First Published: The Call, Vol. 7, No. 7, February 20, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Feb. 18 March for Jobs is finally upon us after months of organizing and hard work by the Jobs or Income Now Coalition and all its member groups. This is a demonstration which the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) energetically endorses.
That our country is engulfed by a deep economic crisis and that unemployment is the most basic cancer eating away at the masses’ livelihood—these are facts which even the politicians and the trade union bureaucrats cannot completely cover up.
But what to do about this situation? That is the key question, and many pretend to have the answer.
Jimmy Carter offers us saccharine promises that the unemployment picture will improve. Out of the entire $500 billion budget he proposed last month, however, only the most meager crumbs will go to jobs.
George Meany and the top echelons of the labor bureaucracy hold no answers either. In fact, they refuse to allow any real mass struggle for jobs to be taken up among the rank and file even in the face of massive layoffs in steel, auto and every other industry.
Instead of exposing the bosses, the trade union bureaucrats have put the blame for the crisis on foreign countries, foreign-born workers, women and minorities—anything that serves to divide the people and hide the real nature of the problem.
Their job is to steer the workers away from the path of class struggle and into reliance on piecemeal reforms and empty legislative measures like the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill (which, although it is called a “full employment” bill, actually does not create a single new job).
The revisionist Communist Party, U.S.A., while using the name “communist” to deceive people and build its influence among those workers fed up with the system, has a similar program.
They too push reliance on legislation like the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill and spread the myth that unemployment can be solved under capitalism, if only the right legislation is passed and if “priorities are reordered.”
Added to this is their constant suggestion that the way to solve unemployment is to “nationalize” industry. They say that government-run enterprises can serve the interests of the masses—thus covering up the fact that the government is nothing but the tool of the bosses.
Added to these points of the revisionists’ program is their unceasing propaganda to conceal, with the sweet song of “detente,” the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the danger of war. The revisionists spew forth prattle like “detente means jobs,” a slogan designed to promote U.S. trade with the Soviet social-imperialists, who are using such trade to help build up their vast war machine.
In total contrast to the bankrupt “solutions” posed by all these forces, our Party declares that the blame for the crisis lies exclusively with the capitalist system, and that the only real way out of the crisis is working class struggle and socialist revolution.
At the Founding Congress of the CPML in 1977, our Party analyzed the fight against the crisis in this way:
“No, the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill and the like won’t provide a single job for the unemployed, nor will the increasing attacks on foreign-born workers. The real program of capitalism in crisis is now, and has always been, a new round of imperialist wars and increasing attacks on the workers.
“What then is the road out of the crisis? How can jobs be won and the basic living standards be raised?...
“First and foremost, we must show that capitalism has no solutions. The massive struggles now being waged against the decaying capitalist system must be given consciousness and communist leadership so that every illusion about a capitalist solution is driven into the dust beneath the feet of marching workers.
“But we must not confine ourselves to hollow phrases about socialism either. For this also is the game of the revisionists who preach ’socialism’ minus class struggle.” (Political Report to the Congress by CPML Chairman Michael Klonsky.)
The fight for jobs is one of the major vehicles through which we can combine revolutionary education with mass action. Through efforts like the Feb. 18 march, our Party can further expose the capitalist system and at the same time build the day-to-day struggle in defense of the people’s living standards.
We stand not only for the final revolutionary aims of socialism and the proletarian dictatorship, but also for building the fightback movement in a revolutionary way, fundamentally different from the way the reformists and revisionists propose to build their “fight” for jobs.
The National Fight Back Organization (NFBO), which was founded in 1975 and played a major role in initiating the Feb. 18. march, exemplifies the type of class struggle perspective that the unemployed movement must take towards the crisis.
The NFBO has been an action-oriented group, seeking to organize the unemployed and build unity between workers with and without jobs. It has condemned and attacked the special oppression faced by minorities and women, and linked the fight against unemployment to the wave of racist police violence.
The NFBO has organized in working class and minority communities against every type of attack and abuse brought on by the crisis—from evictions to deportations.
It has also vigorously demanded, “Jobs not War,” refusing to accept the imperialists’ solution to unemployment—another war in which the youth will die fighting workers of other countries for the profit of imperialism.
Hitting out at the war preparations of the U.S. and the USSR, the NFBO has built concrete support for the third world countries and liberation struggles on many occasions.
In addition to helping build the NFBO, our Party also works to take a class struggle Program into the factories and trade unions, as well as other mass organizations of the people. Even in the short time since the founding of the Party, the CPML has been able to do broad revolutionary education, give leadership to the class struggle in many places and win more workers to the side of socialism.
The work of the JOIN coalition and the NFBO and our Party within it has been characterized by a militant, class against class approach. If the fightback movement continues to be built in this way, it will undoubtedly succeed in wresting concessions from the ruling class along the road of its revolutionary struggle. On a small scale, some jobs and unemployment benefits have already been won as a result of the work by JOIN activists in different cities leading up to Feb. 18.
We need only look back to the history of the communist-led unemployment struggles of the 1930s to see that reforms are won primarily as a byproduct of revolutionary struggle. When in the early ’30s, hundreds of thousands of hungry workers stormed the White House; when tent cities of the poor sprang up outside every state legislature; when workers seized the factories rather than be thrown out onto the streets; when communists spoke on soapboxes in every city teaching the meaning of socialism; it was only then that demands like unemployment insurance, social security and cash relief were won.
But those reforms were also used by Roosevelt and his New Dealers to diffuse the struggle of the working class and halt its revolutionary development. Aided by the treachery of the revisionists within the Communist Party in the 1940s and ’50s, the capitalists succeeded in shoring up their system through the use of such reforms.
Today, 40 years later, those reforms stand exposed for their total inability to meet the people’s needs. We have unemployment insurance, social security, etc., and yet fully ten million workers are unemployed and hungry, the elderly are forced to eat dog food to survive, national oppression is intensifying, police terror is on the rise, and the danger of a new war hangs over the world as a result of imperialist rivalry.
No piecemeal reforms or partial solutions can bring an end to this state of things. We must resist the efforts of the imperialists and their agents to sow illusions about “reforming” capitalism, and instead build our movement with the perspective of overthrowing it.