http://themilitant.com/2018/8223/822350.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 82/No. 23 June 11, 2018
(feature article)
In defense of the US working class
SWP leader at Havana event answers question: ‘Can working people in US
make a socialist revolution?’
Chris Dorst/Charleston Gazette-Mail via AP
Striking teachers at West Virginia Capitol in Charleston, Feb. 26, 2018,
as one of most significant labor battles in U.S. in decades exploded.
Teachers and other school workers went on strike statewide, winning
support from students, parents, churches and other unions. Strikes and
protests spread to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado, and North
Carolina. “What happened there is a living refutation of the portrait of
working-class bigotry and ‘backwardness’ painted by middle class
liberals and much of the radical left,” says Socialist Workers Party
leader Mary-Alice Waters.
The following is the talk by Mary-Alice Waters to a conference
organized by the Cuban Institute of History and the Central Organization
of Cuban Workers (CTC) in Havana, Cuba. Waters is a member of the
National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party and president of
Pathfinder Press. The talk, given April 26, opened a two-part program on
the class struggle in the United States that was a major feature of the
three-day 12th International May Day Scientific Conference.
Waters’ presentation was followed by a panel of four workers and a
farmer from the US who described their own work experiences in different
industries, as well as the union and social battles they’ve been part of
(see biographies on next page). An article reporting on the conference
appeared in the May 21 issue of the Militant. Copyright © 2018 by
Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
Waters was introduced by René González Barrios, president of the Cuban
Institute of History.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
Thank you René for your generous introduction.
On behalf of all of us presenting this morning’s program on the class
struggle in the United States, I want to thank the compañeros of the
Cuban Institute of History, the Central Organization of Cuban Workers,
and our hosts here at the Cigar Workers Palace for the privilege — and
responsibility — you have extended us.
Six months ago, when René first asked us to prepare this session of the
12th International May Day Scientific Conference, I was skeptical.
“We’re neither professional historians nor academic researchers,” I told
him. “We’re workers, trade unionists, farmers, communists, members and
supporters of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists. Will our
presentation be appropriate?”
Each of you has a copy of the brief biographies we prepared on the
members of our panel. I won’t repeat what’s in those notes, except to
say that those you will hear from today have lived and worked in every
part of the United States — on the land and in jobs from coal mines, oil
refineries and railroads, to garment shops, construction sites,
slaughterhouses, auto assembly lines, warehouses, and retail giants like
Walmart — the largest private employer in the US today with 1.5 million
workers on the payroll (and another 800,000 worldwide).
As class-conscious workers, of course, we are participants in every
social, political, and cultural battle at the center of the class
struggle in the US, starting with opposition to every act of aggression,
every war waged openly or covertly by US imperialism.
René listened patiently to all our hesitations. Then he just smiled and
said: “Well, that’s what we need to hear about. Here at the history
institute we talk to many who study the working class. We need to hear
from those who are workers.”
So here we are, and we look forward to your questions, to your doubts
and comments, and to a fruitful discussion especially.
I can assure you in advance that what you hear from us today will not be
what you regularly hear, see, or read in either the “mass media,” or on
what is now known as “social media” — although I prefer “bourgeois
media” as the more accurate label for both.
Focus on two questions
I will focus my remarks on two questions.
First. Did the 2016 electoral victory of Donald Trump register a rise in
racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and every other form of ideological
reaction among working people in the US? Is that why tens of millions of
workers of all races voted for him?
Second. Is a socialist revolution in the US really possible? Or are
those like ourselves, who answer with an unhesitating “Yes,” a new
variety of utopian socialist fools, however well meaning?
The clearest and most demonstrative answer to the first question is
being given right now from West Virginia to Oklahoma, from Kentucky to
Arizona and beyond by tens of thousands of teachers and other public
workers in states Trump carried by a large margin in 2016.
Maykel Espinosa/Juventud Rebelde
Panel on class struggle in U.S. at April 2018 Havana conference
organized by Cuban Institute of History (IHC) and Cuba’s union
federation. From left, Willie Head, Omari Musa, Alyson Kennedy, Jacob
Perasso and Mary-Alice Waters. At right, René González Barrios,
president of IHC. At podium (not in photo) is Róger Calero.
Less than two months ago in the state of West Virginia, one of the most
significant labor battles in several decades exploded onto the national
scene. Some 35,000 teachers, janitors, bus drivers, cafeteria workers,
and other public school employees walked off the job together, defying
past court rulings denying public employees the right to strike. With
overwhelming support from their communities, they closed down the
schools in every single county in the state. Yes, every single one.
Fifty-five counties in all. It was a surprise even for the fighting
teachers.
The action came after years of ruling-class budget cuts that slashed
funding for students’ meals, textbooks, school supplies, building
maintenance, salaries of teachers and other employees, and so-called
extracurricular activities such as sports, art, music, and other
programs indispensable for a child’s growth and learning.
West Virginia is the historic heart of coal country in the United
States, the site of some of the hardest fought union battles in US
history. It has long been one of the most economically ravaged areas of
the country, and even more so today.
Over the last three decades, the coal bosses and their government,
determined to drive down their labor costs and break the back of the
United Mine Workers union (UMWA), have waged a concerted assault on the
lives and living standards of all working people.
Coal companies have closed hundreds of mines throughout the Appalachian
region, as they’ve shifted capital to oil, natural gas, and other
fossil-fuel energy sources, including their vast open-pit and nonunion
surface coal mines in western regions of the United States. Their only
concern is to increase their rate of profit as they employ fewer miners.
Some fifty years ago the UMWA, long the most powerful union in the
country, represented 70 percent of coal miners. That figure today stands
at 21 percent.
We don’t have time to tell the story of how the owners have closed
health clinics won by the union in prior battles. Or why black lung
disease, the deadly scourge of miners, driven back in the 1970s and
1980s, has once again exploded across the region, now hitting younger
miners in an even more virulent form thanks to “new mining technology.”
Nor can we describe how the mining companies have used bankruptcy
proceedings, court rulings, and corporate “restructurings” to cease
recognizing union contracts, dump pension obligations, and eliminate
UMWA-controlled mine safety committees that were fought for and
conquered in previous battles. Through those union committees, miners
themselves asserted their power to shut down work on any shift in face
of any unsafe conditions.
You will hear more about these questions later in the program from one
of our panelists, Alyson Kennedy, who worked fourteen years as an
underground coal miner.
The consequences of this decades-long assault are registered in the
statistics.
West Virginia today has the lowest median household income of all fifty
states in the union save one, Mississippi. In only three states —
Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Mississippi — do teachers earn less than in
West Virginia.
Measured by official US government figures that include so-called
“discouraged workers” — those who haven’t been able to find a job for so
long that they’ve temporarily given up — unemployment in West Virginia
is one of the highest in the country: more than 10 percent in 2017.
The state is a center of the drug addiction crisis in the US — it has
the highest opioid overdose rate in the country. And the drug crisis is
still accelerating, registered most forcefully in one fact: life
expectancy in the United States actually dropped for two consecutive
years in 2015-16.
To this picture you have to add the not-so-hidden toll of Washington’s
endless wars, the burden of which, as always, falls most heavily on
working-class and farm families in the most depressed regions of the
country. Among veterans of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and
elsewhere, the suicide rate is twenty a day. Yes, you heard that right.
Twenty a day.
We could add more to this picture, but it’s not necessary.
The point is that without understanding the devastation of the lives of
working-class families in regions like West Virginia (and there are many
more) — without understanding the vast increase since the 2008 financial
crisis in class inequality, including the accelerating inequality within
classes — you won’t be able to understand what’s happening in the United
States.
You have to compare this panorama of carnage with the lives of the upper
layers of the meritocracy to be found in places like Silicon Valley, and
the more exclusive (far from the most exclusive) neighborhoods of
population centers like Manhattan, Washington, and San Francisco.
This devastation facing working people is not only the consequence of
the worldwide capitalist crisis of production and trade, which began in
the mid-1970s and is still deepening. It is the consequence of the
policies initiated by the Democratic Party administration of the two
Clintons in the 1990s and pursued with equal vigor by the Republican
administration of George W. Bush and the Democratic administration of
Barack Obama.
Policies such as the elimination of federal aid to children of single
mothers and drastic cuts in other social welfare programs on all levels.
Legislation and policies disguised under names like the “war on drugs”
and “criminal justice” that have made the United States the country with
the highest incarceration rate in the world — some 25 percent of all
prisoners on earth. It was among those prisoners, we should add, that
our five Cuban brothers lived and carried out their political work for
some sixteen years.
All these questions are explained and documented in several of the most
widely read books published by Pathfinder Press that are available on
the table that many of you have already visited: The Clintons’
Anti-Working-Class Record and Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? both
by Jack Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party,
and “It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System” in
which the five Cuban heroes talk about their experiences as part of the
working class behind bars in the United States.
Workers resist … search for answers
Often when we explain these social realities to compañeros and friends
here in Cuba (and elsewhere), they ask, “Why do people accept this? Why
hasn’t there been any resistance?”
Our answer is always the same: “There is resistance. Workers never stop
looking for ways to fight back — and act when they find ways.” But if
you are not part of the working class, you’re not aware of what is
happening until it explodes.
No worker goes on strike until they’ve exhausted other remedies. Until
they feel they have no other choice.
The West Virginia teachers strike was just that kind of explosion. It
seemed to come out of nowhere, but it had been building for years. Its
roots are deep.
And when the teachers and other school employees walked out, when they
saw the strength of their numbers, their confidence and determination
exploded too. With support from their pupils, families, unions, and
churches — and a long memory of the many bitter battles fought by the
miners — they organized emergency food services for the students and
strikers. Daytime activities for the children were put in place.
Clothing and funds were collected, and more.
In the best traditions of trade unionism — and a precursor of the
fighting labor movement that will again be built — the strike became a
genuine social movement, battling for the needs of the entire working
class and its allies.
“What we’re seeing is a class of people rising up,” one striking worker
proudly told a reporter.
And he was right. They were the men and women whom Hillary Clinton so
contemptuously labeled “a basket of deplorables” during her presidential
campaign. People from the “backward” (that was her word!) expanses of
the country between New York and California. People she described as
“racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,” and especially women, “married
white women,” too weak to stand up to “pressure to vote the way your
husband, your boss, your son” tells you to.
Is it any wonder Trump won West Virginia by a vote of 69 percent to 27
percent for Clinton?
The better class of people who engaged in this struggle not only kept
every school closed for nine days. They sent thousands of demonstrators
to occupy the state capitol day after day. Midway through the walkout,
teachers rejected their union officialdom’s call to accept the
governor’s promise of a deal. They’d heard promises before. They stayed
out until they forced the legislature to pass, and the governor to sign
into law, a five percent pay raise. And not only for school personnel,
but for every single state employee.
A confident mass of red-shirted victors marched out of the state capitol
building shouting, “Who made history? We made history!”
And as word spread, teachers in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona prepared
for the next strike actions. “Don’t make us go West Virginia on you!”
became their battle cry.
Of all that, you’ll hear more from the panel later this morning.
What has happened in West Virginia is a living refutation of the
portrait of working-class bigotry and “backwardness” painted, almost
without exception, by a broad spectrum of middle class liberals and much
of the radical left in the US, and around the world as well. It is not
only Donald Trump they obsessively hope to impeach. Their target — and
the object of their fear — is that class of people who are rising up,
many of whom voted for Trump.
What’s behind the actions of tens of thousands of working people like
these is not hatred of Mexicans, Muslims, African Americans, or a desire
to keep women at home, barefoot, and pregnant. Just look at the pictures
on the display board at the back of the room. Look at the faces of the
women in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona and elsewhere who are at the
forefront of the teachers’ battles!
Workers engaged in these fights are not clamoring for a border wall,
groping women, or marching with KKK hoods and burning crosses. They are
demanding dignity and respect for themselves and their families, and for
all working people like them.
And they have nothing but distrust and growing hatred for those they
call “the political class” in Washington and in every state capital in
the country, both Republican and Democratic. That’s why chants of “Drain
the swamp!” resonated far beyond those who voted for Trump. It’s not
reactionary attitudes that are driving most of these working people.
Their strike action registered something different: a step in the
direction of independent political consciousness, which can only develop
over time through large-scale working-class actions on picket lines and
in the streets.
With the West Virginia strike and its spreading example, working-class
resistance and class solidarity in the US have entered a new stage.
If you remember even one thing from our program here this morning, I
hope it will be this:
Among working people in the United States, there is greater openness
today than at any time in our political lives to think about and discuss
what a socialist revolution could mean and why it just might be
necessary. Why our class should shoulder the responsibility of taking
state power. How we can ourselves become different human beings in the
process.
What’s more, that political openness is as great among those who voted
for Trump as among those who voted for Clinton, or the record number who
couldn’t bring themselves to vote for either presidential candidate.
We know this not from polls or news reports filed by others. We know it
from our own experiences, and from those of our kin scattered across the
United States. We know it firsthand from our regular communist
propaganda activity, as we go door to door in working-class
neighborhoods of every racial and ethnic composition, urban and rural,
from one end of the United States to the other, talking about these
questions with thousands of working people. With whoever comes to the door.
A socialist revolution in the US?
That brings us to the second question. Is a socialist revolution in
the US really possible?
Two months ago, we were asked that by a student here in Havana at the
foreign ministry’s Higher Institute for Foreign Relations (ISRI). He
didn’t believe it, he said. The economic and military strength of
Washington is far too great — and the working class far too backward. US
imperialism, he insisted, will have to be defeated “from the outside.”
We in the Socialist Workers Party are certainly among a small minority,
even among those who call themselves socialists, who say without
hesitation, “Yes, socialist revolution is possible in the United
States.” And no liberating movement of millions can ever be imposed
“from the outside” on any country.
We say not only is socialist revolution in the US possible. Even more
important, revolutionary struggles by the toilers are inevitable. They
will be forced upon us by the crisis-driven assaults of the propertied
classes — as we’ve just seen in West Virginia. And they will be
intertwined, as always, with the example of the resistance and struggles
of other oppressed and exploited producers around the globe.
What is not inevitable is the outcome. That is where political clarity,
organization, prior experience, discipline, and, above all, the caliber
and experience of proletarian leadership are decisive.
Our confidence comes from the class-struggle battles we ourselves have
been part of, as well as what we learned firsthand from the
battle-tested workers who recruited us to the communist movement. I will
give you just three examples.
Those who recruited my generation were among the founders of the first
Communist Party in the United States in 1919. They were delegates to the
founding congresses of the Communist International. They were leaders of
the great labor battles of the 1930s, battles that in a few short years
swept past the craft-divided business unions of the American Federation
of Labor to build a powerful social movement that organized industrial
unions in virtually every basic industry.
By the high point in the late 1940s some 35 percent of the privately
employed working class was unionized, up from 7 percent in 1930 (and
that number is close to the 6.5 percent who are union members today).
The lessons we learned from the speed and power of that transformation,
the pitched battles not only with employers’ goons and police, but
fascist gangs and National Guard troops sent in to break strikes, are
all part of our basic education.
The rise of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, is told
in rich detail in one of the books you’ll find on the Pathfinder table
at the back, Labor’s Giant Step by Art Preis, one of the Militant’s
principal labor reporters for many years.
What I want to call special attention to here today, however, is the
most far-reaching and politically significant of the labor battles of
the 1930s — the union-organizing drive of the Teamsters, the truck
drivers union. It was an organizing campaign that began in the North
Central city of Minneapolis in 1934 and, by its high point in 1938-39,
had been spread across an area nearly the size of the Indian
subcontinent. Yes, the Indian subcontinent!
The rich history and lessons of this campaign are recorded in four
remarkable books — Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Teamster
Politics, and Teamster Bureaucracy. And it is with great pleasure that
today, here at this conference all four volumes are available for the
first time ever in Spanish.
Farrell Dobbs, the author of the Teamster series, was in his twenties
shoveling coal in a Minneapolis depot when he emerged as a leader of the
1934 strikes that turned that city into a union town. He was the central
organizer of the campaign that brought tens of thousands of
over-the-road truckers into the union — from Tennessee to North Dakota,
from Texas to Michigan. He resigned as general organizer of the
Teamsters union national staff in 1940 to become labor secretary of the
Socialist Workers Party, and he was sent to prison during World War II
along with seventeen other leaders of Teamsters Local 544-CIO and the
Socialist Workers Party for organizing labor opposition to the
imperialist war aims of the US government. He later served as national
secretary of the SWP for twenty years.
More than any other labor experience, it is the Teamsters organizing
drive that taught us what the US working class is capable of as it
awakens in struggle. It taught us how quickly the working class can
learn the meaning of class political independence, proletarian
internationalism, and begin to transform the union movement into an
instrument of revolutionary struggle for the entire class and its allies.
Those experiences involved organizing the unemployed, farmers, and
independent truckers as allies. They included launching and training a
disciplined Union Defense Guard that stopped in its tracks a fascist
recruitment effort promoted by the bosses. These experiences included
broadening international horizons, as union militants followed events in
Germany, China, and Spain and took on gangs of anti-Jewish thugs. There
was growing awareness of the need for workers to enter the political
arena as an independent class force, with their own party.
That rapid advance came to an end in 1939-40 as Washington’s
intensifying imperialist war drive came down on the labor movement. But
as Dobbs writes in his “Afterword” to Teamster Bureaucracy, “The
principal lesson for labor militants to derive from the Minneapolis
experience is not that, under an adverse relationship of forces, the
workers can be overcome, but that, with proper leadership, they can
overcome.”
That is one of the same lessons taught us by the political cadres who
under Fidel led the Cuban Revolution to victory.
Battle to bring down Jim Crow
None of us on this panel today lived through the great labor battles
of the ’30s. But several of us were part of the generations transformed
by our experiences as part of another profoundly revolutionary,
working-class struggle — the mass movement of the 1950s and ’60s that
brought down the Jim Crow system of institutionalized race segregation
in the US South. That successful battle forever changed social
relations, both North and South, including within the working class and
unions.
And that is my second example.
The roots of that struggle are to be found in the century of resistance
to the counterrevolutionary violence and terror against African
Americans that reigned throughout the South following the abolition of
slavery in the US Civil War — the Second American Revolution. The
betrayal of post-Civil War Radical Reconstruction by the rising forces
of finance capital and the bloody overthrow of often Black-led popular
governments in the states of the former slavocracy were the greatest
defeat ever suffered by the US working class.
The objective conditions for the explosion of another wave of that
struggle in the 1950s, however, were the product above all of:
The mass workers struggles of the 1930s, which fought to integrate the
workforce in auto, steel, trucking, and many other industries.
The social convulsions of World War II, which included the exodus from
the land and the accelerated incorporation of millions of African
American workers, both male and female, into industry and other urban
employment, North and South. That was part of what is known as the Great
Migration that had begun during the first imperialist world war, and
included the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were
Black to serve in segregated, dangerous, so-called noncombat units of
the US armed forces during World War II.
The first steps toward desegregation of the US armed forces in the years
of “peace” between the atomic bombing of Japan and the
Washington-organized invasion, partition, and occupation of Korea. These
were followed in late 1951 by the desegregation of the army’s combat
units as well, as the US rulers’ invasion force faced determined
resistance from Korean and supporting Chinese troops.
The victorious national liberation struggles that swept the colonial
world during and after World War II, from China, Korea, Vietnam, and
Indonesia to India, Africa, and the Caribbean. This includes the Cuban
Revolution, which marked the point of furthest advance of those battles.
The naked hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the US rulers who claimed to
have instigated and pursued that second worldwide slaughter for
“freedom” and “equality.”
For my generation, and several others of us here this morning, the years
of mass struggle that overturned the American prototype of apartheid
were a school of popular revolutionary action, our school.
That’s when we learned discipline. When we learned the power we had, not
as individuals, but in our numbers and, above all, our organization.
When we learned how to engage within the movement in heated, yet civil
debate. When we learned to be political, not naïve, as we joined in
political battles raging within the movement for Black rights.
One of the myths of the battle to bring down Jim Crow is that it was a
pacifist movement. That all those involved were opposed, in principle,
to taking up arms in self-defense against the violence of the Ku Klux
Klan, White Citizens Council, and other vigilante outfits deeply
intertwined with the Democratic Party and police departments across the
South and parts of the border states.
The record shows otherwise. It was workers with military training and
combat experience in Korea who organized themselves as the Deacons for
Defense and Justice in Louisiana, and a chapter of the NAACP in Monroe,
North Carolina, to protect their communities and their kids who were
marching. Martin Luther King was protected by well-organized security.
Above all, we identified with and learned from Malcolm X, as he more and
more consciously charted a revolutionary, an internationalist, and then,
yes, a working-class course. As he charted a course to join forces with
those the world over, whatever their skin color, who understood that we
are fighting a worldwide battle “between those who want freedom, justice
and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of
exploitation.”
For many of us, it was that mass, Black, proletarian movement in the
United States, combined at the same time with the example of the workers
and farmers of Cuba and their advancing revolution, that gave our
generation unshakable confidence in the revolutionary capacities of
working people.
That story is told in one of the most important books we have brought
with us, Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes.
“The greatest obstacle to the line of march of the toilers,” Jack says
in those pages, “is the tendency, promoted and perpetuated by the
exploiting classes, for working people to underestimate ourselves, to
underestimate what we can accomplish, to doubt our own worth.”
What the workers and farmers of Cuba showed us is that with class
solidarity, political consciousness, courage, focused and persistent
efforts at education, and a revolutionary leadership of a caliber like
that in Cuba — a leadership tested and forged in battle, in sacrifice,
over years — it is possible to stand up to enormous might and numbers
that initially seem to pose insurmountable odds — and win. And then to
accelerate the building of a truly new society, led by the only class
capable of doing so.
That was the foundation of the political education of our generation.
Vietnam and the antiwar struggle
As the mass proletarian struggle against Jim Crow triumphed, our
confidence in the revolutionary capacities of the US working class
deepened with the third example I’ll point to. That was the battle to
put an end to the US rulers’ war against the people of Vietnam. We never
doubted that the Vietnamese people — and those of us determined to
defend their fight for national sovereignty and unification — would win.
In the course of that battle, as the mobilizations against the war grew
to involve millions, the widening fissures in the fabric of US society
struck fear in the hearts of the US rulers.
Massive revolts exploded in the Black ghettos of major cities in the
North, culminating in those that spread to virtually every US city in
1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis,
Tennessee — a cold-blooded political assassination in the midst of a
strike by sanitation workers there for whom King had gone to rally support.
In an effort to intimidate and quell protests, the US rulers
increasingly resorted to the mobilization of National Guard troops,
culminating in May 1970 in the fatal shooting of two students at Jackson
State in Mississippi and four students at Kent State University in Ohio.
These killings took place as demonstrations of unprecedented size rocked
the US in opposition to Washington’s invasion of Cambodia, along
Vietnam’s border.
And we saw how the US rulers and their servants were shaken by the
spread of mass antiwar opposition not just among students and growing
millions of workers but increasingly the ranks of the US draftee army,
especially those being sent to fight in Vietnam.
This was what the bourgeois political crisis known as Watergate and
ouster of President Richard Nixon was really all about — the tremors of
fear among the US rulers.
It is experiences such as these that have taught us something about the
political dynamics that will inevitably be part of a victorious American
socialist revolution.
❖ ❖ ❖
One final point, to close.
The world we are living in today is not headed toward a future of
capitalist peace and prosperity. To think otherwise you’d have to
believe that the ruling families of the imperialist world and their
financial wizards have found a way to “manage” capitalism in crisis.
That they’ve discovered the means to preclude shattering financial
collapses and breakdowns of production, trade, and employment.
You’d have to believe that the credit crisis that exploded as recently
as 2007-08 was an aberration and won’t happen again, with even more
devastating consequences for working people.
The opposite is the truth.
The crisis of finance capital is not a short-term cyclical adjustment.
World capitalism’s profit rates have been on a long downward curve for
more than four decades, since the mid-1970s. Do any of us believe, under
the domination of breakdown-ridden financial and banking capital, that
world capitalism is entering a sustained period of increased investment
in the expansion of industrial capacity and massive hiring of workers?
All evidence points in the other direction.
We have entered what will be decades of economic, financial, and social
convulsions and class battles. Decades of bloody wars like those in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and more.
The coming years will end in World War III — inevitably — if the only
class capable of doing so, the working class, fails to take state power.
If we fail to take the power to wage war out of the hands of the
imperialist rulers.
But for us, a sober and realistic assessment of what lies ahead is
reason neither for panic nor demoralization and despair. To the
contrary. The years that are coming will also bring increasingly
organized resistance — worldwide — by growing vanguards of working
people pushed to the wall by the capitalists’ compulsion to intensify
the exploitation of working people in order to reverse their declining
rate of profit.
It is through those battles that class consciousness, as well as
confidence and leadership capacity, will develop among working people —
unevenly but apace.
And time is on our side — not theirs.
On March 13, 1961, barely a month before the victorious battle of Playa
Girón, or the Bay of Pigs debacle as it is known in the US, Fidel Castro
spoke to tens of thousands of Cuban workers, farmers, and youth
preparing to meet the invasion we all knew was coming. Answering
Washington’s illusions that the coming battle would install in Cuba a
government subservient to the US rulers, Fidel told the cheering crowd:
“There will be a victorious revolution in the United States before a
victorious counterrevolution in Cuba.”
His words were not empty bravado. Fidel never ever stooped to demagogy.
Nor was he gazing in a crystal ball, pretending to divine the future.
We, and the revolutionary people of Cuba, understood him well. He was
speaking as a leader offering — advancing — a line of struggle, a line
of march, for our lifetimes. He was, as always, addressing Lenin’s
question, “What is to be done?”
In North America — and Cuba as well — each succeeding generation of
revolutionaries has carried those words on our banner.
The political capacities and revolutionary potential of workers and
farmers in the US are today as utterly discounted by the ruling families
and their servants as were those of the Cuban toilers at Playa Girón.
And just as wrongly.
Related articles:
How US working people have fought back
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