https://themilitant.com/2019/11/02/the-turn-to-industry-forging-a-proletarian-party/
Introduction to new book
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party
Advancing a working-class program requires a party working class in
composition
Vol. 83/No. 41
November 11, 2019
Miners block rails, Harlan County, Kentucky, July 2019, to stop
Blackjewel bosses from hauling coal until wages owed them were paid. The
nonunion miners won broad support and, in October, their back pay.
Sydney Boles
Miners block rails, Harlan County, Kentucky, July 2019, to stop
Blackjewel bosses from hauling coal until wages owed them were paid. The
nonunion miners won broad support and, in October, their back pay.
Militant/Arthur Hughes
Jack Barnes
Below is the introduction to the new book, The Turn to Industry: Forging
a Proletarian Party by Jack Barnes. Barnes is the national secretary of
the Socialist Workers Party. Copyright © 2019 by Pathfinder Press.
Reprinted by permission.
BY JACK BARNES
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party is about the
working-class program, composition, and course of conduct of the only
kind of party worthy of the name “revolutionary” in the imperialist
epoch. The only kind of party that can recognize the most revolutionary
fact of this epoch — the worth of working people, and our power to
change society when we organize and act against the capitalists and all
the economic, social, and political forms of their class rule.
This book is about building such a party in the United States and in
other capitalist countries around the world. It is about the course the
Socialist Workers Party and its predecessors have followed for one
hundred years and counting.
“We will not succeed in rooting the party in the working class, much
less in defending the revolutionary proletarian principles of the party
from being undermined, unless the party is an overwhelmingly proletarian
party, composed in its decisive majority of workers in the factories,
mines, and mills,” emphasized resolutions adopted by the SWP convention
in 1938. The party must become “an inseparable part of the trade unions
and their struggles.” It must be an inseparable part of daily battles
waged by the working class and other exploited producers to defend
ourselves and our families against the brutal consequences of capitalist
oppression.
Top, miners block rails, Harlan County, Kentucky, July 2019, to stop
Blackjewel bosses from hauling coal until wages owed them were paid. The
nonunion miners won broad support and, in October, their back pay.
Above, miners hold national protest in Washington, D.C., March 1981, a
few weeks before 160,000 began 10-week strike, turning back concession
contract demanded by mine bosses.
Above, Militant/Stu Singer
Above, miners hold national protest in Washington, D.C., March 1981, a
few weeks before 160,000 began 10-week strike, turning back concession
contract demanded by mine bosses.
That orientation — the course of the Bolsheviks under V.I. Lenin in
leading the workers and peasants to power in October 1917 — has been our
strategic course since a communist party was founded in the United
States two years later, along with others affiliating to the new
Communist International. The new party had one sole aim — emulating the
Bolsheviks’ example. The SWP is the direct descendant of that party.
Top, port drivers rally October 2018 to win recognition of Teamsters as
their union and to defend immigrant workers facing deportation. Above,
two busloads of workers from Sparrows Point steel plant in Baltimore,
including socialist workers who helped organize caravan, joined March
1979 rally of 3,500 in Newport News, Virginia, to back strike for
recognition of Steelworkers Local 8888 at Tenneco shipyards. Fight
registered gains of working class and unions from Black rights victories
in South. Inset, strikers picket shipyard February 1979.
Top, Reuters/Kyle Grillot Above, Militant/Martín Koppel Below,
Militant/John Cobey
Top, port drivers rally October 2018 to win recognition of Teamsters as
their union and to defend immigrant workers facing deportation. Above,
two busloads of workers from Sparrows Point steel plant in Baltimore,
including socialist workers who helped organize caravan, joined March
1979 rally of 3,500 in Newport News, Virginia, to back strike for
recognition of Steelworkers Local 8888 at Tenneco shipyards. Fight
registered gains of working class and unions from Black rights victories
in South. Below, strikers picket shipyard February 1979.
With the rise of industrial capitalism some two hundred fifty years ago,
conflicts between workers and employers increasingly took on “the
character of collisions between two classes,” explained Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto, the founding program of the
revolutionary workers movement. In face of the capitalists’ cutthroat
drive for profits, workers have no choice but to “club together in order
to keep up the rate of wages” and resist employers’ push to extend the
workday and speed up production, with cold disregard for our health and
safety. Inevitably, workers “begin to form combinations (trade unions)”
against the employing class.
Some two centuries of class-struggle experience have confirmed that such
“combinations” take many initial forms — from acts of resistance on the
job; to battles against company lockouts; to strikes, organizing drives,
and campaigns to expand union power.
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party is a new edition of
the book first published in 1981 under the title The Changing Face of US
Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions. It is intended to
be read, and above all used, as a guide to building a revolutionary
workers party. Along with documents from earlier editions selected to
focus on fundamental questions at the heart of the Socialist Workers
Party’s turn to industry from the 1970s on, it also includes three new
pieces that give further concreteness to these reports.
Two of them are from the pages of the Militant newsweekly — one on the
Steelworkers Fight Back campaign of the mid-1970s, the other a column by
party veteran Marvel Scholl entitled “The Making of a Union Bureaucrat.”
The third is from a February 1980 report by Ken Shilman, who organized
the work of party members in the United Mine Workers union at the time,
drawing a balance sheet on the first two years of party building and
trade union activity in the coalfields of West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
and Alabama.
During the 1960s the SWP and its affiliated youth organization, the
Young Socialist Alliance, had grown rapidly, recruiting large numbers of
new members who had been won to the revolutionary working-class movement
as students fighting Jim Crow segregation — North and South — as well as
organizing against the Vietnam War and the oppression of women. In
February 1978 the party’s National Committee adopted the first report in
this collection, “Leading the Party Into Industry,” and began a historic
turn.
Members of the party responded with enthusiasm, as well as disciplined
attention to every detail. By the mid-1980s the large majority of party
members were carrying out union and political work alongside other
workers in auto plants, steel mills, rail yards, coal mines, oil
refineries, electrical equipment factories, garment shops, textile
mills, packinghouses, airports, and other industrial workplaces. Readers
will find the breadth of this activity captured in the reports and the
new and greatly expanded photo pages throughout the book.
Over the years since the SWP made what has become known as the turn to
industry, the imperialist order has sunk into deeper and deeper crisis:
declining profit rates; intensifying global capitalist competition;
stagnation in capital investment to expand plant, equipment, and
industrial employment; mounting pressures toward currency wars; and
unending military conflicts. Workers and our families face attacks by
the capitalist class, its government, and its Democratic and Republican
parties, with their “socialist” wings, on our living and job conditions
— on our very life and limb.
The rulers’ blows don’t fall evenly or with the same force on all
sections of working people. Inequalities are widening not only between
social classes but within the working class itself.
In face of these unrelenting assaults, the working class and labor
movement have been in retreat since the 1990s, one symptom of which has
been the sharp decline in union organization. Union membership in
privately owned workplaces has fallen from more than 20 percent when the
reports in this book were given to 6.5 percent today. The drop has been
steep among industrial workers — from 87 percent of underground coal
miners in 1977 to some 20 percent in 2018; from more than 90 percent of
automobile workers in the late 1970s to some 50 percent today; with
comparable trends among other mining and manufacturing workers.
But the necessity — and opportunities — for working people, nonunion and
union alike, to be bold, to organize ourselves, and to mobilize mutual
solidarity have seldom been greater. And necessity is pushing us in that
direction. The measure of our success will often not initially be the
formation of new and powerful unions fighting for the interests of our
class.
It will be the experience and confidence workers gain as we act together.
Left, unionists across U.S. joined march of 5,000 in Austin, Minnesota,
April 1986, to back UFCW Local P-9 against Hormel. Above, UMWA
contingent in labor march for Equal Rights Amendment, Richmond,
Virginia, January 1980. Leaders of Coal Employment Project, which helped
women get mining jobs, hold banner. Right, Ed Sadlowski, Steelworkers
Fight Back candidate for union president, speaks at Detroit rally, Feb.
5, 1977. Ranks used campaign to seek control over their union and end to
USWA officials’ connivance with steel bosses.
Top, Militant: Above, Militant/Nancy Cole: Below
Top, unionists across U.S. joined march of 5,000 in Austin, Minnesota,
April 1986, to back UFCW Local P-9 against Hormel. Above, UMWA
contingent in labor march for Equal Rights Amendment, Richmond,
Virginia, January 1980. Leaders of Coal Employment Project, which helped
women get mining jobs, hold banner.
It will be our increasing political knowledge and consciousness of the
employers — and of ourselves.
It will be our pride and our readiness to stand up and be counted as we
act together as part of a common class.
And it will be our deeper understanding, explained by Engels as far back
as 1847, that “communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds
not from principles but from facts.” It is the line of march of the
working class toward political power.
Socialist Workers Party members today work and fight alongside rail
workers — freight conductors to yard workers — confronting concession
contracts, cuts in crew size, and increasingly dangerous job conditions
as a result of the carriers’ profit drive. We work and fight alongside
workers at large retail stores owned by Walmart, the biggest private
employer in the United States, with a nonunion workforce of some 1.5
million. We carry out political activity with car service and taxi
drivers — from Africa, Asia, North America, and elsewhere who are
working longer and longer hours under conditions of plunging take-home
pay, unsustainable debt, and rising suicide rates in face of cutthroat
competition among them fostered by owners of the fleet companies and
“gig economy,” “woke” capitalists.
Above, Ed Sadlowski, Steelworkers Fight Back candidate for union
president, speaks at Detroit rally, Feb. 5, 1977. Ranks used campaign to
seek control over their union and end to USWA officials’ connivance with
steel bosses.
Jim West
Above, Ed Sadlowski, Steelworkers Fight Back candidate for union
president, speaks at Detroit rally, Feb. 5, 1977. Ranks used campaign to
seek control over their union and end to USWA officials’ connivance with
steel bosses.
The workers most open today to acting against the employers and to
giving consideration to working-class political alternatives are those
the capitalist families and the professional and upper middle classes
dismiss as “deplorables” or smear as “criminals” or just “trash.” Those
contemptuous slurs are the opposite of the Socialist Workers Party’s
knowledge of the big majority of our class. We consider them a better
class of people. We come from them. We’re part of them.
These are men and women of all skin colors and ages. They and their kin
come from urban and rural backgrounds, from all continents and national
origins. It is among these “deplorables” that a disciplined and fighting
union vanguard of the working class — and above all a tested
class-conscious political vanguard, independent of the Democratic and
Republican parties — will be forged and steeled over time in struggle
against the employing class.
❖
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party stands on the
revolutionary continuity of the Socialist Workers Party, explained and
defended some eight decades ago in In Defense of Marxism by Leon Trotsky
and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by James P. Cannon. The
articles and correspondence in those two books record the successful
effort to maintain a communist course in face of an opposition in the
party and its youth organization that began bending to imperialist
pressure and public opinion during Washington’s buildup to enter World
War II.
Communists use the Militant newsweekly, books on working-class politics,
and our election campaigns to explain the truth about capitalist parties
and the exploitation, oppression, and wars by capital they uphold. Top,
Dan Fein, steelworker and SWP candidate for mayor of Phoenix, Arizona,
in 1979. Above, articles in the Militant report on how Milwaukee Road
rail bosses used bankruptcy courts to cut crew sizes, lay off workers
and boost profits. Rail workers put out buttons and T-shirts demanding,
“Investigate Milwaukeegate.”Communists use the Militant newsweekly,
books on working-class politics, and our election campaigns to explain
the truth about capitalist parties and the exploitation, oppression, and
wars by capital they uphold.
Top, Dan Fein, steelworker and SWP candidate for mayor of Phoenix,
Arizona, in 1979. Above, articles in the Militant report on how
Milwaukee Road rail bosses used bankruptcy courts to cut crew sizes, lay
off workers and boost profits. Rail workers put out buttons and T-shirts
demanding, “Investigate Milwaukeegate.”
“The opposition is under the sway of petty-bourgeois moods and
tendencies. This is the essence of the whole matter,” Trotsky wrote in
December 1939 in one of his articles collected in In Defense of Marxism.
“Any serious factional fight in a party is always in the final analysis
a reflection of the class struggle.” That’s why, as Trotsky explained in
a letter written a few weeks later, “The class composition of the party
must correspond to its class program.”
Trotsky had become by early 1917 a central part of the Bolshevik
leadership forged by Lenin that led the workers and peasants of Russia
in making the October 1917 revolution and two years later launching the
Communist International. In 1929, some half a decade after Lenin’s
death, Joseph Stalin banished Trotsky from the Soviet Union for leading
the fight to continue Lenin’s proletarian internationalist policies.
Trotsky did so in direct political opposition to the rising petty
bourgeois layers in the USSR whose privileges and interests were
increasingly safeguarded by Stalin. Proletarian revolutionists the world
over, including Cannon and other leaders of what became the Socialist
Workers Party, joined with Trotsky in founding a new world communist
movement loyal to Lenin’s course.
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party also builds on Farrell
Dobbs’s firsthand account of the class-struggle leadership that
organized and led workers across the Midwest in the 1930s in the strikes
and union drives that transformed the Teamsters into a fighting
industrial union movement. Dobbs’s four books — Teamster Rebellion,
Teamster Power, Teamster Politics, and Teamster Bureaucracy — “are worth
reading, rereading, and reviewing every year,” as I explain in one of
the reports published here. “The more comrades get into industry, get to
know the unions, and begin operating as part of party fractions, the
more we’ll get out of those books every time we go back to them.”
It is also important to see The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian
Party as a companion to three other more recent works that expand on
social and class issues at the heart of America’s road to socialism:
•Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack
Barnes (2009);
• Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning
Under Capitalism by Jack Barnes (2016); and
•Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions by Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin,
Leon Trotsky, Farrell Dobbs, and Jack Barnes (2019).
Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions centers on the party’s broad
and systematic propaganda activity in the working class. SWP members,
supporters, and young socialists support picket lines, knock on doors,
and stand on porches to talk with working people in cities, towns, and
farm country, as we carry out such activity on the job and in the
unions. We use the Militant newsweekly, books on working-class
politics, and our SWP election campaigns to explain the truth about the
capitalist parties and the exploitation, oppression, and wars by capital
they uphold. Above all, we report how working people are organizing to
resist assaults on our rights and conditions of life and work — on the
job and off.
Above, Militant article on how coal miner Bill Hovland, who was also the
SWP candidate for U.S. Senate in West Virginia in 1982, won back his job
after he was suspended by bosses at Old Ben Coal. Hovland’s firing was
seen by fellow mine workers as part of ongoing battle between bosses and
the union. Workers went on strike, forcing bosses to back down.Above,
Militant article on how coal miner Bill Hovland, who was also the SWP
candidate for U.S. Senate in West Virginia in 1982, won back his job
after he was suspended by bosses at Old Ben Coal. Hovland’s firing was
seen by fellow mine workers as part of ongoing battle between bosses and
the union. Workers went on strike, forcing bosses to back down.
The Militant has tremendous leverage to advance the organization and
education of class-struggle-minded workers and unionists. As a
“newsweekly published in the interests of working people,” which the
Militant’s masthead proudly proclaims, each issue features firsthand
reports by working people — written in our own voices, and in our own
names — about resistance to the capitalist rulers in factories, mines,
and other workplaces and working-class communities. We do so openly and
boldly as who we are and what we stand for, never pretending to be
anything different. And we back our co-workers in acting the same way.
Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions also features Trotsky’s 1940
article, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” which, as
Farrell Dobbs wrote in a 1969 preface, contains “more food for thought
(and action) . . . than will be found in any book by anyone else on the
union question.”
Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, as
emphasized in its very first paragraphs, explains the unbreakable link
between the fight for Black freedom and a course toward the
“revolutionary conquest of state power by a politically class-conscious
and organized vanguard of the working class — millions strong.” A
December 1974 march in Boston to support school desegregation. Mass
meetings, protests and defense of school buses beat back attacks
organized by Democratic Party leaders. Battle was a “decisive combat
experience for an entire layer of the party leadership,” Barnes
says.December 1974 march in Boston to support school desegregation. Mass
meetings, protests and defense of school buses beat back attacks
organized by Democratic Party leaders. Battle was a “decisive combat
experience for an entire layer of the party leadership,” Barnes says.
workers and farmers government, it says, is “the mightiest weapon
possible” to wage the battle to end not only racism and Black oppression
but also the subjugation of women “and every form of exploitation and
human degradation inherited from millennia of class-divided society.”
The introduction to that book explains why it is dedicated to SWP cadres
who are African American, “who have never tired of getting in the face
of race-baiters, redbaiters, and outright bigots and demagogues of every
stripe who have sought to deny that workers, farmers, and young people
who are Black — and proud to be Black — can and will become communists
along the same road and on the same political basis as anyone else.”
❖
There is a concerted attack today on the recognition that class
divisions underlie all forms of exploitation and oppression, and that
class struggle and class consciousness — working-class consciousness —
are central to any effective fight for liberation. The assault comes not
directly from the capitalist ruling families themselves, who have always
tried to hide that dangerous truth — dangerous to them.
Instead, the offensive comes from what many refer to as “the left,”
liberals and radicals among the middle class and professionals — from
privileged college and university campuses such as Harvard, Oberlin, and
others; to prominent newspapers, magazines, and TV networks from the New
York Times and Atlantic Monthly to CNN, BBC, and The New Yorker. It is
promoted on websites and “social media” proliferating too rapidly to
keep track of. These voices — which include individuals and political
groups claiming to speak on behalf of working people and the oppressed —
insist that conflicts based on race, skin color, or what they call
“gender” — not class — are the driving force of history.
Left, as Vietnamese liberation fighters marched into Saigon (now Ho Chi
Minh City) in 1975, last U.S. forces fled. Vietnam war changed U.S.
politics from top to bottom, says Barnes. “What was previously
considered impossible happened.” Right, international campaign won
freedom for 12 members of Socialist Workers Party of Iran sentenced to
death and two others to life terms. Their “crime” was popularizing
socialist views among working people — that is, building a revolutionary
workers party.
But the observation that the record “of all hitherto existing society is
the history of class struggles” remains as true today as it was nearly
175 years ago when Karl Marx and Frederick Engels pointed it out at the
opening of the Communist Manifesto, the founding program of the modern
revolutionary workers movement.
Denial of the class struggle is nothing new. There are more than enough
grandparents to current “theories” about “identity politics,”
“intersectionality,” and so on noisily propagated by young professionals
and other upper middle class layers today. In 1940 James P. Cannon
polemicized against petty bourgeois currents on the eve of World War II
who “rail at our stick-in-the-mud attitude toward the fundamental
concepts of Marxism — the class theory of the state, the class criterion
in the appraisal of all political questions, the conception of politics,
including war, as the expression of class interests, and so forth and so on.
“From all this,” said Cannon, “they conclude that we are ‘conservative’
by nature, and extend that epithet to cover everything we have done in
the past.”
The epithet today is not simply “conservative,” but some variant of
“homophobe” or “racist,” leveled against the working class by
self-anointed “social justice warriors.” Many of them resort to slander
and thuggery to intimidate those they come into conflict with, whether
over political differences, relations between the sexes, or small
shopkeepers merely protecting themselves from shoplifting or other
depredations. Showing disdain for due process and constitutional
protections conquered in class battles by workers, African Americans,
women, and others, these sanctimonious inquisitors organize to smear,
shout down, and silence their chosen antagonists.
n June 1987, U.S. coal miners, including Alyson Kennedy (front), visit
British coalfields to learn about resistance to rulers’ drive to close
mines and break National Union of Mineworkers. They were hosted by Women
Against Pit Closures, made up of miners’ wives and other NUM supporters.
In 2016 Kennedy was the SWP candidate for president of United States.
Militant/Norton Sandler
In June 1987, U.S. coal miners, including Alyson Kennedy (front), visit
British coalfields to learn about resistance to rulers’ drive to close
mines and break National Union of Mineworkers. They were hosted by Women
Against Pit Closures, made up of miners’ wives and other NUM supporters.
In 2016 Kennedy was the SWP candidate for president of United States.
The real targets, however, are tens of millions of working people across
the US, whom these scornful (and sometimes newly minted) bearers of
class privilege seek to drum out of the human race as ignorant,
backward, racist, and reactionary. But these “deplorables” are simply
the current generations of workers whom the bosses — as well as many
union officials — wrote off as “trash” during the great labor battles
that exploded to their shock in the 1930s.
What I wrote in Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? about today’s
self-designated “enlightened meritocracy” has been confirmed many times
over. This “handsomely remunerated” layer — university presidents,
deans, and professors; high-and-mighty officials of “nonprofits” and
NGOs; media and hi-tech professionals; entertainment and sports
personalities; and many others — “is determined to con the world into
accepting the myth that the economic and social advancement of its
members is just reward for their individual intelligence, education, and
‘service.’” They truly believe they have “the right to make decisions,
to administer and ‘regulate’ society for the bourgeoisie — on behalf of
what they claim to be the interests of ‘the people.’”
But above everything else, “they are mortified to be identified with
working people in the United States — Caucasian, Black, or Latino;
native- or foreign-born. Their attitudes toward those who produce
society’s wealth, the foundation of all culture, extend from saccharine
condescension to occasional and unscripted open contempt, as they
lecture us on our manners and mores.”
A few years on, the only update needed is the allusion to their open
contempt being “occasional” and “unscripted.” Today it’s both frequent
and intentional.
❖
Working people have nothing to gain and everything to lose by relying on
the propertied families, their capitalist two-party system, their
“socialist” water carriers among professionals and the upper middle
class, and their government and state. We must organize ourselves
independently, both politically and organizationally, of the propertied
classes who derive their enormous wealth and power from exploiting the
social labor of workers, farmers, and other toiling producers — and who
above all work to conceal that reality from us in order to retard the
development of class consciousness.
Today, the program and course of action presented in The Turn to
Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party are needed by working people
whether fighting for unpaid wages in a mine in Kentucky; organizing to
resist unsafe working conditions in a massive retail conglomerate or on
a two-hundred-car freight train; defending a woman’s right to choose
abortion; demanding amnesty for undocumented immigrants; mobilizing
against cop brutality; or organizing solidarity with struggles by
working people anywhere in the world.
Class-conscious workers openly and boldly join in every fight, every
“combination” we can to resist the bosses’ assaults, whether or not
we’ve yet forged a union in our workplace.
We join in the pressing task of rebuilding and strengthening the labor
movement, taking part in and championing efforts to organize the
unorganized wherever workers are fighting, whatever the official status
of their “papers.”
And we explain the need for and help advance class consciousness, which
unites not divides us, as we begin to transform ourselves and the trade
unions into instruments of struggle against capitalist rule and
exploitation itself.
There are no guarantees about what percentage of our class will become
organized into unions, or how many unions will be transformed. “We’re
not prophets but revolutionaries who work to steer developments in the
direction of strengthening the unity of the working class in struggle,”
notes the report in these pages that draws lessons the SWP learned from
the first year of our turn to industry.
Cuban youth leader Kenia Serrano, right, on U.S. speaking tour, listens
to UAW pickets on strike at Caterpillar plant in York, Pennsylvania,
March 1995, explain their fight. Strikers also welcomed learning from
Serrano about the Cuban Revolution.
Militant/Kathy Mickells
Cuban youth leader Kenia Serrano, right, on U.S. speaking tour, listens
to UAW pickets on strike at Caterpillar plant in York, Pennsylvania,
March 1995, explain their fight. Strikers also welcomed learning from
Serrano about the Cuban Revolution.
In the two great socialist revolutions of the twentieth century — in
Russia in 1917, and then some four decades later in Cuba — the
centrality of trade unions and the fight to transform them came largely
after, not before, the struggle for workers power. But
revolutionary-minded workers can’t bank on that pattern being repeated
in today’s world, in which both the level of industrialization and the
size and weight of the working class are much larger, not only in
imperialist countries but also many others.
One thing we know for sure, however, is that a socialist revolution in
the United States is inconceivable without organizing our class to fight
to build unions and to use union power to advance the interests of
working people here and around the world. And the forging of a
proletarian party — a revolutionary political instrument of the working
class, aimed above all at changing which class is exercising state power
— is impossible without participating in that struggle.
The biggest obstacle to class consciousness is what all the institutions
of capitalist society teach working people to think of ourselves. What
we’re taught about our worth as human beings. What we’re told we’re not
capable of doing and never will be. What we’re lectured about day in and
day out by the bosses and their middle class “experts” and “regulators,”
much of it echoed by union bureaucrats.
But the class struggle has a different story to tell. Malcolm X, Ernesto
Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Maurice Bishop, Thomas Sankara, and other
outstanding revolutionary leaders never tired of reminding working
people why discovering our worth is more important than harping on our
oppression and exploitation. Of explaining what we are capable of
becoming. And of showing us in action how we are capable of transforming
ourselves — and the foundations of society itself — as we organize
together and fight.
It is through such class battles, which include all social and political
struggles in the interests of working people, that we gain experience
and confidence, in ourselves and in each other. It’s how ties of class
solidarity and loyalty are forged. The SWP’s program adopted in 1938,
and still guiding our course today, tells the truth as well as it is
possible to do:
“All methods are good that raise the class-consciousness of the workers,
their trust in their own forces, their readiness for self-sacrifice in
the struggle. The impermissible methods are those that implant fear and
submissiveness in the oppressed in the face of their oppressors, that
crush the spirit of protest and indignation or substitute for the will
of the masses — the will of the leaders; for conviction — compulsion;
for an analysis of reality — demagogy and frame-up.”
There’s nothing to add today to the closing sentences of that program.
The Socialist Workers Party “uncompromisingly gives battle to all
political groupings tied to the apron strings of the bourgeoisie. Its
task — the abolition of capitalism’s domination. Its aim — socialism.
Its method — the proletarian revolution.”
September 27, 2019
In This Issue
Front Page Articles •After 40-day strike GM workers approve contract
•Back strikers’ fight against copper bosses’ union busting
•SWP drive to sell books to explain party, its program
•Protests in Iraq, Lebanon target government, Tehran interference
•2020 campaign reflects crisis of US rulers’ two party system
•UFCW union local says ‘No!’ to any prison ban of ‘Militant’
Feature Articles •The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party
Also In This Issue •Hong Kong protests back Catalan independence fight
•Blackjewel miners’ encampment protest wins back pay
•Striking Chicago teachers, school workers win support
•Florida ex-felons push back restrictions on right to vote
•Socialist Workers Party Fund Drive Oct. 5 - Dec. 10 (Week 3)
•Fall Campaign to sell Militant subscriptions and books Oct. 5 - Dec. 10
(Week 3)
On the Picket Line •Steelworkers in New Brunswick fight Glencore lockout
•Quebec senior residence workers strike for wages and more staff
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David Hume
“ In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees
of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral
evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. ”
― David Hume,