http://themilitant.com/2017/8137/813750.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 37 October 9, 2017
(special feature)
SWP reaches broadly to workers with paper, books
Workers’ anger at capitalist carnage opens doors to communist political,
union work
BY TERRY EVANS
NEW YORK — When President Donald Trump said in his inauguration speech
that the “American carnage stops right now,” it resonated with millions
of working people, Socialist Workers Party National Committee member
Steve Clark told participants in a Sept. 22 Militant Labor Forum here.
It was the demagogy of “a bourgeois politician, but one who — far more
than most in his class — saw the reality of the deepening crisis of the
Republican and Democratic parties and used it to trounce his electoral
opponents in both parties,” Clark said.
That carnage is the product of the global contraction of capitalist
production, trade and employment. The percentage of the working class
with jobs, as well as their wages and family income, are stagnating or
worse, Clark said. Life expectancy is down, health care and pensions
devastated and opioid addiction spreading among urban and rural working
people.
The cumulative political effects of this social crisis — on workers’
outlooks and the bourgeois parties alike — became clear to the Socialist
Workers Party in 2011, after party members joined protests in Madison,
Wisconsin, for several weeks against attacks on public workers’ unions
in that state. The SWP soon concluded that the weekly marches were going
nowhere, since the aim of union officials, liberal activists, and
middle-class radicals organizing them was to oust Republican Gov. Scott
Walker and replace him with a Democrat.
The SWP, Clark said, knew this goal was not only a will-o’-the-wisp
(Walker’s second term ends in November 2018), but more importantly it
fostered the self-defeating illusion that workers and our unions have a
stake in backing candidates of either of the bosses’ parties.
The SWP leadership decided party members needed to get out of Madison,
instead go door to door in working-class neighborhoods in smaller cities
and towns across the state. “As we did so, we discovered deep changes in
workers’ thinking that presented new political openings for the party,”
Clark said.
Wisconsin was one of four states where many workers cast ballots for
Donald Trump in 2016 who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012,
Clark said. These workers weren’t motivated by “white racism,” as
claimed by many on the liberal or radical left, nor were they “voting
Republican.” They’d simply had enough of capitalism’s carnage and wanted
a change.
In fact, as a result of the gains of the Black rights movement in the
U.S., more workers than ever today oppose racist and anti-immigrant
bigotry, discrimination and assaults. That was shown, among other ways,
by the broad response against the murder of nine Blacks in Charleston,
South Carolina, by ultrarightist Dylann “Storm” Roof in 2015, as well as
the outpouring of 40,000 in Boston in August against the racist,
anti-Semitic “Tiki Torch” march of some 250 in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Campaigning at workers’ doorsteps
“Based on the Wisconsin experience,” Clark said, “the SWP concluded that
every branch should put campaigning door to door in working-class
neighborhoods at the center of its activity. We find many workers
interested in talking with us about our working-class program and
becoming readers of the Militant and books by party leaders. Some
introduce us to family, friends and co-workers, come with us to social
protests, take an interest in activities to defend the Cuban Revolution
or want us to join fights or activities they’re involved in.”
Deepening the party’s week-by-week propaganda work in the working class
is at the heart of this fall’s drive to expand the circulation of the
paper and the party’s books.
The refusal of the class-collaborationist union bureaucracy to organize
and mobilize the working class to respond to attacks by the bosses —
with the officialdom’s slavish orientation to the rulers’ political
parties, usually the Democrats — has meant union membership is
plummeting, Clark said. In 1973 some 39 percent of manufacturing workers
were union members; it’s 8.8 percent today. Overall for workers employed
by privately owned companies, the percentage has fallen to 6.4 percent.
“Top union officials and most of the U.S. left — whatever they say, and
however they say it — are convinced it’s not possible to organize
workers into unions today,” Clark said. “And that’s how the union
bureaucrats and middle-class radicals act. None look to workers and our
families as the agents of social change, much less the fight for an
independent working-class political party and the revolutionary struggle
for workers power.”
But the Socialist Workers Party, and its members and supporters employed
by giant retailers like Walmart, in manufacturing industries, in
transportation, and other jobs know differently. “We find the same kind
of political response among co-workers to the party’s program and
activity — and interest in the Militant and books on working-class
politics,” Clark said, “as we do going door to door in workers’
neighborhoods.”
No one can predict when working-class opposition to assaults on living
standards and job conditions, union busting, racist attacks, the
pushback against women’s rights, social catastrophes, and wars
perpetuated by the capitalists, their government and their political
parties will give rise to a sustained social movement to rebuild our
unions and to fight for broad working-class social and political demands.
But one thing is for sure, Clark said. “The political discussions party
members and supporters have with their co-workers today — on the job,
and off — and the books, Militant subscriptions, and party election
campaign material we get into workers’ hands, is necessary preparation
for those class battles.
“The party’s campaign this fall to sell subscriptions to the Militant
and revolutionary books is trade union work,” Clark said, “as is
reaching out to actions in solidarity with striking workers or protests
against racist police killings, attacks on a woman’s right to choose
abortion, or imperialist wars.
“It’s part of strengthening the nucleus of a working-class cadre in
mines, mills, factories, giant retail stores and other workplaces who
can and will lead successful union-organizing drives.”
That’s why SWP members who are leading the effort where they work to
expand the circulation of the party’s newspaper and books are decisive
to leading the campaign by party branches to reach out to working-class
neighborhoods and political contacts across the country.
Washington lost the Cold War
“It’s increasingly clear the U.S. can’t win the wars they’re waging in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere today,” Clark said. “These brutal
wars have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, maimings and the
dispossession of millions. The Afghanistan War began 17 years ago, and
Washington is now sending in several thousand additional troops again.”
Without conscription, the rulers rely on active duty “volunteers” plus
the National Guard, forcing a small section of the U.S. population from
working-class or farm families to do the fighting and dying, with
multiple, wrenching deployments — sometimes as many as four or five.
Only by bringing back the draft do the rulers have a chance at beginning
to win wars again, but they face big political obstacles in even probing
such a measure right now.
The propertied U.S. ruling families lost the Cold War, despite what they
claimed, Clark said. U.S. imperialism continues to grow relatively
weaker, although it remains the only power that can and does project
massive military might in every part of the world. It’s predominant
industrial, trading and banking position is being shaken by the world
capitalist crisis and accelerating competition of capitals — not only
vis-à-vis its main imperialist rivals but other strengthening capitalist
ruling classes. Instead of Russia and China becoming new fields of
investment and growth for U.S. capital, they’ve become competitors
worldwide.
This sharpening imperialist competition is tearing the European Union
apart. This is what’s behind Brexit, a move by a wing of the rulers in
the U.K. to defend London’s diminishing place in the imperialist pecking
order by breaking free from the “ever greater union” stranglehold of the
EU. And the Spanish rulers’ efforts to stop the people of the Catalonia
region in northeastern Spain from voting on national independence Oct. 1.
And it opens the door to advances in the Kurds’ fight for their own
country. Clark urged forum participants to be ready to join in actions
in defense of the Kurdish people’s fight for independence.
U.S. political crisis unwinds
The capitalist rulers face a deepening political crisis here at home as
well, Clark said. Their parties — the Democrats and Republicans — are
coming apart and will never be the same.
The liberals and left haven’t given up on their “Resistance” drive to
get President Trump impeached or indicted.
“The ‘no-knock’ raid on the home of former Trump campaign chair Paul
Manafort highlights the dangers to the working class of the witch hunt
against the Trump presidency,” Clark said. The FBI’s July unannounced
break-in and seizure of Manafort’s documents was part of Special Counsel
and former FBI chief Robert Mueller’s open drive to find a handle to go
after Trump.
To obtain a warrant for the break-in, Mueller went to a secret FISA
court, saying Manafort was likely to destroy the “evidence” he was after
— which the liberal media jumped on as innuendo “that where there’s
smoke there’s fire.” Raids like this — and the FISA court itself — are
police frame-up methods and tools the working-class vanguard has long
and bitter experience with.
Clark explained that some in the Democratic Party and sections of the
Republicans seeking to drive Trump from the presidency have growing
doubts about their ability to do so, and whether it would really solve
the problem they see. “What these privileged, meritocratic layers fear
in the United States today is not Trump, but the millions of workers who
voted for him, seeking to ‘drain the swamp’ and find a way to end the
carnage,” Clark said.
They think they need to find a way to disenfranchise working people, who
they don’t deem smart enough to vote “the right way.” Or they have
illusions they can get rid of us with robots, replacing what they view
as an increasingly “unskilled” and useless bunch of “losers” who aren’t
dying fast enough from opioid overdose or who are cutting into the
capitalists’ riches by drawing disability or jobless benefits. “That’s
their anti-working-class take on the shrinking labor force,” Clark said.
As communist workers campaign door to door among fellow workers, Clark
said, we can help explain and answer these rationalizations for
exploitation and oppression by introducing working people to books such
as Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning
Under Capitalism by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the SWP, and Is
Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? by party leader Mary-Alice Waters.
Clark called attention to Barnes’ introduction to one of the books the
party is campaigning with: Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to
Workers Power. The necessary road forward, Barnes says there, is
building a proletarian party capable of leading “the revolutionary
conquest of power by a politically class-conscious and organized
vanguard of the working class — millions strong.”
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