Vol. 71/No. 47      December 17, 2007

In addition to Waters, the panelists at the forum on the opening day included Eva Golinger, a Venezuelan-American lawyer and author of The Chávez Code; Chris Carlson, a contributor to the venezuelanalysis.com website; and Tufara Waller, cultural program coordinator of the Highlander Center in Tennessee. The issues joined at that session remained at the center of the debate throughout the five days. (See coverage of the forum and book fair in the previous three issues of the Militant.)

The talk by Waters is copyright © 2007 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

I am speaking here today as one of a small minority, including among those who call themselves leftists, or revolutionaries, a minority that says without hesitation or qualification, “Yes, revolution is possible in the United States.” Socialist revolution. To put it in class terms, a proletarian revolution—the broadest, most inclusive social upheaval of the oppressed and exploited imaginable, and the reorganization of society in their interests.

It will be a mass revolutionary struggle that, as it deepens, will win the support of the majority of the working class, small farmers, and other exploited producers and their powerful allies among oppressed nationalities, women, and others. A revolutionary struggle that will be led by an increasingly class-conscious, tested, and expanding political vanguard of the working class.

In the coming, third American revolution workers who are African American will be a disproportionately large component of the leadership.

It will be a revolutionary struggle that takes political and military power from the class that today holds it, mobilizing the strength and solidarity—the humanity—of working people in the United States on the side of the oppressed and exploited worldwide.

It will be a struggle that transforms the men and women who carry it forward as they fight to transform the social relations inherited from the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism.

Not only is a revolution possible in the United States, but revolutionary struggle by the toilers along the course I just described is inevitable. It will be initiated at first not by the toilers, but forced upon us by the crisis-driven assaults of the propertied classes. And our struggles will be intertwined, as always, with the resistance and struggles of other oppressed and exploited producers around the globe.

What is not inevitable, however, is the outcome of these coming revolutionary struggles. That is where political clarity, organization, discipline, and the caliber of proletarian leadership become decisive. That is why what we do now, while there is time to prepare, weighs so heavily.

I wanted to assert this at the start so our discussion here at this event can share a common vocabulary. This is the meaningful content I give the oft-abused word “revolution.”  
 
Cuba and Coming American Revolution
One of the books being presented at this festival by Monte Avila, one of the leading publishers here in Venezuela, bears the title Cuba and the Coming American Revolution. It was written by Jack Barnes and first published by Pathfinder Press. I mention it at the outset not just to salute the editors of Monte Avila for their political perspicacity, and perhaps audacity, in publishing it. More importantly, I want to introduce its theme as a part of our discussion.

Cuba and the Coming American Revolution is not primarily a book about the Cuban Revolution that triumphed on January 1, 1959—although it is about the worldwide impact of that revolution. As the back cover notes, it is, above all, “about the struggles of working people in the imperialist heartland, the youth who are attracted to them, and the example set by the people of Cuba that revolution is not only necessary, it can be made.

“It is [a book] about the class struggle in the United States, where the revolutionary capacities of workers and farmers are today as utterly discounted by the ruling powers as were those of the Cuban toilers. And just as wrongly.”

The book highlights a statement Cuban leader Fidel Castro made almost 47 years ago, on the eve of the U.S.-organized invasion of Cuba at the Bay on Pigs.

That abortive April 1961 assault was undoubtedly imperialism’s greatest miscalculation in the history of our hemisphere, a blunder born of colossal class arrogance and class blindness on the part of those who considered themselves to be the rightful owners of all that the land and the toilers of Cuba together produced. That miscalculation ended at Playa Girón in the glory of the first military defeat of Washington in the Americas.

A month before, in March 1961, Fidel told a cheering crowd of Cuban workers, farmers, and youth, “There will be a victorious revolution in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba.”

At the time, many of us on both sides of the Florida Straits knew those words were not empty bravado, nor was Fidel gazing in a crystal ball. He was speaking as a leader offering—advancing—a line of struggle for our lifetimes, in both the United States and Cuba.

Each succeeding generation of revolutionaries has carried those words on our banner ever since, with the determination to speed the day they will be fully realized.

Today, that flag is being held high by five Cuban revolutionaries now in their tenth year of imprisonment in the United States, where they are being held hostage by the U.S. government as one more way to try to punish the people of Cuba for their refusal to surrender.

This new edition of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution is dedicated to them. To “Gerardo, Ramón, Antonio, Fernando, and René—five exemplary products of the Cuban Revolution who today, even if against their will, serve with honor on the front lines of the class struggle in the United States.”

The fight for their freedom is another of the struggles that will be advanced by our deliberations and our actions here.  
 
A crises-free capitalist world?
Today, above all, I want to address my remarks, with all due respect, to those who doubt that socialist revolution in the United States is possible—to those who believe, or fear, that U.S. imperialism is too powerful, and that revolution is at best a utopian dream.

To those who harbor those doubts, I will pose a question.

What assumptions about the future, explicit or implicit, could justify such a conclusion? What would the future have to look like?

I hope others here will address this as well. But I would like to give my answer. To reach that conclusion, you would have to believe that the coming decades are going to look more or less like those we knew for nearly half a century following World War II.

You would have to believe that there won’t again be economic or social crises on the order of those that marked the first half of the twentieth century. That the ruling families of the imperialist world and their economic wizards have found a way to “manage” capitalism so as to preclude shattering financial crises that could lead to something akin to the Great Depression, to growing assaults on the economic, social, and political rights of the toilers, to spreading imperialist war, to the rise of mass fascist movements in the streets.

You would have to be convinced that competition among the imperialist rivals, as well as between them and the more economically advanced semicolonial powers, is diminishing and that their profit rates, which have been on a downward trend since the early 1970s, are now going to begin to rise for several decades on an accelerated curve.

You would have to believe that such a reversal in their accumulation of capital can be accomplished without the massive destruction of productive capacity—human and physical—wrought by decades of war, such as those that culminated in the interimperialist slaughter of World War II. That is what was necessary for the capitalist rulers to get out of the last great depression.

I believe the evidence is overwhelming that the future we face is the opposite. Just read the headlines this last week! Think about what is happening from Wall Street to Pakistan, from Moscow to Tehran, from the Shanghai stock exchange to the ever-deeper gold mines of South Africa.

The opening guns of World War III are already a decade and a half behind us. We are already living through the opening stages of what will be many years of bloody wars beginning with ones like those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq again. That is what the transformation of Washington’s military structure and strategy is all about.

What is coming are years of economic and financial crises of which the current, still-expanding sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the even more massive debt balloon it is part of, offer only a hint.

What is coming are years that will bring increasingly conscious and organized resistance by a growing vanguard of working people pushed to the wall by the bosses’ drive to cut wages and increase what they call productivity.

What is coming are years punctuated by street battles with genuine ultrarightist movements aimed against Blacks, immigrants, Jews, union militants, socialists, and others—in even the most “stable” of bourgeois democracies.

What is coming are years of economic, social, and political crises and intensifying class struggle that will end in World War III, inevitably, if the only class that is capable of doing so, the working class, fails to take state power, and thus the power to wage war, out of the hands of the imperialist rulers.  
 
A fighting working-class vanguard
In the United States, the outlines of these coming battles can already be seen. The historic shift is not ahead of us, it is already occurring.

The most important political development in the United States is something you rarely see images of on your TV screen or read about in the press. Its power has been expressed, however, by the millions of workers who have taken to the streets in cities and towns large and small across the breadth of the country the last two years on May Day, as that historic working-class holiday has been reborn in the United States as a day of struggle.

A fighting vanguard of the working class has emerged in action in the U.S.—taking the rulers by surprise, as registered in their divisions and heated debates over immigration policy. That vanguard is already placing its mark on politics and the class struggle.

This historic shift has increasingly manifested itself in strikes and organizing battles in factories and workplaces from California to Iowa, from Georgia to Utah. Working people, immigrant and U.S.-born, have stood shoulder to shoulder—sometimes in the streets, sometimes inside their factories, and sometimes in front of their neighbors’ homes—in face of police raids by immigration cops picking off individuals for deportation or on criminal charges of “identity theft” in an attempt to intimidate all. Not just all immigrants, but in fact all workers.

This is not simply an “immigrant” vanguard, although, right now, it is substantially composed of workers who were born outside the United States, from Mexico and Central America especially. The workers who are helping each other hide from la migra in factories, however, and taking in each other’s children when their parents are picked up, are not immigrants alone.

This is a working-class vanguard. It starts out small relative to the size of the working class as a whole. But it doesn’t come out of the blue. It has developed in response to the employers’ quarter-century-long antilabor offensive driving down wages and all social security protections, imposing literally life-threatening production speeds, and denying simple dignity to working people on and off the job.

Part of this offensive has been the bosses’ oft-times organized efforts to secure themselves an expanding supply of undocumented workers—low-paid and nonunion—simultaneously filling their labor needs and providing a wedge to use in attempting to further divide and stratify the working class.

This is not to paint a rose-colored picture of the class struggle in the United States. My aim is not to convince you that the working class is on the offensive or anything like that.

To the contrary, it is the employing class that remains on the offensive. Most labor battles end in defeats or standoffs at best. The unions—which organize a declining percentage of those working in the United States—increasingly become instruments of the bosses’ collaborators in the officialdom. This has been demonstrated once again in the last weeks by the wretched agreements negotiated with the auto industry giants, freeing the employers from responsibility for retirees’ future health care needs and capitulating to the bosses’ demands for a substantially lower wage scale for new hires working side by side with current employees doing the very same jobs.

It’s no wonder that today in the U.S. fewer than 7.5 percent of workers in private industry are unionized—down from nearly a third of the private work force a half a century ago, and going lower.

But none of this is new.

What is new, what is changing, what is of historic importance, is the rapidly shifting character, composition, and dynamics of the U.S. working class. This is the biggest problem the U.S. rulers face. It is ultimately a bigger crisis for them than Iraq or Afghanistan—because it is more enduring.

The capitalist rulers can, and at some point will, temporarily pull back from any single front in the “global war on terrorism.” They can and will make adjustments in their relations with their European rivals, and negotiate tradeoffs with Russia or China. They still have plenty of room to maneuver.

But the working class in the United States, including its expanding immigrant component—some 12 million of whom are undocumented—is something else. That is the source of the bulk of their surplus value, which in turn is the source of their profits, wealth, position, and state power. They utterly depend on this massive pool of superexploited labor. They cannot compete and accumulate capital without it.

And that fact underlies the increasing confidence, combativity, and politicization of layers within the broad working-class movement in the U.S. today.

The battle to win the vast majority of the working class to support for the legalization of undocumented immigrants is the most important political question in the United States, and the largest current battle on the road to independent working-class political action.

And it is a battle. Many workers—white, Black, Asian, all—are influenced by the virulent anti-immigrant campaign of sections of the ruling class. This is an issue that is determining the future of the working-class movement and will continue to do so—much like the fight against Jim Crow segregation did in the 1950s and 1960s, and the ongoing fight against racism and all forms of discrimination still does.

One of the most crucial fronts of this battle, it should be emphasized, is within the Black community, where the divide-and-rule strategies of the rulers often find an echo—despite the fact that life experience and historical memory prepare the vast majority of African-American workers as natural allies of those fighting for immigrant rights.

Workers in the United States, wherever they were born, face the same class enemy, and determined struggles on any front tend to pull workers together in face of the attempts to divide us. And that is what is beginning to happen.

The massive, national, Black-led march on Jena, Louisiana, two months ago by some 20,000 demonstrators, Black, white, Latino and more, native-born and immigrant, protesting the unjust treatment handed out by the courts to six Black teenagers in that town, is a good example of the ways in which the growing proletarian resistance in the United States has already been registered in the renewed strength of a broader fighting vanguard. It was the first national action of its size and character in decades in the United States, and the march on Jena was undoubtedly nourished by the power of the recent May Day mobilizations and related actions.

Many of the young Latino workers proudly participating in that action were learning firsthand, and for the first time, of the history of struggles by working people in the U.S. against Black oppression. And the enthusiastic welcome extended to them by their fellow marchers had a powerful impact on all.

The attempts of the employers to turn immigrant workers—among others—into scapegoats in order to guarantee the availability of their pool of superexploited labor will not cease. Any sharp economic crisis will intensify the battle for the political soul of the working class on this and other questions.

Unlike previous periods in U.S. history, however, when the rulers were successful in radically dividing working people along lines of race and national origin—as in the aftermath of the defeat of Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War, or after World War I—it is precisely the unprecedented internationalization of labor, the vast scope of working-class migration, dwarfing the great waves of the 19th and early 20th centuries, that is today one of our greatest strengths.

We learn from the traditions of struggle coming together from all parts of the world. As we fight shoulder to shoulder, it becomes harder for the bosses to pit “us” against “them.” It becomes more possible to see that our class interests are not the same as those of “our” bosses, “our” government, or “our” two parties.  
 
Revolutionary continuity
As decades of deepening crises and intensifying class struggle open ahead of us, we have something else in our favor. The revolutionary potential of the last period of great radicalization in the 1930s was squandered and diverted into support for capitalism’s “New Deal” and then its inevitable successor the “War Deal”—the imperialist slaughter of World War II.

It was the resources and attraction of a powerful bureaucratic social caste in the USSR camouflaging itself as a communist leadership on a world scale that made this possible. Today, however, that enormous political obstacle no longer stands across the road toward independent working-class political action. Imperialism can no longer rely on it as an enforcer of peaceful co-existence, of “spheres of influence” around the globe. And the most combative and courageous leaders of working-class battles, of national liberation movements, of radicalizing youth, will not be drawn toward the Stalinist negation of everything Marx and Engels and Lenin fought for, falsely believing that was communism.

The lessons of the Russian Revolution and the Communist International under Lenin will be sought after once again as new generations of vanguard fighters search for previous historical experiences from which they can learn not only how to fight but how to fight to win.

That is why, as these battles politically deepen, the real history of the Cuban Revolution too will again be increasingly sought after.

Why has the Cuban Revolution followed a completely different course the last 20 years, salvaging and fortifying its socialist revolution, as the bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—which many falsely thought Cuba resembled—imploded?

How has it been possible for the Cuban people to hold at bay the most powerful empire history has ever known—or ever will know—for almost 50 years?

Why to this day, despite decades of struggle throughout the hemisphere, does Cuba remain the only free territory of the Americas?

To state that truth in no way diminishes the ground already taken and still being taken in struggle by the people of Venezuela today. It simply registers the indisputable fact that what will be Venezuela’s January 1 lies ahead of us, not behind. That what will be the Playa Girón of the Venezuelan toilers lies ahead of us, not behind.

It is in search of answers to these burning questions that books like The First and Second Declarations of Havana being presented here at this book fair by Pathfinder Press, and Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution, are read worldwide with such great interest. Yes, socialist revolution is possible. It can be defended. It can be advanced even in face of our most powerful enemies.

As the Cuban people have proven in practice, a better world is indeed possible. But in any radical or lasting manner, only through socialist revolution.

The stakes posed in the questions we are discussing here at this forum are immeasurable. It is not only the destruction of the health, welfare, and environment of the earth and all toiling humanity that we confront—the destruction of land and labor, the well-springs of all human progress and culture. Those are and will be the inevitable, devastating consequences of the workings of capitalism. The limits we can impose on those consequences are and can be only a by-product of our revolutionary struggle. And should we fail, we can be sure that we all ultimately face a future of nuclear devastation as well.

Every revolutionary struggle, anywhere in the world—not least important right here in Venezuela—is a vital piece of the international battle. But until power is taken from Washington by the workers and farmers, and Yankee imperialism is thus decisively disarmed, nothing lasting is settled.

That is why, it seems to me, it is no small matter to answer, “yes, revolution is not only possible in the United States,” it is coming. Yes, revolutionary struggles are on the agenda, but their outcome depends on us. Yes, fighting shoulder to shoulder with others determined to assure that struggles along this course are victorious is the most meaningful life possible.
 
 
Related articles:
Africa solidarity meeting in Venezuela discusses imperialist exploitation
Venezuela: constitutional referendum fails  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home