial state. At a certain stage in its development and through its experiences, the working-class formed its political party to seize control of the colonial state machinery, and founded its trade union organization to defend it in it’s day to day struggles against capitalist exploitation and dehumanization. But every attempt at the seizure of state power by the working-class ended in its further subjection to imperialist capital and its social oppression under the “legal” whip of the colonial state power.
As soon as the working-class found itself exhausted as an independent class force, it joined with other classes above it in a nationalist movement to seize political and social power. Wherever it has not done this in the Caribbean, that is the tendency.
The development of imperialist production created an ever more detailed division of labor, not only at the point of industrial production, but in the society as a whole. The emergence of a professional and intellectual middle-class is a consequence of the further division of labor. “Self-government,” “autonomy,” and “independence” became slogans of that middle-class. At first the Black colonial middle-class captured the leadership of the Nationalist Movement and gained control of the colonial state machinery. But nothing changed. Nationhood meant to that class the expansion of all judicial and economic ingredients of colonial society on a national scale. The result was the intensification of every evil inherent in the colonial society.
Competition among the national and continental bourgeoisie at the very heart of imperialism and the crisis of imperialist production have had the greatest and most chaotic effects at the ends of the imperialist tentacles — the dependent economy. Prices of industrial and manufactured commodities continuously rise while the prices of raw materials and agricultural products continuously fall. The constant revolutionizing of the process of production and the ever-increasing ration of constant capital (machinery, etc) to variable capital (labor) throws labor power onto the commodity market and swells the ranks of the reserve labor army (the unemployed) who today refuse capitalist work. The exploitation of labor, the mental degradation of the laborer and social oppression increase ten-fold. All established institutions are plunged into social crises. Their very survival is at stake. The state only survives at the rear of its armed power. Finally, the gigantic concentration of imperialist capital under the guise of national capital at one pole, and the socialization of labor at the other, heightens the class conflict and explodes into open class struggle threatening to tear established Caribbean society apart.
The working-class is waging open class war like it has never done before. Antigua and Jamaica, 1968; Suriname, Curacao, and Anguilla, 1969; Trinidad and Tobago 1970 and since; Guadeloupe, 1971; Dominica, 1972; and Surinam, 1973; are just a fee examples of open class war waged by the working-class in recent years. Having gained practical experience and political education by its self-activity within the Trade Union and the Political Party, the working-class has begun the working out of new forms of self-organization and of class struggle.
In those countries of the Caribbean where imperialist production is relatively backward and consequently the modern working-class small and scattered, and where the largest section of the working-class consist of agricultural laborers tied to the land, the situation, though not as mature, is tending in the same directions. In those countries the class conflicts are yet blurred and vague and the class struggle underdeveloped. But the popular mass movement that is emerging is not a Nationalist Movement in the old colonial sense. It is essentially a mass movement led by the agricultural working-class and youth. Whereas the struggles in those countries where the class conflicts are advanced and acute have begun to explode essentially as a socialist revolution; in the undeveloped agricultural societies, the class struggle is emerging as a National Democratic Revolution of workers, farmers, youth, and the old petit-bourgeoisie of artisans, shopkeepers, etc. in alliance with progressive intellectuals.
Such is the character of the historical tendencies of Caribbean class society.
Considering the historical experiences of the Caribbean people and our present situation today; and considering the development of imperialism on a world scale; we, the members of PAN-CARI; at the Founding Congress held from April 19–23, 1973, in the Caribbean declare:
1. That the history of Caribbean society, and all previous societies (since the disintegration of communal tribal society) is the history of class struggles.
2. That the subjection and exploitation of the laborer to the monopolize of the means of production is the fundamental cause of social misery, menta degradation, and political dependence.
3. That the emancipation of the working-class must be conquered and won by the working-class themselves organized in their own class movement. The struggle for the emancipation by the working-class is not a struggle for new class privileges or class monopoly, but against all class privileges, monopoly and exploitation… All previous emancipation struggles brought a new class to power. The emancipation struggle of the working-class will bring to power for the first time the overwhelming majority of the people who constitute the army of exploited labor, and will inscribe on the banner of society: equal rights and duties for all.
4. That the race question must be subsidiary to the class question in the emancipation struggle of the working-classes, but to ignore the race question is as dangerous as to make it fundamental. In all previous emancipation struggles in the Caribbean the race question was indivisibly tied to the class question. Slave labor was Black and sugar capital was white. Wage labor was essentially Black and Indian, and colonial state and capital were essentially white. Today, wage labor has remained essentially Black and Indian, while state power management over labor has become also Black and Indian. Capital is not simply colored white but is universal, imperialism on a world scale.
The emergence of Black Power as a political slogan and mobilizing weapon in the English speaking Caribbean is a result of centuries of economic exploitation, and social oppression of Black labor by white western capital and white western bourgeois state power. At this present stage of world imperialism and the class conflicts in Caribbean society, the emancipation struggle demands the predominance of the class question over the race question.
5. That all previous efforts at working-class emancipation failed because of lack of political unity, solidarity, and organization of the working-class in their various divisions of labor and industries, and their acceptance of petit-bourgeois ideology and leadership.
6. That political movements of the working-class must see as their end the emancipation of the working class from all forms of social and economic subjection and degradation.
7. That a necessary precondition for the emancipation of the working-class is political unity, organization, and clarity of the working-class themselves in their own working-class movement.
Towards that goal there is an urgent need for the organization and unity of the spontaneous and disconnected working-class struggles and movements.
8. That the working-class must take control of the land, production, and the national economy as an essential prerequisite to their emancipation. State nationalization and “localization” is the bourgeois response of the middle-class to the working-class struggles against capital, whether foreign or national. What is needed is working-class nationalization and control of the economy, for only with working-class control, can working-class self-management be achieved.
Consumers’ cooperatives and production cooperatives demonstrate by example what is possible. But the working-class cannot gain their emancipation through cooperatives; for once cooperatives exist within the capitalist mode of production, distribution and exchange as the prevailing mode of social relations, they either die or become capitalist. Only when cooperatives are purged of their capitalist tendencies, are expanded to national dimensions, and are integral part of the new social institutions of the working-class, can they become instruments for social emancipation.
9. That the working-class cannot gain their emancipation until they take political power… To conquer political power becomes the great duty and central task of the working-class. The experiences of the working-class in the Caribbean and internationally have shown that the working-class cannot hold of the bourgeois state and wield it in their own interests… The working-class in the very process of their struggles for political power will have to destroy the existing bourgeois state and build a new type of state in which the working-class themselves will have power and control. Only in those countries in the Caribbean where capitalist production and the bourgeois state are as yet underdeveloped is at all possible for the working-class movement to take hold of the existing state and wield it in the interest of the working-class; and even then it will become necessary so soon as political power is taken, to begin the destruction of the existing state and build a new type of state.
10. That the complete emancipation of labor is neither a local, national, cultural, or racial question, but a social problem embracing all countries of the modern world. Complete emancipation depends on the World Movement for the emancipation of labor; and only when the working-class in the most advanced capitalist countries take political power is complete emancipation possible.
The Caribbean working-classes, as the working-classes of the countries of the underdeveloped world, must take political power so soon as they have the capacity to do so in order to unite the Caribbean as one nation and to begin the process of social transformation, and to lay the social and
Economic basis for complete emancipation of labor. In so doing they will be contributing to the defeat and destruction of world imperialism and bourgeois society and will be a beacon light in the struggles for the working-class everywhere for a new society in which the free association of all will be the condition for the freedom of the individual.
# # # #
To give effect to our fundamental principles we, the members of Pan-Cari, see as our immediate tasks:
(1) The mobilization, unity and organization of the working-classes in our respective countries for the conquest of political power. In the carrying out of this central task, we do not seek to accelerate revolution but to accelerate the work of preparation for the conquest of political power with new popular mass institutions of the working-classes.
(2) The linkage of the scattered struggles of the working-classes and the combination of the disconnected working-class movements into National Revolutionary Movements. The application of this tasks will depend on the particular situation in each country.
(3) The unity through struggles of the exploited sections of the races of the Caribbean society on a working-class basis and the linkages of and combination of the struggle of the exploited sections of those races. The linkage and combination of the struggles will take different forms in different countries of the Caribbean but the fundamental task holds in all causes.
(4) The clarification, definition and propaganda, theoretically and more so concretely on the basis of practical historical experience of the basic form and quality of working-class power in the new type of state, within which the working-classes and all the exploited strata of society will gain experience in the work of administration, self-management, and building the new society.
(5) The waging of a relentless struggle against reformist tendencies in the working-class movement. The greatest enemies of the working-classes today are those reformist middle-class political groups that preach class collaboration and economic “localization;” that seek to capture the leadership of the working-class movement to take hold of the bourgeois state and the nationalist capitalist economy within the network of world imperialism and to combine all social and economic activities into one gigantic bureaucratic institution for the continued exploitation and subjection of labor to capital.
In the non-independent countries of the Caribbean those middle-class groups seek to be given “autonomy” or “independence” from the traditional colonial power to gain control of the colonial state and wield it in the interest of the local middle-classes while leaving the economy in the hands of local capitalists and foreign imperialists. It is the urgent task of the working-class movement to wage ideological war on these reformist tendencies and to purge the working-class movement of middle-class reformism. Ways and means must be worked out by concrete experience to carry out this task in each particular situation.
(6) The building of National Revolutionary Movements of the exploited by the formation of groups, small and large in all mass organizations of the exploited classes and where ever there are concentrations of members of these classes in daily life — within trade unions; in associations; cooperative societies; consumer associations; schools; village and urban communities; women’s organizations; the police and army; farmer’s unions and associations; agricultural cooperatives, etc. — for propaganda, agitation, clarification, and organization. Public meetings and mass rallies are important instruments of mass mobilization, but they are no substitute for day-to-day work in organizations of exploited labor. Where there are few mass organizations of exploited labor, it is the task of National Revolutionary Movements to build such organizations.
(7) The formation of a parliamentary section or faction of the National Revolutionary Movement in those countries of the Caribbean where the masses of exploited labor are still saturated with bourgeois and petit-bourgeois prejudices and do not yet clearly see bourgeois parliamentary government as the political instrument of middle-class petit bourgeois rule in the interests of the foreign imperialists and local middle classes and where the masses of exploited labor still have confidence in bourgeois parliaments.
The Parliamentary faction must be under the strict control of the leadership body of the Movement and any departure from accepted principles, tasks, and political direction of the Movement by members of the Parliamentary faction must be openly criticized. The work, activities, and speeches of members of the Parliamentary faction must be carefully scrutinized and divisionary and deviational tendencies ruthlessly exposed.
The whole Movement cannot be and must not be involved in the work of the Parliamentary faction. Parliamentary political work is not the most important work of the Movement. The task of the Parliamentary faction is not to gain control of the bourgeois state, but to use Parliamentary political activity for agitation, propaganda, mobilization and organization of the broadest strata of exploited labor; to clarify the positions of the movement on the burning issues of the day; and, most important, to convince the exploited masses of the necessity for the smashing of bourgeois parliament as a precondition to the seizure of political power by the working classes.
(8) Regular and systematic work among the youths to mobilize and organize them within the National Revolutionary Movement. Youths are not simply an adventurous body of people. Within the last five years they have been an integral part of the vanguard for revolutionary change in Caribbean society. The tendency of the unemployed youths is not of the reserve army of labor searching for work, but rather of the reserve army of labor refusing capitalist work and prepared to tear capitalist society apart. Truth to tell, they have been rebelling in many forms against the values and practices of capitalist society and whenever a revolutionary situation arises, they throw their entire “soul” and effort into mass political activity. In a few countries of the Caribbean they have taken the lead in an uncompromising political struggle against the ruling classes, and have built a self-organized movement of the unemployed. The more the movement of the working classes develop and the stronger it becomes, the greater and clearer will be that tendency of the unemployed.
(9) The mobilization and organization of Women within the National Revolutionary Movement of the working classes, and wherever Women’s organizations exist or emerge, to carry out political work within these organizations to make them an integral part of the Movement. Women before were considered, implicitly or explicitly, political illiterates, timid, domestic slaves and politically unorganizable by men. This attitude and reality have been the result of centuries of exploitation, mental degradation, and social oppression of Women by ruling classes throughout history (since the disintegration of ancient tribal society).
Women, not coming into direct social relations with the ruling classes and denied the socialized experience (of workers, etc), are made to vent their frustrations and attacks on the enemy of their enemies, men. Whereas their real enemies are the ruling classes, the foreign imperialists, the local capitalists, the petit-bourgeois middle class political and labor leadership — and their bourgeois state.
Women in the advanced capitalist countries have been beginning, only beginning, the struggle for their own emancipation, and Caribbean Women have begun to stir. In a few Caribbean countries Women’s organizations have been formed as “social pressure groups,” “consumer watchdogs,” etc. But as yet the specific character of the exploitation and oppression of Women is enveloped in a ball of confusion. The task of the Movement is to clarify precisely the place of Women in Caribbean society, to mobilize and organize Women in the Movement on an equal basis with men, and wherever Women’s organizations exist to work in these organizations to make the instruments of revolutionary struggle. In carrying out this task, it must be clear that Women, as workers, as farmers, as unemployed, etc, have specific grievances and interests. The Movement as a whole must fight for those interests of Women that will advance the struggle of the working classes against the ruling classes and bring working class state power closer to reality.
10) The establishment of an independent press of the working class and the publication of a weekly newspaper of the Movement. The working classes cannot depend on the limited, falsified information and political propaganda of the bourgeois [news]papers. Dependence on the bourgeois papers brings with it an ever greater dependence on bourgeois ideology and practices. The working classes need an independent newspaper through which they can obtain accurate information, through which the experiences of one section will become the embodied experience of all sections, through which they can clarify themselves on the burning issues of the present period and the way to working class power, and by means of which bourgeois society will be exposed in all its nakedness to the working classes. The independent newspaper of the working classes is not simply an organ of mass communication, but a political instrument of mass mobilization and organization. Not only do the working classes need an independent weekly newspaper, but also booklets, leaflets, bulletins, pamphlets, etc., Only an independent Movement press can satisfy these needs.
11) The building of a Revolutionary International of the working classes of the Caribbean — and workers of Caribbean origin in the advanced capitalist countries. Pan-Cari is not simply a movement for solidarity, exchange of information, etc. But more important, a movement that seeks to mobilize and organize the Caribbean working classes and the broadest strata if exploited labor into a united Movement to take state power in the individual countries and to build a new Caribbean society, united as one, with equal rights and duties for all.
12) The development of links and ties between Pan-Cari and revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped world, Revolutionary movements of Black people in the advanced capitalist countries and the Revolutionary movements the working class internationally. The emancipation of labor is a social problem embracing all countries of the modern world. The experiences of the Vietnamese people have shown clearly the necessity of international ties. Another Vietnam in the Caribbean is fast approaching.
The Social forces are gathering for the great battle at the rendezvous of true human history. On the one side is the working class, the farmers, youths, other strata of exploited labor and progressive intellectuals. On the other side, the middle classes and imperialist capital. History has bequeathed to the working class the great task of leading the masses of exploited labor in the struggle for human emancipation.
Ever Onward to Victory!
[This document can be found in the Martin Glaberman Papers, Walter Reuther Labor Archive, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. Martin Glaberman was the close comrade of CLR James for fifty years.]
