The French edition of In Defense of the US Working Class by Mary-Alice Waters is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for October. The excerpt is from a 2018 talk Waters gave at an international conference in Havana discussing the class struggle in the U.S. She addressed the growing resistance by working people to the decades-long offensive by the bosses and their government. Waters is a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and president of Pathfinder Press. Copyright © 2019 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
Is a socialist revolution in the US really possible? …
We in the Socialist Workers Party are certainly among a small minority, even among those who call themselves socialists, who say without hesitation, “Yes, socialist revolution is possible in the United States.”
And I would add, no liberating movement can ever be imposed “from the outside” on any country. It can only be victorious through the actions of millions.
We say not only is socialist revolution in the US possible. Even more important, revolutionary struggles by the toilers are inevitable. They will be forced upon us by the crisis-driven assaults of the propertied classes — as we’ve just seen in West Virginia. And they will be intertwined, as always, with the example of the resistance and struggles of other oppressed and exploited producers around the globe.
What is not inevitable is the outcome. That is where political clarity, organization, prior experience, discipline, and, above all, the caliber and experience of proletarian leadership are decisive. …
More than any other labor experience, it is the Teamsters organizing drive that taught us what the US working class is capable of as it awakens in struggle. It taught us how quickly the working class can learn the meaning of class political independence, proletarian internationalism, and begin to transform the union movement into an instrument of revolutionary struggle for the entire class and its allies.
The experiences we learned from involved organizing a general drivers union, an industrial union uniting workers from coal and food delivery truckers to taxi drivers, warehouse workers, and over-the-road drivers. They involved organizing the unemployed, farmers, women, and owner-operator independent truckers as allies. They included launching and training a disciplined Union Defense Guard that stopped in its tracks a fascist recruitment effort promoted by the bosses.
These experiences included the broadening international horizons of union militants as they followed events in Germany, China, and Spain and took on gangs of Jew-hating thugs. There was growing awareness of the need for workers to enter the political arena as an independent class force, with their own party.
That rapid advance came to an end in 1939-40 as the pressures of Washington’s intensifying imperialist war drive came down on the labor movement. But as [Farrell] Dobbs writes in his “Afterword” to Teamster Bureaucracy, “The principal lesson for labor militants to derive from the Minneapolis experience is not that, under an adverse relationship of forces, the workers can be overcome, but that, with proper leadership, they can overcome.”
And that is the principal lesson we also learned from the men and women who — under Fidel — led the Cuban Revolution to victory. …
None of us on this panel today lived through the great labor battles of the ’30s. But several of us were part of the generations transformed by our experiences as part of another profoundly revolutionary, working-class struggle — the mass movement of the 1950s and ’60s that brought down the Jim Crow system of institutionalized race segregation in the US South. That successful fight forever changed social relations in the North as well as the South, including within the working class and unions. …
For many of us, it was that mass, Black, proletarian movement in the United States, combined at the same time with the example given us by the workers and farmers of Cuba and their advancing revolution, that instilled our generation with unshakable confidence in the revolutionary capacities of working people.
The story of how those two revolutionary struggles came together for us is told in one of the most important books you will find on the Pathfinder table at the back, Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes.
“The greatest obstacle to the line of march of the toilers,” Jack says in those pages, “is the tendency, promoted and perpetuated by the exploiting classes, for working people to underestimate ourselves, to underestimate what we can accomplish, to doubt our own worth.”
What the workers and farmers of Cuba showed us is that with class solidarity, political consciousness, courage, focused and persistent efforts at education, and a revolutionary leadership of a caliber like that in Cuba — a leadership tested and forged in combat, in sacrifice, over years — it is possible to stand up to enormous might and numbers that initially seem to pose insurmountable odds — and win. …
We have entered what will be decades of economic, financial, and social convulsions, of intensifying rivalries among capitalist state powers. Decades of sharpening class conflicts and devastating bloody wars like those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and more.
The coming years will end in World War III — inevitably — if the only class capable of doing so, the working class, fails to take state power. If we fail to take the power to wage war out of the hands of the imperialist rulers, in the United States above all.
But for us, a sober and realistic assessment of what lies ahead is reason neither for panic nor demoralization and despair. To the contrary. The years that are coming will also bring increasingly organized resistance — worldwide — by growing vanguards of working people pushed to the wall by the capitalists’ drive to intensify the exploitation of working people in order to reverse their declining rate of profit.
It is through those struggles that class consciousness, as well as confidence and leadership capacity, will develop among working people — unevenly but apace.
And time is on our side — not theirs.