Educational Classes

Cadre is the point of contact between a Party and the masses of workers and oppressed people in motion. Mao, Lenin, Che and Workers World Party have written on the characteristics of a cadre and the process that prepares people who will keep the “great spirit of revolution” alive. This class contains a lesson plan, a power point slideshow, “What is a Cadre?” and two readings: “WWP National Candidacy Protocols – Requirements to Begin a Candidacy” and “Workers World Party New Candidate Tasks.”

• Lesson Plan: What Is a WWP Cadre?
• Powerpoint: What is a WWP Cadre? (in PDF format)
• New Candidate Tasks
• WWP National Candidacy Protocols

Building an army of working-class revolutionaries calls upon those rare few willing to give their all to build a multinational, multigenerational, multigendered organization with able-bodied and disabled comrades in motion together. To build a Party requires building solidarity with a constant emphasis on sensitivity. As cadre helps strengthen the Party and works to solve any internal or external problems it may face, each generation of cadre has the power to solve the problems presented by its era. This class contains a lesson plan and five documents to read and discuss: “Guidelines for Practices Regarding Comradely Conduct,” “Social Media Protocol,” “Working Definitions on Issues of Sexual Assault,” “Guidelines for Comrades at Work in Same Workplace,” “Guidelines for Comrades Living with Comrades,” and “Mass Organizing Conduct.”

• Lesson Plan: Candidacy Requirements & Comradely Relations
• Excerpts: Guidelines regarding comradely conduct & Guidelines to address internal conflicts, grievances, breaches
• WWP Guidelines for comrades living with comrades
• WWP Guidelines for comrades at work in same workplace
• WWP Mass Organizing Conduct Guidelines
• WWP Social Media Protocols

In this taped interview with Deirdre G, a founding member of Workers World Party and an editor of Workers World newspaper, describes the reasons and the principled process by which founding members split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1958 and founded Workers World Party in 1959. She describes with engaging anecdotes the political and cultural climate that early comrades developed in the Party, which continue to guide the Party today.
This class includes a lesson plan to encourage candidate discussion and questions about the history, politics and culture of the Party.

• Lesson Plan: History of Workers World Party
• Excerpt from Sam Marcy’s 1972 document, From Ideological Tendency to Political Party of the Working Class

A power point slideshow, “Writing for Workers World/ Mundo Obrero Newspaper,” introduces a Marxist-Leninist perspective on how a newspaper can be a communist organizing tool and presents an orientation for both seasoned comrades and new candidates on writing and photographing for Workers World/ Mundo Obrero. This class contains a lesson plan of a workshop on contributing to WW/MO and on using the newspaper in both local organizing and national theoretical work in a democratically centralized process.

• Lesson Plan: Workers World Newspaper & Community Organizing
• PDF of Powerpoint: Writing for Workers World Newspaper

In 1921, V.I. Lenin said: “Democratic centralism in the communist party organization should be a real synthesis, a fusion of centralism and proletarian democracy. This fusion can be attained only on the basis of the constant common activity, the constant common struggle of the entire party organization … Necessary above all is the development and maintenance of living ties and reciprocity–both within the party between the leading party bodies and the rest of the membership, and between the party and the working-class masses outside the party.” This class has a lesson plan and a powerpoint slideshow, “Democratic Centralism, Party Organization & Comradely Conduct,” that show how Workers World Party strives to apply Lenin’s principles in a 21st century communist party.

• Lesson Plan: Democratic Centralism, Party Organization & Comradely Conduct
• Powerpoint (PDF format): Democratic Centralism, Party Organization & Comradely Conduct

The three main takeaways of this class are: (1) The United States committed genocide against Native Americans; (2) Genocide against Native Americans is ongoing; (3) You are living on stolen land.

“The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the specific form of colonialism whereby an imperial power seizes Native territory, eliminates the original people by force, and resettles the land with a foreign, invading population.”

— Nick Estes, Our History is the Future

• Lesson Plan: Tribal Sovereignty and the Right to Self-Determinatio
• Powerpoint/PDF: Tribal Sovereignty and the Right to Self-Determination: Fundamentals of the Native American Struggle

The U.S. represents an oppressor nation as defined by Vladimir Lenin and by the related principles that all oppressed nations have the right to self-determination and that the self-determination of nations includes the right to separate from oppressor nations. The Black struggle for bourgeois democratic rights is part of the overall struggle against the racist ruling class, although its forms vary. The class contains a lesson plan, a talk by Monica Moorehead on “The National Question, Self Determination and the Black Struggle,” and selections by Moorehead, Lenin and WWP co-founder Sam Marcy, to be read aloud and discussed.

• Lesson Plan: The National Question, Self Determination and the Black Struggle
• Discussion: Remarks by Monica Moorehead on “National Oppression, Self Determination and the Black Struggle”

• Sam Marcy: “The right of self-determination and the class struggle”
• V.I. Lenin’s thesis on national and colonial questions
• V.I. Lenin: excerpt from Chapter 7 of Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism
• Map: Africa in 1914
• What is a Nation? by Monica Moorehead

This class explores Workers World Party’s position that reparations represent the repayment of wealth stolen from Black people by the white supremacist ruling class, that reparations must reflect the ongoing oppression Black people have experienced up to the present, and that imperialism fuels national oppression through capitalist extraction of wealth on an international scale.
The class contains a lesson plan, a talk by Monica Moorehead on “Reparations and the Black Struggle” and several readings to be reported on by participants. There is an option power point slide show, “Overview of San Rafael and Attica Prison Uprisings/ Black August, 1970-71.”

• Lesson Plan: Reparations & the Black Struggle
• Handout: discussion led by Monica Moorehead

• Article: How real reparations can be won, by Makasi Motema
• Article: Roots of the Kashmir conflict, by Siddika Degia
• Article: Bussing and Self-Determination: The NAACP Rally (1975) by Sam Marcy
• Article: Reparations and Black Liberation, by Monica Moorehead
• WWP Statement: Why we support the Jackson campaign (1983)

Workers World Party’s principled position on oppressions based on gender and sexuality is that this struggle for liberation is inextricably intertwined with the struggles of workers and the working class, and with the class struggle against capitalism and imperialism and for socialism. This class focuses on LGBTQ2+ people and linkages of that struggle to oppression based on the M/F sex binary. This class contains a lesson plan along with short reports and group readings from several sources, including Leslie Feinberg, Minnie Bruce Pratt and the Combahee River Collective.

• Lesson Plan: LGBTQ2+/Sex, Gender and Sexuality Liberation
• Handout: WWP Excerpts on Gender Oppression

• UC-Davis LGBTQIA Resource Center Glossary
• Statement, Combahee River Collective, 1977
• Article: LGBTQ2+ Liberation and Working-Class Struggle, by Minnie Bruce Pratt, Nov. 16, 2016
• Pamphlet: “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come.” By Leslie Feinberg
• From Leslie Feinberg’s Lavender & Red series, #71 and #92
  “Many histories converged to fight back at Stonewall, 1969”
  “Gay Cuba: 1965 UMAP brigades: What they were, what they were not”

In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin defines imperialism as “the monopoly stage of capitalism” and describes the resulting five basic stages in the development of Imperialism. This class contains a lesson plan, a power point slideshow presenting the main points of Lenin’s argument, and a reading from WWP co-founder Vince Copeland on Expanding Empire.

• Lesson Plan: Imperialism
• Powerpoint (PDF format): Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

• Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin
• Expanding Empire: The global war drive of big business and the forces that will stop it, by Vince Copeland

African revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah wrote that “the neo-colonialism of today represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage.” Using points by revolutionaries, including Nkrumah and Walter Rodney, the power point slideshow for this class presents concepts of development vs. underdevelopment, the difference between colonialism and neo-colonialism and the effects of colonialism on African-American people within the U.S. In addition to the slideshow, this class contains a lesson plan to encourage discussion that links this issue to ongoing developments within the U.S. and internationally.

• Lesson Plan: Neocolonialism in Africa
• Powerpoint (PDF format): Neocolonialism in Africa

• Walter Rodney, How Europe Under Developed Africa (1972)
• Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa (1970)
• Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965)
• Monica Moorehead, “Reparations and Black Liberation” and “Africa’s debt crisis calls for reparations” from Marxism, Reparations and the Black Freedom Struggle (2007)

Fascism is an extreme right-wing form of capitalist rule. Fascist deologies still exist in different forms in most capitalist countries and in former colonies that are ruled by puppet regimes. In the U.S., fascism is closely linked to the ideology of white supremacy and shows itself in many institutions and cultural tendencies. Fascism is a last resort of the ruling class, which uses it to try to smash all working-class organizations. (workers.org/fascism/) This class includes a lesson plan and powerpoint slideshow on how communists have fought and are still fighting against fascism!

• Lesson Plan: Fascism
• Powerpoint (PDF format): Fascism: What It Is & How to Fight It

Introduction to this class:

• What does Lenin mean by the “State?”
• Where does the State come from?
• Why is it important we understand that the State serves
  the interests of one class over the others?
• What is the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or workers’ state?

Downloads:

• Lesson Plan: State and Revolution
• Talking Outline: State and Revolution

Under the principle that “being determines consciousness,” this two-part class covers Engels’ fundamental principle of dialectics, the difference between dialectical vs. metaphysical thinking, differences between materialism and idealism, and Marx’s thinking on relation between above points and human economic and social development. Included are two lesson plans, a “Talk Outline on Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Parts 1 & 2,” and an extensive reading list for further study.

• Lesson Plan: Dialectical and Historical Materialism, part 1
• Lesson Plan: Dialectical and Historical Materialism, part 2
• Handout: discussion prepared by Nate C

Human labor is a commodity — a thing of value. It is also a value that, when used, creates value. It is from the labor of the worker that the owner derives profit. If a worker is slated to work eight hours, a small percentage of that time is spent covering the cost of the worker’s wage. The rest of the time is unpaid labor — surplus labor — and it is from this that the owner gains extra or surplus value.

• Lesson Plan: Marxist Economics
• Powerpoint (PDF format): Why is it Important to Study Marxist Economics?

This class highlights the difference between democratic socialism focusing on parliamentary procedures and a revolutionary socialism that faces the need to deal with the power of the capitalist state; the control exerted by corporations and the ruling class on the state apparatus; bourgeois control over education, media, religion and culture; and working class divisions cultivated by the ruling class. The class lesson plan of readings from Workers World/ Mundo Obero newspaper clarifies the differences between democratic and revolutionary socialism.

• Lesson Plan: Democratic Socialism vs. Revolutionary Socialism

• Article: The ‘Socialist Manifesto’ and the rise of social democracy
• Article: The strength of women: Venezuelan commune members confront the blockade
• Article: Seeking truth about Venezuela’s food production
• Article: Venezuela today, part 2: People power resists U.S. threats
• Article: Venezuela today: consolidating people power to face U.S. threats

This two-part class concentrates on China’s role as a new global superpower that still continues to build on its socialist revolutionary roots, and also focuses on the 2019 Hong Kong protests and how these are linked to imperialist and capitalist global competition with China. The lesson plan includes extensive readings suggestions.

• Lesson Plans: China and Socialist Development

• Article: China builds new type of globalization
• Article OR Audio: Why the U.S. threatens China
• Article: Development vs. destruction: China and the U.S.
• Article OR Video: Follow the money behind Hong Kong protests
• Video: U.S. Threats Against China

This class is an orientation to the history and techniques of Deep Organizing as a communist approach to long-term political work and workers resistance. The class highlights the difference between business union organizing and communist organizing, summarizes specific Deep Organizing steps and describes one successful Deep Organizing campaign. The lesson plan includes detailed Workers World articles on historical and contemporary examples of Deep Organizing.

• Lesson Plan: Deep Organizing: An Introduction
• Document: Deep Organizing, Communist Organizing: An Introduction”
• (4-part series): Lessons of the victorious Harvard dining hall strike
  part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4