BY JACK BARNES
Below we print excerpts from "The vote for Ross Perot and
Patrick Buchanan's `Culture War': What the 1992 elections
revealed," presented by Socialist Workers Party national
secretary Jack Barnes, four days after the 1992 presidential
elections. It is one of the chapters of Capitalism's World
Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. In this
section, Barnes points to "five facts that put the working
class today in a stronger position than ever before to point
a way forward for humanity out of the crises and decay of
capitalism." The facts he cites are: women in the labor
force, growth of immigrant worker populations, the vanguard
place of workers who are Black, the universalization of
proletarian leadership, and the weakening of Stalinism. The
book is copyright (c) 1999 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by
permission.
The second fact is the growing internationalization of the working class. It is not just that the industrial and urban working class is growing qualitatively larger and stronger in virtually every region of the world - Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, parts of Africa. That is true, and it creates prospects for a truly world communist workers movement in ways never before objectively attainable. In addition to that shift, however, the growing internationalization of the working class within the imperialist countries - as well as in a growing number of the most economically advanced semicolonial countries - is unprecedented.
More immigrants have come to the United States over the past decade than ever before in history, more even than during the decade prior to World War I. In fact, more immigrants came to the United States over the past ten years than to the rest of the countries of the imperialist world combined. And this is not because there has been little emigration to other countries; in fact, there has been a massive growth of immigrant populations throughout Western Europe in recent decades. Some two million immigrants are estimated to have come to North America or Europe in the last two years alone....
Like the employment of women, this immigration is being forced by economic necessity, by the laws of motion of capital itself. It is being forced by the dispossession of rural toilers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East. It is being accelerated by the worsening economic and social conditions of the majority of peasants and workers in these countries, by the "successes" of the "market miracle" in the semicolonial world.
The Patrick Buchanans can talk all they want about building trenches and walls along the border with Mexico. They can talk all they want about massive roundups and deportations, and even about firing on unarmed workers trying to cross into the United States. Other Republican and Democratic politicians can make their slightly more genteel- sounding proposals. But nothing will stop the swelling immigration into the United States and other imperialist countries. In fact, the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the mouths of these politicians is not even primarily intended to stop the immigration. The central aim is to keep the level of fear and intimidation high enough so that the level of wages and working conditions can be kept low.
How do class-struggle-minded workers answer the trade union bureaucrats' demagogic cry that NAFTA will result in losing "American jobs" to Mexico? There is only one answer: There is no such thing as an "American job" or a "Mexican job," only workers' jobs. Workers in the United States have to get together with workers in Mexico and with workers in other countries and organize ourselves to defend our interests as a class, as part of the vast toiling majority of humanity. We must not support policies that strengthen our common class enemy. If workers give any other answer, the bureaucrats and the liberals and the reactionaries will win the argument. If workers give any national answer, our exploiters will only strengthen their power over all those who work for a living.
Class-conscious workers oppose NAFTA, as we oppose all economic and military pacts entered into by the imperialist government at home with other capitalist regimes. But we do so from an internationalist standpoint, rejecting any notion of common interests with the employing class in bolstering their competitiveness against their rivals or helping them reinforce the pariah status and superexploitation of immigrant workers. The only "we" we recognize is that of working people and our allies in the United States, Canada, and Mexico - and the rest of the Americas and the world. Not "we" Americans, "we" English speakers, "we" the white race, or anything else that chains us to the class that grows wealthy off the exploitation of our labor and that of our toiling brothers and sisters the world over.
The capitalist rulers in Europe cannot turn back the tide of immigration either. The German government can put people in boxcars and send them back to Romania. (The Militant should print the photos of those trains!) But that is not going to reverse the growing numbers of immigrants in Germany - the workers from Turkey, from Yugoslavia, from elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe, and from other corners of the world. The German rulers have not even begun the battle to defeat the working class, west and east, and the immigrants are a growing part of that class who bring new experiences and give new power to struggles by workers throughout Germany.
The objective possibilities today to bring the weight of an international class to bear on unfolding fights are greater than at any other time in history, and nothing will reverse this trend.
Vanguard role of workers who are Black
The third great change is the political weight and
vanguard place of the oppressed Black nationality in the
United States. This factor, one the communist movement has
taken into account since our origins, has taken on
qualitatively greater significance with the post-World War II
urbanization and proletarianization of the Black population.
The greatest blow to the working class and working farmers in U.S. history was the defeat of Radical Reconstruction a little more than a decade following the U.S. Civil War. The defeat of Reconstruction by 1877 registered the crushing of efforts to forge a fighting land and labor alliance in this country, coming out of the victory of the second American revolution - the defeat of the slavocracy by the Union armies. That end of Reconstruction blocked prospects for toilers of all shades of skin color joining together to advance their common class interests against the rising industrial capitalist class. It set back the convergence in economic growth and social structure of the North and South. Blacks in the United States, overwhelmingly in the rural South at that time, emerged from this defeat as an oppressed nationality. Over the next decade, near-peonage conditions were reestablished in substantial parts of the territory of the former slavocracy, enforced by organized lynch-mob terror.
In the 1930s the majority of the Black nationality still lived and worked on the land, almost all in the South. The social and political weight of this still largely rural Black population was such, however, that the SWP already recognized at that time that workers who are Black would have disproportionate weight in the vanguard of the proletarian revolution in the United States. The Socialist Workers Party was helped in reaching this strategic conclusion by leadership discussions with Leon Trotsky. Trotsky drew on his experience as a leader of the Bolsheviks and Communist International in Lenin's time to help us understand the dynamics of struggles by toilers from oppressed nationalities in the imperialist epoch, to help us understand the revolutionary possibilities that grow as these nationalities become more and more proletarian in composition.1
Prior to World War II, the growing numbers of workers who were Black played an important role in tenant farmer and other rural struggles, as well as in the fighting vanguard of the battles that built the industrial unions, the CIO movement. The urbanization, proletarianization, and migration northward and westward of the Black population increased as the U.S. government prepared to enter the imperialist slaughter, and then took on historic dimensions as the United States became the great industrial powerhouse that defeated Germany and Japan. The battles against racist discrimination during the war and its aftermath - struggles that picked up again, after a pause, in the mid-1950s - were fueled by these sweeping economic and social changes. They put the race question more than ever at the center of working-class politics in the United States and, by example, lent it added weight throughout the world. The post-World War II rise of the colonial revolution gave a powerful impulse to the Black struggle in the United States, just as the struggles and victories of the U.S. civil rights movement reverberated throughout the colonial world.
The struggles in the 1950s and 1960s that brought down Jim Crow segregation opened the road to forging working-class unity against the capitalist rulers. They laid the foundations for the emergence of Malcolm X, an outstanding leader not only of the oppressed Black nationality but also of revolutionary-minded working people and youth in the United States, whatever their skin color or national origins. Armed with the historical experience and political confidence conquered by those mass civil rights fights and their results, workers who are Black will comprise a much larger component of any fighting political vanguard of the working class than during the last labor radicalization in the United States.
1 See Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self- Determination (New York: Pathfinder, 1967, 1978).