A New Year's message from the heart

Comrades,

I would like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a happy and triumphant new year.

Many, the usual types, are greeting 2025 in a mood of despondency and despair. A second Trump administration fills them fear with and anxiety. In response, they are falling back on the same old strategies and slogans that failed to defeat Trump in 2016 and failed to prevent his return in 2024. Others, not as usual, but perhaps becoming more and more common, have drawn the wrong conclusion from the ajusticiamiento of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The first have fallen into the rut of defeatism and “business as usual.” The second are tap dancing in the minefield of adventurism. The one suffers from a lack of innovation and flexibility; the other from an excess of momentary enthusiasm. Both errors can and will have catastrophic consequences for the Peoples’ Struggle in this country.

One often hears repeated Malcolm X’s famous maxim: “By any means necessary.” However, one rarely sees that quote in its entirety. We, in contradistinction, stand by Malcolm’s full statement: “By any means necessary, provided that it is intelligently conceived and designed to get results.”

As Marxist-Leninists, we are scientists; and, as scientists we take a dispassionate stance towards questions of political strategy. We strive to analyze a given political situation and apply the tools and tactics most appropriate to that political moment. The tools and tactics best suited to achieve the maximum results and get the job done.

We are not pacifists; but neither do we deny the importance of peaceful, non-violent forms of struggle and protest. We do not glorify or romanticize violence; but we do not reject the necessity for armed struggle in the proper time and place and under conditions that call for it.

This is not a game. The class struggle is a nasty, vicious business, and the stakes are often life and death. We recognize that fact and are not afraid to get our hands dirty. Our approach is rational, considered, and painstakingly meticulous. And that is why, unlike anarchists and "ultras" of all types, we tend to win.

2025 does indeed promise to be a year of uncertainty, toil, and peril. But that is nothing new for us. As communists we have suffered worse and we have prevailed. Guided with the invincible theory of Marxism-Leninism; tempered with the accumulated wisdom of our Party; and strengthened by our comrades and our leadership; we have the necessary tools to endure and triumph.

As 2025 unfolds, we must seize every opportunity to organize and advance the class struggle, and to give direction and leadership to a movement that is all too often rudderless and adrift. We must also seek to reach out to and organize those whom the mainstream Left either ignores or paternalistically assumes will merely follow their lead. It is our duty to organize all the marginalized, exploited and oppressed. It is our obligation to provide them with a realization of their latent power, and a strategy for victory.

Now is the time when we earn the right to call ourselves communists and revolutionaries.

Forward, comrades! The future is ours!

Camilo Lazo
National Chair
American Party of Labor