Is America Ready for a Socialist Revolution?
THE DEPAULIA MAGAZINE
May 16, 1986
Fallout Special Pullout Section
DePaul University, Chicago, IL.
Revolutions are hard to make. Society’s discontent will not just suddenly run out in the streets and destroy everything that’s made their lives seem miserable unless they see no other way to end it. As Andrew Kopkind once wrote: “It is what societies do instead of committing suicide, when the alternatives are exhausted and all the connections that bind men’s lives familiar patterns are cut.” Even then, what takes place afterward is impossible to predict.
In America the attempt to make revolution has been curiously futile. Here—where industrialism advanced more rapidly and extensively than any of the world powers—the working class, a traditional basis for Marxist revolution, has remained virtually dormant to the political realm. True, attempts to organize and defend labor in this country have succeeded much in the unional sense, but have produced little in the way of revolutionary potential.
The reason behind this faltering has plagued revolutionary thinkers for almost fifty years. Some have argued that the American working class has been fragmented by racial and ethnic diversity, and that because of this, a sense of common identity never fully existed and the potential for revolution had been kept at a minimum.
Others have said that the image of the American frontier, which has manifested itself so completely in the American consciousness today, is a powerful enough illusion by which the establishment of a broad-based labor party was thwarted. And still others have simply felt that the revolution missed its chance, that it had been curtailed by arbitrary events in history during the important early stages of growth and had been stunted for life.
Yet elements of radical transformation do exist on a small scale in the United States. Throughout the years, organizations have risen and declined as often as the economic cycles they sought to alter. The socialists, in particular, were said to have reached their high water mark in 1912 when six percent of the presidential vote fell to the democratic socialist candidate Eugene Debs, followed by a period of decline, another upsurge during the great NRA sit down strikes of 1933-37, which brought about the unionization of auto labor and the emergence of the Socialist Worker’s Party, stagnation during World War II, repression during the Cold War and renewed interest in the 1960’s when the denouncement of the Vietnam War was its central theme.
Now, in the mid-half of this decade, the future for the Socialist movement and the radical left is again beginning to show signs of improvement. Steven Bloodworth, a worker in the garment industry and member of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), a youth organizational think-tank with ties to the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), sees conditions for this developing on several fronts.
In the trade union movement, he said a renewed spread of anti-union activity by many U.S. companies has caused some unions to become more militant. Specifically, Bloodworth refers to the meat packer’s strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota. The workers there, members of the United Food and Commercial Worker’s Local P-9, have been engaged in an eight month old battle with plant officials over the initial nonnegotiated slash in wages. Later, the wages were raised slightly but the company refused to restore them to their previous level.
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“the cops got frustrated and started roughing people and tossing tear gas. The workers tossed some of the tear gas cannisters back at the cops. They fought back.”
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The company also attempted to impose limits on the worker’s grievance system and called for the right to punish injured workers. A court injuction limiting strike activity was issued in December, and in January over 500 workers were fired for striking at two Hormel sister plants. Workers striking at the Austin plant, however, solidly kept to their demands.
A few weeks ago, Bloodworth and members of the Chicago chapter of the YSA, along with other political groups from around the nation, assembled at the Austin plant for a weekend of solidarity and protest in support of P-9. The event erupted into violence when police attempted to disperse the picketing workers. Bloodworth described the violence: “The cops tried to arrest people and the strikers have this tactic of sort of a tug of war where the cops grab the workers and pick at them—they have no right to arrest because it’s a legal right to picket unless the courts rule pickets illegal, which they practically have done in Austin—and they pull them back from the cops they won’t let them get arrested. Well this went on for awhile until the cops got frustrated and started roughing people and tossing tear gas. The workers tossed some of the tear gas canisters back at the cops. They fought back. But the violence generally comes from the police around the picket line, as it does in South Africa or anywhere else.”
The role of the courts in the Hormel strike has been questionable, said Cathleen Gutekanst, a welder and another member of the YSA who attended the Austin rally. She exemplified this by describing an incident involving a woman who had telephoned her friend to say that she was very disappointed that her friend had crossed the picket line. Her friend then notified the plant manager of the incident, and the caller was served with a court injuction for interfering with Hormel’s “rights” to run the plant.
The socialists found the overall character of P-9 to be especially encouraging. “They’re a real different type of union,” said Gutekanst. They’re real democratic. They have meetings every day. And what the membership says, goes. They discuss everything together. They really set up an apparatus to help the people, with food kitchens, food banks. They go into other unions and ask them to adopt families. They help pay their mortgage and their car payments while they’re on strike. They’re taking every single precaution to make sure that people can hold out.“
While advances of this sort appear to be developing to some degree in the trade union movement, the recent rise of political dissent on college campuses has unveiled an even greater display of activism in America. The latest anti-apartheid demonstrations at the University of Illinois-Chicago and similar activities at other universities across the nation have led Bloodworth and Gutekanst to believe another period of student radicalism is beginning to unfold.
Seeing the potential of a student element in the socialist movement, the two are currently running as candidates in the state-wide race for University of Illinois Board of Trustees. The SWP is also fielding candidates for office in both state and national elections.
Implementing change through the electoral process, though, is not a primary goal of the SWP. When they speak of revolution, they mean it—a radical turning over of the entire system. This implies unconstitutional means, if necessary. As Gutenkanst states, “We think there needs to be an overall structural change. We don’t think it can come gradually through elections, although we do participate in them… Plus I think that by the time millions of people are willing to vote for socialist candidates, that would mean that they were so fed-up with the system and so willing to see an alternative that there would be much bigger social upheavals, a lot of strikes. I think the whole political system in general would be much more polarized. I mean, real right wing groups, and people who are in tune. I think voting for someone is just a symptom, you know, it’s not going to make the change. It’s the byproduct of the change that your going to make yourself when push comes to shove.”
Gail Skidmore, another YSA member, explained that the elections service the YSA and SWP as “platforms for expressing ideas.” When asked whether the transformation to socialism would possibly require violence as a means, she stated that eventually it’s only logical that the bourgeoisie, when faced with the possibility of losing power, will not simply hand it over. Therefore, she said, a struggle will develop and under those conditions force will have to be met with force.
Yet the socialists do not condone violence in the instigatory sense, for obvious reasons. They merely regard it as a reaction to oppression.
The fundamental mechanism for revolution in America then, for the socialists, lays in the organizing of the trade union movement. “If you think that capitalism is a major problem,” said Bloodworth, “then I guess you have to ask what makes capitalism go: it’s the people who produce commodities—the workers.”
Would the recent dissipation of the U.S. industrial base then hamper the socialists’ ability to build a revolution based on the working class? “It’s not a question of how many, it’s not just the number, but the social weight,” he said.
But the industrialization of America has posed serious problems for American labor movements. In his book Prisoners of the American Dream, trade union activist/writer Mike Davis made clear this problem: “the political weakness of organized labor can be measured not so much by the defeats of Carter or Mondale, but by its unhappy failure to pass any enforceable legislation against arbitrary plant closures or the asset-stripping of the old industrial base.”
“I don’t think they can ever abolish the U.S. working class,” said Bloodworth. “It’s just an advanced capitalist country with its economic base in maintenance industry. But we also place a lot of importance on the workers and the trade unions here to take up the needs and issues of the third world working class.”
This point in particular is what distinguishes the Socialist Worker’s Party of America from other major parties on the left. Both Bloodworth and Gutekanst often refer to themselves as “internationalists” and trace the historical line of their ideology as one laid down by Marx and Lenin and built on by the Cubans and Sandinistas. As Young Socialists, they are inspired by young internationalists such as Maurice Bishop, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Malcolm X.
The Communist Party of America, on the other hand, does not have as much of an emphasis on the third world struggle, says Bloodworth. “They think the most pressing problem today is the arms race. We think the most pressing problem is the U.S. war against Nicaragua. They took out a big two page ad in the New York Times on the arms summit. We would like to have seen them take out two pages on the Contra aid.”
But motivating the unions in America to fight for worker’s struggles around the world seems futile, considering the difficulty unions have had in the past few years fighting to save what they’ve built here at home. In the logical end, it is this sense of international solidarity that will save the American labor movement from inevitable demise. For a labor victory won in Seoul, South Korea is a victory won in Flint, Michigan.
In America, though, it is no longer simply a struggle of the unions against the companies, but a struggle within the unions themselves. The socialists feel that the futility of the trade union movement has been caused greatly by the bureaucratization and corruption of the unions. For them, then, the actions of locals such as P-9 represent a step in the right direction. But even there, where the militant potential of the American labor movement is making its strongest showing, not one socialist is a member. It appears that the road to revolution is evidently a long and winding path.
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