Political Declaration of the PDC National Executive Committee

The following statement is available as a PDF.

Political Declaration of the PDC National Executive Committee

September 2025, People’s Defense Committee 1st National Convention

“There are those who struggle for a day and they are good.
There are others who struggle for a year and they are better.
There are others still who struggle many years, and they are very good.
But then there are those who struggle all their lives:
These are the indispensable ones.”

In Praise of the Fighters – Bertolt Brecht

In the face of the bloody and inhumane offensive on the masses, on our neighbors, co-workers, family members, and compatriots in the struggle of our class against theirs, the People’s Defense Committee raises up the banner of revolutionary unity and common struggle. In a context of confusion, we call for clarity. In a situation of division, we insist on unity based on principles and practice. In a context of class war, we march forwards and never backwards.

We issue this statement in honor of the masses with whom and for whom we fight. Those who shed their blood, who have had their loved ones taken from them, who have suffered daily at the hands of U.S. Imperialism. To the workers and laborers; to the immigrants and nationally oppressed peoples; to the working women; to the poor and marginalized; the class youth; the organizations of struggle of our class; we salute you, we address these words to you. While today we are the downtrodden, tomorrow we are the masters of a new world waiting to be born, a world free of horror, exploitation, and oppression.

Gathered in Oklahoma City from September 26th through September 28th, the 1st National Convention of the People’s Defense Committee met for the express purpose of making our revolutionary will concrete. In defiance of opportunist, revisionist, and sectarian schemes, genuine comrades worked together in order to construct a new organ of the working class. The successful holding of this Convention symbolizes a great landmark for the revolutionary movement in the United States, as we must seize the moment with the energy and resolve it deserves.

The People’s Defense Committee 1st National Convention embraced the participation of delegates and observers who traveled from communities around the country to engage in the democratic process of our organization. The decisions, unity, and milestones achieved at this Convention would not be possible without the knowledge these comrades have generated through practice in the class struggles in the neighborhoods and the contributions made to discussion and line struggle in the lead up to and during the Convention. We thank all our fraternal and observing organizations who attended in solidarity and in the interest of developing ever higher unity. The People’s Defense Committee remains firm in its commitment to solidarity with you, and reaffirms our commitment to struggling alongside you as part of the working-class movement.

The unity established at our National Convention is expressed through the adoption of a Political Program for the neighborhood sector, and a Constitution which gives our politics a cohesive and united organizational structure. These bases of unity for our organization will ensure that we are able to continue our work of mobilizing, politicizing, and organizing the broad masses in the streets and the neighborhoods.

Moving forward, our Program must be concretely carried out in the crucible of class struggle. The National Executive Committee has the task of developing national campaigns in order to direct our forces in coordinated blows against U.S. Imperialism. In doing this we are humble and submit ourselves to a protracted period of struggle, of harsh lessons taken in either victory or defeat. We are motivated by revolutionary fervor, a desire to defend the people, and by a class hatred towards those who are responsible for these crimes. We are guided by the generations of class-conscious workers who came before, and hope to take up their legacy, separating the good from bad so that old heights can be re-taken and surpassed, so that new challenges can be surmounted.

To do this we issue the following basic analysis, which serves as the foundation on which our future work will be built:

  1. The greatest enemy of the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples of the world is U.S. Imperialism. Through their control over the means of production (the resources and tools used for production) and the State itself, the capitalists have divided the world and compete amongst themselves for the wealth produced by our labor and our natural resources. The United States is at the head of this evil system. Vast amounts of wealth taken from workers and oppressed peoples around the world flows into the United States to fill the bank accounts and war chests of the capitalists and their political puppets. Our armies occupy dozens of nations, and our bombs and weapons fuel genocides across the world, most notably in Palestine.
  2. The United States is a decaying and declining superpower. Despite having the world’s wealthiest bourgeoisie, our society fails to provide for the needs of huge sections of the population and our every day workers are still impoverished. U.S. society is beset on all sides by crisis: the drug crisis, the housing crisis, the education crisis, the health crisis, etc. All of these crises have one thing in common: they are symptoms of the broader capitalist sickness in the United States. Capitalism thrives on chaos, instability, and suffering.
  3. The U.S. economy is one in decline. It is unprofitable, unproductive, and unevenly developed. The U.S. debt is over $37.4 trillion dollars, at a ratio of 119% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. This is a clear indication, that despite the position of the United States as the sole imperialist superpower, it does not produce enough on its own to match its political position as the center of global monopoly capital.
  4. The proletariat in the United States takes the cost of the decline of U.S. Imperialism, not by choice but by the design of the imperialist bourgeoisie. In the last financial crisis of U.S. Imperialism of 2008, the political and economic cost of this crisis was directly thrust onto the proletariat in order to save the imperialist system. These crises will inevitably continue as a byproduct of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism: that production is socialized but ownership of property is privatized.
  5. This highlights the lack of a strong union center in the United States. As political organizations of the proletariat, class-conscious unions are the main form by which the proletariat organizes itself to struggle against the rule of the bourgeoisie. Without such political organs, the proletariat is left to suffer economically. The conditions of the U.S. proletariat are such that there are many daily demands that are not being addressed, both inside and outside of the workplace. Taken as a whole, the U.S. proletariat is one in desperate need of class-conscious organization.
  6. The United States is a prison-house of nations. The various Indigenous nations, the New Afrikan, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander nations suffer under the economic super-exploitation and political oppression of U.S. Imperialism, and in turn, yearn for liberation and the right to self-determination. These are some of the most deeply oppressed sectors of the masses, with high overrepresentation among the ranks of the proletariat. Nationally-oppressed workers face a double oppression, and are attacked by reactionary American Patriotism which seeks to eliminate them.
  7. The ongoing and expanding offensive against immigrant, Latino, and Black masses at the hands of ICE and Police are part of a general trend of militarization and fascistization. Military occupations which carry out gestapo-style terror are actively being staged in DC, Chicago, LA, and Portland, with the current Administration already discussing similar such mobilizations of the National Guard and federal forces in Memphis, Baltimore, and Louisiana. The Old State uses these attacks on the people in an attempt to ward off the instability of U.S. Imperialism, by ensuring a base for both forced labor, through ICE detention camps and traditional prisons labor, as well as for future fascism, through the construction of a broader base for ultra-reactionary U.S. Patriotism.
  8. The U.S. state has been carrying out a furious attack upon the basic rights of women. The ruling class, with their monopoly on violence, carries out this war on women through relentless struggle against the right to abortion, their maintenance of the gender pay-gap, and of a patriarchal system which perpetuates sexual violence, prostitution, and domestic violence, all of which contribute to social and literal murder of proletarian women.
  9. The state is carrying out an ongoing offensive against LGBT people, especially transgender people. Gender-affirming healthcare is already entirely inaccessible in some parts of the country, and is under threat throughout the rest. Moreover, the state further contributes to the social murder of transgender people through the process of marginalization which casts trans people out of production via the denial of jobs, housing, etc., and forces them into prostitution and various other forms of obtaining means of subsistence which are largely, and increasingly, unavailable to them through the formal economy.
  10. Access to affordable, safe, and stable housing remains a critical demand of the masses in the neighborhoods. Average rent prices are on the rise. Simultaneously, there is a rapidly increasing number of late rental payments throughout the country, there are more unemployed workers than available job positions, long-term unemployment is on the rise, and wages are stagnant. At the same time, there was a record-high number of people who experienced homelessness in the United States last year which saw over 771,000 people without a stable place to live. Economic repression looms over our country. Those who are able to make rent payments and find affordable housing are often faced with pests and lack of upkeep from landlords.

Taken together, the 1st National Executive Committee of the People’s Defense Committee declares:

  1. Imperialism, and particularly U.S. Imperialism, as the foremost enemy of the people of the world, must be overthrown. While the threat of imperialist war and imperialist military power seems to be threatening, it is an illusion that must be struggled against through the construction of a united anti-imperialist movement within and outside of the bounds of the United States.
  2. We salute the ongoing Revolutions in Peru, India, the Philippines, and Turkey. We reaffirm the necessity to make revolution in every country as part of World Proletarian Revolution. This is the sole way to overthrow imperialism once and for all, and to establish the New Society of Socialism. We solemnly pay our respect to Chairman Gonzalo, who gave his defiant speech 33 years ago on 9/24 in the cage of the Old Peruvian State calling to continue the revolution, who gave his whole life for the World Revolution, and whose shining example inspires all to continue our struggle until final victory.
  3. We salute the ongoing struggles against imperialism, especially in Palestine. The Palestinian resistance struggle against Zionism and imperialism is a storm center for anti-imperialist struggle, and we uphold the necessity to work in solidarity with the Palestinian national liberation movement as part of our work against imperialism.
  4. We salute the courageous people of Latin America, Nuestra América (Our America), who have unceasingly combated and resisted U.S. Imperialism and its running dogs, domestic semi-feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism. We stand in solidarity with the democratic and revolutionary forces in Mexico and Central America who’s immigrant compatriots are the recent target of U.S. Imperialism’s recent attacks. We use this opportunity to call for the alive presentation of democratic lawyer Dr. Ernesto Sernas Garcia, who has been disappeared by the Mexican State for 7 years.
  5. Within the United States, the masses of the oppressed nations have the right to self-determination of their destiny. The struggles of the New Afrikan and Puerto Rican nations in particular are crucial to the success of a working-class movement in our country. These causes are intimately bound up with the struggle for socialist revolution, and must be taken up under the guiding principles of anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalism. Organizing the nationally oppressed masses of the United States as part of the broad working-class movement is a task that has been neglected over the last century of our country’s political history, and we affirm the necessity to take this task up.
  6. We reject reformist solutions to the oppression of women. With working women under attack, it is ever clearer that the only solution to this oppression will be through mobilizing, politicizing, and organizing the proletarian female masses. We must take up the struggle against the patriarchal system, and bring it into the workplaces and neighborhoods as part of a comprehensive struggle. Ending the patriarchal system is a key component of ending imperialism.
  7. We unite with and uplift proletarian transgender people in the fight for basic democratic rights, and must take up a class analysis of trans oppression which understands the fight for trans liberation as being inseparable linked to the defeat of class oppression and the liberation of the working class.
  8. Militarization and occupations are tied up in the struggle for national liberation and socialism, and demonstrate the general tendency of the State away from bourgeois democracy and towards fascism—a process called fascistization. It is imperative that the housing complexes, streets, and neighborhoods be mobilized, politicized, and organized to defend the masses from this terror.
  9. The tenant struggle, the neighborhood movements of the poor and dispossessed, and the struggle against cuts, neglect, and austerity must be developed and connected by PDC as a pressing matter of life and death for proletarians. We affirm the necessity to organize the masses around their daily demands, especially those in the neighborhoods which make a difference between death and survival for working people.

We declare that these sectors of struggle are critical areas where the working class faces harsh oppression outside of the workplace. The prior period of work in the mass movement in the U.S. has neglected to adequately engage with these towards any form of concrete advancement in the class struggle. This new period of work, which has only just begun, will be qualitatively different from the previous period as our comrades undergo the process of professionalization and further overcome sectarianism, localism, and opportunism which leave our movement disunited and weak. As part of this process of professionalization, we uphold the necessity to combat the three ill-winds of subjectivism, amateurism, and liberalism which characterized the previous period of work. We firmly denounce the old and failed Avakianite method of intermediate organizations that lead genuine revolutionaries to unite around subjectivist criteria, ultimately causing them to divorce their work from social practice in class struggle.

We have no illusions that the path we have taken is a difficult one. But we are determined in our orientation, and lifted by our confidence in our comrades and our purpose in this road we have resolved to take. The People’s Defense Committee 1st National Convention is the culmination of an old period of work, and marks the birth of a new period we are just now entering. Dispensing with subjectivism, sectarianism, and revisionism, we have united those who have the will to unite around revolutionary principles proven over two centuries of struggle. Our aim is to continue further uniting those who wish to unite, to build up a working-class movement based in the neighborhood struggles. We look to Chairman Mao, who said that “Class struggle is the key link, everything else hinges on it.” We insist on the necessity to construct a new fortress of our class, the People’s Defense Committee, so that we may fight for the people in the streets, in the complexes and neighborhoods, among the oppressed and exploited, as one fist aimed at the destruction of U.S. Imperialism and its rotten State. We are building a new center for this sector of struggle, and hope all genuine comrades will continue to struggle for principled unity with us. Let this Convention be an announcement: WE WILL WIN!

LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S DEFENSE COMMITTEE!

DOWN WITH U.S. IMPERIALISM!

UP WITH SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!

FOR THE UNITY OF THE WORKING CLASS!

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

THROUGH STRUGGLE – WE WILL WIN!

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