Reminder: PA Board meeting

[Joel Wendland]

Hi,

Just one more reminder that the PA board meeting is tomorrow, Nov.
1st, at 12 noon eastern. The main political discussion will center on
my article, "Class, community and working-class consciousness." Find
the article by clicking on this link: http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/9061/

Or see here:

Class, Community and Working-Class Consciousness
By Joel Wendland

“There is very little class consciousness in this country,” one high-
level leader in the AFL-CIO told me several years back, during the
nadir of the Bush-Republican Party stranglehold on the US government.
“So, if the labor movement is going to grow, build strength, win
victories and win more political power, we need to build coalitions
with the community,” he concluded.

Another community and union activist about the same time said, “People
on the left say all the time that we need one big labor or socialist
party. Well that's not going to happen soon. So we need to build
coalitions if we are to have any chance of advancing democratic
struggles.” If these comments are true, what is the importance of
coalition-building to the development of class consciousness, working
class power and social progress in the era of reform since the victory
in the 2008 election?

Both of these working-class activists hit on key aspects of politics
and class in the US. Media pundits typically use stock but meaningless
phrases like “center-right” or “fiscally conservative and socially
liberal” to characterize US politics generally. More a projection of
capitalist class values than an empirically-based description of
society, this view of US politics reflects an attempt to preserve
political and cultural hegemony. In fact, the right-wing ideas and
political formations that have held sway over the last 30 years have
served as the cornerstone of capitalist power in the US.

Hegemony, ideology and consent

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued two basic things about
politics in developed capitalist societies that contain valuable
lessons for today. First, he argued that “hegemony,” or the
maintenance of class power by the capitalist class, flows from the
ability to preserve a multi-class coalition led by the capitalist
class. In this manner, while resistance and opposition persist,
capitalist rule is preserved in the main by the consent of the
governed.

We can see how this principle operates in the health care debate
today. The sections of the capitalist class that oppose health reform,
using fear tactics and a far-right ideology mired in religion and
populist libertarianism, have formed a coalition. This coalition
includes insurance companies and a powerful right-wing media (Fox News
and right-wing radio personalities) and their followers – many of whom
are the very working-class people who would benefit most from health
reform.

On the other hand, the reform movement is comprised of labor and other
working-class-oriented democratic movements, some sections of the
capitalist class, small business owners, middle-class professionals
(like doctors), and the majority of federal-level elected officials in
the Democratic Party.

These configurations are radically different from those which operated
in the early 1990s when reform failed. Then, as in the past, reform
efforts led by a fragmented reform movement met with united and
powerful opposition from the capitalist class.

However, the key to winning meaningful reforms that restructure the
broken private health care system into one that puts human needs
before profits lies beyond just those who make up of the present
coalition of forces that is demanding reform.

Reform driven by the principle that health care is a human right that
can only be guaranteed by providing expanded, affordable coverage,
would be a major victory for democracy and would substantially improve
the material situation of the working class. It would also advance the
general struggle for socialism by laying a basis for future
humanization of the health care system through the elimination of
exorbitant profits. And while the struggle for reform on this front
has exposed the lies of capitalist ideology – the perverse idea that
the appropriation of social wealth as private capital is the best,
most democratic way to organize a social system – the effort to win a
humane system will not be over when a reform bill is signed.

Secondly Gramsci argued that hegemony of the capitalist class is
preserved by means of the formation of a broad, pro-capitalist support
base for that hegemony. Marxists, up to this point, had tended to
emphasize the development of productive forces as the primary
influence on the formation of ideas. Thus advanced capitalist
societies should naturally have advanced working-class movements,
ideas and cultures, they insisted. But Gramsci countered that ideology
and culture are often relatively autonomous from the material bases of
society, as evident, to him, in the slow-to-develop socialist
movements in the major imperialist and capitalist countries of his
time.

While Lenin and others facilely explained this by saying that
imperialism's material benefits, the surplus that trickled down to
working classes in the big capitalist countries, created an
“aristocracy of labor” opposed to socialist revolution, Gramsci
insisted that the main answer to the question really lies in the realm
of culture and ideological struggle, a factor which is still
incompletely understood or ignored by pro-working-class forces and
movements in developed capitalist countries.

Today, we might add a qualification to Gramsci's point: that because
of the anarchic, cut-throat nature of capitalism itself, sections of
the capitalist class compete amongst each other for hegemony as well
(for example, think of the fierce, high-stakes competition between
emerging owners of potential capital reaped from renewable energy
sources and the titans of Big Oil).

Ideologues who side with the capitalist class, or sections of the
capitalist class, adopt fragments of the ideologies of the working
class and the democratic movements allied with the working class,
creating a mirror image of their slogans and stock phrases to
reinforce capitalist-controlled coalitions in order to maintain the
status quo. Words and symbols are stolen from working class or
revolutionary history and pressed into the service of capitalist
hegemony.

Take, for instance, the American flag. What was once a symbol of the
multi-class, national liberation coalition of landowners,
slaveholders, merchants, farmers and the emergent industrial working
class against British imperialism, has been turned by the ultra right
into a nearly meaningless symbol of hackneyed patriotism and
jingoism.

Consider the lapel pin brouhaha against Barack Obama during the
Democratic primary campaign. Expressing the emptiness of the right-
wing symbolism of the flag, Fox News personality Sean Hannity
explained to his audience, “Why do we wear lapel pins? Because our
country is under attack!” As if lapel pins could defend us from
imaginary WMD. In recent years, more than anything else, they became
an emblem of support for Bush's “war on terror” and his war of choice
in Iraq.

Obama's reasoned response called out this phony patriotism: “I'm less
concerned with what you're wearing on your lapel than what's in your
heart.”

Working-class Americans have long fought to recover and re-appropriate
the real meaning of the US flag. During the Spanish Civil War,
volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, which sided with the
Republican cause against the fascist forces, wore American flags on
their uniforms as symbols of their internationalism and their
willingness to shed blood for liberty.

Union members demanding better wages or working conditions, or a shift
in power away from the bosses and capitalists, march with American
flags in their demonstrations. Civil right activists demanding
equality and democracy carried US flags, as if to proclaim how “un-
American” inequality is. For them, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s
invocation of an American dream that makes “justice a reality for all
of God's children” was more than simply words.

In 2005, I had the honor of marching with hundreds of US youth in
Caracas, Venezuela during the opening ceremonies of the World Festival
of Youth and Students. We carried the American flag as a symbol of our
rejection of US intervention around the world and our refusal to bend
to capitalist and right-wing dominance in our own country, and as a
symbol to the youth of the rest of the world, who had also gathered
there, that people like us still existed in the biggest capitalist
superpower. They looked at our US flag pins and knew a working-class
movement persisted here.

Right-wing and capitalist ideologues also distort and steal working-
class values of faith, family, responsibility, integrity, and the
value of work and unity, to advance their own far-right agenda.
Capitalists have learned over the years that stealing our ideas and
values and twisting them to serve the status quo they dominate can be
very effective. This capitalist-manufactured ideological hodgepodge
aims to preserve capitalist rule by turning social problems and their
causes into private matters for individuals to solve on their own.

Take, for example, the question of responsibility. Working-class
people strongly believe in the personal responsibility they have for
taking care of their families, and making sure they have enough to
eat, a roof over their heads, education, safety and quality of life.

Right-wing, pro-capitalist ideologues have turned this virtue into a
vice. If you lose your home because a bank, freed from government
oversight by right-wing anti-regulation efforts, engaged in corrupt
banking practices and preyed on your vulnerabilities, you are
responsible. This is exactly what right-wing media pundits blurted
when the home foreclosure crisis erupted. It wasn’t the banks or Wall
Street who were responsible, and certainly not the right-wing
politicians who dismantled the financial regulatory system or blocked
efforts to stop banks from using such methods.

If you lost your job during the subsequent recession, you alone were
responsible for providing for your survival, right politicians and
media pundits intoned as they railed against extensions of
unemployment benefits, or voted to a person against the economic
recovery package.

If you are sick and have no insurance or have bad coverage, you're on
your own. You are responsible for yourself.

For too long too many working-class people have believed these
distortions of their own class ideas. But the crisis of capitalism
revealed by the current recession has exposed the emptiness and
destructiveness of the capitalist distortion of those ideas.

Obama’s soaring rhetoric, and his advocacy of policies that link
personal responsibility to a shared community responsibility to
provide for basic needs, prevailed during the 2008 election campaign.
A virtual overthrow of the right-wing ideological domination of the
public debate began.

Not just words

In the summer of 2007, during the Democratic primary, the AFL-CIO
organized a Democratic candidates debate. At that event, union members
got to ask the candidates questions on live TV. The entire debate
revealed the momentum the working class and the labor movement had
been gaining in the struggle to delegitimize the right-wing's
dominance of ideological questions and to counter right-wing
hegemony.

One question of note during that debate serves as a highlight of that
struggle. Retired steelworker Steve Skvara stood up and spoke about
working-class families values in a way that presented an authentic,
independent working-class point of view. He said,
After 34 years with LTV Steel, I was forced to retire because of a
disability. Two years later, LTV filed bankruptcy. I lost a third of
my pension, and my family lost their health care. Every day of my
life, I sit at the kitchen table across from the woman who devoted 36
years of her life to my family, and I can't afford to pay for her
health care. What's wrong with America and what will you do to change
it?”

A person in Skvara's position who had been overly influenced by right-
wing capitalist ideology might have blamed him or herself for this
situation. That person might have believed that he or she was solely
responsible for the problem and its solution. Certainly, that's what
they would have heard on right-wing talk radio, Fox News, or
Republican Party politicians and Republican Party-tied television
evangelists.

Skvara, however, flipped the script. He re-articulated basic working-
class values – personal responsibility, family, gender equality,
community and country – to strike at the heart of capitalist values
and contradictions. Health insurance companies, in order to fatten the
bottom line, are known to deny health care coverage to people with
serious – and expensive – illnesses. Steel companies, seeking profits
from cheap labor elsewhere, laid off people like Skvara, closed their
plants here, and declared bankruptcy to get out of contractual
obligations that required them to pay for retiree health insurance for
people like Skvara.

In his moving words, Skvara claimed personal responsibility for his
family, but demanded that politicians who sought his vote fight with
him on his family's behalf against the outrages of corporations that
had abused him and his family for private gain. He also spoke as a
member of a union, a community of workers who banded together to take
on the bosses who sought to worsen exploitation in the workplace. He
tied his own predicament with working Americans as a whole; he tied
the solution to his personal problems to a broad struggle. Indeed, he
seemed to be claiming that a solution to the problems he faces, and
that working Americans as a whole face, lay in generalized, systemic
solutions, such as health care reform, workers' rights, and changed
trade and economic policies that create rather than kill jobs in
working-class communities in this country.

Right-wing media pundits and bloggers got shaken up by this revision
of the dominant ideology of personal responsibility. As might be
expected, they accused Skvara of being a communist and all kinds of
other things.

Skvara's intervention was recalled in a very public way recently. At
the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh this past month. President Obama
remembered Skvara's comment, retold his personal story, and connected
it back to the idea of community. “This isn't just about Steve,” he
said, “this is about all of us.” When workers like Steve Skvara are
able to work in a job that provides them the satisfaction of being
able to care adequately for their families, then the whole “middle-
class” (code word for working class) and the whole country “succeeds,”
Obama said.

“In America, the success of all is built on the success of each,”
Obama said to thunderous applause.

Those aren't just words. They are a reflection of a conscious struggle
by the working-class to re-write the ideological script penned by
right-wing, pro-capitalist ideologues. Skvara's words and their
reflection in Obama's speech are not simple, empty sloganeering. They
represent a way of thinking and speaking forged in the heat of the
steelworkers’ struggle to keep jobs, pensions, and health care in the
face of a capitalist drive for super-profits that discards human
beings like slag.

Indeed, the call and the response – Skvara's original defiance
reflected in President Obama's speech – signal an emergent class
consciousness that moves beyond local workplace struggles or special
interest politics. They precisely reflect the concerns of the labor
leaders, quoted at the beginning of this essay, who urged the
broadening of the labor movement's basic goals and aims beyond
contract negotiations and electing politicians who once in a while
support pro-union policies.

These were words saturated with lived struggle, with the history of
the working class itself.

In his speech before the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh, after
detailing his views on the concrete issues of the 2009 agenda –
climate change legislation, green jobs, expanding educational
opportunities, passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, and passing
health reform that includes a public insurance program – President
Obama then proceeded to rewrite the “master narrative” of American
history.

What do I mean by that? A “master narrative” of history, as the
recently deceased historian of America's multi-racial, multi-ethnic,
multi-gendered, multi-national working class, Ronald Takaki, said, is
the story of America written, by, for and basically about America's
“masters.” It is a story that erases working-class and minority
history. It ignores the voices of women, immigrant populations, and
the LGBT community. The “master narrative” presents a tale of progress
that denies the realities of exploitation and oppression and the fact
of struggle for power and community by working and democratic-minded
people against exploitation and oppression.

In short, it is a masterpiece of ideological hoodwink. Like
contemporary right-wing ideology, the master narrative’s goal is to
preserve an image of the basic goodness of the capitalist class and to
forge a false, but powerful belief in a national unity that transcends
classes or communities.

In his speech, Obama re-wrote that “master narrative” from a working-
class perspective:
“The battle for opportunity,” he said, “has always been fought in
places like Pittsburgh, places like Pennsylvania. It was here that
Pittsburgh railroad workers rose up in a great strike. It was here
that Homestead steelworkers took on Pinkerton guards at Carnegie
mills. It was here that something happened in a town called
Aliquippa.

“It was a tough place for workers in the 1930s – ‘a benevolent
dictatorship,’ said the local steel boss. Labor had no rights. The
foreman's whim ruled the day. And the company hired workers from
different lands and different races – the better to keep them divided,
it was thought at the time.

“But despite threats and harassment, despite seeing organizers fired
and driven out of town, these steelworkers came together – Serb and
Croat, Italian and Pole, and Irish and Greek, the kin of Alabama
slaves, and the sons of Pennsylvania coal miners. And they took their
case all the way to the Supreme Court, securing the right to organize
up and down the Ohio River Valley and all across America.”

President Obama has consistently told a version of American history
from the ground up. He has spoken of social progress as the result of
workers and communities in struggle: women fighting for the right to
vote, slaves and abolitionists united against slavery, men and women
workers united against fascism, and so on.

Again, I would not pretend that political struggle and social progress
are only won on the level of words or discourse, but words like Steve
Skvara’s and speeches like Barack Obama’s give a snapshot of the
current state of struggle and the balance of forces in the fight. They
are not just words, as left and right pundits have uncritically
opined. President Obama, with a united labor-led coalition of workers
and democratic movements behind him, holds certain principles and
values and is fighting for an agenda that itself is saturated by the
complexity and contradictions of the coalition he leads.

Marxism and coalitions

The first Marxist theory of the formation of political coalitions came
from Marx himself. In his various works in which he describes mid-19th
century European revolutions, Marx makes some important points on this
question. The labor movement in early 19th century Europe was mostly
unorganized and often failed to see itself as a class for itself. So
Marx highlighted the times when workers sought or fell into alliances
with non-proletarian strata and movements. Sometimes these alliances
crossed class lines to include sections of the bourgeoisie. While Marx
rightly remained skeptical of such multi-class coalitions, assuming
that the most powerful forces in a coalition would abandon the cause
of the workers, he accepted their practical necessity.

In Capital, for example, Marx traces the multi-class coalition in
England that played on the splits in the capitalist class in order to
pass the most important, if limited, reforms of the period: the
Factory Acts. These reforms reduced working hours, provided the basis
for government oversight of the safety and health of workers, and
improved working conditions. Marx argued that these reforms not only
eased the most outrageous working conditions for workers - they also
helped to develop the forces of production and “[mature] the
contradictions ad antagonisms of capitalism.”

Simply put, it was unnecessary at that point for the advanced sections
of the working class to adopt a narrow revolutionary or socialist
posture. In alliance with other forces who shared a common program,
workers won minimal reforms. Contrary to standard left-wing rules for
revolution, these reforms did not mitigate the class struggle or the
contradictions of capitalism, but in fact helped them to mature, Marx
argued.

Thus, being able to identify those moments when tactical alliances
could help the working class attain strategic aims and produce social
progress is a key function of the Marxist outlook. This Marxist
outlook contrasts sharply today with “revolutionary” ideas that are
more concerned with being “to the left” of someone else, or with being
anti-capitalist enough in all cases.

In the case of early 19th century England, the outcome of the struggle
for labor law reforms necessarily reflected the balance of forces in
place. While power relations among the strata in this coalition were
neither equal nor favored the workers, it was Marx's view that
organized workers could, through struggle and unity, decisively
influence the course of events, public policy, and the development of
capitalism.

The international communist movement has consistently argued for
broad, united coalitions to fight for democratic rights, increases in
working-class power, national liberation, and socialism. Much of the
theoretical frameworks for these arguments flows out of the lived
experiences of socialist movements. For example, in 1903 and 1905 in
two well known books, Lenin approached the question of building a
working-class challenge to capitalist ideological and cultural
hegemony – working-class political education – from the perspective of
a coalition activist.

Emphasizing the importance of democratic struggle, in What Is to Be
Done? Lenin urged his readers to become politically engaged “in the
most varied spheres of life and activity” and to learn from the
practical experiences that arose from the fight against “all cases of
tyranny, oppression, violence and abuses, no matter what class is
affected.” Class consciousness becomes “genuine,” he asserted, when
workers become involved in, and can observe, reflect upon and
articulate, an analysis of the various class and social forces
operating around them in a particular struggle.

A couple of years later, in the midst of the sectarian fights within
Russia's Social Democratic Party, Lenin unapologetically rejected the
leftist notion in his party that revolutionary conditions mature, as
the pro-socialist forces become narrower (and numerically smaller), by
fighting against the less advanced politics of the center forces in
the broad democratic movement. In this view, developed in Two Tactics
of Social Democracy, Lenin maintained that a revolutionary situation
develops and grows as the result of the necessary alliances among many
class forces – capitalist, small business, workers and farmers. The
immediate goal of wining a general democratic victory (“bourgeois in
its social and economic content”) would prove immediately beneficial
to the working class. But to reap the reward of being able to
construct more democratic institutions, workers had to align
themselves with sections of the capitalist class and other non-working-
class forces that shared this interest, he argued.

About 15 years later, after the collapse of the Czarist dictatorship
and the imposition of the socialist government, Lenin developed this
line of reasoning further. In his book, Left-wing Communism: An
Infantile Disorder, he chided European communists who felt that
setting themselves apart from workers and other social strata as “the
vanguard” was the best way to advance the working class as a whole
toward socialism, refusing to “compromise” or join forces with non-
revolutionary elements, decrying such activity as “reactionary.”

Today some leftists use the word “revisionism” to describe such
compromises, and the phrase “move to the left” as the counter-measure
to such revisionism.

Lenin responded to these types of sentiments by saying that a flat
rejection of such compromises on principle is “childishness which is
difficult to take seriously.” When the German communists refused to
align themselves with centrist parties on the vague “principle” that
the only party of the working class should not be tainted by others,
Lenin called their tactic “old and familiar rubbish.”

Beyond name-calling, Lenin offered an alternative. He insisted that
coalitions unite diverse social forces and movements by developing a
common agenda, a plan of action, resources for cultural and
ideological struggle, and benchmarks of success. In addition, such
coalitions should reflect real forces, not invented ones. Today, we
sometimes find leftist parties or groupings creating “coalitions” of
leftists (often from the same party) in an attempt to attract
unsuspecting affiliated leftists to their leftist cause. They call
this a movement or even “party-building”.

To claim that a single political party can create a truly
representative coalition or try to control an existing one, even
refusing on principle to contribute to an existing coalition,
indicates a disconnect between the so-called vanguard status of that
party, the working-class movement as a whole, and the general
democratic cause. The refusal to participate, Lenin stated, was a
“repudiation of the party principle” and was “tantamount to disarming
the proletariat for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”

As for compromise with other social forces, Lenin urged communists to
work at understanding the differences between a compromise that
advances the interests of the working class and those that do not.
This understanding is shaped by the ability to understand the specific
conditions in which working-class people live and struggle to survive,
and on the refusal to base strategies and ideas on “recipes” or
“phrase-mongering.” Subjective impulses and emotional radicalism are
very poor substitutes for critical analysis. Analysis should be based
on knowledge gained from experience in the workers' struggle, as all
class-consciousness is, not something worked out in coffee shops or on
Marxist list-serves. Leadership in struggles for democracy and working-
class power – by socialists, communists or advanced democrats alike –
involves understanding where people are coming from (even reactionary
people) and how they view the world, and then providing a means of
clearly articulating the basic and advanced demands of workers and
their allies.

Any serious union organizer knows this. Workers join a movement to
organize a union in a workplace when they are able to articulate the
specific nature of the exploitation they face. Maybe they want higher
pay. Maybe they want better healthcare. Maybe they want to be treated
with dignity by their supervisor. When those demands are articulated
and brought together in a common agenda workers join the struggle.
When there is a clear path to building the necessary alliances to
create the possibility for victory, workers, more often then not, will
sign a union membership card.

Modern struggles to advance the condition and power of the working
class cannot be "workers-only" clubs. Think about the struggle for the
Employee Free Choice Act. In its effort to build broad support for
this crucial reform, the labor movement has sought and has won allies
in the small business community, in the environmental and civil rights
movements, and even among some capitalists. Undoubtedly some people on
the far left (especially some who refuse to support the Employee Free
Choice Act) will say this tactic is an indication that the labor
movement needs to "move to the left."

The truth, however, is that such necessary alliances make victory more
possible. In such political contests, Lenin argued the refusal "to
maneuver, to utilize the conflict of interests (even though temporary)
among one's enemies, to refuse to temporize and compromise with
possible (even though transitory, unstable, vacillating and
conditional) allies – is this not ridiculous in the extreme?" Lenin
helped formulate what would become a basic policy of the communist
movement: the united front. In 1921, in a speech before the Third
Congress of the Communist International, he argued that even small
communist parties should join with other forces on single-issue,
reform-oriented immediate demands. The goal was “to win the majority
of the working class to communism” – not just a tiny fragment. This
kind of activity must also include meaningful alliances with other
groups, not always narrowly working-class, but those which are always
exploited by capital: intellectuals and professionals, small business
owners, farmers, the racially and nationally oppressed, women and so
on. Lenin insisted that the most politically advanced sections of the
working class could "defend the interests of the whole class with
success" only if the majority, or if tens of millions of people in all
their diversity, could be drawn in the mass "proletarian united front"
struggle.

The term "mass," Lenin said, "implies the majority, and not simply a
majority of the workers alone, but the majority of all the exploited."
Such a broad vision became the foundational philosophy – though often
contested from the left – of the communist movement.

What does it have to with us?

Lenin spoke from a different time and place. So what does pre-
revolutionary Russia, a reactionary social system ruled by an autocrat
and mired in corruption and exploitation, or even the early Soviet
Union with few democratic institutions and very little economic
development, have to do with the 21st century working-class movement
in the United States? On the most general level, the answer to this
question can be found by answering a more specific historical
question: Why, even as productive forces in the US advanced in the mid
and late-20th century, didn’t the US working-class movement develop an
anti-capitalist consciousness?

The quick answer is that the assumption embedded in the second
question is wrong. The US working class did develop an anti-capitalist
class consciousness. We've just forgotten about it. One reason for
this amnesia is the major, persistent flaw in much socialist analysis:
linear thinking, that is history must necessarily progresses in
straight lines. According to this reasoning, if US workers today are
only minimally class-conscious, then this must have also been so in
the past. Human history, however, has repeatedly failed to follow such
rigorous timelines or to stay on such narrow paths. Progress made in
one era has frequently been negated and deleted from memory in
another.

During the Great Depression, aided by a Popular Front strategic policy
(against fascism, for civil rights and working-class power),
communists in the US pursued coalition-building as the best tactic for
building strength.

In her study of radical labor activists in St. Louis affiliated with
the Communist Party, labor historian and activist Rosemary Feurer
recently noted that these radicals adopted the concept of "civic
unionism." Called "social unionism" by others, this vision of class
organizing and consciousness building expanded the notion of struggle
beyond any particular workplace (although part of the struggle would
certainly be there) to the political and cultural dimensions. Labor
leaders found ways to build alliances (even though they were sometimes
unreliable or shifting) with other social forces to build the power of
the working class in a given particular city or town.

These workers were not just up against the capitalists who owned the
factories. They were up against a "political economy of control,"
Feurer writes, that dominated the region. Her description calls to
mind the complex analysis provided by Gramsci: that capitalist
hegemony relies on a multi-class coalition and sway over ideological
and cultural formations. To win a victory in a factory, workers
realized they had to counter the political forces and media that sided
with their bosses. The only way to do that was to build a working-
class idea machine and political pressure on the other side of the
scale. To effectively counter the economy of control workers needed to
build an "equal and opposite force." In this way, the movement soon
became something bigger than a fight for a good union contract,
something bigger than simply desegregating the lunch counter at
Woolworth's. It became something that united the community and the
workplace in a struggle to gain a voice and power.

It was this theory in action that frightened capitalists the most.
Think about the struggle for the union at the Ford Motor Company,
which finally succeeded in 1941. Union leaders, many of whom had
affiliations with the Communist Party, built worker and community
coalitions to unite Black and white workers in the plant and in the
greater Detroit area. This involved outreach to ministers and civil
rights organizations, who had been previously suspicious of the union
because a good portion of the white workers had been influenced by the
racist ideology promoted by Henry Ford himself.

When white union leaders and community leaders convinced the white
workers that their best interests lay in interracial unity, and when
Black leaders in the community and in the plant convinced Black
workers about where their best interests lay, the strike for union
recognition worked. But more than that, when the struggle for UAW
recognition became a cause of the whole people, who waged a public
opinion campaign against Ford and supported the strikers with their
material and moral resources, the struggle was won, and the cause of
the workers moved from the workplace to the political, cultural and
ideological dimensions. This is what was most radical about the that
movement, and this is what frightened people like Henry Ford and his
cronies the most.

From Birmingham, Alabama to Youngstown, Ohio, from Grand Rapids,
Michigan to Seattle, Washington examples can be found where coalitions
forged links between the workplace and communities and linked politics
and culture with the economic side of life. Unfortunately, this time
period, which lasted through the 1930s and the late 1940s, is often
disparaged as not very radical, even by some communists. The Popular
Front, some insist, was little more than a period of dilution of
struggle and a time when the movement "moved to the right."

This attitude should be rethought in light of the historical facts.

The radical nature of this time period can be measured by the swift
and heavy reaction to it led by right-wing, anti-democratic forces.
Those forces were the most reactionary, the most racist, anti-
communist, anti-worker, anti-woman forces the capitalist class could
muster. They surrounded Joseph McCarthy in the US Senate, and they
slithered out of corporate board rooms. With the powerful tools of
legal authority, and media fear-mongering, they influenced the
basically democratic forces to break former their alliances with the
working class. They even convinced historians to erase or distort the
true meaning of this alliance. These were the ideological and
political precursors of the ultra-right that wrested power and
dominance in the capitalist class from the socially-minded centrist
leadership that held sway in the 1960s and 1970s.

The general defeat of the advanced working-class forces cannot be
separated from the global setting in those days. McCarthyite attacks
on workers and civil rights organizations were the domestic tactics
utilized by the capitalist class in the global Cold War. The
effectiveness of such attacks reflected not the weakness of coalition
tactics or the Popular Front strategic policy. but rather the power of
global capital based on its cultural and ideological hegemony.

While we have seen a reengagement with the idea of civic unionism by
the US labor movement since the collapse of the Cold War regime, we
have yet to see a systematic engagement in the arena of ideas and of
culture. Further, we have seen little movement on the part of the left
specifically to find ways to modernize its own ideas, to speak in the
language of the working class, or to identify with the local and
national traditions and popular culture, which hold such deep meaning
for the working class. The working-class movement risks future defeats
by one-sidedly ignoring this crucial dimension of the class struggle.