Communists are materialists, dialectical materialists. We start with facts, with social realities, and how they develop and change over history — how they are shaped by shifting productive relations, social labor, and revolutionary activity. We know that our class and its toiling allies, who make up the majority of humanity, cannot organize the world on new foundations as we are. And a state bureaucracy cannot do it for us, either. We must change ourselves. On this, we are "Guevarists" to the core.

"To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man," Che Guevara wrote in his 1965 article "Socialism and Man in Cuba."² We agree. Workers can and will change ourselves as we go about changing the material foundations of our relations to each other. But this cannot be done without tearing down the brutal class divisions that underlie all social relations today and that will lead through war and fascism to a culmination too horrible to even imagine — unless our class organizes to take power out of the hands of the capitalists.

There is only one real equality possible in today's class-divided world — political equality. And it only becomes possible in the revolutionary workers movement. It only becomes possible as those who make up a fighting workers vanguard collectively prepare ourselves for the battles to rid society of every vestige of exploitation, oppression, and discrimination.

The socialist revolution is not the end of recorded history, as Stalinist ideologues have tended to present it in order to rationalize the counterrevolutionary course of the parasitic caste and its claim to have established socialism in a single country. No, the workers revolution is the beginning of truly human history.

What is most important about the workers revolution is not the particular property changes that will sweep society directly in its wake — although without them, nothing further would be possible — but the fact that its victory opens other revolutions, such as the historic revolution for women's emancipation. That will not be settled just by overthrowing the capitalist state and declaring the class struggle over. The new possibilities opened by a revolutionary victory, however, will lay the material foundations on which women's liberation can be achieved and precipitate an explosion in the fight for real economic and social equality by the millennia-long oppressed sex. Similarly, all the manifold forms of class oppression bequeathed by thousands of years of property systems will for the first time be open to being vanquished.  
 

Resistance will mount

Despite the refusal of the labor officialdom in the United States or in other imperialist countries to organize the working class to use union power, workers continue to press for ways through their class organizations to mount resistance to the capitalists' assaults. I asked comrades from the United Kingdom last week about the actions by coal miners over the past few months against the government's planned pit closures and layoffs. Members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) have organized two one-day work stoppages, one of them just last week in collaboration with the rail workers union. And there were two big miners demonstrations in London last October. Comrades say miners tell them it is better taking some action than just accepting the government's assault and doing nothing, and we've had good sales of the Militant and of Pathfinder books and pamphlets at these protests. Resistance always increases broader political interests among workers.

That same attitude can be seen among miners at the Thorseby mine in Nottingham, comrades say. Thorseby is one of the three largest mines organized by the anti-NUM union —the Union of Democratic Miners — that was built up during the Thatcher period to weaken the NUM. Paul Galloway, a comrade in the communist movement in the UK, has been a union fighter in that mine for a long time. During the great 1984-85 miners strike in Britain, coal was cut at the Thorseby mine every day. At the conclusion of that year-long strike, the NUM was finally forced back to work by the failure of the rest of the union officialdom in the United Kingdom to organize decisive solidarity action. That was Thatcher's greatest victory during her years in office. The other stuff she is credited with — strengthening the economy, the privatizations — that is all nonsense. But the British rulers notched up a real victory in 1985. And throughout that entire strike, the hardest fought in Great Britain for more than a decade, coal was cut at Thorseby every day, despite every effort by the NUM to stop it.

Well, a week ago, when both the coal miners and the rail workers across the United Kingdom were engaged in a one-day stoppage against the pit closures, the NUM put up a picket line at Thorseby that was respected by members of the Union of Democratic Miners. Not one miner went into that mine and not one piece of coal was cut!

I do not raise this example because I expect such actions to lead to massive class battles right now in Britain, or even to short-run labor victories. No single group of workers can jump that far ahead of the rhythms of resistance of the broader working-class vanguard. Nor do I have such expectations from the resistance we have been seeing here in the United States: the fight by the drywallers in southern California to defend their union hiring hall; the strike by members of the United Steelworkers union against Trinity Industries in Bessemer, Alabama; or the strike earlier this year by 7,000 United Mine Workers members against Peabody Coal, and the fight looming next month between the UMWA and the Bituminous Coal Operators Association.

But these acts of resistance are all part of human beings changing, of refusing to be coerced into acquiescence regardless of the rulers' efforts. It is in these struggles that workers find space to practice politics, and that people of all ages gain experience.

We should not talk about these struggles primarily in terms of economics. In depression conditions, with the working class facing the kinds of social assaults we have discussed, the important questions are not economic—because workers cannot reorganize the economy yet. The working class must organize a victorious socialist revolution before that becomes possible.

But workers today can fight to defend ourselves and other working people against employer and government attacks. We can fight for protection against the ravages of capitalism. The questions confronting the working class are political. What kind of attitudes, what sense of dignity, what kind of class perspective can transform individuals and better prepare us to fight to take political power out of the hands of the rulers? That is important to people involved in demonstrations and strikes, and they want to talk about it. That is what they want to read about. They want to read about other workers who are resisting. They want to know what other workers are thinking, and how they are organizing to wage an effective fight.  
 
 
1. Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France," in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 22, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986), p. 335.  
 
2. Ernesto Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Socialism and Man in Cuba (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), p. 6.  
 
 
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