The biggest threat facing the working class movement is a willing retreat by the labor and labor-aligned forces. This is apparent from how Shainbaum’s government has hesitated to send assistance to Cuba, out of desire to avoid further punishment from Washington. Of course, this decision didn’t happen in a vacuum; Mexico came to such a fearful mentality after the U.S. bombed Venezuela to kidnap Maduro, and used its sense of impunity over Gaza to drive Cuba into collapse. Something we must understand, though, is that just because Mexico has very good reasons to be intimidated, this doesn’t take away the need for consistent solidarity. And the way we can apply this knowledge to our own organizing work is by becoming more serious in fighting for Cuba; by going beyond past solidarity methods which have proven to be ineffective, and figuring out how to truly harness the power of the working class.
For Cuba, Palestine, and every other solidarity fight, the only path forward is to go into organized labor. And when we know the history of how revolutionary agitation within unions has worked, we know that the reactionary opportunist labor leaders are not ultimately capable of thwarting our progress; not if we think about this fight tactically, and learn how to use the actions of our enemies against them.
As William Z. Foster wrote in 1927, after the financial monopolies had successfully consolidated their control over the unions:
The heads of the unions have degenerated so fast and so far that now in many cases they are little better than Fascist agents, whose function it is to dragoon the working masses into still deeper and more helpless slavery to the employers. As the years proceeded industry became more and more mechanized, the employers, with vastly increased accumulations of capital, constantly combined their forces, industrial, financial, and political. Manifestly the unions should have responded to these capitalistic developments by amalgamating their forces, broadening out to take in the unskilled and by launching a mass labor party. But the Gompers bureaucrats, tools of the employers, bitterly and successfully combatted such tendencies. They disarmed labor in the face of its enemies.
The only way for communists to respond to reactionary sabotage within the unions is by rallying the workers to forge their own path. And we must do so by showing these workers how their leaders have betrayed them, with our agitational work being a crucial catalyst in bringing such problems to the forefront. This was how the Communist Party responded when the actions of the labor reactionaries brought catastrophic consequences, and made the humanitarian crisis of the Great Depression even worse; the Party carried out massive drives among the workers, ones which gave the workers great new power.
The solution is not to create red unions; this is something Foster illustrated copiously throughout his writings about the history of the labor movement, which frequently include stories about idealistic organizers splitting organized labor by setting up dual labor structures. This is also what Lenin conveyed in his warning about how foolish it is to refuse to work in reactionary trade unions: you cannot simply bypass the obstacle which the reactionary labor leaders represent. You have to face this problem unflinchingly, which you can only do by grasping what revolutionary working-class organization really means.
In the case of Cuba, it means building an independent popular resistance force against the blockade; one that gets its recruits in great part from the workers who will become disillusioned and animated by the anti-solidarity actions of their labor leadership. We’ve seen this with Palestine; when the United Auto Workers officials have refused to commit to assisting in the fight against the Gaza genocide, the union’s principled members have responded by publicly confronting them.
When this confrontation happened two years ago, the only reason why Marxist-Leninists and other anti-imperialists couldn’t sufficiently take advantage of it was because we were very far behind in our organizational capacities back then. We still are, but we have made gains. And if we properly navigate this new moment of humanitarian outrage, we’ll build on these gains in a way that changes the balance of power. We’ll be able to offer our recruits work within aid networks for the blockade’s victims, build up the pro-solidarity forces within the unions, and construct independent worker orgs that aren’t red unions but actual revolutionary institutions.
A key lesson we must apply is that union organizing is not enough. This is something that the ultra-left opponents of union involvement understand, but they don’t have a serious answer to the problems we face; to seriously respond to problems like the anti-solidarity union leaders, we have to master the art of worker agitation and org-building. We have to learn how to communicate with the workers in a way that compels them to join with us, and also how to offer them revolutionary work that will actually pay off.
With Cuba in particular, we have a recent history of attempted American solidarity actions that have proven what doesn’t work, and therefore can let us find effective methods. For decades, left orgs like ANSWER have tried to fight the Cuba sanctions by carrying out repetitive demonstrations, which haven’t been successful; not even in preparing the movement for more substantial actions, or building up its support. This comes from a long-running error where modern activists have been trying to re-create the protest energy of the 60s, and we can only escape this error by recognizing which historical factors truly drive social movements forward.
The revolutionary upsurge that America experienced during the 60s was related to a global wave of anti-colonial and worker revolts; revolts that were able to continue gaining victories, and maintain an ongoing legacy, even after the imperialists had launched a worldwide political extermination campaign. At the same time that Washington was implementing the “Jakarta method,” the model of anti-communist mass murder, the Vietnamese people were able to successfully fight back. This doesn’t diminish the holocaust that Washington committed, or negate the need to take our enemy’s violence seriously; it does mean, though, that an international solidarity front is capable of severely wounding the enemy, even when the enemy is at its strongest.
The lesson from this is to not respond to the enemy’s assaults by choosing acquiescence; this is an error that can come in forms which are cloaked within insidious rationalizations. The “protest cage” left has chosen retreat by centering its practice around demonstrations, which is why it’s lost its former relevance. The ultra-left practices, like splitting organized labor or embracing wanton adventurism, push the revolutionary forces into retreat simply by weakening them.
To make true progress in the fight to rescue Cuba—and by extension every other aspect of our fight—we will have to act in tandem with the worldwide popular revolutionary struggles our government seeks to crush. We’ll have to learn from the liberation efforts of the Global South, one of which was articulated by Che Guevara in 1961: “Dark days await Latin America. The latest declarations of those that rule the United States seem to indicate that dark days await the world: Lumumba, savagely assassinated, in the greatness of his martyrdom showed the tragic mistakes that cannot be committed. Once the antiimperialist struggle begins, we must constantly strike hard, where it hurts the most, never retreating, always marching forward, counterstriking against each aggression, always responding to each aggression with even stronger action by the masses.”
How to translate this logic into the Cuba solidarity struggle, or the other fronts that we’re fighting? We can apply it by using the vile hypocrisies of our enemies to make the solidarity front all the stronger. When the Democrats who run the unions forsake Gaza’s people, or Cuba’s people, we have to make the fight against this opportunism into a rallying point. And we can give this rallying point power by tying it to the experiences of the workers in the USA, who are seeing their political class profit off of our civilization’s collapse.
When Che said that he envies U.S. Americans because our fight is inside the heart of the enemy, this was one of the victories he was anticipating: a popular outrage against imperialism that comes from how finance capital is destroying American society, which compels Americans to merge their struggle with those of the world’s other peoples. The more we bring the people into this fight, the more we’ll be able to damage the structures responsible for the blockade; the more we’ll be able to fight back against the petty tyrants who gatekeep labor on capital’s behalf. Their power comes from the people’s lack of power, and we will correct this discrepancy.
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