Those words, like the four volumes on the Teamsters battles of the 1930s they introduce, are becoming familiar not only to our movement, but to broader numbers of working-class militants. In the course of resisting the employers' assault on conditions of life and work, class-conscious workers come to appreciate lessons from the strikes and organizing drives in the middle of the Great Depression that brought workers across the Midwest into action, with a sustained militancy the bosses couldn't believe.

Farrell speaks of confidence in the working class, gained in the course of extended battles. Not faith. Not logical deduction. But confidence, welded through the struggle of the human beings whose solidarity and combativity advance working people along our historic, zigzagging line of march toward the revolutionary conquest of power. But even if we've talked about these aspects of Farrell's dedication numerous times before, it's useful to think about it from some other angles tonight, as we celebrate Donald Peterson's fifty years as an unflinching communist and consistent party-builder.

In the age of "fame," of the nihilistic call to "do your own thing"—of the advertising-driven men and women of the millennium, the century, the decade, the hour, the minute, the nanosecond—Farrell's assertion at the opening of Teamster Rebellion might seem shocking, even scandalous. Farrell says the men and women, the rank and file, of General Drivers Local 574 lifted him, a recent Republican and disoriented young man, up from a coal yard in Minneapolis. They are the ones who made him the combat commander and revolutionary leader we've come to know. Not vice versa.

How many Farrell Dobbses are there among the toilers? We don't yet know. But we do know that those communists who had the opportunity to live through an earlier period of class battles and who led the Socialist Workers Party for many years—James P. Cannon, Vincent Raymond Dunne, Joseph Hansen, Farrell Dobbs himself, and others—insisted to us that there are many, many millions. What is unusual is the opportunity to apply the abilities of a revolutionary organizer. We are not dealing here with false modesty: those who care nothing about fame have no need for that flip side of bad conscience. Rather, the discovery that there are many revolutionary leaders among the masses is at the very heart of Marxism. It is the liberating recognition that who emerges as the leadership in the course of any mass struggle is accidental. The leaders are those who voice progress along the line of march, the historic direction, of an exploited class—generalizing the lessons from the concrete, ongoing struggles they are part of, the struggles of a propertyless fighting class.

And our teachers insisted on an even more important fact—that the potential of every working person is only infinitesimally realized under class society.

As Lenin so often affirmed, it is the numbers, the mass, of toilers involved in struggle that change the character and scope of working-class politics, making revolution possible. As class battles deepen, it is the growth of a fighting proletarian vanguard that brings to bear the untested capacities and latent creativity of the toiling majority who have no interest in the defense of private property or in the reactionary prejudices, rationalizations, and oppression that prop up the market system worldwide.

All young revolutionists, from any background, must learn this. None knows it before he or she comes in contact with the organized workers who embody it. Revolutionists build their lives around an understanding of these proletarian attitudes—so deeply counter to bourgeois prejudices and common sense. When such attitudes become so ingrained they are no longer something we even think about, they have become habits. They become simply how we act.

And even seasoned revolutionists, at different times in their lives, need an occasional refresher course in habit formation.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels—the founders of the modern communist movement, whom we often look back on in such awe—explained how as young revolutionists they first had to be stripped of class prejudice (also held by industrial workers themselves in bourgeois society) before they could be won to a working-class understanding, before they could recognize a working-class line of march. They had to see with their own eyes, and be involved with, enough workers organized in struggle to recognize that a new world outlook could only be charted from within the conscious, disciplined activity of the class to which they wedded their own present and future as individuals. All their accomplishments in proletarian strategy and communist thought depended on this precondition being realized.  
 

'Disciplined activity in common'

Don did not endure, as so many workers have been condemned to do under capitalism. He acted, selflessly, as part of a common vanguard effort to overthrow the dictatorship of capital with all its accompanying horrors, including the stultification of working people. That cumulative effort by many millions over time is what makes possible the proletarian revolution.

I am grateful to the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party for asking me to prepare this message to the meeting to celebrate Don's life. Don was one of the comrades I met forty years ago during my first trip north to the Twin Cities from a college town in Minnesota to find out about the SWP. I wanted to see if this party—regardless of its exact program—was an organization that, if you threw in your lot with it, would act to bring about in North America what was happening so gloriously at that time in Cuba. That wasn't some theory I had; it was just how I approached politics in those days.  
 

Consistent political commitment

I have no clear memory of what I did, what Don did, or what other individual comrades did—Helen Scheer, John Chelstrom, Joe Johnson, other young revolutionists in addition to myself—when we attended a meeting of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, or walked a picket line in front of Woolworth's in solidarity with the SNCC sit-ins, or participated in a Militant Labor Forum. But I know we were there, taking part, talking politics, selling our press, recruiting—and changing in the process. I know that consistent political commitment by Don and other comrades was responsible for transforming my life, and that of many like myself. It was responsible for giving me the confidence that I had a concrete and dependable answer to my question.

At the first meeting I ever took part in with Don—as an act of personal kindness, and, as I later figured out, simultaneously an act of critical evaluation—he offered me a cigar. He knew I'd developed the habit that no longer dare speak its name during my stay in Cuba in the summer of 1960. Like my father, Don smoked R.J. Dunn's—what my father called "an economical cigar." Over the next decades, after events Don and I had participated in together, he would often give me one. Once in a while I'd get two—not as a reward, as it turned out, but as a silent boost when Don thought I could have worked a little harder and done a little better job. To this day, I judge various efforts as a one-cigar or a two-cigar accomplishment—being grateful Don never considered it necessary to tender three in order to make his point.

Like most comrades I got to know in the party in Minneapolis, Don deflected conversations about himself. When we talked, it was about important events, struggles, political lessons we'd learned, the health and fortunes of comrades we both knew. Don identified with what we—not just the party, but the working-class vanguard worldwide in the broadest sense—were accomplishing, and what we had left to do. It went without saying Don would do his part, and was confident we would do ours.  
 

Confidence in working people

We are grateful that in 1948, in Duluth, Minnesota, a young man still in his twenties, interested in that year's election campaign, found a copy of the Militant on a bus. We appreciate his gumption in doing something, right off the bat, about the interest and sympathy the paper had evoked in him. We are proud that Ray Dunne and Grace Carlson replied to Don's inquiry; responding to a worker interested in the party always went right to the top of Ray's "to do" list.

When Don joined the party in the late 1940s, the post-World War II labor upsurge in the United States had already peaked. The cadres of our movement could not yet know that we had entered what would turn out to be a very long retreat of the labor movement. The working class would sustain the effects of U.S. imperialism's assault on Korea, the consolidation of the "national security state," and the impetus given to semifascist currents under the name of McCarthyism. The struggle for Black rights was still more than a decade away from the self-sustaining momentum that brought down Jim Crow segregation. But Don never saw this as a bad time to have joined the communist movement. Any time is the right time. And he was among those who stayed the course. Those who did were decisive to the party's transformation in the next upturn in the class struggle, which began to gain momentum in the early 1960s.

We are grateful to the Minnesota Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists for giving us the opportunity through this note to take part in your celebration of this lifetime of communist political work. The leadership of Don's party thanks you all for joining together this evening to salute his more than fifty years among us in the revolutionary workers movement. To salute Don's example of activity and dependability that never flagged.

In a deeper sense than we sometimes think about, when we honor a cadre such as Donald Peterson, we at the same time honor the best in ourselves. We honor the proletarian discipline, determination, and steadfastness that is a precondition for the liberation of humanity.  
 
 
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