End of decadeslong retreat of labor opens new opportunities

Oberlin conference will discuss strengthening unions, building Socialist Workers Party

By Steve Clark
March 20, 2023
School bus drivers strike in Wasilla, Alaska, Jan. 26, demanding adequate heating, headlights, windshield wipers and pay. More workers today are using their unions to fight attacks of bosses and their government
Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News via APSchool bus drivers strike in Wasilla, Alaska, Jan. 26, demanding adequate heating, headlights, windshield wipers and pay. More workers today are using their unions to fight attacks of bosses and their government

“Our experiences in the United States confirm that the low point of working-class and labor resistance is behind us,” said Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, in his report on the draft political resolution before the party’s December 2022 convention.

Jack Barnes at SWP December convention.
Militant/Carole LesnickJack Barnes at SWP December convention.

That conclusion — and its consequences for political activity, as big shifts continue in U.S. and world politics — will be at the center of an International Educational Conference organized by the SWP at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, from June 8-11.

The conference presentations by party leaders, educational classes, and formal and informal discussion offer an opportunity for participants to deepen their political understanding of the explosive ramifications of these shifts for workers and farmers. Those at the gathering will have a chance to evaluate common experiences and increase their effectiveness in advancing the political course adopted by the convention and presented in the SWP resolution.

The resolution is the centerpiece of a new book published by Pathfinder Press, The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward  by Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark. The party is using it as part of activity to win new subscribers to the Militant, as well as SWP election campaigns for state and local office and campaigns by Communist Leagues in Canada and elsewhere. The book was circulated in February at events in Cuba, including a conference of editors and writers (see talk by Mary-Alice Waters in the March 6 issue).

Participating in the gathering will be members of the SWP and its sister parties in other countries, as well as workers, unionists, young people, and others they’ve been working and fighting alongside in resisting attacks by the bosses and their government.

From left, nursing students Jessica Forsgren, Ashley Morgan discuss way forward with SWP Chicago mayor candidate Ilona Gersh and member Naomi Craine at Jan. 22 women’s rights rally in Madison, Wisconsin. SWP explains there is no “road to Black liberation or women’s emancipation separate and apart from working-class struggle to confront capitalism’s social crises.”
Militant/Lisa RottachFrom left, nursing students Jessica Forsgren, Ashley Morgan discuss way forward with SWP Chicago mayor candidate Ilona Gersh and member Naomi Craine at Jan. 22 women’s rights rally in Madison, Wisconsin. SWP explains there is no “road to Black liberation or women’s emancipation separate and apart from working-class struggle to confront capitalism’s social crises.”

They’ve been building and strengthening the unions through strike solidarity and other ways. They’re working with working farmers and ranchers facing crushing debt and devastation as a result of the capitalist crisis.

SWP members engage along with others in actions to defend women’s rights; in solidarity with the Ukrainian people’s defense of their national independence; against acts of Jew-hatred in the U.S. and other countries; alongside working farmers as part of building a worker-farmer alliance; in defense of Cuba’s socialist revolution and opposition to Washington’s decadeslong economic and political war against that revolution; support for ongoing protests and workers’ actions in Iran; against police killings and brutality; and other social and political actions in the interests of the working class.

Also taking part in the summer conference will be supporters of the party who help organize the production, printing, and distribution of Pathfinder books. These volunteer efforts are a decisive part of the work to produce new titles and keep in print hundreds of books by communist leaders in the U.S. and the world over.

These include works by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky; by leaders of the Socialist Workers Party from its founding until today; and by revolutionary leaders from Malcolm X, Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara, to Thomas Sankara, Vilma Espín and Maurice Bishop.

Political opportunities

These opportunities to organize and act on the SWP’s communist course register the reversal of a decadeslong retreat in the U.S. by the working class and labor movement.

Over the past few years, there has been increased motion by workers using and building our unions. More workers and unionists are bringing to bear the class solidarity needed to effectively resist the accelerated speedup, longer hours, attacks on job safety, inflation-battered wages, lack of steady work and social and moral blight produced by U.S. and world capitalism’s profit-driven crises of production and trade.

Feb. 24 march in Zahedan, Baluchistan, to protest Iranian government repression. Greatest obstacle to Tehran’s drive to extend its counterrevolutionary reach across Middle East is Iran’s working people — of Persian, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Arab and all other national origins.
Feb. 24 march in Zahedan, Baluchistan, to protest Iranian government repression. Greatest obstacle to Tehran’s drive to extend its counterrevolutionary reach across Middle East is Iran’s working people — of Persian, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Arab and all other national origins.

As the resolution points out, “Real wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated since the 1970s. The birth rate is falling. Life expectancy in the US has declined to seventy-six years, its lowest level in more than a quarter century. Working farmers are pushed deeper into debt and often off the land entirely.” This is a vote against capitalism’s very future.

Increased labor resistance, including hard-fought strikes, has been organized by unions in bakeries and other food industries, in the mines, in freight rail, in hospitals, shipyards, farm implement plants, among truckers and elsewhere. These fights reinforce long-term social struggles to end racist discrimination against African Americans, combat Jew-hatred and advance the emancipation of women.

The extent and forms of struggles by workers and farmers differ from one part of the imperialist world to another, but the resolution’s judgment that the low point of resistance is behind us extends well beyond North America.

That’s not a matter of predictions or prophesies. It’s a recognition that workers and other exploited producers the world over increasingly need to be prepared politically — class against class — for ongoing and deepening crises, wars and political battles.

No separate roads

At the December convention, three reports were presented to deepen discussion of the draft resolution submitted by the SWP National Committee. Barnes presented the opening political report. Mary-Alice Waters reported on “Capitalism’s erosion of the family and the working-class road to women’s emancipation.” And SWP Trade Union Director Mary Martin addressed members’ work building the trade unions and advancing a class-struggle course for the labor movement. 

A central programmatic thread was the inseparable connection between the party’s revolutionary proletarian program and its activity strengthening the unions and joining in social struggles. “The class composition of the party must correspond to its class program,” wrote communist leader Leon Trotsky in 1940. That has been a foundation stone of the party since its origins in 1919, as part of the newly formed Communist International led by Lenin, Trotsky and other leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

Only through the struggle for a proletarian party to advance the fight for workers power, the resolution and reports emphasized, can working people in the U.S. and elsewhere organize and fight effectively against the mounting wars and threats of war, from Europe, to the Pacific and Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

There is no “road to peace” aside from this working-class line of march to end capitalist rule and open a future for humanity. Class-conscious workers don’t have a revolutionary policy for peacetime and a peace policy for wartime, as the communist movement has always explained.

Along that course, the aim must be to take the power to make war out of the hands of the bosses’ government and their twin parties, the Republicans and Democrats.

There are no common interests between the working and producing classes on the one hand, and the capitalist rulers and their parties on the other. There is no cross-class “we” — no classless road to combating today’s mounting inflation, crises of employment and housing, and bosses’ intensified speedup and assaults on job safety.

Nor any “road to either Black liberation or women’s emancipation separate and apart from the working-class struggle to confront capitalism’s social crises bearing down on working people and their families,” the resolution points out. “That, in turn, requires a class-struggle course to address the challenges and responsibilities that fall overwhelmingly on women as the bearers and nurturers of new life.”

In that regard, Waters said, there remains no better guide than what Frederick Engels, co-founder with Karl Marx of the communist workers movement, wrote in 1885: “True equality between men and women can become a reality only when the exploitation of both by capital has been abolished and private work in the home has been transformed into a public industry.”

The battle to end women’s second class status is intertwined with transforming every aspect of the oppressive economic and social relations perpetuated by capitalism. It is integral to the working-class struggle to combat the deteriorating conditions facing more and more families — from the lack of affordable health care, housing, and child care; to the scourges of drug addiction, government-promoted gambling, domestic violence and more. Opposition to federal, state, or municipal laws restricting access to medically safe abortions is part of that broader fight.

Only along a revolutionary course — anchored in proletarian morality based on human solidarity — can social relations be transformed and replace the bourgeois morals resorted to by the ruling classes to rationalize the brutalities of imperialist rule the world over.

Working-class fight against war

From the opening of Moscow’s more than yearlong assault on Ukraine — the first full-scale war in Europe since World War II — the SWP has actively campaigned for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Moscow’s troops.

SWP member Barbara Bowman, right, joins Feb. 24 Los Angeles march defending Ukraine independence. Party campaigns for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all of Moscow’s troops.
Militant/Deborah LiatosSWP member Barbara Bowman, right, joins Feb. 24 Los Angeles march defending Ukraine independence. Party campaigns for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all of Moscow’s troops.

The Putin regime aims to obliterate the Ukrainian people’s very existence as an independent and sovereign nation, reimprisoning them in a revived “Great Russian Empire.” As Ukrainians courageously resist the invasion, Moscow has stepped up genocidal missile and drone attacks on apartment buildings and other civilian targets, including infrastructure for electricity, heat, clean water, sanitation, transport and other necessities of civilian life.

The party demands the withdrawal of all U.S. troops and both conventional and nuclear arms and missile systems from NATO-member countries and elsewhere in Europe. It calls for an end to the sweeping embargo imposed on Russia by the U.S., European and other imperialist ruling classes. Those economic and financial sanctions fall most heavily on working people, who along with Russian soldiers, can be won as allies in repelling Moscow’s invasion.

Washington is strengthening alliances with imperialist and other capitalist governments in the Pacific and Asia to defend their profits and prerogatives, as Beijing’s capitalist rulers press their own economic and military expansion. Threats are growing over Taiwan, over competing claims to sovereignty of island chains in the South China Sea, and over the buildup of U.S. military forces from South Korea to the Philippines and Australia.

Across the Middle East, Tehran’s drive to extend the bourgeois clerical regime’s counterrevolution poses the danger of an expanded conflagration. Tehran is also providing lethal drones and other technical assistance to Moscow’s massive campaign of missiles targeting Ukraine’s civilian population.

These perils are multiplied by the Iranian rulers’ declared aim of obliterating the state of Israel, its promotion of rising Jew-hatred worldwide, and its rapid advances in developing a strategic nuclear arsenal and ballistic missile delivery system.

The greatest curb to these dangers is Iran’s working people — of Persian, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Baluchi and other national origins — whose massive mobilizations since late 2022 have surpassed in size and scope even those of the previous few years.

Washington continues its some 65-year-long economic, trade, financial and political war on the toilers of Cuba, carried out by every Democratic and Republican administration since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Over those decades, the SWP has relentlessly fought for an immediate and unconditional end to these hostile U.S. government policies. As the SWP resolution says, the U.S. rulers’ message “to working people here and everywhere is unvarnished: ‘This is what will be done to you if you work and fight to emulate Cuba’s socialist revolution.’

“Whether in the pages of the Militant, or an SWP campaign speech, at a doorstep or on a picket line, or during the Havana International Book Fair and other activities in Cuba,” says the resolution, “what we say and what we do with regard to the Cuban Revolution does not begin by asking, ‘How is Cuba doing?’”  Instead, revolutionists “ask and answer: ‘How are we doing? ’

“That above all is what revolutionary Cubans want to know. How well are we advancing as a proletarian party on our course to emulate the historic accomplishments of the Cuban toilers? ”

The working class in the U.S. and other countries must fight for our independent class interests, for those of our exploited allies, as well as for each other — along a road to the revolutionary conquest of state power. A road to the world socialist revolution. Otherwise, conflicts among rival national ruling classes will become more explosive and dangerous to all humanity.

Constitutional freedoms

The same independent working-class course is necessary to defend the freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution, a fight that is at the center of the class struggle in the United States today, the SWP resolution says.

International Educational Conference in Ohio, June 2022. Building unions, organizing labor solidarity and expanding the reach of the<i> Militant</i> and books by revolutionary leaders will be centerpieces of this year’s conference at Oberlin College.
Militant/ Arthur HughesInternational Educational Conference in Ohio, June 2022. Building unions, organizing labor solidarity and expanding the reach of the Militant and books by revolutionary leaders will be centerpieces of this year’s conference at Oberlin College.

The rights and liberties needed and used by working people weren’t “given to us” in the Constitution. Many freedoms had been won by the people centuries before  the United States was established. Others were conquered by farmers, workers and enslaved toilers in the course of the first and second American revolutions (the War of Independence, and the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction), as well as class battles since.

Compelling the rulers to put these freedoms down in writing in the Constitution — including the first 10 amendments, and the post-Civil War 13th, 14th and 15th amendments — was a conquest by working people. Doing so, the SWP resolution says, introduced “a degree of rule by law and written boundaries on the rulers’ license to run roughshod over popular and regional interests, rural as well as urban, and other expressions of social, cultural, religious, race and national diversity among the toiling majority of a vast continent.”

“The proletarian party’s unconditional defense of the constitutional freedom of worship,” the resolution emphasizes, “is indivisible from its defense of freedom of speech and assembly.”

Working class and its generations

The SWP’s program is grounded in the party’s confidence in the working class and its new and coming generations.

Workers in Havana carry coffins representing nationalization of U.S. companies, deepening their revolution, imposing workers control of production, August 1960. The Socialist Workers Party points to Cuba’s socialist revolution, and the leadership of Fidel Castro, as an example.
Cuban Council of StateWorkers in Havana carry coffins representing nationalization of U.S. companies, deepening their revolution, imposing workers control of production, August 1960. The Socialist Workers Party points to Cuba’s socialist revolution, and the leadership of Fidel Castro, as an example.

“This is the opposite of the course of bourgeois and middle-class ‘population bomb’ crusaders,” the resolution says. Such anti-working-class “overpopulation” demagogy is “rife among bourgeois and middle-class ‘environmentalists,’ climate doomsayers, scientists and organizations claiming to champion women’s rights. This includes ‘counseling’ working-class women and their spouses, often misrepresented as family planning, to bring fewer children into the world.”

More than a century earlier, Russian Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin had denounced “the completely reactionary nature and ugliness” of such an outlook. The communist leader contrasted it to “that of ‘the class-conscious worker,’ who is confident in ‘the working-class movement and its aims’ and who says instead: ‘We are already laying the foundation of a new edifice and our children will complete its construction.’”

And “their children, and their children!” the SWP resolution adds.

That’s where the eyes of class-conscious workers are focused. Our eyes are on our class, on our fighting alliance with farmers and other exploited producers, here and the world over. Our eyes are on our struggles, on our unions and on building and strengthening the working-class movement.

The SWP refuses to subordinate class-against-class solidarity, working-class independence and our proletarian internationalist course to an alleged “choice” as to whether the Putin regime in Moscow or the relatively stronger government in Beijing has “more to offer” in a so-called multipolar world of rival capitalist powers and the wealthy ruling families they defend.

Labor party based on the unions

During the Georgia runoff for U.S. Senate following the November elections, the bosses and their beholden newspapers and TV networks tried to convince working people we had a stake in the outcome of the race between the Democratic and Republican nominees, Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker (for the first time ever in a U.S. Senate election, a contest between two candidates each of whom was African American).

But working people had no stake whatsoever in that December 2022 race or its outcome. There was no “lesser evil” for the working class and unions — in that Georgia contest, or in any other between the capitalist parties elsewhere in the U.S.

What we do have a stake in is forging a party that speaks and acts in the interests of the working class and oppressed, independent of any  of the bosses’ political parties and candidates. A party that rejects the politics of resentment, which is demagogically used by both parties of the exploiters to try to pit working people and insecure layers of the middle class against each other.

That’s why the Socialist Workers Party advocates and explains to workers in the U.S. — through the Militant, SWP election campaigns and to anyone its members are fighting alongside — the need for a labor party based on our unions.

Building the unions

The resolution adopted by the December convention was edited for publication in the new book in light of the discussion and ongoing lessons from the party’s experience in the class struggle. The most substantial strengthening was to the final section on the activity by party members alongside others in the unions to build the labor movement.

“We make every effort to conduct ourselves as actively engaged, careful, knowledgeable, and competent trade unionists,” the resolution says.

“That’s our job both as party members and members of our unions. That’s our proletarian orientation and Marxist continuity, tested and confirmed in practice by the class-struggle leadership of the Teamsters battles in the 1930s and by our trade union work ever since, including during the turn to industry carried out by the party starting in the mid-1970s.”

The Low Point In Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward opens with an article from the Militant  last year reporting on the June 2022 International Active Workers Conference in Ohio, organized by the SWP. Some 350 working people from 11 countries participated. Readers of the Militant  interested in taking part in the coming Oberlin conference will get a picture here of the kinds of discussions and activities organized at these gatherings.

SWP branches are beginning efforts this spring to win new subscribers to this working-class newsweekly and to get the new book into the hands of as many working people as possible. Assessing the results and preparing to reach out even more broadly in the summer and fall will be a centerpiece of the Active Workers Conference, including the final five months of activity by SWP election campaigns for state and local office — from the New Jersey State Senate, to mayoral races in Chicago, Philadelphia and Fort Worth, Texas. And Communist League campaigns in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

If you’d like to join in the next steps to build and recruit to the Socialist Workers Party and world communist movement, contact one of the party branches in the directory.