(Prepared for the National Convention of Students for a Democratic Society, Chicago, Illinois, June, 1969)
... 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.”
If we take Mellen’s statement literally, then not only cops, but military brass and all other pigs – including Hayakawa – who own no means of production and sell themselves to the ruling class are part of the working class. And he is aware of the confusion that his own simplistic analysis creates, especially when he gets to the question of the middle strata:
In speaking of students, middle-level management, highly skilled labor and professionals, many radicals would like to create a residual middle category and call it petit bourgeois. First, this is a non-Marxist classification – not based on relationship to the means of production. Second, the ideology which characterizes these groups is certainly not petit bourgeois anti-monopolist consciousness, but (to the extent that it is not proletarian ideology) it is ruling class, monopolist (what has come to be called corporate liberal) ideology.
Besides recognizing only one aspect of petty bourgeois ideology (anti-monopoly consciousness, which coexists with and does not always dominate, anti-working class, procapitalist consciousness) Mellen’s statement is mere mystification. He merely describes the subjective attitude of these groups (in ambivalent terms), while criticizing in “Marxist fashion,” their classification as petty bourgeois – without offering an alternative class category for these middle groups or strata.
It is difficult to classify these middle strata, but wishing them into the working class won’t do. Class analysis, especially for classes and strata that are grouped between the industrial proletariat and the monopoly capitalists cannot be done so neatly as dropping eggs in baskets. A real analysis of both the objective position and attitudes of these middle strata towards the proletariat and the proletarian revolution can only be more effectively accomplished through combining study with concrete struggle among these strata.
Mellen’s ”Marxist fashion” class analysis is inconsistent and at best half-Marxian analysis. Relationship to the means of production is indeed the basic criterion for determining social class. But it is not the only one. Relationship to other groups in society is also very important. So is the ability to exercise a degree of control over means of production and the classes that relate to them, even without actually owning the means of production – like managers in the U.S. and their revisionist counterparts in the Soviet Union. There is a material basis for the allegiance of managers to their imperialist masters and it is exactly this objective position that Mellen ignores in his “class analysis.”
Though Mellen speaks of relationship to the means of production and maintains an air of being in the camp of the Marxists – in fact, he rests almost his entire case on only a single aspect of this relationship. To Mellen, ownership or lack of ownership of the means of production is the single criterion of relationship to the means of production; the sale or purchase of labor power is the single demarcation between classes and class strata. Though Mellen’s intentions may be positive, he should realize that his one-sided concentration on the question of ownership puts him uncomfortably in the same bag as the counterrevolutionary revisionists of the Soviet Union. They pose as “Marxist-Leninists” also by fulminating on “relationship to the means of production” and “prove” the non-existence of classes in the Soviet Union by considering only the question of ownership of the means of production. But this sleight of hand “Marxism” should not blind anyone to the true class position of this revisionist clique. They are a ruling class, new Tsars, in spite of the fact that they don’t own a single share of stock.
A very crucial factor in the class analysis of any sector of society is the degree of independence enjoyed by its members. For instance, doctors who work in a large corporation hospital may sell their labor power to the Kaiser Corporation, but they enjoy a great deal of independence within that situation, and they have a real chance to leave Kaiser and go into private practice. Unlike this doctor, or the worker’s supervisor, or even a 26th Vice President of General Electric (who owns no stock), a worker has no choice but to sell his labor power, has no real control over when, where, how and with whom he works. Yes, Marx and Engels noted in “The Communist Manifesto” that the development of capitalism has a tendency to “proletarianize” formerly “independent” professionals. But, today, there is still a large residue of this middle stratum that is independent and whose class position is definitely petty bourgeois. And even the formerly independent professionals, now to a degree proletarianized, still show ambivalence that separates them from the working class. The teacher in the overcrowded classroom, the social worker with the large case load, do engage in class struggle, even unionize; sometimes their struggles are very sharp and very helpful to the working class.
But even when that struggle is sharpest these members of the “working class” insist on their ”professional” status in relation to the laboring masses. They are not misguided here, or just being backward workers – they are reflecting their true class position which is between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Of course, as the imperialist system rots even further and its crisis deepens under the impact of external and internal contradiction, and as the working class becomes stronger and more conscious of revolutionary necessity and develops leadership and organization, more of these intermediate strata will join the revolutionary ranks. Some will become important, selfless leaders and fighters, but the group as a whole will remain divided, up to the hour of victory. The importance of class analysis lies in being able to find allies from among the various classes and strata, distinguish friends from enemies, and to change our tactics as changes occur. We need to refine our experience to be able to distinguish better the divisions in our society. To blur over class differentiation and to reduce classes to an indefinable mass will not help us unite all who can be united (from various classes) against monopoly imperialism.
Mellen is so anxious to fit almost everyone – and all youth – into the working class that he is forced to obscure facts and twist concepts. He claims, for example, that the small capitalists in the U.S. are almost insignificant. A walk down almost any street in any major city or town in the country (here we are not even talking about the several million small farmers) is enough to refute this argument. Presently in the U.S. there are about 3.4 million nonagricultural businesses employing 50 people or less – 540,000 of these employing between 8 and 19 people and over 2.6 million employing less than 8 people. This is an actual increase over 1945 when the corresponding figures were 2.9 million, 221,500, and 2.6 million. Even granting that some of these small businesses are in effect “franchises” of larger corporations, the essential position of their owners and/or managers is still petit bourgeois, not proletarian. The petty bourgeoisie is not only still significant in its size, but its ideological influence (sometimes anti-monopoly, but always pro-capitalist, private property ideology) is still very strong within the working class, especially its skilled upper strata. On the one hand, the average life of a small business in the U.S. is about five years: these small units of capital are continually crushed and their owners ruined and driven into the working class or absorbed into the monopolies as managers. But, on the other hand, these small businesses are also continually regenerated out of the managers of monopoly and the ranks of the workers: plumbers who go into business for themselves, carpenters who become small contractors, cooks who open up a small cafe, or teamsters who buy their own rigs and work on a contract basis, even professors who develop a new product or a slick scheme (one of these last really made it and is now Asst. Secretary of Defense.) To blur over this phenomenon is to weaken our understanding of the real situation within the working class and society as a whole and to seriously cripple our ability to build a revolutionary movement based on the real situation and needs of the people, especially the working class.
It falls into the trap set by the ruling class and its academic agents. In the 1950’s bourgeois sociologists bent every effort (and fact) to dissolve the working class into the “middle class” (and this ruling class trick is still being tried, though with diminishing success). Now Mellen wants to turn the process on its head and dissolve the petty bourgeoisie into the working class. Mellen’s mistake is as harmful to the revolutionary movement as the bourgeoisie’s deliberate falsification. And it leads him into some silly pseudo-analysis. For example, in order to fit all students into the working class, he is forced to argue that “the Student, by studying, creates value within himself in the form of skilled labor power.” He might as well say that a baby sucking on a bottle creates value in himself. Labor power, in a Marxist fashion, enters the scene when the worker puts it on the market to be purchased by a capitalist. If our student never sells his “skilled labor power” but is murdered by a pig in a demonstration, or if he suddenly inherits $1 million worth of stock in Standard Oil, this “value” he is creating is never realized as labor power, never creates any surplus value and counts for nothing. No, like our example of the baby, the student is still bottle-fed, although the formula is different. The first time he will produce any value is when he applies his labor power to the creation of a commodity for the market.
Further, Mellen claims that “the overwhelming majority of American youth (say 18-24) are students, soldiers and unemployed.” In fact, 60% of males in this group are employed, only 8% are unemployed and about 15% are actually in the military. (U.S. Dept. of Labor, Handbook of Labor Statistics, 1968). Even allowing for bourgeois distortion and for a fairly large number of male students in the 18-24 group who work while attending school, Mellen is still incorrect. And these figures are for non-white as well as white youth, so the number of employed white male youth is even higher than 60%. Among women, 18-24, white and non-white, almost 50% are employed. And, in the age group 25-34, over 80% of both white and non-white are employed, most full-time.
Mellen’s acrobatic “Marxism,” his dilution of the Marxist conception of value, his one-sided view of “relations of production” and his disregard for fact – all these are necessary to lay the basis for his primary concern: the negation of the leading role of the industrial proletariat. Marx and Engels always drew a clear distinction between productive and unproductive labor – between the agricultural and industrial workers who are exploited to create surplus value, and workers who sell their labor power but create no value. This is not a frivolous distinction, but one based on the understanding of the fact that the profit of the capitalist rests, ultimately, on his ability to depress the condition of the worker at the point of production. Not only the profits of capitalism but the livelihood of everyone in society, including other, nonproductive workers, depends, ultimately, on the value that is created by the exploited industrial workers – and to a lesser extent in this day of advanced technology by the agricultural worker. Today this is an international phenomenon so that the mere examination of the imperialist country and its internal class structure leaves out the superexploitation of colonized workers and blurs the nature of the internationalized contradiction between productive workers and other classes and strata. But understanding that the source of capitalist profit lies in the exploitation of the industrial worker – “at the point of production” – while certainly necessary to indicate the strategic position of the industrial proletariat as that force in society that can cut the arteries of capitalist power, is not sufficient to encompass the theoretical basis for revolutionary communism or even the leading role of the industrial proletariat. The Economist political trend also understands and bases its theory on it. Nor does Mellen avoid Economism by broadening the definition of the working class – actually he is eclectically accommodating, in this manner, other positions of his (that cannot be characterized as Economism) to Economist political theory. (Economism does not deny armed struggle – in old Russia any workers who went on strike were in for a bloody struggle and the Economists had to recognize that.)
Lenin in What Is To Be Done? (written in 1902) blew away the Economists in the labor movement who argued that the road to socialism lay entirely in the economic struggle of the working class for higher wages and improved working conditions under capitalism. In that brilliant essay Lenin pointed out that the industrial proletariat is the leading class in modern society not because it is involved in a struggle for more wages “at the point of production,” but because its socialization in labor, and its consistent exploitation and struggle against exploitation, as well as its strategic position within the economy and the network of class relations, enables it to grasp the ideas of Marxism most firmly, identify most clearly the social forces in society – who are the friends and who are the enemies of the people – and to carry through an all-class struggle to overthrow the old order. And in this connection political struggle is qualitatively superior to purely economic struggle, and that it is the duty of revolutionary communists to join the economic struggles of the workers in order to help them grasp political conclusions and to raise the level of economic struggle to the level of all-around political struggle against the State.
(We mean, of course, by all around political struggle against the State, not the Harold Wilson/Labour Party version. Economic demands wrapped in a package and raised to a political level will still be bourgeois politics if those economic demands are not viewed as a by-product of the struggle for socialism. Reformism, based on economic demands, often expressed very “politically” is at the heart of Economism.)
Mellen’s apparent subjective desire to deny the leading role of the industrial proletariat is the root cause of his errors in analysis. Thus, he takes a static view of how surplus is accumulated, implying that the basic contradiction between the worker and his employer has been all but eliminated. And he does this not only in talking about U.S. workers, but about the entire world proletariat. First of all, he states that “Two things developed out of competitive capitalism: The system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism.” (our italics)
If this isn’t just a sloppy grammatical mistake, it is a very serious political error, committed also by the “new working class” theoreticians. Imperialism is monopoly capitalism, the highest stage of capitalism. At a certain point in the development of capitalism, the national market is no longer large enough to meet the profit needs of the capitalist, can no longer assure him a profitable return for additional investment. So he is forced to export, not finished commodities, but capital itself, beyond the borders of the native country and market. This occurs throughout the economy, and in all capitalist countries, so that fierce competition is set up among various units of capital, dominated by finance capital, all seeking to control, carve and recarve the world and bend its development to their own profit needs. This quite naturally necessitates wars – between imperialist powers and, increasingly, between various imperialist powers and the peoples of the colonies and semi-colonies.
At times Mellen seems to reflect at least a partial understanding of this, but his apparently incomplete understanding leads him to fundamentally confuse the nature of the Third World Liberation struggles, including the Black Liberation struggle in this country. While he correctly notes that “the driving thrust of imperialism to control and develop suitable investment opportunities means a steadily deteriorating quality of existence of the workers of the whole world,” he can turn right around and, invoking the straw man of “Economism” declare that “the struggles of the people do not occur at the point of production.” The struggles of Third World peoples are primarily national struggles against feudalism and imperialism – and in their final stages, however, protracted, occur primarily as military struggles. But before they reach the stage of military struggle they, in fact, mainly do occur “at the point of production” by peasants on the feudal estates and ”at the point of production” in the shops and factories of the urban centers. The struggle of Blacks for liberation in this country is also a national struggle, whose most active contingents are not industrial workers, but street people, workers without stable employment that the Panthers refer to as “field niggers.” Mellen projects this present circumstance into the mother country and puts forth a strategy based on it:
For the youth of the mother country, the class struggle manifests itself around issues like the draft, the ruling class’ uses of the university, police and other agents of the ruling class, for social control. Throughout society institutions designed to stabilize and serve capitalism are breaking down and struggle ensues. “If the breakdown of the U.S. capitalist system is not necessarily going to come as a huge depression, but as a gradual deterioration of the social structure, then our revolutionary movement must be prepared for the eventuality not just of a general strike, but of a gradual raising of the level of struggle around various issues resulting in a general protracted civil war.
(It is a side issue, but in order not to acquiesce in a misreading of Marxism-Leninism, only some anarchist theoreticians see the general strike as the final act of overthrow of the capitalist system. Marxist-Leninists see the general strike as just one form of struggle, sometimes achievable and useful in the development of unity, consciousness and fighting strength. It would take a rare combination of circumstances, where the capitalist class has become deprived of almost any strength, before a general strike could immediately trigger the death of capitalism.)
We do not deny that bourgeois society in this age of declining imperialism is coming apart at the seams; nor that a civil war is likely to break out in the U.S.; nor, least of all, that the struggle will be protracted. But we do believe that this civil war will come when the U.S. has more totally fallen apart in the midst of a great depression or other vast economic and political crises, such as a devastating defeat in war, for instance, and the ruling class can no longer rule in the same old way, nor the lower classes live under the old system. And none of this argues against the leading role of the industrial proletariat. Actually if in the time of devastating crisis the proletariat has not assumed the leadership of the struggle and has not developed its multi-class, Marxist-Leninist Party, the monopolists will be able to weather even the most devastating crisis, and in one form or another, retain command.
Mellen is really arguing that the industrial proletariat will be in the rear guard of the revolutionary movement of the “working class.” This is why he has to torture all youth to fit them into the working class in order to maintain that the leading role will be played by youth who in their overwhelming majority, according to Mellen’s mistaken figures, are supposed to be in school, the army and unemployed.
Isn’t this what he really means when he says, “Since industrial labor is only a segment of the broader working class and since it is not yet playing a vanguard role in the class struggle, a proper perspective on labor struggles requires that they be seen as only one front on which we are fighting. What we need is an analysis and an argument concerning what sectors of the total working class can develop consciousness and lead the rest”? What, in fact, this leads to, although by a different path, is the same elitism of the “new working class theoreticians.” Mellen, too, is arguing that those who are in motion at present – especially the students – will continue to lead “the rest of the working class” in struggle.
Let’s go back to the international situation – the liberation struggles of the Third World – examine Mellen’s fundamental error there, and then work back to what is a more correct strategy for our own movement. It is true that the immediate struggle of the people of Vietnam, and of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America generally, is the struggle for national liberation. This requires the unity of all patriotic classes, including all but the feudal landlords and the allies, front men and puppets of the imperialists. But this struggle must be led by one of two main class forces: either the national bourgeoisie, which is opposed to imperialist power because the dominance of foreign finance capital prevents the development of a strong native capitalist class; or by the proletariat, in alliance with the peasantry. If the national bourgeoisie leads, it will be unable to carry the struggle through to complete victory and it will be ultimately forced to make its peace with imperialism or be crushed by it (Kenya under Kenyatta, Indonesia under Sukarno). If the proletariat leads, in alliance with the peasantry, the imperialists can be thoroughly defeated: national liberation can be fully consolidated, and the foundation for socialism firmly laid.
This is the experience of the Vietnamese today and of the Chinese in their struggle for national liberation and socialism. In both cases, the leading role is played by the proletariat and its party, the Communist Party, despite the fact that the bulk of the military struggle goes on in the countryside among the peasants.
In China, for example, between 1946 and 1949, the line of the poor peasants was to expropriate even the middle peasants, giving more individual plots of land to the poorer peasants. But the Communist Party, putting forward the advanced line of the proletariat, successfully opposed the poor peasant line in order to maintain an alliance with the middle peasants, defeat the Kuomintang and their imperialist masters, and bring to the fore the class struggle between the urban proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This was the only road to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the building of socialism. Thus, although the proletariat was not the main fighting force in the military field, its political line and the leadership of the party representing its interests, was in fact the leading force throughout the Chinese revolution. And, once again in the Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution, it was the students who moved first and then the peasants and the workers last of all. But, even during the stage of student rebellion the line of the proletariat – making the schools serve the people, eliminating bourgeois forms of competition and flunk-out, combining study with work, eliminating privilege and bureaucracy – was the guiding force. And when the working class, as a whole, did grasp the line of the Cultural Revolution and put it into practice, it raised it to a much higher level, was able to seize power in institution after institution from those taking the capitalist road, and develop new forms of socialist superstructure, so that the mass slogan and practice became, “The working class must exercise leadership everything.”
It was the genius of Mao Tsetung that, during the entire course of the Chinese revolution, through all its twists and turns, setbacks as well as advances, he was able to take the lead in putting forward the line representing the interests of the proletariat and in arousing the masses of the people to grasp this line and put it into practice. In doing this Mao avoided the twin errors of dogmatism and pragmatism. When the students, and then peasants, moved before the workers, as has happened several times in the course of the Chinese revolution, Mao did not try to halt the students or peasant movements and order them to wait for the workers and take their rightful place at the head of the movement. Instead he encouraged the rebellions of the students and peasants, fought for proletarian leadership within them, put forward a line which represented the interests of the proletariat as a class and urged the rebels to spread the movement among the workers themselves. On the other hand, because the students or even the peasants moved before the proletariat, Mao did not try to concoct a new theory or new analysis, either to make the students or the peasants the leading force, or to pin a proletarian badge on them and make them part of – in fact, the leading part of – the working class itself. The road to the proletariat, the means of getting the working class to exercise its leadership in everything, at all stages of struggle, this was the only road to victory in the Chinese revolution, and in all struggles of oppressed people for national liberation and socialism.
Algeria provides the closest approximation to the Mellen model – where the intellectuals and the privileged strata led the revolutionary movement, relying on the lumpenproletariat and part of the peasantry as their main force. The aborted Algerian revolution was an attempt to win national liberation and build a kind of socialism without the leading role of the proletariat and the proletarian dictatorship. The Algerian experience, in contrast to the Chinese and Vietnamese, confirms the fact that the movement of the lumpen sections and the peasantry, led by the privileged strata, especially the intellectuals, can cause trouble for their colonial master, can even wreak havoc on the colonial mother country for awhile, but must still end up accommodating itself to the imperialist control, because it cannot carry the struggle for national liberation and socialism to the end. (This is why the French imperialists still control the oil, and dominate the economy of “independent” Algeria.)
How does this apply in the U.S.? Let’s take the Black liberation struggle. Here again, Mellen confuses the forces that move first with the leading force. Among black people here, as among the Chinese people, the students, the peasants (sharecroppers, tenant farmers in the South) and the so-called “lumpen elements” (semi-permanently unemployed workers, many of them migrants or children of migrants from the rural South) have, in the present period, been in motion and involved in sharp struggles, including small-scale military struggle with the pigs, before the black industrial workers have moved in their masses. The Panthers have concentrated mainly on the “brothers on the block.” But, from the very beginning, the Panthers have put forward a proletarian line – identifying the real enemy, the imperialist ruling class, stressing the international character of the struggle, making class distinctions in dealing with the oppressor white nation, pointing the way toward cooperation with potential allies, and posing disciplined organization as a direct and necessary alternative to spontaneity.
Why is this the line of the proletariat? The brother on the block, hustling, making it as he can, comes into contact with pigs, small shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, landlords, etc. – who are almost all white. Naturally he tends to develop an undiscriminately anti-white outlook. His life is fragmented and highly individualized – a personal struggle for survival – and his vision of society is very limited by this experience. The Black industrial worker lives in the same community as the brother on the block(who may literally be his blood brother), shares much of the same oppression but also suffers national oppression and superexploitation in highly organized and socialized work – often for the monopolies that make up the U.S. ruling class. The Black industrial workers, as a class suffering this dual oppression, are in the best position to grasp the ideology of Marxism-Leninism: to be able to distinguish the interests of the white worker from those of the white capitalist; to understand the need for organization and discipline; and to be able to sustain, in a collective way, the struggle against the real enemy. Although the Black workers have been the last to grasp the revolutionary nationalism of Huey and the Panthers, and other proletarian forces within the Black liberation movement, there is an increasing development toward revolutionary consciousness and struggle among Black industrial workers, who are uniting around their struggles brothers on the block and broad segments of the Black people as a whole.
The argument for the leading role of the Black industrial proletariat is stated by John Watson, of the Detroit League of Revolutionary Black Workers, in a recent interview in New Left Notes, in far more concise and compelling terms than we can do:
As workers, as black workers, we have historically been and are now an essential element in the American economic scene. Without black slaves to pick the cotton on the Southern plantations, the primitive accumulation of capital which was necessary to develop industry in both Europe and America would never have been accomplished. Without black workers slaving on the assembly lines in the city of Detroit, the automobile plants would not be able to produce cars in the first place, and therefore wouldn’t be able to make the tremendous profits which they have been making. “Therefore, we feel that the best way to organize black people into a powerful unit is to organize them in the factories in which they are working. We feel that black workers, especially, have the power to completely close down the American economic system. In order to implement that power, we have to become organized. “In one factory you have 10,000 people who are faced with the same brutal conditions under the same system from the same bastards every day, eight hours a day, six or seven days a week. When you go out into the community, the interests of the people, let’s say in a particular neighborhood, more than likely are going to be much more greatly dispersed than the interests of the workers are. That is, people have different keepers, they are faced with a number of different kinds of problems throughout the community, and they don’t represent the same sort of homologous mass as 10,000 people in a factory do. Therefore, just in terms of expediency there are greater possibilities in the organization of the plant.
And when you consider even farther than that, when you do organize significant sectors of the community, the kinds of actions which can be taken are not as effectively damaging to the ruling class as the kinds of action which can be taken in the plant. For instance, when you close down Hamtramick Assembly Plant, you do a number of things automatically. If you close it down for a day you cost Chrysler Corporation a thousand cars. That considered in relationship to their investment, means the loss of a sizeable sum of money. “Also, when you close down a large automobile plant, you automatically can mobilize the people in the streets, 5,000 or 10,000 people at a single blow. Whereas when you attempt to organize the community, especially if you go from house to house or block to block, it is much more difficult to gather together that many of the people at the same time.
Finally, we feel that in conjunction with the organization of workers in plants you automatically have the development of community organization and community support. After all, workers are not people who live in the factory 24 hours a day. They all go home and live somewhere in the community. We have found that it’s almost an inevitable and simultaneous development that as factory workers begin to get organized, support elements within the community are also organized. We feel that it is necessary to have broad community support in order to be able to effectively organize within the plant and effectively close down significant sectors of the economy.
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.