Communist Party USA
This week is the 76th anniversary of the brutal destruction of Hiroshima. Then and now, the atom bomb attack is hailed for ending World War II and as a triumph of U.S. science and technology. The atom bomb was the most destructive weapon in human history. But within a generation, nuclear weapons would become far more devastating. Hydrogen bombs delivered by long-range bombers or guided missiles launched from thousands of miles away could kill millions of people. Fifteen years after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the first and so far last nuclear attacks — scientists calculated that stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the U.S. and the Soviet Union could potentially kill more than twice the world’s population. The concept is called “overkill.” How can we understand these developments from their beginning and their meaning for today? The CPUSA uses Marxism-Leninism to understand the past and the present and to prepare for the future. We believe that education and organization are essential for freeing the people from the prison that capitalist social relations create for them. Communists apply Marxism-Leninism in a scientific way to analyze social systems and societies in terms of their economic base and their legal, political, social, and cultural superstructure. The economic base (factories, offices, machines, raw materials, and human labor) interacts with the superstructure (formal and informal laws, rules, codes of conduct and social relations between individuals, families, groups, communities) as both change. Vladimir Lenin used three components to simplify and clarify Marxism for the masses: materialism, surplus value (profit), and class struggle. The best way to understand the post–World War II world is to apply these three components. Regardless of idealist slogans used by the ruling classes throughout history (such as Woodrow Wilson’s “The world must be made safe for democracy” and Trump’s “Make American great again”), the collective actions of all ruling classes are defined by class-conscious materialism. The capitalist class in 1945 First, the Second World War was the greatest and most destructive war in history. It was won by a united front of three great allied powers: the British empire on the right, the American republic in the center, and the socialist Soviet Union on the left. This alliance defeated the fascist Axis powers (Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and the Japanese empire), and their collaborator governments throughout Europe and occupied areas of Asia and the Pacific. Partisan forces, especially the large partisan armies organized by the Communist Party of China, the Communist-led Vietminh in Vietnam, and Communist and left-led partisans in Italy, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, and other countries, played an important role in fighting and winning the war against the Axis powers. Communists and the broad left emerged much stronger at the end of the war throughout Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. At the same time, major anti-colonial movements in India, Africa, and the Middle East, many of them oriented toward socialism, grew in importance. This was in response to the colonial empires’ policy of treating their “subjects” as inferiors without rights in their own homelands — the same policy the fascist Axis was seeking to impose worldwide. Post-war aspirations of the U.S. working-class majority In the U.S., Communists at home campaigned for both Franklin Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights program in 1944 and the building of a United Nations organization that would win the peace. Roughly 33% of the work force had been organized into trade unions. The NAACP and other civil rights organizations had grown substantially by the end of the war. Even with a racist backlash that saw riots against African Americans in Detroit and…
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Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945