Defend Ukraine’s independence! For defeat of Moscow’s invasion! US troops, nuclear arms out of Europe, all of Europe!

The Socialist Workers Party stands and acts on our communist continuity with V.I. Lenin, under whose leadership the Bolshevik Party in October 1917 led the working class to state power in Russia. It was that revolutionary workers and peasants republic that ensured the right to self-determination to oppressed nations formerly trapped within the czarist empire.

*   *   *

SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY STATEMENT

Defend Ukraine's independence!

For defeat of Moscow's invasion!

US troops, nuclear arms out of Europe, all of Europe!

The following statement was issued March 3 by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, on behalf of the SWP National Committee.

The Vladimir Putin regime in Russia has unleashed a murderous war, including massive bombardment of civilian-occupied urban centers in Ukraine. In face of this intentional carnage, and despite Putin's dangerous and provocative action placing Moscow's nuclear forces on high alert, Ukrainians are fighting courageously, often arms in hand, to defend Ukraine's national sovereignty and independence. The Socialist Workers Party hails their resistance and calls for the defeat of Putin's invading forces.

As the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union collapsed in face of massive popular mobilizations at the beginnings of the 1990s, Ukraine was one of 14 former republics to declare national independence. Now Putin's regime is ruthlessly seeking to claw back, under Moscow's hegemony, those nations incarcerated in the czarist prison house of nations, regenerating the Russian empire today with Putin as its czar.

Putin's aim is "to erase our history, erase our country," as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky concisely put it March 1.

Putin insists Ukraine is not a nation and has no right to exist as one. "Modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia," he claims. It is "an inalienable part of our own [Russian] history, culture and spiritual space." He proclaims that his hoped-for resurrection of the empire is a step toward rejuvenating Christendom, with its "Holy See" in the Russian Orthodox patriarchate of Moscow.

Russia's armed forces are facing tenacious resistance and taking thousands of deaths and injuries in the first week of the assault. In face of these setbacks, Moscow's armed forces have now stepped up heavy bombardment of residential and commercial areas in hopes of sowing terror and cowing the Ukrainian people into submission. Russian planes and cruise missiles have struck apartment buildings, homes, schools, hospitals and railway stations in Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv and numerous smaller cities. Ukraine's State Emergency Service reported March 1 that 2,000 civilians had been killed during the first week, as well as many Ukrainian soldiers.

Under Putin's direction, his high command is intensifying siege warfare against the entire population of Ukraine, cutting off electricity, water and sanitation, and cellphone, television, and radio communications.

In face of the rise of Jew-hating demagogy and violence in today's world, there is mounting disgust among Jews in Ukraine and beyond at the outrageous claims by Putin — himself a product of Russia's notoriously Jew-hating secret police, formerly called the KGB — that the aggression aims to "denazify" Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Zelensky is Jewish, with a grandfather who fought in the Soviet army to turn back the German imperialist invaders, and other family members who were killed in the Holocaust. On March 2 "denazifying" Russian missiles struck a TV tower in Babyn Yar — the site of the slaughter of more than 30,000 Jews by Nazi forces during World War II — desecrating a Jewish cemetery. No wonder Jews around the world are seeing more of the truth and encouraging Jews in Ukraine to join with others there to stand and fight.

More Russian soldiers and sailors are becoming demoralized and disillusioned. They've been lied to by Putin's regime about what to expect, being told they'd be welcomed as "liberators," and would quickly roll over Ukraine's military forces. Now they're not only taking substantial casualties but facing shortages of food and fuel. Some are disobeying orders to shell civilian targets; retreating from battle or surrendering without a fight; even sabotaging or abandoning Russian military equipment.

Inside Russia, tens of thousands have poured into the streets of cities and towns all across that vast country to demand a halt to the war. They are doing so in face of police repression, with more than 7,000 arrests the first week, as well as government threats of being charged with "treason." Street demonstrations are spreading across Europe, the Americas, and worldwide, as well.

The Socialist Workers Party opposes the broadly aimed economic and financial embargo imposed on Russia by the U.S., European, and other imperialist ruling classes, as well as military maneuvers by these governments. Those sanctions ultimately fall most harshly on working people in Russia.

Washington and its capitalist allies in London, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere shed crocodile tears over Ukraine's national sovereignty and the plight of its people. High-flown phrases aside, however, their only real concern is to protect their own profits and strategic political interests in the region. The Socialist Workers Party demands the complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops and both conventional and nuclear arms and nuclear missile systems from Europe!

Since the 1990s, both Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses have acted to reinforce U.S. imperialism's post-World War II position as the dominant "European" military power. In collaboration with other imperialist governments in Europe, as well as the other bourgeois regimes involved, Washington has extended the reach of its armed might close to Russia's borders. This includes deployment of ballistic missiles in Poland and Romania.

Putin's efforts to excuse his bloodthirsty invasion of Ukraine on grounds of moves by Washington and other NATO governments are as cynical as they are false. A sovereign and independent Ukraine poses no military threat to Russia of any kind.

At the same time, the Socialist Workers Party lends no political confidence to the capitalist government in Kyiv, which stands behind Ukraine's wealthy rulers in their pressure on the living and job conditions and political rights of coal miners, rail workers, farmers and others among the oppressed and exploited.

The Socialist Workers Party stands and acts on our communist continuity with V.I. Lenin, under whose leadership the Bolshevik Party in October 1917 led the working class to state power in Russia. It was that revolutionary workers and peasants republic that ensured the right to self-determination to oppressed nations formerly trapped within the czarist empire.

In 1922, after consolidating victory over the counterrevolutionary armies of the capitalists, landlords and 16 invading foreign powers, the Bolshevik-led government established a voluntary federation  of the Russian, Ukrainian, and four other republics: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Communists in Russia, Lenin insisted, must "declare war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism." It was only after the counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin against Lenin's proletarian internationalist course that Ukraine and other oppressed peoples were again denied their language, cultural, and other national rights.

Members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party are campaigning to get out the truth about the Russian government's murderous assault on Ukraine's sovereignty, on its right to exist as a nation. We and fellow communists in other countries will organize to get this statement, along with weekly Militant coverage of the struggle of the Ukrainian people, into the hands of working people far and wide, including strike picket lines, social protests, at workers' doorsteps and everywhere else we go. And to take them with us in protests against Russia's invasion that are occurring across the United States and the world over.

The Socialist Workers Party is mobilizing its candidates for the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and other public offices to use the 2022 election campaign period to maximize getting out the truth and presenting an independent working-class foreign policy. A foreign policy that starts from the interests of the toilers at home and internationally — not from hypocritical chants about "democracy" and "freedom" behind which the capitalist rulers seek to mask their exploitation and oppression of billions the world over.

The stakes are enormous. Working people must see the necessity of taking political power into our own hands — as toilers did in Cuba at the opening of the 1960s, following a popular, workers-and-farmers-based revolution — or we will face a future of social devastation, reaction, world war, and even nuclear catastrophe.

Join us in this effort to raise an independent working-class voice in the United States — to have an impact on public opinion here, elsewhere in the Americas, Europe, and the world. Join us in demanding:

For the defeat of Moscow's murderous invasion and bombardment of Ukraine!

Defend Ukraine's independence and sovereignty!

Get Washington's nuclear weapons and armed forces out of Europe, all of Europe, now!

https://themilitant.com/2022/02/26/defend-ukraines-independence/

Seals in the rafters: Jack Barnes on Ross Perot

A portion of a talk by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes, titled, "The Vote for Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan's `Culture War': What the 1992 Elections Revealed." This talk was presented at a Militant Labor Forum in New York on Nov. 7, 1992, just four days after the U.S. presidential elections. It will be included in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working Class Politics in the 21st Century by Jack Barnes.

....The vote for Perot is the thing bourgeois pollsters were most wrong about this year. I do not usually pay much attention to opinion polls, since they rarely reveal much about what is really going on in politics and the class struggle. But the polls caught many of the trends in bourgeois politics pretty accurately this year. They were right about the shift after the Republican convention, when bourgeois public opinion swung decisively against Bush. They were right about how the Clinton- Bush race was turning out.

Why were the polls so wrong on the vote for Perot, then? I think they were wrong because a substantial number of people who intended to vote for Perot did not tell the truth when they were selected at random to be surveyed. Why? Because these people considered the pollsters - like reporters, news photographers, and most "professional politicians" - to be part of the conspiracy.

I watched the televised reports on Perot's huge rally in Long Beach, California, on Sunday night before the election. He stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence and began shouting, "Look, look up there! There are seals! There are seals up in the rafters!" I figured, this is it - he's gone around the bend on nationwide TV. But then the camera panned the audience, and they were all cheering. Many of them knew exactly what he was talking about. He was pointing to members of the navy SEALs - the U.S. Navy's special forces, like the army's Green Berets. And then he explained to the whole audience, and to everyone watching on television, why he does not accept Secret Service protection. For his protection, Perot said, he counts on "our boys" who are trained to protect this country, to protect all of us. (Earlier this year, the New York daily Newsday reported that Perot has a "devoted following in the military, notably within the special-operations community.")

Perot told the crowd in Long Beach that he had watched videotapes of the televised presidential debates; he called attention to how many times his eyes blinked versus how many times Bush's and Clinton's eyes blinked. It sounds bizarre, doesn't it? But if you are prone to believe in conspiracy theories, then isn't eye-blinking a wonderful test of who is telling the truth? Watch their eyes blink! Then watch mine!

These things sound irrational to us. But they get a hearing because millions are trying to find answers that can explain the irrationalities of capitalism. Millions want to know what can be done about the destabilizing consequences they fear for themselves and their families. In the absence of real explanations, the "theories" of a Perot can seem to solve the mystery of what is happening to the country, to the government, to the world, to jobs - to any semblance of security in their lives.

Why capitalism appears more corrupt

Perot taps into a conviction growing among millions of people that the established bourgeois politicians are incapable of addressing the social crisis. More and more people are open to the suggestion that these figures are at worst plotting conspiracies; at best they are immoral, not fit to be in office. Millions are convinced that the government is rotten; Washington and all it represents is morally degenerate; the parliamentary and democratic institutions under capitalism are cesspools where thieves and bureaucrats and maneuverers hide. And more and more believe that something radical must be done to break through this spreading corruption.

The ruling class and its political spokespeople today appear to be so much more corrupt, so scandal-ridden, because of capitalism's deepening and irresolvable problems. Actually, the propertied classes and their politicians are corrupt in all periods. They have always cheated each other and used the government to enrich themselves and their friends. Why else do "public servants" stay in government? The difference today is only that the scope of the social crisis makes it more difficult for the exploiters to hide what they have always become and what they have always ended up doing.

Even when the capitalist class was on the rise historically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the executive branch of the government was always careful about what it said publicly, including in front of parliaments and congresses. 

Presidents, prime ministers, and their deputies lied continually. What changes in capitalism's decline, however, is the growing power of the executive branch. What changes is the executive power's need to hide more and more of what it must do to defend imperialist interests against working people at home and abroad, growing numbers of whom have won the right to be at least a part of the "political class."

The Watergate crisis surely had little to do with the episodes from which it got its name-the break-in at the Democrats' national committee office in the Watergate hotel, organized by the Nixon campaign committee's "offensive security" volunteers. No. Watergate registered the implications for the U.S. ruling class of Washington's defeat in Vietnam. It marked the end of the historic high point of U.S. imperialism's strength and stability. Similar problems for the U.S. rulers - revolutionary developments in Central America and the Middle East in the late 1970s and 1980s - are behind the so- called Irangate and Iraqgate scandals too.

This tendency, in the context of sharpening political polarization, increases suspicions of the rulers and their government representatives. Perot plays on this growing distrust of politicians, even as he offers a Bonapartist solution that would in fact greatly tighten the grip of the presidency. Congress is an obstacle, says Perot. Gridlock! Gridlock everywhere! Gotta cut through the gridlock! Gotta get rid of corruption to end the gridlock! Gotta watch out for conspiracies that lead to gridlock!

Perot uses insinuation effectively. How do people like Bush and Clinton end up so wealthy? Ross Perot is a self-made man -an effective businessman, not a Washington insider, he boasts. There's no mystery how he made his money. "I'm spending my money, not PAC [political action committee] money, not foreign money, my money- - take this message to the people," Perot aggressively asserted during the second televised presidential debate last month.

But what about Bush and Clinton? How did they get their wealth? How do they explain how they got where they are? Ability? Moral stature? Hardly. So what is the explanation? "Who would you give your pension fund and your savings account to, to manage?" Perot said in his closing remarks during the final presidential debate. "Who would you ask to be the trustee of your estate and take care of your children if something happened to you?" And he returned to that theme in Long Beach the other night. "If you had a small business, would you hire either one of these guys to run it?" he asked to thundering shouts of "No!" from the crowd. But wouldn't you trust your money with Ross Perot? The guy's a billionaire, after all. He claims to be beholden to no one - no lobbyists, no bankers, no "foreign interests," nobody. He says he spent millions of dollars of his own money on the campaign. Ross puts his money where his mouth is - his own money. That's Perot's pitch....
Perot, the self-made man, isn't afraid to explain why everybody has to accept pain, why "we all" have to sacrifice, he explains. 

Social Security can't be sacred, Perot says, at least not for well-off people like himself who don't need it. (That is his "populist" foot in the door, to open the assault on Social Security as a universal social right, guaranteed for all.) A higher tax on gasoline may be necessary, too. The federal budget deficit has to be slashed at all costs. But "we" in America can do this, Perot says. Can do!

Perot did not win the election, but we should all watch what happens to domestic policy in this country over the next twenty- four months. Perot's economic program will come closer to what the Clinton administration and bipartisan Congress actually implement than anything either the Democratic or Republican candidates talked about during the campaign.

A warning to workers movement
Perot's radical, demagogic appeal gained a hearing from millions this year, as the election results show. I repeat: the vote for Perot is the important outcome of the 1992 elections, and it is a warning the workers movement ignores at its own peril....

A vote anywhere close to the size of Perot's is rare for a third-party candidate in the United States in this century. Remember the John Anderson campaign in 1980? Anderson got less than 7 percent of the vote, running against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. In 1948 two third-party movements broke off from the Democrats - Strom Thurmond's segregationist States' Rights Democrats, and the Progressive Party ticket of Henry Wallace, backed by forces in and around the Stalinists and some liberal milieus. Those two parties combined, however, got less than 5 percent of the vote, and Democrat Harry Truman won the election and started consolidating the national security state for U.S. imperialism.

But Ross Perot got nearly 20 percent of the vote - 4 to 5 percent more than predicted on the basis of those who said beforehand they would vote for him. The Perot vote registers the growing view that no established Democratic or Republican party candidate will ever be any different. It registers the glorification of the armed forces and their special elite units that gains momentum at times of social crisis - no corruption there! It converges with the glorification of the cops. It reflects the elevation of the so-called self-made businessman (like Perot) who knows how to cut through red tape. "I'm Ross. You're the boss!" - that became Perot's demagogic, populist watchword as the campaign progressed. Together, we will cut through the pretense of democracy in Washington, the gridlock of elected institutions, and get things done!

To get a feel for the way similar forces evolved earlier in the century in the United States, it is useful to read a novel called All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. It is based on the life of Huey Long, the demagogue who became governor of Louisiana during the crisis-ridden years of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Warren brings to life some of the social reality behind the rise of Bonapartist-minded demagogues such as Ross Perot. This is not a new phenomena in the United States. What is new is the acceleration of the social crisis that begins to provide a social base for such rightist developments again today. These movements all combine populist demagogy with deeply undemocratic attitudes and proposals, always built around conspiracies.

The social and political pressures reflected in the vote for Ross Perot have nothing to do with him as an individual. The vote he received has nothing to do with what may or may not happen to Perot or to his "United We Stand" movement tomorrow. 

What is new is that a candidate running outside the two major bourgeois parties, with the kind of radical demagogy he spouted, got close to 20 percent of the vote in the United States of America in the closing decade of the twentieth century. To drive home how new it is, we should just ask ourselves the question: "What would I have thought if I had turned on the television ten years ago, or even five, and heard a major candidate for president saying these things?"
This kind of movement, this kind of demagogy is going to be a permanent and growing aspect of the intersection of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois politics in the period we have entered. It is an inevitable product of a world capitalist order heading toward intensified trade wars, economic breakdowns, banking and currency crises, accelerated war drives, and their inevitable accompaniment-class battles.

Perot's radicalism is a manifestation of the increasingly brutal politics of capitalism in decline. It is a radicalism that pits human beings against each other and reinforces all the most savage competitiveness and dog-eat-dog values of capitalist society. It singles out scapegoats among the most oppressed and exploited layers of our class. When Perot explains what "we" can and must do, the "we" is a lie. But when he says that "we" must act quickly and decisively, because "time is not on our side," Perot is pointing to a fundamental class truth-he is just deliberately using the wrong pronoun. Time is not on their side-the side of the capitalists and rightist demagogues who seek to salvage their system. But time is on our side-the side of the working class, in the United States and around the world.

That is why it is so important for workers and revolutionary- minded youth to absorb that radicalization per se is not in the interests of the working class. In and of itself it has no class content. Radicalism has staked out a permanent place in bourgeois politics, one that will expand as the crisis deepens. Perot may or may not be among its standard-bearers next time around. But the bourgeois right will win adherents to their own radical-radically reactionary-views and proposals until the working class begins to forge a leadership with class-struggle answers out of the fighting vanguard of the toilers.

Reading notes - American Politics Today: The Working Class Moves to Center Stage (1979)

American Politics Today: The Working Class Moves to Center Stage
By Jack Barnes

THE MILITANT/MARCH 16, 1979
http://themilitant.com/1979/4310/MIL4310.pdf

________



....We have entered a period in the United
States where the class war, because of the class-
collaborationist default of the labor bureaucracy,
is being fought in guerrilla struggles in factory
after factory. You could say that what is taking
place is urban guerrilla warfare for an extended
period. And, judging from the reports from Can-
ada and Mexico, we should add that it is on a
continental scale.

That is what we have: guerrilla warfare by the
workers, defensive struggles, not politically led,
not consciously organized, not carried out in a
coordinated way.

....It was correct to say that the [1978 UMWA] mine strike was the most important battle of labor since the showdown in the General Motors strike in 1946.

There is no doubt about that now.  What happened in the miners' struggle affected
the relationship of class forces in this country. It
shed light on the patterns of struggle that are
coming-in industry and in the country as a
whole. It illuminated the changing relationship
of forces between the ruling class, the labor
bureaucracy, and the workers. And that is at the
heart of all politics in this country.

The strike deeply affected the ruling class and
the way they view their tactical problems. It
profoundly affected the working class and its
allies, changing the way they look at themselves
and at each other.

I think it also affected the revolutionary party.
It sharpened our view of politics in this country
today. And it showed once more how a party can
act decisively, even when it is very small, in a
way that can begin affecting much larger
forces-providing you are in the strategically
decisive arenas of action.

....Over the years, the American working class
became a political prisoner, incarcerated in the
antilabor legislation and class-collaborationist
institutions. The workers were held in check by
the housebroken labor bureaucracy, which the
employers relied on more and more to do the job
for them.

....One of the biggest problems facing the rulers
in this country is the antiwar attitude of the
workers who fought imperialism's war in Viet-
nam for a decade, then got the austerity offensive
as a thank you. This deep-seated suspicion is a
state of consciousness the rulers are determined
to reverse-because they know they must be able
to directly use American military power.
They must do this not because of the strength
of world imperialism but because of its weakness,
the shift in the world relationship of class forces
against them.

....as the pressure mounts to break out of the
framework of capitalist politics, the rulers are
going to make more and more of an effort to
come up with safety valves that keep the exploit-
ed and oppressed stuck in lesser-evilism. If nec-
essary, they will increase the number of Black
candidates running. They will find this woman
to run, that young person, this "populist," that
gay person, this "environmentalist." They will
even start running some "socialist" Democrats.
Just as long as they don't break out of the
framework of capitalist politics, but instead serve
as a way of sucking people back in.

....Today the gap is closing between the
radicalism and combativity of the labor move-
ment as a whole, and the level of political
consciousness in the Black and Chicano com-
munities.

Not that the gap has been closed. But think
back to the 1950s, with the rise of the civil rights
movement. Compare the consciousness and the
readiness for political action-even if not on the
electoral front-of the Black community and the
labor movement then. In those days, the labor
movement was almost totally dominated by the
most reactionary political positions of the Meany
leadership.

But a great deal has changed in the labor
movement in the past several years. The growing
class consciousness among many white workers
narrows the gap with their Black co-workers.
There's more and more understanding of the
need for class solidarity, solidarity with the
struggles of labor's allies, the need for indepen-
dent class political action.

....In organizations such as NOW, we have to be
able to explain that lobbying is not just a less-
effective tactic; it's a wrong tactic. Lobbying
doesn't accomplish little; it's not even neutral. It
is harmful. It is counterproductive because it
diverts energies from useful activity.
This is not playing with words. If people go to
demonstrate in Washington, and as part of that
they raise some hell in the hallways of Congress,
and get on television, that's good. That's not
lobbying; it's a form of publicizing our demands.

But lobbying as a tactic simply institutional-
izes the course of relying on bourgeois politi-
cians. No bourgeois politician has ever done
anything for any section of the working class
because some lobbyist asked: "Would you do
this? We want this," or demonstrated he or she
was knowledgeable about the issues. That's not
how the capitalist politicians make their deci-
sions.

....We're about the only ones on the American left
who totally reject the nonsense about the country
moving right.

The "country's" not drifting to the right-
there's a class polarization taking place within
the country. There are signs of it every day. And
the more you are part of the American industrial
working class, the more you see it and under-
stand it.

It's certainly true that the Democrats and
Republicans are moving to the right. With their
system in a deep crisis, capitalist politicians like
Carter say things that Lyndon Johnson wouldn't
have dreamed of saying a decade ago. And
Carter will have to say more, and have to try to
do more-economically, militarily, politically.

Because the capitalists must continue their offen-
sive against working people around the world;
they have no choice. And while they can get
important help from the labor bureaucracy at
home, and Peking and Moscow abroad, they
ultimately have to do the job themselves.
A Mayor Gibson in Newark, a Mayor Kucinich
in Cleveland, a Mayor Young in Detroit, a
"socialist" Congressman Dellums, may talk a bit
more "left," but when push comes to shove, they
are owned by the banks. They bring down the
axe on schools, hospitals, jobs, raise taxes-
whatever the bankers need.

So, yes, the capitalist politicians are moving to
the right.

But the workers aren't. And neither are our
allies. They're looking for action. They're looking
for answers. And they're beginning to act-
whether misled, partially led, or just on their
own.

That's the guerrilla warfare we were talking
about at the beginning. As more and more SWP
members get into the steel plants, into the auto
factories, into the mines and rail yards, we are
learning this from our own experience.

It's what one steelworker official was referring
to when he talked to the Washington Post about
the shipyard workers in Newport News. "What a
guy used to put up with in the '30s and '40s, the
young guys today just aren't willing to put up
with," the official said.

And we could add that it doesn't just go for the
guys.

....Omari was right. In Weber, we have
something that could be five, ten, twenty times
bigger than the Bakke case. It goes right to the
heart of class politics. We don't know yet how
broad the movement around this can be. But the
Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, and
that sets off a certain dynamic.

….Mary-Alice [Waters] reminded me of something
else that is important for us to absorb the
meaning of. The American working class is more
advanced, by far, on this question of affirmative
action than workers anywhere else in the world ..
Affirmative action, as we understand the con-
cept, is practically nonexistent in other advanced
capitalist countries. There is no consciousness
that fighting to increase the number of women or
oppressed national minorities in industry streng-
thens the workers in their fight against the
employers. As inadequate as the gains have been here, there's nothing like them in Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan. The labor movement in other countries is just more backward on this question, more influenced by the racist and sexist ideas promoted by the rulers.

This is because of the vanguard role of the
Black struggle in the United States and the
impact of the radicalization that came before the
period we're living through now. It's a precious
conquest of the early stages of this radicaliza-
tion. As a result, workers here have a potentially
powerful weapon. Because affirmative action is
solidarity. It is the strength our class needs to
fight. And this concept already exists, is already
part of this early stage of labor's fight for its
emancipation.

....The turn is not just for us. We think every fighting organization in this country should make the turn. Unless you do what we're doing-getting the overwhelming majority of our members into industry-you are going to be disoriented politically.

In order to see the political challenges and
opportunities today, in order to see the road
ahead, you have to understand what's happening
in the class struggle.

This is at the bottom of the crisis of perspec-
tives facing the Raza Onida Party, for instance.
This is what we must explain to the leaders and
members of the Raza Onida Party whom we
know and work with. We have to explain frankly
and clearly that this is where they have to orient,
or they will have no perspective to offer the
masses of Chicano working people in Texas.

....I think Mac [Warren] put it well when he pointed out that the ruling class sure doesn't think it's simply a preparatory period. That's a good point.
Even more important for us is the fact that a
significant layer of our class also knows that this
is not exactly a preparatory period. That's the
heart of the matter.

That's where virtually every other radical
group goes off the rails. They think it's important
to get elected to union office, instead of organiz-
ing around ideas and actions among the ranks of
the labor movement. That's like a decision to
abandon the fight to be a revolutionary socialist
in the unions.

That's why we stress the point that we can't
have our eyes on the secondary leaders or the
local leaders. We are looking to the ranks. And
we function as open socialists.
The truth of the matter is that every single one
of our opponents look to that layer, not to the
ranks of labor. That's where the Communist
Party looks. That's where the Maoists look.
That's where the International Socialists look.
The Social Democrats already look a little
higher, but they don't ignore the secondary lay-
ers.

Deep in their heart of hearts, a lot of these
petty-bourgeois radicals believe that Fraser and
Winpisinger are to the left of the American
workers. To you that sounds strange. It sounds
like an abomination. Because you are workers
who are thinking about strategy and tactics in
the battles today and the battles ahead.

But petty-bourgeois radicals who come into the
labor movement with a petty-bourgeois program,
get superimpressed with various competing indi-
vidual leaders, some more radical than others. It
wasn't just the Cochranites in our own party who
thought that the Reuther bureaucracy was miles
to the left of the auto workers in the fifties. This
kind of idea comes up with every brand of petty-
bourgeois political opponent today.
This is important to keep in mind. It helps to
reinforce where we're looking, and the axis that
we're on. It's all connected to the here and now.
That's what we're after.

movement, and they will come again. They will
become the dominant forms of struggle, and the
workers will have to cut through the red tape
with a few strokes. All the stuff with the lawyers
and arbitrators will fall by the wayside in com-
bat, class combat.

….of our opponents look to that layer, not to the
ranks of labor. That's where the Communist
Party looks. That's where the Maoists look.
That's where the International Socialists look.
The Social Democrats already look a little
higher, but they don't ignore the secondary lay-
ers.

Deep in their heart of hearts, a lot of these
petty-bourgeois radicals believe that Fraser and
Winpisinger are to the left of the American
workers. To you that sounds strange. It sounds
like an abomination. Because you are workers
who are thinking about strategy and tactics in
the battles today and the battles ahead.

But petty-bourgeois radicals who come into the
labor movement with a petty-bourgeois program,
get superimpressed with various competing indi-
vidual leaders, some more radical than others. It
wasn't just the Cochranites in our own party who
thought that the Reuther bureaucracy was miles
to the left of the auto workers in the fifties. This
What's at stake is challenging the thirty-year
web of class-collaborationist practices in the
labor movement. Farrell calls it miles of red tape.
He saw the genesis of a lot of it firsthand. You
get a picture of miles of red tape being wound
around the bodies of workers so they can't
breathe and can't move.

What did Mac say? Even when a worker gets
mad, what do they say to the steward? "File a
grievance. File a grievance for me."

Think about that for a minute. Isn't that a hell
of a state for the UAW to come to?

That's what is beginning to unravel. It will go
far beyond what we're seeing now. When the
workers very impolitely say, "Take the laws, take
the papers, take the grievance machinery, and
shove 'em."

Workers' real grievances are going to increase,
and they will have to be fought out with strikes
and picket lines against cops and company
goons. Those kinds of struggles built the labor
movement, and they will come again. They will
become the dominant forms of struggle, and the
workers will have to cut through the red tape
with a few strokes. All the stuff with the lawyers
and arbitrators will fall by the wayside in com-
bat, class combat.

….the gap between the radicalization among Black workers and the radicalization inside the rest of the working class has narrowed. That's not because Blacks have become less class conscious, but because whites
have become more class conscious. That's the
most positive thing in American politics.

The Black population has carried the U.S.
class struggle on its back for twenty years. It
started in the fifties with the rise of the civil
rights movement, and that began to transform
American society. It's taken us a long time to get
to where we are now.

But now we're here. And that's a wonderful
thing….