The following excerpted talk is from WW Secretariat member Larry Holmes, who gave a summary of the opening plenary session of the Workers World Party National Conference held Nov. 14-15 in New York.
If somebody looked at the White House log over the period of recent months, it is surprising that of all the visitors, a lot of labor leaders have been going back and forth, meeting with either Obama or his assistants. What is Obama telling these labor leaders, be they from Change to Win or the AFL-CIO or SEIU? I don’t think he is telling them to have strikes and organize more workers and bring their workers to D.C. in the hundreds of thousands if not millions—which they should have done for single-payer health care.
I’m speculating about what they are told in the White House, based on what Obama said in a New York Times interview the day before the Sept. 20 March for Jobs in Pittsburgh. We didn’t know if it was directed at our march. The Times asked, “What do you think of the protests in Pittsburgh?” He said, “They are useless. They are useless because globalization is a reality. Get used to it.”
This is deep. This is part of what is spoon-fed to our class 24/7. I think the Republic Windows and Doors workers showed the light by showing that we don’t have to respect someone’s private property, even if for just a few days.
What was electrifying about it was that a small number of workers clearly scared the hell out of the ruling class, out of the bankers.
Our biggest problem is that our class has been untaught how to fight. It is a legacy of class collaborationist trade union leaders that feel they have some partnership with the Democratic Party and now with the government, which is an illusion in their own mind.
There are many reasons that the workers might give for not fighting. Some say it is so hard they can hardly survive; they don’t have time to fight. It is not because they believe in the system. They know that capitalism isn’t working. But that information is not enough.
It is an axiom of Marxism that while workers learn some things from their own experience, they don’t learn everything. Some things they need to be taught by those of us who aspire to be leaders and guides. What is it they have to learn?
In these circumstances it is learning to unite and fight. Learning to fight is so simple, but it is not the end of consciousness, it is not the middle, it is the very beginning. On that basis, all further political consciousness including revolutionary consciousness is possible. But first you have to wake up, unite and start fighting.
That starts the dialectical process, all the juices flowing. Without that everything is abstract and grey.
In the coming weeks and months we are going to have to deepen our work. What does that mean? It means deliberating with our relatively small organization but also with our allies who I think understand this as well—and more and more allies—begin teaching our class how to fight again as a class—not each other. Not each other!
If we don’t do it the ruling class will teach them to fight each other, or fight immigrant workers, or fight China—everybody fight each other. That is their message. Compete like dogs fighting for a small piece of meat.
This is central to our struggle for jobs. We can talk about how bad the unemployment is. We can talk about the different programs, the 75th anniversary of the WPA . Can we use that next spring?
Clearly we can’t mount a struggle for jobs alone; we need help. And before we get that, we need to make an issue out of needing help. And this is where we come to the political struggle within our own working class—first with the trade unions. They need to learn to help the unemployed. It is not charity.
Unemployment is the enemy of all unions and all workers because it is union busting; it drives wages down.
Somebody has got to go to the trade unions and tell them, what are you doing for the unemployed? Are you helping them? Are you organizing a march or a demonstration or a sit-in?
We’re going to do something. Will you provide the buses? You gave all that money to the Democratic Party. Come up with some money to help get some unemployed and homeless people to Washington or wherever else they are going.
We’ve got to push and push and force a divorce of this ridiculous relationship that the trade unions have with the Democratic Party and the government; it is an abusive relationship. This irreconcilable class struggle is one-sided.
Our class needs to get out of it. They compromised on health care, compromised in smoke-filled rooms; finally wound up with the worst insult by betraying women—women’s right to abortion. More than half the work force is women; they should have walked out. Someday they will.
What is our motivation for going to the workers? Is it our enthusiasm that very soon they are going to storm the heavens and make socialist revolution? And we’re just waiting until they knock on our door for our advice? That is very nice. Perhaps that would happen, but I don’t think so.
It is the other way around. Our interest in our class, the reason why we must engage it intensely, is because we don’t want to abandon them to the ruling class, to the racist bourgeoisie.
This is the most important thing as we consider the 50th anniversary of our party. Let us rededicate our party to intensify its orientation, its direction towards and into the working class. We won’t lose anybody. The best elements in the political movement who may not necessarily consider themselves amongst the workers, they will be won to the workers. Those who don’t, maybe they shouldn’t be there. But we will win the best of them, including many of the youth. I am absolutely certain of that.
Comrade Sam Marcy had a number of predictions that he made more than 50 years ago—predictions based on the science of Marxism. One of those predictions was that the revolutionary center of gravity—which was at the time he made this prediction in the East—liberation movements, the Chinese revolution—would ultimately converge with the imperialist economic centers in the West, principally the center of world imperialism, which is still U. S. imperialism.
Globalization has done pretty much that. It is just the political consequences that are lagging behind the economic consequences.
It is happening if we can win the best in our movement, the best activists, the best revolutionaries, the best progressives, anarchists, socialists, communists—whatever they call themselves—if we can win them to the side of the working class.
He had another prediction that was shared by Lenin. He said in his letter to an American worker in 1922, that because of the strategic position of U.S. imperialism in the world—and it is likely to be that way for a long time—that the multinational working class of this country is bound to be decisive in the world socialist revolution.
If we are as serious as those people were—and they were very, very serious—if we do our work, we will help realize that vision of worldwide socialist revolution.
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