Editor's Note: The following is a presentation given at the annual retreat of the Rally, Comrades! Editorial Board, August 2008.

It's clear that the nation, the people of America , are entering into the beginning stages of what we refer to as a social response to the economic revolution. They are becoming politically aware of what is going on.

The looming depression, the falling dollar, the profound destruction of wealth, the crisis of liquidity, and the formation of regional blocs that are challenging U.S. dominance in the world are expressions of the problem rooted in the labor-replacing technologies. Even if we don't see it directly, or the masses of American people don't understand it directly, it affects them. As things tighten up financially and politically, the American people are being pushed into some kind of political understanding, some kind of political activity. Not very much, not very correct, but the reality is that it is there.

The League was right to concentrate on the theoretical analysis of the economic motion and in pointing out what inevitably were going to be the social consequences. We did not know exactly the form it was going to take, but we did know there would be social consequences.

The American people understand that they are facing a fundamental problem and they are looking for real answers. The election is forcing open the door for political activity. We have to be scientific in approaching this change and stop looking at the world ideologically. Somehow we are going to have to shift to where ideology is in its proper place, and not let it take the place of clear scientific analysis of social motion  where it comes from, where its going, its stages of development.

We need to use the theoretical clarity we've struggled for over the yearsin order to easily shift gears and move into our next stage of development, that is to say, to begin influencing that social activity.

Changing conditions demand that the activity of the League changes accordingly. We can't be a political organization and not change in accordance with changes in the objective situation. The problem we face is the same one we have always faced  how do we make that change, and what is it?

 

Art of politics in using spontaneous movement

 

We need to have a common idea of what we mean by politics. Politics is essentially the art of using the spontaneous social motion in order to achieve necessary goals. You can't have politics without relying on the spontaneous movement and you can't rely on the spontaneous movementif you're not in it. There can't be any politics that doesn't deal with objective reality. But neither can there be any politics that disregards the subjective. The art of politics lies in uniting the subjective goals with the objective social processes that you see at hand.

The spontaneous movement is the struggle for food, shelter, and clothing, the fundamental things people need for life. In the process of that fight, there is the possibility of convincing the masses that there is a way to secure these things forever. By having a common understanding of politics, we unite the effort of the revolutionaries with the actual activity of the American people.

William Saffire's book Freedom is interesting in this regard. One of the underlying themes of the book, and, he proves it every step of the way, is that in the North the main opposition to the emancipation of the slaves was from the working class. Emancipation could have come about fairly easily, but the workers didn't want it. They felt that four million blacks were going to be dumped on the labor market and they would lose their jobs, or at least it was going to lead to a lowering of their wages. They were toldit was better to keep slavery and the workers would accept whatever wages the capitalists wanted to give them.

So here the most revolutionary sector is the thing that's blocking social progress. How do you swing this opposition? On the one hand, the working class was absolutely devoted to the Federal Union and they were ready to fight and die for that. But as labor leaders told Abraham Lincoln  you say anything about emancipation and one half of the army will drop arms and go home.

So the problem that the abolitionist and emancipation groups within Lincoln 's cabinet faced was how do you change the ideas of the American worker on this. There was a spontaneous motion on the part of the workers to defend their jobs even to the extent of preserving slavery, and on the other hand, there was this militant defense of the Union . How do you show them that one was absolutely entangled with the other  you couldn't have Union without destroying slavery, and you couldn't destroy slavery without maintaining the Union . This is what politics of that moment was all about.

So you need to grab the actual existing social motion and figure out the factors that will allow you to turn this thing, to change the minds of people. What took place between the 1863 Draft Riots and a yearor twolater when literally hundreds of thousand of workers enlisted into the Union , singing "As He died to make men holy, we now die to set men free"? What happened during those years? They moved from attacking the government for suggesting emancipation to being ready to die to end slavery. What happened?

It was the skillful activity of the abolitionists  right, left and center, all of them put together  that slowly changed peoples' minds as conditions changed. So the objective and the subjective were united  the changing conditions provided the foundation for a change in the minds of the people. This is what we're talking about when we talk about politics.

 

Fighting for the inevitable

 

Let'slook at the formation of the CIO, for example. In the revolutionary movement in the 1930s everything was CIO, union, union, union. But we wouldn't have had a union if the bourgeoisie didn't see something worthwhile in getting a union. Getting a union was along the spontaneous line of march. You can get a union that supports capitalism or a union that opposes capitalism. And since unions are inevitable, and the revolutionaries are going to fight for a union that opposes capital, there's no reason why the bourgeoisie can't support a union that supports the capitalist system.

What was the role of the CIO? Organized labor represented 23 percent of the working class. The historical role of the CIO was to prevent the unorganized 80 percent of the workers from doing anything against the system. How could the unorganized sector do anything? The organized sector wouldn't do anything, so therefore very little was done to educate and unite the workers.

Did the AFL-CIO do some good? It did some good. Did it do some bad? Yes it did. Was the union absolutely necessary? Absolutely. It's not about being opposed to union. We have to understand that because the union was along the spontaneous line of march, the union became the battlefield. Whatever side won, the union was going to win that stage of development and be able to progress to the next stage of development. We never progressed to the next stage of development because we lostthat fight.

So you have the necessary spontaneous development of something that becomes a battleground. If the bourgeoisie wins, they use it against the left. If we win, we use it against the right. So the question for the revolutionaries is: What is the next inevitable battleground and how do we prepare ourselves to fight so we don't keep making the same mistake over and over again because of ideological considerations?

 

Merging agitation and propaganda

 

What's necessary today is a shift from propaganda that's separated from agitation to dealing with the real world. That real world demands that agitation and propaganda be merged. We're dealing with a working class that is 99 per cent literate and concentrated in huge cities. There is no way to propose abstract answers to concrete problems. This wall that history raised up between agitation and propaganda is diminished today, if it exists at all.

How do we propagandize our agitation? How do we guarantee that within our agitational activity there is propaganda? It's difficult to do in America because of the heritage of the McCarthy era. But people are beginning to open up their minds. But we can't take advantage of it if we simply rest on ideological assumptions

One the questions for us is how do we put the revolutionary and communist propaganda in terminology that grows out of American history and not out of Russian history, or Chinese history or German history?

It's interesting to look at the Civil War. Toward the middle of the Civil war, the rebels were the ones talking about the Constitution and defending the Constitution, and Lincoln was the revolutionary. But the key was that he did it in conjunction with the development of the American people. He didn't do it by himself. He didn't do it ahead of the American people. It was this constant agitation and propaganda that allowed the North to become the "destroyers" of the Constitution, and the South to become the defenders of the Constitution. We don't get away from history; it keeps repeating itself over and over again. We can learn from the revolutionary history of America , that this is the way it happened then, and use that to see how it is likely going to happen again.

Workers understand that education is not going anywhere until this government takes over education and guarantees that every single child has equal education. How are you going to have insurance or health care unless the government takes it over? What grows out of American history that helps us show the next necessary step along the way? Just like with the unions. Union was inevitable and then the battle became was the union going to be a tool of the capitalists or was it going to be a weapon of the working class.

Where do we start, and how do we start? And what is our propaganda within that start? That means dealing with what people are really concerned with. That means moving from these general theoretical propositions and into the work of this specific agitation and propaganda that's along the line of march.

 

Nationalization

 

There was a time when there was no federal army, only state militias. The government nationalized the army. There was a time when there was no national money. They nationalized the money. We could go on down the line. As conditions developed, the bourgeoisie had to nationalize these things so they could function. But that can also be a weapon in the hands of the worker.

The union was indispensable to the Roosevelt democratic coalition; the democratic coalition was indispensable to saving American capitalism. And yet we needed the union, we had to fight to get the union, but we lost the political battle. That battle at least.

What we're seeing here and now is that nationalization is inevitable. Aspects of the banking system have already been nationalized. The ruling class easily and smoothly transferred from "free market economy to nationalization." They are prepared to move to nationalize insurance for catastrophic events where whole townsare wiped out by tornados and hurricanes. They are going to nationalize aspects of health care - private companies can't handle these things anymore.

But that also opens the door for my insurance; my little house here in Chicago also has to be taken care of, not just simply the capitalists' property. It is a battleground where the interests and program of the class can be fought out.

In our propaganda we talk about making the corporation or at least making a sector of the corporations  public property. But the notion that you can leap from private to public property is only propaganda. The first stage in that process is transforming these private concerns into state property. Then the battle becomes who does that state serve. That's how we get involved in politics. If we don't have a situation where the state is responsible then we can't have that fight.

This is why the League emphasizes that the first thing we have to look at is that society has to take over the corporations or the corporations will take over society. We either whip Hitler or he whips us. In between a declaration of war and us whipping Hitler were a thousand battles. It's not just one great leap from this point to that point. It's a series of battles that take place over the years in order to achieve that.

Let's be clear. The government assuming control of these giant interests is in no way communism. But that's the battleground. If we avoid the battleground we can't win the battle. So we're going to have to begin a thorough going discussion about what we're talking about with this idea of a line of march. What is the looming battle, what is the key fight, and how do we build from that, and how do we develop the ideological and political understanding of the American people through this kind of a fight?

 

Choose the battle

 

Not every battle is along the line of march. We have to clearly understand how do we get from this point to that point. The line of march might not be a direct line, but it's going in a definite direction for a definite purpose.

We have to learn to choose our battles. We have to know the line of progression from here to there. That's why we have this concept in our program. The question of taking over the corporate structures is the first inevitable battle. It is unavoidable and we can win. But if we fan out, and start fighting on all fronts, we're not going to win. Nationalization will take place, but in the interest of the bourgeoisie.

The secret of successful warfare is concentration. When you concentrate your forces, you isolate your enemy. You have to choose one division that you are going to destroy. Choose one town you are going to take. Choose one railroad junction you are going to get. Not everything. One thing. But that one thing has to be key. That railroad junction has to be key to all the railroad junctions. That one town has to be key to the entire highway network.

We choose our battles, and then we fight them out in a planned way. This is how the work will have to be done in the coming period of time. It has never been done in America , because it couldn't be done. Conditions were never right for it to happen. It can happen now.

 

Driving force

 

What is the force that we can rely on in order to win this fight? Up to this point, because of the objective situation, we've been talking about the poor in a general sense. We couldn't help but do so. We clearly understood that the industrial workers in the big plants were key to organizing the entire class. In the same sense we know that within the mass of poor is a driving force capable of pulling the entire chain forward.

That driving force cannot be people without a class sense, without a class position in society. This driving force is these millions of people who have had jobs, maybe not the best jobs in the world, but had jobs, and had some possessions, but now have lost everything. It's going to be these people who are on the edge or just pushed over that edge.

In America their natural tendency is to move to the political right. Yet, these "dispossessed" are the only ones who can lead this battle because they know what organization is, they have been part of society. They are the force that has the capability of uniting the rest and pulling them forward, of raising slogans that are achievable along this line of march.

How do we turn them to the correct direction? What are the slogans? What is the agitation and propaganda we put forth to begin shifting from simply dealing with the poor, the homeless, the hungry and toward being political in our outlook and work? That is, how do we subjectively form the class that has the social force to unite the struggle against the entire system?

How do we begin influencing them and bringing them together on some kind of program? This question is going to become the most important and immediate as the economy degenerates. We have never really discussed it. We couldn't because the objective situation did not call for it. But now that things are starting to gel, we are going to have to start discussing it.

So, these are the kinds of questions revolutionaries must answer. We need to use the theoretical clarity we've struggled for over the years to shift gears and move into our next stage of development. Now that social activity is breaking out we can no longer rest content with simply being the theoretical expression of the environment, we now have to become part and parcel of that activity. The questions raised here today have attempted to illuminate that path, but it will be the thinking and contribution of every comrade that will make it a reality.

 

December.2008.Vol18.Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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