Pushing the class struggle forward

Larry Holmes WW photo: Gary Wilson

This capitalist crisis is also a crisis for the working-class movement, for progressives, for the trade union movement, for immigrant workers, for entities trying, with all the weak circumstances, to help the working class and the oppressed rise to the occasion and use this crisis in order to step into class consciousness, class struggle and even revolutionary consciousness.

Usually the stakes in a crisis are as big as the crisis. This is the biggest that has been coming for at least 35 or 40 years. It’s been coming ever since the end of the second imperialist war. The reason behind the crisis is a megamonster, worldwide crisis of capitalist overproduction.

Technology, the way the bosses have been able to enhance productivity, redivide labor all over the world, globalize and centralize labor in order to drive wages down, has backfired. It’s only made the crisis of overproduction that much more severe and merciless. We now have an African-American president. We should say that it’s a victory not only for the African-American masses but everyone in the world who is struggling against racism, for oppressed all around the world.

I want to touch on some positive, hopeful significance behind this development. Comrade Sam Marcy, the founder and chairperson for many, many decades of Workers World Party, died 10 years ago.

In 1950 Sam wrote a document called “Memorandum on the war and the tasks of the proletariat in this phase of the revolutionary struggle.” This memorandum had 25 points.

The first 12 points are orienting the movement to support the uprising of the Korean people and chastising those who were reluctant to do that. He also explained both the gains that the worldwide working class movement had made at the end of the second imperialist war—the strengthening of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Chinese Revolution—but also the problems, and principally the leadership in the Soviet Union.

In the other 13 points Sam explained that before the Russian Revolution it was axiomatic for Marxists to consider that the revolutionary center of struggle—where the workers were rising up, where they were the most politicized and class conscious and perhaps even ready to enter into a struggle for power—was where imperialism and capitalism were the strongest. But after the first few years of the Russian Revolution, it was a very difficult period. It seemed clear that the centers where imperialism and capitalism were strong were in the West, while the revolutionary center where the masses were rising up and engaging in revolutionary struggle, overthrowing governments and building liberation movements, was shifting to the East. And the center of imperialism was shifting away from Europe to the United States.

He made a prognosis: that in the natural course of imperialist development—the redivision of labor, the introduction of technology, attacks on the working class, the unfolding “globalization”—the center of imperialism and capitalism would reunite with the center of revolutionary struggle.

Many people voted for Obama out of justifiable righteous hatred of the war and Bush. And we know why African Americans rose up and voted for him. The world is happy. But there’s something deeper. Look at the character of the working class and how it has changed, how it’s more multinational, more Black and Latin@, with a larger and larger proportion of women and immigrants. Not just in the East or in the West, but also in the U.S. South, in places like Virginia and North Carolina, and also with support from white workers, Obama was able to win.

The fact that a Black politician by the name of Barack Hussein Obama was able to win an election in the most racist reactionary country in the world—at least that’s the way it started by comparison to Europe—is because there is something going on underneath. And it’s asserting itself.

The first big sign of this was the immigrant workers’ uprising in 2006. And if you understand that, you’ll understand why the government has mercilessly gone after immigrant workers to beat them down, break their movement and leave them vulnerable—like the lynching of Marcelo Lucero in Long Island—to make sure their movement doesn’t grow strong and most importantly make sure that other detachments of the working class don’t unite with them. They’re afraid because this is the future.

In this demographic development that is changing the composition of the population and the working class, there is also a class struggle going on. And our class is not ready to assert itself yet. So when you have an Obama phenomenon, it is the ruling class—especially those who are wiser—who co-opt Obama and use this development in their class interest. He is wondering, along with all his advisers and the rest of the ruling class, how in hell they are going to deal with this crisis. They cannot end it no matter how much money they throw at it.

It is why Obama is now desperately trying to make a coalition government with all the factions of the ruling class both in and outside the Democratic Party; why Hillary Rodham Clinton might be the secretary of state and Gates might continue as secretary of war and others from other factions also might continue.

He needs them and they need him. How will we fight the new government with its new face? How much of a problem will it be? Will it confuse workers? Will it confuse the Black masses? Will they say, “Don’t criticize Barack Obama, he’s on our side”?

I don’t expect that period to last very long at all.

I have been so strong about doing something on the 80th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birthday because it is a way of beginning the class struggle against the class character of the United States government, no matter who is president.

Our party always knew that in this country and in this world you have to have a close strategic relationship with the Black working class, and it has to be based on longstanding experience, trust and ironclad solidarity. These are things that only come with time. And that will be more and more the case with the rising of immigrant workers, not only Latin@ but also Asian.

In the midst of the deepening economic crisis that seems like it’s headed toward a depression—as workers suffer—there will be a vacuum if there is no struggle, and we know who will try to step into that vacuum: the racists. The only way we can fight that is by prosecuting the class struggle and making sure it is what it needs to be in order to be effective. We have to begin sooner rather than later. Some of our friends on the left who don’t understand the national question might run off and start attacking the government, antagonizing and alienating the Black working class and making a big mistake that will take months if not years to recover from.

Our problem is not the lack of a program of demands, of a strategy. Our comrades in Michigan and in California are fighting for a moratorium on foreclosures. We have been the organization that has raised that struggle up. There is no lack of an opening in the struggle.

Right now Secretary of Treasury Paulson is the one giving money out to the banks, not just $750 billion but trillions of dollars. If Congress wants money for GM or whatever, they have to go visit the bankers. It’s a bankers’ coup. Why hasn’t someone called a big demonstration?

Now, the FDIC is for taking $24 billion and using it to renegotiate the mortgages of 1.5 million people who are facing foreclosures. And the bankers have said no. You can get into a struggle when there is an opening like that in the ruling class and the workers can rush in.

Even the minds of the ruling class itself are churning. On the one hand they’ll be thinking, “We’re not going to bail out the workers, we have to cut everything, we have to fire them all, we have to break the back of the unions, not bail them out, we have to cut all the wages and take everything else.” But on the other hand they’re thinking, “If workers don’t have any money, all the levers of the economy are going to collapse, so we have to do something.” They are thinking of New Deal-inspired works project programs to rebuild the infrastructure. So even before a struggle gets going, they are thinking of what they may have to do. So imagine if a struggle was going.

Our problem is the weakness of our movement. It’s a sober, objective observation. A long period of reaction has had a devastating effect on the working class and revolutionary movements. Because of that our movement is not prepared to fight back. It may be, and it’s not the first time in history, that the workers are more prepared to fight back than their leaders. We have to determine what it is as a party that we can do to help push things forward.

We cannot organize or unleash the struggle all by ourselves. But we can be a decisive factor. Revolutionaries have an edge. Our view is not obscured by confusion or by just being concerned about one or two issues or by being mad at somebody over something that happened 10 years ago. Nothing obscures our vision.

We cannot help this struggle that will advance the working class, its consciousness, its political level, its leadership, and put it on the road to the struggle for power unless we are stronger. Our party must take this problem and find solutions to it. We need more cadres. We need to call on all of those who want to fight capitalism, who want to enter on the socialist road but understand that that’s not an abstraction but has to do with uniting with the working class—that’s what makes you stronger as revolutionary socialists and that’s what makes revolutionary socialism stronger.

An understanding of the national question and imperialism, of getting the struggle going in a qualitative way here against this attack, in the midst of this economic crisis, in the end is the best way that we can show solidarity with all the oppressed people in the world who are fighting for their liberation. We can weaken imperialism at its heart.

The next period may very well be a period of preparation and not a period of huge struggle and victory, although not necessarily. It seems like the next six months will be the first test of what the working class and its allies, including ourselves, are able to do. Consider what you can do around Martin Luther King’s 80th birthday. He died fighting in Memphis for workers.

A few months from now is May Day. The immigrants brought it back. Because of the crisis this is the first year where there may actually be a time for the rest of the working class—white, Black, every nationality and gender—to join the immigrant workers in a united May Day, maybe even a united May month.

There are going to be anti-war demonstrations on the sixth anniversary of the war. We need an influx of creative and imaginative ideas that we can use to go and argue with all the coalitions to unite the demonstrations with the workers’ struggle at home. This would raise the level of the struggle.

We must act as socialists and communists with great discipline, great sobriety and clear thinking so that we can accomplish the things we need to do. If we do this in the short term, the chances of the fightback advancing with all its repercussions are excellent. It’s really up to us.