The collapse of the Stalinist apparatuses that had long ago driven workers out of politics through terror, demoralization, and corruption has initiated a process that cannot be reversed. The big-business media focuses all their attention on the elections, so-called privatization schemes and the trickle of imperialist investment, blocs between openly fascist currents and Stalinist outfits that claim to represent the working class, and the blows being struck to living and working conditions. At the same time, however, a slow but sure process begins to unfold--at first simply on the level of individuals seeking answers--as workers in these countries head toward coming into the world and into politics.

Never before in history has there been a bigger disproportion between the current small numerical size and negligible social weight of communist organizations in the mass labor movement, and the leverage of the political weapons we produce, translate, edit, circulate, and get around in whatever ways we can. There is nothing like it in the history of the workers movement. I do not know what better word to choose than "leverage"--it is an easy, physical analogy. Whether we are participating in a book fair in Tokyo or Tehran, a university conference in Cuba, or a meeting of young fighters in South Africa--we have the same experiences everywhere.

Fighters want to get their hands on the Communist Manifesto, on books about the Russian revolution, on copies of New International magazine, on books about politics and the labor movement in the United States, on literature about the revolutions in Cuba and South Africa, on books about the Black struggle, on works that give a scientific explanation of women's oppression and the road to their liberation....

A bolshevik party is not and does not try to be monolithic. It does, however, strive for political homogeneity and common struggle experience to prepare for our inevitable responsibilities. In the crunch, it has had a helluva batting average.

One of the most difficult things for capitalism's propagandists to understand and portray accurately is how a political vanguard of the working class reaches out to others to use and defend political space--as we did during the October missile crisis. Communists have no schemas or timetables. But we do know that the tensions inevitably rising from world capitalism's depression conditions and its inexorable march toward fascism and war keep leading not only to unanticipated crises, but also to resistance out of which vanguard workers can build a movement. Right now, we can anticipate that growing interest among working people and youth in radical ideas ignored by them in the past--or rejected without serious study--will keep ahead of the pace of mass popular struggles.

But these political realities cannot even be seen, much less understood, unless we recognize the space that exists inside the working class and the unions--space that can be used by revolutionary-minded workers to practice politics. This space is not seen or registered by anything in bourgeois public opinion. It can only be seen from inside the working class and the unions. It can best be seen by workers who are communists who are using that space to talk politics with other workers, to promote revolutionary literature, to bring co-workers and their unions into fights around social and political issues, and to participate in guerrilla skirmishes around conditions on the job. Without using this political space, the tensions just seem like tensions, the openings are missed, and the space will be diminished over time.

As I was watching those television specials last month, I realized that as a young revolutionist during the missile crisis I had learned a little bit about using political space. I was not fully conscious at the time of everything I was learning, but it turned out to be very useful. That is why I was so struck by the inaccuracy of that aspect of the documentaries. There are people at this meeting tonight--not a whole lot, but not just two or three either--who became different people during those ten days in October 1962, and not because they went out and bought canned goods. They developed a deeper political relationship with others in the YSA and SWP who were working together unflinchingly along the same lines.

During the crisis, I never thought there was going to be a nuclear war. I am not misremembering--I genuinely never thought so. I did know that the U.S. rulers were driving to start a war to crush the socialist revolution in Cuba, and I knew that they would put the future of the world in stupendous danger if they did so. So, like thousands of others, I spent day and night trying to stop that from happening. We saw there was space to do this, and we used it. What is more, as we did so we won some new, young fighters to the communist movement who were strengthened and given greater staying power by the test of fire.

Today there are opportunities to win a new generation of revolutionists to the Socialist Workers Party. Many of them right now will not initially come out of a revitalized labor movement. Through the proletarian party, however, they can be won to join in building a leadership that can organize the working class to make a popular revolution and prevent the fascist devastation and world war that capitalism is dragging humanity toward. Fighters from this generation will reach out to find parties of revolutionists who are workers, revolutionists who have some experience in the class struggle. They will want to emulate communist workers who have learned to defend and use space within the organizations of the working class, and who can show them how to do politics--how to do working-class politics, a differentiation most of these fighters will not have thought about beforehand.

This is the kind of working-class experience that nobody will ever get through election campaigns. This is the kind of politics that for bourgeois public opinion does not exist.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home