Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
... the composition of the politically guiding vanguard of every class, the
proletariat included, also depends both on the position of this class and
on the principal form of its struggle. Larin complains, for example, that
young workers predominate in our Party, that we have few married
workers, and that they leave the Party. This complaint of a Russian
opportunist reminds me of a passage in one of Engels’ works . . .
Retorting to some fatuous bourgeois professor, a German Cadet, Engels
wrote: ’Is it not natural that youth should predominate in our Party, the
revolutionary Party? We are a party of innovators, and it is always the
youth that most eagerly follows the innovators. We are a party that is
waging self-sacrificing struggle against the old rottenness, and youth is
always the first to undertake a self-sacrificing struggle.’ No, let us leave it
to the Cadets to collect the ’tired’ old men of thirty, revolutionaries who
have ’grown wise’, and renegades from Social-Democracy (Communism).
We shall always be a part of the youth of the advanced class. – V. I.
Lenin, written at age 36
The most basic truth that all revolutionaries must grasp, the starting
point for our action, is the fact that the principal contradiction in the
world today is between the oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa, and
Latin America and the imperialists headed by U.S. imperialism.
What distinguishes Marxists from pseudo-Marxists is the question of
support for the national liberation struggles of oppressed peoples,
and for the struggle of the working class to achieve leadership within
those liberation movements. Within the U.S. this means support for
the third world liberation struggles, headed by the Black people’s
movement, and for the leading role of Black and other third world
workers.
Two, equally dangerous, errors are committed by opposing
tendencies within the revolutionary anti-imperialist movement in
the mother country. The first is to deny altogether the colonial
oppression of Black and other oppressed peoples in this country,
reducing their struggles to a mere part of the struggles of the
working class, whose present consciousness and level of struggle is
far lower than that of the great majority of the oppressed peoples. In
practice this means selling out the Third World Liberation
movements. The opposite error is to recognize only the colonial
nature of the oppression of Third World peoples in this country, to
fail to understand fully class division within the oppressed nations
and the dual nature of the oppression of the working class of these
internal colonies, and, therefore, to fail to support the fight for
working class leadership within the liberation movements. In
practice this tendency also means selling out the peoples of the
internal colonies by allowing the bourgeois forces within the
liberation movement – who are bolstered by their ties with the
imperialist ruling class – to usurp the leadership of the movement.
For revolutionaries in the mother country the crucial question is:
How can we build the greatest possible support, within the mother
country, for the third world liberation struggles, inside and outside
the United States, and how can we help prevent the co-optation or
reversal of the revolutionary development of these movements? We
cannot allow ourselves to be reduced to mere spectators, however
enthusiastic, of the third world liberation struggles. But, on the other
hand, we cannot allow our subjective desire to personally support
these struggles to prevent us from building a movement for mass
support. We believe that, in the immediate period, the greatest
assistance mother country revolutionaries can give h to spread our
present anti-imperialist movement to the masses of people,
especially the working class, who are beginning to experience, in
sharpening terms, “the heightening contradictions of moribund U.S.
imperialism. And, in the long run, the best, indeed the only, way we
can help consolidate the victory of the world proletariat is to
overthrow the system of U.S. monopoly capitalist imperialism and
replace it with socialism. We believe that this can only be done by
fighting for the leading role of the proletariat, by developing a basic
strategy for initiating and carrying out the fight for proletarian
leadership.
The power of Marxism, in its development through Mao Tsetung
thought, is demonstrated in the fact that increasingly within SDS –
the largest anti-imperialist movement in the mother country –
nearly everyone calls themselves Marxist. And many are genuinely
seeking to learn and apply the ideology of the international
proletariat: Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought. This
tendency has gained such strength and momentum that even the
enemies of the proletariat and its ideology are forced to dress up
their arguments in Marxist-sounding language. In fact, most
everyone wants to be in the working class. The burning question is
how to get there: to go out and actually integrate ourselves with
working people, or to change the definition of working class so that
we can all fit in, just as we are.
For several years now the debate has not been whether the working
class is the main force in the revolution, but exactly what is meant by
the term “working class” and within that classification, what section
or strata will be the leading force in overthrowing the imperialist
ruling class and building socialism. For a short time the theoreticians
of the so-called “new working class” had considerable influence
within SDS and the student and youth, movement as a whole. But
the obvious fact that these privileged strata of the “new working
class” – highly skilled technicians, engineers, teachers, journalists,
social workers, etc. – do not have the greatest stake in making the
revolution, nor the greatest power to do it, along with the fact that
these very same strata in the Soviet Union, and other East European
countries, have been shown to be the social basis for revisionism and
the restoration of capitalism, has almost entirely blown away the
“new working class” theory.
Still, the question of which section of the working class will be the
leading force in the revolutionary movement – and specifically, the
validity of the classical Marxist view of the industrial proletariat as
the main force of proletarian revolution – continues to rage within
our movement. We do hold to the “classical” Marxist view. As
Marxists, however, we recognize our responsibility to defend and
explain this position in terms of concrete conditions of U.S.
imperialism and U.S. society today, taking into account the very real
changes in the world situation and in the productive and social
forces that have undeniably occurred since the time of Marx.
Lenin, in reviving and defending the fundamental principles of
Marxism, insisted that Marxism was not an abstract dogma, but a
living science; that the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions is
the living soul of Marxism.” So, in defeating the line of the Russian
Narodniks – anarchist intellectuals who argued that capitalism was
not only undesirable but unnecessary in Russia and that a rural,
communal form of “communism” could be built directly out of the
collapse of feudalism – Lenin did not insist that it was an iron law
that capitalism must develop everywhere, that capitalism was the
inevitable intermediary between feudalism and socialism. He
demonstrated, instead, by concrete analysis of the Russian economy,
that capitalism was already developing in Russia, that this
development already was irreversible, and that socialism could only
be constructed on the foundations laid by the developing capitalist
edifice. Today, in the face of arguments and analyses that claim to
show that changes in the material base of modern-day U.S.
capitalism have reduced the size and revolutionary potential of the
industrial proletariat, we will try to base our case for the leading role
of industrial workers on concrete examination of these arguments
and concrete analysis of the actual position of the industrial
proletariat and the entire working class in the U.S. imperialist
system today.
First, to deal with the question of what is the working class – who is
a worker and who is not. Here again, everyone invokes Marx and
“Marxist” analysis. For example, in a recent article in New Left
Notes (May 13, 1969), Jim Mellen says:
Marx’s prophecy of the development of capitalist society into two classes,
a large ruling class and a small ruling bourgeoisie, has nearly come
true ... If class membership is determined by relationship to the means of
production, in a Marxist fashion, then the vast majority of the people in
this country, who own no means of production and are forced to sell
their labor power to someone who does, are members of the working
class.”
So, although the sharpest struggle is still between the brothers on the
block and the pigs who directly and brutally oppress them every day,
the leading role of proletarian ideology and the increasing activity
among the industrial workers themselves, provide clear indication
that the Black industrial proletariat will ultimately be the leading
force in the Black Liberation Movement.
One of the increasing trends in moribund imperialism within the
U.S. – as it drives Black people off the Southern farmlands, and as
the new technology of the monopolies creates new skilled jobs for
many white workers (blue and white collar) – is the concentration of
Black and other oppressed peoples in the most exploited sections of
the industrial proletariat. In the State of California, for example,
nearly 50% of the industrial proletariat (and a very large part of the
rural working class) are Blacks and Latins. In many of the Detroit
auto plants, on the huge assembly lines of unskilled workers, Black
workers often make up 75% of the work force. And, generally, in
auto, steel, longshore, and some places in textiles, Third World
workers make up anywhere from 20% to 50% of the masses of
unskilled workers. This progressive concentration of Third World
workers in the superexploited sections of the industrial proletariat,
along with the national oppression they are subjected to in their
communities, and even on the job, puts them in the position of being
the leading force, not only of the Third World liberation movements
in this country, but of the U.S. proletarian revolution as a whole.
With these facts in mind we can deal with the notion – which still
has considerable popular currency in our movement – that the
industrial proletariat has been bought off; that it either actually
benefits from imperialism, or is so bribed by the imperialists that at
best it will fall in line at the rear of the revolutionary ranks
somewhere far down the road to revolution. But even if we set aside
the Black and other Third World industrial workers and speak only
of the white industrial workers, the idea that they are, in their great
majority, bought off by imperialism does not hold water and, indeed,
is a curious argument coming from our movement, which still
consists primarily of people far more privileged under imperialism
than ail but a very small number of industrial workers. If we have
been able to resist temptation and are delivered from evil – have
been able to cast off much of bourgeois ideology, to make sacrifices
in struggling against the imperialist enemy – is it so hard to conceive
that the working class as a whole, and the industrial proletariat in
particular, could see the light and pick up the banner of
revolutionary struggle? And shouldn’t last year’s French events
indicate that this is a great deal more than a pious hope?
While the present political consciousness of most industrial workers
is not as high as that of most activists in the student movement,
there are still many ways in which their understanding of the
imperialist system – especially the violent nature of the state and the
absolute domination of the government by the rich – is more
advanced, less marred by bourgeois illusions, than the
understanding of most college students. But before going into the
question of privilege, let’s deal with one other major argument
against the leading role of the industrial proletariat.
It is often claimed that the industrial proletariat is so reduced in size
today that, even if it is not bought off, it is no longer the largest, most
strategic single class in society. While it is true that over the last 50
years the relative number of industrial workers has decreased, the
trend is not nearly so great as is sometimes suggested. Today,
workers in manufacturing (20 million) make up over 25% of the
non-agricultural work force. Combining these with workers in
mining, transportation, contract construction, and public utilities,
the number of industrial workers represents 43% of the
nonagricultural civilian work force with the remaining 57% in trade,
finance, services and government employment (U.S. Dept. of Labor,
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1966). Fifty years ago (1919) the
percentages were exactly the reverse (industrial workers, 57%; other
workers, 43%), and workers in manufacturing represented 40% of
the working force. But it is still true today, as these figures indicate,
that the industrial proletariat is the largest, and certainly most
strategic, single class in society.
But is this class as a whole, or in its great numbers, bought off? It is
true, as Lenin pointed out, that imperialism, particularly an
imperialism as powerful as the U.S. today, creates strata of privileged
workers, from among the ranks of the most skilled and highly
organized. And it is by looking at these privileged strata of the
industrial working class, and projecting their privileged position
onto the rest of the class, that the theory of the industrial workers as
the bribed tool of reaction is defended. Many within our movement
had this position reinforced by a misreading of the pamphlet, The
Movement and the Workers, by C. Van Lydegraff. And although Van
Lydegraff’s intention was certainly not to argue that the industrial
proletariat will not ultimately be the leading force of the
revolutionary movement, his pamphlet is written in such a way as to
leave itself open to that misinterpretation. It is true that a number –
and not a tiny minority, although far from a majority – of the U.S.
white industrial workers make enough money to buy an apartment
house or two, or a little stock – and in this sense they do share in the
plunder of the imperialist system. But even these skilled workers, the
vast majority of whom still must sell their labor power in order to
live, are hit hard by automation, recessions and other anarchies of
capitalist production, in its highest, imperialist stage. (This has been
especially true in recent years of workers in mining and the printing
and typographical trades, for example). Of course, the ruling class,
when it finds itself unable to smash the organizing efforts of
industrial workers and the gains won through militant organization,
tries to turn these gains against the proletariat as a whole. Of course,
it encourages selfish interests among these better organized workers,
and, in the short run, it meets with some success. But it does not
provide any long-range security for these workers; it continually
seeks ways to hack away at their gains – through raising taxes and
prices, layoffs, speed-ups – and in times of slow-down or crisis for
the capitalist economy, it turns to union busting and the use of the
state to break strikes, etc., etc. All this is happening to the U.S.
industrial proletariat. That’s why the past two years have witnessed
more wildcat walkouts than the previous twenty years. Last year
alone saw 5,000 strikes. That’s why there is general ferment,
especially among young workers – which even the ruling class is
talking about in uptight terms. In a recent Fortune article (March,
1969), for example, we are warned that in New York at least:
Not only are younger members (of unions) pressing for higher wages
than retirement benefits stressed by old-line union leadership, but
also the young men resent the autocratic manner in which many of
the unions are run. ’It’s part of the generation gap,’ Lindsay recently
said. ’The rank and file are turning down the recommendations of
their leaders. The younger people in the unions are interested in
different things.’” It is the job of revolutionaries to make these
“different things” internationalism, working class solidarity, the
defeat of the imperialist enemy, and ultimately the dictatorship of
the proletariat.
The U.S. imperialist system is in grave crisis and on the brink of
much deeper crisis. Not only because it is being challenged
throughout the Third World, on which it depends for fantastic
superprofits, but because even its former junior partners, Japan and
West Europe, are turning on it. This is why U.S. magnates in steel, to
cite just one industry, are clamoring for higher tariffs against
Japanese and other steel imports. The U.S. competitive advantage
over its capitalist rivals has vanished: the U.S. trade balance which
for years was several billion dollars and growing, has been reduced
to less than a billion and is shrinking. The investment in foreign
countries and the spread of U.S. military installations around the
world, have put large amounts of U.S. dollars in the hands of foreign
creditors, at a time when the gold supply has been cut by 60%. The
devaluation of the pound, and the move to devalue the franc which
are part of the monetary system propped up by the U.S. dollar – all
this spells serious trouble for the U.S. ruling class. And the Vietnam
war has greatly worsened the inflationary spiral and with it the
monetary crisis: and the end is not yet.
All this takes its toll on the working class. While wages have never
been higher, prices have gone out of sight, and the tax structure is
simply insane. The average worker finds 20% of his paycheck stolen
from him in federal withholding, and another 20% is clipped in sales
and state income taxes and a host of “hidden” taxes like additions to
his telephone and light bills. Any system that has to tax the primary
producer 40% of his wages has given up any claim to rationality.
This extortion will increase. Already Nixon’s advisors are working up
apian to lay off several million workers and freeze wages in order to
“stop inflation.” Nixon is also working with Congress to get
legislation passed denying rank and file union members the right to
vote on contract negotiations. When the working class – already
terribly strung out on credit (it is largely responsible for the $300
billion household debt in the U.S.) is hit by the ruling class’
“austerity measures” and increasing authoritarianism, the present
restlessness will be broadened and deepened. The industrial
workers, always most directly and hardest hit by the crises in
capitalism, will suffer the most severe setbacks from either
“austerity” or accelerated inflation or both at once.
None of this means that the working class in general and the
industrial workers in particular will automatically become
revolutionary, or even “radical.” But it does mean that the
possibilities for revolutionaries to go among workers, especially
those hardest hit, and arouse them to militant struggle and
developing revolutionary understanding will be greatly enhanced.
The ruling class is well aware of this, and of the grave danger it poses
to its rule. A month ago, the head of the Steel Institute told his fellow
tycoons that if the students, SDS revolutionaries, and other
“radicals” were not prevented from linking, “this could mean the end
of capitalism.” This why J. Edgar Faggot rants and raves about the
growth of proletarian, Marxist-Leninist ideology in SDS, and why the
labor lackeys of the ruling class, all the way from Victor Reisel to
George Meany to Walter Reuther are uptight about SDS and the
Panthers joining workers’ picket lines and reaching out more and
more to the working class. The ruling class would rather not have
communists hanging around the workers when it really starts
sticking it to them.
While white workers are privileged under imperialism (as compared
to Black and Third World workers), the great majority do not benefit
from imperialism. To use an analogy, the entire world proletariat is
in jail under imperialism. But the colonized workers (and peoples) of
the world are in “the hole”; unskilled white workers are in a regular
cell, and many skilled white workers can be considered guards, who
actually live parasitically off the oppression of the rest and join in
oppressing them.
The Mellen thesis distorts the world situation by distorting the
nature of imperialism. Implicit in his article is some sort of an
assumption that U.S monopoly capitalism is relatively and basically
meeting the needs of its industrial workers “at the point of
production.” Imperialism, however, according to this view, oppresses
not only the people of the Third World (at home and abroad)
especially the young street people, but also the youth of the mother
country, who have to face the draft, the “police and other agents of
the ruling class for social control.” But imperialism is one system –
monopoly capitalism, the highest stage of capitalism – and it is
neither stable nor meeting the basic needs of its industrial workers
“at the point of production” or anywhere else.
The enemy of the U.S. worker is exactly the same as that of the
Vietnamese workers and peasants. That is why it is both possible and
necessary for revolutionaries to join the working class and develop,
among workers, internationalism and solidarity with their class
brothers in this country and throughout the world. It will be
advanced industrial workers who will be able to grasp the
revolutionary ideology that is developing in the student movement,
and lead the proletariat as a whole in struggle to expose and defeat
the enemy and prepare the way for the industrial proletariat to lead
the revolutionary movement to the dictatorship of the proletariat
and socialism.
THAT IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT ABOUT THE YOUTH IN THE
WORKING CLASS. Not that they are part of a new super-alienated
class – youth – or that all youth are now in the proletariat, but that
young workers, like young people from other classes, growing up in a
period when U. S. imperialism is being successfully challenged by
liberation struggles of Third World peoples – inside as well as
outside the U.S. – are able to grasp more quickly than older workers,
and older people generally, the bankruptcy of the imperialist system.
Youth, in any class, are always the most audacious. They are the first
to take initiative in exposing the enemy and struggling against him.
But young workers, because of their class position – and because
they are often concentrated in the same work center as Third World
workers – are able to transfer the alienation of youth, which does cut
across class lines, into concrete action that can spread throughout
the entire working class.
The question before SDS and the movement generally today is: what
is the road to the proletariat. How can we build working class
leadership in the struggle against U.S. imperialism? For SDS this
certainly does not mean that we should stop or cut back in support of
Third World liberation. In fact, we should accelerate and heighten
our activity. But, at the same time, we must recognize that next to
Third World people, youth in the working class, especially among
industrial workers, are the main road to arousing and activating the
entire working class. This is especially true of young wives and
women generally in the working class, who can take the lead in
tearing apart the entire fabric of privilege that divides and conquers
the working class as a whole.
The purpose of this paper is to present the case for the leading role of
the proletariat and outline the implications of that thesis for the
development of a Revolutionary Youth Movement. Of necessity we
have neglected the particularities of organizing other strata and this
document should not be confused with a special program nor with
an overall class analysis. Suffice it to say that we dissociate ourselves
from any view that denies that the student movement is a
component part of the revolutionary struggle of the people, that
denies it will spark other movements, that denies it is correct to
continue work on the universities as well as expanding the
movement to working class schools, state and community colleges
and high schools; or that it is incapable of developing a revolutionary
sector guided by proletarian ideology. On the contrary, it is precisely
within the student movement, and even more fully, within the Black
Liberation movement that embryonic revolutionary ideology is being
forged as witnessed by this convention.
The extension of that movement to the proletariat is both necessary
and inevitable. The question is: Will workers’ rebellions develop
spontaneously or will conscious revolutionary communists by their
integration with workers transform that spontaneous rebellion into a
disciplined iron fist, capable in alliance with others of smashing the
state power of the imperialist ruling class? Revolutionary youth must
go wherever workers are concentrated, initiate struggle and build
cadre there. This means, in addition to schools, the army and
working class communities. And it means the shops where large
numbers of Black and white workers are concentrated in production
or transportation. Even while working with students, guys in the
army, women in the community, and unemployed men and women,
we should be putting forth proletarian ideology, building anti-
imperialist consciousness and promoting forms of struggle in the
interests of the working class as a whole. And, on the other hand, our
work with industrial workers should avoid the pitfalls of economism.
Our most important task is to find the advanced workers who can
grasp revolutionary ideology, lead the masses of workers against lay-
offs, speed-ups, inflation, taxes, and denial of democratic rights to
union members, etc., and can build among them class solidarity and
proletarian internationalism: an understanding of the need to
repudiate sham, short-term privilege for the long-term benefit of the
class as a whole. Central to this will be the fight in support of Black
liberation and against white supremacy and male supremacy on the
job and in the community. Workers who are already willing to
repudiate short-term selfish interests whenever they stay out on
strike for more than a few weeks (in which case they lose more in
wages than they can win back), can be brought around to repudiating
false privilege that destroys class solidarity and internationalism –
and prevents their advance. In all our work, while uniting the
greatest numbers possible against the imperialist enemy, we should
be concentrating on cementing our ties with industrial workers –
firmly putting our movement on the road to proletarian leadership in
the struggle to defeat the ruling class and build socialism.