Liberation Communist Party

The Liberation Communist Party, commonly referred to as Liberation is a major political party in the United Republics. The party was established in 1955 as a result of the splintering of the once hegemonic Workers' Communist Party. The split, over irreconcilable stances taken on the invariant nature of Marxism and the practical political questions of austerity & rationing in the post Great Revolutionary War climate, and the escalation of the War for the Horn of Africa, resulted in the foundation of the councilist Liberation Party as well as the organic centralist Communist Labor Party. Since the split, Liberation has been one of the major parties of government in the UASR.

Factions
In the present day, the party's primary factional division is between the Militarized Internationalists, who seek a constant intensification of global class conflict until the establishment of a world workers' republic, and the Ereists, who hold that the decisive death blow against the bourgeois epoch has been achieved, and that capitalism is dying its natural death. The Ereists argue for the abolition of the last vestiges of capitalism and the expansion of human civilization outside of the Earth's biosphere.

Ideology and platform
The LCP follows three main tenets:, militarized internationalism, and “cultural revolution”, in all versions of its charter from 1960 onwards. Various other policies have been added, including, strong support for , the universal right to bear arms, and the formation of a world communist government, but those three central tenets have guided even those policies.

Militarized Internationalism is perhaps the best known of these tenets, but the tendency is itself often misunderstood. In the words of LCP stalwart William Buckley, “the notion of just invading various countries and imposing communism top-down is ludicrous. The idea behind [militarized internationalism] is more about the internationalist part. The idea of empowering peoples the world over to take up arms against their oppressors. To use our resources to help them to fight their own revolutions, not simply make communist colonies out of them.”

The LCP believes in “military intervention” in revolution, but has a lot of leeway in its execution, from direct invasion to simply providing resources to radical leftist groups in conflict with a bourgeois state. The ultimate goal is complete worldwide revolution, and the formation of a world commune. As put by Fred Hampton, “We must not stop at just one or two revolutionary states being formed from the ruins of bourgeois, imperialist states, but the entire capitalist system brought down by the will of the people! As long as the Evil Empire [referring to the Franco-British Union and its allies] continues to exist, the job of the revolutionary is never finished!”

“Cultural revolution” is not simply cultural libertarianism, as some foreign observers have described it. It’s not simply “no governmental intervention in cultural issues”. Rather, it seeks to form a new “international proletarian culture” that is led primarily by the working class, separate from official cultural institutions or large collectives. Culture should be rebuilt, destroying all remnants of bourgeois norms and attitudes, including the nuclear family and notions about what “natural rights” constitute, replaced by revolutionary ideals. Art should reflect the concerns and attitudes of the working class and a rejection of capitalist attitudes, and should advocate on behalf of socialism.

In practice, this had led to LCP criticism of CulSec funded projects that are more experimental and critical of the military or parts of the proletarian experiment and began the Hampton era policy of the armed forces supporting film productions involving the military in various capacities (leading to criticism that blockbuster films are in effect becoming ).

Both military internationalism and cultural revolution are an expression of a core belief of the LCP: that the transitory dictatorship of the proletariat state must, as a matter of form, centralize control of capital by the working class, distributing its products through a common economic plan, until such time as the last vestiges of bourgeois society fade away from society. In other words, there must be a strong transitionary proletarian state with a democratic centralist economy in order for communism as a system to reach its fullest potential. Even with the transition to lower-stage communism, the belief continues that all forms of the capitalist value-form be deescalated in any way, in any part of the world.

This belief has made the LCP most popular amongst the military, state security, heavy industry, more militant student and minority organizations, and especially immigrants from capitalist nations, who have become the biggest constituency and advocates (particularly Indians, Cubans, and Rhodesian communities)

Councilism, perhaps the most esoteric, but also most important tenet, is another expression of this. Derived from the “council communism” of KAPD and the localist tendencies of the AUSLID, councilism sees the local councils and soviets (federated and centralized) as the purest expression of working class democracy. Thus, empowering them, whether at home or abroad, would be the best way to help the proletariat form individual democracy.

Originally formed amongst radical student groups in the AUSLID, as the LCP began recruiting to that organization’s left wing, it began to abandon the “vanguard party” idea that had been the WCPA’s main objective through its existence and embrace decentralized soviets to bring forth the “eternal revolution” (as opposed to Labor, which continues to advocate the idea of a democratic centralist vanguard party-union as the main expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat.)

The LCP, along with allied think tanks like the Center for Workers’ Progress, have funded the creation of “Soviet towns” by radical groups, independent of the state, to help give a model for revolutionaries in the region.