One of the highlights of the weekend activities that Barnes refers several times in these summary remarks was a panel and discussion, held the previous evening, called "Bringing Alive `The Changing Face of U.S. Politics.'" The panel featured six Young Socialists leaders engaged in a wide range of revolutionary work, from high schools and college campuses to factories, farms, and the printshop producing Pathfinder books and pamphlets, the Militant newspaper, and other revolutionary materials. They were joined on the panel and in the discussion by a number of leaders of strikes, lockout conflicts, and farm struggles around the country who talked about the stakes in the battles they were in the midst of, and about the importance of the Young Socialists gathering. These included Gary Grant and Eddie Slaughter, president and vice president, respectively, of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association; David Yard, a member of United Mine Workers of America Local 1969, on strike at that time against Freeman United Coal in Illinois; and Dean Cook, a member of Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Local 4-227, in Pasadena, Texas, fighting a three-year lockout battle against Crown Central Petroleum.
The talk is the opening chapter of a new book to be published by Pathfinder at the end of February, Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Jack Barnes. The talk is copyright (c) Pathfinder Press 1999 and is reprinted by permission.
We have just heard the report by Samantha Kern on behalf of the newly elected National Committee of the Young Socialists, outlining the decisions of their convention that concluded less than an hour ago. Samantha introduced us to the members of the YS National Committee seated here on the platform.
The committee of the Socialist Workers Party that will work the most closely with this new National Committee of the Young Socialists in the coming months is the Trade Union Committee. This is a field-based leadership committee; its members work and live in cities across the United States. For the first time since the mid-1980s, moreover, the development of the trade union work of the party has reached the point where the composition of the Trade Union Committee has been able to coincide substantially with the election and reelection of the organizers of the steering committees of every one of our national industrial trade union fractions.
So, let me introduce to you the members of the Trade Union Committee who are also seated here on the platform, and tell you who they are, what they are doing, and where they are going.
First, is Tom Alter, from Des Moines, member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Tom is on his way into the printshop. Nan Bailey, from Seattle, in the International Association of Machinists. Both Nan and Tom are organizers of the steering committees of their respective national fractions. Joel Britton, from Chicago, is the organizer of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union national fraction steering committee. Doug Jenness from the Twin Cities, who's a member of the United Steelworkers. Samantha Kern, from San Francisco, member of the UFCW and YS National Committee. Tom Leonard, a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers fraction in Houston. Sam Manuel from Washington, D.C., organizer of the steering committee of the United Transportation Union fraction. Greg McCartan from Boston, organizer of the national fraction steering committee of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). Cecelia Moriarity, the organizer of the Coal Committee of the party, had to leave an hour and half ago to get back to Pittsburgh for work. Norton Sandler, San Francisco, member of the International Association of Machinists. Amy Euston, from Des Moines, who is currently organizer of the United Auto Workers fraction steering committee but has a start date in a UFCW-organized plant. She is also a member of the Young Socialists. And Gregory Weston from the Twin Cities, organizer of the USWA national fraction steering committee.
Sam Manuel, Doug Jenness, and Tom Alter also compose the Farm Committee of the party, which has largely grown out of the work of the Trade Union Committee.
This trade union work leadership body, which includes the organizers of the steering committees of each of our national fractions, is starting to lead what we have called the third campaign for the turn.(1) These are the comrades who will work most closely with the Young Socialists National Committee on the road to the April 1-4, 1999, convention of the Socialist Workers Party and conference of our broader movement, to be held in San Francisco. Above all, their job on the way to San Francisco will be to recruit to the party every member of the Young Socialists who is not in the SWP. Together they will organize their members to set the example on bringing fellow workers with them to the convention.
Many people in this room were in Pittsburgh for an Active Workers Conference hosted by the SWP and Young Socialists in July of this year. At that conference, we referred to a sea change in politics that was occurring. We said we would probably never use that term again, so it wouldn't become a special term of art employed by the party and no one else. But I've just used it again, because I've been seeking a word to capture what has been described here the last three days and have found nothing better. If we listen to ourselves, listen to each other, think about what has come together here at this conference and the obligations it imposes on us, we will recognize that sea change, or at least the most important aspect of it: that a shift in mass psychology is taking place in the working class in the United States of America.
The same is probably happening in other imperialist countries. I know comrades in our movement internationally think this is true. But in this summary I'll stick to our experience here.(2)
Earlier in the conference, we talked about many aspects of the working-class retreat that-to our surprise, at the time-we faced in the early years of this decade.(3) This was not what we had expected would happen, as the opening article in New International no. 11, "Ours is the Epoch of World Revolution," explains. We thought the union battles at Eastern Airlines and Pittston Coal in 1989-90 were more the coming pattern. But that is not the way it turned out. We faced a pause and then a renewed retreat. Battered by the way imperialism's brutal assault on Iraq ended, without a fight, and lulled by the extension of the Reagan-Bush economic expansion, our class went into retreat for more than half a decade.
In a period of retreat like that, defeats weigh more heavily. Most workers' minds adjust-if only slightly-toward the increased probability of defeat. Each positive development is read as incidental-important, but incidental, not symptomatic of something beginning to change. Each struggle is seen as an effort, sometimes even a glorious effort, but not necessarily a break from a pattern of retreat. Positive news for the enemy class is anticipated as the most likely outcome; negative news for our class is foreseen as the unfortunate but anticipated fact.
Struggles themselves are surrounded by a certain attitude-not an attitude of "can't win," but more a tendency to become somewhat isolated from each other, and to accept such isolation. You face the "fact" that after the struggle you are involved in winds down-and over that eight-year period, struggles did wind down-it may be a long time before you're involved in another one.
Organized communists don't see it quite the same way because of the breadth, scope, and variety of activity and practical work they're engaged in. But we, too, are affected by this. Above all, we're part of our class, of its fighting vanguard, and we share all these experiences and their effects.
Rise in resistance since early 1997
The sea change I've spoken of had begun by the opening of
last year-early 1997, at the latest. That's when it became
clear that no matter what the legacy-in an industry, in a
union, in a region, among any segment of working people-no
matter how limited the results of previous struggles, what
happens now in any struggle has less and less connection to
earlier defeats. Using your peripheral vision to find the
fighters in the working class and among its allies becomes
more and more valuable. They are often there. It's like
becoming a good point guard. Develop your peripheral vision.
Teammates are there!
Farmers involved in struggles an ocean apart will reach out to each other like brothers and sisters. Militant farmers who have been part of this conference will travel to England to meet farmers who will have never in their lives met anyone from North Carolina or Georgia. Farmers in England are now going into the worst agricultural crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. These vanguard fighters will have a new and unanticipated identification with each other.
I was grateful to David Yard for reminding us when he spoke on the panel last evening of Donnie Thornsbury and the three other UMWA brothers who were framed-up in 1987 for their intransigent union-building activity in the strike against A.T. Massey Coal, and who are now sitting in the federal pen, serving long terms. Not only framed up by the government, but thrown to the dogs by the officialdom.(4) It made me think about the history of our party, of Kelly Postal, as well as the 1939 Sioux City frame-up of Teamster militants that Farrell Dobbs describes in Teamster Politics and Teamster Bureaucracy. Of the SWP Smith Act defendants who went to the federal pen in 1941 for their opposition to U.S. imperialism's war policies.(5) You didn't know who was moving faster to get them there-the Teamster officialdom and their like-minded brethren, or the state.
David walked us through those not-so-long-ago battles by brothers and sisters in the mines who fought in a different period and couldn't find a way to win. He reminded us of what we owe to the blood that has been shed.
He talked about many other things as well, and after he sat down something interesting occurred. We began discussing how we were not going to allow a simple line of continuity to be drawn to that earlier defeat. The outcome of the Freeman strike-and the readiness of the active core of miners' leaders to move on to other battles-will be decided in struggle.(6) A boilermaker from Alabama took the floor and talked about his memories as a kid and what it had meant when striking miners marched through his hometown. He wants to see that again. Farmers fighting for their land in Georgia and North Carolina started talking about coming to Central Illinois to walk the picket lines together with the miners.
We were putting something together that reaches beyond what was there before. The lines of continuity of any given struggle do not lie primarily in the industry we work in, nor our union, nor the region we live in-although those are realities that shape our struggles. Our continuity is found along the lines of evolution of the working class as a whole, especially the section of it that wants to fight. And a change has begun. Its beginnings are well behind us.
From the origins of the modern communist workers movement 150 years ago, we have measured the success of any struggle by working people by whether or not we emerge more united, more confident of our collective strength, and more powerfully organized to advance the interests of our class and its toiling allies. "Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time," wrote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto, the founding program of our movement. "The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place workers of different localities in contact with one another."(7)
There is a hunger among working people that is greater than in any other section of society, a political hunger among workers and farmers-the fighting coalition that will make up the government that will carry humanity into a new world. It's a hunger for solidarity, for struggle; it's a hunger to learn from each other. A refusal to accept that the pattern of struggles today is decided by past defeats. It's like watching someone weaving something. We can't yet tell what it's going to be. We don't know the details of the pattern; it's too early. We don't know what the ups and downs will be. We can't foresee the specific defeats and victories.
But we know a new pattern is being woven as we come out of the retreat, out of the rulers' final blow-off boom, out of "globalization"-their grandiloquent term for their imperial arrogance and brutal assaults on human dignity the world over. Resisting indignity and isolation, the emerging pattern is taking shape. The vanguard of working people whose actions will define it is increased by every single fighter who reaches out to others and offers to fight.
This is different from what we lived through for more than half a decade. The scope, the intensity, the stick-to-it- iveness, the reach-all this is different.
We've started seeing not only that there are clumps of workers and farmers who are resisting, who are saying "No!" to the demands for sacrifice by the employing class and its government. The beginning of wisdom for us is not just recognizing this, as we did at the 1997 party convention. The key was when we began recognizing that while we've gotten to know these groups of workers and farmers in the present, they would not have this kind of present if they didn't also have a political and collective past. It's embarrassing for Marxists to have to remind ourselves of that, isn't it?
And if they have this present, and they have a political and collective past, then they have also established political and leadership relations with others and have a political future. They have a present and a future based on relations among people who have stayed the course together. They've worked with other people, and they assume we've done the same. They respect that.
It takes some time to get to know each other, to learn to work together. You can take two very fine units of an army, bring them together, and they'll respond differently to a tactical field situation. They'll do things slightly differently, and one's not necessarily right and the other wrong. It can be two of the several tactics that can advance the fight.
This is true of many of the workers leading the fight against the Crown lockout.(8) It's true of many of the miners leading the strike against Freeman United in Central Illinois. It makes us think more deeply about the Blue Shirts at Caterpillar in Peoria, who've continued to meet and organize ongoing resistance in the wake of the 1992 and 1994-95 strikes.(9) It makes us think about other experiences we've had, and to realize that this is a phenomenon involving not just hundreds buts thousands of workers and farmers in the United States today, and many more around the world.
These individuals and clumps of workers are the cells of a class-struggle cadre that will grow into the millions as battles accelerate.
Working class ahead of students
We have discussed the degree to which the working class
today is more radical than the student population-more
radical from a class standpoint. This may not be unusual in
the broad sweep of modern history, but compared to the last
several decades in the United States, this is different.
It's not a denigration of students. Changes are also taking place among them. We've had substantial discussion of this, and we are taking advantage of it. But the heart of those changes depend above all on the linkage to struggles of working people in this country. It is through that link that protest activities of youth cease being simply moral witness, whether individual or collective-cease being temporary acts of rebellion that will ultimately be absorbed, transformed, and perverted by the owners of capital and wielders of power.
For a number of years starting in the late 1950s, we lived through a period during which students moved out ahead of the working class radicalization as a whole-although even this period is often presented inaccurately. Even then a vanguard section of the working population-a section predominantly Black-was ahead of the students, and that was decisive. Most histories of the Vietnam War period and the anti-Vietnam War movement are inaccurate about this. They just have a war going on. They don't include the uprising that gained momentum over a period of years, the revolutionary movement being led by the political vanguard of the Black population of the United States. What happened in those years was more complex than is usually portrayed, and the interconnections deeper.
But what is happening today is new. That's a fact. The Socialist Workers Party right now is recruiting individual young workers who we meet accidentally, who we bump into in the course of struggles, as we sell papers in neighborhoods and at plant gates, someone's boyfriend or girlfriend, who knows, who cares? We bump into them and we recruit them to a workers party. And we could be recruiting more.
This is a change. I was reminded of how much a change by the remarks of Robin Maisel, the comrade in the wheelchair who spoke during the discussion on the second day of the conference. Robin was deeply involved in the opposition campaign in the United Steelworkers union in 1975-77-the campaign for democracy, to elect Ed Sadlowski president of the USWA. I remember how powerful and attractive that campaign became, and what it did. I remember its connection with a layer of savvy union miners who had been through the struggles of the Black Lung Association in West Virginia and of the Miners for Democracy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It sometimes seemed as if half the cadres of the Sadlowski campaign were miners on leave, especially throughout the South. But the Steelworkers Fight Back campaign was primarily linked to a long history of struggle in the Steelworkers union itself. That struggle rose, it reached out, it didn't find a large echo, and it fell. Many people in this room were part of that experience, were changed by it, changed for the better.(10)
What is different now is that while the outcome of no single battle is guaranteed, neither is any battle ordained to lose. This places great weight on being serious about politics, serious about tactics. It places great weight on competence. When the greatest working-class leaders I have known and worked with-Ray Dunne(11) and Farrell Dobbs-referred to a fellow worker as competent, that was the highest accolade they could give. It meant those workers didn't get fighters they were responsible for unnecessarily injured or killed. It meant they maximized the gains possible out of every situation, and did so in such a way that those with the greatest imagination accomplished a little bit of the impossible. It meant they were premature Cubans. Or perhaps, old Bolsheviks. The same thing.
This change is the most important thing for us to absorb. What we've seen come together at this conference is the only possible trajectory for the Socialist Workers Party. It is the road we will march along from here to the San Francisco convention, and on to an even larger Active Workers conference in Ohio late in the summer.
Is there anything in the working-class movement to reach for other than those layers-individuals, but also now layers-who want to fight? To those who, in the process of fighting, desire to meet each other, go through new experiences together and, as Malcolm said, want to broaden their scope, to read, to think. They want to discuss with people who are straight with them, who they are fighting alongside, in order to figure out answers to the broader questions posed by a social system that on a world scale seems more and more out of control, in crisis, gruesome to behold.
There is nothing idiosyncratic about what came together here at this conference. The Socialist Workers Party is a small vanguard formation. The United States is nowhere close to being on the verge of a revolutionary upheaval. The acts of the Socialist Workers Party do not carry social weight in the normal sense of the word. We don't have to take back any of the cold, objective observations along these lines that we have made. They are correct, revolutionary, materialist statements. But being wrong on this score is not our greatest danger.
The greatest danger we've faced for a while now is not recognizing the degree to which every fighting worker and workers grouping that uses its strength, imagination, commitment, integrity, and capacity-that acts in a timely fashion, with all the weight it has-can work in a way that brings together on a national and international scale these experiences of working people. It can affect events. It can attract other sections of the population to the liberating spirit of these battles-beginning with the youth, beginning with those who don't have a million conservatizing worries and commitments draped on them from the past.
There are many things written about youth and their attitudes, their values, and some of them are true. What is forgotten by analysts who are outside the working-class movement, however, is the attraction of youth to the alternative offered by the working class, the kind of lifelong political trajectory that is open to each individual young person, regardless of class background. Lenin, who was no romantic on these questions, insisted that youth do not have a class character per se, that their class character is derived from their connections to the political formations in the country that reflect the interests of the basic social classes. He insisted that youth go through a period in their lives when they are in fact part of no class. They are in the process politically of becoming part of a class, in the midst of making that decision in thought and in action.(12)
In this world of accelerating capitalist disorder, where all of us gradually absorb into muscle and bone the meaning of class polarization, the propertied rulers will offer us more executions, more imperialist military assaults, more storm troopers (like private security gangs), more brutality, more social dislocation, more attempts to deny rights to working people who become determined to fight back. That's what they offer with all the degradations their system breeds. Those who are fighting against that reality offer an opposite road to young people, the possibility to join with others who have the social power to realize a different future.
Above all, the task of the Socialist Workers Party in collaborating with the Young Socialists is to organize to go with them to the working people of this country who are engaged in struggle, simultaneously reading and discussing the history and ideas that will help them understand the social realities they are repelled by and are determined to find a way to change.
I hope every Young Socialists chapter and individual YS member who reads and studies the 1990 Socialist Workers Party resolution "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" does it together with an SWP unit.(13) Likewise, every SWP branch should find Young Socialists, current and future, to collaborate with in organizing those classes. Above all, I urge both the party and the youth to discuss this resolution and other basic communist literature with workers and farmers involved in politics, trade union struggles, and other forms of organizing.
Workers who want to fight effectively know they'll never win if they have to reinvent the wheel every day. They resist giving up conquered ground. They want to learn from the lessons of past battles. They know previous sacrifices cannot be allowed to have been in vain. Given the changes in politics today, the concrete working-class traditions captured in the books and pamphlets produced and circulated by the communist movement becomes more and more important. These tools are literally irreplaceable; they are weapons of a fighting class, not just its leading party. Many before us bled-and, yes, died-in the fights out of which these lessons were learned. That's why the stakes are so high in keeping in print the entire arsenal of books and pamphlets published and distributed by Pathfinder-from works coming out of more contemporary experience, such as The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, the issues of New International magazine, and a broad range of pamphlets on current struggles and political topics; to classics of the communist movement by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, James P. Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, and others.(14)
Along this course, movements of social protest of which young people are a part will begin to be marked by a different character, because the activism of communist-minded youth brings a new element into them. Young Socialists are often the bearers of the linkage to the working-class movement within these protest movements. And they will be an obstacle to those who want to lead such movements on a different class trajectory.
We are not the only ones who think youth are important. Great energy-more bounce to the ounce-is attractive to all classes and all layers, to be used for their own purposes. We should never have the illusion others aren't after this energy too. Every intelligent employer is always looking for ways to absorb this energy. The trade union bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, every political current within the working- class movement, every rightist current outside the working- class movement-all are seeking young, live forces.
Trade unions and the state
One of the great truths of our epoch will now become
increasingly evident. There will be more and more state
interference in the trade unions, because the employers and
bureaucracy alone can't always handle well-organized,
intelligent militants. The same will be true for
organizations of militant farmers, debt slaves.
The state-the government, cops, courts, National Guard, bourgeois parties, including, yes, the Democratic Party-all will come to be seen as the enemies they are, the bitter, brutal enemies of labor organizing to defend itself. Fighting along these lines leads vanguard layers of workers toward a program, a pattern of activity taking broader positions defending the interests of those who are fighting together with them. This leads them to further conflicts, and the necessity to fight to create democratic formations in the unions in order to expand solidarity. Political independence from the state and employers becomes a precondition to exercising simple solidarity.
We must keep our eyes on the ranks of labor while the institutions around us shatter. This is important. Under conditions of class polarization, Bonapartism, and economic catastrophe, the institutions within the working-class movement-like other popular institutions that have evolved in ways allowing them to function under "normal" conditions-will not be stable, They will tend to shatter.
As this happens the employers will be surprised. The labor bureaucracy will be surprised. But we must not be surprised. We must not depend on any of these institutions in their current form. These organizations as they exist today are not what they will inevitably become. Functioning as if this is not the class truth can only lead working people to unnecessary and sometimes devastating defeats.
We often say our goal is to transform the unions into revolutionary instruments of class struggle, and we excoriate anyone who would walk away from this effort within the unions as they currently exist, no matter how difficult the obstacles. I don't believe there's a single voice of dissent about that in this room. But we should understand. When we say existing union structures will shatter, this is not simply a prediction. It is more and more a statement of fact today, and it indicates a course of struggle, a course of action, a line of march. We don't start with the unions as they exist, but with those who are or should be the members of these unions. The ranks, that's who our eyes are on.
It's becoming less uncommon to have more than one union in places where previously this was not true. There will be more AMFAs.(15) At the same time, while the officialdom does nothing to organize the growing numbers of nonunion workers in industrial workplaces, they are carrying out mergers with unions in unrelated sectors of the workforce, thereby weakening the industrial character of the union movement. Such shifts will not be a true register of what is happening in the labor movement, however. The important register will be what is happening within the ranks of labor as currents organize and combat experience grows.
The pace of politics is increasing, and we can't make the mistake of thinking that all working people are waiting for something to happen to them before they react. As the economic crisis becomes devastating in Indonesia, in Korea; as it becomes devastating in Russia, and throughout Africa; as crisis begins to rear its head in Latin America once more, workers in this country read and think about it. They begin to see the future coming toward them. The former attitude was: "Devastation elsewhere is horrible, but it won't happen here." That is shifting. Now workers can imagine devastation striking home. Some of them anticipate it and act on that anticipation. And that is part of the sea change we are discussing.
Yesterday we discussed the surprise election of the Bonapartist candidate Jesse Ventura to the governor's mansion in Minnesota. I made the point that I don't have a scientific way of weighing all the variables that affected how people voted, electing Ventura by a substantial majority and catching everyone off guard-including the SWP unit in that state. But I do know one thing. It was not economic and social conditions in Minnesota itself that were decisive in that election. Different classes and sections of classes there recognize the evolution of conditions around the world, and they anticipate what the future holds in store, including in Minnesota. That anticipation is what was decisive to the votes cast by a number of them.(16)
Bourgeois confidence begins to shatter
If we are right about all this, another shift is occurring.
The confidence of the bourgeoisie is starting to get shakier.
Belief in the eternity of ever-inflating paper assets, of the
great stock and bond financial bubbles, is crumbling. I don't
know how fast the changes will come. But I do know the key to
the world capitalist economy is in this country right here.
The United States of America, led by the most rapacious
ruling class in history, was supposed to be able to police
the world, to dominate the world, to be the only strategic
pole in the world. It was supposed to purchase the goods of
the world if necessary, to take over the banks and factories
of the world when possible, to straighten out other
countries, including other imperialist powers. You can say
that no one ever really believed it was going to be like
that, but I don't think that's decisive. The U.S. rulers did
come to act as if they believed it.
When things happened that seemed to cut across their world dominance, the U.S. ruling class read them as contradictions that could be dealt with by changing presidents, or Congresses, or adjusting policies. This was their attitude, their tactical stance. It reflected their confidence. This flexibility gave solidity to their two-party system, to their social contract, to their more and more bipartisan domestic policy. That's changing. And as the confidence and homogeneity start to disintegrate, we will see the beginning of the breakup of the two-party system. That bipartisan setup is not the same thing as the domination by the Democrats and Republicans within bourgeois politics. But the two-party system as we have known it for decades is now showing signs of its future decomposition. That is one of the benchmarks that Ventura's victory registers.
A comrade in Minneapolis just E-mailed me an article about a meeting two days ago of the Minnesota state AFL-CIO Executive Council that governor-elect Ventura was asked to address. They had to invite him, of course. The reporter says Ventura "gave the state's top union officials a public tongue- lashing." He mainly told them how during the campaign he had stood up to "union goons" who tried to stop him from crossing a picket line to enter a meeting. "I walked up to the biggest one. I looked him right in the eye, and I said very quietly, `I strongly suggest you get out of the way.' He did."
Ventura spoke to these bureaucrats in a manner they are unaccustomed to hearing from a newly elected governor of any party. He addressed them with an in-your-face aggressiveness that they deferred to-and that, most importantly, posed a danger to the entire labor movement. He told the AFL-CIO officials he disagreed with a minimum wage, that government shouldn't set "the wage floor for private businesses." He told them he disagrees with the concept of a "living wage." You take what you can bargain for.
And Ventura excoriated them for not endorsing him, for not having a "bigger vision" extending beyond the Democratic Party. He reminded them how often they had begun backing "losers." They then gave him polite applause. "We applaud you for your candor and your straight-ahead style," one of the labor bureaucrats told him. Another called Ventura "a straight shooter," ta-da-ta-da-ta-da.
When a reporter present interviewed the heads of the Minnesota AFL-CIO after Ventura spoke, their main comment was that Ventura is right about one thing: they are on a losing electoral course. "It's evident that the way we're going we haven't been very successful." We keep endorsing candidates that don't win. We're discussing pursuing another course, they told the press.
This is typical. This is how the class-collaborationism of the labor officials and other misleaders of the mass movement-like the worst misleaders of the Black movement who Gary Grant spoke of at some length during his presentation-pave the way for Bonapartism, which in turn greases the skids for fascism. It's a process that takes time. It doesn't happen without struggle and differentiation. But that is the process that occurs as a long wave of world capitalist expansion comes to an end, stability erodes, and the institutions of class rule begin to shatter.
In the years that led up to World War II, throughout Europe, we saw this same process in country after country. Disappointment and frustration with the policies of class- collaborationist misleaders opened the door to support among broad sections of the middle class and even some layers of workers for demagogic Bonapartist figures. Bonapartism then prepared the way for rising fascist movements to triumph without any serious struggle from a working class that had been demoralized and disoriented by its class- collaborationist and violently factional misleaders. We're starting to see similar things again. But they don't have to reach the same outcome.
Underestimating ourselves
When struggles break out today, we don't have any idea what
is possible until we've exhausted the expansion of
solidarity, exhausted the outreach, including the
international character of it. There are no limits to what
can be accomplished until the dialectic, the give-and-take,
between the struggle and its supporters worldwide has been
played out to the end.
The greatest problem we face is that working people who are fighting underestimate what we are capable of, what we are actually accomplishing. We don't recognize ourselves as the true bearers of culture and decency into the new millennium. This we will learn in struggle together.
One of the goals for the April 1999 San Francisco convention of the Socialist Workers Party and the conference that will surround it-a conference that will be the common work of the SWP and Young Socialists-must be to take the comrades who are here, our comrades-in-arms in sections of the mass movement who are not yet members of our party, and increase the number of them in attendance by five- or ten- fold. We hope more of the militants with whom they are standing shoulder to shoulder will attend, and we want to work with them to make that possible. We must bring fighters from other struggles we are involved in-Ireland, Puerto Rico, Cuba, police brutality, women's rights, immigrant battles, farmers' protests, other strikes.
That gathering must be a get-together, a regroupment of forces, an introduction of all these fighters to each other, so they can see that in combination their forces are much larger than they themselves know. We must unlock every struggle from any narrow picture of its own history-and by narrow, I mean any single chain of cause and effect-and put it in this world as it's becoming. That's the road to a whole that is truly more powerful than the sum of its parts. But that takes mutual confidence gained through common combat experience, political clarity, and organization.
Obstacles falling
Recently a unionist from Norway visited the locked-out
Crown workers in Houston. He came to offer the support of his
union, and I was struck by the weight, the importance that a
layer of the most conscious workers resisting the lockout
correctly gave to that act of solidarity.
We said almost a decade ago that the world in becoming would be marked at the new millennium by the absence of the major obstacles of the previous century, by the absence of obstacles to working people worldwide seeking to exchange their experiences in struggle. We said it would be impossible for state powers to clamp down on this, and it would be impossible for any political current to dictate who you could or who you could not work with.
That's what ended with the fall of the Stalinist monolith. It ended for all time, as we explain in detail in our 1990 resolution, "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War." We're now seeing the first baby steps of what that means in practice. We start with the Socialist Workers Party, with the Young Socialists, with our co-thinkers around the world, and with comrades-in-arms in any just fight that's going on. We start together. There is no limit to the speed and character of how this solidarity can be organized, this convergence, this fusion of the efforts of vanguard layers who are fighting. And nothing could possibly be more important in the transformation of the Socialist Workers Party, its activity and proletarian character, and the meaning of the third campaign for the turn.
The interaction of these forces is truly what will "bring to life The Changing Face of U.S. Politics," as the Young Socialists comrades so aptly named the panel they organized on the second night of this conference. This is what people in this room have worked so hard for. And now it is we who must move toward this combination of effort, of solidarity, opening ourselves up to those engaged in struggle right now.
I truly meant it when I said in my talk yesterday that we must have a perspective, over time, wherever possible of fusing our party with the small parties-in-formation that are coming out of struggles today. These small groups of vanguard fighters have a history together. They have tested themselves in combat, learned to know and trust each other, and have a great time working and fighting together. They anticipate future battles that incorporate the lessons of today, and their struggles are leading them to start talking about broader questions and to the conclusion that there's something rotten about capitalism. These are men and women who literally have already donned their shrouds and are going to continue fighting, regardless of the consequences. They're the new Cubans in this country. They are us. That's who we are, too. And we want to work together, to converge. We want to be in the same party.
We will transform our movement together. We will find ourselves in small towns as well as large cities. I was reminded by one of the veterans of the Steelworkers Local 8888 battles in Newport News present here this weekend that this is the twentieth anniversary of our movement establishing a branch in Newport News, Virginia, so we could more effectively fight shoulder to shoulder with others to advance that struggle.(17) I don't remember for sure if we still had the Richmond, Virginia, branch when we moved into Newport News and into the struggle of 8888. A number of heads are nodding yes, so I guess we did. That was fun, right? Having a branch of the Socialist Workers Party in Bobby Lee's Confederate capital, at the same time we were in Newport News.
There are people here who built an SWP branch in Price, Utah. In Peoria, Illinois. In Charleston and Morgantown, West Virginia. In Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. In Seaside, California. In Austin, Minnesota. In Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, Texas. In Omaha, Nebraska, and Albany, New York. And in other cities, small and large, too numerous to list. I'm not making a prediction. I'm not saying we should go someplace in particular. I'm saying we are open to that course, and we will follow it. We will have the courage of our convictions, and our movement's leadership will be defined by a sensitivity, a responsiveness, and a competence in moving in this direction. Political openings and responsibilities will determine organizational forms.
When we published the SWP resolution "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" in New International no. 11 a few months ago, we put it side by side with, we yoked it together with, the "Young Socialists Manifesto," a kindred proclamation issued this year by the other communist organization in this country that the Socialist Workers Party has a special relationship with. We noted that the "Young Socialists Manifesto" was the piece that brought the entire contents of the magazine into focus as a guide to revolutionary practice.
In the introductory article to that issue of New International, we also insisted on some other facts.(18) We began with the statement that "the opportunities for organizations of communist workers and of youth to act together along the lines presented in the pages that follow have been expanding at least since early 1997."
"Signs of renewed defensive action are all around us," we noted. "More numerous strike actions reflecting the tenacity and resistance of the embattled ranks; a noticeable growth in the confidence and determination of women in industry-" (At least in our discussions since then, we have gotten out numerous examples confirming the accuracy of this judgment about women in industry. I don't know why it is so difficult, but it has been like pulling teeth to get comrades to talk about what is happening and what they are doing. Then, once we start, all the experiences we're living through, the women's committees and other experiences, begin pouring out.) "-the increased weight of Black leadership in labor battles and struggles of working farmers; an upswing in the Puerto Rican independence movement; more actions in defense of immigrants' rights." And if the reports we've heard here are correct, we should add that we are seeing a revival of some aspects of the Chicano movement as well.
If these things are true, however, if this new resistance among toilers in this country is a fact, then something else is happening as well. The relationship between the ranks and the officialdom is being altered-potentially, and in reality.
This shift means that political work among women, for example, and talk about the place of the fight for women's rights should start getting a different kind of hearing than it did four, five, six years ago. Such work takes on greater weight.
Is it true that "the weight of Black leadership in labor battles and struggles of working farmers" has increased? We wrote that phrase several months ago. Is it true, or not? It's a factual question. We must make a judgment. Don't we see it, don't we hear it? Didn't we see a manifestation of it here? If the statement is true, it means new possibilities of changing leadership in the Black community itself-a bridge from fighters with a lifetime of struggle experience (not those who at one time fought and later lost their way) to a new generation of younger fighters emerging today. And it also means a new impetus to the struggle of working farmers throughout this country against land loss and debt slavery.
Don't these things mean we should be getting a slightly different response to a revolutionary newspaper when we sell the Militant in the Black community? To thinking farmers? Among the ranks of workers, both men and women?
Isn't the same thing true about the Puerto Rican independence struggle? Is that not our experience?
The shift in the working class, in the mass psychology of the toilers, in the emergence of vanguard layers within the class, means the beginning of a process, the opening of a fight for leadership in the labor movement itself.
This is the question of questions. This is what the San Francisco convention of the Socialist Workers Party should be about. This is why no matter what else, we will not postpone that convention.
Yesterday I said all you had to do was drive up Highway 1 from here in Los Angeles to get to the San Francisco convention. An old California hand told me I was wrong: you can't just drive up Highway 1 this time of the year; it's washed out. I say that's not talking like a Cuban. So Highway 1 is washed out? So what? You can still get to San Francisco that way.
We must study "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" and retake it ourselves. We must do the same with the companion book of resolutions and reports adopted in the early 1990s by the Socialist Workers Party that Pathfinder will be publishing under the title Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. These are tools, instruments to guide revolutionary practice, for every serious militant among working people.
As this process deepens, politics will not get simpler. Political work will get more complex, because bourgeois politics is marked by fewer and fewer long-run trends. Can you name any long-term trends in bourgeois politics today that are not more quickly short-circuited, that are not contradicted by counterprocesses?
We've talked about the shift to the left in bourgeois politics, for example. There's no question that's true. It is a preemptive shift out of weakness, in anticipation of the crisis that is deepening and the resistance that is accelerating. But we're talking about left and right within bourgeois politics. We should remember that every major war of the twentieth century has been brought to us by those riding under the banner of bourgeois liberalism. At the same time that the percentage of Democrats in Congress grows, the bipartisan policies they carry out, such as the assault on the social wage, increase. The shift to the left in bourgeois politics is not some long-term process. And it is yoked to growing class polarization, rising Bonapartism and increased adaptation to it, and increased dangers of war.
The conflicts and instability among European powers, as well as the conflicts between Washington and shifting alliances among the European powers, all will increase. Common commitment to the euro will not always be a stabilizing factor.
Political demagogy in the leadership of the union movement, in the leadership of mass movements, will grow. We're just beginning to see this process. It puts a premium on competent tactics, on vanguard fighters learning to prevent foolish, impatient things from occurring; to avoid letting anger and not strategy be our guide; to avoid unnecessary victimization; to develop habits of discipline; to hold yourself accountable for the consequences to others of every action.
When leaders of the Socialist Workers Party went to prison at the beginning of the Second World War, they were sent up because they wouldn't subordinate the unions to the war. They wouldn't subordinate the battle for colonial freedom to the war. They wouldn't subordinate the struggle for Black rights to the war. They wouldn't support the imperialist aims of the war.
At Sandstone Federal Penitentiary in Minnesota, other inmates were trying to figure out why we were there, how we fit into the social hierarchy of the cons. A couple of fellow prisoners who were doing time for bank robbery (which was relatively high on the social scale at Sandstone) asked them, What are you in for? The SWP leaders explained by saying, Well, you see, they nabbed you for trying to take a bank at a time. Sometimes you can do that quickly, with a small group, and get away with it. But sooner or later you always end up in here, or dead. Our goal is not one bank at a time; our goal is to take the whole damn thing. And that can only be done by putting together a large group-disciplined, fighting working people who have learned patience, determination, strategy; who have worked together and had to figure out how to get there.
That's what we have to offer. We're organizing to take the whole damn thing. Working people can do this.
The capitalist rulers offer us social disaster. They offer us depression. They offer us death from curable disease. They offer us war. They offer us fascism. They offer us an unending list of horrors. But we offer ourselves the ability to prevent those horrors from becoming the final reality, the confidence that we can transform that future.
We are at the beginning of something that will bring deeper changes. But because we are at the beginning, we can make the mistake of not seeing it soon enough, of not radically changing the pace, character, understanding, and-above all-the timeliness with which we act today.
That, more than anything else, is what I want to put before you. That's what we have to fight for all the way to the SWP convention and beyond: to recognize that the changes that have already occurred require us to organize ourselves as the turn party we are, require us to bring the Young Socialists toward working-class struggles. Require us to recognize, as the resolution in issue no. 11 of New International says, that communist workers are above all a fraction of the working class-a simple mathematical fraction-and a fraction of the fighting vanguard of that class. Require us to see the communist party as the leading organized fighters of the class, that generalizes the experiences of past struggles that can lead to victory-that "point[s] out and bring[s] to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality," as the Communist Manifesto explains, and that in comparison to the majority of the working class has "the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement."(19)
This is possible. This is what we concentrate all our energies on. This is what the third campaign for the turn aims to accomplish. This is why we say to groups of fighting workers who have reached a certain stage of discussion, confidence, and generalization of their experiences-join the Socialist Workers Party. We want to work with you, with an eye to fusing with your forces so we all have a stronger organization.
Along this course we offer every Young Socialists member a chance to be an absolutely unique and irreplaceable part of proletarian action. And we will attempt to recruit every one of you who is not in the Socialist Workers Party to the party, as we work to recruit every worker who is fighting to our party as well.
That is the road to San Francisco. It is up to you to decide whether the course is justified, the goal worthy of the effort. If so, we ask you to join us in making it happen.
FOOTNOTES
1. Following a July 1998 Active Workers Conference held in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the National Committee of the
Socialist Workers Party launched a campaign to increase the
number of party members working in meatpacking jobs organized
by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) and
garment and textile jobs organized by the Union of
Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), as
well as to rebuild a national union fraction of coal miners
organized in the United Mine Workers (UMWA). This is known in
the SWP as the "third campaign for the turn" to the
industrial unions. Altogether, the party has national
fractions of its members in seven industrial unions today.
Together with the two listed above, these are the
International Association of Machinists (IAM); Paper, Allied-
Industrial, Chemical and Energy union (PACE-formerly the Oil,
Chemical and Atomic Workers, prior to a 1999 merger with the
paperworkers union); United Auto Workers (UAW); United
Steelworkers (USWA); and the United Transportation Union
(UTU).
The party's turn to industry, initiated in 1978, aimed at getting the overwhelming majority of the membership and leadership of the party into industry and the industrial unions to carry out political and trade union work. This is the norm for communist organizations. But the political retreat of the working class and labor movement in the United States during most of the 1950s and 1960s had made it impossible for the SWP to maintain the organized structure of industrial union fractions it had built since the 1930s.
The second campaign for the turn, begun in 1985, focused on expanding the number of union fractions in each party branch, and thereby extending the geographic spread of the party's national industrial union fractions. The first and second campaigns for the turn are documented in the book, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes, as well as the booklet Background to "The Changing Face of U.S. Politics." Both are published and distributed by Pathfinder.
2. Participating in the conference were members and leadership delegations from communist organizations in Australia, Canada, France, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, including Young Socialists from these countries who were fraternal delegates at the YS convention. In addition, there were participants from several other countries.
3. On Saturday, December 5, Barnes had spoken to the party/youth conference on "Bonapartism and Polarization: Contradictions and Instability of the Leftward Shift in Bourgeois Politics." Earlier that same day, Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine New International, had spoken on "Cuba as Part of the World: Confronting Global Capitalism's Assault on the Toilers and Winning a New Generation to Communism." Waters, who had recently returned from a reporting trip to Cuba for the Militant newspaper, brought greetings to the Young Socialists convention from the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, an organization founded in 1993 that brings together fighters from several generations who participated in the revolutionary war against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship, battles to defend the revolution from imperialist-organized aggression, and internationalist missions in Africa, Latin America, Vietnam, the Middle East, and elsewhere.
4. Donnie Thornsbury, president of United Mine Workers Local 2496 in Kentucky, and three other UMWA miners were convicted in December 1987 on frame-up charges of killing a scab coal hauler during the 1984-85 strike against the A.T. Massey Coal company. He and the other three miners-Arnold Heightland, James Darryl Smith, and David Thornsbury-are serving sentences ranging from thirty-five to forty-five years at the federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky.
5. From 1934 through the opening years of the 1940s, the class-struggle leadership of Teamsters Local 574 (later Local 544) in Minneapolis led the battles that built an industrial union movement in that city, organized over-the-road truck drivers throughout the Midwest, and transformed the Teamsters union in that area into a fighting social movement. In June 1941 a mass membership meeting of Local 544 voted to disaffiliate from the Teamsters and join the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In April 1942 Kelly Postal, secretary-treasurer of the local, was tried and convicted for "embezzlement" for carrying out the membership decision to transfer union funds to a new bank account for the CIO affiliate; he was sentenced to one to five years in prison and was paroled in May 1944 after serving eleven months.
In October 1939 seven leaders of Teamster Local 383 in Sioux City, Iowa, Local 90 in Des Moines, Iowa, and Local 554 in Omaha, Nebraska, were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison on frame-up charges of having burned a truck during a hard-fought and victorious bakery truck drivers strike in Sioux City earlier that year.
On December 8, 1941, eighteen leaders of Local 544-CIO and of the Socialist Workers Party, convicted in federal court of "conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government," were given sentences ranging from twelve to eighteen months in prison. These were the first convictions under the Smith "Gag" Act, signed into law by Democratic Party president Franklin Roosevelt in June 1940. This reactionary legislation was aimed at breaking the class- struggle vanguard of the labor movement that was leading opposition to Washington's preparations to drag workers and farmers into the imperialist slaughter of World War II.
An account of the class-struggle leadership of the Teamsters, the labor battles they led, and their fight against government frame-ups can be found in the four-volume series by Farrell Dobbs: Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Teamster Politics, and Teamster Bureaucracy. Dobbs was a central leader of these labor battles, and subsequently national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party.
6. On December 17, 1998, members of the three striking UMWA locals ratified a contract with Freeman United Coal Company by a vote of 202 to 154. While the pact included union concessions on health benefits, seniority in bidding on jobs, and other aspects of the prior contract with Freeman and the UMWA's 1998 agreement with the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, the central Illinois miners and their union emerged stronger from the 98-day strike. "The strike showed the strength we have," David Yard told the Militant newsweekly. "We are not the same people we were 98 days ago. Many guys have gained more confidence and understanding-there's a stronger bond among us."
7. See The Communist Manifesto (Pathfinder), pp. 31-32.
8. Since February 1996, some 250 members of Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Local 4-227 at the Crown Central Petroleum refinery in Pasadena, Texas, have been fighting an employer lockout. The OCAW members had refused to accept a proposed contract imposing layoffs with no regard to seniority, hiring of nonunion temporary workers, and other union-busting demands by management. They were locked out several days after the expiration of their prior contract. Crown rationalized the lockout on the slanderous grounds that the workers were engaged in sabotage. In January 1998 management filed a civil lawsuit charging fourteen workers with 400 acts of sabotage, as well as conspiracy to commit sabotage. The locked-out Crown workers have reached out for labor solidarity across North America and around the world.
9. Some 9,000 members of the United Auto Workers union at eight Caterpillar plants in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Colorado waged a seventeen-month strike in 1994-1995 against arbitrary firings and other unfair labor practices. While voting down a management contract offer by 81 percent, strikers began returning to work in December 1995 after top UAW officials called off the walkout. Continuing their fight from the shop floor over the next two years, Caterpillar workers ratified a six-year contract in March 1998 by a vote of 54 percent of the membership-but only after management agreed to rehire all 160 UAW members who had been fired during the 1994-95 strike and the earlier 163-day strike in 1992. The previous month 58 percent of the membership had rejected a contract proposal that did not include the rehiring of those workers. Organized efforts to resist the antilabor consequences of the two-tier wage setup and other concessions in the March 1998 contract, as well as to build solidarity with struggles by other workers, are still being waged by many union cadres and militant new hires at Caterpillar.
10. Steelworkers Fight Back was launched in 1975 under the leadership of United Steel Workers District 31 director Ed Sadlowski to oust the entrenched regime of USWA president I.W. Abel. A central issue in the campaign was the fight to extend union democracy, including the right of the membership to vote on contracts. The election was held February 8, 1977. According to the official results, Sadlowski received 43 percent of the vote. He received a majority of votes of workers in large mills. See The Fight for Union Democracy in Steel by Andy Rose (Pathfinder, 1976).
11. A founding member of the Communist Party in the United States in 1919, and later of the Socialist Workers Party, Vincent Ray Dunne was part of the Minneapolis-based class- struggle leadership of the Teamsters union in the 1930s. Along with Farrell Dobbs, Dunne was one of the eighteen Teamsters and Socialist Workers Party leaders convicted in the 1941 Smith Act trial.
12. See "Youth and the Communist Movement," the final talk in this collection.
13. "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" is featured in issue no. 11 of the Marxist magazine New International.
14. The thirst for knowledge of previous struggles among layers of vanguard fighters has spurred Pathfinder to put back in print a number of pamphlets on labor battles and political questions from the 1970s and 1980s that have not been available for a number of years. These include pamphlets on the 1977-78 UMWA coal miners strike; the 1975-77 campaign for union democracy in the United Steelworkers union waged by Steelworkers Fight Back; the fight for affirmative action in steel and other basic industries; and others.
15. The company-minded officialdom of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) has organized raiding operations to break off mechanics employed by Northwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and elsewhere from the International Association of Machinists (IAM), which has traditionally organized mechanics in common locals with ramp workers and other more poorly paid airline workers. Some IAM members have voted for recertification out of a desire for a change from the officialdom's refusal to wage a fight to defend the interests of union members. The bureaucracy of the Machinists union has sought to parry AMFA's challenge by adapting to its reactionary orientation. In its unsuccessful effort in late 1998 to repel the AMFA challenge at Northwest, for example, the IAM bureaucracy aped AMFA's craft mentality by establishing a separate district for mechanics.
16. For further discussion of the emergence of Bonapartist figures in U.S. bourgeois politics, see the talk elsewhere in this book on, "The Vote for Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan's `Culture War': What the 1992 Elections Revealed."
17. Workers at the giant Tenneco shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, struck for eighteen weeks in early 1979 to win recognition for their union, United Steelworkers Local 8888. They won recognition later that year.
18. See "Ours Is the Epoch of World Revolution" by Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters, in New International no. 11.
19. The Communist Manifesto, pp. 35-36.