Excerpt: The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party

The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party

Advancing a working-class program requires a party working class in composition

Excerpts from Introduction:

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….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.

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.

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.

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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.

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."

Full article:

https://themilitant.com/2019/11/02/the-turn-to-industry-forging-a-proletarian-party/

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