People Before Profit blog

Fighting for Socialism in a Backward Liberal Democracy

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:59:00 +0000

Friends around the world and here in the United States often ask why the CPUSA does not push a vote for its own candidates, or others on the left, instead of emphasizing the need to back Democrats so as to defeat the Republican ultra right.

We sometimes have supported left candidates, and no doubt will do so in the future, circumstances being propitious. However, we are not now at the point that we can do this wholesale, especially at the national level.

Why? Basically, because the electoral system in the United States is backward in ways that prevent smaller parties and progressive independent candidates for federal and most state offices from getting a toehold.

First and foremost, U.S. law, at the federal and, for the most part, the state levels, allows the rich and the corporations to spend huge amounts of money to buy elections. This has always been the case, but the 2011 “Citizens United” decision of the Supreme Court has worsened the situation by declaring corporations to be political “persons” entitled to rights of freedom of expression. So to limit the ability of corporations to spend money on electoral propaganda is now a violation of their constitutional rights! The left can not compete with the corporations in political fundraising, and can only outweigh this advantage by doing a fantastic job in organizing working class people at the base. We are trying, but not there yet.

Secondly, for the presidency, the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate and the 435 in the House of Representatives, as well as most state elections, there is no provision for run-off elections in the event that no candidate gets 50% of the vote. The practical effect of this is that a vote for a long-shot candidate, such as a socialist or a communist, may objectively help the worst, most reactionary of the candidates of the two big bourgeois parties, at present generally the Republicans.

In many other countries, elections for president and other offices include multiple viable parties and candidates in a “first round” general election. If nobody gets 50% of the vote (or sometimes, some other percentage), then there is a second round. Those parties who don't make it past the first round then have some leverage: They can decide whether to urge their members to support one or the other of the candidates in the run off, even negotiating agreements for concessions from the candidates they eventually support. As well as leverage in the immediate electoral context, left wing parties can use this state of affairs to build up their visibility and strength. No such mechanism exists at the level of federal elections in the United States, or most state elections.

Thirdly, many countries have proportional representation systems in their legislative elections, but the United States does not. In such systems, besides legislative seats gained in individual constituency districts, parties are awarded extra seats to help make their representation in the legislature more nearly congruent with the overall votes totals they received nationally. So in Mexico, for example, in the 500 seat Chamber of Deputies, 300 deputies are elected from single member districts, and then another 200 are distributed to the parties according to a proportional representation formula. Since the United States lacks proportional representation, it is perfectly possible that a party which receives only 51% of the popular vote would have all of the seats in both House and Senate, while one that receives 49% ends up with none. That has never actually happened, but the lack of proportional representation is another factor that has prevented smaller parties on the left from getting a toehold in national and state legislative bodies.

Fourthly, for most elected positions in the United States, candidates have to present petitions with a certain number of citizen signatures before their names can appear on the ballot. This requires hard work by either volunteers or paid staff. The small scale parties of the left do not have the money to pay petition circulators, while the major bourgeois parties do. In many cases the required number of signatures for established major parties is much lower than for new parties or for independent candidates.

In addition: Voters in the United States do not vote directly for the president, but for electors pledged to support the presidential candidates in the Electoral College vote which occurs shortly after the general election. How the Electors elected to the Electoral College vote varies from state to state, but usually the entire state delegation to the College gives all its votes to the candidate who won the majority of electors from that state. Again, this favors the big, established parties.

Another issue is the composition of the federal Senate. Because every state gets two senators no matter what its population, small states have historically had a disproportional influence in legislative decisions. This has often worked to favor the right, though not always. And the 600,000 residents of Washington D.C., the nation's capital, who have generally trended leftward in their voting patterns, have no voting representation in Congress at all.

And now, the right wing Republicans are engaged in a major effort to block poor and minority working class people, who trend leftward, from voting at all. They are getting state legislatures to pass laws requiring all voters to present a government-issued identification document with a photo at the time they go to vote. In most cases, this means a driver's license or a passport, documents which poor people are less likely to have (there is no universal government identification document in the United States). If prospective voters do not have such documents, the state governments supposedly will issue identification cards to them, but this is made difficult by various maneuvers.

All of these things work together to favor the ruling class interests and the political right, as well as effectively shutting out the communist and socialist left from election to office, except sometimes at local levels. If we hold to a Marxist interpretation of politics, the fact that “democracy” in the United States is rigged in favor of the ruling class should not surprise any of us.

Left candidates at the national level are, therefore, engaged in a politics of protest, of agitation, of mass political education, and are not likely, in the foreseeable future, to win office, let alone contest state power. Such protest campaigns have their place, but we also can not ignore what goes on between the Republican and Democratic parties. We do not agree with the position that it makes no difference whether the Republicans or Democrats win the elections, including the national election coming up in 2012.

Although both major parties represent interests of segments of the ruling class, there are differences in their positions which are important to working class interests.

To give just one example, the Democrats (or most of them) and the Republicans differ on their stance toward the labor unions. The current crop of Republican politicians seems determined to utterly crush the labor unions and eliminate all on the job rights for American workers. The Democrats, with exceptions, rely on support from the labor unions for votes and contributions, and so are reluctant to antagonize them. Though the actions of Democrats in power has been far from what the unions have demanded, there is enough of a difference to make it important that the Republicans not gain power, and the Democrats, with all their faults, are the only force that, in the short term, can prevent this. This is of supreme importance to the left, because labor and other working class struggles are the context in which the left develops and builds its strength.

The Communist Party USA grew to be a significant political force in the 1930s and 1940s because it was rooted in the efforts to organize unorganized workers and in other working-class mass struggles. Our very active opposition to racism and fascism were also important factors in the growth of our party. However, in the “McCarthyism” period after the Second World War, the ruling class launched a campaign of repression against our party, especially in organized labor. Eleven unions which had communist or left leadership were pushed out of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which communists had helped to organize, after Congress passed the Taft-Hartley law which forbade unions from allowing communists to serve as officers. All but two of these left-led unions (the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) were destroyed. The CIO then merged with the conservative, craft dominated American Federation of Labor (AFL) to form the AFL-CIO, under reactionary leadership. Only after the AFL-CIO internal elections of 1994 did this begin to change.

Our party, and the left, can not grow and advance if the working class and its organizations are bludgeoned to the point that they are continually on the defensive and losing strength. This is precisely what the Republicans ultra-right is trying to do.

Our electoral policy is based on this, as well as the overall extreme nature of the current leadership of the Republican Party: Racist, militaristic, anti-worker, anti-poor, anti-youth, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti gay and lesbian, and anti-democratic.

The current crisis is showing the world, including the working people of the United States, that capitalism can not solve the problems it has itself created, and thus has no future. The structural crisis of capitalism now includes not only the irreconcilable clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but also the exhaustion by capital of the world's energy and other resources, as well as the environmental crisis.

When the toiling people of the whole world, including the United States, come to understand this, we can achieve political breakthroughs we have not been able to achieve before. We consider the workers' uprisings in Wisconsin and Ohio, and especially the wonderful “Occupy” movement, to be major positive developments in the development of this understanding.

Protest to Occupation: From Capitalist Democracy to Self-Determination

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:59:00 +0000

Many political pundits of various media institutions were quick to demand the Occupy Movement declare a list of grievances at its founding. Though not immediately, and not uniformly, a set of demands has emerged from many of the 100 or so occupations found in cities across the United States. Demands include such proposals as the end to the war on terror, the formation of a single-payer health care system, a higher tax on the wealthy, the overturning of the Citizens United v. the FEC Supreme Court decision, restoration of the guidelines once found in the Glass-Steagall Act, and various other forms of economic regulation as well as limitations on money's influence in politics.

These demands give some idea of what the Occupy Movement is about, but focusing too narrowly on the demands misses the movement's very important core element. The most important feature of the Occupy Movement was the very process by which the demands were made.

The Occupy Movement is important in that it no longer looks to the government, as it currently is, to acheive its goals. The General Assembly, the legislative body present at each occupation, represents in miniature an alternative governing organization meant to both demonstrate everyday people's ability to manage their affairs as well as act as a body to be compared to the government itself. In fact, Goldsmiths, University of London anthropologist David Graeber, a founder of the Occupy Movement, made many statements indicating this as the reason for the movement's being organized as it was.

The Occupy Movement is about people's exercising self-determination, its very process of decision making to be juxtaposed to the current lack of power participants feel in our capitalist democracy.

The preamble to the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City clarifies:

"As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power."

"We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments."

The Occupy Movement is young and yet at its beginning, as corporations and the class which operates them are so entrenched in U.S. politics.

The most popular reason given for why the wealthy and corporations exercise so much power politically involves the process of campaign finance. In the past decade the majority of money presidential and congressional candidates raised came from contributions of $200 or more. Less than one percent of the population made these donations, 81 percent of whom had incomes of more than $100,000 a year. These donations pale in comparison to the amount of money businesses donate directly to candidates' political parties, which comprise near 90 percent of total contributions in any given election.

Corporations not only have a powerful effect on elections, but are a virtually inseparable part of the political process itself.

The capitalist class is able to use the wealth generated by the corporations which they run to continuously lobby on their behalf.

Lobbying is a constant component of corporate strategy. In 2010, the oil and gas industry spent over 146 million dollars while employing 802 lobbyists, the pharmaceutical industry spent over 244 million dollars while employing 1,612 lobbyists, and finance (insurance and real estate) spent over 475 million dollars while employing 2,563 lobbyists. In comparison, public sector unions, representing the largest non-corporate, politically active institutions in the U.S., spent just over 14 million dollars and had a mere 150 lobbyists.

Further, as corporations are institutions which both own and manage a nation's resources, they naturally become politicians' biggest source for relevant information with which to form public policy. Corporate directors, executives, and those they employ as top level accountants or lawyers form the basis of the nation's largest think tanks and policy discussion groups.

Think tanks organize corporate money and industry experts to discuss issues surrounding public policy. They debate current policy, identify issues of their own and train experts. Of the ten largest think tanks in the U.S., seven are either explicitly conservative or promote ideas in line with the stated goals of the Republican Party. The other three define themselves as non-partisan. Some think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, focus on promoting experts and their interpretation of policies via public relations efforts while other think tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute or Chamber of Commerce, focus more on providing information and expertise to involved corporations, policy discussion groups, or directly to politicians.

Policy discussion groups are leaner than think tanks and tend to be focused more directly on policy formation. These are corporations' political working groups, where experts from think tanks present ideas to the heads of corporations and position statements are formed. One of the most powerful policy discussion groups is the Business Council, which began as a quasi-governmental advisory group in the 1930s only to become an independent entity in 1962. The Business Roundtable is the Business Council's active branch. These groups either meet directly with members of Congress and the Executive branch or work through lobbyists.

Corporations are, therefor, not only economic entities. They represent institutions of organized power and are the foundations that allow the capitalist class the constant influence in politics which the Occupy Movement stands against.

The economy, having developed so that a small group of capitalists wield such a vast amount of power, forces progressives to reconsider capitalist democracy. The directors of these corporations are not only member's of the nation's wealthiest one percent, but have been observed by sociologist G. William Domhoff to also be 90 percent male and 95 percent white. Capitalism has developed such that it undermines democracy itself.

The Occupy Movement introduced many to the process of self-determination through the management of their occupations, from the preparation and distribution of food, to the organization of hygiene and the production of media. The challenge is to expand on the practice of self-determination and employ it on a vast scale.

Another Occupy Movement founder, Naomi Klein, presented how this might be done in The Take, a 2004 film on Argentinian worker's self-management of factories. The film demonstrating how communities united to operate factories abandoned by that nation's companies in a recession. Curiously, they used the slogan "occupy, resist, produce." Many of the reclaimed factories continue to operate effectively under management elected from the workers' own ranks in democratic self-management systems established during their occupation.

It is time for progressive forces in the U.S. to seriously pose capitalism as a question. At the end of November, the Republican governor's association met in Florida in part to talk about messaging. Frank Luntz, a Republican political messaging strategist, insisted that conservatives replace the word "capitalism" with the words "economic freedom" or "free market". A recent change to Texas textbooks also replaced "capitalism" with "free enterprise system".

The capitalist question, when posed as a matter of economic freedom, prompts those without economic power to respond "freedom for whom?". The question begs an answer that calls for the need for a "democratic economy". This idea can be conceptualized as parallel to the goal of "democracy in the workplace", a phrase the labor movement currently uses in its struggle.

There can be no real political democracy until there is economic democracy.

Democracy and America

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:07:00 +0000

In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville a French aristocrat, published a report on his journey in the United States titled Democracy in America. The following year the supporters of Andrew Jackson held the first convention of a political party that they had stitched together from Southern slaveholders, middle state urban political cliques, and champions of de-centralized state banking, rapid westward expansion and "Indian removal" -- and called it the Democratic Party.

That party still exists and in fact has held a national convention every four year since 1836, making it the oldest ongoing political party in the world.

While this history may seem obscure to some, let me begin to connect some of the dots. While De Tocqueville was suspicious of American roughness and no friend of slavery (he was a supporter of abolitionism and laissez-faire capitalism in the Kingdom of France), his portrayal was generally positive, even flattering to the American Republic, which he saw as a kind of benign alternative to the French revolution which had driven his titled family into exile for a generation. And American political scientists and historians have long flattered Tocqueville, taking his work out of context in order to portray it as a profound observation on American civilization.

However De Tocqueville was no friend of working class democracy During the revolution of 1848, he supported the ruthless suppression of the Parisian working class by General Cavignac, and the "party of order" ( for a different view of the revolution and the socialists of many kinds who led the workers of Paris, see Karl Marx, "The Civil Wars in France"). Although he opposed the dictatorship of Napoleon III, I have no doubt that he would have actively supported the terroristic repression of the Paris Commune of 1871, just as he actively supported the terroristic repression of the revolution of 1848.

The "democracy" he was wished to see in Europe and saw in the United States as a model was essentially what Jefferson and Jackson wanted, minus slavery, which he, unlike they, did not support --- a Republic of laws and "balanced" political structures where the Jacobin revolutions of the past and the socialist revolutions of the present and future would be prevented from developing.

A Different "Brand" of Democracy

But this view of democracy did not win out in Europe or for that matter most of the rest of the world over most the last one hundred and fifty years.

Democracy was a dirty word to ruling groups everywhere outside of the U.S. in 1848 when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto which called upon Communists not only to raise the economic question in all of the political struggles of the working class but to commit themselves to the working class struggles for democracy which they defined as the struggle to gain political rights/power to fight and end capitalism. While Europe was rife with revolutions, the U.S. was completing its conquest of what was Northern Mexico in the name of "Manifest Destiny" in the Mexican-American war.

Throughout Europe and later Asia, Marx and Engels view of democracy became dominant as democracy was inexorably linked to socialism. The first mass party of socialism in the world for example was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and many Marxist socialist parties used the word democratic in their names.

After the Soviet socialist revolution and the schism globally between right and left socialists, left socialists in most places called themselves Communists and their right socialist rivals "social democrats," although both social democrats and communists, the latter more energetically and creatively than the former, defined the mass struggles of working class as "democratic struggles."

After world war two, a number of European and Asian countries which established Communist led governments and sought to develop socialism defined themselves as "peoples democracies" often putting the name democracy into the their governments, i.e., the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

The Communist Party, USA in the tradition of the global Communist movement going back to the Communist Manifesto, continues to analyze and support peoples movements like the Occupy Wall Street movement today as "democratic struggles" to advance the interests of working people over their exploiters and oppressors.

Democracy, as understood by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as partisans of socialism and working class power was clearly the leading definition of democracy through the world, as against the definition of democracy, that is a associated with de Tocqueville, which sought to prevent revolutions of or in the name of the masses without returning to the old royalist tyranny or, later, the new dictatorship of Louis Napoleon. In the 21st century. In the cold war period, though, the U.S. became in first nation to use "democracy" as an anti-Communist, anti-socialist slogan, to merge democracy with capitalist definitions of "liberty" and spread this definition to its allies through the world.

American Exceptionalism?

What was different in the U.S. Here, democracy first of all meant universal white male suffrage, which meant that politicians beginning with Andrew Jackson began to appeal to the "Common Man." The fact that the U.S. was the first country to achieve universal suffrage and that a socialist movement did not play a major role in this achievement would assist ruling groups in defining peoples movements as "enemies of democracy."

But a closer look will help us see that America, was not really so different. For early supporters of workers' rights, the democracy meant using the power to vote to establish "free schools" (public education) land redistribution ("vote yourself a farm" was an antebellum political slogan) and the enactment of laws against imprisonment for debt, economic and social reforms. These definitions were very much in the tradition that Marx and Engels portrayed in the Communist Manifesto.

But in most of the emerging political power structure from Andrew Jackson’s administration, particularly, the electorate would be deflected away from democratic movements in the worst sense by what the late George Frederickson, a distinguished historian of antebellum America, called Herrenvolk (master race) democracy. There was little that one could find positive in this whites-only democracy, which promised to solve all of its problems by territorial expansion at the expense of "inferior peoples", Indians and Mexicans, who were obstacles to the "manifest destiny" of the American Republic. Manifest Destiny meant "the noble mission" to expand to the Pacific, establish ports for the trade of both Europe and Asia, defeat the powerful European states commercially, and establish, to use Jefferson's earlier term, an "empire for liberty."

For Marxists today and many abolitionists then , it was a grand design to maintain the existing class system of slaveholders, large merchant capitalists, and large landowners even with universal white male suffrage---to trick the "common man" into fearing slaves and immigrants those who would “take away from him “ wealth he never had, in order to support politicians who flattered him while at the same time opposing the schools, roads, currency and debt laws, or other reforms that offered the workign class a chance to rise in society. This "brand" of Democracy was about individuals gaining wealth in a capitalist society where mobility was equated with classlessness. In its antebellum expression, this was the pre-industrial America of "farmers and mechanics" defined as the producing masses by the upper classes in order to keep the slaves, and urban and rural poor, at bay through a manifest destiny based on territorial expansion.

In its post WWII expression, this brand of democracy defined overwhelming majority of working people as an amorphous "middle class" whose ownership on the installment plan of personal property, houses and automobiles, had moved them up and out of the working class. Politicians and media representing the corporations and the wealthy used and continue to use this "brand" of democracy to keep working people at bay through, first through a new "manifest destiny" which merged the slogans of "democracy" and "free markets" to establish a global empire in the name of anti-Communism.

The Two "Brands "of Democracy

Both admirers and critics of U.S. politics have assumed that the de Tocqueville-Jackson, and contemporary Wall Street Journal, definitions of democracy have been the only ones in the U.S. But, as we have shown, both "brands" have existed here, in dialectical conflict with one another. Let us take a more detailed look at U.S. history to explore this point. Although Andrew Jackson remained enormously popular long after his death (some wished that he was somehow return from the grave as a strongman in 1860 and prevent civil war), the democracy associated with his era, an "exclusionary democracy" rooted in individualism, national chauvinism, and an economic expansion that covered up deepening economic inequality, failed completely to prevent both the civil war and the restructuring of U.S. society and government which followed it. The party he had played such a central role in creating, the Democratic party, became a regionally based minority party in the aftermath of the civil war as abolitionists, land reformers, educational reformers, and others involved in the antebellum movements for the "other democracy” joined manufacturers and others in a new political party committed to building an industrial capitalist society without slavery, the Republican party. But the victory of the Union over the Confederacy did not bring did not produce a decisive victory for that "other brand of democracy."

The new anti-slavery Republican party under Abraham Lincoln ended slavery and enacted currency, credit, and land legislation to advance industrial capitalism. But its leaders, true to their most important class base, within a generation abandoned the struggle to democratize the former slave states and turned the Republicans into a force to serve and protect the new industrial corporations and new national banking system, portraying the workers movement in ways similar the way Republicans had portrayed the slaveholders and Confederates during the civil war, as enemies of freedom, rebels and traitors to the union.

A new two--party consensus rooted in an a recycled "exclusionary democracy" took shape; first, a cruel racist tyranny over the former slaves of the former confederacy was condoned by the federal courts and tacitly excepted by the federal government; second, legislation protecting labor and regulating business, when such legislation was enacted, was routinely declared unconstitutional by the courts. At the the same time, a postbellum federal judiciary stacked with corporate lawyers upheld anti-labor legislation, the suppression of strikes, and also "racial" segregation based on the doctrine of "separate but equal" through the former slave states and some areas of the North.

Socialists after the formation of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) began to call for a democracy based on workers' rights and power, using the term "economic democracy" which the anti-monopoly progressive reformer, Robert Lafollette, Sr., Governor and later Senator from Wisconsin, also used widely in the early 20th century. The philosopher John Dewey, whose work became the basis for progressive education in the U.S. in effect sought to focus this view of democracy in an important work of the 1920s The New Individualism, which saw modern collectivist and egalitarian public policy as the necessary foundation for modern life, given the development of modern industry. One could see this economic and social democracy as a continuation of the antebellum abolitionists, education, credit and land reformers. Or one could see it as an American equivalent of the democracy advocated by socialist and communist parties in the late 19th and twentieth centuries. In a sense it was both.

The great depression gave us for the first time a U.S. president and national government that both preached it as a necessary adjustment to modern life and also the basis for the creation of a better society. What the New Deal government sought to do, I would contend, was to create a new synthesis of these two "brands" of democracy, one in which the order and harmony associated with de Tocqueville would merge with the demands for economic security and social justice which most of the world identified with Marxist thought and socialist movements.

These attempts at a new synthesis were seen in the writings of prominent New Dealers, i.e., Henry Wallace, New Frontiers, Rexford Guy Tug well, The Battle for Democracy, and Thurman Arnold, Folklore of Capitalism and most importantly in practice in the social welfare and regulatory legislation protecting labor and restraining predatory capitalism. Franklin Roosevelt, in his definition of U.S. WWII aims as the four freedoms "freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear", in effect brought together these two brands of democracy. In his second bill of rights address, which the press called the "economic bill of rights", Roosevelt as part of his 1944 reelection campaign calling for employment, education, and housing to be seen as essential rights, not privileges in a modern democratic society .

In effect there were political freedoms and rights that had to be balanced by economic and social freedoms and rights in order to maintain order and harmony. The system of checks and balances whose purpose was to prevent political tyranny through the concentration of political power had to be merged with a system of economic checks and balances in order to prevent the concentration of economic power in the hands of large corporations and banks. Given the needs of an advanced industrial economy, regulation of industry and finance and, more importantly, strengthening labor so that it could effectively resist capitalist assaults on workers and counterbalance capitalist power in alliance with government, were necessities if democracy was to develop in the postwar world.

The New "Manifest Destiny"

Whereas the New Deal government in its attempt to develop a synthesis for democracy looked to what many political scientists called a "positive state" approach to government, that is government's responsibility to intervene in the economy to defend the general welfare as against government functioning as "passive policeman" in classic capitalist theory, the huge expansion of the U.S. economy during WWII and the relative downfall of its major capitalist competitors, combined with the rapid advance of revolutionary anti-capitalist forces through the world to stalemate this democratic synthesis.

The expansion enabled large capital to mobilize a national and global counteroffensive against peoples movements, block the labor and social legislation planned by the New Deal government for the postwar period, in effect establish the cold war and use it to expand U.S. capital through the world and rally the beleaguered major capitalist countries into the NAT0 alliance.

Instead of being revered while many of their principles were betrayed, as postwar abolitionists were by the Republican leadership after the civil war, Communists and other advocates of militant labor, anti-racism, all peoples democratic movements and an inclusive definition of democracy, faced purges and general political persecution by the Democratic party under Harry Truman and his successors.

These cold war Democrats joined with their political enemies in the Republican party to forge a new two party consensus around fighting the cold war (which meant making the wartime military-industrial complex permanent) and an economic policy centered on the military industrial complex as the main public policy to prevent depression in the U.S. and foster quantitative economic growth.

This new manifest destiny saw American investments and military bases established rapdly through the world; a large U.S. army maintained by a peacetime draft until 1972; U.S direct involvement in major wars in Korea and Vietnam in the name of this consensus (defending "democracy" and freedom from "totalitarian" Communism); and numerous indirect interventions in Latin America, Africa, the Near East and Asia.

Leading groups within the trade union movement and the liberal wing of the Democratic party accepted this new Manifest destiny while they continued to support without any success pro labor and social legislation in the U.S. in the postwar era, looking searching for a new Franklin Roosevelt who would lead them to forgetting while without realizing that the anti-Communist consensus globally struck at the mass movements at home that had made the New Deal government and Franklin Roosevelt's leadership a reality during the depression and WWII.

Where We Are Today and How We Got There

History did not end with the cold war consensus as writers like Daniel Bell suggested in works like The End of Ideology at the end of the 1950s. The civil rights movement as a people's democratic movement advanced in a sense both brands of democracy, using mass demonstrations and non-violent (technically illegal) civil disobedience along with the aid at strategically important moments of the federal judiciary---a judiciary which had been "liberalized" both in its personnel and in its legal theory by New Deal policy and appointments.

Democratic movements for women's rights, gay rights, environmental protection, and peace, all influenced by the methods of the civil rights movement proliferated and won significant victories in the 1960s and 1970s against the machine of repression which J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had initially fashioned in the early cold war era.

But these movements have been on the defensive since the mid 1970s, and have seen many of their gains undermined. The end of U.S. economic expansion in the 1970s after thirty years of cold war military spending led to a crisis which was "resolved" in the 1980s through a major class victory by finance capital and the most reactionary sectors of the capitalist class generally and a defeat for all peoples democratic movements and the labor movement especially. In essence a sort of political vacuum was created in which the far Right, with huge amounts of wealth and media influence, used both to gain both political momentum and political advantage. Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980 gave the Right a level of state power that it had not had since the 1920s in the U.S.

Since the beginnings of the Reagan presidency, the percentage of workers in trade unions has dropped by more than half-among private sector workers the percentage is the lowest it has been since before the Communist and left led labor upsurge of the 1930s. Income inequality has grown very dramatically as real wages have stagnated and declined while the cost of housing, health care, transportation, and utilities has risen sharply. Both consumer debt and government debt has risen exponentially---both representing in effect extra profits to finance capital through consumer interest payments and government interest payments, which restrict government expenditures for socially useful projects.

Monopoly capital over the last three decades has lived in a sort of capitalist utopia of its own making--- of deregulation and detaxation with insurance and government bailouts for banks and corporations. It is well known that the hedge fund swindler Bernard Madoff, for example, was convicted of stealing over sixty billion dollars of investor funds in the greatest ponzi scheme in history. To put where we are today in perspective, we should understand that Madoff's stolen sixty billion was nearly 20 billion greater than the total national debt in 1939, the last pre World War II year.

The reactionary domestic offensives of the last three decades, following on the heels of more than three decades of cold war, have taken their toll on "Democracy in America."

de Tocqueville and Marx Go Back to Future

If de Tocqueville returned to the U.S. and watched the Republican presidential debates, he would probably think that he was watching a group of actors taking a farce that had failed in Paris to the provinces. When he heard president Obama denounced as a socialist, a term that was relatively new in his time but which he could understand more from the revolution of 1848 than any Republican, he would probably look around for the agitators calling upon the workers to rise up and overthrow the aristocracy, or for the more moderate elements, like Louis Blanc, establishing "national workshops" (government supported cooperatives) for the unemployed. The nearest thing he would find would be the Occupy Wall Street movement, which would make him uncomfortable. Politicians like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann also make him uncomfortable, probably bringing back memories of Marie Antoinette. He would probably tell the Republicans that what was needed was some middle ground between them and the occupy Wall Street movement, and more education and training for politicians. The more they sought to revive their Ancien Regime, the more likely they were to either lose everything or bring down society around them.

Marx would see things more clearly. He would look through the political farce to the class forces in operation. He would say as he did in 1848 that the working class, however confused and misled by capitalist ideology is fighting for its own interests as it resists the attempts by reactionary forces to destroy trade unions, eliminate social services, and blame the poor, undocumented workers, and people of color(the usual suspects of reaction) for the economic crisis. He would see as he did in 1848 that the first task of Communists, was to advance the workers struggles for democracy and to point to the economic factors that underlay each democratic struggle. He would see in the occupy Wall Street movement not something to use for a political party or an administration but to educate and advance as a democratic movement.

First he would understand that classes, not individuals or political parties or mass organizations are the decisive force in history. The occupy Wall Street movement has raised the agitational democratic slogan, "we are the 99 percent against the one percent." But how can that democratic slogan be transformed into heightened working class consciousness. First, we must make it clear that democracy means in its most elemental political sense a government which serves the interests of the majority who live by working for wages and salaries. Such interests are not served by government "bailouts" of banks and corporations without clear responsibilities by banks and corporations to invest capital in order to promote full employment and real wage growth.

What can a democratic government do?

Actually, a great deal, and it can do it rapidly. First it can repeal the Reagan and post Reagan era legislation deregulating banking, the stock market, transportation and energy. While one can say with some justification that this is calling the fire department after the house has already burned, comprehensive and updated regulation (which would also regulate hedge funds, derivatives, and other new finance capitalist instruments of accumulation) is not only protection against repeating the disasters of the past, which was evident when the deregulation inspired Savings and Loan disaster of the 1980s was repeated as the much more devastating crisis of 2008.

Along with comprehensive re-regulation, a democratic government can enact a new Federal Reserve law placing the federal reserve system under direct public control and compelling finance capital to invest in both private and public job and income creation project.

This can be done without nationalizing the banking system, which Communists and socialists would see as a long range goal. Nationalization of the banking system or at least parts of it has been advanced in capitalist countries by socialist, labor and left governments, e.g., the British Labor Party's post WWII nationalization of the bank of England. But such policies have left the existing banking system intact, failed to effect major changes in the interest of the working class and have been repealed by subsequent governments.

It would appear that the public ownership of credit can only be achieved as an integral part of a full fledged socialist transformation. In any case, there is no American Labor Party today campaigning on a platform to establish a "socialist America" today as there was a British Labor Party in 1945 campaigning for a "socialist Britain" nor is there any on the horizon, in either America or Britain. A democratic government would also act to revive progressive taxation in the U.S. restoring pre Reagan era income and corporation tax schedules, eliminating the loopholes which exist within those schedules and connecting these policies with both the federal absorption of state debts and reduction of regressive property taxes.

Here such a government could adapt policies used in Western Europe and other advanced industrial countries where public education and other local public services are not funded primarily by local personal property taxes.

Such a tax policy, like the establishment of a national health service, not only be great advances for democracy in America but they would also undermine the influence of right wing Republicans over public opinion.

Just as a genuine national health service or Medicare for all national health system would be seen by most citizens as a vast improvement in terms of their out of pocket expenses and access to quality care, which happened in all countries which adopted public national health care (reality trumping the propaganda of "rationed bureaucratic socialized medicine" which was used by business and conservative groups in Britain 65 years ago and in many other countries), so most Americans would realize that a democratic system of taxation, with sharply reduced property and other regressive local and state taxes and sharply increased income and corporation taxes, including taxation of profits and stock market transactions, would both lower their overall tax burden and provide them with improved services in education, police and fire, housing and health care for their taxes, instead of the present long-term federal policy which emphasizes military spending and other subsidies to capital and the lowest rate of effective taxation on upper income groups in the developed world, which means increases spending on the debt itself, while passing the buck to state and local governments.

Finally, it can make political democracy much more of a reality by strictly policing political campaigns to restrict the flow of money into those campaigns, providing equal air time to political candidates of all parties, establishing voter registration criteria which will make universal registration possible, and exploring the use of proportional representation as a way give voters more serious political choices.

The Role of Communists in the "Battle for Democracy"

Communists can and must play a central role in this contemporary "battle for democracy." If history is any judge, people's democratic movements won their greatest victories in the 1930s and 1940s when the CPUSA was able to creatively use its general theory of organization and understanding of the strategic and tactical differences between immediate struggles and long-term goals to advance the industrial labor movement and all democratic movements of the people under the general rubrics of the people's front and united front and the center left and New Deal coalition.

Both political anti-Communism and the absence of a CPUSA large and influential enough to play that role in the 1960s and 1970s were a factor in the fragmentation and defeats in political and economic terms of the people's democratic movements of that period.

Democracy is never something that is fixed, unchangeable. The more working people are engaged in peoples democratic struggles, the more they understand the necessity of establishing a democracy of political, economic and social content, not merely a democracy of political forms. The less working people are engaged in peoples democratic struggles, the more likely they are to lose even those political forms and be left of a series of empty slogans. Communists have been at the forefront of both democratic struggles and the interpretation of the meaning of democracy since the Communist Manifesto, longer than virtually anyone else. Since the mid 19th century the struggles for and future of democracy has been inexorably intertwined with the struggles for and the future of socialism.

Today that has never been more true globally and in the U.S. And Communists have a central role to play in organizing, educating and coordinating these struggles to both advance an activist understanding of democracy among the working class and a credible socialist program which the large sections of working class will understand and support in their own class interests.

The African American Struggle for Freedom is a Central Theme of U. S. History

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:37:00 +0000

By Ted Pearson*

In his report to the National Committee of the Communist Party U.S.A on November 21, 2011, Sam Webb, CPUSA Chairperson, observed that “Racism …. rests on the systematic elaboration of the notion of white superiority. And this notion has its origins in and is sustained by racist practices and structures that confine people of color to a subordinate status relative to white people in nearly every area of life.”

This needs to be explained and developed very concretely. We need to find creative ways to disabuse white working class people of the notion that whiteness offers them some kind of privileged position vis-à-vis capitalism. Such notions are instruments of their own exploitation and pits them against their brother and siste workers of color. Capitalism has developed institutions of white supremacy in which white racial privilege appears as a reality relative to people of color. We need to show that this saps the strength of the working class and the people in confronting the 1 per cent.

Struggles of African Americans in the United States have been a central issue in every juncture of our history. This was true in 1776, when slaveholders rebelling against the threat of British abolitionism were part of the American Revolution and the British were able to use this to their advantage. (See “Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution,” by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen) It was true in the U. S. Civil War. (See “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery “ by Eric Foner) It was a factor in the movement for women’s suffrage. It’s been a constant theme in the Labor Movement. Concessions to white supremacy weakened the progressive majority during the New Deal period, and hurt the global war to defeat fascism. These problems continue today in every popular mass movement.

White supremacy is at its root Black oppression. This not a quantitative question of “who is the most oppressed?” It is a qualitative, historically determined question of “Whose oppression is and has been at the center of all struggles?”

Many other peoples of color have suffered and continue to suffer special oppression under U. S. capitalism. These are all manifestations of white supremacy, and they all must be fought.

The genocide of Native Americans (up to total extinction of some peoples and cultures) and the theft of virtually all their land are extreme. The grinding poverty and destruction of Native Americans continues in the shadows of the U.S. society and economy today.

The number of Latin American immigrants in the U. S., their struggles for basic rights, and their role in the working class has grown many times over in the recent past. All Latinos have become a lightning rod for unrelenting attacks by the far right.

Since 9-11 Arab Americans and Muslims of all nationalities have been singled out for harassment, violations of civil liberties, and general discrimination by the government and the far right.

But it is uniquely the continuing legacy of African enslavement – the identification of blackness with inferiority and whiteness with its opposite - that persists and potentially disrupts every political and economic struggle in the United States today, whether it be for a living wage, for civil liberties, for the right to organize, for education and health care, for gender equality, for equal rights of immigrants, for “fair” taxation of wealth, for human rights of gay, lesbian and transgender people – everything.

It is not accidental that the majority of the men and women in prison today are African American, and most of the rest are Latino. The so-called criminal justice system and the prison-industrial complex maintain a new form of slavery. It is the primary instrument that enforces a renewed system of jim crow-de facto segregation of Black people throughout the United States today, as thoroughly documented by Michelle Alexander in her seminal work, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness.”

The historical record shows that the rape and enslavement of Africa and Africans have been central in modern world history. Karl Marx noted that from its beginnings capitalism was fueled and consolidated by “[t]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins. … Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ch.XXXI, p.703-712, Progress Publishers, Moscow). Unlike the indigenous and aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Asia who were forced into labor on their own soil, early capitalism made Africans into commodities (slaves) and sold them in the Americas. The thousands who died in the Middle Passage were simply spoilage in the view of the slave traders.

Africa was robbed of its most precious resource – its people. Unlike wage workers, whose labor power was purchased as a commodity and whose product was taken, the entire physical existence of Africans was stolen and sold outright. Being African became, as a matter of law and custom, a mark of being a slave, an item for sale in toto as a commodity. The value of this commodity accrued completely to the slave master with nothing for the slave. In contrast, being white became the mark of being free, a vessel of labor power. Free white workers owned themselves and they could sell their labor power as a commodity or not, for their own benefit. Between Black and white was erected a spectrum of color in which one’s status as pariah could be determined by the darkness of one’s complexion.

How did this happen? Certainly in our creation there was no separation of human beings into categories of free and slave defined by skin color. White supremacy did not “just happen” naturally. It was the midwife of capitalism and all the brutality and violence that it brought into the world.

The history of how the English colonial masters created and institutionalized white supremacy in their colonies in the Americas is brilliantly documented in detail in Theodore Allen’s two volume work, “The Invention of the White Race.” Starting in 1616 (before the Pilgrims came to New England) the English shipped thousands of English, Scotch, and Irish to the tobacco plantations of Virginia, where they were held to unpaid work in bondage under contracts typically lasting seven years. They were drawn from among the former peasants cast off the land in the British Isles in the 17th century through the enclosure of the commons and the expropriation of their land. Cast onto the roads, driven into the cities these men and women were arrested en mass for vagrancy, which was made illegal. They were given a choice - prison or Virginia. Work in the tobacco plantations of Virginia was hard and conditions were harsh; most did not live long enough to complete their bondage. Marriage was not permitted among them; fornication was absolutely prohibited.

Some Africans were also brought to Virginia as bonded or indentured workers on the tobacco plantations. They were a minority of such workers originally.

The Virginia Company’s plantations were on land that had been taken from its original indigenous inhabitants through force, some of whom struck back. Colonial masters made certain that it was bonded workers, virtual slaves, who bore the brunt of these counter-attacks. In 1676 a frontier planter named Nathaniel Bacon demanded protection against Indian raids from the colonial administration. Failing to get it, he organized an armed force of bonded workers without regard for color or ethnicity, and stormed Jamestown, the seat of power, burning it down.

It may seem ironic that it was a in a demand for more aggressive action against the peoples of the First Nations of the new world that Bacon’s Rebellion was born. But this was the logic of colonialism.

In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses had declared that as a matter of law “all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother. “ But this condition was not color or ethnically based. In the years after quelling the insurrection Virginia passed racial slavery into law. In 1682 the House of Burgesses declared that “all servants [...] which shall be imported into this country either by sea or by land, whether Negroes, Moors [Muslim North Africans], mulattoes or Indians who and whose parentage and native countries are not Christian at the time of their first purchase by some Christian [...] and all Indians, which shall be sold by our neighboring Indians, or any other trafficking with us for slaves, are hereby adjudged, deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.” Finally, in 1705, they passed the Virginia Slave Code which codified the slavery of all non-Christian servants and declared them and their offspring to be “real estate” and slaves forever. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes#Definition_of_.22slaves.22, the Slave Codes.)

In his 1625 Essay No. 15, Sir Francis Bacon (a distant cousin of Nathaniel), advised that “a wise government … can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.” Bacon further noted that “Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions and combinations that are adverse to the state, and setting them at distance, or at least distrust, amongst themselves, is not one of the worst remedies” for sedition and insurrection. (See http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/15.html .) Folloing Sir Francis’ dictum, under the 1705 Virginia Slave Code bonded and free Christian whites were afforded special privileges and exemptions under the law. The contracts of white bondsmen could end; whites received “freedom dues” or grants of grain and land upon obtaining their liberty; Africans and their children, even when the product of rape by their masters, were never to be released from bondage. African Americans could not testify against a white person. Free African Americans could not vote. A slave who defended him or herself against a white person was to be executed. The murder of an African American was not a crime (although repeated abuse of slaves was penalized, much the way we treat animal abusers today).

Being European and “white” was established as a de facto and de jure mark of being free, or potentially free; having a black skin was the mark of the un-free. The white race and white supremacy were invented, and the working population, most of which was European at that time, became easier to control. Allen puts it precisely in his discussion of the revision of the Virginia Slave Code of 1705:

“The exclusion of free African Americans from the intermediate stratum was a corollary of the establishment of the ‘white’ identity as a mark of social status. If the mere presumption of liberty was to serve as a mark of social status for masses of European-Americans without real prospects of upward social mobility, and yet induce them to abandon their opposition to the plantocracy and enlist them actively, or at least passively, in keeping down the Negro bond-laborers with whom they had made common cause in the course of Bacon’s Rebellion, the presumption of liberty had to be denied to free African Americans” (vol. 2, p. 249). Another law mandated that pastors were to review the rights of white people and the lack of rights of Black people every Sunday at church.

The perpetuation of the myth of the white “race” and its presumption of freedom and social mobility continues to infect social and class struggles to this day, even as thousands of white working people are thrown out of work and pushed into homelessness and poverty. No matter how bad things get whites are supposed to find solace in the fact that they are “not black” - because for a majority of African Americans economic depression has been a constant for decades.

Even though there has been progress as a result of the historic civil rights struggles of recent decades, it remains true that the skilled trades in offices and industry are dominated by white men. In spite of progress among many white workers in cutting through the fog of white supremacy, racism still fuels the vitriol heaped upon President Obama by the Faux News-Tea Party right.

Winning the labor movement to struggle against white supremacy has to be a central theme of the class struggle. It’s a major challenge. White supremacy is maintained by practices and institutions in every aspect of American life. An individual white person cannot shed white supremacy by simply denouncing and rejecting “white privilege” in words, or adopting a monastic life style. It can only be fought by living a life of struggle rooted in the knowledge that it is absolutely true that “an injury to any one is an injury to all,” or, as the Socialist Eugene Debs put it, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

White progressives have a duty to set an example in this struggle and to never succumb to the notion that their whiteness imbues them with any superiority. It requires that the fight for the unity of Black and white be constant and in every struggle, never postponed until conditions are “favorable.” It requires that progressive white people fight for leadership by African Americans in every movement and struggle, along with that of white workers and Latinos, and women, and for unity of all.

*Ted Pearson is Co-Chairperson of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and. The views expressed above are his own, however, not necessarily those of the CAARPR or the CCDS.

The Fight for Immigrants' Rights is a Fight for Democracy

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:22:00 +0000

The surprise generated by the statement by G.O.P. presidential candidate Newt Gingrich to the effect that he favors a mechanism whereby some undocumented immigrants might gain legal status, and the ongoing uproar caused by harsh anti-immigrant laws in Alabama, South Carolina and Arizona, have brought the issue of immigrants and immigration back into the political debate. The question of immigration is usually discussed in terms of economics, but needs to be seen in terms of democracy also.

Briefly: To have 10.2 million working class people functioning as an especially exploited part of our economy and working class, but deprived of basic rights in the workplace and in the community, is antidemocratic and undermines the rights of the whole working class. And immigration policy is most definitely a matter of class struggle.

Gingrich proposed that a special “red card” visa for undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for 25 years or more, who have not acquired criminal records and who have established ties to their communities. They could live and work in the United States, but would be barred from acquiring U.S. citizenship, and could not vote in federal and most other elections.

Meanwhile in Alabama, Latino families are either keeping a low profile or making plans to leave the state, since a recent state law criminalizes not only undocumented immigrants but just about anybody who deals with them. Protests and demonstrations against this and similar laws have been going on around the country.

The authorization to immigrate legally to the United States is doled out on the basis of class, wealth and politics. Rich “entrepreneurs” get a welcome mat; poor workers and farmers, desperate to come here because our own foreign trade policies have destroyed their livelihoods in poor countries get arrested, jailed and deported.

Wealthy foreign businessmen get a special access to permanent resident visas if they promise that within two years of coming to the United States, they will have set up businesses which “create jobs”. This program, called the “Immigrant Investor” or EB 5 visa program, has not been proved to have a significant impact on the job market or the economy.

Also, people from certain countries are given privileged access to legal residence and citizenship because they are seen as probably conservative and pro-capitalist. The most obvious example is the treatment of Cuban exiles. The notorious “Wet Foot, Dry Foot” policy allows any Cuban rafter who actually reaches U.S. shores to stay here and be treated as a privileged political exile, with access to government aid and eventual citizenship. People perceived to be communists or other radical leftists are still often prohibited from even visiting the United States, let alone settling here.

However, poor farmers and workers who wish to come here legally from countries like Mexico, El Salvador and Haiti, where their livelihoods have been severely undermined by neo-liberal “free trade” policies promoted by the United States have a Hell of a time getting permanent resident visas.

Depending on their country of origin, they may have to wait decades. U.S. visa policy favors people in certain economic categories, as well as people with close relatives already in the United States, but also favors nations who have relatively few natives already living here. So there is a huge backlog for legal immigration from Mexico. This year, the government is just getting to the backlog of adult sons and daughters in Mexico of U.S. citizens, who filed their applications in 1993, 18 years ago. There is also an annual lottery of visas, but very few of the people who enter it actually qualify. And even if your number comes up, people who are without economic resources, such as secure job offers in the United States or relatives here well enough off to support them, do not get permanent resident visas. If people are desperate enough, they come as part of the undocumented stream.

Opponents of legalization of the undocumented often seem to think that people come here without papers because they are too lazy to fill out the paperwork to come legally. In fact, for a great many people who have a desperate economic need to come, the obstacles to legal immigration are such that the only way they can really do it is undocumented.

Other obstacles face those who manage to get permanent resident status, and want to become citizens and voters. Although most applicants don't consider the usual 5 year wait to be very onerous, the fees for citizenship application processing keep going up. And a couple of years ago, the naturalization test which prospective citizens have to take to prove they know English and understand the history and form of government was “revised” to make it more difficult. Most U.S. born people would have trouble answering many of the questions on this test. For immigrants with only a few years of formal education, it is a high hurdle indeed.

So if you are a poor farmer from Michoacán, Mexico, where grain farmers have been particularly hard hit by massive imports of taxpayer-subsidized U.S. wheat, maize and other agricultural products under the terms of NAFTA,and if you have no prosperous relatives in the United States, the chances of getting a visa to come here permanently are slim to nil. So you come anyway, without documents.

Likewise, if you are a poor rice farmer in Haiti, who have been driven clean off your land because of the dumping of taxpayer subsidized U.S. rice in your country at prices with which you can not possibly compete, have been therefore forced into the slums of Port au Prince, and then have seen everything you owned destroyed in the January 2010 earthquake, your chances of solving your problems by migrating legally to the United States are close to zero.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that there are 10.2 million people in the United States who are here without authorization. Probably between 7.5 million and 8 million are in the labor force. They are workers, and an integral part of our economy. Capitalist enterprises, especially in agriculture, hospitality and construction, realize surplus value from their labor. As they have no enforceable rights on the job or in the community, this surplus value is enhanced by the ability of employers to underpay them and make them labor in unsafe working conditions.

To have 10.2 million members of our working class living in the United States bereft of all political rights, without possibilities of gaining citizenship and the right to vote, is undemocratic. To have 7.5 to 8 million workers as part of the economy, but without labor rights, is also undemocratic. And the undemocratic nature of this situation has a very strong class dimension: It is overwhelmingly working class people who are deprived of rights, while wealthy businessmen and women get a very different treatment.

The immigrants' rights movement, which with its labor allies put millions of people on the street in 2006 and 2007 behind a demand for legal status for the undocumented, is fighting for democracy, not for special privileges for a few, The unions, which have wholeheartedly supported the demand for legalization and “a path to citizenship” understand that if the current group of undocumented immigrants could acquire rights in workplace and community, they would be a mighty force for the democratization of both our workplaces and our electoral political system, because of their class composition as a group. Undocumented immigrants, and their relatives, neighbors, friends and co-workers, know more than anybody what the reactionary policies of the Republican Party portend in terms of the people's rights. They are a mighty working class force waiting to be unleashed; that's why people like Governor Bentley of Alabama and Governor Brewer of Arizona don't want them to get legal status.

Gingrich's plan to allow undocumented immigrants to work (and be exploited) but not become citizens and voters is of a piece with the many and frequent demands from business that undocumented workers be replaced with temporary guest workers. These, too, have minimal rights in the workplace, and absolutely none in the political realm.

In spite of candidate Obama's campaign promises on immigration reform, there was really not a push by the administration and the Democrats in the first years of the administration. A plan proposed in June of 2009 by the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win unions and the great majority of the immigrants' rights groups, got support from the Hispanic, Black, Asia-Pacific and Progressive caucuses in Congress, but not from the executive branch or the Democratic leadership in House and Senate. The DREAM Act, which would grant legal status to undocumented immigrant youth interested in serving in the Armed Forces or going to college, was pushed toward the end of 2010 but was “too little and too late”, and the Republican gains in the 2010 elections, together with the renewed attacks on immigrants by the right, have killed of all chances for major immigration reform legislation for the time being. Frustration with the administration has also arisen from the news that deportations are at a record high.

However, the immigration reform movement and its allies did manage to get the Obama administration to announce, earlier this year, a change in the focus of deportations, away from ordinary workers and their families and toward people convicted of serious crimes, based on “prosecutorial discretion”. This, if carried out thoroughly, could be a lifeline to large numbers of ordinary working class immigrants. The struggle now is to make sure that the bureaucracy of the Homeland Security Department actually carries out the new policy. The American Immigration Council has carried out a study which shows that in many cases, DHS employees have taken a contemptuous attitude toward the new policy, and are flatly refusing to implement it

So part of the struggle now is to make sure that, limited though the Obama “prosecutorial discretion” policy is not effectively destroyed by either bureaucratic obstructionism in DHS or a Republican victory in the 2012 elections.

Other things have to be fought for also: For the reversal of the reactionary state anti-immigrant laws, for an end to the “Secure Communities” and “287 g” federal programs that allow local police to be deputized as immigration agents, and for an end to federal use of the E-Verify system to drive undocumented workers out of relatively well paid jobs into a complete underground existence.

All this is integrally part of the class struggle and of the struggle for democracy for all.

Obama in Osawatomie

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:01:00 +0000

President Obama’s speech last week in Osawatomie, Kansas was the true "pivot" towards jobs and away from the austerity debates of last summer for which workers, occupy protesters and tens of millions more have been waiting. As Jarvis Tyner commented, "we can criticize Obama and when it is done in a united front way he has shown that he can be moved." We can also note that no amount of unemployment, suffering, wage-cuts, or desperation appears to move any Republican candidate for president in the slightest degree.

The Osawatomie speech was an important and revealing look at Obama's domestic policy agenda as the election year begins in earnest. He clearly judges the possibility of serious compromise with the Republicans before the voters cast a judgement next November as minimal. He took a big step toward a serious jobs program while embracing the principle of bipartisanship by invoking the progressive side of Republican Teddy Roosevelt's campaign against the rising inequality of his time. Obama anchored all his arguments with an assault on the growing inequality in the US today, clearly showing the impact of the Occupy movement, and the labor-led victories in Ohio, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Arizona and Maine.

Without negating any of the downside of TR (his racism, for example) Obama's association with the progressive side of TR's reforms was an artful tactic. A tactic that appeals to the moderate Republican constituencies whose support he hopes to -- in fact must -- split away from the Republican agenda. Dividing the enemy is an art most trade unions excel in, but some on the left seem to have an allergy to it. Fear of somehow being seduced by the dark side is involved I think. But one need not be concerned that associating TR with a modern assault on reducing inequality will weaken the movement -- when reducing inequality is beginning to look like a revolutionary demand to the right-wing monopolies.

As Jared Bernstein, Vice President Biden's chief economic advisor, observes: "The contrast between YOYO (you’re on your own) economics and the trickle-down, starve-the-beast agenda it implies, and the President’s we’re-in-this-together agenda has the potential to be deeply resonant with the vast majority of Americans for whom YOYO has been a terrible bust."

But we need to add some meat on the bones, some structure to the debate. In the first place, REAL, IMMEDIATE progress on unemployment needs to be made. Especially among youth the government must become an employer of last resort. Minor initiatives like patent reform, free trade deals, “doubling exports” (with no regard to imports) doesn’t cut it. The heart of the president's speech were new, real economic opportunities for working people. It was NOT a call for fumbling around the edges or scoring points with interest groups.

The President targeted four areas in the speech: higher education, infrastructure, progressive taxation, and financial regulation.

1. Higher Ed: Improving college access is vitally important. However, we must be mindful that education policy is supply-side. It’s critical in the medium and long term, but it’s a lesser part of the solution to our biggest short term challenge: the quantity of jobs. There are many educated people out there that are over 99 weeks without a job.

2. Infrastructure: This is the number one place to invest a lot of energy in setting a jobs agenda. But, as Jared Bernstein writes: "The key here is to not get hung up on shovel ready—like-it-or-not, we’ll need the work for much longer than that. We need to think about large-scale ideas that go beyond roads and bridges." Projects like FAST! (Fix America's Schools Today) proposed by Senator Sherrod Brown are things that people can relate to in their daily lives. A national project to burying electricity and phone lines would be hugely popular in the aging Bos-Wash corridor, where you can easily lose power for weeks when hit by monster storms which used to happen ever 30 years but now come every 6 months. There is no shortage of work that needs to be done.

3. Tax Reform: As the President stressed in his speech, public infrastructure investment costs money, so fiscal policy must account for it. But, as Bernsteain argues, I agree -- keep it very simple: Stop favoring one type of income over another. The distortions in the tax code around “investment income,” like capital gains and dividends, lose mountains of revenue, feed inequality, and are at the heart of the “Buffett problem”—the fact that many of the wealthiest households face lower rates than average folks.

4. Transaction Tax: If nothing else is done (separating investment and commercial banking, etc) making the financial industry INSURE THEMSELVES against their own recklessness is a MUST.

Other items that should be considered start with a manufacturing policy that HAS to be added to the agenda. Without an industrial policy like China and Germany -- the green revolution will pass us by! In additon steps to immediately improve the incomes and protections of low-wage, low value-added non-tradable, service work (think home-health aides, cashiers, security guards, etc), including eaiser unionization, living wage laws, national health care, and free college educations for workers and their children -- are essential to fight the corrosive effects of inequality.

Whoever wins the Republican nomination, the competing vision will be between the YOYOs on one side, and ideas like those above on the other. In essence, the conservative vision will be looking back toward Bush, arguing that everything’s basically fine in the economy except Obama needs to go, the wealthy need to keep more of their pretax income, and the EPA and Departments of Education and commerce need to be shut down.

That will not resonate beyond the corporate base. And neither will it win the election when there ARE alternatives: In that regard, the President took a great step forward for the whole country in Kansas.

Victory in Ohio

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:18:00 +0000

The massive defeat of Issue 2 in the Ohio elections Nov. 8 repealed the measure, known as Senate Bill 5, and stopped the attempt by Gov. John Kasich and his extremist allies to bust public employee unions and break the political power of organized labor. The magnitude of the defeat - 61-39% -- and the unprecedented unity and breadth of the labor-led coalition that brought it about should have lasting effects on the politics of this key battleground state. The election also sent shock waves across the country, spurred the effort to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and may mark an important turning point in the national struggle to defeat the ultra-right, especially with the 2012 presidential elections fast-approaching.

There are important lessons to be drawn from the protracted 10-month grassroots campaign to repeal SB 5.

The first is that right-wing extremism is a clear and present danger to the democratic rights and economic security of the American people. Kasich was narrowly elected in 2010 by a margin of 49-47% falsely claiming that his opponent, incumbent Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, was responsible for the 400,000 jobs Ohio lost in the national recession. Many normally Democratic voters, angry, frustrated and discouraged at the continuing lack of jobs, stayed home thinking that it really didn't matter who won.

But they learned in short order how wrong they were. Far from adopting measures against unemployment, Kasich rejected federal funds for a rail system that would have created 10,000 jobs and the Republican-controlled legislature pushed through a far-reaching program to destroy unions, curtail voting rights, attack reproductive freedom, slash funds for local government and public schools, allow privatization of valuable state assets, permit guns in bars and open wide the doors to destructive environmental practices, especially fracking. Layoffs of public employees have continued without interruption and are expected to reach 50,000 because of the state budget cuts.

Much of Kasich's program was rationalized with claims of a budget deficit, but at the same time the Republicans cut revenues by ending the inheritance tax for millionaires, doubled funding for private and charter schools and left standing huge tax cuts and loopholes for big business and the rich. Without these measures the state would have had a large budget surplus.

The centerpiece of all this was the draconian SB 5, stripping the right of collective bargaining from 360,000 public employees, outlawing their right to strike, ending binding arbitration of contract disputes and facilitating decertification of unions. As in Wisconsin and other states, the template for the bill was provided by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the public policy arm of the right-wing oil billionaires, Charles and David Koch. After the bill passed the Senate by one vote with six Republicans joining the 10 Democrats in opposition, even more extreme provisions, pushed by Americans for Prosperity, another Koch brothers outfit, were added to the final version.

Kasich said Ohioans must either "get on my bus or we will run you over." He publicly denounced a cop, who dared to pull him over for a traffic violation as "an idiot," and promised supporters he would "break the back of organized labor in the schools."

Packaged with such arrogant rhetoric, SB 5 ignited a mass reaction unprecedented in size and scope in Ohio history. For two months in the dead of winter tens of thousands surrounded and filled the State House chanting "Kill the Bill" while rallies, town hall meetings and marches were held throughout the state as the measure made its way through hearings. Kasich and Americans for Prosperity at first attempted to mobilize their much-vaunted Tea Party shock troops in counter demonstrations but, when only a few hundred showed up, they abandoned the field and, except for sporadic town hall meetings with local Republican groups, the Tea Baggers were hardly seen again.

Out of the mass actions in February and March was born the coalition to repeal the bill through a referendum. We Are Ohio, a campaign structure led by key public employee and a few other unions and allied with the state AFL-CIO, was set up to coordinate the effort.

Its first decisive success was to mobilize some 10,000 volunteers who collected a record 1.3 million signatures in nine weeks to place repeal SB 5 on the ballot. This was five times the minimum statewide total required. A minimum number required for 44 counties was more than doubled in all 88 counties. This broad base of support reflected the fact that throughout the state, even in the most rural Republican strongholds, firefighters, teachers and other targeted public employees had risen to fight.

Kasich attempted to counter the referendum with the Tea Party, who collected signatures and placed a bogus "repeal Obamacare" measure, which became Issue 3, on the ballot. This was supposed to mobilize the right wing base, although state nullification of federal law has questionable legal standing. No campaign was conducted and most voters had no idea what the issue was about, but the measure, vaguely worded as a "health care choice" proposal passed and National Republican Chairman Reince Priebus lamely tried to discount the massive defeat of Issue 2 as simply a "state matter," and claim that passage of Issue 3 was a nationally significant repudiation of President Obama.

While public employees were the direct targets of SB 5 and at the core of the fightback, the coalition embraced the entire labor movement. Teamsters, steelworkers, auto workers, coal miners and building trades workers saw SB 5 as the opening gun in a more far-reaching attempt to pass a "Right to Work" law and bust all organized labor. The coalition included the predominantly Republican safety forces and Ohio Education Association teachers who were not generally connected to AFL-CIO labor councils. The safety forces formed their own group, Protecting Ohio's Protectors, which was critical in building opposition to Issue 2 in the Republican base as well as forcing the Republican Secretary of State to accept ballot language sought by We Are Ohio.

Aside from labor, the coalition included two other major components - a broad group of community allies, especially the African-American community, and the Democratic Party.

Community groups included the Stand Up For Ohio coalition of labor, environmental and other groups that had previously organized around the theme of "Good Jobs and Strong Communities." In addition, churches, seniors, groups opposed to budget cuts, MoveOn and eventually the Occupy Wall St. movement became involved, motivated partly by moral outrage at the brazen attack on a fundamental democratic right, but many, including small businesses and farmers, tenants and homeless groups also saw the attack on living standards, consumer buying power and reduced public services as a threat to their economic well-being.

A major effort to reach African-American voters was conducted by the Ohio Unity Coalition, headed by Petee Talley, Secretary-Treasurer of the State AFL-CIO. The coalition included the NAACP Voter Fund, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, Black churches and community groups and fielded an army of volunteers and paid staff to canvass the community door-to-door. They drew on the widely-held understanding of the key role government employment, with its enforcement of anti-discrimination measures, had played in providing African-Americans with decent wages and benefits as well as guaranteeing badly needed public services. In addition, Fight for a Fair Economy, a coalition set up by the Service Employees, had several hundred staff and volunteers working in Black communities throughout the state.

The Black community and the Obama For America campaign were especially concerned about the voter suppression law enacted by the Kasich forces aimed at reducing turnout of minorities, seniors and low-income people.

In an important show of unity We Are Ohio joined the effort to repeal this law and helped collect 380,000 signatures in August and September to place it before voters on the 2012 ballot thus blocking it from affecting the presidential election.

SB 5 was not just an attempt to end union rights in public employment but was also a power grab aimed at breaking opposition to the whole right wing extremist agenda and busting unions that provide funds, volunteers and other resources primarily to Democratic candidates.

The Democrats recognized the importance of We Are Ohio being non-partisan so as to maintain its ability to reach Republican voters and agreed to keep a low profile and work simply as a member of the coalition. Thus, Obama stayed away from Ohio, but Vice President Joe Biden rallied the repeal effort at the state Democratic Party dinner and at a large Labor Day rally in Cincinnati. He joined AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka in a national conference call declaring that labor was the key force to keep "the barbarians from the gate."

Former Gov. Strickland was also active especially in the Statehouse rallies and the iconic former astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn made a TV commercial for the repeal campaign. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and all five Democratic Congresspersons spoke at Labor Day events and get out the vote rallies. Rep. Dennis Kucinich put out his own yard sign. The Democratic state legislators were extremely active in all phases of the ten-month effort as were many local Democratic officials. The Obama campaign assigned staff and mobilized volunteers to work with We Are Ohio as did the state and county Democratic Party organizations and many college Democrat groups.

The labor-led coalition was not a well-oiled machine but rather a loosely coordinated popular uprising. Many unions and other groups focused on mobilizing their own members and conducting their own operations - phone banks, canvassing, mailings, literature distributions. Some unions made extraordinary efforts. The Cleveland Teachers Union was able to involve nearly one-third of its members in all phases of the fight and ran a continual phone bank out of its offices reaching over 540,000 voters.

Working America with offices in four cities knocked on nearly 400,000 doors. Senior Voice and the Cleveland Tenants Organization sent speakers to educate and mobilize thousands of voters in senior and low-income apartment buildings.

With so many simultaneous operations going, there were inevitable disputes, tactical differences and logistical conflicts. But the differences were minor irritants that were lost in the overwhelming mass upsurge. Building a Better Ohio, Kasich's group to promote Issue 2, was never able to mobilize a mass base and never recovered from the petition drive. The petitions, collected from every nook and cranny of the state, filled a semi-trailer that led a parade of 6000 through downtown Columbus June 30. As they were unloaded, the Secretary of State had to call in a structural engineer to guarantee his office floor could hold the load.

After that show of force, splits grew in state and national Republican ranks and, Kasich was not able to raise the funds and mobilize resources to counter the breadth and depth of the continually growing repeal movement. While details of right-wing funding remain hidden, it appears that corporate forces were reluctant to invest in a losing project and Building a Better Ohio was greatly outspent by the opponents of SB 5. Angry with the limited enthusiasm from his own party, Kasich boycotted the state Republican dinner in July.

He did have the support of all the corporate newspapers with the exception of dailies in Toledo and Akron and Issue 2 was also endorsed by state and local Chambers of Commerce and the associations of manufacturers, contractors and corporate farmers.

The national right-wing apparatus got into the act but could hardly make up for the lack of a local grassroots movement. Sarah Palin made a robocall, Liz Cheney operated a phone bank from Virginia, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck railed that the repeal effort was socialist and pious Christian fundamentalist Mike Huckabee came to a meeting of Kasich forces urging that "creative" actions be taken to prevent opponents from voting including "letting the air of their tires and telling them the election was on a different day." In fact, a mysterious group actually did make robocalls to SB 5 opponents telling them the election had been postponed to Nov. 9.

These actions reflected the isolation and fraudulent nature of Kasich's campaign. His hope to confuse and mislead voters backfired with the notorious "Grannygate" scandal. Building a Better Ohio lifted footage from a We Are Ohio TV ad featuring 78-year-old Marlene Quinn who called for defeat of Issue 2 since her great grand-daughter was saved in a house fire and she recognized the need for firefighters to be able to negotiate for safety equipment. Building a Better Ohio used the footage in its own ad with a voice over of a woman urging passage of Issue 2. We Are Ohio fought back with a new ad where Quinn forcefully denounced the desperation and deceitfulness of the Issue 2 supporters. The incident greatly undermined Kasich's support especially as he publicly defended the fraud saying it was "fine" with him.

The desire of many Republicans to distance themselves from Kasich also emerged in the bizarre visit of GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney to a pro-Issue 2 phone bank in Cincinnati a few days before the election. After the visit Romney told the media he had no position on the issue and that it was up to Ohio voters. Although he later recanted, insisting he really supported Issue 2, Kasich's backers demanded the resignation of Kevin DeWine, state Republican chairman, who, they said had engineered the incident to embarrass the governor.

The defeat of Issue 2 was a huge setback for the GOP extremists who believed they could use their narrow victory in 2010 to ride herd over all opposition, including in their own party. Although Issue 2 was the only thing to attract significant numbers of voters, the 46% turnout was the highest in 20 years in any off-year election, higher than in the 2010 gubernatorial election and far exceeded the 31% turnout in the comparable 2007 off-year election. More voted No on Issue 2 than voted for Kasich in 2010. It passed in only six counties and failed in 55 counties Kasich won in 2010.

Kasich was clearly shaken by the outcome and said he would have to reassess his agenda, a stance denounced by Rush Limbaugh and the extremists who insisted he push ahead as if nothing had changed. The Tea Party immediately announced it would start a referendum campaign for a "Right to Work" law and Kevin O'Brien, the extremist assistant editor of the Plain Dealer and enemy of public education, urged Republicans to immediately reintroduce SB 5, only this time leaving out the safety forces and focusing entirely on teachers.

But the Plain Dealer editorial board, which had endorsed Kasich for Governor and backed Issue 2, now conceded SB 5 was, in fact, "union busting" and lacked the support of all reasonable people. It urged the "Right to Work" effort be dropped, noted that Kasich's approval rating had fallen to 38% and ran a puff piece Dec. 4 on the multi-millionaire Governor, previously a director of the bankrupt Lehman Brothers Wall St. bank, allowing him to reference his working class background and claim he was misunderstood.

The Republican leadership in the Legislature said it would hold off revisiting labor issues until the new year and some warned that a sleeping giant had been awakened and continued attacks on union rights could well guarantee an Obama victory in Ohio.

The election also set back the Republicans in the Cincinnati City Council where all four pro-Issue 2 Councilmen lost and for the first time the Council gained an African-American majority. The Democrats certainly have grounds for celebration, but it remains to be seen if they can consolidate a base in traditionally Republican areas. They also face a serious challenge in recovering from the losses sustained in 2010 in the State Legislature and Congress because that election gave Republicans control of the redistricting mandated every ten years after the Census. While the state is closely divided, new districts were drawn to give 12 of the 16 Congressional seats to Republicans and similar hurdles were thrown up in state districts.

The Democrats are trying to overturn the redistricting through a referendum and in the courts but it is not clear they will succeed.

Serious challenges remain but the struggle to repeal SB 5 has greatly raised working class unity and consciousness. The main lesson is clear. With a broad, labor-led democratic coalition, right wing extremism, the greatest enemy of the American people, can be defeated.

A Volatile Time

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:06:00 +0000

This is a volatile period. Battle lines are being drawn. Not for a while have things been so unhinged.

A marked upswing, if not a qualitative turn in class and democratic struggles, is afoot.

Sustained mass actions, civil disobedience, new levels of solidarity and consciousness, innovative tactics and slogans, and a complex array of social forces and organizations are reshaping the political landscape in unexpected ways.

The most dramatic expression of this broadening, quickening, and to a degree spontaneous upsurge against the gaping inequality and injustice in our society is the Occupy movement.

This spirited movement - and the spirit is contagious - is capturing the imagination of tens of millions who are fed up with Wall Street's greed and worried sick about their own diminishing economic prospects.

Its politics don't fit neatly into any distinct political category and its methods of organization are unorthodox. No single "ism" prevails. Nevertheless, most of the participants are on the progressive and left side of the spectrum even if they don't characterize themselves in those terms.

While the occupiers are disgusted with Wall Street and Washington's deference to the "lords of finance," they don't embrace a specific set of demands. Some observers see this as a grave weakness, but we shouldn't. They have shined a spotlight on Wall Street, changed the national conversation from anti-government to anti-Wall Street, and turned the struggle against finance capital into a mainstream, top versus bottom issue.

This movement has spread to other cities and around the world, proving that in a volatile climate, small initiatives can trigger massive social irruptions.

Each occupation has its own distinct character shaped by local conditions and struggles. Grinding poverty, not Wall Street opulence, surrounds Occupy Detroit, for instance.

The occupations are winning the enthusiastic support and solidarity of labor all across the country. In Oakland, the longshore workers shut the port down.

If there is a divergence between the occupiers and labor's leadership, it lies in the attitudes towards the 2012 elections. Labor sees the defeat of the Republican Party - the party of rightwing extremism - as the critical terrain on which the class struggle will be fought.

Many of the occupiers, on the other hand, are suspicious of the political process, and see no value in participating in electoral and legislative politics.

What is needed is a friendly dialogue about the place of electoral politics in the larger scheme of things.

Spokespeople for labor should make the point that the 1 percent cringes at the thought of the occupiers and the 99 percent going to the polls in next year's elections.

Class warfare

For Republicans the occupations are distressing, to say the least. They have called them "un-American," say they are "designed to incite American against American," and are "the work of mobs."

But these attacks increasingly fall on deaf ears, and reveal in unmistakable ways their class loyalties to finance capital.

No longer can they have it both ways: insisting on class peace while waging class war. The jig is up. The people are at the gates. What goes around comes around.

In Marxist terms, the class contradiction is sharpening.

The occupations may seem to have come out of the blue, but they didn't. Since the spring we have witnessed an uptick in class and democratic struggles on a global scale from Cairo to Athens, Madrid and Santiago.

In our own backyard, major struggles broke out in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and elsewhere.

Nor should we forget that millions of young and older activists who threw themselves into the campaign to elect Barack Obama are looking to leave their mark on the political process going forward.

Thus, the occupation movement continues, draws inspiration from, and is rooted in homegrown as well as international struggles. It is a current in a much larger constellation of forces in which the participation and leadership of labor and people of color are of crucial importance.

Young people

Young people, bringing their flair and freshness, are the largest constituency of the occupations. Not only do they want to curb the power of the banks, take the money out of politics, and democratize public and private institutions, they also want to transform their own lives.

Some of what they do may seem farfetched and removed from the realities of power, but maybe that speaks to our limited cultural and political imaginations.

In any case, the potential of further building a broad youth movement has never been greater. It could eclipse in size and understanding the youth rebellion of the 1960s. And that movement left a permanent mark on the politics and culture of our country.

An immediate challenge - and a special challenge for the Young Communist League - is to energize the rest of the young generation whose life prospects are grim. As long as they are not a part of the occupation movement and the struggle generally, any hope of any substantive victory now and in the future is greatly diminished. And here I include the college campuses that are not yet plunged into struggles on a broad scale.

One would think that the economic conditions that measure the well being of young people - unemployment, student debt, etc. - should dispose them in the direction of struggle. And it does, but it doesn't happen automatically; the same conditions can also result in a narrow focus on individual advancement.

What young people do hinges on many factors, including if the broader movement gives them both support and, at the same time, space to articulate their specific concerns, express their generational styles, and construct their own independent forms of organization.

Challenges

Obviously the occupation movement faces challenges. One of them is to articulate a set of demands - jobs creation, student debt relief, transaction tax, millionaires' tax, etc. - and a pathway to win them.

Looming large as well is growing the movement in labor and communities of the racially oppressed, avoiding unnecessary confrontations with the police that draw attention away from Wall Street robbery, approaching the 2012 elections, and transitioning to a new phase of struggle in which the occupation of physical space isn't necessarily a defining feature.

Everyone is asking: what's next for the Occupy movement? A fair question with no easy answer, but it is no more important than some other related questions: How does labor and other social movements - how do we - adjust to this moment? What new initiatives and methods of struggle fit this upswing in class and democratic struggles? What new demands should see the light of day? Isn't greater boldness necessary? How can the entire progressive community mobilize broad support against police actions to evict the occupiers from public space?

All of this needs to be chewed over.

Strategic policy

In times like these some might think the shortcomings and inconsistencies of the president and the Democrats since 2008 warrant a change in strategic policy in general and electoral policy in particular.

I can understand this sentiment, but the facts on the ground, as messy, contradictory and disappointing as they are, don't call for jettisoning our strategic policy.

The main obstacle to social progress remains rightwing extremism and its corporate backers. They cast a reactionary shadow over the whole political process.

The election of Barack Obama was a blow to the ultra right, but subsequent events have demonstrated that it wasn't a decisive blow.

The right still retains considerable power and initiative to frame the debate and disrupt the legislative and political agenda.

Its overarching goal next year is to regain control of all three branches of the federal government. How dangerous is that? In my view it would set the stage for a period of extreme rightwing onslaught.

In the bull's-eye would be every democratic right, economic protection and people's organization.

The right to organize into a union would be annulled.

The unemployed would be left out to dry.

Abortions would become a criminal offense.

Education and health care would become a privilege.

The social safety net would disappear.

Discrimination would become the law of the land.

Global warming would accelerate to the point of irreversibility.

Prison populations would expand still further.

The projection of military power would become the favored instrument of foreign policy.

In sum, gone would be the rights, protections and programs that were won in the 20th century.

If you don't believe me take a glimpse at Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio where rightwing Republicans took control of the levers of power in 2010, and then ruthlessly rolled back rights, eliminated social programs and attacked the labor movement.

Those actions are a harbinger of what the Republican Party would do if in command of the federal government next year.

By contrast, the decisive defeat of the right would weaken Wall Street and the entire corporate class, give leverage and momentum to the people's movement, and open up the possibility of an era that puts people and nature before profits.

Said differently and dialectically, the defeat of the right at the polls next year is not only to the advantage of the Democratic Party, but also to the advantage of the labor-led people's movement. To affirm one doesn't deny the validity of the other.

In fact, I would go a step further, and say that a decisive victory will be of more advantage to the working class and people's movement than to its temporary ally, the Democratic Party.

None of this is to suggest that the Democrats aren't now or won't be in the future an obstacle to progressive change; in too many instances they are, but they aren't the main obstacle for the moment.

This election, then, is not about choosing a lesser evil. Politics is not a morality play and the Obama administration and Democrats are not evil. It is about our nation's future: Are we going to move in a progressive-democratic or rightwing anti-democratic authoritarian direction?

Thus, the labor-led people's coalition, and Communists as a current within that coalition, must make every phase of the election process a number one priority.

The people's coalition must be a major factor in the primaries. It must reach, register and educate new and stay-at-home voters. It must guarantee a maximum voter turnout on Election Day.

No less important, it must unrelentingly expose the reactionary positions of the Republican candidates and their racist and anti-democratic systematic campaign to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters.

Not everyone shares this view. Some think the Democrats are as bad as the Republicans.

Others go further and say that the Democrats are worse because they create popular illusions that change is possible within the two-party system.

Still others say the electoral process is so compromised by corporate money that participating in it is a fool's errand.

And finally there are advocates of running a third-party presidential candidate in this election.

I can understand these sentiments, but only up to a point. In the end, conditions don't warrant non-participation in the elections or a third-party candidacy.

Like it or not, millions go to the polls in spite of their misgivings. They are invested in the electoral process. And the Democratic Party remains the vehicle of reform for tens of millions, the majority of whom are working and oppressed people.

What is more, labor will throw itself into the campaign to elect Democrats, moderate as well as progressive, albeit from its own organizational base.

Much the same can be said about the racially oppressed. Ditto for the women's and seniors' movements. The majority of youth will also take part in the elections, and like four years ago on the side of President Obama and the Democrats.

A third party presidential candidate would only help the extreme right.

The two parties of the capitalist class have similarities. That is undeniable. But differences also exist at the level of policies, which can be widened under the impact of a powerful people's movement, as they were in earlier historical periods.

The past three years have been frustrating to be sure; much the same could be said about the past three decades. But frustration and impatience are a poor excuse for a strategic and tactical policy in relation to the coming elections and politics generally.

Only a very sober and objective analysis should guide our thinking and actions. It is easy to imagine any number of electoral strategies, but the question is: which one is rooted in objective realities and advances class and democratic struggles?

I wish the movement were not only ready to form an independent labor-based people's party, but also to help elect a consistently anti-corporate government, which under certain conditions could open up a path to socialist transformation.

But I don't believe that we are at that stage of struggle yet. And wish as we might, we won't be until our movement is broader, deeper and more consciousness of its tasks and objectives.

There is no direct path to socialism. The class struggle goes through various stages and at each stage new tasks arise. To skip over them in the name of militant radicalism may feel revolutionary, but in the end it is self-defeating and strategically misguided.

Lenin wrote in "Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder",

"Parliamentarism has become 'historically obsolete.' That is true as regards propaganda. But everyone knows that this is still a long way from overcoming it practically. Capitalism could have been declared, and quite rightly, to be 'historically obsolete' many decades ago, but that does not at all remove the need for a very long and very persistent struggle on the soil of capitalism."

Struggle for jobs

Of the issues that will move the American people, poll after poll tells us that it is the issue of jobs, jobs, and jobs.

This is of overriding concern and understandably so. Roughly 25 million workers are either unemployed or underemployed. This is a national disaster with an unmistakable racial, gender and youth edge. It requires emergency action.

President Obama's jobs proposals are the ground on which millions, including the occupiers, can be drawn into the fight to create jobs and rebuild the nation's infrastructure. The AFL-CIO is embracing and promoting them. Others will come on board too as the campaign gathers momentum.

The president's proposals are not as far-reaching as some other jobs proposals. The plans put forward by the Congressional Black Caucus, Progressive Caucus, AFL-CIO and Representative Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., are more ambitious, and we recognize that they contain more in-depth solutions. But the hard fact is that none of them stand a chance of congressional approval given the current balance of forces in Congress, and in the House in particular.

The president's proposals do, although the going will be tough. The Republicans, while initially making conciliatory noises, are determined not to give the president a positive record to run on. They figure a president with no accomplishments, especially in a period of crisis, will not be returned to office.

That such a position will hurt millions of people is of no concern to them. In fact, in their view, the worse economic conditions are, the better are their chances of winning back the White House and Congress in 2012. Irresponsible yes, cynical yes, even diabolical, but as a political calculus, this contains some truth.

Indeed, unless the American people are convinced otherwise, they could easily blame the president for the economic mess when they go into the voting booth next year.

The president, probably more than the rest of us, seems to be well of aware of this. Thus he appears determined to take the initiative on the main economic policy questions facing the nation. It seems evident he is no longer willing to let Republicans frame the political agenda.

Indeed, his jobs speech and subsequent travel to campaign for jobs put the GOP leaders on their heels for the first time since 2010 when they regained control of the House.

Now we won't like everything the president proposes, especially if he supports cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, and we should mobilize to make sure such ideas are dropped. But at the same time, that shouldn't be an obstacle to getting behind the job proposals (and I would add the millionaires' tax) in a full-blooded way.

The left should not set the perfect against the possible. It's counterproductive. And let's not "damn" the president's jobs and tax initiatives "with faint praise" - an approach that has been employed too often to no good effect.

A robust grassroots campaign for Obama's jobs measures will put wind in the president's sails, give people hope, and improve the prospects of a people's victory next year. We shouldn't concede this struggle in advance to the obstructionist efforts of the Republican Party. In fact, supporters of the jobs bill (and let's include occupiers) should organize visits to the congressional offices of Republicans during the holiday breaks.

Every Communist Party collective should discuss how to participate in this campaign. Where possible we should join with others in the neighborhood and at the workplace to establish jobs committees. A few people working together can make a difference; mass is a relative concept. Neither we, nor the movement generally, have enough traction on this critical struggle.

Struggle for unity and fight against racism

To win victories requires unity. We understand that well, but so do our adversaries. Thus they work overtime to divide the people's movement.

The employed against the unemployed, men against women, straight against gay, believers against nonbelievers, workers against welfare recipients, native born against immigrants, old people against young people, labor against environmentalists, occupiers against election activists, and white people against people of color.

Each of these deserves some elaboration, but space doesn't allow for that. So what I would like to do is focus on the fight against racism.

Racism is the most persistent and pernicious form of division in our country. It creates a fault line in our movement that if not overcome, irredeemably weakens the people's struggles.

Racism appears in structural and ideological forms. It is more than prejudice or attitude. It rests on the systematic elaboration of the notion of white superiority. And this notion has its origins in and is sustained by racist practices and structures that confine people of color to a subordinate status relative to white people in nearly every area of life.

Much has been said in recent years that the country is in a post-racial era. The only problem with this claim is that there is little evidence of it.

By every social measure people of color find themselves in inferior conditions. A quick glance at unemployment rates or life expectancy rates or wealth accumulation rates or incarceration rates or poverty rates offers ample proof of this fact.

Nor has racism in its ideological form abated. Perhaps its contemporary expression is different than it was a half century ago, but its essence hasn't changed.

In a column a few weeks ago, Pat Buchanan wrote:

"Can Western civilization survive the passing of the European peoples whose ancestors created it and their replacement by Third World immigrants? Probably not, for the new arrivals seem uninterested in preserving the old culture they have found."

He doesn't say segregation now and segregation forever, but it is a hardly concealed appeal to the worst instincts of white people.

Buchanan is not a lone voice in the wilderness. Since his election President Obama has been the object of open and unrelenting racist vilification.

"He's not a citizen," "he's in over his head," "he's Hitler in a blackface," "he's a tribesman," "he's a dick," "he's your boy," and on and on.

All of these vile expressions of racism pollute our political culture, rationalize the harsh conditions in which people of color live, fatten the corporate bottom line and sustain the rule of the most reactionary sectors of our society.

Racism is also the ticket of the party of white supremacy - the Republican Party - to return to the White House next year.

This racist ideological offensive attempts to convince white working people that they share common cause with the reactionary right.

But there is no evidence for this claim. While the program of the extreme right - cuts in people's programs, denial of voting rights, obstructing jobs legislation, etc. - falls especially hard on people of color, it also negatively impacts white working people as a whole.

This is the common thread that binds the multi-racial working class together. And this is especially so if the democratic demands of people of color and other oppressed people combine with the overall demands of the working class and people as a whole.

Thus what is urgently needed is a broadly-based, sustained struggle for economic justice and full equality.

Such a struggle not only brings relief to the victims of racism, other forms of oppression, and class exploitation, it also constitutes the strategic cornerstone of a winning struggle against the Republican right in the elections next year.

I emphasize this question because there is a tendency to lose sight of the special oppression that sections of the working class experience and the democratic demands associated with that oppression. This is a mistake at any time, but particularly now when such grave dangers are facing our country and the world.

Economy and its current status

The Great Recession of 2008 is looking more like the Great Depression of the 1930s. The economic crisis of U.S. (and world) capitalism is entering its fourth year.

And according to no less than Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, "the recovery is close to faltering." To think otherwise is wishful thinking.

In fact, a downward turn, aka "double dip," is more likely than a surge upward - not to mention a resumption of sustained and robust economic growth.

The International Monetary Fund in a recent report underscored the shaky prospects for the economy.

"The global economy is in a dangerous new phase. Global activity has weakened and become more uneven, confidence has fallen sharply recently, and downside risks are growing."

One of those risks is the potential default and implosion of the countries on Europe's southern tier - Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain. Each is caught in a dense web of mounting sovereign - government - debt that makes it susceptible to defaulting on its obligations to various financial institutions.

This would send financial and economic shockwaves across Europe and then to the United States and the rest of the world.

Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and economist, says the impact will be "catastrophic."

The rational policy response to this threatening danger on both sides of the Atlantic should be a combination of fiscal expansion, monetary easing, and debt restructuring/forgiveness.

In other words, governments should inject money into the veins of the economy, monetary authorities - read central banks and banks - should reduce interest rates and make credit easily available, and officials in the imperial centers should write down/postpone/cancel the debt of financially strapped governments such as Greece.

But that is not what they are doing. Austerity is the watchword. And, as you would guess, the brunt of it, despite massive resistance, is falling first of all on the working classes.

Hopefully European and American leaders will come to their senses, stimulate their economies and restructure the debt of indebted governments.

But we shouldn't hold our breadth. In short order, the super committee of Democrats and Republicans will bring forward its budgetary recommendations to the Congress. In all likelihood it will propose cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs, along with some modest tax increases on upper income people and corporations. Such proposals will hurt not only working people but the economy as well - a double whammy.

Only mass pressure will force the committee members to reconsider this course of action. We should be an integral part of these mobilizations.

Structural crisis

It would be wrong to characterize this global economic crisis as only cyclical in nature. In a typical cyclical crisis, workers are idled, wages are lowered, excess capacity is destroyed, inefficient competitors are eliminated, inventories are reduced, and debt is drawn down. And in so doing the conditions are created for a vigorous recovery - that is, a fresh round of accumulation of capital (investment and growth) on a broader scale.

In the post-World War II period this is precisely what happened in the core capitalist countries. Full recovery followed retrenchment.

But so far, this crisis is different. True, it follows old patterns, but only up to a point. No revival and recovery has followed.

Growth rates are no longer negative, but they are not robust either. And there is little reason to think it will be much different going forward.

All of which suggests that this crisis is structural and systemic as well as cyclical.

Over the course of the last century, the country has experienced four structural crises.

The first was in the 1890s and out of it came the rise of finance and finance capital (the first financial hegemony), which lasted to the Great Depression.

The second was the Great Depression 1929-1940 and out of it came the Keynesian (class) compromise and an era of vigorous growth.

The third began in the 1970s and lasted for nearly a decade, and out of it came neo-liberalism (or the second financial hegemony).

And the final and most recent dates to 2007-2008 and its outcome is still to be decided.

None of these crises were self-correcting. They were longer lasting and deeper in character. And their resolution was bound up with the outcome of a bitter class struggle in which the victor - the working class and its allies or the capitalist class and its allies - was able to restructure the economy, politics, and conventional wisdom in its interests.

Crisis of neo-liberalism

Neo-liberalism, as mentioned, emerged in the wake of the structural crisis of capitalism in the 1970s. It was the result of the economic contradictions of capitalism and the class struggle at that time.

It rested on flexible production networks on a global scale, union busting, deregulation, low-wage labor, inflation suppression, the hollowing-out of the welfare state, tax redistribution, and above all, the rise of finance.

The state didn't withdraw from the economy as much as it restructured its role and functions to suit the objectives of the top fractions of the capitalist class and particularly finance capital - that is, the restoration of class power, income and privilege.

Giving a necessary and heavy assist to this process was the Reagan administration. Much like Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Reagan employed state power to crush the opposition to neoliberal policies, reframe popular thinking, and grease the skids and shape the contours of neoliberal financialization and globalization. In doing so he set into motion three decades of neo-liberalism in a rightwing skin.

In other words, the morphing of capitalism into its neoliberal form was a contested process in which the working class and its allies found themselves on the defensive, fending off blows, and unable to mount a sustained and sufficiently strong counteroffensive.

What is more, the neoliberal expansion beginning in the early 1990s resting on debt-driven bubble economics, temporally hid the conflicting interests and contradictions of this structure of capital accumulation.

But all this changed in the fall of 2008 when the collapse of the housing market triggered a near-meltdown of financial markets and a long-term crisis of overproduction and stagnation in the economy as a whole.

Looking ahead, the exact contours and content of the recovery will depend on which class and its allies are able to leave their imprint on the political and economic process.

This is not a struggle between capitalism and socialism in the near and medium term, but over whether the working class and its allies are able to set into motion a process of reforms and radical reforms within the framework of capitalism.

So far financial capital and rightwing extremism have the initiative. But the battle and final outcome is far from settled.

What is encouraging is that millions, thanks in part to the occupy movement, are coming to the conclusion that there is a divergence between neo-liberalism and the needs of the working class and society.

If neo-liberalism is being challenged at the national level, it is under siege at the global level. In nearly every region of the world neo-liberalism finds itself discredited.

It was undone by its own contradictions. It promised growth and rising incomes, but brought hardship.

In some regions of the world, namely Latin America and Asia, the rebellion against neoliberal globalization and financialization has progressed from protest to the development of alternative growth models.

International developments

Following the demise of the Soviet Union twenty years ago, ideologues of U.S. imperialism spoke of the possibility of a unipolar century. How wrong they were!

Today the world is multi-polar, interdependent, unstable, and resistant to U.S. military power. It is defined by the rise of new powerful states - China in the first place. And it is filled with new overarching challenges - climate change, resource shortages and depletion, pandemic diseases, terrorism, and more.

Thus it is fair to ask if elite circles in the U.S. will take a fresh look at the U.S. role in world affairs and adjust it to new realities.

The answer to that question is yes and no.

On a tactical level the answer is yes. Some rethinking is going on regarding the methods employed to maintain U.S. dominance.

There is, for example, serious discussion about cutting the military budget in favor of domestic spending on education, research and infrastructure.

Or, to take another example, the war against the Gaddafi forces in Libya gives us a glimpse of what a different and less costly approach to the projection of military power might look like, that is, NATO-led interventions, the use of air power and drones, selective assassinations, sabotage and cyber warfare.

But on a strategic level the answer is no. No one in elite circles is suggesting that the U.S. should relinquish its dominant role in the world. And given the fierce rivalry over oil and other natural resources now and in the future, it is fair to say that this won't change in coming decades.

Illustrative of this is the administration's response to the Arab Spring. The White House welcomed democratic change as long as it was in a certain direction and didn't jeopardize the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism in that region of the world.

As a consequence, it cautiously supported democratic aspirations in Tunisia and Egypt, aided the rebels in Libya, struck a posture of silence or near-silence in the face of government repression of prodemocracy forces in other countries, including the murder of dissidents, and ginned up threats against Iran.

Moreover, U.S. support for the Israeli government continued, albeit with tensions between the administration and the Netanyahu government, while at the same time, the U.S. opposed the PLO's bid in the United Nation for Palestinian statehood.

Which goes to demonstrate that no matter who is in the White House the opposition to any strategic change in foreign policy is enormously powerful and includes core sections of transnational corporate capital, the military-industrial and energy complexes, the Pentagon, right-wing extremists, the foreign policy lobbies and other institutions of the national security state.

U.S. foreign policy is not solely decided in elite circles, however. The American people - not to mention people worldwide - also have a say.

More and more they are insisting with a new vigor that a new political and economic order be constructed, shorn of U.S. dominance.

For progressive and left activists this creates some new opportunities to rein in U.S. imperialism and military spending. Needless to say, we should continue to be part of the peace and anti-imperialist movement.

Militancy and civil disobedience

We are for militant expressions of struggle; historically speaking, civil disobedience is part of the DNA of progressive and left movements.

It was Communists who illegally occupied the GM auto plant in Flint, Michigan in the winter of 1936, leading to the organization of GM and the rest of the auto industry.

It was Communists who were among the young people who occupied lunch counters in 1960.

It was Communists who were among the people arrested in the protests over the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

And in recent weeks, Communists proudly marched off to jail with other occupiers.

And going forward we won't be shy to put our bodies on the line when the cause is just and the message inspires others to stand up for justice.

At the same time, we are against reckless provocations, violence to persons and property, and false bravado - all of which undercut the political and moral authority of the people's movement.

The litmus test for any action or slogan or issue is: does it win the active and/or passive support of larger and larger numbers of the American people?

If it does, full speed ahead. If it doesn't, we should rethink our approach.

The task is not simply to propose the most radical action in every situation. The task is to choose that tactic that wins the sympathy of millions, not some small circle of committed activists.

I often say what really matters (and this is a bit of an exaggeration) is not what we think, but what millions think. The latter is the starting point of communist policy and work.

Role of the Communist Party

0ur role is to assist labor and its allies to fight more consciously and strategically across every front of struggle.

We are not go-it-aloners, nor do we advocate narrow approaches to struggle. We're not a big party, but we think big. Our aim isn't to make a momentary splash or show off our radical pedigree for its own sake, but to redirect powerful currents of change in the direction of social progress and socialism.

At the core of the movement that we hope to build is the organized section of the working class. Because of its new thinking and initiatives, resources, experience - and let's not forget its location in the system of social production - we don't consider labor (and the working class as a whole) as just one more participant in the broader movement. Its role is strategic to the broader movement's success.

On the other hand, we don't believe that labor (and the working class as a whole) can go it alone. That would be a losing strategy. Its organic allies are people of color, women, immigrants, seniors and youth.

Only with such breadth and relationships is victory possible in the near term against the right and in the longer term against corporate power and its political parties.

In other words, broad unity is the path out of this crisis and the fight for such unity is a distinguishing hallmark of communists. As Marx and Engels wrote long ago, our foremost concern is the unity of the movement as a whole.

Finally, we see no contradiction between the struggle for immediate reforms and the struggle for radical reforms and socialist revolution. In fact, we can't get to the latter without fighting for the former; that is, only in the course of fighting for democratic reforms are the conditions created for radical change.

Ideological work

A critical part of our work is ideological. That could be said on any occasion, but today it resonates with special force. Old notions long held by working people haven't entirely gone by the wayside, but they have become unhinged to a greater or lesser degree. Tens of millions believe that the system is unjust, that the 1 percent lives very differently than the 99 percent.

The fact is that it takes some doing to defend - let alone extol - capitalism, when its flaws and injustices are experienced by so many.

We can bring to light the linkages between capitalism's inner dynamics, the capitalist economic crisis and the current onslaught on people's living standards and rights in the public and private arenas. In particular, we can remind everyone that "free enterprise" got us into this mess, but won't get us out.

And what better time to bring into this conversation our vision of a democratic, home-grown socialism.

Party growth

We are experiencing party growth not seen in many years - perhaps since the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is related to the ongoing economic and political crisis, a growing tide of struggle, and openness to the ideas of socialism.

Most of the new members are joining online. Each month approximately 70 new CPUSA members are joining and another 30 are joining the YCL. Some are joining both. Many more are joining through the existing local clubs.

Meanwhile, readership of PW has grown, its Facebook "likes" have topped 15,000 9,000 for the CPUSA and 1,700 for the YCL.

This is presenting the party and YCL with two challenges:

1. Reaching the millions who are thinking anew about socialism and the CPUSA.

2. Reaching out and engaging the new members, who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences in struggle.

A qualitative leap in our public presence is of critical importance if we are to reach far beyond a small circle of people. Among other things, we should agree on a new ad campaign on Facebook.

In this campaign we should present the party in a fresh and contemporary way - a party of the 21st century in its thinking, organization, songs, symbols and image. We don't honor our history and past with a retro look; we should be more creative, more in the moment, more in tune with the feeling and perceptions of ordinary people.

As to the second question, the party and YCL have taken a number of steps to shorten the time of contacting new members and to expand the avenues of involvement and communication including: new member outreach projects in New York and Virginia, regional schools for YCL and young party members in Los Angeles, Orlando, Dallas, Chicago and New Haven; two national phone banks; establishment of a new roots meeting; visits to unorganized states; weekend schools in several districts; and regular political action messages to the membership.

We have also discussed how to improve the racial, national and gender composition of those joining. A whole series of steps are being planned including educational campaigns on the struggle for equality, targeted advertizing, meetings of our equality commissions and districts, etc.

A new Communist Party is being born. It is forcing us to work in a different kind of way, including entrusting responsibility for various areas of work to new members, tapping the talents and ideas of the new members, etc.

But more comrades and clubs need to be involved in the outreach and engagement if we are to take advantage of this extraordinary moment and make a turn.

Hands-on leadership

To play our part in this volatile period requires that we give practical as well as ideological leadership to the clubs and membership.

We should plan on meeting with every club to discuss its activity in the coming year. This discussion should be practical as well as ideological. And out of these discussions should come a simple but bold plan of work for the coming year that organically combines mass work with party and press building.

These are exciting times. The future is still to be decided. Let's do our part to make that future one that is worthy of humankind.

THIS IS A FDR/MLK MOMENT --- A TIME FOR ACTION

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:03:00 +0000

Edited from remarks at the 11/11/11 meeting of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA.

2012 is a big election year and as we know the stakes are very high. The right-wing Republican opposition unashamedly defends the wealth and privilege of the 1% over the 99% that includes tens of millions who are struggling to survive. These self proclaimed patriots are willing to wreck our country in order to defeat Barack Obama in 2012 elections. Our party and youth league are an active part of the great democratic mass that is standing against them.

These so called patriots wrap themselves in the flag and claim strict adherence to the Constitution. Those who are elected officials are sworn to uphold the laws of the land. But as we meet today they are organizing in over 30 states (with Koch Brothers and anonymous corporate money) to steal the election by suppressing the votes of Black, Latino and white democrats. They are creating new restrictions to make it much harder for youth who voted in record numbers in 2008 to do the same in 2012.

I say to Mike Huckabee, former Republican presidential candidate, who thinks voter suppression is a joke: what the Republicans are doing is a serious violation of the constitutional rights of the US people. Voter suppression driven by racism and hatred of working people is rooted in the shameful period of Jim Crow. It is no joke. When I think of voter suppression I think of Schwerner, Goodman and Cheney --- the three civil rights workers, one Black and two Jewish, who were brutally murdered for registering Black people in Mississippi to vote in 1964. People died for the right to vote and those who continue such despicable practices are in violation of the highest principals of any democracy.

If the Republicans and Tea Party gang want people to stop accusing them of racism, there is a solution. They must end their long history of using racist scapegoating and pushing racist policies and practices. After the passage of the Civil rights and voting rights acts in the mid sixties the racist Southern white Democrats (called "Dixie-crats") en mass joined the ranks of the Republican Party. They were warmly welcomed. Today without their racist Southern base of voters the Republicans could not win the presidency, or any national election. They literally thrive on racism as a party. And that is why there is a virulent racist component to almost every program they advance today.

It begins with the disgraceful attacks on the first African American President. But continues also on the issues of:
---Reducing the size of the federal Government and privatization: it means that the government will not be able to stop massive corporate abuse of working people. It means the destruction of vital public services and the jobs of public workers who are disproportionately African American and Latino unionized workers.
---The privatization and charterization and destruction of public education is primarily aimed at predominantly black and Latino school.

The racist component is dramatically present in the incarceration rates for African-American males and the use of the death penalty. Since a higher proportion of African American and Latino workers are members of unions then other racial groups, the Republicans pro-corporate anti-union drive also has a strong racist component. One of the most backward parts of the Republican program is its racist attacks on Mexican immigrants.

Comrades and Friends, there is a direct correlation between the level of racism and the fight for democracy, peace and for socialism. In our country in a special way, racism blunts the fight against capitalist exploitation and oppression and US imperialism. These struggles cannot be advanced without an ongoing struggle against racism.

This coming Black History Month should be marked by a renewed offensive against racism. The struggle against racism is central to everything we are fighting for. The struggle against racism must intensified. "We are not going back! Step up the united fight against racism and for equality!" That should be the theme for our Black history month events. We also want to make a special effort in conjunction with Black history to honor two distinguished communist leaders.

This is the centennial year of the birth of Henry Winston. It is also the 101 year of the birth of Gus Hall. These two outstanding communist leaders represent one of our nations greatest examples of interracial leadership. As a dynamic team these two workers one Black one white left a legacy of outstanding struggle against racism and for working class unity. They left a treasure trove of brilliant writings, practices and theoretical work which needs to be brought out, studied, circulated widely and made available to reread. We also need to expose the new Jim Crow and the role of racism particularly as it related to the historic 2012 election fight. Without racism they cannot win the election. Racism is central to the rights electoral strategy.

I also think we need to let people know the bring out the policies of Gus and Winny on the class struggle, on building broad united movements of struggle and the critical fight for democracy which permeates every thing they wrote. Our party had clear differences with the liberal John F. Kennedy but in 1960 election our policy was defeat Nixon. Same with 1964 --- defeat Goldwater. In 1968 we had a Presidential ticket but our strategy remained--defeat Nixon. In 1972 when I ran with Gus Hall, the sharpest edge of our criticism was against Nixon . In 1976 Carter ran against Ford. The sharpest edge of our campaign was against Ford and the Republicans. All the while we have had big differences with the Democrats but policies of the Republican right represented the main danger and the main obstacle to moving forward. The fight to advance the democratic and revolutionary process forward tooward greater and greater changes requires defeating the greatest danger. And that is what we did. And the process did go forward.

Obama's support among African Americans and Latinos remains high even though they have criticisms of him. The leadership of the AFL/CIO also sees short comings but supports his re election. I agree with Sam Webb that "supporting the lessor of two evils" does not explain the tactics accurately. I believe it is building a broad united front against the main danger. That is mature and winning politics. It is true Obama has fallen short on some issues and made concessions and some tactical turns to which we take exception. That was the Obama with out the militant social movement that Roosevelt had during the new deal.

But an honest assessment of Obama's overall record will show mistakes but also show he did some remarkable things. The stimulus created and/or saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, The health care bill with will cover 30 million uninsured. The democratic forces are getting their second wind. Congresswomen Donna Edwards described this period as a "FDR moment". At the height of the Wisconsin struggle Jesse Jackson described it as a "Martin Luther King moment." What were they talking about? They are talking about a new willingness to struggle by democratic masses, about new movements emerging. There is a new movement among the youth. It has a great potential of gaining a deeper understanding of what are winning tactics. Their demands can be won with a broader more inclusive approach. Confrontation with the cops gives the media a reason to frame the issues around law and order, not jobs and taxing the rich, not relief from student loan debt. Higher levels of class and racial unity must be achieved for further progress.

New battle lines have been drawn. The Occupy wall Street movement and the fight for the American Jobs act has fired up the democratic forces. They are taking the offensive. We must continue to be fully involved. The announcement that the troops will be withdrawn from Iraq means it's time for Peace Action!

The Occupy Wall Street movement based on the reality that the problem is the 1% capitalist ruling class and "we the people" are the 99% majority. That idea is an advanced idea and in harmony with our anti monopoly strategy. But to mobilize the 99% means building a popular front style movement. Narrow sectarian politics of "my way or the highway" will not suffice. Views that 'I will only work with the left and the center is the enemy" will not mobilize the 99%.

Why are we confident about this point? Because it was the broad united from tactics that our party brought forth that was key to basic change like defeating Fascism and that built the New Deal and Industrial Unions. Next year we are proposing a national conference on strategy and tactics. How do we get to Socialism? The incredible victories in Ohio and Wisc., Mississippi. Arizona, Maine, New Jersey and else where tell us a lot about were masses are at politically. It's time for action; to mobilize masses for jobs to tax the rich and to register, educate and mobilize, voters for next November and beyond. The Right wing can be defeated in 2012. Organized labor understands this. The major anti racist organizations under stand this. Arizona shows what is possible. We are in a new era of democratic and progressive upsurge a lot of things are possible.

And I tell you comrades, we can criticize Obama and when it is done in a united front way he has shown that he can be moved. The whole effort of the Congressional Black Caucus and Progressive caucus to organized town meetings and job's fairs which drew large crowds across the country played a big role in pushing Obama to come up with his American Jobs Act which is laying the basis for a big defeat of the Right in 2012.

Frankly comrades, speaking as one who has been politically active under 9 different Presidents --- 5 of the right wing Republicans 4 liberal Democrats --- all the while pushing for progressive change and the ideal of a socialist USA; from many decades of struggling and pushing for change, nothing Barack Obama has done or failed to do in the last 3 years is a reason to sit back and not take part in this tremendous historic struggle to defeat the extreme right wing at the polls next year.

We need to treat this like the life and death struggle that it is. As Sam Webb has put it ...If you want to know what the Right will do to the country look at what they are doing everywhere they dominate the political and legislative process. What the working class did last week in Ohio, Mississippi, Maine, Arizona and New Jersey showed a high understanding of what is at stake and a determination to reverse the setback in 2010. This battle can be won. For sure, cynicism and pessimism will not lead to victory. It will take a lot of work. There will be setbacks and disappointments no doubt. But we can and must be optimistic: this battle can be won.

The Tea Party was supposed to be the new majority trend in our country. But where is the Tea Party now? They are still a well-organized and financed group. They tried to help Walker and Kasich. I'm sure they were working in Ohio, Miss, etc., but they could not match the united might of organized labor, the unity of black, rown and white, Asian Pacific, Native American Indian in struggle. Men, women, youth, old, gay and straight --- united nothing can stop us.

Where was the Tea Party? They had plenty of money but they were out organized, out strategized and most importantly, their bankrupt ideas are losing support among honest working people. They are not a match for the united power of the organized working people; along with racial and nationally oppressed, youth and students women, LGBT, peace and justice struggling together in a broad popular front. That's what is needed to turn the tide.

Our job is to contribute all that we can to maximize that power. And that is what will set the stage for a new progressive era and for a Socialist transformation. Big progressive change is closer then we think.