Road to forging a fighting labor movement – The Militant

[….] What’s needed is an effective, disciplined movement of working people that fights for an amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S. A movement that draws in the unions and reaches out to rally all the exploited and oppressed to its side, one that immigrant workers can join and help lead. The banner they carried in their millions in protests in 2006 and 2007 said, “We are workers, not criminals!”

Fighting to check the competition for jobs workers always face under capitalism has been at the center of the unions’ course since they first emerged with the rise of modern industry. Karl Marx, a founder of the revolutionary workers movement, explained in 1866 that unions must “learn to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interests of its complete emancipation.”

They must “enlist the nonsociety [unorganized] men into their ranks,” Marx wrote. “They must look carefully after the interests of the worst-paid trades, such as agricultural laborers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.”

Advancing this perspective requires rallying around the call for amnesty for workers without papers, essential to unify and strengthen the labor movement for the deeper class struggles that lie ahead, and to open the door for the working class to take political power into our own hands.

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Road to forging a fighting labor movement – The Militant