Workers World, Vol. 13, No. 3
This is part one of a speech given by Workers World Party Chairman Sam Marcy at a recent forum held at the New Yorker hotel.
Comrades and friends, the topic for tonight is the resurgence of the class struggle in America and the crisis of U.S. imperialism.
The phrase “class struggle” has for some time been a forbidden phrase in America. It almost seemed as though “class struggle” was expunged from the language of the American workers. However, we are seeing today that it is possible to erase the words from the language of the working class for a while, but it is impossible to avoid the hard fact that the class struggle in America is very much alive.
Fifteen years ago, at the very height of the McCarthy period in the U.S., at a convention of the Paper Hangers Union of America, the leadership suddenly became terror-stricken. Someone had discovered in their constitution the sentence, “The workers must prosecute the class struggle to the end.”
The union bureaucrats were so panic stricken that they quickly took that forbidden idea out of the constitution. You can expunge the class struggle from a constitution, but you cannot expunge it from contemporary life in America or anywhere else on the face of the earth.
The paper hangers themselves learned just a year later that the class struggle was indeed alive when two dozen of them were indicted for organizing wildcats. That in itself showed even these conservative workers that such words as the class struggle had great significance.
To begin our discussion of the resurgence of the class struggle in America, we should first of all refresh our memories of what the words actually mean. I know that the word imperialism has already been widely used, particularly by the revolutionary youth. And even the word violence is widely accepted in the movement today. But the words class struggle; that you don’t hear so much!
It is often said that Karl Marx discovered the class struggle. But Marx emphatically denied that. In a letter to a friend who had asked him that question, he replied that he had not discovered the class struggle. Bourgeois historians had known about the class struggle for years. Some of them had even described class battles before. What I’ve contributed, Marx said, was to show that the class struggle rotates around the axis of exploitation, that the wealth of society rests upon those who work.
The whole struggle, since the dawn of private property, has been between the class which owns the property and the propertyless class. Those who own all the wealth of society exploit the poor so that they can live in idleness and power. The whole struggle is over how the idle rich can utilize the fruits of exploitation to extend their wealth and power – political and social power. Furthermore, Marx said, this exploitation of one class by another has gone through a series of historical periods, at least 3,000 years old.
First there was slavery, the chattel slavery of ancient times, on an almost universal scale; then there was feudalism, which was in turn replaced by capitalism. All the political struggles, all the art, all the literature and the religions were rooted in the fact than one ruling class extracted to the absolute maximum whatever they could from the slave class.
That which is unpaid labor – what the property owners keep for themselves from the labor power of the slave, serf or workers – over and above what is necessary to maintain the subject class, that is what the class struggle is about. In the era of slavery, it was a struggle to get the surplus out of the slaves, as it was in America, not too long ago. The struggle of the feudal lords against the serfs was to get as much unpaid labor as they could out of them.
It was Marx who discovered that the modern capitalist system has only simplified the character of the exploitation by the ruling class. He taught us that the quintessence of the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class is over the unpaid labor of the workers that the bosses pocket as profits.
All the workers – Black, white, Brown, Red, of all nationalities, all over the world – they are the only ones who produce. They produce all the wealth of society; nothing runs without them. All of history has been the history of how the ruling classes have stolen the fruits of their labor. That is what the class struggle is all about.
Marx’s monumental contribution to the workers and oppressed everywhere was his discovery that we have finally reached a point where this long and cruel epoch of the class struggle is going to give way to the dictatorship of the proletariat. He predicted that proletarian revolution would abolish the very class struggle he studied so profoundly. This was the contribution that Marx made, after learning from the bourgeois historians that the class struggle existed.
When we talk about the class struggle in the U.S. today we must first of all recognize that the American working class is not conscious of its struggle; it is not conscious of its class position in society; it is not even conscious of its destiny.
The task of Marxism is to bring consciousness to the working class. Marxists must teach the workers it is their historic role to abolish the class struggle once and for all. This kind of class consciousness is a scientific concept and must be brought to the workers.
To do this we must fight the incessant indoctrination of the workers by the bosses that the struggles of the workers in the various plants are not class struggles. Strikes are looked up as merely struggles between an individual employer and the employees rather than as battles between two giant class camps. It is only the ideology of the ruling class that has made that kind of false thinking into an article of religious faith in this country.
In the epoch of imperialism, however, social crises will bring the class struggle into sharper relief. We are already seeing it happen here. With the development of a furious offensive in the imperialist war against the Indochinese people and the inability of the U.S. ruling class to get out of the domestic crises (unemployment, inflation, poverty), the class antagonisms are sharpening, becoming clearer every day.
Out of sheer self-defense, Black and white and Puerto Rican workers will unite in the struggle against imperialism. The fact that three and a half million workers went out on strike last year for the first time in many years, in sporadic strikes against the will of their backward leaders, is a harbinger of things to come.
It has been said that the class struggle is dead. But throughout history the class struggle has subsided and then suddenly emerged again. Sometimes the workers are passive; at other times they strike out boldly against their exploiters. But the important thing to remember is that it isn’t temperament that decides the character of the class struggle; it isn’t even the willingness to fight that decides.
The character of the struggle is determined by production relations. It is determined by the absolutely insatiable demand of monopoly capitalism to suck the blood of every worker. The workers may at times be submissive or even downright servile, but the irresistible urge of the bosses to get more profits continues. The squeeze must show up somewhere.
That is what we are facing in America. Our party has no illusions that the workers are going to come to us right away. It requires a kind of new beginning for a revolutionary organization to view the workers in the light of the fact that they have finished a period of passivity.
All the old passive leaders, the dead hand of the past, are going to be removed. And the bosses, who have banked upon the American working class as the one rock upon which they will be able to maintain themselves in the struggle for foreign colonization and mass genocide, the bosses will find that this giant social mainstay is no longer reliable, is no longer stable and is no longer passive!
The workers are beginning to fight back not because of any psychological processes, not because of any moralizing and not even because of revolutionary propaganda, but because of the imperious necessities of life. Marx taught that in the final analysis the economic struggle is basic. No matter how deep it may be buried for a while, it would have to break out on the surface sooner or later. Economic facts, in the long run, determine everything. In that sense, Marxism is truer today than it ever was.
It would have been impossible for me to open up any discussion on the resurgence of the American labor movement without first stating the fundamental postulates of the Marxist outlook on this question. There could be nothing so false as a talk which covered a series of strike struggles without explaining the underlying forces that made them.
The Nixon administration, with all its talk about halting inflation, stopping unemployment, with all the demagogy about law and order and all the vile appeals to racism, has not been able to do one thing – it couldn’t prevent the cost of living from rising. That is a blunt and brutal fact of life. Today it was announced that the cost of living rose another five and a half percent. This means that since Nixon has been in power there has been an 11 percent increase in the cost of living. That Nixon couldn’t stop. No demagogy could stop that. And leaflets to the workers have more meaning now than ever before because of that simple fact.
Capitalism has help us because capitalism is the grave digger of its own system!
Now let’s go over some of the current struggles that we have witnessed in the light of their significance to the class struggle in American today. Let’s begin with one that is perhaps removed from the audience, one that got little attention because it was small and of such short duration – the railroad strike.
Why was the railroad strike significant? Was it the amount of money that the workers won or did not win? No. What was important was that the workers defied the government, even if it was only for eighteen hours! That alone marks an all time record for the conservative railroad workers’ union. The strike lasted only 18 hours or so, but the fact that the workers stood up to the court injunction imposed on them made the railroad barons tremble.
Why couldn’t the workers continue their strike? They couldn’t continue it without preparing the entire working class for a struggle against the whole capitalist class. The railroad workers didn’t come up against Nixon and the railroad barons alone. They came up against the whole capitalist state machinery, concentrated in the form of a single judge. That judge said to the union, hand over $200,000 of your treasury every day that you stay out. And it seems the judge meant it.
Naturally, the union bureaucracy was at a loss. They could not fight this fight because they were unprepared for a class struggle. That’s what it would have been.
The total bankruptcy of the union mis-leaders today leaves the door open for revolutionary youth and class conscious workers to go to the railroad workers and explain that such struggles have to be fought on a class basis. Only Marxists can explain that to the railroad workers, not the labor leaders who are in power now. The United States ruling class has the most advanced technical machinery at its disposal. Yet the workers are saddled with the most ancient, dilapidated and encrusted labor leadership, a leadership unable to move against monopoly capitalism, unable to fight these giants of modern industry with modern weapons.
Just the fact that the workers went out, however, raises possibilities for revolutionaries to intervene. The workers didn’t get what they wanted. This will force them to look around, to discuss more and more what tactics will help them in their struggle, because the cost of living is not going to go down; it’s going to go up. The war is not going to stop; it’s going to continue. This makes it inevitable that the workers will be looking for new solutions.
(Next issue, Part II will include an analysis of the telephone workers’ strike, arbitration and the relation of white workers to Black workers’ struggles.)
G.B.’s note: The promised continuation did not appear in the following issue. It doesn’t appear to have been published afterward.
Last updated: 11 May 2026