The Proletarian Situation As U.S. Imperialism Declines (Part 1)
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Introduction:
The Proletarian Situation As U.S. Imperialism Declines: The 2023-24 Conjuncture In Brief
The following articles are presented in a series of sections, which while generally serving our domestic political needs, are focused on answering many questions posed to us by comrades in Latin America about ourselves, our analysis and our practice. We will consider U.S. class politics in the context we explained elsewhere as the unfolding bipolar world where the reigning hegemon is in decline. We will elaborate elements of program throughout while guiding readers to our Draft Program for a comprehensive historical statement of method and our Draft Theses on Imperialism and terminal crisis. While rightism attacks “woke” consciousness in defense of teaching mythological U.S. history and all the irrationalities of capitalist ideology, we go after their witting and unwitting abettors and allies who propose the ballot box as the remedy for every ill. No mercy for liars! Every vote for bourgeois parties is a vote against the class-for-itself!
September 11 reminded us of the 1970’s Chilean experience. The election of a socialist at the head of a popular front not only did not signal the arrival of socialism via the ballot box, but the failure to break with and smash the bourgeois state guaranteed that the fascist coup d’etat would follow.“Socialists” who disagree have to show us how Marx and Engels were wrong (they can’t!) when they wrote…,
‘In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the [Paris] Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”’ (June 1872)
Additional installments to this series will explain in more detail how the features of the 2023-24 conjuncture are shaping our employment of the historic transitional program to pry its way into the consciousness of the wage labor masses and their allies. Now is the moment to popularize the Transitional Program, exactly in answer to the question ‘WHY are our strikes and struggles being sold out?!”
There are many subjects we are not covering here that are the meat of our day to day work in ongoing international, defense and economic struggles: we fight for women’s liberation, job safety and conditions and in defense of public education and science. We cannot at the same time make this analysis a readable length and make it a world atlas of political features. We will elsewhere make the case that the robbery of living wages, upstreaming value from the productive to the parasite class, has been the overarching characteristic of the post-VietNam war period. It is the connector between the pauperizing of the global south and the homeless worker retirees in the U.S.A.
We’re Not Respectable, We’re Revolutionaries!
Revolutionary optimism must confront demoralization in the face of the rise of irrationalism, gaslighting and a media barrage of ‘alternate facts.’ The forces of irrationalism escalate as the forces of production, in the hands of capital manifest everywhere as forces of destruction. Working class optimism must be based on the fact that it remains the only productive, progressive and revolutionary class, that the objective conditions for socialism are more than ripe, that the bourgeoisie has no way out of the terminal crisis, and that consciousness is mutable. Yet, the forces of production being advanced is, in itself not sufficient to effect the transition to socialism; the subjective factor, the working class and in particular its vanguard elements, must build their organizations of self rule, their class vehicle, the revolutionary party and international that trains rank and file militants to become cadres that lead the class uprisings to win workers’ power.
Workers need their own party to develop and battle test their program in the day to day class struggle.
Such a party must defeat the rank objectivists; for them, the spontaneity of the masses is sufficient to defeat the most egregious evils of the capitalist state in the present. For objectivists, the fight for socialism can take place when that is the mood and movement of the masses. We reject objectivism at all times. Trotsky warned us against the proponents of the minimum/maximum program. Objectivists fit this description, reserving the socialist demands for “holiday speechifying.” For some objectivists, the time for the revolutionary party is always in the future. The greatest conquest of Bolshevism was the disciplined democratic centralist party of worker intellectuals wielding the tools of scientific socialism.
Worker Bolsheviks took their program into the workers movement where they challenged the objectivists, reformists and evolutionary socialists for leadership. Their efforts showed that working class consciousness could and must be freed from the ideological constraints of bourgeois legislative parameters and the trappings of depoliticized militant trade unionism and radical syndicalism. By building and politicizing organs of working class self rule in the shape of factory committees and workers councils, workers’ consciousness of themselves as a class for themselves multiplies. Today most socialists furiously reject the Bolshevik method, having become objectivists they reject the task of bringing forward a class struggle program and class independence. Some trade class independence for “Third Party” efforts, others, indeed most socialists from the ranks of the LRP, Oakland Socialist, and DSA not only vote Democratic in the privacy of their own personal frustration, but campaign for Democrats because, in their defeatist world view, ‘There Is No Alternative.’
One index of the demoralization of petty bourgeois politics is the periodic recourse to retailing third, bourgeois “progressive parties” or amalgams of the same on one ballot line. The Cornel West candidacy is bourgeois politics. We reject it as subservient to the rule of Capital and it must not be mistaken for genuine class political independence. West, for all his ‘prophetic’ bloviation, was running for the Green’s nomination, a party which has no program for a workers’ government or for workers’ power over production and the expropriation of the commanding heights of the economy. Such is as can be expected from candidates who self identify as “independent left” but not fundamentally working class, internationalist and communist. After abandoning the People’s Party to seek the Green nomination, West has dumped the Greens for what in other countries would be a Radical Party program, utopian but reformist, fixing up capitalism with truth, justice and love.
Green ‘socialist,’ Howie Hawkins, and Jeffersonian democrat Ralph Nader are quick to explain how Green campaigns are designed to pressure the Democratic Party. They’ve explained that at minimum these campaigns engage voters who would otherwise sit out; and at best the pressure could force Democrats to adopt Green positions just as the Wallace campaign pushed on Truman’s program in 1948.
Socialists (like SocAlt and Midwestern Marx) tail ended this candidacy, falling into the trap of class collaboration with imperialism, first by shelving the fight for the workers party now, trading it for a radical democratic petty bourgeois amalgam, and second by failing to critique the fake anti-imperialism which posits the China/Russia bloc not as a rival imperialism but as leaders of an anti-imperialist alliance of victims of imperialism.
We condemn the demoralization the objectivists bring into the workers movement! The post COVID strike wave in the U.S. poses an opportunity for the workers to deepen class consciousness and reclaim their agency. Our class power can be established by class struggle militants initiating union caucuses to develop a transitional program that exposes the contradictions and generalizes each particular conflict into a class battle. Revolutionary workers must propagandize and advocate in and for every struggle and movement of the oppressed, to break from the capitalist parties, to fight for political independence with a strategic goal of a workers government to implement a transitional program.
Revolutionary optimism tells us that during this 2023 strike wave we must oppose those who turn the mobilizations into an organizing drive for reform legislation and electing ‘labor friendly’ candidates and instead turn the workers movement toward initiating a fighting workers labor party. Because the unions are the workers only mass organizations and most workers are not organized in unions, the workers party must be based in the unions and among the non union workers’ communities oriented toward organizing the unorganized, the unemployed and immigrant workers together with the unions, community groups and specially oppressed minorities.
“Rank and File” Mysticism and Other Plagues the Petty Bourgeois Carry
How come our leaders line up a mile wide and battalions deep to oppose every mention of political independence and block the unions and social movements from making a ‘hard break’ from the Democrats? How come we hear so many “revolutionaries” rhapsodizing the U.A.W. strike with silence about the “responsible” leadership that embraces Biden and rejects shutting down the auto industry, rejecting the lesson of how the union was built or even mention of how! The rank-and-file mysticism insists the necessary consciousness for sit-down strikes is not there; then they say ‘we are not members, we are on the outside, it is not our business to tell the membership what to do.’ This is another form of objectivism and all it leaves out is ‘we are not proletarians, we have careers in professional identity politics careers to pursue, and transitional demands are unreasonable and so 1938.’ Of course there is also a ‘genuine’ rank and file “ism” of real but sadly reformist dogmatic dimensions, seeing little as possible, Capital as titanic power, and no hope outside of electoral pressure politics. This stratum produced the Fain leadership, while the aforementioned socialist stratum are lauding him. Expect no historical materialism from these cheerleaders. They are dazzled by the 40% demand and do not see how a creeping “stand up” strike does not threaten a workers’ takeover, expropriation of “ownership” or a wholesale workers’ replacement of management. We like rank-and-file caucuses fine. We like them built around Transitional Programs.
Instead of fighting for political independence and bringing a class struggle program into the unions, the left trade unionists clamor for ‘rank and file’ leadership and the anarchists nod along. Political independence and minor elements of a minimum social program are common add-ons for this layer of left and ‘out bureaucrats’ who generally fancy themselves ‘socialist.’ To win, workers need more than throw away points about a someday Labor Party buried in a Rank and File caucus program. We need the fight for political independence to free our hands and unleash our power in every fight. Today worker militants have to rearm themselves to defeat this layer of the labor leadership who hold us back with their reformist promises and capitalist politicians parading as ‘friends of labor’ and ‘rank and file leadership’
James P. Cannon, founding member of both the CP and the SWP wrote – in Two Articles on the Slogan ‘Rank-and-File Leadership’,
“The chatter about “rank-and-file leadership” is a disgrace for communists. Such horseplay can very well be left to the confusionists of syndicalism who object to the idea of a workers’ political party on the ground that the masses need no leaders. This demoralizing nonsense only hampers the organization of the working class and thus serves the bourgeoisie. The mission of the communists is to educate the workers, not to muddle and confuse them; to aspire, frankly, to lead them in their struggle, not to trail behind them and cater to ignorance and prejudice with demagogic slogans”
Now, just as in Cannon’s time, we are up against labor lieutenants of Capital, and so…,
“…. it is possible under capitalism for only a minority of the working class to free itself from bourgeois influences and ideas and to understand the historical class position of the proletariat. These are the conscious workers, the vanguard of the class. In order to influence the class it is necessary for these conscious workers to organize themselves and to fight unitedly against the domination of the capitalists and their agents in the labor movement. From this arises the Marxist idea of the centralized workers’ party. It is the first letter of the Marxist alphabet on the question of working-class organization.
This principle of leadership by the most conscious and resolute elements applies to strikes and other daily struggles as well as to the class struggle as a whole. The agitation for “the leadership of the rank and file” negates this principle and sows confusion. By this it only makes the leadership of the reactionary agents of the capitalists more secure. This harmful and anti-Marxist slogan should be cast aside. Instead of it, the Communist workers in the unions, as in every other field of the class struggle, should frankly contrast their policy and their leadership to the policy and the leadership of the labor lieutenants of capital. This is the only way to teach the workers and help them in their struggle. There is no roundabout way.” (Two Articles on the Slogan ‘Rank-and-File Leadership’)
Leon Trotsky, who alongside Lenin was the most prominent leader of the Russian Revolution and founder of the Fourth International, had insight into what class independence for trade unions means.
“In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent that they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of proletarian revolution.”
An independent and revolutionary trade union movement would resolve the racism question by fully integrating the unions, demanding jobs for all and fully integrated shops, organizing interracial self defense would be everyday work! Alas, the decades long war of police terror against the Black and immigrant communities was not opposed with Labor, Black and Brown self defense uniting all workers against the capitalist state, a vacuum of leadership allowed for lost layers of declassed and frustrated to join the fascist alt-right.
“Ah, but we are facing the fascists in the 2024 elections aren’t you with us?,” cry the liberals, Democrats and much of the socialist left. “With you?” We responded, “We fought them in Charlottesville and Portland, chased them off the streets in Boston and Berkeley, they dare not come into Oakland or Detroit; the AFL-CIO in Vermont called for a general strike and self defense against the January 6th insurrectionists!” We respond, “Where were you?” This questioning infuriates the pacifists, for whom no circumstance can exist that call for acquainting fascists’ heads with pavement. These, such as the Chomsky anarchists and tradition-agnostic IWWs funnel you into the Democrat vote time after time.
Just when the workers needed self defense guards to stop the fascists, the Democrats, union tops and fake socialists demobilized Black Lives Matter (BLM) just like they did the “Me Too” movment and to Occupy in 2012. Even pretense to a program including self-defence and workers agency falls apart when backing the Democrats. They depended on historic norms in policing and criminal justice while workers and the oppressed are being shot down and intimidated in the streets by cops and neo-fascists during the Obama, Trump, and Biden years! On January 6th the Democratic Party National Leadership was crawling for cover in the safe room under the Capitol because their electoral campaign demobilized a nascent working class and Black led anti-facist united front. Though the senior Huckabee threatens a civil war if Trump isn’t re-elected, Democrats show no sign they are physically prepared to face down another putsch. Together with their fake left friends they change the subject, saying we split the class.
Thus the revolutionary Marxists are often accused of conducting internecine warfare and sectarianism rather than building the ‘movement.’ We reject these accusations as the whining of economists (reformists) who have made a century-long career of telling the workers the objective conditions are not ripe. We say Trotsky was right…the conditions are already overripe. There is never a time for class collaboration! Voting for capitalist Democrats will not stop the fascist resurgence. Now we need a workers party, workers assemblies and workers defense guards to enforce worker’s democracy and crush the fascist threat. This starts with polemics to break the workers from all the misleaders, state department socialists, class collaborators and demoralized opportunists. This is not internecine warfare or sectarianism, this is class war!
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