The proletariat in the United States has a great responsibility and a great mission: to carry out a revolution which, once victorious, will be like lifting a giant bone-crushing burden off the backs of the people of the whole world. It will mean the defeat and elimination of one of the two greatest international exploiters and oppressors. It will be an event whose magnitude will be completely unprecedented in world history. Even Nazi Germany did not oppress anywhere near as many people, and the U.S. therefore is justly hated by even many more. Literally hundreds of millions worldwide will rejoice and will step up their own struggle for emancipation.
Upon coming to power, the U.S. proletariat will renounce all wars of aggression and plunder in word and deed. If the U.S. imperialists and their Soviet rivals, along with their respective allies, have already unleashed a world war, then the victorious proletariat will immediately pull its state out of that war. It will stand against and expose the imperialist nature and conduct of the war.
If the inter-imperialist war has not yet begun–and revolution in one of the superpowers is the only thing that might prevent it–then the U.S. proletarian state will refuse to enter such a war. In either case it will renounce all imperialist alliances, such as NATO; and it will, upon seizing power, make public all the secret treaties and agreements made by the imperialists to serve their international plunder and war schemes. The remnants of the imperialist army will be dismantled and in its place will be the new army of the proletarian state. Its tasks will be first to defend the new state power against the internal reactionaries who will not only dream of but will try for a comeback, and also to defend the socialist state against any aggression by international imperialist powers and other reactionary states which will be in league with the home-grown reactionaries. All U.S. forces will be withdrawn from foreign soil and from the territorial waters of other countries and all the U.S. military bases in other countries will be dismantled.
The socialist state in the U.S. will immediately cancel all unequal treaties and end all colonial relationships, direct or indirect, with other nations. It will renounce all privileges extorted from other nations at the point of a gun by the imperialists.
The U.S. colony of Puerto Rico will be immediately freed, that is, if the Puerto Rican people have not already won their freedom. And in that regard, if war–world war or civil war–is raging in the U.S., the Puerto Rican people should be supported by the proletariat in the U.S. to take advantage of that situation to break free and claim their own emancipation from U.S. imperialism.
The policy of the proletariat in the U.S. will be to use the state power it wins to strengthen relations of support and assistance for revolutionary forces throughout the world–supporting just wars of national liberation and socialist revolution and forging the closest unity with any other socialist states. It will be open to establishing relations with reactionary states but only according to the principles of peaceful coexistence and subordinate to proletarian internationalism and support for revolution.
Beyond that, as it liberates the productive forces in this country from the shackles of capitalism, the working class in power will unleash them not only for the benefit of people here, but to assist the exploited and oppressed the world over in their revolutionary struggles and in the revolutionary transformation of their countries, which have been, to no small degree, held back by imperialism. This will mean genuine aid and will be nothing like the “foreign aid” of the imperialists, which is used to further ensnare and enslave the people of other countries.
Upon coming to power, the proletariat will need powerful armed forces which–although organized according to completely different principles–will need to be equipped with the weaponry the imperialists have, including nuclear weapons. The proletarian state in this country will take up the struggle to abolish nuclear weapons the world over–and this struggle will be fundamentally different from the phoney “disarmament” talk of the imperialists. However, the remaining imperialists and other reactionaries, being desperate gangsters, will not so easily give up these weapons. This makes it quite likely that it will be a long time before all nuclear weapons are finally abolished–although the destruction of the U.S. capitalist state will be a mighty stride in that direction.
So long as capitalism and exploitation exists in any country, this will be a base for the bourgeoisie in its attempts to defeat the working class and restore capitalism everywhere. And wherever capitalism rules and maintains backwardness, it stands as a great barrier to the peoples of all countries in developing the rational use of the world’s resources and productive forces. The international working class can emancipate itself only by emancipating all humanity; it can achieve communism only by eliminating the rule of capital and the chains of exploitation and the remnants of class-divided society everywhere.