Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Markin comment:
If we needed a workers party that fights for a workers government in the 1990s when this is was first publsihed then we need it twenty times more badly now in the 2010s. Read on.
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Why We Need Labor Party
The End of the American Dream
"Everyone Wants the American dream. But the dream isn't there anymore. You fall more than you climb." — Comment by worker interviewed after November 1994 elections.
During the 1990s, the idea of the American dream, that the next generation will do better than the present one, has now all but disappeared for most workers and youth.
Take Craig Miller, a 37-year-old father of four from Kansas City. Like millions of other workers, he was recently laid off from his job, in his case, by TWA, and has his living standards and life expectancy shattered. He has faced s job market littered with low-paid part-time jobs. "Sure, we've got four of them. So what? So you can fork like a dog for $5 an hour." He and his wife both now work for McDonalds while he also drives school buses and she works at a toy store as a second job.
During the 1980s and 1990s, living standards have been under continual assault from all directions, whether it is cut wages, loss of jobs or higher taxes. More and more the struggle is just to get by. Insecurity, tension and fear have become a daily part of life. The depth of the attacks on workers' living standards over the last two decades can be seen from these facts.
From 1973 to 1992 while productivity has gone up 25%, wages have gone down 19%.
Between 1979 and 1987 the average worker worked 95 hours more each year. That is more than three and a half weeks a year. Also vacation time has fallen by one third.
Between 1979 and 1989, 44% of the population saw a real fall in their income, and only 25% saw an increase. This means that 75% of the population saw their living standards decline or stagnate.
Between 1973 and 1987 the income of families headed by someone under 30 years of age fell 30%. The income of families headed by someone who didn't graduate from high school fell 5.2%!
This collapse in living standards is rooted in the failure of the economy to produce well-paying jobs which was the basis for the American dream. Years of concessions, downsizing, lay-offs, the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas and the proliferation of low-paid service jobs have changed the job market and conditions of life for workers. This has occurred during both recessions and recoveries of the economy.
In this climate, workers are told by the politicians and the media that they have to further tighten their belts. As if they haven't been tightening their belts already! Leaders of the Democrats and Republicans now point to the need to "compete" in the global economy as the new reason why workers must work harder, take home less pay, work unsociable hours and allow their children to grow up facing jobs paying only $5, $6 and $7 an hour. Once again, we are told that if we do this then things will turn around in the future.
Meanwhile, the rich have amassed a fortune, and the politicians in Washington are surrounded by wealth and privilege, far removed from the day-to-day concerns of working people. Of an estimated $7 trillion of wealth created in the 1980s, $3 trillion went into the bank accounts and pockets of the wealthiest 1% of the population, i.e. almost half of all the wealth!
During the 1990s the anger at this process rose to the surface. Quite rightly, US workers have pointed the finger at political leaders. In 1992, it was the Republican president Bush who was swept from power with only 38% of the vote. In November 1994, it was the turn of the Democratic leadership in Congress. Both Democrats and Republicans have been hammered by voters for their failure. Working people now face the newly-elected Republicans in Congress who are looking to further cut public services and benefit the rich and big business.
America is at a turning point. The ways of the past are no longer working. Conditions keep deteriorating year after year. It is time for an alternative. The starting point for this alternative must be that we, as workers, have our own interests and our own solution to the problems of America. This solution is drastically different from that of corporate America, with its agenda of speed-ups on the job and cuts in services in order to defend its profits. Our agenda is based on the real needs of workers. Food on the table, a decent house, a secure well-paid job, health care for all and the right to get a decent education. It is based on the idea that all the people need to have a decent job available to them, so they can produce sufficient goods and services to earn a decent living. It is based on challenging the control and ownership of the top 500 corporations who dominate the economy, and putting power and control into the hands of working people.
This can only be done by challenging the two existing political parties which serve the interests of big business and capitalism. A new political party needs to be built. A political party organized by, funded by, and democratically controlled by the vast majority of the people in the country, the working people. This party would not be controlled by corporate America with its "special" interest. With such a party, workers could for the first time gain real control of the resources of the country, and would be able to transform America to provide for the needs of our class, the working class.
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The Democrats and Republicans
Two Parties of Big Business
"The differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties involves no issue, no principle in which the working class has any interest... every workingman who has intelligence enough to understand the interest of his class and the nature of the struggle in which it is involved will once and for all sever his relations with both." — Eugene Debs, former leader of the American Railroad Union and Socialist Party Presidential candidate.
Everyday, in the press, workers are told that one or the other party, whether the liberals or conservatives, are responsible for this decline in conditions. But the reality is that all these policies are passed by both parties.
Between 1976 and 1980 the Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. From 1980 to 1986 the Republicans controlled the White House and the Senate, while the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives.
Between 1986 and 1992 the Republicans controlled the White House while the Democrats controlled the Senate and the House of Representatives. From 1992 to 1994, the Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate and the House of representatives. During this whole time both parties have also controlled the state and local governments across the country.
For a bill to be passed in Washington, it has to be passed through the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. This means that both parties are responsible for the assault on the living standards of workers over the last twenty years.
During this period, each party has argued that they had a different policy to the other. What really happens is that one party, for example, the Republicans, announces a cut off $5 million, while the Democrats instead propose a cut of only $4.9 million! Each party then campaigns about how outrageous the other party's policy is. Then they both suddenly find that they can reach an agreement, and they pass the bill into law.
Through this mechanism, each political party has argued that it represents a different philosophy and policy to the other. But their actions have proved otherwise. Both parties have shown that they agree with one main idea: that it is the working class, not the rich, that must be made to pay for the crisis.
Business Roundtable
The agenda for these two parties is set by corporate America. Corporate America created the parties, and controls their purse strings. The major newspapers and other media are owned by these large corporations. Thus, big business is able to set the political tone and make its views heard loud and clear.
When the postwar economic upswing came to an end in 1975, big business prepared its policies to deal with the developing period of economic crisis. To do this it formed the Business Roundtable. Like similar bodies in previous periods of history, this body was made up exclusively of the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of the top corporations. No politicians, members of the press, or other individuals could attend these meetings. They laid down clear plans on how they were to deal with this coming crisis. In a word, their plan was to put the pain of the crisis onto the backs of the working class and the middle class.
Every administration since then, starting with President Carter, has followed out the details of this plan. It was to deregulate key industries, to cut federal spending on middle and working class programs, to freeze the minimum wage, to cut government regulation, to cut wages, work-rules and benefits at work, to weaken the unions, to cut taxes on the rich and business, and to build up the US military.
Jimmy Carter
In a December 1977 meeting of another influential business groups, the Business Council, President Carter promised these leaders that if they encountered government action "that unnecessarily encroaches on your effectiveness, I hope you'll let either my Cabinet officers or me know, and I'll do the best I can to correct it ... If you let me have those recommendations, I'll do the best I can to comply with your request." (The structure of Power in America, page 107.)
The Democratic administration of Carter began to implement this program during the late 1970s. It deregulated trucking and allowed the increase in inflation to erode the value of wages. It also began to cut social programs and increase spending on the military. During the years Carter was in office, prices rose 41% and profits rose 54.6%, while wages only rose 31%. During his term in office an offensive began on union activists, with 15,000 workers being illegally fired for union activity in 1980. The concessionary movement in labor contracts also began at this time. Not one of labor's priority legislation was passed under Jimmy Carter.
Reagan and Bush
Under the Reagan and Bush Administrations these policies escalated. In a warning shot fired at labor, Reagan fired the air-traffic controllers who went on strike in 1981. This attack was a green light for the employers to mount an offensive on the working class and the poor. Demands for concessions escalated, social programs were cut, and the minimum wage was frozen. There were large increases in military spending and new expeditions of US military force abroad. On a whole number of different fronts, a savage assault was launched on the living standards of working people. As a part of this, taxes were cut on the rich and increased on working people. At the same time services were cut back at all levels of government.
Clinton's Agenda
Now under Clinton, despite attempts to present the Democrats as "friends of labor and working people," these policies have continued. In 1993, over 600,000 jobs were lost - more jobs than in the recession year of 1991. Major corporations have continued to downsize with lay-offs of workers, and most of the jobs created have been low-paid and often part-time or temporary. At the same time Clinton, with the passing of NAFTA and GATT, is forcing US workers to compete with the low wages paid by corporations in Mexico, leading to a new downward pressure on wages and the further loss of an estimated 500,000 jobs. At the same time Clinton's budget included laying off 250,000 federal workers.
The main aim of the Clinton administration is to allow US corporations to better compete with their rivals overseas. This means lowering wages at home. The way to achieve this has been by demanding "flexibility." Under this banner, workers are being forced to give up work-rules, the eight-hour day, to accept lay-offs and to do more work. By cloaking this attack on workers in the language of the "Team Concept" big business seeks to get the union leaders to support its goals. Labor Secretary Reich states that he wands to make unions "high productivity organizations." This is just a code work for intensifying the pace of workers to boost the profits of the corporations.
The Wall Street Journal summed up the attitude of big business in a lead article on November 22, 1993. It stated: "Even though President Clinton has railed against rich people, special interest lobbyists, overpaid executives and insurance and drug companies, he is now aggressively wooing big business, inviting small groups of top executives - 80 in the past 10 months - to lunch. On issue after issue, Mr. Clinton and his administration come down on the same side as corporate America." Leading CEOs also see Clinton as friendly to them. "Take issue by issue," says Curtis Barnette, Chairman of Bethlehem Steel Corp., "Is Clinton good for American business on trade issues? Yes. On health care? Yes."
The Rich Get Richer
The result is that the rich have had a bonanza. The money created by the explosion in price of stocks, the increase in property prices, the increase in profits and the increase in interest rates have ended up in the pockets of the top 1% of society.
The wealthiest 1% of the population, about one million families, received roughly 60% of the after-tax income gains realized by all US families from 1977 to 1989. At the same time demographers reported in 1991 that Americans aged 35 to 45, moving into middle age were only one-half as wealthy, on an inflation-adjusted basis, as their parents had been at the same age. Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economic historian found "inequality at its highest since the great leveling of wages during the New deal and World War Two."
Between 1980 and 1988 the top tax rate on unearned income dropped from 70% to 28%. Just between 1984 and 1988, the net wealth of Forbes 400 richest Americans roughly doubled. Also the percentage of the total tax revenues to federal spending coming from corporate income tax fell from 26.9% to 7.7%. At the same time the amount workers paid in payroll taxes increased from 11.5% to 29.2%.
Big Business - A Tiny Privileged Elite
Kevin Philips, a former Republican political analyst, and a former member of the Wall Street Journal's five-person panel of political experts spells out the nature of this top 1% of US society in his book, Boiling Point. He says, they own "about one-half of the individually owned corporate stock, two-thirds of the bonds, an even higher percentage of the municipal bonds, and roughly 45 percent of the nonresidential real estate!" The top layer of this 1% effectively constitute the owners of the big corporations, i.e. the capitalist class.
When the huge concentration of corporate ownership is taken into account, the picture becomes even clearer. 2% of all companies in the US account for nearly 75% of the business in the country. The top 500 industrial corporations, which represent only one-tenth of one percent of this elite 2%, control over two-thirds of the business resources, employ two-thirds of the business resources, employ two-thirds of the industrial workers, account for 60% of the sales, and collect 70% of the profits. The majority of these corporations are under the sway of a tiny number of huge financial corporations. In the 1930s, it was estimated that 60 families, through their interlocking shareholdings controlled the commanding heights of the economy. It can be seen that a similar situation still exists today.
How Big Business Sells its Policies
The policies of the last 20 years have been directed by the interests of big business. However, if they had announced their plans in advance, it would have sparked a revolution similar to the Boston Tea-party of 1773. Instead they have had to camouflage the nature of the policies they introduced.
Business Week in 1974 clearly spelled out the process: "It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow - the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more ... Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept this reality. (October 12, 1974 p. 120)
This 'selling job' was done by the mass media. In a recent book The Media Monopoly, it was calculated that although there are 1,700 newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 9,000 radio and 1,000 television stations, 2,500 book publishers and 7 movie studios in the US. Most of these are owned by a mere 50 corporations. Almost half of these corporations are among the top 500 corporations in the country. The owners of these corporations could fit in one room. With the present avalanche of media, cable and phone company mergers, including the merger of Viacom and Paramount, these 50 companies will be reduced to a handful in the coming years. It is these huge media corporations that have presented the false images and "selling job" for this brutal attack on the living standards of the American workers.
At the same time, sitting on the boards of the Universities and Foundations are the directors of the top 500 corporations. In this way they can ensure that the dominant ideas that emanate from these institutions do not expose or question their own role as an elite in US society. Since they are also the major funders for these institutions, they can use this lever to ensure that their views are represented.
These institutions have helped to argue for the philosophy of the last 15 years. The universities glorify the profit motive and praised the accumulation of great wealth as business schools have flourished. Also, the idea of government playing a constructive role in the economy has been increasingly questioned. Junk bond traders like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky were held up as great heroes, while the history of struggles of working people and the idea that there could be an alternative economic system were dropped or relegated to fringe classes; In particular, there has been a vehement assault on the ideas of socialism and Marxism.
Big Business Attacks
It is with these levers of power that big business pushed through its agenda in the last 20 years. These policies were backed up by a shift to the right by the courts and by the National Labor Relation Board. An open offensive was called on union organizing. Big business consistently broke the law by illegally firing workers who looked to organize. One in 20 workers who looked to organize a union through NLRB elections was fired. At the same time, injunctions were issued against any successful picketing. In this way big business looked to weaken the unions through the use of the judges, the courts, the local police force and when necessary the national guard.
An All-sided assault began on wages, health benefits, work rules, safety standards, pensions and the sanctity of the eight-hour day. To back up these policies, social programs were cut and spending on public housing was reduced. The increase in the unemployed and the homeless was then used as a warning to those workers who were considering going out on strike or standing up to this offensive of big business. Big business revived the policy of immediately hiring scabs to break strikes, and employers, using legislation already on the books, began to permanently replace workers who went out on strike. This was accompanied by a systematic attack on gains made by African-Americans and other oppressed minorities, and the use of the press to whip up racist propaganda to create divisions among workers.
The programs that benefit the rich and big business have not been cut. The largest growing item in the budget is the increased interest on the national debt, which costs taxpayers close to $200 billion a year. This spending goes into the pockets of the top corporations and the richest 1% of society. At the same time the bailout of the savings and loans was a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary taxpayers to the top 1% who owned the majority of shares in these institutions. Fortune magazine has calculated that this bailout in the end will cost the American taxpayer $502 billion! Also, there have been no serious cuts in spending on weapons programs, which help to support the huge military-industrial complex corporations.
The Role of the Democratic Party
As these attacks were unleashed, the labor leaders and civil rights leaders have continually attempted to present the Democrats as friends of labor and the specially oppressed minorities. In fact, despite the fact that both political parties have represented the interests of big business, over the last century, a certain division of labor has developed between the parties. This is not because of any fundamental difference between the Democrats and Republicans.
It was to a great extent an accident as to which party would play this role, especially considering that the Democrats were the party of the slave-owners. However, at important periods of time, when conditions deteriorated leading to a mass movement of workers, youth, small farmers or the civil rights movement, it was the Republicans who were in power. The anger swept out the party in power, and put the Democrats into power, who were often then able to gain some credit in the eyes of workers.
Roosevelt and the Democrats in the 1930s
At the turn of the century, the Democrats were able to capture the growing movement of populism. This process was even more developed in the 1930s. Republican President Herbert Hoover was in power when the 1929-33 depression struck. As a result, he was swept from power and replaced by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 elections. It should be noted that Roosevelt did not present his New Deal policies before he was elected. However, once he was elected, he was immediately faced with a collapse of the banking system, and an economy stuck in depression.
In this situation, and facing a rising and increasingly radicalized working class, the more strategic and more farsighted sections of big business realized that certain refinements of the old methods of rule were needed. Through Roosevelt and the Democrats, the policies of the New Deal were initiated. The role Roosevelt played was to appease the movement of the working class - thus saving capitalism from a challenge to the system itself. This was done by creating public work schemes and aiming some conciliatory comments and statements towards the working class.
On occasion, the Roosevelt administration spoke of the right of workers to organize and included a vague statement to this effect in legislation. But these minor concessions were accompanied by repression. The National Guard was used against the labor movement more times under Roosevelt than under any other president. The first engagement of US troops in the 1940s was against union members in California - not against Japanese or German troops. Workers were shot on picket lines from coast to coast.
The labor leaders, terrified by the radicalized, fighting working class movement below them, seized on Roosevelt's minor concessions and insisted that he was a "friend of labor." With the help of these leaders, the movement towards an independent political party of labor was averted. The American working class was kept within the boundaries of the two parties of big business. The leaders of the Democratic Party reached out to the labor leaders and gave them secondary and minor positions of consultation in their administration. In return, at election time, labor activists were exhorted by their leaders to turn out and work for the Democratic Party.
Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s
In the 1950s the civil rights movement exploded. Republican president Eisenhower was in the White House. The initial response of big business and both parties was to use the police and National Guard to put down the civil rights demonstrations and protests that spread across the South. Democratic administrations in the South launched vicious attacks using water hoses and dogs. However, as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, it became clear that the streets could not be cleared this way. The heroism of the black working class and youth propelled the movement forward. As J. F. Kennedy, the Democrat, replaced Eisenhower as president in 1960, big business became convinced that some reforms had to be made. Once again, it happened to be the Democrats who were in the White House when big business was forced to give reforms by a mass movement.
The Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were passed and the social programs of the so-called Great Society of Johnson were put in place. As Roosevelt had done with the labor leaders in the 1930s, Kennedy and Johnson, using the bait of reforms, reached out to pull in clack leaders inside the Democratic Party. These leaders who would not be contained were repressed or murdered. A section of the black leadership began to be elevated above the conditions of the mass of the black workers and youth by gaining professional positions or by benefiting from small enterprises or businesses. They developed a separate outlook, and they saw the Democratic Party as the instrument through which their interests could be represented. The Democratic Party, which had been the party of the former slave-owners and which contained the most racist and anti-labor big business representatives from the South, was now presented as a friend to blacks as well as a friend to labor.
In this manner, with the help of the reformist labor leaders and a layer of the black leaders, big business managed through a combination of repression and concession, and the use of its two parties, to ride out the challenge of the working class offensive of the 1930s and 1940s and the black revolt of the 1950s and 1960s. However, in the process, one of its political parties, the Democrats, became a target for the demands of labor leaders and a layer of black professional and small business leaders. In this way the pressure of the working class and black population would at times curtail the room to maneuver and flexibility of the Democratic Party in defending big business's interests. This is not to say that the interests of the working class or especially oppressed minorities can ever be represented by the Democrats. Instead, the Democratic Party has certain particular secondary features different from the Republicans, due to the division of labor between these two parties in the past to defend and represent the interests of big business. Henry Ford II put the process very clearly: "We must support the Democrats so we can continue to live like Republicans."
The Republican Party
The Republican Party, also has had to make demagogic appeals to the working class to come to power. The Republicans under Nixon in 1969 were forced to give verbal support for civil rights, a family assistance plan for the poor, federal food stamps and a national health insurance program. Nixon in his campaign stressed his own rags to riches life and attempted to present himself as a spokesman for "forgotten middle class Americans." Nixon, in fact, introduced the federal food stamp program and indexed social security payments to inflation, and was blocked by Congress in his attempt to pass a health care bill.
Anger of Voters in 1990s
After two decades of attacks on living standards and a continual erosion of well-paid full-time jobs with benefits, increased pressure on the job and a crisis enveloping all aspects of life, a mood of anger developed among workers. This anger swept Bush away while Ross Perot, as an independent, captured 19% of the cote in 1992. In 1994, it was the turn of the Democrats to be removed from office. Further, both in 1992 and 1994, polls showed that a majority of eligible voters would support a new political party.
Opinion polls document that the majority of Americans are angrier than any previous generation since the 1930s. In 1964, a mere 29% has said that government was run for the benefit of a few big interests. Following Watergate that surged to 66%, and 70% after disenchantment with the Carter presidency. By 1992 it had reached 80%.
Opinion polls also document a strong feeling that something is seriously wrong with the country, and that voters are looking for fundamental change. An unprecedented number, 65% of the population, believe that "quite a dew" of the people running the government are crooked. In a poll in Fortune magazine, one in three people said that the US would be better off without any millionaires at all!
Crisis of the Political System
Both political parties of big business have been weakened under the impact of the crisis. This has caused increased divisions in the parties. In the Democratic Party, this is reflected in a struggle between the wing of the party that attempts to draw in union leaders and civil rights leaders by promising them some reforms, and the wing that has coalesced around Clinton, the dominant wing at present, which is concerned with proving to big business they are the best party to represent them. In the Republicans, when they needed foot soldiers to get Reagan elected, they encouraged the Moral Majority and evangelical right into the party. Now, this wing has become very string, as shown by their influence in the 1994 elections. The scene is now set for a struggle between the more traditional big business foundations of the party, and the Christian right for control of the presidential candidate and the future direction of the party.
Regardless of which wings dominate these parties at different times, they cannot represent the interests of workers. What these internal divisions do show is the pressure put on them by the growing anger of the voters, as they continue to push through the unpopular policies demanded by their sponsors, big business, while at the same time they try to get re-elected by the public again.
What is being prepared is conditions to build a new political party to represent workers. If such a party had existed before the last elections, the anger of workers would have had a vehicle to represent it. If leaders of organized labor committed to fight to reverse the attacks on the working class and to make the rich and big business pay for the crisis, then the election results would have been very different. A Labor Party could well have been built, and elected into power.
Class Polarization
Faced with the failure of the Democrats to deliver any goods in this new economic climate, increased class polarization is developing across the country. The NAFTA debate was a rude awakening for millions of workers about the role of Clinton and the Democrats. The American public faced a barrage of propaganda unseen in recent years and saw big business pull in the Democrats to push through their policies over the opposition of the majority of the population. In this process, with Clinton promising to protect Republicans from the wrath of the electorate, especially from labor, if they voted for NAFTA, the special role that the Democrats play in defending the interests of corporate America was exposed to millions of workers. The working class had been given a very sharp lesson in the nature of politics and mass media in the US, and how important their concerns are when they go up against those of the top corporations.
Cuts in Services - Increase in Taxes for Workers
The Reagan and Bush Administrations cut back federal funding given to local government. A study by the US Conference of Mayors showed that Washington's contributions to US cities has dropped between 64% between 1980 and 1990. This has meant less money to be spent on education, mass transit, Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and other key social service programs. Federal spending on these programs fell from 22.6% of the federal budget to only 14.7% in 1987. Therefore to maintain existing programs, let alone deal with the increased needs of the poor, state and local government have either had to raise taxes, or cut social programs, education and spending on the infrastructure.
The tax burden at a local level favors the rich. The richest 1% pay only 7.6% of their income in local and state taxes, compared to 10% for the working class and 14.8% for the poor. This was at a time when real inflation, i.e. on the day to day necessities of life, was running at two to three times the level specifies in the Consumer Price Index. Once again it was the working class who paid for the cuts in the services they should receive.
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The Working Class
Two Struggle to Build its Own Political Party
"The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party." — Frederick Engels, collaborator with Karl Marx writing about the US in 1866.
Throughout the history of the United States, a struggle has raged between the owners of the wealth, and the people who produce the wealth. This history of working class struggle has been hidden from the eyes of workers.
Every gain that has been won by any section of workers has been through their own struggle. The right to a public education, the ending of child labor, the right to organize, the 8-hour day, unemployment benefits, the right to healthcare at work or through federal programs, pensions, the right to abortion, the ending of slavery, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s which defeated the Jim Crow racist laws in the South, and the ending of the Vietnam war were all achieved through struggle.
These victories were won by the working class organizing independently, and by demonstrations on the streets. Also, the gains won by workers outside unions were only conceded because of the victories won by organized labor. It was the fear of employers that "their" workers would also organize that led them to grant concessions. These gains were won only after the most determined and often vicious resistance by big business. They have been won only because the working class has displayed superior cohesion, stamina and strength to that of the corporations.
The US was a country born out of revolution and struggle, with the defeat of the British colonial power in the War for Independence and in the Civil War. In these struggles workers and small farmers played an important role in fighting to end foreign oppression and to join ranks with blacks in the South to end slavery. Since the Civil War the main struggle has been between big business who own the workplaces and the workers and small farmers who have struggled for a decent life.
The Robber Barons and the Republicans and Democrats
After the Civil War, US capitalism saw a period of massive growth and dynamism. Between 1860 and 1894, the US jumped from fourth place to first place in the world in the production of goods. During this period, a handful of fabulously wealthy individuals, known as the robber barons, concentrated into their hands the major sections of industry and banking, and created huge monopolies. By the turn of the century, 60 of the wealthiest families, including the Morgans and Rockefellers, came to constitute the ruling class of this country, controlling the commanding heights of the economy, and becoming more powerful than countries and governments.
To defend their interests, these robber barons, allied with the rest of the big business, have funded the two big business political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats to defend their interests. The Democratic Party had previously been the political party of the slave-owners, but was now being reconstituted as a second party of big business. These two parties passed laws, backed up by the courts and the police, to drive down the living standards of workers and their families.
Working-Class Organizations
History shows that workers, faced with these attacks, have moved to organize. Not only have they organized unions to win and defend economic gains, but they have also attempted time and again to organize their own political parties to secure a change in government to improve their conditions.
The first national union, the National Labor Union was formed in 1866. The National Labor Union opened its door to all workers, irrespective of color or sex, and demanded that the employers "do justice to women by paying them equal wages for equal work." At the same time it came out in support of independent political action: "The time has arrived when the industrious classes should cut themselves aloof from party ties and predilections and organize themselves into a National Labor Party." Labor Parties were organized and ran candidates during the 1860s and 1870s at a local and state level, and gained support from workers, despite intimidation from the employers.
From the 1860s onward, there was also an important socialist trend in the labor movement. The socialist message, that the fight for better conditions must be linked to creating a new workers' society, was accepted by many as the only way that conditions of workers could be improved. William Sylvis, the founder and leader of the National Labor Union, was in communication with Karl Marx, the leader of the international trade union movement, who played a leading role in founding the International Workingmen's Association to unite working class organizations in different countries. The American section of the International Workingmen's Association was founded in 1867 and played an important role uniting workers in struggle, and linking the struggle of organized labor with those of the unemployed.
New York Labor Party Movement of 1886
The events of 1886 demonstrated the growing power of the working class in its struggle for better conditions. Out of the eight-hour day movement during the recession of 1884, and subsequent Haymarket Massacre, where the workers' leaders in Chicago were framed up, the working class moved into action by building labor parties.
The Labor Party movement began in New York City with the arrest of union leaders. Motions were put to the Central Labor Union, and the New York Labor Party was formed. It nominated Henry George as Labor Party candidate for mayor of New York City.
The platform of the Labor Party announced that the Labor Party movement aimed "at the abolition of the system which makes such beneficial inventions as the railroad and telegraph as a means for the oppression of the people, and the aggrandizement of an aristocracy of wealth and power." Its demands included: an end to property qualifications for jurors, the enforcement of sanitary inspection of buildings, the abolition of contract labor in public works, the granting of equal pay for equal work without distinction of sex in public employment, and the municipal ownership and operation of the means of transportation.
In a period of seven weeks before the election labor clubs were built across the city of New York. Ethnic labor clubs were created to build support in different neighborhoods. Union locals emptied their coffers to help finance the campaign. Such was the fear of big business in the city, that the bosses set up their own bogus Labor Party, which failed to fool anyone. In the end, in a result considered fraudulent by many workers, Labor candidate George came second, defeating the Democratic Party. Veteran labor journalist John Swinton described the New York campaign in the following terms: "The campaign was by all odds the most formidable demonstration yet by the forces of organized labor in the United States."
Even more impressively, the movement spread across the entire country like wildfire. Congressional candidates were run in 14 states, and for numerous local elections. The Labor candidate for mayor won 27% of the vote in Chicago. State senators, congressmen and assemblymen were elected in a number of areas, including the mayor of Milwaukee. Although this movement was not able to sustain itself, it clearly showed the support labor candidates could win.
Economic Crisis Sparks Movement of Workers
The struggle to form unions and political parties was continually interrupted by changes in the economic conditions. While the economy has tended to go forward and conditions in the workplace have improved, then workers have seen less need to be active in organizations and the leadership of the unions has become ties into a close relationship with the employers. As soon as the economy has collapsed, then workers have found themselves unprotected from employers' attacks. Workers have found that their leadership has become an obstacle to fighting the bosses. With conditions worsening, this has propelled workers into action and to transform their organizations.
The economic depressions of 1873, 1884, 1893, 1906 and 1929 all had a drastic effect on workers' living standards. Unemployment exploded, wages were cut, and labor suffered defeats. However, in each case the labor movement rose to new heights of organization and struggle.
It has been out of such experiences that workers have then also moved towards independent political action and build labor parties. At the height of this movement the ideas of socialism, i.e. workers taking over the government and building a new society, has gained increased support. For example, in the aftermath of the 1886 events, Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backwards, which described how a socialist society might look, sold one million copies in a few short years. Many of the leaders of the union movement at this time were socialists. Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) at that time saw the goal of the labor movement as the "emancipation of labor."
But, with US capitalism in a period of overall growth in this period, the economic depressions have been followed by new economic upturns. This led to a dipping in the mood for political action. With the bosses making profits, and the threat of lay-offs receding, the movement has often spurted forward on the economic plain with strikes and increased organization. However, because of the conditions of the time, and the fact that the pioneers of the labor movement came out of the elemental struggles of the time, the leaders of these movements very often embraced the goals of independent political action and socialism.
Turn to Business Unionism
The events of 1893 and 1894 were a turning point for US labor. The 1893 depression threw one half of the AFL's members out of their jobs. In 1894, the American Railway Union (ARU) under the leadership of Eugene Debs organized all railroad workers into one union and was forces to strike. Railroads were shut across the country. Big business responded with severe repression, mobilizing goons, special deputies and arresting the leaders. This posed before the leaders of the AFL the need to shut down all labor in Chicago to win the strike. However, Gompers, head of the AFL, refused, and the ARU strike was defeated.
These events had posed before the AFL leaders the option of rallying all of the working class to confront big business to challenge for political power, or to accept the right of big business to control politics and to keep the majority of workers out of the unions. The leadership retreated. It decided that the US working class should play a subsidiary role to US big business, and developed the philosophy of 'pure and simple' unionism.
This issue has been debated at the 1983 convention where delegates voted by 2,244 to 67 to insert a socialist clause into the program of the AFL in 1893, calling for the "collective ownership of all the means of production and consumption." But, in 1894, by a bureaucratic trick, Gompers got this removed. In recognition of this event, the Wall Street Journal, in its recent centennial edition had an article entitled "Events that helped shape the country." One of its entries stated that in the year 1894, "The AFL led by Samuel Gompers votes against adopting socialist reform programs... Gompers believes that US labor should work with capitalism, not against it."
The consequences have been a disaster for workers. The AFL restricted itself to organizing only skilled workers into craft unions. All attempts to organize the overwhelming mass of laborers was rejected. Out of this, a racial wall was created which excluded black workers. This was the beginning of 'business unionism,' where the labor leaders accepts that what is good for business and capitalism is also good for labor, since an expanding capitalist economy will provide the basis for the existing union members to benefit.
From this time on the AFL leadership's policy was to keep the AFL to a restricted group of skilled workers until the mass movement of workers in the 1930s broke the unions open to unskilled workers. Importantly, the AFL leadership determinedly opposed any moves to build a workers' political party. These policies also led toe labor leadership to support the foreign interventions of US big business, including entry into two wars, invasions of countries in Central America, and the US wars in Korea and Vietnam, because it was in the interest of US big business and capitalism.
Workers Build New Political and Industrial Organizations
Workers looked for other avenues to take their struggles forward. In 1901 the Socialist Party was formed. Eugene Debs, who had gained national support from workers for his fighting stand during the Pullman strike, ran as a Socialist Candidate for president in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920. During this time, especially after the recession of 1906, socialism gained wide support with candidates running for many offices, including the election of one Senator. It reached the greatest support in 1912, when the readership of the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, reached one million in 1912, and Eugene Debs won one million votes in his campaign for president.
The words of Eugene Debs still ring true today. In 1900 he boldly stated: "The differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties involves no issue, no principle in which the working class has any interest... Between these parties socialists have no choice, no preference. They are one in their opposition to socialism, that is to say, the emancipation of the working class from wage slavery, and every workingman who has intelligence enough to understand the interest of his class and the nature of the struggle in which it is involved will once and for all sever his relations with both."
In 1905, workers came together to found a new militant labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). This organization fought heroic struggles for workers. The words with which Big Bill Haywood, leader of the Western Federation of Miners, opened the founding convention of the IWW have inspired millions of workers across the generations:
"This is the Continental Congress of the working class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism... The aims of this organization shall be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters."
Labor Party in San Francisco
Workers also repeatedly challenged the policies of the AFL leaders. Labor parties were formed in a number of cities at different times. This movement was carried furthest in San Francisco, where due to the attacks of the employers, the AFL leadership was unable to prevent 300 delegates representing 68 unions forming the Union Labor Party in 1901.
In a thrilling campaign, Eugene Schmitz, president of the Musicians' Union, was elected Labor mayor of San Francisco. With the Union Labor Party in power, the trade union movement in San Francisco experienced a dramatic upsurge. The Union Labor Party refused to allow the police to assist scabs to break strikes. Within one year the union membership doubled, not one major strike had been lost and major gains were won by both skilled and unskilled workers. When the Union Labor Party won again in 1903, the Democrats and Republicans ran a combined candidate in 1905. However, this just galvanized the labor campaign even more. The Coast Seaman's Journal stated: "The issue is: which class shall control, the working class or the business classes represented in the Citizen's Alliance?" The Union Labor Party had its greatest victory and won every position in the 1905 elections. The AFL leadership had to intervene swiftly to prevent a similar development occurring in Los Angeles.
Movement is Delayed
But, despite many promising starts, the movement to build a national labor party was unable to achieve a breakthrough at this time. Despite the harshness and brutality of the conditions and periodic economic depressions, they were always followed by spurts forward in the economy.
By the turn of the century, ascending US capitalism had emerged as the most powerful economy on the planet. The upsurge of the movement between 1894 and 1912 was cut across by US preparation for World War I and the accompanying boom.
This powerful movement of workers, and the growing support for the Socialist Party, forced big business to give important reforms in the areas of child labor, the length of the workweek, public education and democratic election of officials, etc. But they are a fraction of what would have been won if a labor party had been formed. Also, because of big business's monopoly of politics, it could then erode these gains won through struggle by getting its political parties to pass new laws and by using inflation to erode wages.
Immediately after World War I the mass movement exploded forward again. Mass strikes and organizing drives were launched in steel and meatpacking and other industries, including the Seattle general strike. Out of these struggles Eugene Debs from his prison cell where he had been incarcerated for opposing the war, won 900,000 votes for president. Also, in Chicago, the Federation of Labor mobilized their forces and built a labor party which won a quarter of a million votes in 1920.
This movement of 1919-1920 was cut across by the repression of the 1919 steel strike, the Palmer Raids in 1920 and the economic boom of the 1920s. This boom ended with the economic depression of 1929. Union membership declined from 4 million in 1920 to 2.6 million in 1933. But after the shock of the depression and 25% unemployment began to wear off, a few signs of economic growth began to appear. US labor then launched what was to be its greatest offensive and victory.
Industrial Unionsim
Starting with the struggles of the unemployed, society began to polarize. The defeat of Hoover in the 1932 election, and the election of Democrat Roosevelt, increased expectations, as workers flooded into the AFL unions. This initial wave of workers into unions was frustrated by the craft business unionist outlook of the leadership. Pressure from the rank and file found an outlet in three successful strikes in 1934; the Auto Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio, the Teamster general strike in Minneapolis and the San Francisco general strike. These strikes, led by socialists, had built on the traditions of the IWW and mobilized wider layers of workers alongside the unemployed to build powerful force to achieve victories.
This movement inspired workers in other industries, and led to splits in the top AFL leadership. John L. Lewis, leader of the Miners Union, the only industrial union in the US, created the Committee of Industrial Organization to rally workers to industrial unions. However, it was the 44-day sit-down strike at GM in 1936-1937 that finally turned the tide.
A wave of sit-down strikes spread across the country. At its height, half a million workers occupied over 1,000 workplaces throughout the US. The floodgates had been burst open. Victories were won in steel, chemical, rubber and electrical industries. The union movement tripled in size between 1933 and 1938, from 2.6 million to 8.3 million members. By 1946, it had reached 14.6 million. Along with unions came better pay, conditions and rights.
The events of the 1930s had demonstrated the power of the working class. In the face of this movement which threatened to challenge capitalism itself, big business was forced to concede further reforms. The 40-hour workweek, the National Recovery Act (NRA) job programs, the minimum wage and unemployment benefits were only some of the reforms won at this time. The union leaders argued that these reforms showed that Roosevelt was a "friend of labor." But it was the mass radical movement on the streets that threatened to move beyond the system that forced big business, in the guise of the Democratic Party, to retreat.
Independent Political Movements in the 1930s
Once Again, despite the opposition of the leadership who supported the Democrats, there also developed important moves toward independent political action. The combined vote of the Socialist and Communist Parties tripled in 1932 to nearly one million. 100,000 joined the Communist Party. In 1934, socialist writer Upton Sinclair got 38% of the vote running openly as a socialist for Governor of California, on a Democratic ticket. His election was run as a grassroots campaign, and his success was achieved in the face of sabotage by the local Democratic Party whose leaders called for a vote for the Republicans.
By the 1936 election, layers of workers were angry at the attitude of Roosevelt towards labor. In 1935 alone, the National Guard was used 73 times against strikes. At the founding conference of the United Auto Workers, members voted to support a labor party in the 1936 elections. It was only the personal intervention of John L. Lewis that swayed delegates to reverse their decision and give Roosevelt one more term. In New York City the American Labor Party was organized by the union leadership in order to then switch the votes behind Roosevelt.
In 1937, without any political party or union supporting it, an opinion poll showed 21% of the population in favor of a labor party. Due to the pressure, the CIO had to set up the Labor's Non-Partisan League to organize labor's vote. However, it then channeled this mood for independent political action behind the Democrats. In 1940, J. L. Lewis came out against Roosevelt for president. He was to give a radio broadcast a few days later after taking this position. The hope that he would lead the party was so great that 25 to 30 million listeners tuned into his broadcast. In a disastrous decision, he came out in support of the Republicans, and dashed the hopes of millions of workers.
Why a Labor Party Did Not Develop in the 1930s
One essential reason a labor party was not formed was the opposition of the union leadership. Alongside this was the role of the Communist Party, which also opposed the formation of a labor party. Having inherited the best fighters from the Socialist Party and the IWW, and because they had waged important struggles for workers in the 1920s, they were able to win 40% of the leadership of the CIO in 1936. But, in the meantime, the Communist Party had been transformed from a party that fought for workers to a party that followed the line of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, including building an alliance with Roosevelt in an attempt to stop Hitler invading the Soviet Union. Therefore, in the 1930s, the Communist Party systematically worked with the leadership of the unions to oppose a labor party and to corral workers' anger towards the democrats.
But the most important factor which prevented a labor party developing in the 1930s was the strength and position of world dominance of US capitalism, and the enormous reserves it still had. This allowed big business to ride out the storm, by giving temporary reforms to workers. The workers themselves had enormous belief and trust in the new CIO leaders. They did not have the necessary time to develop a new movement to build a labor party.
Before a growing mood for a labor party could then develop, the US began a huge rearmament program in preparation for entry into World War II. The pumping up of public opinion behind the war effort and the creation of millions of jobs cut across the further development of the movement.
Labor in the Postwar Period
With World War II coming to an end the biggest strike wave in US history erupted, with strikes in steel, meatpacking, autos, electrical workers. This was part of an international movement of workers after the war. Big business hoped to break these strikes, and drive labor back to the conditions of the 1920s. But, despite the intervention of the US troops, the traditions of the 1930s were still strong, and labor came out of these strikes with victories. Such was the movement at this time, that US troops stationed overseas demonstrated to be brought back home and sympathized with the strike movement.
During and after the war the issue of a labor party continued to be raised. For example, in Wayne County in 1943 and in Detroit in 1944 labor movement bodies voted to set up labor and labor-farmer parties. However, the labor leadership blocked this move for a labor party.
A great example of the way forward was shown when the Labor Party was elected to power in Britain in 1945. Under the pressure of the working class, the Labor Party implemented a free healthcare system and nationally guaranteed pensions to benefit the whole working class. This greatly increased the unity and strength of the working class in Britain. Important sections of the economy were also brought into public ownership to safeguard jobs and services.
The US labor leaders turned their back on this process and decided instead to push for gains in healthcare and pensions to be tied to the union contract, and to continue to rely on the goodwill of the Democrats and Republicans. This decision not only weakened the militancy of workers who would face loss of healthcare and pensions if they were fired or laid-off, it also cut organized labor off from the rest of the working class and the unemployed who were left without healthcare and pensions.
Through their control of the two major parties, big business used its monopoly of politics to pass laws to restrict the ability of labor to strike, and build support from other unions. The Taft-Hartley Act and other anti-union legislation was passed by a majority of both Democrats and Republicans. The rights that workers had won through struggle on the picket line and the streets were diluted on the political arena. At the same time a McCarthyist red-scare was launched at activists to erase the traditions of the 1930s and to discredit the ideas of socialism. The existence of the totalitarian dictatorship of Stalinism in the Soviet Union made it easier for McCarthy's attacks to gain support.
Postwar Economic Upswing
The 1950s and 1960s saw major strikes in auto, steel and other industries. Workers made major gains in their contracts. This period also was the period of the postwar economic upswing, the most dramatic economic boom in the history of capitalism. This combination of the economic boom and the strength of the union movement coming out of the 1930s and 1940s allowed workers to make major gains. By 1972, US workers had the highest living standards in the world.
During the years of the postwar upswing it became possible for a large layer of working people to see their living standards improve, put their kids through college, have regular vacations and have some security in their lives. Workers favorably compared conditions of the 1950s and 1960s to those of the depression of the 1930s.
However, large sections of workers were left behind. The 1950s and 1960s saw the heroic struggle of the black population who faced the worst economic conditions and the Jim Crow racist laws in the South. The civil rights movement exploded in the South and was followed by major struggles and riots by black youth and workers in the North. Then, in the 1960s, the movement against US intervention in Vietnam exploded. Also, at this time women across America moved into struggle to demand equal rights. All of these struggles achieved major gains for workers and youth. The economic upswing made it possible for these gains to be extracted from big business.
This period of the postwar upswing strengthened the idea of the American dream. Each generation was expected to do better than the last. The idea was put across that the US society was in some way 'exceptional'. It was held up as a shining example of democratic achievement under capitalism. This was also a period when both political parties were able to gain support from a large layer of workers. Despite the movements during this period, the continuing strength of the economy allowed these movements to be contained within the political system.
The gains made by workers greatly increased the confidence of US workers. Workers have come to expect certain rights, and to expect a decent life. These raised expectations will make it far more difficult for the employers to take them away in the coming years. This increased confidence and expectation of the working class is an important gain from the last 40 years.
Increased Illusions
The postwar economic upswing of 1950-75 also increased the illusions among labor leaders in the ability of US capitalism and the two major parties to deliver the goods. During this time all that seemed necessary was to meet with the boss, and a deal could be made. The threat of a strike, or at times a short strike, was all that was needed often to win reforms. In these years the union leadership pulled closer to management, and espoused outright support for capitalism. As Meany, leader of the newly merged AFL-CIO stated in 1955: "We believe in the American profit system." At the same time the militant traditions of the 1930s were buries.
Despite the gains won at this time, the refusal of the labor leaders to build a labor party and fight for the wider concerns of workers and youth, including minorities and youth, and prevented the working class from making much greater gains. This can be seen in the fact that there is no decent healthcare system, nationally guaranteed pensions and the more generous form of unemployment insurance that have been won by workers who built their own political parties in Europe, Canada and Australia. As a result, the labor movement is not seen by many workers as fighting on their side. It is seen by many workers and youth as a single issue group interested only in the protection of its own members. This weakened the cohesion of workers as big business begun its attacks.
Labor in the 1980s and 1990s
With the postwar economic upswing coming to an end in 1975, big business launched a systematic assault on all the gains of the past 40 years. The union leadership has been caught totally off-guard. They consider it to be a misunderstanding, and are desperate to prove that labor is only asking for a fair-day's-pay for a fair-day's-work. However, with their profits on the line, big business is not interested in making friendly deals. They are looking to drive conditions back to those of the 1920s.
Today the press is filled with reports from experts from the universities and from big business saying that the labor movement is a relic from the past. But, despite a fall in the percentage of workers in unions to 16% of the population, this decline is not because workers have left unions. It is mainly due to mass lay-offs in auto, steel etc., and by the growth of the non-union workforce, particularly in the service sector.
In fact, the 1980s saw a great increase in the number of service and public workers joining the unions, especially women workers. The unions today, despite the huge number of unorganized workers, have a larger proportion of blacks, latinos and women than ever in its history.
Bitter Struggles in the 1980s
Workers have responded to these attacks by moving into struggle. School students, college students and teachers have walked out over school cutbacks and communities have demonstrated against increased violence and racism. Workers at Caterpillar, Greyhound, Eastern, Hormel and TWA, teachers, public sector, telecommunications and hospital workers, have been forced out on strike. Massive demonstrations for jobs, for the right to abortion, against discrimination based on race or sexual orientation have been organized across the country.
Not one major strike has been lost due to the failure of workers to support the struggle. More and more, workers who went on strike faced the terrorism of the bosses. Workers who had given the best years of their lives to their jobs, were replaced by scabs. Injunctions were enacted immediately, and picket lines were restricted. Workers who looked to organize were fired, and the NLRB backed up management in the majority of its decisions. Workers still went out on strike to defend their future and their dignity, despite the threat that they would loose their jobs, homes and everything they had won during their lives. This was particularly the case for workers at Greyhound who led two heroic struggles.
The real reason for the setbacks and defeats suffered in the last 10 to 15 years, and reduction in the number of strikes, has been the failure of the union leadership to lead a successful struggle. This leadership has turned to the right by accepting concessions, tied its fortunes to the Democrats and failed to link up the struggles of different sections of workers. If improvements could be won in conditions of depression in the 1930s, then the attacks of the 1980s, when the unions were far more powerful, could have been repulsed. The leadership of the labor union failed to comprehend the nature of these attacks and to organize a successful struggle by linking these struggles together around a fighting program.
Where a more fighting leadership has been present, gains have been made, even if they were temporary. Examples include: Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles, the dry-wallers in California, teachers in Chicago, Pittston miners, Teamsters in Pittsburgh, drivers in the 1994 one-day strike at UPS, students in 1989 in New "York City, protesters mobilizing in the streets to keep abortion clinics open.
To make gains today three actions are necessary. The leadership must mobilize the membership. A program must be developed to mobilize the rest of the working class, and the laws of the employers must be challenged. The gains made in these recent struggles have been because at least one of these three elements has been present. The Teamster strikes at the Pittsburgh Press and at UPS were successful because the injunctions were ignored. When a fighting lead has been given, workers have responded enthusiastically.
*****
New Challenges in the '90s
"We understand that unless we organize a party grounded in the trade union movement around issues that matter to most working people, we won't be able to seriously influence the resolution of issues that our members, other working people and millions of others care about most." — Bob Wages, Secretary-Treasurer of Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, which supports the building of a labor party and supports Labor Party Advocates.
Today, the working class is numerically more powerful than ever. The great mass of small farmers and shopkeepers have dwindled to a tiny proportion of society, gobbled up by big agribusiness companies and giant retail outlets like Wal-Mart. Into the workforce have come millions of working women who have left the isolation of their homes and emerges as a strong force to advance the interests of the working class. Thus, today, over 110 million people gain their primary means of subsistence by receiving a paycheck for a living. If you take their families, the working class is the overwhelming majority of the population.
The US working class produces the food the raw materials, the steel, the automobiles and all the major products in the US. It also drives the buses, unloads the ships, tends the sick, teaches the young and does the day-to-day running of the government. Without our labor, nothing would move. Also, many of other sections of society, small farmers and the self-employed live similar lives and have similar concerns to those of the working class. This is the strength of the working class.
Anger at conditions on the job has already led to increasing success in union organizing. In 1993 and 1994, for the first time in over a decade, there was a net increase of over 400,000 in union members. The potential support for unions is shown in a recent poll which showed that 75% of the population believe labor unions improve wages and conditions. At a certain point the present mood will break through with important victories, preparing a new movement of tens of millions of workers into the unions.
Unlike in the past, this time the movement for a labor party will be carried through to completion in the period coming up. This is due to the deep crisis of American and world capitalism. Workers will not be able to solve their struggles on the job and through unions alone. It is only by moving onto the political arena of struggle and ultimately a workers' government that any major problems can be solved.
No Escape From the Crisis
For the first time in US history, there is no escape for workers by moving West. In the past, this was an escape valve for growing social and political pressure. Now, California can no longer offer the hope of wealth and prosperity that it did in the past. In fact, California is going through its deepest crisis. Due to mass layoffs, and the economic crisis, in 1992m for the first time in history, more people left California than entered it.
Also, in the past, American capitalism had been able to overcome its political crises through economic growth. This was due to the relative health and strength of US capitalism. The period when US capitalism was a youthful and growing economic system is long gone. The period from 1930 to 1970 when the US was at the peak of its power is also gone. Today the US is no longer the absolute dominant world power, and has to compete fiercely even to defend its home markets from its rivals' products. It is dragged down by a huge budget deficit, a record trade deficit and an exploding national debt.
In his book, Boiling Point, Kevin Philips describes the particular features of the decline of the United States, and compares it with the decline of precious world powers like the Spanish and British Empires of previous centuries. He concludes: "Polarization and anger among ordinary citizens of precious great economic powers who saw themselves losing ground led to food and tax riots and finally revolution in eighteenth century Holland, and then, in early-twentieth-century Britain, to rapid gains for the Labor Party, with its blueprints for class warfare, socialism and the expansion of the welfare state."
Since the collapse of the postwar economic upswing in 1975, the world economy has entered a period of crisis and stagnation, as the level of economic growth has declined around the world.
The Democratic administration of Carter began to implement this program during the late 1970s. It deregulated trucking and allowed the increase in inflation to erode the value of wages. It also began to cut social programs and increase spending on the military. During the years Carter was in office, prices rose 41% and profits rose 54.6%, while wages only rose 31%. During his term in office an offensive began on union activists, with 15,000 workers being illegally fired for union activity in 1980. The concessionary movement in labor contracts also began at this time. Not one of labor's priority legislation was passed under Jimmy Carter.
Growth Rates of Top 7 Capitalist Countries:
1960s
4.8%
1970s
3.3%
1980s
2.6%
1990-1992
1.3%
1993
1.1%
US Growth in Real Average Annual GNP:
1940s
4.3%
1950s
3.2%
1960s
3.9%
1970s
2.8%
1980s
2.6%
The growth level of 2.6% in the 1980s was only possible because the whole of US society went into debt. This cannot be sustained in the 1990s. In fact, it is a huge drag on the economy. In fact, the forecast for growth in the 1990s by Merrill Lynch is 2% - the lowest since the depression decade of the 1930s, and approximately half that of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
Time magazine stated in November 1986: "It is the middle class whose values and ambitions set the tone for the country. Without it the US could become a house divided in which middle Americans would no longer serve as a powerful voice for political compromise." These are the conditions that will force US workers to struggle to transform the unions and build a mass labor party in the 1990s/
The implications of this were drawn by Dan Lacer, editor of Workplace Trends, clearly lays out the present situation. "This is not just a recession. This is the end of a 40-year boom. Everything we consider to be a normal workplace relationship is not - it is a postwar boom relationship."
Increased Support for a Labor Party
Once again, US society is moving into crisis. A deep class polarization is developing as workers see their living standards in decline, while the rich line their pockets. Now once again this process is being repeated. Under the impact of the growing crisis, and failure of the Democrats, support for a union-based labor party is growing at all levels of the labor movement.
The process is similar to how developments occurred in the past. Whenever the economy has moved into crisis, class polarization develops and workers move into struggle on the issues of jobs, conditions and wages. Out of their experiences of these struggles, workers have also begun to build an independent political alternative - a labor party.
Today, even before a mass movement of workers and youth has developed, there is growing consciousness about the need for a labor party. At the end of the 1980s, Tony Mazzochi, then Secretary Treasurer of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union moved to form Labor Party Advocates (LPA). LPA is not a labor party; it is an organization committed to building a labor party. In a number of polls in union locals run by the LPS, in almost every case there has been more support for a labor party than the Democrats or Republicans.
Beginning in the fall of 1993, the San Francisco and Alameda Labor Councils voted overwhelmingly to support Labor Party Advocates, and to build a California Labor Party. The idea of a labor party gained even more support after the NAFTA "debate". The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union (OCAW), the United Electrical Union (UE) and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWE) now support LPA, with the OCAW having transferred its Political Action Committee money to LPA.
Other labor leaders have begun to question the role of the Democrats. Ron Carey, leader of the Teamsters, addressing Bill Clinton immediately after the passing of NAFTA, said: "You will have to pay for this... We will develop political alternatives for 1994 and 1996 so that working people do not have to choose between the lesser of two evils." This is part of a process of increased debate and division at the top of the AFL-CIO, where leaders of important unions like SEIU, Teamsters, CWA, mineworkers (UMWA) and other unions are beginning to question the present failed policies of the AFL-CIO leadership, and are demanding more aggressive policies in relation to strike support and organizing the unorganized. This is a reflection of increased anger among the rank and file, and the demand that the unions organize a serious fight-back.
Workers Need a Labor Party
In the present situation, the leadership of the AFL-CIO have the responsibility to call a conference of delegates from unions, union locals, community organizations, youth, student and civil rights organizations across the country to set up such a party. This would trigger an overwhelming response from workers inside and outside the unions. Such a conference could draw up a comprehensive program which would attract support from workers and youth across the country.
The creation of a labor party in the US would be an event of world significance, and would transform politics in the United States. It would give workers the feeling of being part of a class - the working class. Workers could then see that they have interests separate from big business on every major issue that faces America. The lack of a strong feeling of class has enormously weakened US workers and allowed big business to divide it into 'interest groups'. A labor party would be a huge step forward towards the development of a clear and strong class-consciousness among workers in the US.
The building of their own political party, despite the failure of their leadership, has been the key event in raising the class-consciousness and increasing the power and cohesion of the working class in every other country. The same would be the case here. The labor party would inject into day-to-day life a political outlook that clearly and sharply defends the needs of workers, and exposes the interests of big business.
The creation of a labor party would be a major blow to racism and other reactionary ideas, and would build unity among workers. Huge support would develop among the blacks, latinos and other oppressed minorities. Big business has systematically used racism to drive down the living standards of black, latino and other oppressed minorities and to divide the working class. The creation of a labor party would unite workers from all backgrounds, all races, all sexes, all ages and all religions.
At present the majority of workers are outside the unions. By building a labor party that this section of workers can participate in the struggle of the workers against big business, and thus be pulled over more decisively onto the side of the organized working class.
Through the creation of a strong labor press and labor cable TV channels, the propaganda of big business could be exposed as serving the interests of a tiny minority. By explaining how big business has caused the problems of all workers, the labor party would be able to raise money and build support for the struggles of all sections of workers. Workers forced out on struggle would no longer be isolated from the rest of the rest of the working class in the same way as in the past.
Just as the formation of a labor party would strengthen the working class in its struggle with big business, it will create a massive shift in the balance of class forces in the US in favor of the working class. It would force big business to grant more reforms, because of its fear that a labor party would grow. The formation of a labor party would win more concrete gains for workers than all the attempts of the past to get the Democrats to pass legislation to benefit workers. This has been the experience of workers in other countries, for example in Canada, where important gains have been won without their parties coming to power. This has won a shorter workweek, universal healthcare system, increased protection on the job, improved unemployment benefits, etc.
Labor Party Advocates
As explained, what is necessary to create a labor party is for the leadership of the AFL-CIO international unions to break from supporting the Democrats and put all their resources behind building a labor party. However, Lane Kirkland and the majority of the other leaders of the AFL-CIO continue to support the Democrats. This has meant that the movement for a labor party has had to come from different forces of the labor movement.
This growing mood for a labor party has crystallized around the Labor Party Advocates, LPA. For the first time in many decades an organization has emerged rooted in the working class that supports a labor party. Labor Party Advocates has set the fall of 1995 or spring of 1996 as a date to hold a conference to form a labor party. All workers should get involved to ensure that this comes to fruition and is a great success.
LPA is not yet a labor party. It is an "organizing committee" for a labor party. The process of building a labor party will only be completed when decisive sections of the labor movement break from supporting the Democrats and put their resources behind labor candidates and a labor party.
It is essential that LPA continually pressures the union leadership to take the decisive step and break from the Democrats and build a labor party on a national level. At the same time LPA must use its resources and mobilize its members to bring the idea of a labor party to every union local and every meeting of labor. It must mobilize the union membership to pressure the union leadership to build a labor party.
The idea of a labor party must be taken into the workplaces, unions, communities and schools of America. All money should be cut off from the Democrats. When a labor party is created, those organizations should be asked to support the labor party. Labor party campaigns must be taken into the union locals to get these bodies to support LPA and a labor party.
Bob Wages, leader of the OCAW explains the support that exists for a labor party among the rank and file: "I have not been one place in this country that the rank and file aren't ready to get with it. We have to get the rank and file regardless of what the leadership does."
It is essential that labor also runs labor candidates in this present period of anger at the established political parties. The likes of Ross Perot, David Duke and Oliver North must not be allowed to fill the political vacuum. The disastrous policies of the Democrats and Republicans must be challenged in every possible arena. The 19 million who voted for Ross Perot demonstrates the weakness of the two parties. Labor candidates can score spectacular successes, and thereby get the attention of workers across the country. The success of Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist congressman from Vermont, who in subsequent elections has increased his majority, demonstrates clearly what can be achieved.
At this stage, LPA has decided not to run candidates and not to develop a program. If this policy continues, a great opportunity will be missed, and it will make it much more difficult to build support for labor party among workers. It is undoubtedly the case that a number of union activists and workers will be ready to support and campaign for labor candidates, if a lead is given from the top.
In the run up to the 1996 elections, LPA should continually call on the AFL-CIO to run labor candidates and to support labor candidates that do run. At the same time, where support exists for running a candidate, LPA should call on its members to take action to move their union locals and labor councils to set up labor electoral committees. Where these are substantial enough, then they should run labor candidates in the November elections.
Need for a Program
For LPA to grow in the short term, it is essential that it have a program which can attract workers to join it. Of course, the full program of LPA would not be adopted until their convention. However, the OCAW has developed a minimum program of demands which LPA has publicized. Adopting such a program would not cut across the democratic process of adopting a program at the convention. The OCAW program, published in LPA's journal of April 1993 included a massive jobs program, a bill of rights for workers, a Canadian-style single payer national health program, anti-scab legislation, legislation on fair trade and to boost economic growth, the right of workers to refuse to work in an unsafe workplace and a childcare program for families who need it.
At its convention LPA should hammer out a clear program of demands that will address the needs of workers and youth from all backgrounds. It must also lay down a strategy of running candidates in elections. This would give the labor party great publicity and allow it to attract thousands of new members.
Any successful campaign to build a labor party has to reach out and win the confidence of the youth. The youth have no future in the 1990s in this system. They are also, in general, outside the labor movement. Yet, facing a future of low pay, part-time jobs, in a society being wracked by crisis, they will be in the forefront of all struggles for a better society. Every successful movement, from the union struggles of the 1930s to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1950s and 1960s was led by youth. Youth will throw their energy and fighting spirit into the labor party movement if it boldly fights for the issues that affect them, and creates a campaigning youth section.
The conditions and concerns of all racially oppressed minorities must be addressed. A labor party must ruthlessly expose the racist policies of big business and the conditions that have been created in the inner cities. This will attract to it some of its most dedicated activists and a huge amount to support.
Many individuals will point to the fact that third parties in the US have not been successful in the past. However, this is not because they were third parties, but because they were not backed by the power and strength of the organized working class. In the past, third party candidates have gained quite considerable support. However, they have failed to gather the resources to present themselves to win sufficient support to be a credible alternative to the two parties. Also, because they have tended to have a middle class character, they have failed to consistently represent the interests of the working class, and have tended to come into the orbit of the two major parties. A labor party would not be a 'third party'. In a short term its growing strength would force big business to put its resources either behind one party, or to fuse the two parties, in order to compete with an emerging mass labor party.
Transformation of Unions
The role of the unions is key to developing a mass political party that can challenge big business. There are 55,000 union locals, representing over 16 million workers with billions of dollars in their bank accounts. During the 1992 elections the unions donated $42.5 to congressional candidates. This is only a fraction of finances and personal energy that would be put forward to elect a labor party to power. Also, the unions unite workers from every racial and ethnic background, both men and women. There is a strong tradition of democratic activity, voting and decision-making. This is the force that will be crucial to launch a successful political party of the working class which can challenge the resources available to big business.
The question of building a labor party is inseparably linked to transforming the unions. The members who are fighting to regain democratic control of their unions will also tend to be fighting for a labor party. It will become clear that the same trade union leaders who sit and make deals with the employers behind the back of the members, are also meeting with the politicians to make deals there. Thus only by building a labor party will these backroom deals be ended as political decisions would now be overseen by labor party members.
As in the past, the transformation of the unions will occur with explosive speed. At a certain stage, not only will new members surge into the unions, but similar explosive movements as have occurred in the past will transform and retransform the labor movement, including the growth of the emerging labor party.
Historic Opportunity
The potential support for a labor party is huge. Almost one half of the population does not vote. This is mainly because they are totally alienated from politics as they see it. During both the last two elections most people said they voted against candidates rather than for them. In 1992, 63% said they wanted another party. In the run up to the 1992 election, Ross Perot, an unknown billionaire had more support than both major parties in the opinion poles. In that same year, 83% said they believe the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, and the economic system is unfair. Also 55% said they believe millionaires got rich by exploiting others.
This is the basis for mass support for a labor party with a bold and fighting program. Although at first it will be a minority of workers who will support a labor party, activists will find growing support among broad layers of workers and youth. At a certain stage the pressure from below for a labor party will result in a section of the leadership of the AFL-CIO unions puts their resources behind the movement.
For a temporary period, a split may occur at the top of the AFL-CIO, with the top AFL-CIO leadership still clinging onto the Democrats. It is most likely that the AFL-CIO leadership will give at least one more push for the Democrats. The labor party movement may begin in one city, state or region, and then spread to other states. Also, there may be an initial spurt in one area which may die down before reemerging with far greater strength later. Also, initially it may be spearheaded by only one, two or three major unions. However, eventually an unstoppable movement will be built from below. It is then that the AFL-CIO leadership will be forced to break from the Democrats, and put the resources of the unions behind putting the labor party into power.
This is the experience in other countries where labor parties were formed. The Canadian labor party, the New Democratic Party, NDP, emerged in 1961 when the Canadian Labor Congress, (Canadian equivalent of the AFL-CIO) put its resources behind the movement for a labor party that had begun during the 1930s by the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation.
In Britain, before the Labor Party was created by the unions at the turn of the century, its forerunners the Social-Democratic Federation and the Independent Labor Party (ILP) had waged systematic campaigns for the unions to build a labor party. Significantly, it was the election of the first labor candidates in the 1890s which gave a huge boost to the development of the British Labor Party. These candidates broke the tradition of the unions supporting one of the two big business parties, the Liberals.
A newly formed Labor Party, once it had the resources of the union leadership behind it, will very quickly develop a membership of millions, and a thriving energetic youth section. Faced with a hostile big business press, it will develop its own newspapers, magazines, cable channels etc. to put its message across. It will not rely on the political machines of the big business parties. Instead it will be the energy, enthusiasm and financial sacrifice of ordinary workers that will spread the word.
Door to door canvassing, street meetings, public rallies and mass demonstrations would spread the message of the labor party. An energetic and radical youth section would harness the enthusiasm and creativity of the youth. The movement would build on the heroic mass-campaigns of the Socialist Party in the 1910s and 1920s, when Eugene Debs traveled the country on a special train to win votes.
Out of these enthusiastic campaigns, in a short period, the Labor Party will challenge for power. In these campaigns, society will become more polarized into classes. Big business will unleash its gutter press and all its politicians to defeat the monster it sees emerging. However, in its campaigns it will only deepen the class-divide and class understanding of US society. As occurred in San Francisco in the 1904 election, big business may, in desperation, attempt to merge its tow parties together to defeat the Labor Party.
Eventually, workers will see through the various disguises that big business uses to hide its real interests. Its display of smoke and mirrors, its appeals to "democracy" and the "American way", its vicious red-baiting, its use of racism to divide and rule - all these will be unable to disguise the truth. Society is divided into two major classes: a small minority who own the factories, companies and who control the wealth, and the majority of the population whose lives have been made a misery by the actions of this tiny elite. The election of a labor party will start a new chapter in US history.
*****
The Need for Socialist Policies
"American labor has been in continuing conflict with capitalism since the mid-19th century when the Industrial Revolution changed forever the relationship between worker and employer." — Jack Henning, Executive Secretary Treasurer of the California Labor Federation, August 1994.
The plans of a labor government to improve the condition of workers would be met by a huge outcry from big business and its mass media: "You can't do that - because it will lower our profits." "If we can't make a profit, then we will have to lay-off workers or close down." In effect, labor will face a strike of capital. Big business will sabotage every attempt for fundamental change. It will move its money overseas, it will speculate against the US currency, it will sabotage production. All these actions will have one intention - to stop the labor government implementing its policies, and thus compromise it in the eyes of the working class.
The labor government will very quickly be faced with the problem of how to carry out its program at a time of deep crisis of capitalism. The present economic crisis of capitalism stretches around the globe. In Japan, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, the cry is the same - lay off workers, cut wages, compete with the lowest wage economy. In this economic reality, an incoming labor government will not be able to fund the economic policies necessary to transform conditions of workers, and allow big business to make a profit. But if big business is not allowed to make a profit, then it won't invest, it won't leave its capital in the US, and the economy will collapse.
It is in this context that the question of socialist policies and socialism has to be raised. There will be many in the movement, especially among the union leaders, who will consider it a distraction to discuss the ideas of socialism. Unfortunately it is these same leaders who signed concessionary contracts in the 1980s, without considering how this would weaken the unions in the future. This is mainly due to the deep traditions of pragmatism in the US, which leads people to address the immediate problems at hand, without feeling a need to look at the broader picture, and without considering what obstacles might come up along the road. However, the question of socialism, even at this stage of the movement for a labor party, is an issue of central importance if the conditions of working people are to be improved.
The ideas of socialism have been attacked by big business and the mass media uninterruptedly since they were first developed. This is to be expected, since socialists believe that the interests of the majority of the population, the working class, should have preference over the interests of the tiny minority of the capitalist class who presently control power in society.
The ideas of socialism have nothing to do with the former regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which were not socialist. These were planned economies run by a bureaucracy who developed for themselves the lifestyles of millionaires, and destroyed the workers' democracy which began to develop after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Even so, because of the planned economy, production in the Soviet Union grew six and a half times between 1918 and 1965. Eventually, this bureaucratic control strangled the economy and led to the recent move to restore capitalism.
A Socialist Alternative
The basis of socialist ideas is that profit is the unpaid labor of the working class. All the products of society are produced by the labor of workers. Workers produce the wealth. However, ownership of the factories and workplaces in the US is in the hands of big business. The capitalist laws in the US say that because they own the factories, then they can set the rules at the workplace and take the profits. Workers are forced to work for a set wage. However, during each workday, workers produce more value than contained in the wages that are paid them by the bosses. This unpaid labor by workers is called profit, and is expropriated by the capitalist class. This leaves workers producing goods of more value than they receive in wages. Workers are unable to buy back all the goods they produce. Since workers buy over two thirds of all goods in the economy, this inevitably leads to economic recessions and slumps.
The solution of a big business is to act to defend their profits. This means cutting wages, so they get a greater share of the wealth coming out of the factories. But this further cuts into workers' buying power, and leads to a further fall in production lay-offs and depressions. This is the logic of capitalism since its first appearance in the mid-1860s. This failure of the capitalists to systematically reinvest their profits into new factories and new production leads to a deepening economic crisis and throws society into crisis.
It was Karl Marx who first understood this and put forward an alternative. That alternative, socialism, said that since workers produce the wealth, then the workers can run the economy without the capitalist class. He explained that the capitalist class does not contribute anything to production. Far from profit being the motor of the economy, as is repeated every day, the role of the capitalist is destructive, since if he cannot make a profit, he will lay off workers, close plants and destroy good productive factories. This leaves productive workers on the streets unemployed, more metal on the scrap market and the nation a little poorer.
By the working class coming to power and creating a democratic plan of production, the economy can be taken out of the blind and destructive forces of the market and profit, and directed in a way that best meets the needs of the majority. In essence, this is democracy being introduced into the economy. Thus, economic decisions would be made by the majority, for the majority, rather than by the minority in the interests of the minority.
By following socialist policies, a Labor government would have the resources available to it to implement its program, and transform the lives of working people across the nation.
The first task would be to create jobs and to end poverty and unemployment. With socialist policies and a democratic plan of production, a huge program of investment into productive jobs could begin. The 14 million unemployed and under-employed workers could be found jobs on the basis of a massive public works program to rebuild the cities, and provide decent housing and education in the poor rural areas. Those working on these projects could be paid decent living wages and be paid full benefits.
The slums could be replaced by decent integrated housing available to all workers, beginning with those with most need. Roads, schools, hospitals and community centers could be built. In this way conditions in the inner cities would be transformed. As part of this would be a comprehensive program of training to provide all workers with the necessary skills. Jobs would be provided to those living in the neighborhoods, on a first-come-first-serve basis with employment decided by representatives of the unions and the community to put an end to racist hiring practices.
At the same time a national review would take place of the productive resources available to the incoming Labor government. Its policies would then start to reallocate economic resources to provide for the needs of workers in all areas of their lives. The first priority would be to provide food, housing, decent clothing, subsidized heating fuel, furniture, medical help and other important needs. At the same time resources would be put into making education, retraining, culture, music, sports and other important cultural activity available to everyone. Also, by sharing out work, the workweek could be reduced to 30 hours a week and less.
Make Big Business Pay
All of this could be financed out of the profits, rent and interest that goes to the richest 1%, and the huge boost such a program would give to the economy. An enormous amount of new wealth would be created by these programs. This would allow decent wages to be paid to all workers. Through bringing the banks and insurance companies into public ownership, and out of the profit-making business, then financing would be available for those projects that need them, rather than the banks being the personal speculating tool of the top 1%. The fraud that was committed by these individuals in the Savings and Loan scandal, would have been enough to transform the lives of tens of millions of workers.
Women's rights would be truly defended. A free national childcare plan would relieve an enormous stress from families. At present, much of the labor of workers ending up in million-dollar salaries, multiple mansions, expensive yachts, foreign bank accounts and expensive executive privileges. By stopping this gravy train for the rich, all workplaces, community centers and education centers could have child care facilities available free of use.
Enormous resources would be opened up by socialist policies. From 1973 to 1992, the US economy began to slow down due to the crisis of the capitalist system on a world scale. If the 4% a year growth rate that had been achieved between 1960 and 1973 had continued in the years after that, $12.1 trillion extra Gross National Product would have been created. That $12.1 trillion is five times all the budget deficits in the last 15 years! $12.1 trillion is enough to pay 28 million workers a salary of $25,000 a year for each of those 17 years. This is just the amount of money that was wasted by the slowdown in the economy over the last 17 years. It is a fraction of what could be achieved by expanding the productive possibilities in the economy with socialist policies.
Socialist policies would be tailored to creating long-term stability - good long-lasting products, decent housing, etc. There would be no gains to be made from short-term profit, shoddy materials and defective products, which are so profitable under capitalism. Housing would be built to last, and its value would be available to workers for longer. This would easily cover the cost of constructing it.
Racism is a weapon used by big business to divide the working class. The working class would have no need for it and would discard it. Since decent living standards could be won by all, then there would be no privileged elite to defend. Policing would be taken out of the hands of representatives of big business. Labor-community committees would take responsibility for all aspects of public safety and policing. These bodies would be elected and accountable to the population they serve.
Cancel the National Debt
The $5 trillion national debt, which is a threat to the economic livelihood of every worker under capitalism, would be canceled. The National Debt represents Treasury Bonds sold to rich investors, who receive high rates of interest, and whose repayment is guaranteed by the government. Meanwhile we are paying the interest of over $200 billion on this debt through our taxes. However, 95% of these Treasury Bonds are owned by the richest 1% of Americans. A Labor government could cancel this national debt, with no repayment to the rich investors. Those ordinary workers who happened to own Treasury Bonds would of course be reimbursed, or their investment protected.
Big business would cry "thief" at many of these socialist policies. However, a Labor government could simply refresh the memory of workers about who suffered in previous depressions, bank collapses, and the junk bond buy-outs in the 1980s. In the bank crash of 1932, when thousands and thousands of workers stood freezing in line outside banks to try to recover a part of their life savings circled the banks, the rich investors had pulled their money out in advance. In this unnatural disaster, it was the tens of millions of workers and small farmers whose lives were shattered and hopes dashed. A Labor government should point to the super-profits made by the rich in the 1980s, and how the top 1% had been well compensated. However, a Labor government, unlike big business in the 1930s, would guarantee a job for every person in the country who was able to work.
Of course, as a newly elected labor government began to implement its socialist policies, it would immediately face a massive resistance from big business. In this situation, the labor government would need to rally workers and youth to its support. Through mass demonstrations, by introducing workers' democratic control at all levels of society, including the armed forces, then the newly-elected leaders of the working class in Congress and the presidency would not become isolated, but would rest on the huge power and strength of a mobilized and conscious working class - the vast majority of the population. In that way, big business, and the forces it would try to mobilize, would become isolated and defeated. By introducing exchange controls, and taking into public ownership the commanding heights of the economy, any attempt by the rich to send their capital overseas would be stopped.
Expansion of Democracy
A Labor government committed to implementing socialist policies would expand democratic rights into all areas of life. This would include the rights of students, parents and school workers to participate in running the schools and colleges. It would also extend workers democratic control of the workplaces. It would also take the newspapers, TV and radio stations, etc. out of the hands of the tiny minority who presently control them. All areas of media would be open to all groups in society that can prove they have support in society. With today's and tomorrow's technology, the population could easily gain access to all, the information they need to participate in decision-making at all levels of society.
The coming to power of a Labor government committed to socialist policies could transform the lives of every worker, youth and senior citizen. Insecurity, fear, hunger and discrimination based on sex, race or sexual orientation would be ended. The scars inflicted on this generation by the system would not so quickly heal. But future generations would be spared the anguish of the present generation. With democratic accountability, and through the participation of every person in running society, a new nation could be built. This would be possible by adopting socialist policies and building socialism.
However, a labor government that came to power and decided to work within the framework of capitalism would find its hands tied. Big business would attack it everyday, exposing its failures. Without having control of the economic levers of power - the ownership by the rich of the top 500 corporations which dominate the economy - then the Labor government would be unable to implement its policies. In fact, it would have to implement new cuts in an attempt to convince big business to invest their profits.
Such a labor government would disappoint its best supporters, and betray the expectation of workers across the country. In that situation a huge debate would develop in the ranks of the labor party, with the ideas of socialism gaining increased support.
Ideas of Socialism Rooted in the Experience of Workers
The ideas of socialism are not foreign to the working class in the US or other countries. They are the only ideas that consistently meet their real needs. At times of increased crisis and struggle, they have continually reemerged. From their first appearance in the middle of the 1800s, to their growing support in the early 20th century, and to their reemergence in the 1930s, they have appeared in different forms and been represented by different organizations.
More recently, big business whipped up McCarthyism in the early 1950s in an attempt to exterminate the traditions of the 1930s, and the support for the ideas of socialism. However, as the black revolt of the 1950s and 1960s continued to grow and strengthen, new traditions of militancy reemerged. The black revolt was an inspiring struggle by the most oppressed section of US society. They led to new organizations and leaders to emerge who challenged the idea of working with the Democratic Party and who began to challenge capitalism.
Martin Luther King
In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King began to move more clearly to seeing the struggle in terms of a struggle of classes. In 1966 he said, "The movement to date has done much for the middle class but little for the black underclass. We are dealing with class issues. Something is wrong with capitalism ... maybe America must move towards democratic socialism." In August 1967, he said "the movement must change itself from a reform movement to a revolutionary movement. We must see the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are tied together and you cannot get rid of one without getting rid of the other." He also spoke of the need to unite blacks and labor, and he increasingly have his resources to union organizing drives. When he was shot in Memphis he was there helping garbage collection workers who were on strike. He was also in the process of organizing the Poor People's March on Washington.
In 1965, Malcolm X, after his break with the Black Muslims said, "the system in this country cannot produce freedom for an African-American. You cannot have capitalism without racism." Bobby Seale, leader of the Black Panther Party said in 1968., "We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight capitalism with black capitalism, we fight capitalism with socialism... The very nature of the capitalist system is to exploit and enslave people, all people. So we have to progress to a level of socialism to solve these problems." Unfortunately, as these black leaders were moving in the direction of class solidarity and socialism, and becoming more of a threat to big business, the labor leaders failed to support them, and were explaining to their members that their livelihood was best served by staying within the framework of capitalism. This left these militant black leaders more isolated and open to the ferocious repression that came down upon their heads, and the assassination of many of their leaders.
In the 1970s the movement ebbed. During the 1980s conditions for the majority of black workers deteriorated further. Conditions in the inner cities became a nightmare. Black youth saw no jobs and no future. Murder became the number one cause of death for black youth. But, out of the despair of the 1980s, and awakened by the uprising in LA, gang truces have spread across the country. An important layer of youth have turned away from killing other black youth to look for the causes of their problems. They have turned to unity against the oppressive and racist police system, and also are increasingly identifying capitalism as the cause of their problems. Conditions are preparing a new generation to pick up the baton from where it was left by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers of the 1960s.
At a national Gang Peace Summit in 1993 members from 67 different gangs committed themselves to end police brutality, and forge economic, community and spiritual empowerment. One leader defended these steps forward: "We've been accused of trying to build a black army. If trying to raise the consciousness of our brothers and sisters is building a black army, then that's what we're doing." One of the youngest leaders said "We are a new movement. We are a revolution. We will transform this society."
The conditions of crisis in California have seen the California Labor Federation take the lead in giving labor a new direction. Not only did its 1994 convention endorse the idea of a massive program of public works and single payer health insurance, but it also endorsed the idea of a labor party. Executive Treasurer Jack Henning opened the convention with a speech which condemned capitalism and quoted Karl Marx. He explained that "Global unionism is the answer to global capitalism." He went on to say, "We were meant for a higher destiny, we were never meant to be the lieutenants of capitalism."
All the way through the history of the labor movement, there has been a debate between those who want to move towards socialism and those who want to stay within capitalism. In essence it has been a struggle for workers and youth and the organizations of labor, to break away from the ideas and influence of big business and its media and political parties.
Experience of Labor Governments
The experience has been that whenever workers parties have been elected and have decided to stay within the framework of capitalism, then they have failed to transform the lives of workers. This has been the experience of the NDP (Canada's labor party) which came to power in three provinces in the last couple of years. In Ontario, the NDP was elected on a program of reforms. As soon as the NDP came to power, the rich blackmailed the government by threatening to move industry out of the province. The financial markets conspired against the government.
Bob Rae, the leader of the NDP government should have responded by immediately explaining the situation to the people and mobilizing the population around the slogan "Who Rules Ontario - the votes or big business?" On this basis a movement could have been built which would have had enormous support to bring the banks and major industries into public ownership. This would have allowed the government to implement its program of reforms. Instead, he backed down, and began to retreat from his program of reforms. Within a year, he was attacking workers and students in a vain attempt to placate big business to support his policies.
A similar experience happened with the 1974-79 Labor government in Britain and the Socialist government that was elected to power in France in 1981. Because of their retreat in the face of demands of big business, they then disappointed the workers who voted them in, and were subsequently voted out of office.
In the coming period, many in the labor movement who oppose a labor party will attempt to point to these experiences in France, Canada and other countries to argue that it is pointless to build a labor party. However, just the existence of these workers' parties has forces big business to make concessions such as universal healthcare, guaranteed vacation time longer than in the US, etc. The real lesson is that a labor party, once elected, needs to implement socialist policies and transform society in order to finally create a society where a decent life is guaranteed to all workers regardless of age, sex or race.
In the coming struggle to build a labor party, it is essential that a socialist program is developed that will inspire support from all layers of workers, and that can solve our problems.
A Socialist Program
A Guaranteed real, full-time job for all; a $12.50 minimum wage and a $500 per week minimum income.
A 30-hour workweek with no loss of pay.
No cuts in any public services; full funding for all community needs.
Mass pickets and workplace occupations to stop union busting, plant closures, layoffs and win decent contracts.
Organize the unorganized.
Free higher education for all high school graduates.
Free socialized medicine.
End pollution and environmental destruction by big business.
End all forms of racism, sexism, discrimination and division within the working class. Equal pay for equal work.
End attacks on Immigrants.
End police brutality and harassment through labor and community committees to control all aspects of public safety.
All union and public officials to be paid the same as the average worker.
Public ownership of the top 500 corporations and a socialist plan of production under democratic management and control of the workers themselves.
For a society based on the needs of the majority, not the profits of the minority.
For a democratic socialist world to end hunger, war and environmental destruction.
By adopting such a program it will allow a Labor Party to inspire millions of workers that it will deal with the problems they face. It will also prepare workers and youth for the policies that need to be implemented in order to finally end the conditions of insecurity, fear and poverty that are plaguing growing layers of workers in the 1990s.
International Socialism
In coming to power, the working class could reach out to workers across the globe. Workers in the US would end the big-business policies of using foreign policy to suppress and hold down movements of workers in other countries, to ensure higher profits for the US multinational corporations. The technology of the US could help transform these countries if power was in the hands of the workers and small farmers.
A socialist US would be a beacon to workers around the world. It would lead to the largest movement of workers ever, as the chief protector of dictators and generals. US big business would have been removed from power. Dictatorships would fall, and revolutionary movements would erupt around the globe. With economic support cut off from these dictators, they would soon fall. In fact, US workers would look to help all the genuine workers movements around the world to organize their own movements and to come to power.
Instead of the world being a market for exploitation by a handful of huge multinational corporations, under socialism it would be organized to unite the resources and skills of workers. A new world could be built without wars and without starvation and famine. The largest US export to many countries would no longer be military equipment and ammunition, but equipment and skilled manpower to help them build up their economies and transform their lives. A democratic socialist workers government would be able to construct an economy which would maintain the long-term health of the planet.
With a democratic plan of production, and an end to the artificial distortion of national economies in the underdeveloped world because of their plunder for cheap raw materials and foodstuffs by the big corporations, then industry could start to develop around the world. This would transform these national economies. They would then lead to the end of the division of the world into a few rich advanced countries, and the remainder of the world living in abject poverty, not by driving down the wages of workers in the more advanced industrial countries, but by raising up the wages of workers around the world to the highest levels.
With power taken out of the hands of big business the ruling classes around the world the present wave of civil wars, ethnic cleansing and wars would tend to die down. Since there would no longer be a small minority who would gain by exploiting a larger national minority, then democratic decisions could be made about how different communities and nations wish to live. The principle of self-determination would be established as a democratic right for all peoples. With democratic socialist policies, a socialist federation of the world would allow the harmonious development of all the peoples of the world.
Workers Unity Against NAFTA
In 1994, workers and peasants in Mexico, Canada and the United states were joined together under the yoke of NAFTA. US big business saw this treaty as a means to increase its power and privilege. However, every president who originally signed the agreement is no longer in office. The biggest uprising in over 80 years has occurred in Mexico, the peso has collapsed and Mexico has been thrown into crisis. The Tory government has been humiliated by being reduced to only 2 seats in parliament in Canada. In the US, George Bush was defeated and there is growing support for a labor party.
Already the working classes of these countries and internationally have begun to unite to defend their interests. The 1990s will be a decade of unprecedented struggles. Us workers can now strike a blow for workers in all three countries by organizing and building a labor party. The creation of a labor party would be noticed by every workers around the globe. Inside the belly of the beast they would see the emergence of a new ally - the US working class.
Monday, December 26, 2011
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The "Socialist Alternative (CWI)" Press Trotsky's Relevance Today-The Most Modern Ideas – Peter Taaffe
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Trotsky's Relevance Today-The Most Modern Ideas – Peter Taaffe
Sixty years ago this August, Stalin's hit man, Raymond Mercader, murdered the greatest living revolutionary of that time, Leon Trotsky. It was not just the Trotskyists who felt the terrible blow of his death but the working class and labour movement of the whole world. This brain - in a sense, the brain of the working class at that stage - would no longer illuminate and clarify the problems confronting working class movements internationally.
Just to list Trotsky's 'practical achievements' would in itself justify commemorating this anniversary. He was the chairman of the first ever soviet - committee of workers' representatives - in the first Russian revolution between 1905-1906. In 1917 he was the organiser of the October Russian revolution, the greatest single event in human history. He then created and led the Red Army which defeated the twenty-one counter-revolutionary armies of imperialism that attempted to crush the revolution.
But above all, Leon Trotsky was one of the greatest theoreticians of the workers' movement. If Karl Marx was the man of the millennium, then Leon Trotsky was undoubtedly, with Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Rosa Luxemburg, also one of the greatest figures of the millennium, and certainly of the 20th century. His ideas, his method of analysis, and the conclusions drawn from this, are as relevant today as in the past.
The Permanent Revolution
Take Trotsky's famous theory of the permanent revolution, which brilliantly anticipated the class forces involved in the outcome of the Russian revolution. Russia prior to 1917 was a feudal or semi-feudal system which meant virtual slavery for the population. Like India today, the majority of the population were peasants who eked out an existence on narrow parcels of land while the urban working class had no rights and were ruthlessly exploited in rapidly developing industry. Russia had not completed the capitalist democratic revolution as had England, for instance, in the 16th century, and France in the 18th century. The main tasks of this revolution were the elimination of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the land, unification of the country, and the solution of the national question.
It also involved the introduction of democracy, the right to vote, the election of a democratic parliament, a free press, and trade union rights for the working class. Last but not least, the completion of this revolution would free the economy from the domination of imperialism, particularly of Anglo-French imperialism which saw Russia as a virtual colony.
All trends of opinion within the Russian workers' movement saw as the main task the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. However, Lenin and Trotsky differed from the Mensheviks (minority members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour movement) who believed that the task of the working class was to play second fiddle to the so-called liberal capitalists. The Mensheviks considered that the latter were the main agents of the capitalist democratic revolution. Socialism for them was the music of the distant future.
At the same time, the Mensheviks saw the Russian revolution as a purely national event with a limited echo internationally. Yet the late development of the capitalists as a class in Russia, and with it a delay in the capitalist democratic revolution, meant that the weak and feeble Russian capitalists were no longer capable of completing this historic task. As we see in the neo-colonial world today, the capitalists invested in land and the landlords invested in industry. Therefore, any serious attempt at a thoroughgoing land reform challenging the power of the landlords would also come up against the opposition of the capitalists and their political representatives, the liberal capitalist parties. This has been shown not just in Russia but in Germany in the 19th century and very graphically in our time in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
A newly-arisen force in Russia, not present in the English and French revolutions, was the working class, which had developed into a powerful force and, at that time, in a unique fashion. Trotsky pointed out that the liberal bourgeoisie were terrified, quite correctly as events demonstrated, that a struggle against Tsarism and the social foundations upon which it rested, would open the floodgates through which the working class would pour, together with the peasantry, and place on the agenda its own demands. Both Trotsky and Lenin, therefore, argued that it was an alliance of the working class and peasantry which alone could carry through the capitalist democratic revolution.
Lenin expressed this in his formula of the 'democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry'. Trotsky, however, in his theory of the permanent revolution, pointed out that the peasantry historically had never played an independent role. It must be led by one or other of the two great classes in society, the bourgeoisie or the working class. Lenin and Trotsky agreed that the capitalists could not carry through their own revolution. Therefore, Trotsky argued, the working class must assume the leadership of the revolution, drawing behind it the masses in the countryside. Lenin, on the other hand, left open the exact relationship between the peasantry and the working class, in his 'algebraic formula'.
Trotsky argued that because history had shown that the peasantry can never play an independent role the alliance, therefore, must be led by the working class. The combined movement of the working class in the cities, and a mass peasant uprising in the countryside, was envisaged by Trotsky in his theory of permanent revolution as the way the revolution was likely to develop in Russia.
This was confirmed in October 1917. Moreover, there was a complete agreement in the approach of Lenin and Trotsky between February and October 1917 as to how the revolution would be successful. Despite all the attempts of latter day 'Leninists' to dispute this - from the remnants of Stalinised 'Communist' parties in the neo-colonial world to ex-Trotskyists - Lenin himself in 1917 pointed out that his previous formula of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' had been filled with a 'negative content'. With Trotsky he indicated that the task was now for the proletariat to seize power, supported by the peasantry.
Once having come to power, argued Trotsky, and carried through the main tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the revolutionary power would proceed to the socialist tasks within Russia and also act as a spark to the world revolution itself. And this is how events actually worked out with a mass revolutionary wave in Western Europe - in Germany in 1918-19, Hungary 1919, Italy in the sit-down strikes and occupations of 1920, etc. These revolutions were only defeated because of the perfidious role of the leaders of the mass social democratic organisations at the time.
Marxists do not idolise 'ancient texts' no matter how brilliant they might be. However, if a theory is very 'old' and yet it correctly foresees events and processes, it is the most modern of theories. And Trotsky's ideas are as applicable today for most of Africa, and for huge parts of Asia and Latin America, as they were for Russia more than 80 years ago. The capitalist democratic revolution has not been completed in big parts of the neo-colonial world. The landlords and capitalists are incapable of solving the even greater accumulation of problems which exist today compared with 1917.
Earlier we drew a comparison between India today and the pre-1917 position in Russia. Despite significant growth in industry in the urban areas, the great majority of the population find their lives blighted by the maintenance of feudal and semi-feudal land relations and the monstrous regime which goes with this.
Take another example, the Congo, a former colony of Belgium. After the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 this 'country' was ruled by the gangster capitalist regime of Sese Seko Mobutu. A complete disintegration ensued with the reinforcement of tribalism, and the monumental corruption of Mobutu and his coterie, which stole most of the assets of the country. The hopes of the impoverished masses were raised, however, with the triumph of Laurent Kabila in 1997. He was a former collaborator of Che Guevara when the latter participated in a guerrilla insurgency in 1965.
Yet Kabila has accepted, in the context of the world-wide triumph of the 'market', the perpetuation of all the diseases of Mobutuism which went before. Tribalism and corruption not only still exist but have been reinforced. There is now the prospect of a terrible Rwanda-type genocide developing from the internecine tribalism in the next period. Sierra Leone also indicates that where no class exists or possesses the necessary consciousness to take society forward, a terrible relapse and regression can follow.
Yet, as Lenin pointed out, Africa, on the basis of communism, could move within a generation from tribalism to communism. Only the African working class, however, linked to the world workers' movement, can achieve this. Once having come to power the working class will complete the bourgeois democratic revolution and carry through the socialist regeneration of Africa through a continent-wide socialist federation.
The Struggle Against Neo-Colonialism
Even during the world boom of 1950-75 the permanent revolution operated, but not in a classical form. In a whole series of countries, China, Vietnam and Cuba, society faced an impasse on the basis of landlordism and capitalism. On the other hand, the working class was weak or restricted by false leadership, usually the Stalinists. When for instance the Red Army of Mao Zedong entered the cities, they found a vacuum. There was no way forward on the basis of landlordism and capitalism. This had been underlined by the situation following the defeat of the Chinese revolution of 1925-27, which had resulted in the complete dismemberment of China, its division amongst various warlords, and the intervention of imperialism.
Mao Zedong balanced between different sections of society, the peasantry, the working class, and sections of the capitalists, and gradually expropriated landlordism and capitalism. The land was nationalised and most of industry was taken over. But workers' democracy as in 1917 in Russia did not exist. Instead from the beginning a deformed workers' state was established.
Thus the main lines of Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution were vindicated here, although in a caricatured form. It is true that the conscious role of the working class as the leader of the revolution was a vital ingredient of Trotsky's theory and this was absent in China and in the Cuban revolution. Nevertheless, a social revolution had been carried through, the elimination of landlordism and capitalism had taken place, but without the working class playing the directly leading role. This was only possible because of the peculiar relationship of world forces both within China and internationally. A bonapartist elite resting on a peasant army was able to balance between the classes and preside over a social revolution. However, what emerged was a deformed workers' state rather than a state in which the working class and poor peasantry exercised direct control on management of industry and society through democratically elected soviets or councils.
In Cuba the revolution developed in a somewhat different form with mass popular support for the government of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. However, even here there was not the workers' democracy of the Russian revolution and, therefore, inevitably, almost from the beginning, a bureaucratic layer began to crystallise which concentrated power in its own hands.
A similar situation followed the victory of the Vietnamese revolution, whose main motive force was not the organised urban working class but the peasantry, the majority of the population. The guerrilla war conducted by the National Liberation Front was able to defeat the mightiest military power on the globe, which represented a victory for the peoples not only of Vietnam but of the neo-colonial world. But, because of the class forces involved, the regime which ushered from the Vietnamese revolution, based upon the peasantry and with nationalist limitations, could not be a healthy workers' state.
Without an understanding of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, of his method of analysis, present-day Marxists would be completely at a loss to understand how events have developed in the post-1945 situation in the underdeveloped world. But it is not sufficient merely to repeat the formulas of Trotsky, applied to the Russian revolution. We also need to recognise the changes in the objective situation which have developed since. A new situation has now opened up following the collapse of Stalinism. It is now possible for the classical ideas of permanent revolution, with the working class playing the main role, to materialise. The catastrophic situation in the neo-colonial world is shown, for instance, by the situation in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia in Latin America. In Venezuela a middle-class army officer, Hugo Chávez, has been pushed into introducing radical measures and even more radical phraseology. How far Chávez will go depends upon a number of factors, not least the world economic situation and the social effects in Venezuela and throughout Latin America.
Could Chývez take to the road trod by Castro 41 years ago and break with landlordism and capitalism? This is an open question with the absence of a mighty Stalinist regime in Russia, which acted both as a reservoir of support and as a model for the deformed workers' states which developed in the neo-colonial world. On the other hand, the working class is held back by an insufficient consciousness of the objective reality of societies like Venezuela, or is in a straitjacket provided by ex-workers' parties which have gone over to the 'market'. It will take time and experience for the working class to reassemble its forces and reach a full understanding of the situation which it faces. But it is clear that Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution offers a vital tool for understanding the situation and politically rearming the working class in these societies.
The Revolution Betrayed
Trotsky's analysis of the rise of the bureaucracy and the victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution is one of the treasures of humankind. Without this Marxists would have been groping in the dark to find a way forward. In his Diary In Exile, Trotsky summed up his contribution in the following fashion:
"The work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life - more important than 1917, more important than the period of the civil war or any other.
"For the sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October revolution would still have taken place - on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring - of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with 'Trotskyism' (ie with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin, the October revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be said of the civil war, although in its first period, especially at the time of the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to anyone but me.
"Thus I cannot speak of the 'indispensability' of my work, even about the period from 1917 to 1921. But now my work is 'indispensable' in the full sense of the word. There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it. There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International". (Diary in Exile, pp53-54)
There is not an atom of personal arrogance let alone 'pessimism' in these lines. Trotsky was the first real dissident, together with the rest of the Left Opposition, to oppose Stalinism. They were the staunch defenders of workers' democracy against the Stalinist counter-revolution.
The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was not at all 'personal'. In 1937, before the Dewey Commission inquiry into the Moscow Trials, Trotsky explained his and Stalin's role: "Neither Stalin nor I find ourselves in our present position by accident. We did not create these positions. Each of us is drawn into this drama as a representative of definite ideas and principles. In their turn, the ideas and principles did not fall from the sky but have profound social roots. That is why one must take, not the psychological abstraction of Stalin as a 'man', but his concrete historical personality as leader of the Soviet bureaucracy. One can understand the acts of Stalin only by starting from the conditions of existence of the new privileged stratum, greedy for material comforts, apprehensive for its position, fearing the masses, and mortally hating all opposition". (From Trotsky's incomplete biography of Stalin.)
The rise of Stalin to power was not at all due to any superior personal qualities but was with "the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who created the machine, but the machine that created him".
The Russian revolution was seen by the Bolsheviks as a prelude to the world revolution. The international defeats and setbacks, however, resulted in its isolation. In isolation Russia was never ready for socialism. Karl Marx emphasised that the beginning of socialism involves a higher technique than the highest level reached by capitalism (in the modern era that means higher than the US today).
The isolation of the revolution led to the beginning of a crystallisation of a bureaucratic elite. This isolation, in the first instance, arose from the role of the social democracy in betraying the revolution in Western Europe. But following Lenin's death, Stalin, Zinoviev and Bukharin, in opposition to Trotsky, replaced reliance on the independent movement of the working class and a patient building of strong independent communist parties and leaders, with a policy of diplomatic pressure and the courting of left leaders. This resulted in defeats which in turn reinforced the position of the bureaucracy, which gradually elbowed the working class aside.
This was a process and not one act. There was a dialectical interrelationship between the rise of the conservative strata in the USSR, which acted as a brake on the workers' movement internationally and led to defeats, and the ever-tightening grip of the privileged officialdom within the Soviet Union itself. Initially, Stalin wished the success of the revolution. However, his own conservative bureaucratic methods, both politically and the organisationally within the communist parties outside Russia, promoted the defeats of the working class.
'Isolated' and vilified by the enormous resources of the Stalinised Comintern, Trotsky nevertheless provided brilliant and timely advice which, if followed, would have avoided in Germany, for instance, the catastrophic victory of the Nazis in 1933. Trotsky's writings on fascism, particularly his advocacy of the united front of the workers' organisations to stop the rise of Hitler, is one of his greatest contributions. The study of his writings of this period provides the key to an understanding of the phenomenon of Haiderism and neo-fascism, including the dangers and its weaknesses at the present time.
But with the victory of Hitler, the consolidation of the bureaucracy as a conservative strata (with interests separate and apart from the mass of the working class in the USSR and internationally) developed apace. From a wish to see the revolution succeed internationally, by the time of the Spanish revolution of 1936 the ruling strata had developed an obsessive and mortal fear of the triumph of revolution anywhere.
The bureaucracy understood that the victory of the social revolution in the West would trigger an uprising of the masses in the Soviet Union, not against the gains of the revolution, the planned economy, but against the usurping privileged elite represented by Stalin. Therefore, a one-sided civil war was carried out in the form of the purge trials. This has been graphically described in the books of the late Vadim Rogovin, particularly in 1937, Stalin's Year of Terror.
The main defendant in the Moscow Trials was the absent Leon Trotsky. Yet to read the books of the 'experts' of this period of history, you would have no inkling of this. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, in his so-called 'history' of the 'gulag', only grudgingly mentions the Trotskyists and never indicates that it was Trotsky and his ideas that were feared by Stalin and the bureaucracy. It was these ideas which were on trial in Moscow.
Trotsky and those close to him suffered the most ferocious persecution at the hands of the Stalin murder machine. Yet in the teeth of all this, Trotsky produced his brilliant analysis of Stalinism which, better than anything else, foretold the future of the 'USSR' under this totalitarian system. In 1936 he foreshadowed two possibilities for the USSR: "A successful uprising of the Russian working class, a political revolution and the restoration of democracy, or the return of capitalism with calamitous consequences for the mass of the population".
This is what he wrote in The Revolution Betrayed: "A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead immediately to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and the factories would then fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert themselves into stock companies, or they might find some other transitional form of property - one, for example, in which the workers would participate in the profits. The collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far more easily".
He then writes: "The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture". Forty-four years later, in an almost chemically pure form, is this not what happened as a result of the collapse of Stalinism?
Because of this analysis it was the Trotskyists alone - particularly the adherents to the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) - who fully understood the consequences of the collapse of Stalinism, not only for the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, but for world relations as well. When the capitalists were projecting living standards for the masses of these countries comparable to Germany or the USA, we pointed out they would be lucky to enjoy Latin American living standards. In truth, even this perspective was proved to be optimistic as the living standards of the masses have plunged to that on a par with the worst parts of the neo-colonial world. The expected life span of the average male in Russia is just about higher than Nigeria but lower than the Philippines and on the level of India.
Marxism in Our Time
A vital ingredient for the return to capitalism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe was the world 'boom' of the 1980s. This was a very lopsided economic process with the development of the productive forces, science, technique and the organisation of labour not assuming the forms that it did in the 'long boom' of 1950-75. It was accompanied by a huge polarisation of wealth and the stubborn maintenance of unemployment which signified the incapacity of capitalism to fully utilise the productive forces, particularly the labour of the working class, the most important productive force.
Nevertheless, the capitalist ideologists were mesmerised by the combination of the collapse in Eastern Europe and the economic 'fireworks' which followed the recession in the early 1990s. A new 'paradigm', a 'new economy', a new and lasting era of prosperity which would overcome all the problems of their system: this was the watchword of the majority of capitalist economists right up to the beginning of the new century.
It is not the first time that we have witnessed the spokespersons and strategists of capital demonstrating their empiricism and illusions about their system. Indeed, it is an inevitable feature of any boom or upswing in production. And we are not the first in history to have answered these arguments by relating the basic propositions of Marx's analysis of the functioning of the capitalist system to the new features and new developments which exist under capitalism. Marx himself pointed out that capitalism is incapable of harnessing the full potential because of the limitations of private ownership of the means of production and the narrow limits of the nation state. It was and is a system of booms and slumps.
Trotsky, in a period that has some parallels to the situation that we will be facing in the next era, defended Marx's basic economic analysis in the context of the 1930s. This was summed up in his brilliant little pamphlet, Marxism In Our Time. Originally conceived as an introduction to Otto Ruhle's abridgement of the first volume of Capital, The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx, it provides a most modern understanding of the processes developing in world capitalism today and, particularly, those processes which will develop following the coming world recession or slump.
Trotsky points out that the basic contradiction of capitalism is that the working class cannot buy back the full product of their labour, because they only receive a portion of this in the form of wages. However, capitalism overcomes this contradiction by ploughing the surplus back into industry. But this, in turn, leads to an even greater production of goods which the working class at a certain stage is incapable of buying back. The capitalist economists dispute this even, as Trotsky pointed out, in short-lived booms, such as the 1924-29 boom in Germany, when Werner Sombat proclaimed that capitalism had overcome its contradictions (on the eve of the 1929 Wall Street Crash).
The modern Sombats are those like Hamish McCrae, the economics correspondent of The Independent. He oscillates between fear of the coming recession and whistling in the dark to keep up his spirits by proclaiming that capitalism's 'just-in-time' methods have eliminated stocks and, therefore, the problem of a future 'glut' of goods which we saw as recently as the crisis in South-East Asia. Even if McCrae is right, however, instead of massive overproduction, excess 'capacity' will grow. Thus capitalism is only able to continue functioning on the basis of leaving 10% or 20% of its production idle. It is a system based upon production for profit and not for social need. The growth cycle of the 1990s is the weakest since 1945.
Moreover, in this boom capitalism has not overcome class contradictions but has, in fact, intensified them, as daily reports in the capitalist press underline. There are at least one billion poor people on the planet who receive each year as much as 600 men and women who rule Western monopoly capitalist firms. The division between rich and poor has increased exponentially, not just between the advanced industrial world and the neo-colonial world but also within the so-called 'rich' countries themselves. Half-a-percent of the population of the USA own as much as the bottom 90%. In the US, the model of the new so-called 'economic paradigm', 50 million workers are worse off than 20 years ago while the living standards of 80% have stood still. Colossal wealth is being creamed off by the capitalists while, in cities like Minneapolis, there is the 'undying shame' (The Mirror) of 10,000 free meals a week being served on the streets.
But this boom is going to come juddering to a halt in the next period. And when it does the consequence of the parasitic role of modern capitalism will be laid bare. In anticipation of this Alan Kennedy, a capitalist management consultant, has issued a wake-up call to the US capitalists in a new book, The End of Shareholder Value. He points out that US companies "have mortgaged the future in pursuit of short-term financial gain for shareholders".
The use of stock options, huge management greed by top executives, is one of the scandals of the last decade. This has been accompanied by massive downsizing and restructuring and what is euphemistically called 'financial engineering'. When challenged about the long-term consequences of their financial gangsterism a representative of the new breed of capitalist executives declared to Kennedy: 'Why... should I care, I'll be long gone before anyone finds out'.
And this financial plundering is not restricted to executives but goes to the heart of the methods of modern monopoly capitalism. For instance, General Electric is one of the biggest manufacturing firms in the US. Yet $30bn has been used by this company in 'share buy-backs'. The parasitism of capitalism, Kennedy believes, is deep-rooted. What is his solution? "In an ideal world, we'd correct the abuses through regulation. Unfortunately, I don't think anything less than a major crash will make people step back and look clearly at where it's all gone wrong".
But it will be the working class of the US and world-wide who will pay for the crimes of modern capitalism. In the recession or slump that looms, all the myths about the role of modern 'technology' guaranteeing a world free from recession or slump will be revealed. Marxists, of course, have recognised that technology has played a role in certain industries. But its effect has been intensive in information technology and a few industries and not at all, as in previous periods, extensive in furthering a broad-based development of the productive forces.
Moreover, one of the paradoxes of this society, again analysed by Trotsky, is the greater the technological advance the greater the intensification of work for the working class, the bigger the exploitation, the greater the stress, suffering and depression, which is a world malady at the present time.
Tony Blair wants to impose the US 'Anglo-Saxon model' on Europe and the world. This will make the working class into helots (work slaves) whose sole raison d'?tre is to produce profit, surplus value, for the capitalists. However, like conditions will produce like results. The Observer newspaper, in commentating on the new millennium, warned the capitalists that the conditions which exist today are similar to those in the late 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century. It is no accident that the powerful socialist and communist movements arose in this period.
So also the working class will reawaken and move into action in the next period. But they will confront not just capitalism and its parties but the leaders of organisations, the trade unions and ex-workers parties which, in the past, purported to represent them. Now we are confronted with massive pressure from below for action amongst teachers in Britain, France and Spain, which is thwarted by a self-satisfied and cosseted trade union leadership. This has resulted in teachers in Spain marching in anger against sell-outs by the leaders of the Workers' Commissions (ex-Communist Party) trade union, shouting in anger: 'We want our own unions'.
The capitalists pretend that the working class is powerless against globalisation. But as the anti-World Trade Organisation demonstrations, the so-called 'riot' in London in June 1999, and the new protests this year show, this is not the case. At this stage, these demonstrations involve new layers of youth as well as sections of the working class. Up to now the heavy battalions of the proletariat have not moved. But events, and mighty events, impend and will move them into action. A serious recession or slump will result in furious defensive battles of the working class.
Preparing for a New Era
The most important effect of a new recession or slump will be political. A new ferocious outbreak of the class struggle will mean leaps in consciousness. One consequence of the collapse of Stalinism and the massive ideological offensive which followed in its wake, was the disheartening and falling away of the more developed layers of the working class. However, one of the consequences of the coming economic convulsions which faces world capitalism will be the emergence of a new generation, particularly of this more developed layer, which will not be satisfied with a diet of agitation or propaganda alone. They will be seeking an explanation, historical generalisations, and the summing up of the experience of the working class, to forge new weapons for the coming struggle. They will find enormous help in this task in the writings and speeches of Leon Trotsky.
Of course, Trotsky wrote and worked in a different historical era to ourselves. Some of the issues he was compelled to deal with are no longer as burning for the working class. You will find in his writings this or that antiquated expression or an idea which does not appear immediately relevant to our world today. However, an amazing amount of what Trotsky wrote is extremely pertinent, a thousand times more relevant to serious workers looking for an explanation of economic, political and even historical phenomena, than anything else on offer.
His book, Where Is Britain Going?, has not been equalled for its broad historical analysis and of its description of the labour movement of the time. The characters have changed, the strength and weaknesses of the labour movement have also changed. But in one line or paragraph of this book is more truth about the realities of Britain today than the millions of words which have come from the mouths of Labour leaders, historians and so-called 'experts' in the labour movement. Take, for instance, the chapter dealing with the English civil war. Contained here in this kernel is virtually a complete outline of the processes of the English civil war and their connections to modern Britain.
The marvellous lines of Trotsky on Chartism also say virtually everything that needs to be said, and would provide a rich vein upon which serious socialist and Marxist scholars could write a worthy history of our revolutionary forebears which would prepare us for the struggles to come. After all, in the experience of roughly ten years of Chartism were all the elements, from peaceful petitions to the revolutionary general strike, which have been discussed in the last 50 years in the British labour movement. Moreover, these are themes that will be returned to in the convulsive events that loom.
Trotsky never had any fetish about organisational forms. He also opposed both ultra-leftism and opportunism. His ideas were never for the meeting room alone but were preparation to intervene wherever the working class is and win them to socialist and Marxist ideas. Following Trotsky's advice, members and supporters of Militant (now the Socialist Party) patiently worked within the Labour Party in Britain. The Labour Party, as with its cousins internationally, had a dual character. Sectarians of all stripes disputed this. They took the phrase of Lenin that the Labour Party was a 'bourgeois workers' party' and turned their backs on the Labour Party and the support it then enjoyed at bottom from the working class. There was not an atom of dialectical analysis in their approach. Right from the outset, the Labour Party had 'bourgeois' leaders in the sense that even those who claimed to be 'socialist' ultimately were not prepared to go beyond the framework of capitalism. Nevertheless, at its base the Labour Party was perceived by workers as 'their' party and its creation was a step forward from a class point of view of the proletariat in Britain. Moreover, it possessed democratic features which allowed Marxists to intervene, in the case of Militant, with great success. We were able to connect the ideas of Trotsky to youth and workers.
Militant was the most successful Trotskyist organisation since the Left Opposition in the whole of Western Europe. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of workers were introduced to the basic ideas of Trotsky through the work of our organisation (now the Socialist Party). In Liverpool between 1983-87 we created a mass movement which shook the ruling class. We initiated and led the mighty anti-poll tax battle, with 34 of our comrades jailed, which ended in the defeat of the tax and the consignment of Thatcher to the rubbish heap of history. No other Trotskyist party in the advanced industrial world could claim such a record.
But the test of all ideas, as with Trotsky himself in the 1930s, is not just how to take advantage of an upswing in the class struggle but how to preserve the ideas and the forces of Marxism in a period of stagnation and retreat. The CWI, with 34 sections under its banner world-wide, has managed to achieve this difficult task in the decade that followed the collapse of Stalinism. No other organisation can rival the analysis that we have made of the causes of the collapse of the planned economies of Eastern Europe, of Stalinism, and of the new relationship of world forces.
While tenaciously defending and developing the ideas of Trotsky, we also in this period initiated the mass movement around Youth against Racism in Europe, against fascism in the early 1990s right up to today. We successfully intervened and led the movement in Austria against Haider. In 1997 we also saw the election of Joe Higgins as a member of the Irish parliament (TD), following the mass struggle against water charges which we pioneered.
While others are, in reality, abandoning Trotsky as no longer relevant to 'the modern world', we perceive that his ideas and methods are as vital, indeed more vital, to the struggles that are opening up.
Trotsky himself once commented that in a new socialist world, the average intelligence would be of a 'Beethoven, a Van Gogh, a Marx or Lenin' and, beyond this, new peaks of human greatness would arise. We would have to say today that in the pantheon of the 'greats' of the world labour movement, Leon Trotsky stands alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin. A new generation of workers who will be moving into struggle will build a monument to Trotsky, not of stone but a mass socialist and revolutionary movement.
The new changed period will allow Marxism to reconnect to the working class, in the first instance, to its more developed layer, which will provide the backbone for the creation of new mass forces. The working class in Britain, for the first time in 100 years, in a mass sense has been politically beheaded by New Labour's move to a position analogous to that of the Democratic Party in the USA. This is why the Socialist Party in Britain calls for the creation of a new mass workers' party, while at the same time seeking to build its own forces within the working-class movement. We hail Trotsky as a great theoretician and leader of the working class but we do not merely acclaim past leaders. It is necessary for us, particularly the new generation of workers, to study the writings of Leon Trotsky alongside of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg but, above all, to seek to acquire his method which will allow us to create a mass Marxist force that will eradicate from the planet the scourge of capitalism and all that goes with it.
Socialism Today # 49, July 2000
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Trotsky's Relevance Today-The Most Modern Ideas – Peter Taaffe
Sixty years ago this August, Stalin's hit man, Raymond Mercader, murdered the greatest living revolutionary of that time, Leon Trotsky. It was not just the Trotskyists who felt the terrible blow of his death but the working class and labour movement of the whole world. This brain - in a sense, the brain of the working class at that stage - would no longer illuminate and clarify the problems confronting working class movements internationally.
Just to list Trotsky's 'practical achievements' would in itself justify commemorating this anniversary. He was the chairman of the first ever soviet - committee of workers' representatives - in the first Russian revolution between 1905-1906. In 1917 he was the organiser of the October Russian revolution, the greatest single event in human history. He then created and led the Red Army which defeated the twenty-one counter-revolutionary armies of imperialism that attempted to crush the revolution.
But above all, Leon Trotsky was one of the greatest theoreticians of the workers' movement. If Karl Marx was the man of the millennium, then Leon Trotsky was undoubtedly, with Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Rosa Luxemburg, also one of the greatest figures of the millennium, and certainly of the 20th century. His ideas, his method of analysis, and the conclusions drawn from this, are as relevant today as in the past.
The Permanent Revolution
Take Trotsky's famous theory of the permanent revolution, which brilliantly anticipated the class forces involved in the outcome of the Russian revolution. Russia prior to 1917 was a feudal or semi-feudal system which meant virtual slavery for the population. Like India today, the majority of the population were peasants who eked out an existence on narrow parcels of land while the urban working class had no rights and were ruthlessly exploited in rapidly developing industry. Russia had not completed the capitalist democratic revolution as had England, for instance, in the 16th century, and France in the 18th century. The main tasks of this revolution were the elimination of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the land, unification of the country, and the solution of the national question.
It also involved the introduction of democracy, the right to vote, the election of a democratic parliament, a free press, and trade union rights for the working class. Last but not least, the completion of this revolution would free the economy from the domination of imperialism, particularly of Anglo-French imperialism which saw Russia as a virtual colony.
All trends of opinion within the Russian workers' movement saw as the main task the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. However, Lenin and Trotsky differed from the Mensheviks (minority members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour movement) who believed that the task of the working class was to play second fiddle to the so-called liberal capitalists. The Mensheviks considered that the latter were the main agents of the capitalist democratic revolution. Socialism for them was the music of the distant future.
At the same time, the Mensheviks saw the Russian revolution as a purely national event with a limited echo internationally. Yet the late development of the capitalists as a class in Russia, and with it a delay in the capitalist democratic revolution, meant that the weak and feeble Russian capitalists were no longer capable of completing this historic task. As we see in the neo-colonial world today, the capitalists invested in land and the landlords invested in industry. Therefore, any serious attempt at a thoroughgoing land reform challenging the power of the landlords would also come up against the opposition of the capitalists and their political representatives, the liberal capitalist parties. This has been shown not just in Russia but in Germany in the 19th century and very graphically in our time in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
A newly-arisen force in Russia, not present in the English and French revolutions, was the working class, which had developed into a powerful force and, at that time, in a unique fashion. Trotsky pointed out that the liberal bourgeoisie were terrified, quite correctly as events demonstrated, that a struggle against Tsarism and the social foundations upon which it rested, would open the floodgates through which the working class would pour, together with the peasantry, and place on the agenda its own demands. Both Trotsky and Lenin, therefore, argued that it was an alliance of the working class and peasantry which alone could carry through the capitalist democratic revolution.
Lenin expressed this in his formula of the 'democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry'. Trotsky, however, in his theory of the permanent revolution, pointed out that the peasantry historically had never played an independent role. It must be led by one or other of the two great classes in society, the bourgeoisie or the working class. Lenin and Trotsky agreed that the capitalists could not carry through their own revolution. Therefore, Trotsky argued, the working class must assume the leadership of the revolution, drawing behind it the masses in the countryside. Lenin, on the other hand, left open the exact relationship between the peasantry and the working class, in his 'algebraic formula'.
Trotsky argued that because history had shown that the peasantry can never play an independent role the alliance, therefore, must be led by the working class. The combined movement of the working class in the cities, and a mass peasant uprising in the countryside, was envisaged by Trotsky in his theory of permanent revolution as the way the revolution was likely to develop in Russia.
This was confirmed in October 1917. Moreover, there was a complete agreement in the approach of Lenin and Trotsky between February and October 1917 as to how the revolution would be successful. Despite all the attempts of latter day 'Leninists' to dispute this - from the remnants of Stalinised 'Communist' parties in the neo-colonial world to ex-Trotskyists - Lenin himself in 1917 pointed out that his previous formula of the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' had been filled with a 'negative content'. With Trotsky he indicated that the task was now for the proletariat to seize power, supported by the peasantry.
Once having come to power, argued Trotsky, and carried through the main tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the revolutionary power would proceed to the socialist tasks within Russia and also act as a spark to the world revolution itself. And this is how events actually worked out with a mass revolutionary wave in Western Europe - in Germany in 1918-19, Hungary 1919, Italy in the sit-down strikes and occupations of 1920, etc. These revolutions were only defeated because of the perfidious role of the leaders of the mass social democratic organisations at the time.
Marxists do not idolise 'ancient texts' no matter how brilliant they might be. However, if a theory is very 'old' and yet it correctly foresees events and processes, it is the most modern of theories. And Trotsky's ideas are as applicable today for most of Africa, and for huge parts of Asia and Latin America, as they were for Russia more than 80 years ago. The capitalist democratic revolution has not been completed in big parts of the neo-colonial world. The landlords and capitalists are incapable of solving the even greater accumulation of problems which exist today compared with 1917.
Earlier we drew a comparison between India today and the pre-1917 position in Russia. Despite significant growth in industry in the urban areas, the great majority of the population find their lives blighted by the maintenance of feudal and semi-feudal land relations and the monstrous regime which goes with this.
Take another example, the Congo, a former colony of Belgium. After the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 this 'country' was ruled by the gangster capitalist regime of Sese Seko Mobutu. A complete disintegration ensued with the reinforcement of tribalism, and the monumental corruption of Mobutu and his coterie, which stole most of the assets of the country. The hopes of the impoverished masses were raised, however, with the triumph of Laurent Kabila in 1997. He was a former collaborator of Che Guevara when the latter participated in a guerrilla insurgency in 1965.
Yet Kabila has accepted, in the context of the world-wide triumph of the 'market', the perpetuation of all the diseases of Mobutuism which went before. Tribalism and corruption not only still exist but have been reinforced. There is now the prospect of a terrible Rwanda-type genocide developing from the internecine tribalism in the next period. Sierra Leone also indicates that where no class exists or possesses the necessary consciousness to take society forward, a terrible relapse and regression can follow.
Yet, as Lenin pointed out, Africa, on the basis of communism, could move within a generation from tribalism to communism. Only the African working class, however, linked to the world workers' movement, can achieve this. Once having come to power the working class will complete the bourgeois democratic revolution and carry through the socialist regeneration of Africa through a continent-wide socialist federation.
The Struggle Against Neo-Colonialism
Even during the world boom of 1950-75 the permanent revolution operated, but not in a classical form. In a whole series of countries, China, Vietnam and Cuba, society faced an impasse on the basis of landlordism and capitalism. On the other hand, the working class was weak or restricted by false leadership, usually the Stalinists. When for instance the Red Army of Mao Zedong entered the cities, they found a vacuum. There was no way forward on the basis of landlordism and capitalism. This had been underlined by the situation following the defeat of the Chinese revolution of 1925-27, which had resulted in the complete dismemberment of China, its division amongst various warlords, and the intervention of imperialism.
Mao Zedong balanced between different sections of society, the peasantry, the working class, and sections of the capitalists, and gradually expropriated landlordism and capitalism. The land was nationalised and most of industry was taken over. But workers' democracy as in 1917 in Russia did not exist. Instead from the beginning a deformed workers' state was established.
Thus the main lines of Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution were vindicated here, although in a caricatured form. It is true that the conscious role of the working class as the leader of the revolution was a vital ingredient of Trotsky's theory and this was absent in China and in the Cuban revolution. Nevertheless, a social revolution had been carried through, the elimination of landlordism and capitalism had taken place, but without the working class playing the directly leading role. This was only possible because of the peculiar relationship of world forces both within China and internationally. A bonapartist elite resting on a peasant army was able to balance between the classes and preside over a social revolution. However, what emerged was a deformed workers' state rather than a state in which the working class and poor peasantry exercised direct control on management of industry and society through democratically elected soviets or councils.
In Cuba the revolution developed in a somewhat different form with mass popular support for the government of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. However, even here there was not the workers' democracy of the Russian revolution and, therefore, inevitably, almost from the beginning, a bureaucratic layer began to crystallise which concentrated power in its own hands.
A similar situation followed the victory of the Vietnamese revolution, whose main motive force was not the organised urban working class but the peasantry, the majority of the population. The guerrilla war conducted by the National Liberation Front was able to defeat the mightiest military power on the globe, which represented a victory for the peoples not only of Vietnam but of the neo-colonial world. But, because of the class forces involved, the regime which ushered from the Vietnamese revolution, based upon the peasantry and with nationalist limitations, could not be a healthy workers' state.
Without an understanding of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, of his method of analysis, present-day Marxists would be completely at a loss to understand how events have developed in the post-1945 situation in the underdeveloped world. But it is not sufficient merely to repeat the formulas of Trotsky, applied to the Russian revolution. We also need to recognise the changes in the objective situation which have developed since. A new situation has now opened up following the collapse of Stalinism. It is now possible for the classical ideas of permanent revolution, with the working class playing the main role, to materialise. The catastrophic situation in the neo-colonial world is shown, for instance, by the situation in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia in Latin America. In Venezuela a middle-class army officer, Hugo Chávez, has been pushed into introducing radical measures and even more radical phraseology. How far Chávez will go depends upon a number of factors, not least the world economic situation and the social effects in Venezuela and throughout Latin America.
Could Chývez take to the road trod by Castro 41 years ago and break with landlordism and capitalism? This is an open question with the absence of a mighty Stalinist regime in Russia, which acted both as a reservoir of support and as a model for the deformed workers' states which developed in the neo-colonial world. On the other hand, the working class is held back by an insufficient consciousness of the objective reality of societies like Venezuela, or is in a straitjacket provided by ex-workers' parties which have gone over to the 'market'. It will take time and experience for the working class to reassemble its forces and reach a full understanding of the situation which it faces. But it is clear that Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution offers a vital tool for understanding the situation and politically rearming the working class in these societies.
The Revolution Betrayed
Trotsky's analysis of the rise of the bureaucracy and the victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution is one of the treasures of humankind. Without this Marxists would have been groping in the dark to find a way forward. In his Diary In Exile, Trotsky summed up his contribution in the following fashion:
"The work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life - more important than 1917, more important than the period of the civil war or any other.
"For the sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October revolution would still have taken place - on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring - of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with 'Trotskyism' (ie with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin, the October revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be said of the civil war, although in its first period, especially at the time of the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to anyone but me.
"Thus I cannot speak of the 'indispensability' of my work, even about the period from 1917 to 1921. But now my work is 'indispensable' in the full sense of the word. There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it. There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International". (Diary in Exile, pp53-54)
There is not an atom of personal arrogance let alone 'pessimism' in these lines. Trotsky was the first real dissident, together with the rest of the Left Opposition, to oppose Stalinism. They were the staunch defenders of workers' democracy against the Stalinist counter-revolution.
The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was not at all 'personal'. In 1937, before the Dewey Commission inquiry into the Moscow Trials, Trotsky explained his and Stalin's role: "Neither Stalin nor I find ourselves in our present position by accident. We did not create these positions. Each of us is drawn into this drama as a representative of definite ideas and principles. In their turn, the ideas and principles did not fall from the sky but have profound social roots. That is why one must take, not the psychological abstraction of Stalin as a 'man', but his concrete historical personality as leader of the Soviet bureaucracy. One can understand the acts of Stalin only by starting from the conditions of existence of the new privileged stratum, greedy for material comforts, apprehensive for its position, fearing the masses, and mortally hating all opposition". (From Trotsky's incomplete biography of Stalin.)
The rise of Stalin to power was not at all due to any superior personal qualities but was with "the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who created the machine, but the machine that created him".
The Russian revolution was seen by the Bolsheviks as a prelude to the world revolution. The international defeats and setbacks, however, resulted in its isolation. In isolation Russia was never ready for socialism. Karl Marx emphasised that the beginning of socialism involves a higher technique than the highest level reached by capitalism (in the modern era that means higher than the US today).
The isolation of the revolution led to the beginning of a crystallisation of a bureaucratic elite. This isolation, in the first instance, arose from the role of the social democracy in betraying the revolution in Western Europe. But following Lenin's death, Stalin, Zinoviev and Bukharin, in opposition to Trotsky, replaced reliance on the independent movement of the working class and a patient building of strong independent communist parties and leaders, with a policy of diplomatic pressure and the courting of left leaders. This resulted in defeats which in turn reinforced the position of the bureaucracy, which gradually elbowed the working class aside.
This was a process and not one act. There was a dialectical interrelationship between the rise of the conservative strata in the USSR, which acted as a brake on the workers' movement internationally and led to defeats, and the ever-tightening grip of the privileged officialdom within the Soviet Union itself. Initially, Stalin wished the success of the revolution. However, his own conservative bureaucratic methods, both politically and the organisationally within the communist parties outside Russia, promoted the defeats of the working class.
'Isolated' and vilified by the enormous resources of the Stalinised Comintern, Trotsky nevertheless provided brilliant and timely advice which, if followed, would have avoided in Germany, for instance, the catastrophic victory of the Nazis in 1933. Trotsky's writings on fascism, particularly his advocacy of the united front of the workers' organisations to stop the rise of Hitler, is one of his greatest contributions. The study of his writings of this period provides the key to an understanding of the phenomenon of Haiderism and neo-fascism, including the dangers and its weaknesses at the present time.
But with the victory of Hitler, the consolidation of the bureaucracy as a conservative strata (with interests separate and apart from the mass of the working class in the USSR and internationally) developed apace. From a wish to see the revolution succeed internationally, by the time of the Spanish revolution of 1936 the ruling strata had developed an obsessive and mortal fear of the triumph of revolution anywhere.
The bureaucracy understood that the victory of the social revolution in the West would trigger an uprising of the masses in the Soviet Union, not against the gains of the revolution, the planned economy, but against the usurping privileged elite represented by Stalin. Therefore, a one-sided civil war was carried out in the form of the purge trials. This has been graphically described in the books of the late Vadim Rogovin, particularly in 1937, Stalin's Year of Terror.
The main defendant in the Moscow Trials was the absent Leon Trotsky. Yet to read the books of the 'experts' of this period of history, you would have no inkling of this. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, in his so-called 'history' of the 'gulag', only grudgingly mentions the Trotskyists and never indicates that it was Trotsky and his ideas that were feared by Stalin and the bureaucracy. It was these ideas which were on trial in Moscow.
Trotsky and those close to him suffered the most ferocious persecution at the hands of the Stalin murder machine. Yet in the teeth of all this, Trotsky produced his brilliant analysis of Stalinism which, better than anything else, foretold the future of the 'USSR' under this totalitarian system. In 1936 he foreshadowed two possibilities for the USSR: "A successful uprising of the Russian working class, a political revolution and the restoration of democracy, or the return of capitalism with calamitous consequences for the mass of the population".
This is what he wrote in The Revolution Betrayed: "A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead immediately to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and the factories would then fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert themselves into stock companies, or they might find some other transitional form of property - one, for example, in which the workers would participate in the profits. The collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far more easily".
He then writes: "The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture". Forty-four years later, in an almost chemically pure form, is this not what happened as a result of the collapse of Stalinism?
Because of this analysis it was the Trotskyists alone - particularly the adherents to the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) - who fully understood the consequences of the collapse of Stalinism, not only for the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, but for world relations as well. When the capitalists were projecting living standards for the masses of these countries comparable to Germany or the USA, we pointed out they would be lucky to enjoy Latin American living standards. In truth, even this perspective was proved to be optimistic as the living standards of the masses have plunged to that on a par with the worst parts of the neo-colonial world. The expected life span of the average male in Russia is just about higher than Nigeria but lower than the Philippines and on the level of India.
Marxism in Our Time
A vital ingredient for the return to capitalism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe was the world 'boom' of the 1980s. This was a very lopsided economic process with the development of the productive forces, science, technique and the organisation of labour not assuming the forms that it did in the 'long boom' of 1950-75. It was accompanied by a huge polarisation of wealth and the stubborn maintenance of unemployment which signified the incapacity of capitalism to fully utilise the productive forces, particularly the labour of the working class, the most important productive force.
Nevertheless, the capitalist ideologists were mesmerised by the combination of the collapse in Eastern Europe and the economic 'fireworks' which followed the recession in the early 1990s. A new 'paradigm', a 'new economy', a new and lasting era of prosperity which would overcome all the problems of their system: this was the watchword of the majority of capitalist economists right up to the beginning of the new century.
It is not the first time that we have witnessed the spokespersons and strategists of capital demonstrating their empiricism and illusions about their system. Indeed, it is an inevitable feature of any boom or upswing in production. And we are not the first in history to have answered these arguments by relating the basic propositions of Marx's analysis of the functioning of the capitalist system to the new features and new developments which exist under capitalism. Marx himself pointed out that capitalism is incapable of harnessing the full potential because of the limitations of private ownership of the means of production and the narrow limits of the nation state. It was and is a system of booms and slumps.
Trotsky, in a period that has some parallels to the situation that we will be facing in the next era, defended Marx's basic economic analysis in the context of the 1930s. This was summed up in his brilliant little pamphlet, Marxism In Our Time. Originally conceived as an introduction to Otto Ruhle's abridgement of the first volume of Capital, The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx, it provides a most modern understanding of the processes developing in world capitalism today and, particularly, those processes which will develop following the coming world recession or slump.
Trotsky points out that the basic contradiction of capitalism is that the working class cannot buy back the full product of their labour, because they only receive a portion of this in the form of wages. However, capitalism overcomes this contradiction by ploughing the surplus back into industry. But this, in turn, leads to an even greater production of goods which the working class at a certain stage is incapable of buying back. The capitalist economists dispute this even, as Trotsky pointed out, in short-lived booms, such as the 1924-29 boom in Germany, when Werner Sombat proclaimed that capitalism had overcome its contradictions (on the eve of the 1929 Wall Street Crash).
The modern Sombats are those like Hamish McCrae, the economics correspondent of The Independent. He oscillates between fear of the coming recession and whistling in the dark to keep up his spirits by proclaiming that capitalism's 'just-in-time' methods have eliminated stocks and, therefore, the problem of a future 'glut' of goods which we saw as recently as the crisis in South-East Asia. Even if McCrae is right, however, instead of massive overproduction, excess 'capacity' will grow. Thus capitalism is only able to continue functioning on the basis of leaving 10% or 20% of its production idle. It is a system based upon production for profit and not for social need. The growth cycle of the 1990s is the weakest since 1945.
Moreover, in this boom capitalism has not overcome class contradictions but has, in fact, intensified them, as daily reports in the capitalist press underline. There are at least one billion poor people on the planet who receive each year as much as 600 men and women who rule Western monopoly capitalist firms. The division between rich and poor has increased exponentially, not just between the advanced industrial world and the neo-colonial world but also within the so-called 'rich' countries themselves. Half-a-percent of the population of the USA own as much as the bottom 90%. In the US, the model of the new so-called 'economic paradigm', 50 million workers are worse off than 20 years ago while the living standards of 80% have stood still. Colossal wealth is being creamed off by the capitalists while, in cities like Minneapolis, there is the 'undying shame' (The Mirror) of 10,000 free meals a week being served on the streets.
But this boom is going to come juddering to a halt in the next period. And when it does the consequence of the parasitic role of modern capitalism will be laid bare. In anticipation of this Alan Kennedy, a capitalist management consultant, has issued a wake-up call to the US capitalists in a new book, The End of Shareholder Value. He points out that US companies "have mortgaged the future in pursuit of short-term financial gain for shareholders".
The use of stock options, huge management greed by top executives, is one of the scandals of the last decade. This has been accompanied by massive downsizing and restructuring and what is euphemistically called 'financial engineering'. When challenged about the long-term consequences of their financial gangsterism a representative of the new breed of capitalist executives declared to Kennedy: 'Why... should I care, I'll be long gone before anyone finds out'.
And this financial plundering is not restricted to executives but goes to the heart of the methods of modern monopoly capitalism. For instance, General Electric is one of the biggest manufacturing firms in the US. Yet $30bn has been used by this company in 'share buy-backs'. The parasitism of capitalism, Kennedy believes, is deep-rooted. What is his solution? "In an ideal world, we'd correct the abuses through regulation. Unfortunately, I don't think anything less than a major crash will make people step back and look clearly at where it's all gone wrong".
But it will be the working class of the US and world-wide who will pay for the crimes of modern capitalism. In the recession or slump that looms, all the myths about the role of modern 'technology' guaranteeing a world free from recession or slump will be revealed. Marxists, of course, have recognised that technology has played a role in certain industries. But its effect has been intensive in information technology and a few industries and not at all, as in previous periods, extensive in furthering a broad-based development of the productive forces.
Moreover, one of the paradoxes of this society, again analysed by Trotsky, is the greater the technological advance the greater the intensification of work for the working class, the bigger the exploitation, the greater the stress, suffering and depression, which is a world malady at the present time.
Tony Blair wants to impose the US 'Anglo-Saxon model' on Europe and the world. This will make the working class into helots (work slaves) whose sole raison d'?tre is to produce profit, surplus value, for the capitalists. However, like conditions will produce like results. The Observer newspaper, in commentating on the new millennium, warned the capitalists that the conditions which exist today are similar to those in the late 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century. It is no accident that the powerful socialist and communist movements arose in this period.
So also the working class will reawaken and move into action in the next period. But they will confront not just capitalism and its parties but the leaders of organisations, the trade unions and ex-workers parties which, in the past, purported to represent them. Now we are confronted with massive pressure from below for action amongst teachers in Britain, France and Spain, which is thwarted by a self-satisfied and cosseted trade union leadership. This has resulted in teachers in Spain marching in anger against sell-outs by the leaders of the Workers' Commissions (ex-Communist Party) trade union, shouting in anger: 'We want our own unions'.
The capitalists pretend that the working class is powerless against globalisation. But as the anti-World Trade Organisation demonstrations, the so-called 'riot' in London in June 1999, and the new protests this year show, this is not the case. At this stage, these demonstrations involve new layers of youth as well as sections of the working class. Up to now the heavy battalions of the proletariat have not moved. But events, and mighty events, impend and will move them into action. A serious recession or slump will result in furious defensive battles of the working class.
Preparing for a New Era
The most important effect of a new recession or slump will be political. A new ferocious outbreak of the class struggle will mean leaps in consciousness. One consequence of the collapse of Stalinism and the massive ideological offensive which followed in its wake, was the disheartening and falling away of the more developed layers of the working class. However, one of the consequences of the coming economic convulsions which faces world capitalism will be the emergence of a new generation, particularly of this more developed layer, which will not be satisfied with a diet of agitation or propaganda alone. They will be seeking an explanation, historical generalisations, and the summing up of the experience of the working class, to forge new weapons for the coming struggle. They will find enormous help in this task in the writings and speeches of Leon Trotsky.
Of course, Trotsky wrote and worked in a different historical era to ourselves. Some of the issues he was compelled to deal with are no longer as burning for the working class. You will find in his writings this or that antiquated expression or an idea which does not appear immediately relevant to our world today. However, an amazing amount of what Trotsky wrote is extremely pertinent, a thousand times more relevant to serious workers looking for an explanation of economic, political and even historical phenomena, than anything else on offer.
His book, Where Is Britain Going?, has not been equalled for its broad historical analysis and of its description of the labour movement of the time. The characters have changed, the strength and weaknesses of the labour movement have also changed. But in one line or paragraph of this book is more truth about the realities of Britain today than the millions of words which have come from the mouths of Labour leaders, historians and so-called 'experts' in the labour movement. Take, for instance, the chapter dealing with the English civil war. Contained here in this kernel is virtually a complete outline of the processes of the English civil war and their connections to modern Britain.
The marvellous lines of Trotsky on Chartism also say virtually everything that needs to be said, and would provide a rich vein upon which serious socialist and Marxist scholars could write a worthy history of our revolutionary forebears which would prepare us for the struggles to come. After all, in the experience of roughly ten years of Chartism were all the elements, from peaceful petitions to the revolutionary general strike, which have been discussed in the last 50 years in the British labour movement. Moreover, these are themes that will be returned to in the convulsive events that loom.
Trotsky never had any fetish about organisational forms. He also opposed both ultra-leftism and opportunism. His ideas were never for the meeting room alone but were preparation to intervene wherever the working class is and win them to socialist and Marxist ideas. Following Trotsky's advice, members and supporters of Militant (now the Socialist Party) patiently worked within the Labour Party in Britain. The Labour Party, as with its cousins internationally, had a dual character. Sectarians of all stripes disputed this. They took the phrase of Lenin that the Labour Party was a 'bourgeois workers' party' and turned their backs on the Labour Party and the support it then enjoyed at bottom from the working class. There was not an atom of dialectical analysis in their approach. Right from the outset, the Labour Party had 'bourgeois' leaders in the sense that even those who claimed to be 'socialist' ultimately were not prepared to go beyond the framework of capitalism. Nevertheless, at its base the Labour Party was perceived by workers as 'their' party and its creation was a step forward from a class point of view of the proletariat in Britain. Moreover, it possessed democratic features which allowed Marxists to intervene, in the case of Militant, with great success. We were able to connect the ideas of Trotsky to youth and workers.
Militant was the most successful Trotskyist organisation since the Left Opposition in the whole of Western Europe. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of workers were introduced to the basic ideas of Trotsky through the work of our organisation (now the Socialist Party). In Liverpool between 1983-87 we created a mass movement which shook the ruling class. We initiated and led the mighty anti-poll tax battle, with 34 of our comrades jailed, which ended in the defeat of the tax and the consignment of Thatcher to the rubbish heap of history. No other Trotskyist party in the advanced industrial world could claim such a record.
But the test of all ideas, as with Trotsky himself in the 1930s, is not just how to take advantage of an upswing in the class struggle but how to preserve the ideas and the forces of Marxism in a period of stagnation and retreat. The CWI, with 34 sections under its banner world-wide, has managed to achieve this difficult task in the decade that followed the collapse of Stalinism. No other organisation can rival the analysis that we have made of the causes of the collapse of the planned economies of Eastern Europe, of Stalinism, and of the new relationship of world forces.
While tenaciously defending and developing the ideas of Trotsky, we also in this period initiated the mass movement around Youth against Racism in Europe, against fascism in the early 1990s right up to today. We successfully intervened and led the movement in Austria against Haider. In 1997 we also saw the election of Joe Higgins as a member of the Irish parliament (TD), following the mass struggle against water charges which we pioneered.
While others are, in reality, abandoning Trotsky as no longer relevant to 'the modern world', we perceive that his ideas and methods are as vital, indeed more vital, to the struggles that are opening up.
Trotsky himself once commented that in a new socialist world, the average intelligence would be of a 'Beethoven, a Van Gogh, a Marx or Lenin' and, beyond this, new peaks of human greatness would arise. We would have to say today that in the pantheon of the 'greats' of the world labour movement, Leon Trotsky stands alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin. A new generation of workers who will be moving into struggle will build a monument to Trotsky, not of stone but a mass socialist and revolutionary movement.
The new changed period will allow Marxism to reconnect to the working class, in the first instance, to its more developed layer, which will provide the backbone for the creation of new mass forces. The working class in Britain, for the first time in 100 years, in a mass sense has been politically beheaded by New Labour's move to a position analogous to that of the Democratic Party in the USA. This is why the Socialist Party in Britain calls for the creation of a new mass workers' party, while at the same time seeking to build its own forces within the working-class movement. We hail Trotsky as a great theoretician and leader of the working class but we do not merely acclaim past leaders. It is necessary for us, particularly the new generation of workers, to study the writings of Leon Trotsky alongside of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg but, above all, to seek to acquire his method which will allow us to create a mass Marxist force that will eradicate from the planet the scourge of capitalism and all that goes with it.
Socialism Today # 49, July 2000
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