November 1-8, 1994
Our view of the class struggle negates any possibility of really prolonged and permanent stability of the capitalist system. Marxism breathes the fire of rebellion, not only of the masses but of the productive forces against the private ownership of the means of production.
This is what we have to consider in connection with the Middle East and the growth in militarism by the imperialist bourgeoisie.
We have to put the struggle in Iraq and the struggles by other oppressed countries in the context of the period through which we are passing. It is a period when the passivity of the working class is still a fundamental factor but when the growth of the productive forces is so immense that it is bound to destabilize every social and political organization, not only of the bourgeoisie but of the proletariat as well.
It is a period in which the working class has to arm itself politically. It’s important that when we talk about imperialism or about the struggle of any oppressed country against imperialism, we take into account Lenin’s analysis of it, written in 1916, just a year before the Russian Revolution broke out and two years after World War I had begun.
Unlike the others who analyzed monopoly, he linked it to the class struggle for the proletarian revolution. He saw monopoly as a factor that would lead to the proletarian revolution and not as something that would stifle the class struggle forever or keep the working class from breathing the free air – free in the sense of a class struggle where the workers can participate unhindered.
For the time being the U.S. position in Haiti is stable. The Clinton administration has managed its relations with the DPRK and may possibly agree to stop its now-open, now-secret war against Cuba.
None of this should be regarded as closing all avenues in the anti-imperialist struggle. This is a big planet and class and national struggles go on every day. There will be no lack of opportunities to explain our internationalist position or intervene.
We want to bring the anti-imperialist struggle to the mass of workers. The tendency still exists for a layer of workers in the imperialist center to be conservatized because they benefit from super-profits, but this is narrowing because of the general crisis of capitalism.
Our greatest task is to get the Party combat ready. This is really the essence of our preparatory work.
The Party must be fully aware of what is going on nationally, especially in the cities. More often than not it’s a city-wide struggle that opens up the class struggle nationally.
Clinton is not of the ruling class but staunchly for it. He has less adherence to and contact with the labor movement. He has met the union leadership only on rare occasions. No Democratic president has been so aloof from the labor leadership as Clinton. His only meeting with AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, on Dec. 10, 1993, ended in rancor without even a photo op or a joint statement of the most innocuous character.
In part this is due to the lack of struggle by the trade unions. This is not a criticism but a representation of what is. Both labor leaders and the corporations understand this, each from their own vantage point. Clinton seldom gets attacked for any favoritism to labor. This is most unusual. At times it appears the labor movement and labor leaders don’t exist as far as the administration goes.
It is possible some discussion is going on about what to do next year of Labor Day, whether to make a show of strength of the labor movement. There is also the opportunity of May Day. But if the labor movement is discussing this at all, I am unaware of it. I would appreciate news on this.
Aside from the Caterpillar strike, there have been few overt manifestations of the class struggle as such. What does it all mean?
It means this is a period of preparation. The rate of exploitation is increasing, particularly for women and immigrant and Third World workers. These subterranean forces are bound to come to the surface. Class antagonisms will sharpen.
The greatest mistake we could make is to disregard all this and regard the present period of preparation as the normal and permanent condition of the workers. No, it is a passing phase. A larger struggle is being prepared by more and more intense exploitation. A larger and larger part of what normally goes for the maintenance of the working class is going into the coffers of the bourgeoisie, as surplus value, as super profits.
A number of bourgeois economists have pointed this out. From their own point of view, they have shown the insatiable character of monopoly capitalism.
But they don’t show the inevitable result: a break-up of the class peace.
Nothing would be worse for the Party than to be confronted with opportunities to engage in new class battles and not have the wherewithal to sustain them – to have to make further reductions in staff just when we would want to put organizers back on full time.
We must take our analysis of the developing situation very seriously. Otherwise we will be cause completely by surprise. And there is nothing worse for a Party which has anticipated the development of the class struggle and analyzed its driving forces than to find when the opportune time arrives that it is unable to participate because of its financial situation.
When the great economic crash hit in 1929, the more militant unions were weaker than the conservative and reactionary AFL bureaucracy. As soon as an upsurge started, as soon as it was possible to organize the unorganized, the first question always was, who had the financial wherewithal to commence the struggle?
The unions that had saved considerable funds, such as the ILGWU and the ACWU, had a financial advantage over the left and revolutionary unions, even though the latter were capable of intervening more aggressively than the conservative unions.
What is said about unions applies with equal force to the political organizations of workers. The CP and what was then the SWP were weak. The situation in Minneapolis, where the SWP was strong in the unions, was an exception.
Our entire problem is how to prepare for the next period so we won’t be caught by surprise, won’t be caught without shelter in a period of storm and stress.
We must have confidence in the future. It will not be a continuation of the present trend of growth in the capitalist economy. Even if there is further growth, decline is inevitable. The only question that concerns the bourgeoisie now is when the decline will begin.
We have to consider the same thing, but from a working-class point of view. It requires not only preparation but patience.
The basic means of production are all in the hands of one class, the bourgeoisie. They monopolize the means of production.
For a number of years in the U.S., the theory prevailed that more and more workers would eventually purchase stock in the companies where the worked until, through a gradual process, the workers would become the de facto owners of the corporations.
But real ownership is still in the hands of the same relatively few big monopolies who had it 50 to 60 years ago.
Take automobile production, which involved hundreds of thousands of workers. Many millions of workers might own stock in this or than automobile company through pension funds and so on. However, these small shareholders don’t make the decisions. They either sell or in one form or another assign their ownership to others – usually to banks or bigger shareholders.
At any one moment, the decision-making and the ownership are in the hands of a very few people. These people may be the Board of Directors. But this Board of Directors may only be servants for those who really own the biggest and most important share of auto production.
Statistics will demonstrate that the most significant decisions in auto production, relating to ownership, are confined to a relatively few people who either act as proxies for the owners or are themselves owners.
The dispersal of stock ownership into the hands of millions of stockholders does not stop the concentration of wealth by fewer and fewer big owners – the capitalist class.
Every so often bourgeois economists write extensively to demonstrate the widening gap between those who really make up “corporate America” and the millions of individual owners of corporate stock.
Few of the latter have any say over how corporations should be run. That is a closely guarded secret between the corporate directors and the banks and insurance companies.
When a big company goes bankrupt, the small shareholders lose out most. The bankruptcy courts and bankruptcy laws favor a reconstitution of the bankrupt company in such a way that the small shareholders are usually disenfranchised or given minimal financial consideration.
At the very dawn of the capitalist system, a bankrupt company would hold the chief stockholder and partner or partners personally liable. If a ship was lost at sea, the owner would be responsible for the debts incurred. All his or her personal property would be sold at auction to make good for the loss of the ship or other debts.
But corporate law, which was developed early in the capitalist system, fundamentally changed that. The owners are liable only in a limited way for the properties involved, notwithstanding Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”
Vast literature on all this unabashedly demonstrates the truth – which Marxists have known all along – that capitalism, whether in a period of prosperity or one of decline, continually concentrates property into few and fewer hands.
Some say Iraq has more oil underground than other countries in the world, including Saudi Arabia. Whether this is accurate or not, the theoretical question it poses is whether the ownership of this or that very important commodity makes a particular country rich, far above the others. We should first consider this in terms of Marxist economics.
Does the fact that Iraq may own the greatest share of oil in the Middle East, or even in the world, necessarily make it rich? Does gold make South Africa rich?
Gold and oil are both commodities. Both have a use value and an exchange value.
Of course, these are vast riches that can improve life and the standard of living of the workers and peasants. They should be owned by the people who till the soil and work the oil fields.
But in capitalist society, these riches are commodities whose role as use values can only be realized if they bring a profitable price on the market. Unless they can be sold, they lose their value to the owners. And even when they are sold, they are subject to price fluctuations. If the market is glutted with oil or gold, the countries involved are unable to utilize these vast riches to enrich the lives of the masses.
In a socialist society, whatever is produced is for the use of the people. But in an capitalist economy, everything is produced for the market.
A basic characteristic of imperialism is the dependence of the raw-material-producing countries on the highly industrialized imperialist countries for the sale of their products. The raw-material countries have shown no ability to organize against the imperialist countries. All efforts to build various cartels or agreements have been short lived and have met the opposition of the imperialist countries politically and economically.
So notwithstanding the vastness of the riches in the raw-material-producing countries, they are in an inferior position until they become highly industrialized. Under imperialism, this is a distant perspective.
One of the means by which the imperialists are able to thwart the efforts of the oppressed countries is through the control of the world financial markets, to the extent that they can be controlled. The raw-material-producing countries are forced to deposit their funds in the big imperialist banks. However unstable these may be, they are more stable than any established by the oppressed countries themselves.
What is the objective situation in the country? We have to return to our roots. What are the Party’s roots? Basically that of a proletarian party.
The very first document upon which we constituted the Party was based upon orienting ourselves to the proletariat, to the workers and the most oppressed. Our criticism of the SWP was mostly directed to that.
The Party has engaged in and initiated many class struggle of the workers and against racism since then. More recently, however – and not for the worse – our work focused on support of the anti-imperialist struggle. A very good, very progressive, and very revolutionary decision. But that is only one aspect in the building of a proletarian party. It’s quite natural. But building an anti-imperialist support organization is not necessarily building a proletarian party.
Marx and Engels tried very hard to develop a proletarian party. They didn’t always succeed. The party they tried to build veered in the direction of bourgeois reformism. Only important leaders and sections of it adhered to a revolutionary program for the overthrow of capitalism.
The strongest parties were in Germany and France. They were great working-class organizations; nevertheless, they could not fully embrace a thoroughgoing Marxist position. However, they were exemplary for the whole world at the time.
Our work, commendable and necessary as it is, is only part of a proletarian program. It leaves out what’s happening in the broad working class. It leaves out 90% of the Black and Latin masses. You see, objective situations determine the character of our work.
If you work in an office with six or seven people and they get pretty good pay, you can talk all you want about building the proletarian nucleus over there, but it is not the place to be. The mode of thinking of well-paid salaried workers differs fundamentally from those who work in the factories, or low-paid workers in offices, laundries and other places. And there are millions of them. Thus far they have been beyond our reach.
I’ve often said that when I get up in the morning and go outside, I see this tremendous mass of young workers going into the factories over here. Our Party doesn’t even – and I don’t criticize it – distribute our literature there. Maybe we couldn’t do it.
But there’s nothing so distasteful as to ponder the thought that we can’t change the direction of the work we’re involved in. Our Party has something no other party has: a fully Marxist approach on all fundamental questions. We can always correct our mistakes or make changes in direction. We do not own allegiance to any other organization. We are not dependent on friends whom, if we broke with them, it would mean a great deal. We are free to examine and re-examine our situation in the light of the upcoming situation.
At the moment our work is Cuba, Haiti and other issues, but they may be shortly resolved. Cuba may reach an agreement with the U.S., which under the circumstances may be the best thing they can get at the present time. The situation may quiet down there. And it’s the same with Haiti – unless the youth view the U.S. intervention as violently brutal and so forth, in which case there might be a lot of protest in this country. But it won’t be decisive. And when that happens, there will be sort of a letdown in the movement.
It think it’s very important that we orient the Party towards the working-class movement. I know that most comrades, thinking of a re-orientation towards the working class, ask themselves, what can I do? I work in an office, or in a place where the workers are very backward, not listening to anything meaningful.
That may be true but is not decisive. If you look only at their class origins, Marx and Engels were very removed from the workers. Many leaders in the Bolshevik party, including Trotsky and Lenin himself, were removed from the workers. Very few members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party worked among the workers, except for a handful. And they were exceptional.
The other members of the Central Committee were always worried they might say something to offend the workers on the committee and that would be terrible. Because many of the comrades who had devoted themselves to the proletarian movement were not themselves from the proletariat. And some of the proletarians who came into the party were not necessarily politically motivated towards the proletarian revolution.
As I see it, the Cuba work will take a turn, unless there is an invasion or something. But it can’t be the fundamental content of the Party’s work if we want to be a proletarian party that stretches out to the rest of the class, where there is so much happening in the daily lives of the workers. Even now, if you examine the left Democrats, they’re speaking out on the grievances of the workers and getting themselves elected on that basis.
We started the party on a sound foundation. It was to get away from the petty-bourgeois politics of the CP, which oriented towards the Democratic Party, and the SWP, which oriented towards anti-communism and covered it up by calling it anti-Stalinism. We were also against Stalinism, but 99% of what the SWP said about the Soviet Union and the socialist camp was focused on the reactionary aspects of Stalin’s program, forgetting about the great socialist construction and the destruction of capitalism.
So we first have to talk this out among ourselves. No hurry-up job, or quick results, or doing something that would be rash or ridiculous. And bearing in mind what I said before about the working class, that it is Black and Latin and Native and white, gay and straight, and all the other groups.
If you are with the working class, with the oppressed masses, you don’t have to harp on national oppression and so on. You just have to take care of the grievances of the workers. It is so much easier than talking all about national liberation; you are confronted with it daily in the struggle.
I propose the Party should first have a little bit of discussion on this. There is an inherent unwillingness to get into it because the comrades themselves, as constituted at the present time, are not the basic proletariat of the U.S., they are not representative examples of it. But that’s not necessary. What is necessary is the orientation.
Our original orientation was exactly right, but the anti-imperialist struggle absorbed us. Before Vietnam there was Cuba, and before that there was China. Those struggles consumed the Party’s activities. The Party could not reach out to the broad masses on those questions because the mood was very, very hostile under those circumstances. It still is, but it’s a different situation.
The largest proletariat in the world is in this country. There are more industrial workers here than anywhere else. The bourgeois liberals give a false picture of what’s happening to the movement. They say the proletariat is being siphoned off. The machines take up all the work and the workers are being thrown out. That the development of machinery, particularly high technology, makes the proletariat superfluous. They aren’t needed. But that’s a misinterpretation.
It think we should go over what I wrote on this. High tech changes the character of the proletariat, the people who work, it doesn’t eliminate them. And even if that were true, it doesn’t negate the issue of the oppression and exploitation of the largest mass of the people.
So we have to evaluate the situation. How will the Party, the National Committee, orient the membership on what to do and where to go?
The Caterpillar strike that’s taking place in Illinois is a very big development. Our Party has nothing to do with it. I don’t think the CP or SWP do either.
The character of our Party is totally different from what it was 30 or 35 years ago. The minute that strike broke out, we would have had half the Party running down there. Even though we would have devoted a great deal of attention to the anti-imperialist struggle and the Black struggle.
So we have to go over the real problems of the Party. When we speak of the movement today, we usually mean the anti-war movement. But the real movement is the movement of the working class. The other is a subsidiary of it.
If we had any significant hold in the working class movement, we would naturally have the main hold on the political movement. I could speak more at length on this, but it’s not necessary. Look over the original statement of our Party, and what our objectives were.
At that time, the FBI was very quick to pick up what our program was, and send it down to Washington. It said that Workers World Party is a party “dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of socialism, it promotes the revolutionary class struggle as opposed to petty bourgeois socialism,” and so forth.
The movement of the working class needs us more than ever. The CP, while it may have a great deal in common with us when it comes to program, is really not there. They missed the anti-imperialist struggle. They were not in it, as though it was not part of the proletarian party.
We have to return to our roots, which means to build a proletarian party. We don’t have to hurry the comrades here and there who may not be ready to talk about it yet. We have to wait until there is a conference. That’s when to talk about it.
It’s a serious issue. When the question is whether to take an initiative or when the next demonstration should be, the center can do it on its own. But to go over an orientation is another thing.
Naturally, it depends on the course of capitalist development. A lot is being written on how the proletariat is being mowed down, how it isn’t significant anymore because of the advance of technology and so on. I think a lot of this is answered in our original book on high tech, but we can answer it again.
It is important to find out where the workers are and try to reach them, especially those groups most inclined to listen to us. The mistake usually made in this connection is to see it as an abandonment of political work, so that we become mere trade union functionaries. That is deplorable. Many times parties do forget why they came into the trade unions – to promote the class struggle and socialism, and of course solidarity among the nationalities and the struggle against racism.
We can do it best if we are in the plants rather than outside. But we don’t all have to be in the plants. No party has everyone in the plants. This is a crude way of assessing it. We just have to understand how to approach the workers from the outside.
I see the Watchtower people who give out religious stuff that is so ridiculous in this age. But by the very fact that they stand out there in the cold and rain, they attract attention. Some think they must be doing good things, look how they sacrifice. We’re not much involved in that. We haven’t got the forces.
But we have to modify our modus vivendi. Communists can create miracles. Look at the revolutions that have taken place. They were mostly the result of Marxist elements. And even where they weren’t, it was because Marxists were behind and not in front. So again, this is just food for thought. All this work on anti-imperialism is of exceptional importance. We’ve made a great contribution, and will continue to do so. But things are not the same as before.
The U.S. is not in a position to send out military forces blindly, or attack here and there. Because they can get what they want now by other means. They admit to having made a mistake in Somalia by sending in forces and being defeated. But the Somalis will eventually have to try to make some arrangement with the U.S. to get food and commodities moving in. Both sides have to compromise to some extent.
The most important thing is that none of these important developments elsewhere would have the same meaning if the workers here were led by a workers’ party and directed to political struggle. And this is what we have to do.
We are the only political party that can change its political direction and retain our revolutionary position at the same time. We’re not afraid to change course, fearing lethargy or that the rank and file will not support us. They will if it is very carefully explained over a period of time.
I’ll walk back to 11th Avenue one of these days and will see a lot of comrades out there, a lot of comrades doing the work, agitating, propagandizing.
The Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) was a government investigating committee established by Congress toward the end of the Depression to look into the financial and business practices of the major U.S. corporations. It was a very important committee with broad investigative powers, including the right of subpoena. It was therefore in a position to reveal who actually owns the basic elements of U.S. industry and finance.
The committee was a so-called bipartisan grouping but was dominated by liberal congresspeople. Rep. Wright Patman of Texas was the chair. It held out the promise of revealing not just who owned what, but the real inter-connections between the corporations and the banks.
It was a remarkable endeavor by a small group of congresspeople to uncover the vast array of networks that are the material basis for the political rule of the monopolies. It need scarcely be added that the committee was accused of muckraking and abusing its power by invading the privacy of business operations that did not have public significance. But while it was castigated by some elements of the ruling class as anti-big business and unduly critical of Wall Street, there was no attempt to hamper the committee in its investigations.
It did bring forth a great deal of material that substantiated the basic concepts of imperialism as expounded by Lenin insofar as the concentration of capital was concerned.
The big question was how to utilize the findings of the committee and make them available to the unions, which sorely needed them in the struggle with the corporations.
The unions had scarcely begun to utilize this vast array of information when the imperialist war began. It lasted from 1939 to 1945 – the U.S. got into it in 1941. As a result, many of the hidden operations of the big corporations were never revealed. The doors were soon closed tight, never to be reopened again.
Now, more than a half century later, there has been no follow-up by any congressional committee to unearth the really significant trends in capitalist industry and finance, let alone the relationship of the financial-industrial groups, the monopolies, to each other.
Some work was done in the 1940s and 1960s by Ferdinand Lundberg (“America’s 60 Families” and “The Rich and the Super-Rich”) but it did not really throw new light on what concerns us – the interrelations among the monopoly groups and their growing role in intensifying the exploitation of the working class.
Some may say that all this is good and fine to know but is it really necessary? It is.
You know, the employers maintain dossiers not only on the big unions and leaders and grouping within the unions but on thousands of individuals. The employers have access to the FBI files through the medium of dummy public organizations which in reality are instruments of the large corporations but whose ties are hidden.
At the present time not a single Congressional committee shows any inclination to demand an opening of the files of giant corporations to show what they are really doing.
It is not that we expect capitalist politicians to do this, but it is good to know that these capitalist politicians do have political authority when it comes to investigations. This is important, for example, in cases like the long and bitter Caterpillar strike. This ruthless and brazen attempt to crush the workers cries out for an investigation of the company’s tactics. It should attract not only interest but the strongest public condemnation by sister unions and progressive organizations in general.
All this is by way of showing that important economic struggles by the union movement have a strong complementary political character.
The worst of all illusions by union leaders in the contemporary phase of capitalist development is to believe that they can successfully conduct a long strike against a major corporation without it having a broad political aspect.
Even 100 years ago it was becoming evident, especially among the more advanced union leaders both in Europe and the U.S., that a purely economic struggle against the corporations was outdated. The sad situation of U.S. labor during all these years was personified by William F. Green, a leader of the AFL who said that “Our policy should not be to involve ourselves in politics but to content ourselves with supporting those who favor labor and opposing those who are against it.”
With such an inane policy he wrote off the immensely and absolutely indispensable role of the unions to publicly engage in independent class politics, rather than become hangers-on or minions in the hands of ruthless capitalist politicians.
All this has to be remembered in connection with significant recent strikes – for example, Caterpillar, Phelps Dodge, the airline strikes and Greyhound. And there were all too many other strike struggles that the capitalist press refused to publicize and in which the unions’ meager funds and small membership made it impossible for them to reach out.
The Caterpillar case is an example of what happens when one of the strongest multinational corporations goes beyond what the capitalist state itself finds necessary. The UAW has filed 77 unfair labor practice charges against Caterpillar. The NLRB has upheld 40 of them. Caterpillar is refusing to change its practice and is appealing. This could take years and eventually wind up in the courts.
The fact that the Caterpillar Co. may ultimately be punished by the capitalist state in court proceedings does not invalidate the fact that the capitalist state is overall the generator of monopolies, especially in the imperialist epoch. No small part of this is done with an eye toward international connections with the world market and how to capture its most lucrative parts.
It should be remembered that the government, by law, keeps records on how many strikes take place. It does this as part of its so-called effort to be even-handed between labor and capital But the Reagan administration changed this and stopped counting what it called smaller strikes.
The coordinated effort by the AFL-CIO to make regular reports on the condition of the labor movement and on its struggles, aside from reporting the results of union elections, is significant but needs more input from the local unions. All this could cost a great deal of money. Information gathering is an important vehicle for conducting the struggle and the government should make it accessible free of charge.
Instead, only private companies conduct surveys. The unions may become subscribers by paying fees to them.
Strikes in countries other than the U.S. in which U.S. interests are very much involved also have a significant impact, but they are rarely alluded to in the capitalist press. It is a big question whether the unions’ international connections have been helpful, even though they surely could have been.
It is not to be forgotten that for decades, the international connections of the AFL-CIO have been to assist the CIA in its struggle against communism. Much of the great influence of the French and Italian labor movements may have turned in a completely revolutionary direction had it not been for the obstruction and thoroughly counterrevolutionary role the AFL-CIO international section played in Europe.
The capitalist governments long ago established the International Labor Organization (ILO) to deal with these very important matters. It is strictly a company organizations; the union movement has to fight it, not collaborate with it.
A great deal of misinformation regularly gets published in the capitalist press regarding the diminishing role of the working class. This has been a canard of the capitalist press ever since the working class became powerful with the 1848 revolutions. The working class showed then for the first time that it could participate in politics as an independent force, even when capitalist industry was still in its infancy, when the bourgeoisie itself was not yet fully in control of the political system because of the remnants of feudalism in Europe.
Their claim of the diminishing role of the working class is supposed to show that the Marxist theory of the class struggle is not valid because the working class is shrinking while the middle class is supposedly growing. But this is a fallacy.
The role of the working class in capitalist society cannot be measured merely in terms of numbers but by virtue of its strategic position in society. Nothing moves without the workers.
Tens if not hundreds of bourgeois theses cannot ignore this most salient and undeniable fact. Instead of a narrow definition of workers, meaning only those involved in capitalist manufacturing as such, we have to correctly estimate the role of the working class in the operations of the capitalist system as a whole. There are dozens and dozens of industries which employ workers to do all sorts of jobs from clerical to maintenance, sanitation, to repair of the operations of the system.
If confined to the narrow definition of the working class, of only those directly involved in capitalist production, the working class may decline numerically. It was Marx himself who first pointed this out. But he did not stop there. He also pointed out that by virtue of the same process, the capitalist class was made altogether superfluous. Why is this never brought up by the bourgeois economists, all their writers, thinkers and apologists?
It is interesting to note how the bourgeoisie today confuses the basic scientific analysis it adhered to when it was a young class struggling against feudalism. Take, for example, a book by Robert D. Reich called “The Work of Nations.” (Vintage Press, 1992) Reich in now the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration.
His title is a takeoff of Adam Smith’s classic work “The Wealth of Nations.” Reich’s is supposed to be an improvement. But really it is a denigration of Smith’s contribution. Whereas Adam Smith called attention to tendencies of capitalist development, Reich confuses everything. Whereas Smith described, in its embryonic form, the development of capitalism, Reich by his ostentatious effort to be clever covers up what should be brought out very clearly.
What Reich cannot avoid dealing with in discussing wealth is the products of the wage workers. But instead of clearly stating the role of the working class, Reich lumps it together with the capitalist class and the middle class, since according to him they all work for a living.
But workers produce everything. It is the working class and not the capitalist class that produces the things that not only make life bearable but make it possible to advance from one stage of development to another.
There is absolutely nothing new in his book which has not been said by others a thousand times and in a more interesting way. But it has this merit – for those who are acquainted with theses written in the universities and what their objective really is, or at least a good portion of it. They are written in order to get credentials for a job! And in this Robert Reich is really up to the mark. It is the kind of book that an incumbent Democratic administration really appreciates.
And so Reich’s thesis was something that the Clinton administration could well approve and has earned him the job of Secretary of Labor. Knowing this is paramount – the rest of the book can be completely disregarded.
The truly important bourgeois analyses, at least of current developments in the capitalist economy, are written by economists employed by the banks and insurance companies. Their work is circulated privately – for a hefty fee, of course.
The Nobel Prize in economics is regularly given to capitalist economists who write the most edifying nonsense about the system. On the other hand, there is also a grouping whose job it is to define trends in the capitalist economy objectively, but written in such a way as to avoid destructive conclusions.
In the period since the October Revolution, one of the principal tasks of bourgeois economists in general, and of capitalist government economists in particular, was to find ways of rewarding those economists who would paint the capitalist system in rosy colors and denigrate everything that was established in the Soviet Union. They never for a moment brought out that the establishment of working class rule in Russia made it the second largest economy in the world in a couple of decades, covering ground which had taken capitalism a couple of centuries.
Over the years many groups – the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party and others – have been trying to reach the working class. It is not true that these parties are not concerned with reaching workers. They are, but it is a relative factor with them.
It is a more urgent one for us. But it won’t do much good to get into a frenzy about going to the workers. We can slowly build on what we have. From small acorns grow mighty oaks. This may be a cliché but it is nevertheless true.
It is not only that we have more perseverance, but that our revolutionary program makes it more indispensable for us. We should never get into a position where in the course of promoting the workers’ struggle we deliberately neglect the progressive elements in capitalist society. The workers’ movement everywhere is started either by advanced workers or intellectuals. Our job is to orient toward the working class slowly, but surely, as an integral process of the development of the Party. It is different from getting involved with this or that initiative.
There are fundamental differences between the way a Marxist or communist views the shop struggle and the way it is viewed by an ordinary worker in the present era who is unacquainted with the Marxist approach. The difference between the way a communist negotiates with a company or an individual supervisor and the way an ordinary trade union worker views it who also is unacquainted with Marxist conceptions of the class struggle is of a fundamental character.
The ordinary worker in a shop is taught to view an individual grievance against a company as accidental or incidental to the maintenance of production, harmony and a good relationship between the company and the union, between the bosses and the workers.
A trained communist worker, on the other hand, views each and every individual grievance as part of the general struggle not only against the company but against capitalism.
It does not mean, as a bourgeois-thinking trade unionist would charge, that communists subvert the negotiating process to suit communist ends. On the contrary, communists are just as careful, and even more so, not to provoke a struggle that is unnecessary and unjustified in the sense that it will antagonize other workers.
Rather it means viewing every grievance as a manifestation of the class struggle. The bourgeois trade unionist teaches the workers to minimize the significance of the grievance in the interest of a “higher cause” – good relations between capital and labor. Communists do not deliberately put themselves in a position where they are opposed to “good relations.” But communists must explain tirelessly, and relentlessly, that “good relations,” such as they may be, are the products of a struggle – sometimes earned by many weeks on the picket line or even incarceration in prison.
The idea of maintaining “good relations” is of the essence of class collaboration and negates the character of the class struggle. No matter how friendly or considerate a company may be, it does not obviate, even for one moment, the process of subjugating the workers to the need for super profits by the company. How could a company be so ruthless as to suddenly shut its plant without notice on Dec. 24? Yet this has been done time and again, notwithstanding that some plant managers may not be able to find their way home after being “thanked” by the workers.
But pouring out the anger of the workers against local management is too often an agreeable form of negating the general struggle of the workers against corporate monopolies, big business and the capitalist class.
All the teachings of Marxism are verified in the struggle between the workers and bosses, not only on a grand scale in huge strikes and insurrections but also in the myriad of struggles that take place day in and day out.
It is a struggle first and foremost of the bosses to extract from the workers every minute of time and ounce of energy of the working day. Stretching the working day by extending the time the workers are exploited is no longer easy, the way it used to be, especially in light of the constant revolution in the means of production. But the extraction from the workers of more energy expended in production grows relentlessly.
What has to be explained above everything else is that the antagonisms between capital and labor should not rotate around mere grievances of the working class related to specific conditions of work or pay. The current means of production, which have grown fabulously in the last few decades, as well as the means of production built up centuries ago are the social property of the workers.
That their ownership is still in the hands of the employers has to be explained as a passing phenomenon, in the same way that chattel slavery existed for such a long and enduring period, including in the U.S. It was nevertheless a transitory era.
The present epoch, in which the means of production is still monopolized by an ever-shrinking group of virtually omnipotent industrialists and financial magnates, is also a transitory historical phenomenon. This contradiction between the private, individual ownership of the means of production and the collective process of production will be resolved on the basis of returning the ownership of the means of production to the class that produced the material wealth of society in the first place.
As long ago as when Marx wrote “Wage Labor and Capital,” the competition among the workers for jobs was discussed. This competition was much exaggerated by the bourgeoisie, who made it appear that the competition among workers would overwhelm any tendency towards organization and the cementing of working class solidarity.
One of Marx’s greatest contributions was not only recognizing this question but proposing ways and means to overcome it. Marx became one of the principal founders of the First International with this in mind. It became a fundamental influence in overcoming national and craft divisions in the interest of working class solidarity.
The slogan “Workers of the world unite!” arose from this urgent need to overcome the artificial divisions which are part and parcel of capitalist industry.
The immigration struggle has to be put in the context of this Marxist concept. Any attempt to avoid it or water it down is impermissible for a revolutionary party.
Last updated: 11 May 2026