Written: 1960. A speech in honor of May Day, the International Workers Holiday.
Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "On the Threshold of a New Epoch." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp 355-359). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Ten years ago, my May Day speech spoke of McCarthyism, the execution of the Rosenbergs, FBI terror, witch burnings and blacklistings. In those dark days, I looked to the words of Eugene Debs for a tone of courage, to Marx for an example of tenacity, to Trotsky for the comfort of his long view of history.
But today, on this May Day, we need not burrow among the archives to find inspiration in printed words. Those words have taken on flesh—and fresh living blood—and volcanic reality. Today we are not mourning freedom's martyrs—we are avenging them. The revolution they dreamed about is happening—in a manner they never dreamed of.
Today, millions challenge and protest. The forces of domination—in the U.S., North and South, in fascist countries, in South Africa—are trembling and hysterical under the impact of this social tidal wave. No longer are the advocates of change merely "talking on street corners to scorning men," as Bartolomeo Vanzetti wrote. Instead, enraged and determined masses are storming the citadels of entrenched power.
This is new; let's note it. From the 1920s through the end of WWII, we intoned a mournful dirge of defeat and betrayal—Stalin's bloody usurpation of power in the Soviet Union, the collapse of the general strike in England, counterrevolution in China, fascism in Germany and Spain, the genocide of the Jews.
But amid the corpses and ashes, something good remained—the Soviet Union's nationalized and planned economy, a beacon for workers everywhere even though it was repressed and strangled by the Stalinist bureaucracy. WWII weakened the Comintern's grip on its national sections and the spirit of 1917 came bursting forth in China and Yugoslavia, with rumblings all over the buffer zone. Soon, explosions were happening one after another, every day, in the British labor movement, the Arab revolutions, victories against colonialism in India, Africa, Cuba, Korea, Turkey!
We used to patiently track, over a period of years, how events in colonized countries were echoed by reactions in the imperial powers. Today, you can see the cause and effect of Permanent Revolution unfolding in a matter of days, with the newspapers freely describing how revolts are being inspired by the example of a neighbor, a former colony, a struggle halfway across the world.
Suddenly we've entered an epoch of successful revolutions, of daily turmoil, of an irresistible dynamic. And the source of this fabulous, new, magnificent rebellion, these victories? It's not where you might expect.
There's a widespread illusion that the road to revolution lies through the patient and systematic education of the most advanced organized workers, as a group, from a union to a political to a radical to a revolutionary consciousness. After years—decades—of this dogged tutelage, a class eventually becomes sophisticated enough to revolt.
But that's not how revolutions work. They break out suddenly—sparked by a particular issue that cannot be precisely foreseen—and they develop fast. As they progress, the goals become broader and also more concrete and revolutionary. But at the beginning, the insurrection does not produce a well-edited manifesto—not even by Dr. Castro and the Cuban intellectuals—but an outburst of resentments and anger. The initial force of this explosion depends on the depth and longevity of oppression.
That is why the early stages of revolution almost invariably feature the phenomenon of the most backward and oppressed and traditionally silent surging past the more politically sophisticated and economically secure. We have seen them: the young girls in Cuba, the women with babies on their backs in Korea and Africa. When the most oppressed in the world, the most miserable and hopeless, burst the dam holding them back, the power is fantastic. The Dark Continent erupts into freedom—and the South African miners haven't even joined the struggle yet. When they do, the die is cast.
The anti-apartheid upsurge in South Africa is being felt in the West with demonstrations in England and sit-ins in the southern United States. In the New York Times, Harrison E. Salisbury reports, "Some Negroes have nicknamed Birmingham, Alabama the Johannesburg of America. . .they say it's a difference of degree, that here they have not opened fire with tanks and big guns." Yes, here all they use are whips, razors, guns, bombs, torches, clubs, knives, mobs, police, dynamite, jails, blackjacks, kidnappings, and raids. If Southern Negroes ever had any illusions of the democratic nature of the state, Johannesburg dispelled it!
Against the brutality of the Southern police state, Negro youth and students are standing up. Uncorrupted, untempted by collaboration and "Talented Tenth"-ism and good jobs— they are audacious, enthusiastic, brave. The young do not choose to compromise—the antics of their elders are simply too degrading. So they electrify and stun their seniors, who are then shamed into defending them.
Not only are NAACP officials forced to mouth pious phrases of moral support, the labor bureaucrats are making similar noises. Union ranks are impressed by the indomitable civil rights activists; and germinating in their minds is the idea that what's effective against Jim Crow would be equally good against anti-labor laws, and that the best way to move your immovable leaders is to start moving yourself.
The American union movement has been shown up and forced to take a good look at itself by the calm demonstrations of a few thousand southern Negro students.
And how the Democrat-Republican hoax becomes increasingly exposed! Go on, Reuther, tell these southern kids whom to vote for—which phony in Truman's party to support! The wrigglings and writhings of the AFL-CIO bureaucrats are a farce, and not just to radicals. Northern students as a whole are in natural sympathy with the civil rights cause and the Cuban revolution. They are fired up and they will listen to socialists as never before.
It is a good thing that international pressures are waking up new sections of the oppressed outside the union movement.
Today's unionists are fewer and better paid, becoming privileged aristocrats in habits and thinking. The union movement as we know it is losing ground, breaking up. It is in the throes of a crisis it virtually ignores in which technological changes are throwing people out of work and dramatically increasing the number of menial, unskilled, part-time, nonunion jobs.
The revolutionary impulse in America is not going to come from the unions as they are today, but from the displaced and discarded workers, from the youth, from the Negro fighters for freedom. And we radicals won't be mute spectators—in our ranks will be the new revolutionary-minded workers and youth whom capitalism and its labor lieutenants have sought to throw on the garbage heap. Their anger and resentment will be powerful.
What of the role of revolutionaries in America today? It is easier, yes, because every victory and revolt abroad gives something to us. The long period of conformity and conservatism is still with us, but it is not as strong as it was. Breaks and relaxations have appeared all over, evidencing themselves in small, even gossipy issues of popular culture which reveal elements of class struggle, of non-conformism. But still it is hard, because this country's pressures and seductions are many and insidious. We are still few and isolated, and the road ahead is uncertain and complex.
Nevertheless, we are devoted to achieving human freedom because apart from that we know there is no freedom for us.
The socialist future is clearly within the vista of our epoch, of our lives. And what better fate can a person carve out than participation in the emancipation of humanity? What better use to make of one's life than in preparing that new civilization? We look toward a time when we shall have ceased to mourn martyrs. A time when we are no longer occupied with explaining defeats and rising above betrayals. Not because we will have forgotten the past, but simply because we are so engrossed and fulfilled in the role of creating a world rich with freedom, plenty, humane relations between people, and the joy of living.