Some Thoughts about the Coming Struggles

In US history, it is important to remember that the most reactionary forces have been in the ascendancy before major upheavals that have established a new politics and brought about major transformations in society. Marxists understand that as the contradictions within a system ripen, they can no longer be contained by conventional political forms, and ruling classes desperate to extend their profits and power are forced so to speak to take their gloves and their masks off.

This was true in the 1850s, when the Southern slave holders pushed their power in the Democratic Party to the limit to demand the elimination of all checks on slavery and Democratic presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, 'Northern men with Southern principles' as their anti-slavery enemies called them, did their bidding. The Whig party, which contained the majority of anti-slavery politicians and activists became, as CPUSA national chair Sam Webb said recently about the contemporary Democratic party 'an empty shell,' a collection of individuals united only in their opposition to the Democrats.

The immediate effect of the Whig collapse and the slave holders drive to expand slavery in the Western territories was deep alienation and disillusionment among abolitionists and other reformers. Many felt that politics had become a grotesque circus of racists and thieves. But, anti-slavery forces grew stronger as masses responded to the deepening crisis and abolitionists joined with former Whigs and even some anti-slavery Northern Democrats to found the Republican party, a mass party that was a huge advance over the Whigs. Within four years of its establishment, the Republicans gained control of the presidency and Congress on a broad reformist program of which restriction of slavery and repeal of the gains the slaveholders had made were the central issues. Activism, organization, and resistance characterized the Republican Party. Practically, this was centered against the implementation of the Fugitive slave law (1850) the slaveholder campaign to use the Kansas Nebraska Act (1854) to make Kansas a slave state, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857) eliminating all restrictions on slavery and denying citizenship rights even to free Northern Blacks. But Republicans also appealed positively to white farmers and workers with calls for land redistribution, national support for the building of roads and canals, the expansion of public education, and a banking and credit system that would aid domestic manufacturers and small business owners and, it was believed, workers and farmers.

The programs, the activism, and the organization together produced an anti-slavery national political coalition that brought the Republicans to power in 1860, fought and won the civil war rather than appease the slave states, as many establishment figures wanted to do in 1861, and carried forward post Civil war economic policies that made the US the greatest industrial nation in the world and the largest and most powerful Republic in human history by 1900.

This revolutionary transformation, of course was a revolution for industrial capitalism, one that devoured within a generation its abolitionist radical wing and abandoned four million former slaves to a brutal racist dictatorship in the South, which used 'states rights' as its ideological cover. The Republican Party rapidly became the first party of the large corporations – the Trusts as they came to be called – as this transformation was carried forward and abandoned the farmers, workers, and especially former slaves. Marxists should in no way be surprised that a revolution for capitalism developed dialectically deeply anti-democratic forms after it was carried forward in the name of expanding freedom and democracy. By the late 1870s, Civil War slogans of liberty and union were being used to suppress strikes and workers fighting capitalist exploitation were being condemned in Civil War language as partisans of rebellion and treason.

By the 1920s, the triumph of monopoly capitalism at the national level was complete as Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover busted unions, reduced taxes on corporations and the rich, sought to privatize government owned property, and portrayed the United States as a capitalist Utopia where every dollar government helped business make would trickle down to the masses of people, producing as Hoover said in 1928, 'a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.' Before the depression, Hoover and others even said with straight faces that the expansion of stock ownership was proof for the democratization of capitalism.

In the 1920s, as contradictions deepened, a huge rural depression devastated the country, and urban poverty grew alongside the great building boom, the electrification of the cities, and the automobile and new consumer electronics products, right-wing Republican administrations relied on divisions over 'cultural issues,' prohibition particularly, and received indirect aid from fundamentalist ministers who crusaded against Darwinian evolution, and the spread of the 'sin soaked cities' way of life into the countryside.

Many activists, particularly among middle class intellectuals, withdrew from political life in this period and consumed the popular satirical writings of novelist Sinclair Lewis, whose most famous character, the pompous salesman-businessman George F. Babbitt, became a symbol for American civilization through the world. Others consumed the libertarian conservative journalist H.L. Mencken, who saw American political life as a conflict between an upper and a lower 'booboisie,' that is, rich jerks trying to keep what they had and get more at the expense of poor jerks whose highest ideal, when they weren’t hanging out in fundamentalist churches, was to get the wealth of the rich jerks.

This cynicism, some of which is being reborn today, didn’t produce the changes in politics and society that were to characterize the 1930s and 1940s. Instead, a 'new left' represented most significantly by the Communist Party, USA, began to address the most vital questions facing the workers movement, the need to build industrial unions, to develop both a theory and practice to defeat racism both inside the working class and in the larger society, since it was a central weapon of the capitalist class, and to oppose American imperialism. At the same time, new urban labor oriented politicians like Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Wagner in New York, Adolph Sabath in Chicago, John O’Connor in St. Louis and others won elections on platforms to eradicate slums and enact legislation to provide benefits and protection for labor and consumers.

The Great Depression, worse in the US than in most other industrial countries because of the viciously reactionary policies pursued by Harding-Coolidge-Hoover, provided the background for the Communist and left labor led insurgency which directly influenced and was both indirectly aided by and influenced by the New Deal government of Franklin Roosevelt, in which these urban labor oriented officials and politicians, now called 'liberals' rather than progressives, to differentiate them from early 20th century middle class reformers, played a leading role.

Capitalism remained firmly in power, as it had during the Civil War, but, as one radical activist noted, it was a capitalism 'you could live with,' a capitalism with a 'safety net' for the poor and unemployed, federal legislation to protect workers right to organize, social security and other social benefits. Although the center and left which made up the New Deal urban labor-minority coalition differed over long range goals–the liberals seeing labor based reforms as a way to stabilize and humanize capitalism, the Communists and their allies seeing these reforms as stepping stones to an eventual socialist society, both agreed on the necessity for the reforms and on a concentration on the urban working class, along with tenant farmers, sharecroppers, the rural poor—a class based coalition that would overcome the historic divisions between Catholic, Jews and Protestants, urban and rural masses, and begin to address the central division between white and black people used by ruling circles since colonial times to deflect class consciousness and mobilizations.

The results were a qualitative break through for the working class movement. First, Communists joined with other trade unionists to fight for industrial unions and won major victories in mass production industries, particularly auto, steel, electrical appliances, meat-packing and mining. These victories came after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (1935) but before its ratification by an embattled right-wing dominated Supreme Court (1937-1939) and limited acceptance by major corporations, who launched a massive campaign to amend the legislation and restrict its implementation at the state level.

These victories accompanied and made possible the enactment by Congress and ratification by the Supreme Court of Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Minimum Wages, and the Forty Hour week, gains that the Bush administration still seeks to reverse nearly seventy years after their establishment. The working-class upsurge also led the New Deal government, with the support of the left, to actively appoint federal judges who both accepted pro labor social legislation, expanded the scope of civil liberties protections, and later repudiated in legal decisions school segregation and other forms of discrimination before Congress and the President were ready to do so.

Although US capitalist expansion during World War II and its response to the world revolutionary situation that followed the war by supporting counter-revolution everywhere and launching a massive institutionalized Red Scare against the CPUSA and the broad left, these gains, undermined compromised many of these gains and limited their further development, as the post-Civil War Civil Rights legislation and constitutional amendments were also compromised, the institutional gains made in the New Deal era remain a vital force in society.

Today, the forces of the Right appear to have effective control of all three branches of the federal government, as they did in the 1850s and 1920s. As in those times, their policies are both opposed by a majority of people, particularly those in the most advanced sectors of the society, and are clearly leading to disaster, as even many defenders of the existing order understand. The question is how to organize opposition and make opposition effective.

First, the labor movement, both organized and unorganized remains the key to both stimulating and concentrating a mass upsurge. As was true during the 1930s, organizing the unorganized is the most important task and the AFL-CIO, which since the establishment of the Sweeney leadership has devoted more resources to organizing, must intensify organizing drives.

Here the CPUSA’s longtime concept of industrial concentration might be applied to unorganized workers in the most populous 'right to work' states.

With such a commitment to militancy and industrial concentration on key 'right to work' states, Florida, Texas, and North Carolina, among others, which have experienced major industrial development in the last half century, it can be possible to win major organizing struggles and expand greatly the number of unionized private sector workers without the repeal of Taft-Hartley. The CIO won huge victories in the late 1930s through militant struggle before the effective implementation of the NLRB system of labor relations. While this is not the 1930s, or even the 1950s, given the right-wing forces that are in power in Washington, victories can be won by mobilizing communities and pro labor local political forces in such states.

Victories in the next few years in key 'Sunbelt' can also help to defeat the right-wing Republican stranglehold over those states. Electing trade unionists at all levels of government through the country – labor activists committed to using government to advance workers rights and serving as stewards for the whole people should be a central concentration for the CPUSA and all left forces in politics. Fighting to place trade unionists on boards of education for elementary and secondary schools, boards of governors for public college and universities, city councils, state legislatures, the federal Congress, is essential to making left positions on economic and political questions mainstream positions. Such a policy will also make a mass labor party, whether it calls itself that or something else, a real possibility, rather than a paper formation. Such policies will enable us also to challenge 'family values' demagoguery with serious appeals to protect and strengthen working families. Most Americans don’t know that paid parental leave has been established in the majority of developed countries. Most Americans don’t know that there is such a thing as 'family allowances,' a variety of direct subsidies to families that help them cover child rearing costs rather than the farcical tax deductions that exist in the United States.

Most Americans do know that socialized medicine has been established through the developed world, but not here. Few, even the working class majority that supports such programs, sees this as a working families issue. Some Americans know that since the Reagan years, the largest group living in poverty, under US government statistics, are children. In alliance with labor, the broad left can connect these issues not only for urban working people, but for the rural poor, who are often influenced by right-wing Churches who provide them with some sense of community and even charity.

The administration’s war policy can only intensify. Here, the CPUSA and a labor left can educate both itself and the broad masses that the conquest and occupation of Iraq and possibly Iran in the near future is about establishing what is essentially a colonial military force to plunder the world’s most important natural resource, oil, and increase the profits and power of transnational corporations. These corporation and the government which is of, by, and fore them are committed to exporting more and more good jobs abroad and burying the American people in an ocean of state and consumer debt that must inevitably lead to a huge decline in the living standards of the great majority of people, not just the bottom 20% of income earners in the U.S., who have experienced such a decline since the Reagan years, even though it has been offset to some extent by imported goods from global sweatshop industries.

Here we can come forward with an alternative to an imperialism that leads to endless warfare and militarization, one that uses the military industrial complex to raise corporate profits, the debt to provide interest payments to domestic and foreign capitalists and reduce funding for social services that benefit the people. We can do this through the peace coalitions by strengthening their relationship to and alliance with labor and in the process making trade unionists more committed to the strengthening of the peace movement as necessary for labor. And we can create national peace organizations that will go well beyond the present national coalitions and their divisions.

Organization, activism, resistance to the forces of reaction which are incapable of change. The articulation of a positive program to appeal to our working class majority that will lead it to support the mass organizations and parties that will fight to implement change. This is what has led to far-reaching victories in what appeared to be a context of defeat and despair in the past. This is what can and must lead to victories in the near future.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.



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