More than four weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, it is increasingly clear where America is heading: toward militarization and authoritarian rule.
Trump’s strong-man tendencies have long been evident. Although largely forgotten, he repeatedly accusedDemocrats of rigging the vote during the 2016 presidential campaign, warning that he might not concede even if the official tally went against him. Such threats grew more and more ominous in 2020 until Trump finally sent his forces crashing across Capitol Hill in early 2021 in a last-ditch attempt to block Joe Biden’s victory and force Congress to name him the winner. If Trump had lost in 2024, there would have been every reason to expect more of the same, i.e. more violence, more phony accusations of electoral theft, and more attempts to overturn the results.
But now that he has won, Trumpian authoritarianism is in full view. Examples include:
-- His ultra-confrontational cabinet picks;
-- His plans to force the Senate to adjourn so he can bypass the confirmation process and appoint cabinet members on his own;
-- His vow to use the military to round up as many as 11 million illegal aliens;
-- His promise to pardon hundreds of January 6 insurgents the moment he takes office;
-- And his close ties to the authors of Project 2025, the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s proposal for a sweeping purge of the federal bureaucracy and a “unitary executive” that will infuse the government with Christian nationalist values.
Trump’s cabinet choices run the gamut from ultra-right to centrist. They include Marco Rubio, one of the most rightwing members of the Senate, who is his pick for secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, his choice for defense secretary, who is a Christian nationalist who believes that “just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today.” But they also include relative moderates such as Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and the ever-cranky Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of health and human services, who, despite his anti-vax views, is not otherwise illiberal. Scott Bessent, his choice for treasury secretary, is openly gay while Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary, is a former Democrat -- as, of course, is Trump.
They're an eclectic mix that only have one thing in common: each in his or her own way is an affront to the Washington establishment, whether it's the “intelligence community” up in arms over Gabbard, the healthcare industry terrified by the accession of RFK , or homophobic sectors of the Trump coalition . The result is a take-it-or-leave-it approach in which Trump fairly dares the old guard on Capitol Hill to just say no.
If they do, the next step is plain: a constitutional showdown. With the help of Mike Johnson, the ultra-conservative speaker of the House, Trump is bruiting plans to force the Senate to adjourn against its will so he can use his recess powers to ram through \ appointments on his own. The strategy, based on an obscure constitutional clause in Article II, section three, is setting off alarms throughout official Washington, with even the libertarian Cato Institute describing it as a “norm-defying abuse” that would trigger “a full-blown constitutional crisis.”
But that is what Trump wants. With the Supreme Court likely on his side, Trump wants a crisis so he can cow Congress into submission and stretch the Constitution to the limits so as to accommodate his authoritarian designs. If the maneuver works, the upshot result will be a giant step toward Argentine-style neo-Peronism in which the chief executive casts off constitutional restraints and rules on his own by decree.
Using the military to round up illegal aliens would cement authoritarianism even more firmly in place. Article I, section nine, gives the president emergency powers to suspend habeas corpus “in cases of rebellion or invasion [as] the public safety may require it.” So it's a perfect opportunity for a president armed with unilateral powers to denounce illegal immigration as a foreign invasion and announce that he is suspending judicial review so that he can round up millions of people and place them in special detention camps. And if Trump rounds up millions of immigrants, then it's not too difficult to imagine other roundups that might follow, e.g. leftwing activists who defend immigrants and their interests, anti-Zionists, etc.
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As for Project 2025, it is a 1,000-page plan whose ultimate goal is to turn the federal bureaucracy into a conservative battering ram. Among the goals is banishing DEI, i.e. diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and other such “woke” initiatives and prosecuting “anti-white racism” instead. Project 2025 also calls for barring the National Institutes of Health from engaging in stem cell research, rejiggering environmental regulations so as to favor fossil fuels, and criminalizing pornography. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts is explicit about Project 2025's goals. “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” he writes in the introduction. “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”
“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right,” he adds. “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error.”
Then there are Trump’s plans to enlist Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in a Javier Milei-like assault on the federal workforce along with his refusal to cooperate with federal agencies like the General Services Administration that traditionally oversee the transition process. The plan is to decimate a government apparatus that he views as little more than enemy territory while elevating himself high it.
“He should not trust the politicized and weaponized intelligence and law enforcement agencies that hobbled his presidency the first time,” declares Mike Davis, the leader of another pro-Trump outfit called the Article III Project. “It’s a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people.”
Finally, there is Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s decision to drop charges related to the Capitol Hill insurrection and Trump’s promise to pardon hundreds of “J6’ers.” Together, they show how the federal government has given up holding Trump to account for the most serious constitutional breach since the Civil War and how the uprising itself is well on its way to being officially vindicated. The very idea of free elections is coming under assault. Henceforth, the only elections Republicans regard as valid will be elections they win.
What does it all add up to -- authoritarianism, Bonapartism, or out-and-out fascism? With ostensible Marxist organizations all over the map with regard precisely what Trumpism at this stage represents, the answer in this writer's view is the first. One reason is structural. Broadly speaking, authoritarianism (or hyper-presidentialism to use the academic term) operates within existing constitutional guidelines. Both Juan Perón of Argentina and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines submitted to regular elections, for instance, and even January 6 would have ended on a constitutional note even if Trump had succeeded in throwing the election into the House since Republicans would no doubt have followed the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the letter.
This is not to say that those constitutional procedures are anything other than obsolete, arcane, and undemocratic. Considering that the Twelfth Amendment dates from 1803 and has never been updated, they are all those and more. But what's important is that America’s weak and decrepit constitutional structure would have remained formally intact. By contrast, Napoleon III, the subject of Marx’s famous study, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, overthrew the existing constitution after launching a coup d’état in 1851 so that he could draft a new constitution from scratch, one that allowed him to serve an unlimited number of ten-year terms and gave him have total authority to declare war, sign treaties, form alliances, and initiate laws. The result was not authoritarianism under the existing constitution but dictatorship over it. As for fascism, it dispenses with constitutionalism entirely by positing a mystical union between führer and volk that is above the law, one characterized by “unconditional authority downwards, highest responsibility upwards.” Goebbels thus described Hitler as “the greater German, the führer, the prophet, the fighter, that last hope of the masses, the shining symbol of the German will to freedom” – anything, that is, except a mundane politician or officeholder.
Class relations are also key. Trotsky described fascism as an attempt to resolve the contradictions of capitalism within the confines of the bourgeois state. Since “[t]he productive forces are in irreconcilable contradiction not only with private property but also with national state boundaries,” the result is an effort “to solve this contradiction through an extension of boundaries, seizure of new territories, and so on. The totalitarian state, subjecting all aspects of economic, political and cultural life to finance capital, is the instrument for creating a super-nationalist state, an imperialist empire, the rule over continents, the rule over the whole world.”
But Trump is not remotely there yet. He is not a military expansionist, for example, and indeed attacked neocon hawk Liz Cheney during the campaign for launching “forever wars” from the comfort of Washington. His choice of middle-of-the-road Wall Streeters like Lutnik and Bessent to head up negotiations with China indicates that, for now at least, he is intent on using financial rather than military means in dealing with the “threat” posed by the PRC.
Bonapartism is meanwhile classically associated with a high pitch of class conflict in which the would-be ruler plays off the warring elements against one another so as to maintain himself in power. Yet the current period is marked by working-class quiescence in which strikes, despite a recent uptick, are still running at a rate 75 percent or more below that of the late 1960s and early 70s.
None of which is to say that Trump will not “graduate” to Bonapartism in the event of an economic or foreign-policy crisis or other disruption. In fact, with the world in growing turmoil, such crises are more likely than not, which is why Bonapartism, i.e. outright political dictatorship, is plainly on the agenda. Fascism, similarly, cannot be ruled out either although it will take political breakdown and a massive upsurge in revolutionary class struggle before it advances to the fore.
To sum up: Trumpism has not yet reached the Bonapartist stage, much less the fascist. Nonetheless, constitutional constraints have been cast aside so forcibly. The reason is the political breakdown of the last 30 years or so, which has been unprecedented. The legislative branch is paralyzed, corruption is soaring, economic polarization is out of control, while ordinary citizens have rarely been more pessimistic. An eighteenth-century constitution that is increasingly at odds with the needs of modern society is making a mockery of anything resembling democratic self-government. If we toss in global warming, imperial overstretch, economic instability, and an increasingly powerful drive to war, then it is evident that capitalism is entering into the greatest crisis in history, a perfect multi-dimensional storm involving everything from high finance and the environment to political structure. With its limits and contradictions, American democracy was never more than a crude facsimile. But even that it is collapsing under the strain of a growing capitalist breakdown.
As far as the US is concerned, this means that mass repression, cultural reaction, and crude expressions of racism, sexism, and homophobia will all follow. Life in America is changing rapidly, and there is nothing that middle-class radicals, “progressive” journalists, or the washed-up liberals who constitute the Democratic Party’s left wing can do to return it to anything resembling normalcy.
The only force capable of combatting such tendencies is the proletariat. But it can do so not by restoring the old pseudo-democracy but by replacing it with a real democracy in the form of a [Global] (Correction - IC'53) workers’ state. The more repressive and unstable the Trump administration grows, the more the working class must take the lead. Five programmatic elements are absolutely crucial:
-- No to one-man rule.
-- No to mass deportations.
-- No to war.
-- Yes to workers’ solidarity on both sides of the US-Mexican border.
-- Yes to a democratic constituent assembly elected on the basis of strict proportional representation whose task will be to reconstruct America’s broken system of government from the ground up.
The one safe prediction we can make about the upcoming presidential election is that it can only result in a further intensification of the crisis of US democracy.
This is not Marxist boiler-plate in which bourgeois democracy is always bankrupt and capitalism is always in its death throes. This is the real thing. A lot of concerns are weighing on voters’ minds as Election Day nears, the economy, the climate crisis, inflation, and housing prices, to name just a few. But among the most pressing is an across-the-board constitutional breakdown that is rapidly accelerating. For example:
-- The Electoral College, which nearly quadruples the clout of voters in lily-white Wyoming versus those in minority-majority California, is playing an increasingly outsized role. In the first two centuries of the American republic, the EC overturned the popular vote on only three occasions: in 1824, 1876, and 1888. But it has already done so twice since November 2000 and may well do it a third time next month.
-- The Senate is more imbalanced than at any point since 1820.[1] Thanks to equal state representation, it allows the 54 percent of the population that lives in just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty. A majority can be gleaned from senators representing just 17 percent of the country while a filibuster can be gleaned from 41 senators representing as little as eleven.
-- The House is so heavily gerrymandered that Republicans next month may enjoy as much as a 16-seat advantage according to estimates by the Brennan Center for Justice.
-- The Supreme Court is increasingly undemocratic not just in terms of decision making but structure. Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote (i.e. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barret), while four were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas). Given that Clarence Thomas, the oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship will likely continue well into the mid-2030s. If Trump wins a second term, it will continue even longer.
-- Federalism is in shambles. Since January, Texas has seized control of a portion of the US-Mexican border in the town of Eagle Pass, 140 miles west of San Antonio. This is outright insurrection, yet the White House is paralyzed.
-- Racial imbalances are growing. More than 80 percent of racial minorities live in the ten biggest states that are outvoted in the Senate while states that are rural and white tend to benefit most from the Electoral College. The multi-racial urban majority thus finds itself more and more disenfranchised.
-- What makes this even worse is that reform is essentially impossible thanks to the dysfunctional amending clause laid out in Article V, which stipulates that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as a comma in America’s holy of holies. Thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural change, no matter how modest. The US is as frozen as the Celestial Empire on the eve of the 1911 revolution.
The upshot is a perfect impasse. All advanced capitalist states are under growing strain due to the post-2008 “long recession” and a host of problems that go along with it. But since no country is saddled with a constitution that is as ancient, dysfunctional, and all-encompassing as the US version, no one faces a mechanical breakdown of anywhere near the same magnitude. It is the equivalent of a car with a missing headlight, a missing wheel, and a sputtering engine. But even if it leaves Americans stranded by the side of the road, there is nothing they can do because Article V renders them powerless. Even a constitutional convention is a non-starter since Article V stipulates that its decisions are merely recommendations subject to the same two-thirds, three-fourths rule. Wealthy minority interests are using the breakdown to impose an increasingly rightwing agenda. Yet the democratic majority is powerless to respond.
Powerless under the existing system, that is, but not under a new one of its own making.
There is a way out -- not a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, but a constituent assembly along the lines of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917. The difference is crucial. Where one takes place under the Constitution, which describes how it may be called and what it can do, the other takes place over the Constitution since it is a gathering of the constituent elements – “we the people” and all that – who created it in the first place. It is therefore free to operate on the Constitution as a whole, not according to the document’s rules, but according to its own, which is to say those of direct democracy. If the assembly votes to ditch the Second Amendment, then out it goes. If it votes to drop the Constitution in toto and draw up a new plan of government to take its place, then out it goes too.
This is not a constitutional solution, since no such solution exists. Rather, it is a revolutionary solution whose goal is either to create a new state or re-found the existing state on an entirely new basis. Hence, it is one that only the industrial proletariat can implement.
The US thus faces a classic choice between breakdown and revolution, between decay, authoritarianism, and a deepening social crisis on one hand and socialist democracy on the other. The founding fathers have done us the favor of closing off all other escape routes.
As for the individual candidates running in 2024, they are an expression of the political crisis rather than in any sense an answer to it.
Kamala Harris is the candidate of the center-right status quo. While she claims to stand for change, she has made it crystal clear that she will continue White House policies based on war, repression, economic royalism, and inaction in the face of accelerating climate change. She represents the politics of muddling through, of doing whatever it takes to make it from day to day without regard to long-term considerations. When vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz recently suggested that the Electoral College should go, the Harris campaign forced him to recant. Even mentioning the structural crisis was more than Harris could bear.
Donald Trump, by contrast, is the candidate of lower-income voters who are “mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore,” to quote the 1976 movie “Network.” They support him not despite the fact that he is a bull in a china shop, but because of it. In their blind fury, they can think of no solution other than smashing stuff up and are therefore counting on him to do it. His authoritarianism and destructiveness flow from a political structure that is broken, irrational, and increasingly undemocratic.
For what it’s worth, this writer rates Trump’s chances at 41 percent and Harris’s at 39, with a 20-percent chance of January 6-style chaos instead. But regardless of who wins, the great American breakdown will continue unabated.
[1] Frances E. Lee and Bruce L. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10-11.
(This August 5th marked the 129th anniversary of Frederick Engels’ death, who together with Karl Marx founded the modern working class movement. For this occasion we are republishing an article originally printed in recognition of the 150th anniversary of his birth.)
BY TIM WOHLFORTH
… So closely did Marx and Engels collaborate in this work that it is difficult and in many cases impossible to separate out their distinct contributions to Marxist thought.
Engels in particular wrote on questions of philosophy and for this we must pay special tribute at this time. While this in part reflects his special interests in anthropology and science, it was just as much due to Marx’s preoccupation with Capital. Capital, of course, was for Marx a theoretical task of the highest order and as such a real development of Marxist philosophy. For those who look for a ‘‘textbook’’ by Marx on dialectical materialism could well start with Capital. Particularly important among his philosophical writings was Anti-Duhring with its important section Socialism; Utopian and Scientific, Dialectics of Nature, and Feuerbach. Because Engels took up such a sharp fight for materialism and insisted that dialectical logic was a reflection in the mind of the real contradictory movement of material reality, he has come under increasing fire by idealists.
ATTACKS
Their essential argument is to contrast the early Marx who had not yet fully developed his materialist and class outlook with the later writings of Engels. These attacks on Engels’ materialism, which have become popular in current academic ‘‘Marxist’’ circles, actually have their origins in this country with the pragmatists of the 1930s. It was Professor Sydney Hook who wrote in 1936:
“Marx himself never speaks of a NaturDialektik, although he was quite aware that gradual quantitative changes in the fundamental units of physics and chemistry result in qualitative changes. Engels, however, in his Anti-Duhring and in his posthumously published manuscript Dialektik und Natur openly extends the dialectic to natural phenomena. His definition of dialectic, however, indicates that he is unaware of the distinctive character of the dialectic as opposed to the physical concept of ‘change’ and the biological concept of ‘development.’ ‘Dialectic,’ he writes, ‘is nothing more than the science of universal laws of motion and evolution in nature, human society and thought.’” (From Hegel to Marx, Page 75.)
This attempt to pit the later Engels against Marx is of course a blatant fraud. For instance Marx himself writes in 1873 in the preface to the Second Edition of Capital:
“(My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘The Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, and the real world is only the external phenomenal form of ‘The Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”
These attacks on Engels were continued by James Burnham, leader of the petty bourgeois opposition within the Socialist Workers Party in 1940. Burnham wrote of Engels:
“I find about 75 percent of what Engels wrote in these latter fields (He is referring to ‘‘philosophy, logic, natural science and scientific method’’—TW) to be confused or outmoded by subsequent scientific investigation - in either case of little value. It seems to me (and as a Marxist I do not find it astonishing) that in them Engels was a true son of his generation, the generation of Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, of the popularizers of Darwin who thought that by a metaphorical extension of the hypothesis of biological evolution they had discovered the ultimate key to the mysteries of the universe.”
PRAGMATISTS
Trotsky is-then accused of serving up “only a stale re-hash of Engels.”
What these American pragmatists find so reprehensible in Engels is Engels’ insistence that the development of the real world is lawful and that our minds can accurately reflect this development if we can master dialectical thinking. Through dialectics our very forms of thought are developed so as to bring out the real struggle and change in the natural and social world.
The idealism of Hook and Burnham was actually a reflection of a class position of the middle class intellectual, confronted with the rise of fascism and the needs of its own ruling class to prepare for imperialist war. Thus they sharply rebelled against a philosophical stand which exposed the real class nature of society and their responsibility to take a stand on class issues and fight to change the world through the construction of the party. For them the real world was not lawful and thus they could not really effect it. They could thus only accept it by adapting to the needs of those who ran it - the imperialists.
The thinking of Engels was always in sharp contradiction with American pragmatism. It was Engels who said of this country:
“...From good historical reasons the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for making the masses stupid.’’ (Letter to Sorge in 1886.)
American pragmatism was to be in the later period a development of such imbecility.
To Engels the development of dialectics was precisely to make possible revolutionary activity, to prepare for and carry through the socialist revolution. Engels, in his later years, carried on an extensive correspondence to this end with American Marxists. In this way he became thoroughly acquainted with American conditions, the level of the American working class and its historical peculiarities as well as the weaknesses of the American Marxists themselves. It must be remembered that Engels had authored the articles which appeared under Marx’s name in the New York Herald on the German revolution and that he had written extensively on the American Civil War, particularly its military aspects.
It was in this context that Engels took up the fight to turn the early Marxists in America into the actual organizations of the American working class and urged them to take up the fight for a labor party. He wrote:
“The first great step of importance for every country newly entering in the move- ment is always the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party.”
This brought him into collision with a section of the German-American movement about which he stated:
“The Germans have not understood how to use their theory as a lever which could set the American masses in motion; they do not understand the theory themselves for the most part and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic way as something that has to be learned by heart, which then will satisfy all requirements forthwith. To them it is a credo and not a guide to action.”
THEORETICAL
The meaning of Engels’ work and struggle for us today comes out sharply in all this. First, we can see that the first real development of an understanding of the American working class, its theoretical backwardness and its great potential if and only if, the American Marxists learn to penetrate it so as to pit it politically against the capitalists - this understanding came from Engels along with Marx. Thus a perspective for the development of the American working class came out of the international experience and theoretical leadership of the proletariat - and not out of some peculiar American development.
This perspective, this need to struggle for a labor party in the United States and through this struggle for Marxists to penetrate deep into the working class, can only be carried forward through an understanding of Engels’ theoretical work as a whole - in particular his fight for dialectics as a comrade-in-arms of Marx. American pragmatism comes into collision with Engels’ materialist dialectics and as such reinforces the American bourgeoisie making it impossible for American Marxists to penetrate the working class.
It is precisely the pragmatism of the present-day Socialist Workers Party which leads it to adapt to middle class movements, abstain from work in the trade unions, and refuse to fight actively for the labor party as Engels urged. It is not surprising that the SWP makes no mention of the 150th birthday of Engels. To the SWP Engels is a figure but not the leader of a theoretical struggle vital to the construction of the party now.
CP
The Communist Party organ Political Affairs publishes an editorial on Engels’ birthday which does not say a single word about his relationship to the United States and the political and theoretical struggle he waged for a class party here. This is then followed, not by an editorial, but actually a Political Committee Resolution on the 60th birthday of Gus Hall. Engels merits an editorial but Gus gets a resolution (which he no doubt voted for as a member of the Political Committee.)
What is essential today is that we go to school with.Engels and seek to learn from him what the early Marxists in this country turned a deaf ear to, what the pragmatists of the 1930s sought to deny, and what the contemporary revisionists and opportunists treat with disdain as they go about their essentially liberal business.
TURN
We must take a sharp turn towards dialectical materialism as we actually go out into the working class and take up the struggle to defend the working class politically against the new attacks of Nixon, Agnew and the whole imperialist ruling class behind them. The solution to the American question requires above all an international perspective and this at heart is a fight for dialectical materialism.
Resolution on immigration and emigration adopted by the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International on August 23, 1907
The congress declares:
The immigration and emigration of workers are phenomena that are just as inseparable from the essence of capitalism as unemployment, overproduction and workers’ underconsumption. They are often a way of reducing the workers’ participation in the production process and on occasion assume abnormal proportions as a result of political, religious and national persecution.
The congress does not seek a remedy to the potentially impending consequences for the workers from immigration and emigration in any economic or political exclusionary rules, because these are fruitless and reactionary by nature. This is particularly true of a restriction on the movement and the exclusion of foreign nationalities or races.
Instead, the congress declares it to be the duty of organized labor to resist the depression of its living standards that often occurs in the wake of the mass import of unorganized labor. In addition, the congress declares it to be the duty of organized labor to prevent the import and export of strike-breakers. The congress recognizes the difficulties which in many cases fall upon the proletariat in a country that is at a higher stage of capitalist development, as a result of the mass immigration of unorganized workers accustomed to lower living standards and from countries with a predominantly agrarian and agricultural culture, as well as the dangers that arise for it as a result of a specific form of immigration. However, congress does not believe that preventing particular nations or races from immigrating – something that is also reprehensible from the point of view of proletarian solidarity – is a suitable means of fighting these problems. It therefore recommends the following measures:
I. For the country of immigration
1. A ban on the export and import of those workers who have agreed on a contract that deprives them of the free disposal over their labor-power and wages.
2. Statutory protection of workers by shortening the working day, introducing a minimum wage rate, abolishing the sweat system and regulating home working
3. Abolition of all restrictions which prevent certain nationalities or races from staying in a country or which exclude them from the social, political and economic rights of the natives or impede them in exercising those rights. Extensive measures to facilitate naturalization.
4. In so doing, the following principles should generally apply in the trade unions of all countries:
(a) unrestricted access of immigrant workers to the trade unions of all countries
(b) facilitating access by setting reasonable admission fees
(c) the ability to change from the trade union of one country to another for free, upon the fulfilment of all liabilities in the previous union
(d) striving to establish an international trade union cartel, which will make it possible to implement these principles and needs internationally.
5. Support for trade union organizations in those countries from which immigration primarily stems.
II. For the country of origin
1. The liveliest trade union agitation.
2. Education of the workers and the public on the true state of the working conditions in the country of origin.
3. An active agreement of the trade unions with the unions in the country of immigration for the purpose of a common approach towards the matter of immigration and emigration.
4. Since the emigration of labor is often artificially stimulated by railway and steamship companies, by land speculators and other bogus outfits, and by issuing false and scurrilous promises to the workers, the congress demands:
l) The monitoring of the shipping agencies, the emigration bureaus, and potentially legal or administrative measures against them to prevent emigration being abused in the interests of such capitalist enterprises.
III) Reorganization of the transport sector, especially ships; the appointment of inspectors with disciplinary powers, recruited from the ranks of unionized workers in the country of origin and the country of immigration, to oversee regulations; welfare for newly arrived immigrants, so that they do not fall prey to exploitation by the parasites of capital from the outset.
Since the transport of migrants can only be statutorily regulated on an international level, the congress commissions the International Socialist Bureau to develop proposals to reorganize these matters, in which the furnishings and the equipment of ships must be standardized, as well as the minimum amount of airspace for every migrant. Particular emphasis should be placed on individual migrants arranging their passage directly with the company, without the intervention of any intermediate contractor.
These proposals shall be passed on to the party leaderships for the purposes of legislative application and for propaganda.
The existence of class struggle within the movement underscores the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat within the Party. Unchecked, middle-class radicals will take a proletarian movement and drain it of all life, leaving nothing but a husk.
It is not necessary to preach a crude workerism excluding all members of other classes from joining the movement.. However, long experience with middle-class factions rising to a dominant position shows the need for organizational measures that ensure the dominance of the workers
The "United Front" tactic was developed in the context of mass reformist workers parties, which long ago transformed into bourgeois parties. Further, right-moving centrists seek 2 integrate in2 bourgeois politics. Only "Struggle Fronts" of proletarian groups offer a way forward.
This question is not plucked from thin air. For example, the New York docks where Tom carried out much of his political work were overridden with mob activity: https://t.co/ZhUdrAIT6A
The assassination of Tom Henehan is not "ancient history", or a topic reserved for niche historians... In fact, only a rejuvenated Trotskyist movement will be able to disclose the truth behind Toms murder. https://t.co/1fo00T4X2X
We recently made contact with a small group of Chinese Trotskyists who have asked us to republish the following informal essay which highlights some of the material difficulties in Mainland China for the working class and the necessity of socialist revolution. We hope that this humble beginning is the portend of a wider collaboration between the Trotskyists of Asia and the West, aiding the fight for a revolutionary program using the latent potential of social media and the proliferation of online translation programs.
The comrades revealed that they previously tried to collaborate with the ICFI to fight for Trotskyism in China but were met with disappointment:
"From my personal perspective, our theories are completely consistent. Judging from my interactions with the International Committee during these times, the fact is that the International Committee does not care about our actions."
"He defined the struggle of us, Chinese Trotskyists, to defend Marxism against Pabloism as a crazy adventure..."
"From this perspective, the possibility of the establishment of a proletarian party in China has actually been reduced."
Letter:
I. Brief background introduction
On May 20, my family encountered an unexpected change from the outside world: the community staff in my hometown asked my family to move from a rental house with heating to my hometown on the grounds that it was "inconvenient to monitor" - otherwise, my family's minimum living allowance would be revoked.
In order for readers to understand the situation, let me briefly explain the situation of my family: my father suffered from cerebral infarction, and my mother had problems with her lumbar spine due to diabetes due to the burden of family expenses; and my sister suffered from spina bifida and was diagnosed with depression due to the incoordination of her spiritual world. She had a low level of education and had difficulty finding a job; I myself was still studying in college - it can be said that my family could not lose the minimum living allowance, just like the Abrahamic religions could not lose Jerusalem.
Even in such a difficult situation for my family, the community staff still had to achieve their goal by giving a completely impossible choice - to change the cage and drive my family away from the position of minimum living allowance, so that they could let the residents who could please them get this reward.
——Even though my old house is dark and damp, and cannot be repaired due to property rights issues, they still turn a deaf ear to it.
II. The necessity of revolution
This kind of thing is by no means an exception in the mainland. The patronage network formed by bureaucracy has blocked all ways for the proletariat to fight for their own rights, and we can only accept social pressure and constantly suppress our inner desire for a better life.
The purpose of the bureaucrats doing this is to show off their power: this is particularly evident among grassroots bureaucrats. To make a popular analogy, the class monitor will take charge of the class when the head teacher is not there. At this time, he is likely to use his power for personal gain to satisfy his own interests; it is this pleasure of manipulating other people's lives and the need to obtain patronage networks that drive them to govern in this way. This is fundamentally due to the worship of power under the authoritarian system. It takes a lot of space to explain this phenomenon, so the author will not show off his writing skills here; in short, the relative lack of revolutionary enthusiasm of the proletariat in mainland China, the concealment and deliberate deception of true socialism by the bureaucrats, etc., are the fundamental reasons for this phenomenon.
The author has been engaged in writing Trotskyist articles in the mainland before. He was born into the proletariat, so he understands that only under the true revolutionary thought and through the vanguard party to achieve unity with the world proletariat can we fight for a better life for us (emphasis added), so that our children and grandchildren will no longer be tortured by the exploitation and alienation mechanism of capitalism, and can realize their own value in real labor; only in this way can the world not fall into the barbarism that will inevitably lead to the capitalist world war and protect human civilization.
This article is just an essay; it is just a summary of the author's position on the articles he wrote in the past, and it is not a very formal commentary or other genres of articles;
But in short, I hope this article can let you see that the revolutionary voice of the mainland Trotskyists has never been abandoned.
For more writings by the Chinese Trotskyists, please visit:
The overturning of Weinsteins conviction exposes cracks in the orientation of the MeToo movement towards bourgeois justice and the prosecutorial powers of the state. Sexual violence is rooted in the class nature of society. Only the workers can offer a solution 2 social problems.
The fight for the rights of women is a class question that can only be solved by means of class struggle. Workers courts could be convened to judge ALL of the evidence against accused perpetrators such as Weinstein beyond the inequities in the capitalist legal system.
The task before the working class is to overthrow the labor bureaucracy by building rank and file committees as alternatives to the labor fakers. These committees must struggle to unite all workers internationally.
We have been made aware of an interesting exploration of the possibilities of international trade unionism in a polemic written against the ICFI from 2020:
"It is necessary to highlight, in this connection, that it is only to the degree that our Party exerts its influence over all organizations of the working class, including trade unions, that the narrow, nationalist perspective upon which these bodies have been hitherto organized, and with which the current union bureaucracies in particular continue to disorient the rank-and-file, will be transcended. This can only be achieved by directly introducing to the rank-and-file slogans to counter the nationalist orientation of traditional trade unionism, particularly within those industries in which the internationalization of production reaches its most advanced organization. (When the UAW bureaucrats attempt to impose wage freezes under the pretext of averting auto factory shutdowns in the United States, we advance among all of the rank-and-file the slogan “sliding scale of internationally indexed wages” to not only undermine the effort to maintain US and Mexican workers in competition against each other, but also build the basis for new organizational forms through common struggle.) ..."
"The more contemporary political struggles within industrial trade unions, which are specific forms of class struggle, must be understood in the context of the expanded accumulation of constant capital (which increasingly replaces living labor while producing a surplus of capital requiring export for valorization), the direct pressure exerted by imperialist capital endowed with ever greater mobility and capacity to “offshore” production, the conscious policy of the ruling class to politically coopt critical layers of organized workers in strategic industries that remain within national borders, etc. These forces magnify all of the conservative social and political elements inherent within industrial unions organized on the basis of the nation state to the point of rendering their politics reactionary.
However, those that see this as “proof” that workers’ unions in general are no longer arenas of revolutionary struggle, that they can offer nothing progressive to workers, etc., and thus elevate the assertion that revolutionary tactics are defined by whether or not they are conducted within or outside a given structure (trade union) to that of a “principle,” not only fail to see that the real process underway is one in which the material basis for this old form of the workers’ mass organizations has been eroded by economic development itself, but also, and this is the critical point, that this process itself contains within it the very solution to the problem.
Just as capitalist production can no longer be conceived within the narrow bounds of the nation state, the mass organizations of the working class, contemporary trade unions, must also transcend these limits both in terms of organizational structure and the slogans revolutionaries raise within them to politically educate the rank-and-file. ..."
"As such, the nationalist orientation and structure of contemporary workers’ organizations forms the outer limit of their politics. The progressive transcending of these limits requires the conscious political intervention of revolutionaries directing the rank-and-file towards overcoming the narrow confines of nationalism. It is worth noting, in this connection, that the strategists of imperialism, who have on more than one occasion proven themselves more “dialectical” than revolutionaries, have already attempted to benefit from this tendency by dispatching their subalterns from within the union bureaucracies throughout the new centers of industrialization in developing economies. Indeed, state-sponsored diplomatic missions from imperialist countries abroad now regularly include reactionary union leaders.
It should be clear, as such, that the new “trade unions” (I am forced to use this term as language, so far as I am aware, has not caught up with the material forces propelling this phenomenon) will (re)develop or organize on an international basis. This is why transitional slogans like “sliding scale of wages” must be modified to include the international indexation of wages as a means of highlighting the common class interests of workers in imperialist and low wage peripheral countries pitted against each other."
While we would be critical of certain points, such as orienting to "reform" movements in the unions which are often the creations of a faction of the bureaucracy, we recommend a read:
"Every revolutionary party finds its chief support in the younger generation of the rising class. Political decay expresses itself in a loss of ability to attract the youth under one’s banner. The parties of bourgeois democracy, in withdrawing one after another from the scene, are compelled to turn over the young either to revolution or fascism. Bolshevism when underground was always a party of young workers. The Mensheviks relied upon the more respectable skilled upper stratum of the working class, always prided themselves on it, and looked down upon the Bolsheviks. Subsequent events harshly showed them their mistake. At the decisive moment the youth carried with them the more mature stratum and even the old folks."
(We are reintroducing here the WL's 1988 election platform as an example of the Orthodox Trotskyism of the ICFI before it began losing its bearings towards the turn of the century due to the retreats of the working class in the 1990s. Notable are its approach to the trade unions - based then, as now, on an understanding of the implications of globalization [showing that such an understanding is not incompatible with the understanding that the unions remain workers organizations, albeit degenerated] and a critique of national trade unionism rather than a total writing-off of the trade unions, its call for wage equality with regards to women and minority workers, its defense of the right to self-determination for Puerto Rico, as well as the call for Workers' Defense Committees - a long forgotten call.)
Workers of the World, Unite! Build a Labor Party! For a Workers’ Government and Socialist Policies
The Workers League calls on all workers, unemployed and young people to support the campaign of our candidates in the 1988 presidential elections. Ed Winn, a trade union militant for 22 years and a now-retired member of the Transport Workers Union, is the Workers League candidate for president. Barry Porster, the labor editor of the Bulletin newspaper, is our candidate for vice president.
They are the only candidates telling the truth to the working class: that none of the life-and-death problems confronting working people can be solved without a bitter struggle against the capitalist system.
All the social miseries that afflict modern society—mass unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, homelessness, illiteracy, drug addiction, war—are, in the final analysis, the product of capitalism. The most basic human needs of millions of workers in the United States and all over the world are brutally sacrificed on the altar of corporate profits.
The capitalists represent only a negligible proportion of the population. But by means of their ownership of the means of production, they hold society in an iron-like grip. For all the democratic trappings, what exists in the United States is government of big business, for big business and by big business.
The election process itself is little more than window dressing behind which the ruling class decides which of the two parties and which of its candidates will look after the interests of capitalism.
The Republicans and Democrats serve the same capitalist masters. Regardless of which party wins the November elections, and regardless of whether the next president’s name is Bush, Dukakis, Gore or Jackson, the antilabor rampage will continue. We warn all workers in advance that should the Democrats win the election, they will defend the interests of big business no less ruthlessly than the Reagan administration.
The future of the working class depends not upon the outcome of elections, but upon the mobilization of its immense social power in a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system.
To bring this vital message to the working class, the Workers League is intervening in the 1988 elections. We are fighting to place Ed Winn and Barry Porster on the ballot in as many states as possible in order to present to millions of workers and youth a revolutionary socialist program to overcome the conditions of mass unemployment and poverty and the threat of imperialist war created by the capitalist crisis.
The program of the Workers League is aimed not at reforming the bankrupt profit system, but at its overthrow. Its purpose is not to change one set of capitalist politicians for another, but to bring the working class to power in order to expropriate the capitalists and carry out the socialist reconstruction of society.
The Workers League is raising three fundamental tasks before the working class:
1. The forging of the international unity of workers of all countries in a common struggle against capitalism.
We denounce the chauvinist platform of economic nationalism which, with the full support of the trade union bureaucracy, seeks to pit American workers against their class brothers all over the world. Capitalism is a world economic system and the workers of the United States are part of the international working class. In every country, workers confront multinational corporations which produce on a global scale and shift production from one country to another in search of the highest profits. These corporations cannot be fought successfully simply on a national basis. In order to defeat the capitalists, who operate on a global scale, the American workers must adopt an international revolutionary strategy and unite their struggles with those of their class brothers in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. Regardless of their country, language, religion or skin color, workers share the same concerns and confront the same capitalist enemy.
2. The building of an independent Labor Party, based on the unions, to fight for a workers’ government.
The Workers League calls on all workers to demand that the AFL-CIO repudiate its worthless alliance with the Democratic Party and form a genuine workers’ party that will fight for workers’ power. We call for the convocation of a Congress of Labor to found a labor party, bringing together all the diverse battles of the working class into one unified political struggle against the capitalist system, and to establish a workers’ government.
3. The implementation of a socialist program to abolish the profit system and replace it with a rationally planned socialist economy.
The anarchy of private ownership of production and the division of the world into rival capitalist nationstates is the cause of the present social crisis. The precondition for the realization of full employment with decent pay, the elimination of poverty and all the social degradation it produces, and the securing of the democratic rights of all working people is the nationalization of basic industry and the banks under workers’ control, with no compensation to the capitalists.
The World Crisis
The program advanced by the Workers League is the only viable alternative to the economic insanity of the crisis-ridden capitalist system. The worldwide financial crash, which began on Wall Street on October 19, 1987, was a warning signal of an impending economic catastrophe, on the scale of the Great Depression, which threatens indescribable suffering for millions of workers and their families.
The policies of the next capitalist administration, whether Democratic or Republican, will be dictated by this crisis, not by the worthless promises of the 1988 election campaign. There is a bipartisan consensus that what remains of social-welfare programs must be destroyed and that the living standards of the working class must be slashed still further. New military aggression will be launched in Central America, the Middle East and elsewhere. This is the reality behind the hollow rhetoric and the massive advertising blitz of the capitalist candidates.
Capitalism is confronted with an insoluble crisis which arises out of the essential contradictions of the profit system. While production is social, involving the coordinated labor of millions of workers, not just in one country but internationally, the means of production—the raw materials, factories, mines and mills—are the private property of a handful of capitalist owners. Production is totally subordinated to the profit drive of the capitalists.
Moreover, while capitalism has created an unprecedented integration of the world market and a world economy, the capitalist world remains divided into separate and competing nation-states. Since the advent of imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century, the contradiction between the development of an integrated world economy and the nation-state has exploded in the bloody form of two world wars, from 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945, in which tens of millions of people were slaughtered. In both these wars, the major capitalist powers of the day, the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Japan, were fighting for domination of the world market.
More than 40 years after the end of World War II, the renewed growth of trade rivalries, particularly between the United States and Japan, demonstrates that the political stage is being set for a new round of explosive conflicts. All of the economic measures and institutions sponsored by the US after World War II to overcome interimperialist antagonisms and manage a renewed expansion of trade and investment, the Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, are now powerless to halt the slide into trade war and depression.
In short, the productive forces—the means of production and labor itself—are in violent conflict with the existing social relations—capitalist private ownership and the nation-state system. There is no solution to this crisis outside of the destruction of the whole capitalist nation-state system and the creation of a united, worldwide socialist republic, based on the harmonious and integrated development of the resources of the entire planet.
At the center of this global crisis is the devastating decay in the world position of US imperialism. From having once exercised undisputed hegemony over the world market, it has become the world’s biggest debtor. The US share of world markets has fallen from 50 percent at the end of World War II to only 23 percent today. In 1945, Detroit produced 80 percent of the world’s automobiles. By 1965, this fell to 65 percent and by 1980, to only 20 percent.
This historic decline underlies the vicious assault on the living conditions and past social conquests of the working class. The vast economic reserves once held by American capitalism, which made the United States the richest country on the earth, have been wiped out. The resources which Roosevelt could call upon even in the 1930s and which made his “New Deal” possible no longer exist. That is why not one of the capitalist candidates is able to advance a serious program of social reform.
Upon coming to office in the midst of the Depression in 1933, Roosevelt reassured his frightened capitalist backers that he would avert the threat of socialist revolution by making America a nation of home-owners. It is a measure of the transformed economic position of American capitalism that the ruling class is today unable to provide any solution to the spreading plague of homelessness.
The Role of the Multinational
The increasing integration of global capitalist production, dominated by giant multinational corporations, has sharply intensified capitalism’s contradictions. These multinationals carry out operations on every continent, linking together workers from the United States to South Korea, from West Germany to Brazil, in a unified process of production. The tremendous growth of multinationals since the end of World War II, but especially during the last 20 years, demonstrates the existence of all the objective prerequisites for the creation of the scientific worldwide planning upon which a socialist society would be based. Under capitalism, however, the operation of . multinationals simply produces a horrific intensification of the exploitation of the world’s workers.
In every country, wages are directly influenced by conditions which exist globally. In the US, workers are told they must accept drastic cuts in wages if they want to keep their plant from shutting down. Workers know that if they resist these demands, the employer can close the factory and start up its operations again in Singapore or Hong Kong.
The starvation wages and savage exploitation which imperialism has long inflicted upon the masses of workers in Latin America, Africa and Asia are being brought home against the American working class. This is what the corporate bosses mean when they clamor for an end to the “wages gap” between American workers and their brutally oppressed class brothers in South Korea and Taiwan.
Capitalism: A Doomed Social System
The growth of global production has gone hand in hand with a spectacular development of technology. Virtually every aspect of social production is undergoing a revolutionary transformation as a result of the advances in computer technology. But far from serving as a boon to mankind, these innovations have meant the systematic replacement of workers by robots and the most efficient forms of slave-driving against those still left with a job. At the same time, the military monopolizes the latest scientific advances to perfect weapons of mass destruction. For all the developments in science—which, under a rational social order, would promise an almost unimaginable rise in the living standards of all mankind—capitalism cannot put a roof over the heads of millions of homeless nor provide food for the tens of millions of starving people around the globe.
This is because technology remains the private property of a handful of billionaires who use it solely to pursue greater and greater amounts of profit. Organized on the basis of socialist property relations and a planned economy, this same technology could be employed to develop the productive forces, coordinate international production, reduce the working day, wipe out hunger and poverty and vastly improve the living standards of the workers of the world.
But capitalism has long exhausted its capacity for the historically progressive development of the world’s productive forces upon which all humanity depends for its survival and welfare. Today, this system produces social suffering on an unprecedented scale. One chilling statistic provides the most damning indictment of capitalism: it is estimated that 40,000 of the world’s children die each day of starvation! Thus, for every day of its continued existence, capitalism rips a bloody piece of flesh out of mankind’s future.
From the standpoint of man’s entire social history, this means that capitalism is a doomed social order. While the ruling class likes to portray the dog-eat-dog world of “free enterprise” as the final and ultimate triumph of civilization, capitalism is no more “eternal” than the ancient slave and medieval feudal systems which preceded it. It must be replaced by a higher system, socialism. Private ownership of the means of production and the division of the world into hostile nation-states must give way to the abolition of class society and the scientific planning of world production based on the satisfaction of human needs.
The transition from capitalism to socialism is an inevitable step in mankind’s evolution. This historically necessary transformation, however, can only take place through the conscious struggle of the working class to overthrow the dictatorship of the capitalists and establish its own dictatorship of the proletariat as the transition to a classless and truly humane society: without exploitation, oppression and want.
The Social Crisis in America
The 1988 elections are being held under the shadow of a devastating social crisis, although one would never guess it by listening to the complacent pronouncements of the capitalist candidates.
Three million people are homeless, including half a million children. In industrial centers like Detroit and Pittsburgh, in the coal fields of West Virginia and Kentucky, hundreds of thousands of autoworkers, steel workers and miners have been thrown into the streets, lining up at soup kitchens, working for minimum wage or less.
Millions of workers and their families have lost basic medical benefits, their cars and their homes, along with their jobs. Infant mortality rates in major cities are double those in Europe, Canada and Japan. Age-old killer diseases, such as tuberculosis, once again claim their victims among the hungry and the homeless.
Since 1981, the Reagan administration and the Democratic Congress have virtually wiped out social programs introduced over the last 50 years. In the face of rising homelessness and hunger, funding for subsidized housing has been slashed by 79 percent, training and employment programs by 70 percent, the Work Incentive Program by 71 percent and compensatory education programs for poor children by 12 percent.
Twenty years after the nationwide ghetto rebellions, the meager concessions granted in the “war on poverty” have been revoked and conditions of unemployment and poverty are worse than those which sparked these uprisings. In Detroit, for example, unemployment has risen from 7.2 percent in 1970 to 23.2 percent today and the city’s poverty rate has tripled since 1967, from 14.9 percent to 42.8 percent.
The worst conditions face the youth. In cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, young people are robbed of their future by mass unemployment, cuts in education, police killings and rampant drugs. The only alternative offered to them by capitalism is joining the army to be sent off to die defending the overseas interests of multinationals like Citibank and General Motors.
Through its vicious immigration laws, the bourgeoisie has turned millions of workers—forced to flee from their own countries by US-backed tyrants and starvation imposed by the Wall Street banks—into fugitives and pariahs, without recourse against the abuse of sweatshop bosses, the police and slum landlords.
At one pole of society, for the working class, there is poverty, hunger and homelessness; at the other pole, for the handful of ruling class multimillionaires and the privileged layers of the middle class, the piling up of obscene wealth through speculation and stock swindles.
Together with the destruction of conditions of life for the working class, the capitalists and their government have launched an assault on basic democratic rights. Police violence is on the rise. Racism and bigotry are encouraged by the Reagan administration and the Democratic politicians, while the gains of the civil rights movement are systematically attacked. The Supreme Court builds up the police powers of the state, while handing down one antilabor ruling after another. With their enthusiastic support of the death penalty, the Supreme Court justices have become the hangmen of the nation.
Trade unions under attack
The spearhead of this big business assault on the working class has been an unprecedented wave of unionbusting. The capitalists have revived the class war methods of scab-herding, police and gun-thug violence and legal frame-ups.
As the 1988 election campaign began, four union coal miners involved in the 1984-85 strike against A.T. Massey in Kentucky—Donnie and David Thornsbury, Arnold Heightland and James Darryl Smith—were framed up and sentenced to rot in jail for 35-45 years, while a fifth UMWA member, Paul Smith, faces a possible death sentence. Without a shred of evidence, the federal government railroaded these miners on false charges of shooting a scab during the bitter Massey strike. This case marks the return of the ruling class to the type of legal lynchings which were employed against the Haymarket martyrs, Joe Hill, and Sacco and Vanzetti. It is a stark warning of what the entire working class will face, no matter which capitalist party wins the elections in November.
During the past decade, the membership of the trade unions has declined drastically. The United Auto Workers has lost 300,000 jobs in the auto industry, and another 200,000 are slated for elimination within the next two years. The membership of the United Steelworkers has been cut in half. In the Pittsburgh area alone, 250,000 workers have lost their jobs. As for the United Mine Workers, the number of dues-paying members has declined from 160,000 in 1977 to only 73,000 today.
Since the mass firings of PATCO workers, who were completely abandoned by the AFL-CIO bureaucrats, unionbusting has become the national pastime of every corporation. Methods not seen in the United States since the 1930s have become commonplace. The firing of strikers and their replacement by scabs, a practice virtually unknown during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, became an everyday occurrence in the 1980s.
While the AFL-CIO bureaucrats pretend that the attack on the unions is simply the result of Reagan’s policies, the fact of the matter is that unionbusting is, like all the other attacks on the working class, a bipartisan enterprise. Democratic mayors and governors have participated no less enthusiastically than their Republican counterparts. In Arizona, Democratic governor (and future presidential candidate) Bruce Babbitt in 1983-84 called out the National Guard and state police to smash the strike and break the unions of the Phelps Dodge copper miners. In Minnesota, the strike of Hormel meat packers was broken by Democratic Governor Rudy Perpich, who sent 1,000 National Guardsmen to escort scabs into the plant. The list of big-city Democratic mayors who have used police to assist corporate strikebreaking includes Detroit’s Coleman Young, Chicago’s Harold Washington, Philadelphia’s Wilson Goode and New York’s Edward Koch.
The determination of the ruling class to render the trade unions incapable of resisting the attacks of big business is exemplified by the recent Supreme Court decision to deny food stamps to strikers. As Supreme Court Justice Byron White, who owes his seat to John F. Kennedy, declared in his opinion for the majority: “Denying such benefits makes it harder for strikers to maintain themselves and their families during the strike and exerts pressure on them to abandon their union.”
Workers of the world, unite
In the face of this crisis, the only road open to the working class is the revolutionary road fought for by the Workers League: to unite American workers with their class brothers internationally in the struggle for socialism. The days when workers could conduct the struggle against the bosses as if it were a purely national affair are gone forever. The very fact that a single commodity is often the product of the combined labor of workers in different countries demonstrates the objective unity of the international working class in the process of world capitalist production.
But this objective unity must find its conscious expression in the development of a new revolutionary strategy for the labor movement. Plant closings, wagecutting and unionbusting cannot be fought successfully on a merely national, trade union basis.
The working class cannot allow the bourgeoisie and its agents in the labor bureaucracy to pit workers in one country against another. The struggle against the multinational corporations requires that the American working class systematically organize the scope of its struggles beyond the national borders and coordinate its actions, industrial and political, with those of its class brothers in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, in a common struggle for socialism and against the capitalist system.
This is why the Workers League brings to the labor movement in the United States the strategy of world socialist revolution.
This program can only be advanced through an uncompromising struggle to expel the bureaucratic traitors from the unions. Pathetically illustrating the truth of the well-known adage that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” the AFL-CIO bureaucrats seek to hide their political nakedness by wrapping themselves in the American flag.
The only policy they put forward is trade war and protectionism. They try to foist the blame onto the workers of Japan, South Korea and other countries for the loss of “American jobs,” while opposing any action against plant shutdowns and telling workers to accept overtime, while their laid-off union brothers are in the street.
While the AFL-CIO bureaucrats frequently resort to condescending racist gibes about cheap labor in Asia and Latin America, they say nothing about the fact that low wage levels are due, in no small part, to the support which the AFL-CIO has provided to the CIA in creating and maintaining brutal anti-working class regimes in such countries as South Korea, Taiwan and El Salvador.
The bureaucrats’ policy is based on defending not the interests of the workers, but rather the interests of the American capitalists against their foreign rivals. Their hatred for foreign workers is inseparable from their abandonment of every struggle in defense of workers at home. Concessions, wage-cutting and the wiping out of millions of jobs are all accepted as sacrifices required to make American capitalists competitive.
Their hysterical appeals for protectionist legislation exemplify the completely backward nature of their nationalist program. The integration of the world economy is the inevitable outcome of the development of the productive forces; and the attempt to establish the sovereignty of an insulated American “national” economy by encircling its borders with the barbed wire of import quotas and protectionist tariffs is a reactionary delusion.
Cutting American workers off from their class brothers all over the world, the economic nationalism of the bureaucracy blocks all forms of international trade union solidarity. Already international unions like the UAW, which once united workers from the United States and Canada, have fractured along national lines, with the Canadian autoworkers seceding and forming the CAW.
Moreover, because this policy legitimizes and encourages the most provincial and narrow-minded approach to the problems confronting workers, its disastrous results are felt at every level of the labor movement. It pits union against union, workers at one company against workers at another, and within the same company, workers in different regions, plants or even departments against each other. The logic of the bureaucracy’s policy is the complete atomization of the working class, and an end to trade unions as organizations which unite workers for a common struggle against the employers.
The essential content of the pro-capitalist and nationalist policies pursued by the AFL-CIO bureaucrats is corporatism: the complete subordination of the unions to the interests of finance capital. The AFL-CIO does not even maintain the pretense of trade union independence from corporate management. The bureaucrats have abandoned every basic principle of trade unionism. They have traded guaranteed wage increases for profit sharing in order to identify the interests of the workers with those of their exploiters. They have joined countless labor-management committees from the shop floor on up to the corporate boards of directors, acting as assistant foremen and company police against the workers.
Drive the bureaucracy out of the unions
The policies of the Workers League and that of the AFL-CIO bureaucrats represent polar opposites. We stand for the program of world socialist revolution to liberate the working class from capitalist exploitation. The bureaucrats stand for the defense of the profit system, upon which their own fat salaries, expense accounts and ill-gotten privileges are based. Between these two lines no reconciliation is possible.
The bureaucrats tell workers that they must bow before the antilabor laws, court injunctions and police repression of the capitalist state. In every major union battle—from PATCO, to Phelps Dodge, to Hormel to the Massey miners—the bureaucracy has helped put a legal straitjacket on the unions. This cringing before the capitalist state has reached the point where the UMWA bureaucracy led by President Richard Trumka refuses to lift a finger against the frame-up of the Massey miners.
The Workers League campaign fights for the independence of the trade unions from the capitalist state. Our candidates call for the full force of the union movement to be brought forward in struggle against this state and its antilabor repression, frame-ups and unionbusting laws.
The bureaucracy not only accepts the capitalists’ right to shut down plants and lay off millions, it collaborates to ensure the orderly closure of the factories and to sabotage the resistance of workers.
The Workers League calls on the rank and file to resist plant shutdowns by reviving the revolutionary class struggle methods employed by workers in the 1930s, when they met the attacks of the bosses with sit-down strikes and factory occupations. The revival of militant forms of industrial struggle is a vital part of the struggle to realize the revolutionary program fought for by the Workers League.
For decades, these bureaucrats have ranted and raved against socialism and communism, responding to every demand by the rank and file for militant action with ferocious red-baiting. They are no different from the company-union thugs and gangsters employed to fight the CIO in the 1930s. Their anticommunism, together with their national-chauvinist orientation, brings the AFL-CIO bureaucracy very close politically to the most right-wing sections of the capitalist class, and even to fascist elements. In the event of imperialist war, the trade union bureaucrats who today shout for protectionism will become recruiting sergeants for the US war machine.
The gulf between these bureaucrats and the rank and file has reached the point of an explosion. While over the past 10 years, millions of workers have lost their jobs, homes and their families, it is safe to say that the bureaucrats have lost nothing. All of them, after abandoning the sinking ships of closed plants and broken unions, have found comfortable jobs in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, or in corporate management itself.
To turn the unions into fighting organizations of the working class requires a rebellion by the rank and file against the pro-capitalist bureaucrats. The Workers League campaign is directed toward mobilizing the rank and file to drive the company agents in the AFL-CIO bureaucracy out of the unions, which means building the new revolutionary leadership which the working class requires.
Build a Labor Party
In the 1988 elections, the trade union bureaucracy is once again preparing to pour tens of millions of dollars in workers’ dues into the coffers of whichever antilabor candidate is selected at the Democratic convention in July. The Democratic Party is a capitalist party; it represents the same class interests as Reagan and the Republicans. The bureaucracy’s claim that the election of a Democrat in November will reverse the attacks suffered by the labor movement over the last seven years is a cynical lie. The closer it has sought to integrate itself into the Democratic Party, the more the bureaucracy has sabotaged the struggles of the working class.
The working class must reject this bankrupt policy. American workers can unite with their fellow workers internationally in a successful struggle against capitalism only by establishing their complete political independence from the American capitalist class and its two political parties, the Democrats and Republicans. This must begin with the labor movement breaking from the Democrats and building an independent Labor Party.
The Workers League demands the building of a Labor Party as a genuine mass working-class party through which the working class can fight for revolutionary socialist policies. The fight to construct a Labor Party is inseparable from the widest possible mobilization of the strength of the working class in mass struggles: strikes and mass picketing, factory occupations, direct resistance to evictions, foreclosures and utility shutoffs.
The Workers League calls for the convening of a Congress of Labor to bring together representatives of the trade union rank and file, the unemployed workers, the youth, retired workers, the unorganized, immigrant and minority workers in a genuinely democratic assembly of the working class.
This Congress must repudiate the pro-capitalist politics of the trade union bureaucracy, establish an independent Labor Party based on a socialist program, and unite all the separate struggles of the working class into a mass movement directed against the capitalist system and the capitalist state, for the establishment of a workers’ government.
The Labor Party must fight for socialist policies which start, not with what the decaying and bankrupt capitalist system can afford, but with what millions of working people need in order to survive. The struggle for these policies is not a question of casting a ballot in November nor lobbying Congress for legislation.
The capitalists and their political servants oppose any and every systematic social reform. They will all say that these demands advanced by our campaign are impractical and unrealizable.
Such arguments deserve only contempt. First, nothing is more impractical than the bureaucracy’s program of class collaboration, which has produced nothing but defeats and suffering for the working class. Moreover, what is realizable or unrealizable is determined only in struggle. Had it always been led by corrupt cowards like Kirkland, Bieber and Presser, the American labor movement would never have won the eight-hour day, let alone built industrial unions. Indeed, even these basic gains are being lost by the treachery of the AFL-CIO misleaders.
Furthermore, if capitalism cannot provide for the basic needs of the masses and satisfy demands which arise from the desperate social crisis which this system has itself created, then this simply proves that it must be replaced.
Our Program
The Workers League candidates call for the building of a Labor Party that will fight to implement the following program:
Nationalize Basic Industry and the Banks!
Millions of jobs have been wiped out over the last 10 years in steel, coal, auto and other sections of basic industry. The capitalists seek consciously to create a permanent army of the unemployed to pit against the unions. The Workers League advances a program to unite the working class and ensure a job for every worker.
The first step which must be taken is the nationalization of key industries, transport and utilities under workers’ control, without compensation to the capitalists. Only in this way can the productive forces be placed at the disposal of society. At the same time, the banking and credit system must be nationalized and amalgamated into a single state bank, democratically controlled by the working class. Moreover, to protect the working population from the manipulations of the Wall Street marauders, we demand the shutdown of the stock exchanges and commodity markets. These revolutionary measures will permit the scientific allocation of resources in the interests of the masses of people.
This does not mean the confiscation of the small depositor’s bank account. On the contrary, the expropriation of the private banks and the concentration of the financial system in the hands of a workers’ government will create the conditions for providing adequate and cheap credit and protecting small depositors from the growing wave of bank failures.
Based on this program of revolutionary nationalizations, we propose as well the following necessary measures to ensure full employment:
Immediately establish a 30-hour workweek at 40 hours pay to create jobs at union wages for every worker and to unite the employed and the unemployed workers. On this basis, all the existing work would be divided equally between all in need of work, with no reduction in weekly wages and benefits.
Launch a massive multibillion dollar program of public works, putting millions to work building new housing, hospitals, schools and transportation systems.
Nationalize privately-owned factories and businesses which have been shut down as a result of the crisis, without compensation for the capitalists, and reopen them as public enterprises, under the direct management of the workers.
Immediate Assistance to the Unemployed!
While fighting for the above program to guarantee a job for every worker, immediate action must be taken to provide relief to the millions of unemployed. The Workers League demands:
Immediate restoration of all social benefits lost by workers after their layoff.
Payment of unemployment benefits at a level necessary to maintain a decent standard of living for laid-off workers and their dependents.
Union coverage for all unemployed workers.
Defend Living Standards!
The real income of workers in the United States has declined steadily for the last 15 years. During the last decade, the average wages of young workers fell 30 percent, and for young black men, the figure was 50 percent. COLA clauses, one of the principal gains of the labor movement in the post-World War II era, have been eliminated from the contracts of the majority of the unions in the US. The economic crisis raises anew the danger of uncontrolled inflation. Workers must not be forced to pay for the crisis of the capitalist system. We propose that the labor movement build a labor party that will fight for the following policies:
Automatic cost-of-living increases for every worker’s wages to fully compensate for every rise in the cost of living.
The end of wage discrimination against female employees and minority workers by guaranteeing “equal pay for equal work.”
The Workers League proposes as well the establishment of independent committees based on the unions to monitor price increases. Workers can place no confidence in the rigged inflation indices of the capitalist government.
Billions for Social Programs!
Social services and programs instituted over the last 50 years are being eliminated by the capitalists. They claim that health care, education and Social Security must be wiped out to pay for their ballooning debts and budget deficits. The working class must demand the restoration of all cuts and a vast expansion of social programs to wipe out hunger, poverty and misery. The Workers League proposes that the following demands be written into the platform of the labor party.
Free and complete medical care for all at state expense. Nationalize the hospitals, drug companies and nursing home chains to take profit out of medical care, which should be viewed as a human right and not as a special privilege available only to those who can afford it. Extend medical care to working-class and low-income areas by training hundreds of thousands of new doctors.
Billions more for education to wipe out illiteracy, construct new schools and hire teachers. Equalize teachers’ pay and school resources in every region of the country and in all school districts. Free higher education for all those who desire it.
Guaranteed Social Security payments to provide a minimum $25,000 a year income to all retired workers, with 30-and-out retirement at full benefits for all. All pension funds must be secured against corporate bankruptcies by providing 100 percent federal insurance.
Establish free and comprehensive day-care facilities for the children of all working-class families.
Against the capitalist politicians who claim that the budget deficit makes such programs impossible, the Workers League proposes the repudiation of the $100 billion-plus annual interest payments to the bankers on the national debt.
Against the capitalists and their lackeys who claim that society cannot afford these elementary necessities, the Workers League calls for the formation of committees of workers, housewives and small farmers to obtain access to all of the business secrets of the banks and corporations. These committees must obtain a precise balance sheet of the real assets of the multinationals and expose the daily under-the-table swindles through which the capitalists rob the people and conceal their wealth, as well as the vast squandering of resources and human labor which they carry out in their relentless pursuit of profit. Those corporations and industries which demonstrate their bankruptcy must be expropriated and run by the workers.
Defend the Unions!
Unionbusting and strikebreaking have reached epidemic proportions. Union membership is the lowest in 40 years and every strike confronts the attacks of the capitalist state. The Workers League demands:
Halt all attacks on the trade unions by nationalizing every company engaged in unionbusting.
Outlaw the hiring of scabs and corporate gun-thugs.
Establish the complete independence of the unions from state control. Repeal all anti-union laws such as Taft-Hartley, Landrum-Griffin, the Taylor Law and the “right-to-work” laws. Abolish the NLRB and all other agencies of capitalist state control over the unions.
Free the framed-up Kentucky coal miners and rehire the PATCO air traffic controllers and all other workers who have lost their jobs due to unionbusting.
To combat the attacks of the state and the betrayals of the bureaucracy, the working class must develop new means of mobilizing the masses.
Organize Factory Committees: Fight the attacks of the employers and the collaboration of the union bureaucrats through the formation of factory committees, elected directly by all the workers in each factory and workplace. These committees must organize the broad masses of unemployed, nonunion workers and youth around themselves in a direct challenge to the capitalists’ control of production. Against the threat of closure, the factory committee will organize the occupation of the factory. The committees must fight to establish workers’ control of the factories, determining all questions of employment, wages, working conditions, etc.
Form Workers’ Defense Committees: Against the armed violence of the capitalist state, the army of hired security thugs, scabs and police, the working class must form its own self-defense groups to protect its picket lines, demonstrations and meetings.
A Future for the Youth!
The conditions facing youth and young workers are the worst for any section of the working class. The labor movement must provide a decent future for the youth through the following program:
Reorganize the education system, under the control of the unions and student committees, to provide youth the high level of education required by the development of modern technology. This should include the establishment of special job training programs open to all youth and paid for by the bosses. This may be supplemented by state-paid job training and apprenticeship programs, also under union control, for youth to learn needed skills and trades.
Provide unemployment benefits that guarantee a decent living standard to all unemployed youth immediately upon finishing school.
Raise the minimum wage to $6.00 an hour, and abolish all two-tier wage and part-time job schemes and other forms of pay discrimination against youth.
Full union rights for young workers, such as the millions who work in the fast-food chains.
Begin large-scale public works programs to build modern recreation centers, with full training facilities in sports and the arts, in all working-class neighborhoods.
A minimum of six weeks paid vacation for all youth.
House the Homeless!
The denial of the right to decent housing to workingclass families has become a life-and-death question for millions of homeless people and has nakedly exposed the complete bankruptcy of capitalism. Against the real estate speculators, rich landlords and the bankers who have created the crisis of homelessness, the working class must fight for:
Nationalization of the real estate monopolies to end speculation and profits in the housing industry which are responsible for soaring rents.
Launching of an emergency program of low cost, high-quality housing construction.
Lowering of all rents so that no working-class family is obliged to pay more than 15 percent of its income for housing.
Immediate suspension of all evictions because of nonpayment of rent. Seize the vacant housing and multiple homes maintained by the real estate monopolies and the millionaires and make it available to provide emergency shelter for the homeless.
Nationalization of basic services such as heat and other utilities to be provided at affordable prices to every working-class home.
Defend Democratic and Civil Rights!
The most basic democratic rights have come into irreconcilable conflict with capitalism and its system of private ownership of the means of production. Political repression, racism and discrimination are all employed by the capitalists in defense of their system. The working class must put forward its own program to defend its rights:
Free all political prisoners, such as the Massey coal miners in Kentucky and Gary Tyler, who remains in jail 13 years after he was framed up in Louisiana on a phony murder charge at the age of 15.
Abolish the death penalty.
Outlaw racial discrimination in employment, housing and education.
The democratic rights of the Native American people must be defended and the treaties which they concluded with capitalist governments renegotiated on terms favorable to them.
Outlaw discrimination based on sex and sexual preference. Defend women’s right to abortion on demand.
Defend Immigrant Workers!
The labor movement must put an end to the horrible conditions faced by immigrant workers, the most exploited section of the working class. All workers must be able to live in whichever country they choose with full citizenship rights. The platform of the labor party must demand:
Repeal of all anti-immigrant legislation. Abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol.
Guarantee of full legal rights, including the right to work, for all undocumented workers.
Abolition of discrimination against workers based on language or country of birth.
Voluntary state-paid instruction in English for all immigrant workers and their families. The time spent by immigrant workers on English-language instruction shall be compensated at the same rate as their normal employment.
Aid Farmers and Small Businessmen!
Through the construction of a labor party, the working class will provide a helping hand to the family farmers and small businessmen who have been driven into bankruptcy in record numbers by capitalism. The Workers League proposes that the platform of the labor party include the cancellation of their debts and the provision of adequate credit and assistance, on reasonable terms. Foreclosures must be immediately halted and those who have lost their farms during the past decade must have their land returned to them.
While as socialists we are convinced of the superiority of large scale industrial and agriculture production as part of a planned economy, socialism does not mean the expropriation of family farms or small businesses, which are threatened with extinction by the parasitic bankers and monopolies.
Oppose Imperialist Plans for War!
A new world war, which would inevitably be fought with nuclear weapons, threatens mankind with the end of civilization. Workers can prevent this holocaust only insofar as they know the real source of the danger that is the greatest threat to man’s survival.
The danger of war arises directly out of the predatory character of the capitalist system. In addition to the danger that the intensifying trade war against its capitalist rivals may at a certain point be converted into a shooting war, American imperialism’s massive military buildup is directed above all against the Soviet Union. Having never reconciled itself to the October 1917 Revolution which overthrew capitalism in Russia, the US ruling class remains determined to reconquer the vast territory of the USSR for the renewal of capitalist exploitation.
Moreover, American imperialism is the worst enemy of the oppressed and exploited people of every country on the planet, providing the material and financial resources required by the most reactionary regimes to maintain their rule. Not a single drop of workers’ blood should be shed to preserve the global interests of Wall Street. The Workers League rejects the concept of “national defense” as a cynical ruse aimed only at duping the workers. The real enemy of the American working class is not the toilers of Central America, the Middle East or the Soviet Union. It is the capitalist class here at home. In the event of a future military conflict involving the United States, we stand for the defeat of US imperialism.
War cannot be stopped through pacifist appeals to the ruling class or fraudulent disarmament deals. The only road to peace is the revolutionary mobilization of the working class to disarm the warmongers, that is, through the overthrow of capitalism.
In furtherance of that aim, the Workers League calls for:
The abolition of the Pentagon, the CIA and all the associated agencies through which the American ruling class defends the interests of imperialism.
Immediate withdrawal of all troops and dismantling of all bases maintained by US imperialism overseas.
Nationalization of the military-industrial complex under workers’ control and the confiscation of its profits. All war industries should be converted to useful production.
Cancellation of the $1 trillion foreign debt owed by the impoverished nations of Latin America, Africa and Asia to the Wall Street banks.
Establishment of a socialist foreign policy based on fraternal relations with the workers and oppressed peoples of the entire planet. Repudiate links with the racist state of Israel which was created in 1948 to defend the interests of US imperialism in the Middle East. Support the struggle of the Palestinian people to regain their homeland through the establishment of a socialist Palestine as part of the struggle for a United Socialist States of the Middle East where Arab and Jewish workers would live together in peace. Support the overthrow of the racist South African state and the establishment of a black workers’ republic of Azania. Support the ouster of the British from the north of Ireland and the establishment of a united socialist republic of Ireland.
Support for the unconditional right to self-determination and independence for Puerto Rico. Immediate freedom for all Puerto Rican nationalists who have been framed up in New York, Hartford, Chicago and other cities and imprisoned because of their political activities.
Defend the gains of the Russian Revolution—the nationalized property and planned economy of the Soviet Union—as well as the deformed workers’ states of Eastern Europe, China, North Korea and Southeast Asia, against imperialism. Full support to the working class of the Soviet Union, Poland, China and the other deformed workers’ states in the struggle to overthrow the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracies through the political revolution.
For a Workers’ Government!
This program can only be realized by the working class taking political power, through a mass revolutionary movement to establish a workers’ government.
The formation of a workers’ government will not be accomplished through the winning of a majority in Congress and electing a worker as president. The capitalist class will never bow to a democratic majority and peacefully hand over power to the working class.
All the institutions of government in the United States at every level, federal, state and local, the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve, the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, are part of an apparatus of state violence whose fundamental task is the defense of the “right” of a handful of capitalists to own the wealth of the country and exploit the working class, the vast majority, for their own profit.
So-called democracy in America is bourgeois democracy: democracy for the capitalist class, democracy for the rich. The elections held by the ruling class every two or four years simply mask the dictatorship of the capitalists over the working class by propagating the illusion among the masses of working people that their votes choose the government and determine its policies. The democratic rights of the working class were not established by the capitalist government, but won in struggle against it.
A workers’ government would abolish the institutions of the capitalist state and establish a new form of state, a workers’ state, based on the democratically elected representatives of the working class, organized in workers’ councils, and defended by a workers’ militia controlled by the trade unions. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule of the vast majority of workers and the suppression of the tiny minority of capitalist exploiters.
For Workers’ Democracy!
The workers’ councils will be elected directly by the workers in the shops, the factories, the mines, the farms and the working-class neighborhoods. Local units will combine into regional bodies and regional into the federal body. As opposed to the millionaires’ talk shop of the present US Congress, these councils will be working bodies which will directly implement the democratic decisions of the working class.
Such a government will replace the present shell game of bourgeois democracy with real representation, democracy and control for and by the working people.
After it abolishes private ownership of basic industry, finance and natural resources, the overriding concern of this workers’ government will be the reorganization of economic life on the basis of a scientific plan in order to increase production and vastly improve the living standards of the people. Decisions on production will be made not by financial and industrial magnates concerned only with their own profits but by the workers’ representatives, basing themselves on the sole criteria of what the people want and need.
The Workers League is not running in the elections to spread any illusions that the burning issues facing the working class will be decided through the ballot box. There is no electoral road to socialism.
The facade of political democracy in America is already being ripped away by the development of the capitalist crisis. The Iran-contra affair revealed how far the preparations for military rule in the United States have already advanced. Lt. Col. Oliver North, the blood brother of the death squad leaders in El Salvador and the Philippines, drafted plans for the suspension of constitutional rights and the declaration of martial law in the United States, in the event of widespread domestic opposition to a war by US imperialism. These plans included the establishment of detention camps for Central American immigrants and other likely political opponents of an imperialist war and emergency legisla-
North’s plans for military rule, which were approved by the White House and the National Security Council, were covered up in the Iran-contra hearings conducted by the Democratic-controlled Congress, and all of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, for definite class reasons, are concealing this issue in the 1988 election. The entire ruling class is aware of the political explosion building up in the United States, and fully supports the preparations to use state violence and paramilitary forces against the working class.
The American capitalists’ support for blood-drenched dictatorships around the world shows the real character of their rule. Faced with a mass revolutionary workers’ movement at home, they will cast off the democratic facade in the US as well and turn to wholesale violence. They will seek to repeat the fascist bloodbaths carried out by their big business counterparts in Italy and Germany in the 1930s, or, more recently, in 1973 Chile.
This is the irrepressible conflict which is building up within the present social crisis of capitalism. Either the workers establish their own government to expropriate the capitalists, or the capitalists will set up a fascist dictatorship to crush and enslave the workers. The workers are the absolute majority of the population and because of their strategic position in industry enjoy enormous power. But the essential prerequisite for victory is a revolutionary leadership, a party, which consciously prepares for it.
Build Revolutionary Leadership!
The crisis facing the working class can only be resolved by building a revolutionary Marxist leadership. Only such a leadership can conduct the political struggle needed to defeat the bureaucracy and establish the political independence of the working class.
We have entered a new period of mass revolutionary struggle by the American and world working class. The campaign of our candidates is part of the struggle to arm this revolutionary movement of the working class with a Marxist program and a new revolutionary leadership, to insure its victory.
We are running in the elections in order to reach the widest possible audience of workers, youth and students, to convince them of the necessity to join the Workers League and become educated as Marxists, conscious fighters for the perspective of world socialist revolution. This entails the most ruthless struggle against all those political forces which operate to hold back the working class and block the development of socialist consciousness.
The Fraud of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition
A key instrument of big business in disorienting the working class in the 1988 elections is the demagogic campaign of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Jackson’s campaign is especially aimed at deceiving the most oppressed layers of the working class, the unemployed, minorities and the youth and keeping them tied to the Democratic Party and capitalism.
Claiming to represent the interests of poor and working people, Jackson is a fervent supporter of capitalism and US imperialism. He is the latest in a long line of the demagogues used by American capitalism throughout its history to divert the working class from the road of independent political struggle and socialism.
The liberation of the working class from capitalist oppression must be achieved by the working class itself. No self-proclaimed capitalist messiah is a substitute for the development of the political self-consciousness of the working class—that is, its clear understanding of its own distinct interests as a class—and the organization of its struggle against capitalism on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.
The Jackson campaign does not represent the development of revolutionary consciousness in the working class, let alone a genuine alternative to capitalism. Behind the preacher’s demagogy is to be found the same bankrupt capitalist program. For all his verbal denunciations of poverty, he does not challenge the capitalist property relations out of which this poverty develops. Indeed, a dispassionate study of Jackson’s program reveals him to be a rather conservative bourgeois politician whose proposals appear timid compared to the far more sweeping reformist agendas of such liberals of yesteryear as Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. Were Jackson to be elected president, he would function no differently than all the other black Democrats—like Andrew Young in Atlanta, Thomas Bradley in Los Angeles, Coleman Young in Detroit, Wilson Goode in Philadelphia, Richard Hatcher in Gary, and the late Harold Washington in Chicago—who, once in office, presided over the continued impoverishment of the working class.
The ruling class desperately requires charlatans like Jackson as a lightning rod to deflect the growing threat of a social explosion and a political break by the working class from the two capitalist parties.
The AFL-CIO bureaucrats use Jackson to cover their most outrageous betrayals and bolster their discredited alliance with the Democratic Party by parading him before mass rallies of workers in every important struggle against plant closures, unionbusting and wagecutting. Such stage-managed media events produce political illusions but not strike victories. A collection of union officials, constituting a veritable “Who’s who” of labor traitors, have become sudden converts to the Rainbow Coalition, attempting to divert workers into harmless protests and prayer sessions.
The real class character of Jackson’s campaign is shown by the way this demagogue can go in a single day from mingling on the picket line with workers fighting unionbusting at International Paper to soliciting the endorsement of ex-candidate Bruce Babbitt, who as Arizona governor was notorious for his use of the National Guard to smash the Phelps Dodge copper miners’ strike. Indeed, the bankruptcy of Jackson’s petty-bourgeois program is exemplified by his opposition to the class struggle and his fervent espousal of class compromise and reconciliation: as if it is possible to reconcile the interests of the billionaire capitalists and the exploited working class! Thus, the Jackson campaign represents not the rebellion of the workers, but the desperate efforts of the ruling class to prevent the growth of a mass revolutionary movement against capitalism.
Whether as the nominee of the Democratic Party or as an “independent” candidate, Jackson is a bourgeois politician who serves the interests of imperialism. Under no conditions will the Workers League lend the slightest support to Jackson. In fact, the political mobilization of the working class to fight for its real interests is inseparable from an irreconcilable struggle to dispel whatever illusions exist among workers in the Jackson campaign and his Rainbow Coalition.
The Counterrevolutionary Role of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party
The Jackson campaign has the support, open or tacit, of all the forces of petty-bourgeois radicalism, Stalinism and revisionism. The Moscow-line Stalinists of the Communist Party USA have decided not to run in the presidential elections for the first time since 1964, in order to clear the way for all-out support to Jackson. At the same time, they have kind words for virtually any capitalist politician who supports Reagan’s Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty with the Soviet bureaucracy and Mikhail Gorbachev, including sections of the Republican Party (Bush and Dole), as well as all the Democrats.
The Communist Party USA has nothing to do with genuine socialism and communism. It is a direct agency of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, which seeks an agreement with US imperialism at the expense of both the Soviet workers and the international working class. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet bureaucracy is directly undermining the foundations of the planned economy, encouraging tendencies towards capitalist restoration, and opening up the Soviet Union to imperialist penetration.
The Stalinists peddle the most dangerous pacifist illusions, telling workers that they must support capitalists who favor “peaceful coexistence” with the Soviet Union. The real import of this policy is to demand that workers maintain peaceful coexistence with the profit system, rather than fighting to overthrow it.
The anti-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party is also moving openly into the camp of the Democratic Party. The presidential campaign of its candidate, Mac Warren, is a blatant fraud; the fact of the matter is that the SWP has been promoting the campaign of Jesse Jackson.
The SWP has dropped all reference to the campaign for a Labor Party, first pioneered by Trotsky and the SWP when it was a Trotskyist party. It presents as the task of the working class, not the struggle for socialism, but the struggle to defend democratic rights, in alliance with a “democratic” section of the capitalist class.
At any rate, the SWP’s claims to defend the democratic rights of the working class is especially cynical, given the fact that the leadership of the organization has been massively penetrated by the FBI and other police-state agencies. During the past decade, the Workers League has published irrefutable documentary evidence of the SWP leadership’s systematic cover-up of police agents in its organization. Moreover, the recent unprecedented decision of the government not to appeal a federal court ruling ordering payment of $264,000 in damages to the SWP for past harassment demonstrates the confidence the ruling class places in this party. It is inconceivable that the American ruling class would pay more than a quarter-million dollars to an organization which it believed was dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. The Workers League warns all workers to maintain an attitude of the maximum suspicion and vigilance toward the activities of this dubious, police-ridden outfit.
The various neo-Stalinist, Maoist and revisionist groups are all trailing in the wake of the Jackson campaign, using it as their vehicle to enter capitalist politics openly and abandon even the pretense of opposition to American imperialism. Not one of them warns the working class that Jackson is a demagogue and his campaign a safety valve for big business.
In program and class orientation, all these tendencies are organizations of the petty bourgeoisie, not the working class. They serve to divert workers and youth looking for a revolutionary alternative to capitalism into the swamp of middle-class radicalism and protest politics. They are defenders of the trade union bureaucracy and apologists for its alliance with the Democratic Party.
The Record of the Workers League
The Workers League was founded in 1966 on the basis of Marxist principles, to continue the struggle waged by Leon Trotsky to defend the heritage of the October Revolution. Though barred from formal affiliation by the reactionary Voorhis Act, the Workers League maintains fraternal relations with the International Committee of the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. In close collaboration with our political co-thinkers in countries all over the world, we fight to unite the working class in a common international struggle against the capitalist system.
The Workers League originated in the struggle for proletarian internationalism inside the Socialist Workers Party, against the betrayal by the SWP of its Trotskyist heritage. The founders of the Workers League were expelled from the SWP for opposing its abandonment of Marxism and the strategy of world socialist revolution.
For more than two decades, the Workers League has fought for revolutionary policies within the working class. We have opposed every form of class collaboration and efforts to subordinate the working class to the political agencies of the bosses. We have insisted on the insolubility of the capitalist crisis, warning that the contradictions of American and world capitalism would lead to a revolutionary explosion in the United States.
The Workers League is the party of irreconcilable revolutionary Marxism, combating all those political tendencies—the trade union bureaucracy, Stalinism and revisionism—which seek to divert the working class from its revolutionary tasks, and thereby serve as political appendages of the capitalist ruling class.
The Candidates of the Workers League
The proletarian character of our campaign is expressed above all in our program, which upholds the historical interests of the working class. It is demonstrated as well in the selection of our candidates, both of whom have a long record of struggle in the workers’ movement.
Ed Winn, 51, is a trade unionist, a member of the Transport Workers Union Local 100, recently retired from his job as a bus mechanic for the New York City Transit Authority, where he worked for 22 years. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, he became active in the civil rights movement and participated in the March on Washington in 1963.
His entire life has been devoted to the struggles of the working class. As a New York City transit worker, he walked the picket lines in the 1966 and 1980 strikes. He served as a union shop steward, and from 1977-81 as an executive board member. During this period he opposed the betrayal of the 1980 strike by the TWU bureaucracy. He joined the Workers League in 1976 and is a member of its central committee. In 1984, Ed Winn was the Workers League’s candidate for president in the party’s first-ever national campaign. He was on the ballot in six industrial states and received 14,363 votes.
Barry Porster, 40, is the labor editor of the Bulletin. Born in Philadelphia, he joined the Workers League while a college student in 1971. He has been on the editorial board of the Bulletin since 1975. He was responsible for coverage of the 1977-78 miners’ strike, and more recently, of the struggles of autoworkers against plant closings and concessions. He is a member of the Workers League Central Committee.
The Workers League campaign calls on all workers and youth to confront the implications of the world economic crisis and the historical decline of American capitalism. It is time to discard illusions and to face reality.
The working class has never won anything through compromise and class collaboration, but only through the most bitter class struggle. Words like “concessions” and “labor-management cooperation” should be banished from the vocabulary of the workers’ movement.
Join the Workers League!
The Workers League appeals to all workers and youth who agree with our program: Join the Workers League and devote your lives to the building of the revolutionary party that will put an end to capitalism and create a socialist society. We make a special appeal to the working class youth to join the Young Socialists, the revolutionary youth movement affiliated with the Workers League.
We urge you to immediately get involved with the work of our election campaign and help put Ed Winn and Barry Porster on the ballot in as many states as possible. Help us form Winn-Porster election committees that will campaign in working-class neighborhoods and at plant gates all over the country for the socialist program of the Workers League.
We call on the most courageous and self-sacrificing workers and youth to fight for the international unity of the working class, the building of a Labor Party, and the mobilization of the working class for a socialist America, as part of the world socialist revolution.
