Not a Third Party but Our Own Fighting Workers-Labor Party!
Workers and Oppressed need their own political party today to organize and lead struggle!
We know that workers are dissatisfied with choices that say, ‘you will subscribe to one or another imperialist plan while your country heads for a dark age and economic decline.’ We say, you are right to reject that model of a no future future; but you have no party that represents you. You need a workers’ leadership that will fight for a better world under workers’ control and a plan developed by the democratic discussions of the broader working class! You need to be heard. Not in a booth with a prescribed script and a little lever. Not once every two or four years and divorced from all the real, important social questions. What you need is power, and your own class party is only part of that. It will organize but you will exercise the power through class struggle, through the implementing of the working class’s historic program and through the organs of class power you create. The party program enumerates these, educates about them and agitates for their demands, but building workers’ power requires ranks and leadership, both largely supplied by you!
Everything about the present “democratic republic” howls at you with the derision of the privileged and their lawyers! Our idea of representation is not a smug profanity at your expense but mass meetings and factory occupations with resulting ultimatums to the bosses and their state. How is it that the bourgeois parties see no special threat to their parliamentary game from the fascists and nazis who parade openly on U.S. streets? The answer is that nowadays these embarrassing forces are goons available to set upon organizations of the workers and oppressed, i.e., ‘extra-legal’ last resort defenders of the capitalist workplace-and-political dictatorship.
We always take our stand on the survival and recovery of the one productive class! And this means the civil-libertarian tolerance for fascism must go and be replaced by workers’ power. This is a call to self-defense! Ours is likewise the plan for species survival, while the boss’s plan is planet destruction for private profit.
Ours must be an anti-war party, not a fig leaf of workers’ support for inter imperialist wars on workers of other countries, the variable capital. We would make common cause with them to overthrow the rule of their bosses, their capitalist class, their imperialist overlords! Therefore we support nations’ right to self-determination while supporting the oppressed masses’ desire to remove the parasite classes who have sold the workers and peasants’ lives and output to great foreign powers. The bosses’ parties of the U.S. only support the kind of “self- determination” that subordinates the masses to comprador bourgeois native vassals of themselves. Think of the history of the Caribbean nations! A U.S. workers’ government would end all of that oppression and exploitation overnight!
We need our own party! Historically reforms were won only when workers organizations and workers parties went into struggle in the streets and workplaces. Once there were Marxist parties in Europe who won major reforms long before we won anything like them in the U.S. The German workers won Social Security in 1885 when Bismarck was defeated along with his anti-socialist laws in a struggle with the rising Social Democratic Party (SPD.) And he conceded. It was fifty years later when the U.S. got Social Security under the hammer threat of the rise of the CIO pressuring FDR. The New Deal has long been understood to have saved capitalism, conceding the 40 hour week, the minimum wage and the National Labor Relations Board. Whereas reality was otherwise: Popular Front politics of betrayal by Stalinists, democratic “socialists” and Union bureaucrats saved Roosevelt and his class from socialist revolution!
Marxists active in unions and workers organizations intervened to promote self organization, education in class struggle, and use of historic methods by connecting every minimum demand to the end goal of workers power and socialism. However, the struggle for power and even mention of it was suppressed by those who insisted that socialism could and would be built first in the USSR.
Civil rights in the U.S. scarcely made any progress during the twenty years of FDR and Truman rule, with Black people treated as second class citizens while the U.S. bourgeoisie was railing against totalitarian communism abroad and this became diplomatic trouble for the U.S. postwar, as old empires collapsed and social revolutions ensued. All around the world the non-aligned movement, ranks and suits alike knew who Bull Connor was and came to know who George Wallace was in the Kennedy era, when Black masses in the streets threatened to take the political narrative in the southern states away from the major parties’ machines and forced the Voting Rights Act and ‘the war on poverty’ from LBJ.
Reforms won in the 1950-1970’s were no sooner established than the backlash to under-fund and diminish their efficacy commenced. Full equality was never won and today segregation is a de facto reality. Back Lives Matter once again illuminated the rampant police violence and terror against the Black and Brown populations. A workers party would organize multi-racial workers’ self defense guards to stop police and fascist violence.
The school to prison pipeline has been thoroughly documented as a means of keeping whole layers of Black and Brown working class youth marginalized and disproportionately unemployed, even unemployable, in a non-union reserve army of low wage labor, lumpenized and underskilled. At a minimum this results in today’s non-white unemployment rate, among capital’s damages and cost to the health and sanity of society!
Sixty years after LBJ we live in the banks’ and real estates’ two Americas. A workers’ party and a workers’ government will take its stand on comprehensive social equality. The “Jobs For All” program of a workers party values every life and the planet needs all brains and all hands. Along with jobs, free quality housing, healthcare, education and childcare would be available to all.
Contrast the 2024 situation where every reform of the post-civil war era is likely to be on the capitalist government chopping block in the immediate future, where those reforms have not been neutered by their “two” party politicos already! And this is because the capitalists have not only not solved any basic social problem (they CAN’T!) but because their international empire is in steep decline and in an inescapable economic crisis!
What type of Workers/Labor Party? Economist or Socialist/Internationalist?
The “left” electoralism, historically supporting ‘friends of labor,’ has always been doomed to failure because a petit bourgeois current of socialists, syndicalists and anarchists not only cross the class line by supporting capitalist parties, their machinations take the struggle out of the class struggle. These Gompers act as the transmission belt of bourgeois ideology into the working class. Philosophically they arrive with a pocket full of pragmatism to challenge the dialectics. What they actually bring is demoralization as they demobilize mass movements into electoralism, losing the enthused masses because reformism cannot deliver what is necessary.
So with the workers movements confined to the capitalist parameters the masses quickly lose the moment. Democrat agents stopped the class struggle from spring-boarding towards class political independence by giving away the workers agency to the capitalist Democrats. The “left”-endorsed candidates, the Berniebots, Squad et. al. promised an evolutionary road towards socialism and once elected lost the left-moving workers’ enthusiasm to Biden and the Democrats’ wars, to stasis where reform was promised, and to inflation.
These ‘Aw Shucks’ socialists are always the first to oppose the workers movement methodologically developing a transitional program to guide the class struggle from minimal demands to the struggle for a workers government. A workers’ government expropriates the bourgeoisie, establishing a central plan under workers democratic management. The workers’ program becomes the class-political independent party and in action will lead militant organizing against every racist police murder, home eviction and for all workplace demands with class struggle methods, building the cadre for the fight for workers power.
Such may take the form of a mass fighting Workers/ Labor Party based in the unions. But that could only come about in a class struggle for the leadership of the working class against those who make careers out of tying labor to capital through the Democrats. Only in the heat of the class struggle can these misleaders be exposed and replaced by militant fighters from the invigorated ranks, rising up for their demands. Such a party could use the elections tactically to agitate and propagandize among the workers and oppressed, but never to join a coalition government with the capitalists! Such “People’s Front” coalitions have led to historic defeats each and every time! They begin with disarming the people of their program, their independence, and then surrender to the fascists!
Undoubtedly the fighting workers’ party would elicit an enhanced fascist reaction as the workers movement’s development (its inherent anti-racism and anti-sexism) would challenge fascism’s every move in the streets. Questions of workers self defense and the nature and role of the capitalist state become immediate! A class struggle fighting Workers/Labor party must use elections as a tool to expose bourgeois electoralism, the fraud of bourgeois democracy and as a soapbox upon which to build the class struggle, building workers action committees, workers councils, workers militias, and its new revolutionary workers international!
We always call for a revolutionary workers’ party, this being the indispensable force for achieving socialism. A Labor Party is not necessarily the same creation, depending upon what program it defends, the sentiment and the worker masses’ activity, in short the rank-and-file activism and its radicalizing political trajectory. This means the fight for a labor party is a tactic. We had reason to raise this in the ‘90s when the rise of Labor Party Advocates had large numbers of militants aroused and ready to discuss programmatic questions. We raise the demand for a workers’ Labor party today after the upsurge of strikes and union organizing in 2022-23, particularly by young, previously non-union and oppressed and exploited service sector workers. Further, we see many looking for an electoral alternative that somehow would better represent the mass ferment of the last five years against racism and sexism. We raise the Labor Party demand to educate how ALL bourgeois ‘alternative” parties are ALL WRONG! We don’t need a Third Party. We need a working class party.
The third parties are pressure groups, regardless of their pretensions in “winner take all” U.S. elections. None of them have any principled opposition to parliamentary blocs with groupings of bosses’ representatives. We are for class- political independence, not ‘horsetrading!” We see electoral work as education and the popularizing of labor’s historic program, both in terms of survival demands aimed at the bosses and their state AND the revolutionary organizational forms that prepare the future political regime, the government of the workers and the oppressed, the “dictatorship of the proletariat!”
How to Build A Workers/Labor Party
We would always propagandize for a workers party to vivify the distinction between the two fundamental social classes in conflict at all times, conflict whether overt or sly. The labor party is more agitational than the revolutionary workers’ party, as it is for a United Front for a labor party coming out of the unions.
With no crystal ball we cannot say whether workers will make the labor party their instrument for taking power, or whether they will jump en masse into the building of the revolutionary workers party.
What we can say is that a parliamentary workers party will never deliver all power to the workers and oppressed. This is true both for the structural reason of the immense over-representation of the bosses’ interests and the willingness of our oppressors to resort to civil wars, mass repressions and fascism. Allende repeated will always be defeated!
Primarily the Workers Party must organize and lead struggles that unite broad and strategic layers of the working class in action. With the onset of Capital’s terminal crisis, every minimum demand can only be resolved in the workers’ interests by escalating class struggles leading to a workers’ government. The proof is how Capital is never defeated but immediately begins takebacks, wage theft and voter suppression and this is accepted as the price of bipartisanship. The Workers’ Party must be a tribune of the people! The working class solution to every crisis must be demonstrated, made concrete by stiffening up the class resolve. Workers must turn all the unions into organizations of struggle, not appendages on the Democrats. Class consciousness deepens in struggle as lessons of social being are learned.
Class Struggle caucuses in the unions are necessary to fight for the political independence of the working class, raising demands to challenge for the right to appropriate the social surplus of all economic activity. Doing so will sort out the class-collaborator ‘leaders’. The fight over surplus value is the struggle for the life of the working class. But this only describes survival, at best. We have to explode the mystifying and fetishizing of exchange value: money is subject to inflation that you sell your labor time for! Labor time is the real measure of the worth of human activity, and we must establish this as the truth. This starts with the struggle to shorten the workweek with no reduction in pay to share the work among all. The capitalist class has reaped the gains of skyrocketed productivity from the 1970’s to the present while wages have stagnated for decades under both Republican and Democratic regimes. The average worker today knows that without extreme change their children will not enjoy their parents’ and grandparents’ quality of life. They look at the political prospects and feel hopeless!
The prospect of socialism has been denied the workers by a class collaborationist trade union leadership, the bureaucracy, the labor lieutenants of capital who tie the working class to the Democrats.
Slightly to their left, social democrats sought to manage capitalism with welfare state solutions destined to fail under the unrelenting tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The Stalinists (yes they are still out there) spoiled socialism in the eyes of the western workers first because their revolutions were stymied by the popular front politics pushed by the Stalinized Comintern, and second because the promise of workers power was crushed by an authoritarian, bureaucratized communist party.
But it is not just a question of the material economic conditions of the working class. Racism, Black oppression, women’s oppression, national oppression and discrimination against other groups, notably immigrants/migrants are endemic features of capitalism. Wars and looming climate catastrophes threaten the very existence of society. These questions will never be resolved in a favorable manner under capitalism. Capitalism’s whole future existence depends upon its raping the planet!
A workers party may come from other places besides but it has to come from the unions. The unions have their limitations and these must be overcome in struggle. The backsliders will always remind you that your union is there only to win your economic demands. This just means that they are reserving the whole sphere and subject of politics entirely to themselves. You can leaflet and phone bank for their endorsed “friends.” We say, “NO”!
Consider the surge of strikes during the post-COVID and Biden tenure, yet there was never a struggle inside the unions for a labor party. The decaying union leadership bureaucracy coordinating with the AFL-CIO’s affiliation with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is the major roadblock against class struggle, especially class struggle leading to class independent politics. They never took up the class struggle demand to organize the unorganized in a meaningful, mass way, “wall-to-wall!”. The unorganized in places like Starbucks, Amazon, and publishing outfits are still slogging through the long, lonely and legalistic path towards NLRB recognition, followed by the even bigger struggle to win a first contract. It was class struggle that built the labor movement: mass picket lines, solidarity, general and sit-down strikes.
Rightism’s effort to promote anti-labor state statutes is now being organized by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council). Now the Heritage Foundation has sprung Project 2025 on us to deal our class an historic defeat. To defeat these anti- labor laws we need sit down strikes and plant seizures! And like the German army of 1870 you have to “prepare this class battle down to the last button on the last uniform,” as James P. Cannon put it.
Sit down strikes have to be prepared conscientiously, planning steps ahead of each eventuality: feeding and outside support, legal resources, first aid, armed pickets, propaganda, etc. The membership has to be strike ready, selecting strike leaders whose interests are their own.
Who will lead the union masses into such fights? The Union leadership today is committed to depending on the Democrats and preserving capitalist property relations such as are challenged when workers take over factories. The sentiment of the enraged masses may be for sit down strikes, wildcats and general strikes but only when that sentiment is organized class wide can it lead to workers power. This is the role of class struggle caucuses in the unions which use the transitional program to build the workers party. We reject the view that no social vanguard exists outside of the party membership. On the contrary we do everything to organize the social vanguard into the party. Therefore those who say the historic transitional program is only for the party membership are another syndicalist roadblock. Theirs is another variety of ‘min-max’ with a max that never arrives!
The Revolutionary Trotskyist Tendency (RTT), the predecessor of the CWG-USA, published an article “How to Build a Labor Party” in International Trotskyist no.4, 1991, that explains this all very well. We reprint the following excerpts in the next three sections as our method remains the same.
Trotsky’s Attitude to the Labor Party (ed. from “How to Build a Labor Party”)
“Are we in favour of the creation of a reformist labor party? No. Are we in favour of a policy which can give the trade unions the possibility to put its weight upon the balance of forces? Yes. It can become a reformist party -it depends upon the development. Here comes in the question of the [transitional] program.” (Leon Trotsky on the Labor Party in the U.S. (Merit), pg.14.)
Throughout the 1930s, Trotsky participated in a debate over the labor party question with the U.S. Trotskyists in the Socialist Workers Party and its predecessor, the Communist League of America. A particularly important series of discussions on this question took place in Mexico City between April and July, 1938. Prior to the SWP’s first national conference in March 1938, the SWP and its leadership under James Cannon had followed Trotsky’s position of opposing the slogan of the labor party.
The change in Trotsky’s position (in 1938) resulted from the fact that Trotsky quite correctly viewed the question of the labor party as a tactic, dependent on the changing features of the class struggle, and not as a strategy. Support for the building, entry, and electoral activity of the labor party was not, for Lenin and Trotsky, something that was carved into stone (as it is for Militant in Britain and the U.S. today).
Thus, Trotsky opposed the tactic in 1932 and re- evaluated it in 1938. In the early 1930’s, he did not foresee the sudden upsurge of the CIO and the building of mass industrial unions which took place in 1936. He believed that American workers would by-pass the stage of a mass workers’ party and that the development of the revolutionary party would take place at a faster rate than the decline of capitalism.
The emergence of the CIO movement laid the basis for Trotsky’s re-evaluation of the labor party tactic. He saw the CIO upsurge as an important factor which would renew the determination of the working class to take action; and for this they would need their own political party. In other words, the class struggle itself dictated the need of the workers for a labor party, and a number of workers’ parties were formed across the USA….In this situation, it was important for revolutionaries to support the struggle of the workers for political independence and to prevent the union bureaucracy from channeling the struggle in a reformist direction. In a discussion with the SWP leaders, Trotsky was explicit that revolutionaries must fight for a revolutionary program within a labor party:
“Cannon: How can you explain a revolutionary labor party … ?
“Trotsky: I will not say that the Labor Party is a revolutionary party, but we will do everything to make it possible. At every meeting I will say: I am a representative of the SWP. I consider it the only revolutionary party. But I am not a sectarian. You are trying now to create a big workers’ party. I will help you but I propose that you consider a program for this party. I make such and such propositions.” (Ibid., pg. 20.)
There are those on the left who would argue that these debates took place in the 1930’s and that they do not apply to the class struggle in the 1990’s. On this we would have to differ. Although the features specific to the labor movement in the 1930’s are different from the specific features of the class struggle in the 1990’s, we live in a period which is of the same basic characterization. That is, it is a period marked by the death agony of capitalism in general, and specifically, by a burning need of the workers to fight back in every way – particularly politically. Today the tasks placed before us are similar to those posed to the Trotskyists in the 1930’s. In this regard, the questions and debates of the SWP leaders with Trotsky in 1938 are particularly pertinent to the kinds of tasks we have to carry out in building a U.S. labor party today. Then and now, as Trotsky pointed out, objective reality demands political action by the working class. Today, there is as much of a real need for a labor party in the U.S. as in the 1930’s. We must start from the objective decay of capitalism and not from the workers’ illusions in it. That means that we should prevent a labor party in the U.S. from following the British reformist road:
“… the need for a labor party is absolutely proven by all events. It is proved that economic action is not enough. We need political action.” (Ibid., pg. 26.)
“I say here what I said about the whole program of transitional demands. The problem is not the mood of the masses but the objective situation, and our job is to confront the backward material of the masses with the tasks that are determined by objective facts and not by psychology. The same is absolutely correct for this specific question of the Labor Party.” (Ibid., pg. 24.)
For Trotsky the labor party question was part of the program of transitional demands; and most of those demands, including the demand for a labor party, would not be fully realized under capitalism. (It would be easier to get rid of capitalism than to fully implement the demands!) In other words, an anti-capitalist labor party (that will last) will not be realized without the socialist revolution. Therefore, today we must raise the slogan of the labor party and other demands not because we believe that the capitalists can grant them as reforms (reforms are by-products of the revolutionary struggle!); but because the struggle to implement them will mobilize the working class against the capitalist system. In the course of this struggle, the consciousness of the workers for the socialist revolution will develop.
Trotsky summarized the relationship between the labor party slogan, the transitional program and the socialist revolution as follows:
“It [the labor party] can become a reformist party- it depends upon the development. Here the question of program comes in. I mentioned yesterday and I will underline it today-we must have a program of transitional demands, the most complete of them being a workers’ and farmers’ government. We are for a party, for an independent party of the toiling masses who will take power in the state. We must concretize it -we are for the creation of factory committees, for workers’ control of industry through the factory committees….
“We say, the factory committees should see the books. This program we must develop parallel with the idea of a labor party in the unions and workers’ militia. Otherwise it is an abstraction and an abstraction is a weapon in the hands of the opposing class.” (Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (Pathfinder Press), pg. 83 (emphasis added).)
For us today, as it was for Trotsky, the labor party cannot be raised without the fight for other transitional demands. The labor party was not built after the 1930’s, because there was no mass revolutionary party which could link the demand for the labor party to the class struggle and other transitional demands, such as: a sliding scale of wages (i.e., wages indexed to the cost of living), workers control, workers militia etc. This vacuum has allowed the “progressive” union bureaucracy to raise the labor party slogan as an abstraction, that is, in order to pacify the workers.
How to Fight for a Labor Party (ed. from “How to Build a Labor Party”)
At the end of 1990, a meeting of Labor Party Advocates (LPA) was held in the Bay Area, as part of a U.S. tour by Tony Mazzocchi to introduce his campaign. Although the majority of left activists present in this meeting were reluctant to voice key criticisms of substance against Mazzocchi’s perspectives (especially in the presence of major dude hotshots from the union bureaucracy like Walter Johnson), the RTT took a different view.
We pointed out that Mazzocchi’s campaign was not just half-hearted in not running or endorsing independent labor candidates, but would lead to a dead end- in light of the present climate of ruthless, systematic attacks on the working class. We pointed out that the reason for Mazzocchi’s refusal to support running independent labor candidates is his belief that union militants should not stop campaigning for the Democratic and Republican parties!
But the majority of union workers want to build a labor party! A poll carried out by Mazzocchi himself among union workers in the midwest, showed that about 60% favor the building of a working class party now. In addition, when a union-sponsored candidate from the United Mine Workers union ran in an election for the state legislature of Virginia in 1989 (during the Pittston Strike), he won the election against the incumbent Democratic candidate. There is no reason at all why this cannot be repeated today.
In the Bay Area LPA meeting, we proposed that an important step in building the labor party should be for the unions (with the help of LPA) to run independent labor candidates – against both the Republicans and the Democrats-on a class struggle program. At the same time, we also raised the dangers involved in organizing a purely reformist workers’ party, as the example of Kinnock’s Labor Party in Britain clearly shows.
As a revolutionary tendency, we support any real campaign to build a workers’ party which will mobilize the workers. We therefore think that the Labor Party Advocates campaign should not be ignored. If it attracts growing numbers of workers and activists, revolutionaries should participate in it and counterpose class struggle methods for building a labor party to Mazzocchi’s reformism. However, the labor party will never be built by the ‘lip-service” campaigns of even the most left-wing bureaucrats. Only a massive struggle, as part of an offensive of the working class as a whole, can lead to the building of a workers’ party in the U.S. (and only militant rank and file workers and revolutionaries can be expected to begin the process seriously).
When the class struggle erupts on a national scale, a labor party can be built in the U.S. relatively quickly -even within a few years. But, the working class will not need to go through a “reformist” stage before it can organize to overthrow its exploiters and oppressors and take power. On the contrary, the workers should pass through the school of the labor party in order to break with reformism. This will require winning over the best fighters from the mass base of the labor party to the revolutionary tasks of the working class.
The RTT will fight for a workers’ party which is explicitly anti-capitalist, i.e., one that stands for workers’ power, on a revolutionary, transitional platform. We are against the methodology of Labor Militant, who try to hide this goal in the closet by calling for a labor party which will run on a series of so-called “democratic socialist policies” (in reality watered-down demands). We are no more in favor of building such a “semi- reformist”labor party, as we are of building one that is reformist, pure and simple.1
However, the RTT will work within any workers’ party that comes into being in the U.S., even if it evolves in a reformist direction. Within such a party, our top priority will be to prevent it from becoming crystallized into a reformist party, and we will fight within it at every opportunity for a revolutionary program of transitional demands.
How to Fight the Labor Bureaucracy (ed. from “How to Build a Labor Party”)
While we demand that the labor bureaucracy take concrete steps towards building the workers’ party, our priority is first and foremost to campaign amongst the union rank and file for such a party. Today, the first step towards building this party is to organize caucuses of sympathetic militants in locals around the country. Conferences at both local and national levels should be organized to establish the labor party and to debate its program. Members of organizations of the oppressed, such as the National Black Independent Party (NBIPP) and the National Organization of Women (NOW) could be invited to participate in these conferences. At the same time, workers should demand that the trade union leaders support the campaigns of independent labor candidates, and that these same leaders break once and for all from the bosses’ parties and become active in the campaign to build the labor party. However, we must emphasize that we do not leave it up to the labor leaders to begin the process of building the labor party – the workers themselves must take the lead.
We demand that the union bureaucracy (especially the ‘left wing’’ which likes to talk about the labor party) support campaigns for independent labor candidates. But if they refuse support, we will continue to campaign – just as vigorously- for union-backed labor candidates. In fact we will use the campaigns to organize against the bureaucrats. We will campaign for a class struggle rank and file movement, which will fight for the unions to break from the Democrats once and for all as the key step in building a labor party. The workers should build a labor party with the union leaders if possible, against them if necessary. Trotsky’s comments on how we should deal with the trade union bureaucracy, are pertinent today more than ever:
“What we can say is that the objective situation is absolutely decisive. The trade unions as trade unions can have only a defensive activity, losing members and becoming more and more weak as the crisis deepens. If the trade union leaders are not ready for political action, we must ask them to develop a new political orientation. If they refuse, we denounce them. That is the objective situation.” (Leon Trotsky on the Labor Party in the U.S., op. cit., pg. 24.)
It is more likely that a rank and file movement in the unions will be constructed without the cooperation of the union bureaucracy. This movement must be based on a class struggle program of transitional demands, such as a sliding scale of wages, free abortion on demand, and nationalization of essential industries under workers’ control.
(ed. end of excerpts from “How to Build a Labor Party”)
“Labor Lieutenants of Capital”: Gompersism will get you killed
Most members, if they know the name Gompers at all, know him for saying “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.” They do not know he tore up the historic anti-war position of the AFL and assembled a rump convention to approve U.S. participation in World War I. The craft union leaderships have been pro- war every time, ever since July, 1917.
In March 2024, the United Steelworkers petitioned the Biden administration to investigate China’s shipbuilding sector for violations of international trade agreements, and they were not alone. A grand alliance of twenty-four AFL-CIO union affiliates in the Maritime Trade Department (MTD) signed on the petition:
“Today, the Office of the United States Trade Representative received a petition from USW, IAM, IBB, IBEW, and MTD regarding the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) acts, policies, and practices in the critical maritime, logistics, and shipbuilding sector.”
A labor-initiated petition to step up the economic war against China is no surprise! The military industrial complex, the cold war and military contracts in every congressional district have long been the glue holding labor to the imperialist project. The material benefits gained by the labor aristocracy bonds organized labor with a petty bourgeois consciousness which can only be broken by class struggle and the conscious intervention of a revolutionary leadership.
From chips to ships, now the campaign is against ‘violations’ of international trade agreements drafted to limit state funding of maritime industries. Violative practices which would create ‘unfair trade advantages,’ are the target of the Trade Union movement’s petition. Put another way, the suits want to export their memberships’ unemployment to China.
The coincidence of the narrow economist interests of the labor aristocracy with U.S. imperialism’s flailing military project is the material basis for U.S. labor unions lining up in the economic war and building up toward direct military conflict with China and various BRICS+ affiliated states (see Class Warrior, Volume 1, Number 6, June 2014, “BRICS Around the Neck of the Proletariat”).
In any language crisis spells opportunity. From Ukraine, to Gaza to East Asia the proxy wars deepen toward regional and world war! Rather than building the New Zimmerwald (see “Ukraine: For a New Zimmerwald!”) a working class anti-war united front, the labor leadership wants to get its piece of the pie and keep the labor aristocracy complacent and proud to fly the Red, White and Blue. They hide their class collaboration and popular front with imperialism behind their mandate to defend the [narrow] economic interests of their membership! Which today means economic warfare against the workers of the world and military production at home with good union jobs.
It has been 50 years since the U.S. steel sector peaked and was outsourced seeking cheap labor power to counter the falling rate of profit. As industries fled abroad the industrial economy became a service economy and organized labor became a shadow of its former self. Today the inter-imperialist competition for control of the seas ramps up and the U.S. is outpaced by China’s industrial productive capacity.
The Republicans and Democrats have their own ‘United Front’, their drive toward war with China; the two major imperialist parties of the capitalist political class have chained up the working class with rank economism touted by labor fakers.
The labor leadership depends on the backwardness of the working class to keep it in line with the imperialist project. Sentimental retailing of how WWII was ”the good war” neither tells the historical truth, the bureaucracy’s role in it, nor the possible species extinction in many models of WWIII! Along with superprofits as a given, you’d experience jingoism- with-domestic-racism pretending to serve national unity, the big lie of a “national interest” requiring what the war would really be, the destruction of physical plant and YOUR flesh and blood youth.
The chauvinism and commitment of the labor tops, the labor bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy to nationalist economism vs socialist internationalism is the most powerful block preventing the working class from breaking from the capitalists and charting an independent road of struggle. And the left fakers who will not fight for a workers party and who implicitly or explicitly support the Democratic Party of imperialism at election time are covering for the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, the “Labor Lieutenants of Capital” as described by early American socialist Danial DeLeon.
Living Dead Kautskyism
According to most if not all the socialists who are voting for the Democrats or other capitalist parties regularly, a Transitional Program of working class political independence and self-reliance is an outdated anachronism and is conceptually unwelcome. They tell us that fascism is at the door and that, “although we place no faith in the Democrats- we must bloc with them (even the devil) against the fascists.” They do this knowing full well the history of fascism. When it arrives it does so to crush the working class opposition and all organizations of the workers and oppressed minorities. It arrives with a nostalgic longing for a mythical past where women obeyed the patriarch, where allegiance to god and country, ‘blood and soil’ nativism, is defined by Christian fundamentalism and the right of capitalist accumulation is sacrosanct and superior to all others!
Even religious fundamentalism can be ditched, as it is only a useful method of mass mind control–other methods also work such as Fuehrer worship and cults of personalities. And fascism allows for the defense of capitalism to include state capitalist interventions in major industries to ensure the ability of the state to endure and meet its obligation to the capitalist class to counter the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The sole task of fascism is as the last ditch attempt to save capitalism from the social revolution which accompanies economic collapse. It is a time when the capitalist ruling class throws out all pretense to continued adherence to the democratic gains of 1642, 1776, 1789 and 1848. To restore the rate of profit labor must be crushed and in ways bourgeois democracy will not allow. This is when the fascist demagogues and their violent minions are unleashed.
Under fascism the trade unions are crushed with brutal assaults. Oppressed peoples are marginalized, ghettoized, brutalized, scapegoated, up to and including population removals and genocide. Militant workers, socialists and organizers of oppressed minorities are isolated and murdered. Indeed many of such brutalities are common in the imperialist centers and semi-colonies today and are carried out by the state using state institutions and media to cover for, excuse or otherwise convince the masses all is well. Where fascism distinguishes itself is through the organization of mass fascist militia that violently crush all opposition. And in the face of the ‘wolf at the door’, our erstwhile socialists tell the workers that their best bet today is just taking a minute out of their busy lives to go to the voting booth and vote Blue! The worst are still worse, not just surrendering to, but openly campaigning for the Democrats!
Most of these outfits will advise not to give up daily organizing activities but to add the (bourgeois) electoral to your daily militancy. Workers militants’ first order of business is not building a fighting workers party based in the unions and communities of the oppressed, a task which cannot be accomplished without challenging the existing leaderships tied to the Democrats, but to (for the moment) sing Kumbaya with the class traitors and escort the workers to the polls. One might ask these socialists why socialists are even needed if the “semi-rational- democratic wing” of the capitalist ruling class can defeat fascism. Don’t expect them to answer you.
Indeed the same question can be posed to these outfits who argue that arming and supporting the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine by US/EU imperialism is how to stop Russian imperialism and WWIII. Then there are those sectors of the “left” which rely on the imperialist Russia/China bloc to defeat US imperialism internationally while at the same time jumping on the stop Trump at any price bandwagon. Both camps of social imperialists tell us they will hold their nose and vote for Harris. They all avoid Zimmerwald as inappropriate, as are dual defeatism and fraternization to turn the imperialist war into a class war!
For our reformists, the workplace and community action committees reclaiming the unions and organizations of the oppressed and using their resources in arming and training anti-fascist Labor, Black and Brown militias are not the first order of the day in the fight against the New Hitler at the gate! That ‘worn out’ program must be discarded (or for the most dilettantish at minimum supplemented) with an electoral strategy to defeat Trump with a ‘tactical’ vote for the Democrats. After all, “it’s the least you can do!” It’s the least something, borderline non- material, almost only a thought and an incorrect one at that!
So with pro Ukraine and pro Russia leftists both advocating for votes for the Democrats, the workers are left under the political sway of the entrenched union bureaucracy. Why join any of these socialist outfits when all they offer is a popular front with either the declining or the rising imperialist bloc?
The working class has a gut response to the fascist reaction and that gut response exists in our era as the mass movement of Black Lives Matter which coalesced quickly after the Michael Brown- Breonna Taylor-George Floyd string of police murders. No sooner than the recognition by the mass media that these mobilizations collectively represented the largest outpouring into the streets in U.S. history, were they demobilized by Democratic Party operatives, community based organizations and
nonprofits designed to redirect the mass uprising into the elections. The same happened after Occupy, crushed in the streets by Obama’s FBI’s coordination with local police, mostly in Democratic controlled cities. Indeed the Democratic party is where mass movements go to die. They KILL OUR MOVEMENTS!
| But the dialectic is not as simple as they tell us. It teaches us that masses in motion develop understanding and break through limitations imposed by the status quo. They can either be propelled to higher understanding of the crisis of capitalism and the actual unfolding of the imperialist world order or they can be lulled back to sleep or worse, into participation implementing the fascist reaction. |
The dialectic our fake Marxists teach denies the working class agency. They tell us a qualitative change requires that workers discard the old, ‘anachronistic’ and worn out tropes such as “only the working class can liberate itself,” that a new coalition or multi- class alliance is needed to face the Trumpian wolf at the door. The principle of class independence, the dialectics they now teach us, is a luxury which the workers cannot afford. Tested orthodoxies for them are the rantings of armchair sectarians brainwashed by the tomes of the first four congresses of the Third International. No need to study the admonitions of Leon Trotsky to the workers of China, Italy, Germany, Spain and France that fascism is a mortal enemy of the working class, that it always arrives at the behest of the capitalist class; and as such it can only be defeated for good by socialist revolution and all the tasks that lead to it.
First and foremost is the working class’ political independence in building united fronts that unite all workers organizations in class struggle, self-defense and resolving the crisis of leadership of the working class. This means an uncompromising struggle in the workers organizations against the leadership and bureaucracy that ties the workers movement to the capitalist class and its imperialist undertakings via the transmission belt of the Democratic Party (and to a lesser extent the other capitalist parties.)
We are told that the workers are not ready. That is the limit of their dialectics! Writing off the fact that consciousness is mutable, that as a class we discover what is possible when we do what is necessary; what is objectively necessary based on what actions the objective conditions require to resolve the contradictions, not just to observe them (see Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach).
Without taking the Transitional Program into every one of these struggles, to bring class analysis and class objectives forward as the bridge from fighting inflation, underfunded schools, lack of healthcare, unemployment lines, scapegoated immigrants, criminalized populations, union and anti-imperialist struggles, they have chosen Eduard Bernstein over Rosa Luxemburg again, just as Kautsky did in 1914! Kautsky the “renegade”(said Lenin) who supported the Kaiser’s world war, never fought the Nazis and never learned that liberal parliamentarism was not always fated to win; never learning the superlative democracy of the Paris Commune before his death in exile just before Hitler launched WW2.
And just like Bernstein, for the fake socialists the mass movement is everything and the program is of secondary consideration. They become objectivists, evolutionary socialists, they deny the role of the party as the historic memory of the class tasked with organizing the vanguard and bringing the theoretical gains and lessons of our class history into every struggle. This program is needed to politically defeat the leadership tied to the class enemy via the Democratic Party. They must be exposed and replaced with new blood from the militant rank and file committed to class independence and class struggle not to class peace! The masses may elect socialists who shine as the best activists but without the program they merely serve as a left pole within the bureaucracy, often as not facilitating its aims.
They fall into an anti-dialectical syndrome of Minimum and Maximum(ism). They reduce Marxism from a science of revolution to a religion of objectivism. Because socialism is objectively necessary the workers will find their way there despite all the pitfalls (economism, electoralism, reformism etc.) So socialists just need to be in the forefront of every struggle as the best builders, no need to actually apply the dialectic! “Today we fight only for the minimum demand” (another dollar at the jobsite, or a ceasefire in Gaza, $60 billion in arms for Ukraine, as counterrevolutionary as that actually is.)
We propose not going down with the sinking ship of U.S. imperialism and its defenders! We need our own party to fight for AND GET what we need to survive and provide for the existence and flourishing of future generations and their exploitation-free civilization!
Death Agony of Capitalism, Now in Terminal Crises
Today the world’s working class and society faces even more catastrophic conditions than even in Trotsky’s day at the beginning of World War II. Regional inter imperialist rivalries are increasingly involving shooting matches. Students of history find this familiar, i.e. the declining empire threatens its rivals and everyone else. But what is not ordinary inter imperialist collision is the number of actors who have nuclear weapons or ambitions. Add to this the ambitions of the white supremacist colonial settler state of Israel, proxy and enforcer for U.S. petrodollar domination. And an imperialist China/ Russia alliance eager to expand both its market share and its territory.
It is sheer suicide for the workers of the world to line up to fight for the capitalists of “their own” cultures. Human life elimination is manifestly possible. Ukraine and especially Palestine show us the forecast. To validate any capitalist party with your vote is to surrender your influence over whether there will even be a future. To oppose all this horror you need a party of workers’ mass action, and not the class- collaborators’ parliamentarism of empty oratory, subterfuges and graft. A workers party will fight for reforms that are your expressed wishes of today, principally survival demands for general wage increases, COLAs in all contracts and a real war of factory committees, wage- and-price committees and neighborhood committees against inflation/price gouging. We call these ‘partial’ and democratic demands. More is required! You will tell your party!
Entire populations that have been historically repressed and unrepresented by bourgeois democracy were able to make some gains since the 1940s, largely as a result of a greater degree of integration into the working class. But Black and Brown populations have seen these gains under attack since the 1980’s and there is no reason to think the changes of personnel in the excrescence, the “two party” superstructure atop the real state, the police, Courts, judges, screws and prisons, is going to slow the repression, the rate of murders by police. We want the police abolished, along with the courts and prisons! We want them replaced by self-organized organs of assemblies of wage workers and unemployed people, by organs that answer to WORKERS COUNCILS, the basic unit of power of the workers’ government we seek.
You have a right to live. And right this minute we have to fight for our Sisters’ right to healthcare of their choice and not that of the insurance mega corporations, religious and other reaction and misogyny! We say FREE ABORTION ON DEMAND AS PART OF A SYSTEM OF FREE QUALITY HEALTHCARE FOR ALL THROUGH SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!! FREE 24 HOUR CHILD CARE! EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK! This is just a starting lineup, to be expanded as our real conditions demand.
But you have more than a right to just exist and we have a vision of a future without exploitation, and we will fight for a program sharing this vision. So when a boss says he can’t afford a 30-hour week for 40 hours pay, we’ll OPEN THE BOOKS and get the raise and install the factory committee as the new management. Should this require sit down strikes to accomplish, our party will organize the entire community in support. And naturally such workplace occupations will require the security the Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards will provide. Major corporations will be retooled for human needs after being nationalized under workers’ control.
After the working masses gain confidence and strength and stand up to their full height of self- organization, the question of power will practically pose itself. Experience shows, however, that the call must be made, and loud and clear. The test of the workers party will be whether it can take and hold power to carry out its program against all self-interests of Capital and secure humanity’s future.
The one productive international social class insists on surviving and flourishing.
The burgeoning issue of climate catastrophe is not solvable absent workers control of industry. The capitalist ruling class defends the capitalist system, a system based on profits through exploitation of labor and the destruction of the environment. It will take a centralized, planned economy under democratic workers control that addresses the rational needs of society to halt the drive towards a climate that will not support modern human society and will lead to the extinction of many other species. And this prospect faces us irrespective of the war dangers or world capitalist depression.
The crises we are confronted with today can only be addressed through the abolition of capitalism, not only in the U.S. but on an international scale. Build a Workers/Labor Party in the U.S. to organize, unite and lead the working class and the oppressed in the fight for socialist revolution to establish a Workers Government that will carry through the tasks to build an egalitarian socialist society. Build a Workers International composed of national workers parties to carry through socialist revolutions on a world scale.
Workers of the World Unite!
