First Published: The Call, Vol. 5, No. 13, July 26, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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As attacks against the living standards of the masses increase, especially against the unemployed, the National Fight Back Organization (NFBO) is mapping out plans to expand its “Jobs or Income Now” Campaign. Local job actions are to be stepped up, with national mobilizations coming later in the year.
Founded last December at a conference of 1,300 working-class activists, the NFBO has three main demands and principles of unity: Jobs or Income Now! Fight Discrimination against Minorities and Women! End Superpower War Preparations!
A member of the National Steering Committee, Arlene Shuemake, explained to The Call that the fight for jobs is the central campaign ’and the most burning demand of millions of people throughout the country. Whether it’s for one unemployment check or thousands of jobs, Shuemake stressed, the NFBO must be oriented towards action to win these demands.
“The demand of the people,” Shuemake said, “must be taken up right now and not just in words. We can’t sit and talk but have to combine practical work with politics and agitation. Go to the welfare office, to the unemployment centers and to every place where struggles break out. Go to fight for the people; at the same time, explain to them why there’s unemployment and why the capitalist system is to blame!”
Rejecting the view that the fight for jobs or income now is reformist in character, Shuernake explained that this depends on how the fight is taken up.
“If all you do is ask for some jobs and stop there, then we won’t even win economic improvements for all workers. The important thing is to push the struggle further, demanding full employment for all workers, to continue the battle, build on it and broaden it against the capitalist system itself. That’s what the Fightback is supposed to do!”
The Boston Workers United to Fight Back (BWUFB) is an example of a fightback committee that has integrated the political struggle with the demand for jobs. BWUFB has fought and played a leading role in the anti-segregationist movement. Carrying out broad agitation, especially among the white workers, the BWUFB has rallied support for the struggles of Afro-Americans among both employed and unemployed workers.
Shuemake explained that an important focus of political education in the fight back is aimed at building multinational unity in the fight for jobs. She pointed to the fightback work that has been organized against deportations from Los Angeles to New Jersey, as well as nationwide activity in support of Gary Tyler.
Fightback organizers point out that as capitalism’s attacks on the working people are increasing, a spontaneous fightback is also spreading. Militant struggles against cutbacks in education, healthcare and day-care have broken out in New York and other big cities; bringing thousands of workers into the streets. The Fight Back Organization must go into these spontaneous out-breaks and provide leadership.
Although the recent crisis has been the impetus behind the spontaneous outbreaks and the formation of the NFBO, the organization has not made the crisis alone the target of struggle. Larry Miller, a steering committee leader and member of the October League, commented, “Through broad agitation, actions and propaganda, the NFBO has targeted the system which inevitably produces crises like this recent one and which is characterized by imperialist rivalries which will lead ultimately to war.”
A recent Milwaukee demonstration provided a good example of how to turn political action into exposure. The People’s Union to Fight the Crisis joined a struggle of tenants against slumlord Meyer Shadur.
They helped to organize a march by Shadur’s tenants into his sweatshop. Leaflets were passed out, using the link between boss and slumlord Shadur to expose the capitalist system of private ownership and exploitation.
While the NFBO is based mainly among the unemployed in the communities, the local chapters, have been able to link the struggles of employed and unemployed in raising demands for a short work week with no cut in pay, an end to speedup, forced overtime and layoffs. Among auto workers and other industrial workers, these demands are central to contract struggles.
But the NFBO is no substitute’ for ’the trade union, Miller stressed to The Call. “Earlier we made some errors in confusing tasks of the Fightback with the tasks of the unions.” Miller described how in one city the local fightback committee was called in to set up a picket line to protest the firing of a Black worker. “Support work like this is not bad,” he said, “but instead, workers should have taken up the struggle first in the union, rallying support from the most sympathetic workers in the plant. .”
“We learned from experiences like these,” Miller said, “that it’s wrong to substitute the Fightback for the union local or caucus to wage battles in the factories. The unions are the most basic organization of the working class.”
The NFBO, in sharp contrast to the unions today, is under revolutionary leadership. Because of this, a tendency developed to characterize the NFBO as an organization which is inherently more politically advanced than the trade unions. Miller pointed out that at times, “The Fightback was incorrectly treated as the main organization for training and preparing factory workers for revolution, standing between the unions and communist organizations like the October League. We should see that the fightback committees, as community-based organizations, and the trade unions, as the most basic organizations of factory workers, are both direct transmission belts between the masses of workers and the communist party.
“We certainly want to see the Fightback demands and campaigns taken up in factories and unions,” Miller went on, “and they have been. In a number of cases, union caucuses and locals have affiliated to the Fight Back Organization or backed our campaigns and programs. This is one way that industrial workers come forward in the long run to lead the struggles of. all oppressed people, including the fightback of the unemployed .” Miller also pointed out that in the Fight-back chapters as well as in the unions, communists are playing a decisive role in providing political leadership. They ’are organizing, educating and winning more workers to the need to oppose capitalism’ and building broad revolutionary organization among the masses.
“The job of the NFBO,” he added, “is to spread this kind of revolutionary organization, wage concrete battles for concrete demands, and to forge from the struggles of the unemployed a weapon to draw many more thousands of people into the fight against capitalism.”