For American communists, and all other working-class organizers around the globe, leading unemployed revolts is a major upcoming duty. When we start doing this, we’ll be able to return America’s workers movement to the relevance it had before the late 20th century’s great capitalist offensive. In its efforts to stop such new working-class gains, the establishment has been attacking everyone with left-wing or anti-imperialist positions, including reformists like Hasan Piker. We must maintain focus throughout all of these assaults, making our organizational tasks the foremost priority next to defending ourselves. And a critical one of these tasks right now is providing leadership for the next revolts by the declassed workers.
If we take on this role, we’ll be able to re-create the kind of mass militancy that emerged among the unemployed during the Great Depression. As William Z. Foster described, this was a level of organization that the state couldn’t put down simply through police power, because the numbers and the discipline were too great:
As the first hunger march went along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House (and later to the A.F. of L. building) to lay its demands before Hoover (and [AFL president William] Green) the parade was flanked on both sides by rows of marching policemen who outnumbered the hunger marchers by at least two to one. The Party concentrated its entire forces upon making these national marches successful. The manifold activities of the Unemployed Councils, besides making a burning national issue of unemployment insurance, also resulted in securing many immediate relief concessions to the unemployed all over the country. The frightened capitalist class saw that the old game of letting the workers starve it out during economic crises would no longer work. They were dealing with an awakening working class, one which in the next few years would write some epic labor history.
It’s these kinds of missions that the party’s ranks need to set ourselves upon. They’re exactly what our enemies have been trying to distract us from; when we aren’t impacted by this psychological type of policing, we can stay on the path to overwhelming the actual repressive apparatus.
There are other problems we’ll need to overcome before we can reach such an advanced stage, the main one being lack of funding and resources. We can’t fix this until we get more allies with money, which will require more time; but what we can do now is train the members we already have. And something we must equip our ranks for is giving assistance to the victims of our engineered economic collapse. Irene North described how the old CP did this:
The most advanced members of the unemployment councils took on the special administrative tasks in the neighborhood or city. More often than not these advanced workers were or became members of the Party. This work took on the form of gathering and disbursing food, organizing and maintaining close contact with new unemployment committees and councils, organizing rent eviction, mortgage foreclosure, and gas and light resistance, demanding free lunch service in the schools, registering the unemployed in trade unions, and fighting the, “misleadership” of the unemployment movement on the part of the AFL, Socialist Party, Musteites, etc. The Councils took pains to especially defend the interests of minority races, as they suffered the worst because of discrimination.
Quite often relief for a family in crisis was immediately secured through generous temporary sharing of home and hearth of local Communist cadre. In this and the above mentioned ways many Communists were able to build respect and friendship for the Party through service, thereby underlining the strength of collective action and the failure of government and business in providing for the needs of its citizens. The Party also attempted to raise class consciousness through its technique of protest. Resistance to rent eviction is one good example of how the Party tried to raise the issue of disrespect for the sanctity of private property through its relief work
These were the historic conditions where protests, which these days are often just ineffectual displays by isolated left orgs, could actually multiply the gains of the working-class struggle. The CPUSA, when it was still truly alive, wasn’t isolated from the masses. Its entire justification for existing depended on its community work; without this work, a communist party means nothing to the people.
Today’s American communist movement has made community aid its main endeavor, which gives our ranks experience with mass work that they didn’t have during our movement’s dormant decades. Next we must build on our existing skills and knowledge, studying the works of Foster, Debs, and others who’ve successfully built workers power in America. This will make us better able to give the workers guidance as they inevitably seek out ways to rise up.
I’m saying it’s inevitable that they’ll rise up, not that they’ll win the next battles; whether they do win depends on if they can find a good source of leadership. New revolts by the unemployed are coming, the question is whether they’ll take a form that’s organized or disorganized. Without a cohesive movement, this popular energy will be recaptured by ultra-left trends that are either blindly flailing or opportunistic. We’ll see a growth in the kinds of left groups that devote their entire focus towards protests—usually of a poorly managed and ultraviolent kind—while rejecting the American masses as fundamentally reactionary.
As we go into the spaces where people are gathering to build new working-class organizational strength, no doubt we’ll need to work with many people who hold ultra-leftist beliefs. This is the crowd that you’ll find in organizing. But as we’ve learned with the MAGA base, an ideological tendency’s members can be brought to the right position even if they have severe contradictions. It’s these contradictions that can lead someone to seek out a higher mode of consciousness, because as the problems with their ideology get exposed, there arises a need to make a change in their lives.
Without our intervention, these recruits into the struggle will largely become burnt out and leave, because their efforts will be undermined by the scam artists and toxic leaders within the movement. It’s our duty to go into these circles, and build up a version of organized labor that’s based within the historical lessons we’ve absorbed.
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