10 April 2021

CDE. CHRIS HANI MEMORIAL ESSAY: Why the US needs a communist party ... and why it does not have one


I compose these thoughts barely a day after the US National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] declared a resounding defeat for the Retail, Warehouse, Department Store Union [RWDSU] election in Bessemer, Alabama, and a victory for Amazon, whose CEO is one of the wealthiest people on the planet. While the union has vowed to challenge illegal acts taken by Amazon and seek overturning the election, I cannot help connecting this defeat to similar ones in Mississippi with Nissan, and in Tennessee with Volkswagen. I do not doubt those corporations resorted to all kinds of maneuvers to turn the vote in their favor, but this does not mean the labor movement in general or the unions in particular should not do some deep reflection of where it gained and where is fell short, pick up its arsenal of weapons, sharpen ones too long in disuse, and continue the fight for the working class and its ascendancy to power.

Reflect on, say, some of the failures of that most valiant labor union, the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO], and its push to organize the Deep South in the 1940's. The monumental campaign was dubbed "Operation Dixie." Had the CIO's organizing campaign to unionize sharecroppers and dock workers and farm labor, it would have made the US look very different today, brought an end to Jim Crow at least 20 years early, and possibly altered the militarist direction of US foreign policy.

 And given the high saturation of Black workers in the South - as today - it would have changed the face of Black America.

But Operation Dixie failed, and it nearly bankrupted the CIO. Without a doubt, the viciousness with which segregationist white elites responded to the CIO was unequal. To the white elites, this particular union had two particular sins: the power of a militant union steeped in Communist Party organizers and the policy of integration, which was integral to the CPUSA's stance since its beginning. 

The CIO, unlike other antique-minded unions who were either indifferent to white racism or afraid of alienating their own white rank and file, organized workers across racial lines, and they did this in the North, in the West, and in what was then the Territory of Hawaii. So the CIO's entrance into the Bible Belt was perceived as a double threat to white Southerners, and it had to be stopped at all costs.

As we know, the Operation Dixie did fail.

But among the factors that contributed to the CIO defeat came from blind spots of the organizers themselves who failed to appreciate the traumatizing effect Jim Crow politics had on many Black workers. 

In the case of New Orleans, LA, at the time, Black workers had been afforded the exclusive jobs at the ports of that Gulf of Mexico city. These were grueling jobs with low pay, but to a Black man in Jim Crow Dixie, it was a job nonetheless. "The new CIO affiliate promised democratic unionism, the replacement of the notoriously corrupt 'shape-up' with 'the hiring hall method of dispatching men without discrimination and the 'equalization of earnings.'" [1] Added to the resistance put up by white segregationists, these Black workers themselves put up resistance to the prospect of a CIO victory. Such a victory, they reasoned, might undercut their own employment under an integrated workforce and leave many of them with the double jeopardy of being Black and working class poor.

"ILWU organizers in the Gulf had to test their egalitarian creed in a new and alien environment where Black workers predominated numerically on the docks but the ideology of white supremacy and the reality of racial separation remained pervasive." [ibid]

What could the CIO then, or the UAW and RWDSU today, have done differently to address the special concerns of Black, Southern workers?

I ask the question in that way because I take all these unions in good faith. Their respective records prove their antiracist credentials. But is this enough? Is it enough to be antiracist?

I'll return to this.

***

The challenges confronting us from the right remain enormous, pervasive, and escalating.

Arguably the US being a settler-colonial nation-state the political tendency would always be toward the right leaning as the white settlers were paranoid of indigenous and African rebellion against their peculiar spread of civilization. This paranoia is writ large in the nation-state's founding documents, which have over the years been expanded, but never corrected.

This has been the perfect fertile ground in which a right-wing orthodoxy would prevail in this country.

The right-leaning tendency of the US project only worsened after such events like the Haitian Revolution, John Brown's insurrection, Wounded Knee, the Bolshevik Revolution, etc., not to diminish in any way the more local insurrections staged by what scholar John Ogbu calls the "involuntary immigrants" - Africans and the indigenous populations - upon whom settler-colonialism landed with a heavy thud. [2]

While Ogbu's focus was mostly on academic outcomes and cultural disengagement, his delineation of the broader Black diaspora and so-called "Hispanic"/"Latino" in native-born US Blacks and Chicanos on the one hand from continental Africans and other South Americans on the other should be useful tools for labor and community organizers to understanding how settler-colonialism impacts us in very different ways.

Settler-colonialism has always had to, as the cop will claim, "fearing for its life."

This has meant that the right-leaning tendency of this nation-state has always shifted the leftwing off its center, where a certain consensus is made and certain facts agreed to - like for example, the discourse that the country was founded on imperfect freedom and evolving towards perfecting such. Nonsense just like that, which we hear from left and from right.

Or the framing of the colonialist revolution from Britain's George III as in any way a "workers rebellion."

I would argue many of the incessant splits, irreconcilable differences, distortions, divorces, purges, and expulsions from within the left arise from this tension of being on the left and having to deal with this right-leaning tendency. How to negotiate an energy that is there, like a poltergeist? You cannot ignore it. What do you do with it?

But the right-leaning character of this country, coming as it does from the roots and from its origins means this energy can always reshape the left if cadres are not diligent and vigilant against it.

Any left-leaning political organization or party that aspires to be on the left and be relevant to the left can easily become so entangled within the right wing of this country - given that the right wing is virtually the air we breath and the ground we stand on.

This caution includes unions like UAW and RWDSU, and all the others. Because what befell the CIO is the same force that bolstered the opposing American Federation of Labor and later the combined AFL-CIO. Some called it Anticommunism, but it is much simpler than that. It's as simple as John Jay's admonishment in the Federalist Papers that "the people who own the country should run the country."

This means curbing any worker power over the means of production or civic life. This was equated with communism.

And to ensure the AFL [by 1955, the merged AFL-CIO] would remain staunchly anticommunist, the CIA and other federal agencies later, massaged the direction of the union in particular and the labor movement in general with funding. [3] Probably informants and plants too, I have no doubt.

This solidified the role of the US's largest labor federation on the side of the right-leaning tendency. This means a lot of what it pronounces from podium and pulpit is performative. This means even its internal structures must be shielded from rank-and-file members. 

The leadership of the West Virginia teachers union did not want a strike. Strikes are illegal in West Virginia, but the teachers forced the issue and forced their leadership on the train, because the train was about to leave without them.

Such displays are unfortunately very rare.

The concession to right-leaning thought has made unruly rebels and delinquents out of those who want to exercise the muscle of working class power, shuttered the activity of unions locals into Rotary Club meetings, and diverted the energies of leadership towards finding tactical ways to keep itself away from the mass of workers: and this should make the leadership of these organizations apostates.

When the so-called grassroots groups become supporters or provide justification for bourgeois candidates like Obama, or Clinton, or Biden, and do so out of the expediency that the US electoral system was created by paranoid white settlers wanting to create a nation-state owned and run by its class, these grassroots play a dangerous game - that is to say, by design US elections are less free, less open, and not democratic - these grassroots groups go through an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" moment where they are cocooned into bourgeois mouthpieces. If there are criticisms, they are vagaries; because they cannot give the game away and say a plague on both their parties. Such a declaration would mean the grassroots organizations would actually have to declare radical alternatives and do some radical organizing of the masses who need radical solutions.

For the record, I do not know, but would never be surprised to learn, that the reason these leftist parties and grassroots organizations are so facile to their purpose is the same reason the AFL-CIO is not. I do not know if CIA, USAID, or National Endowment for Democracy funds are massaging their backs as well, but it would not be a surprise.

***

By talking all around and not on the topic of the headline, I hoped to lay out the field why communist parties traditionally emerged to to seize the neglected left space, mobilize the working class, and reach across racial and ethnic lines to create a force to be reckoned with. 

This is the minimum any communist party should be doing, and if it is not it is not a communist party. Armed struggle or no armed struggle; going into exile; working underground seem to be to depend on the conditions of the time and place. But even a group of French intellectuals having coffee at a Parisian café should be bringing the same sharp analyses of what is going on as the South African miner. There cannot be a rhetorical accommodation to bourgeois power in France while those workers are being frontally assaulted by that same state power.

This tone deafness does not suit a communist party.

Just so, US Vice -President Kamala Harris' political background should never, ever warrant her being praised in any capacity by a comrade in a partisan newspaper. Let's review the low lights of this woman's career: she was maneuvered into a local District Attorney race to unseat a comrade. Upon winning that seat, she went after protesters and poor women. She dragged her feet to keep Black men incarcerated who should not have been.

She has not a root, not a finger, not a toe in any of the movements that aspire our social and political goals. The comrade she unseated in that San Francisco race not only himself has deep roots, but so did his mother and father.

Further, while the working class has sustained body blow after body blow at least since the administration of Jimmy Carter, in modern times, Black, Brown, and Indigenous workers have fallen exponentially farther. 

Recall by Obama's second administration it was widely reported the "disappearance" of 1.5 million Black male workers.

Given the right-leaning consensus of a settler-colonial state, it's to be expected that the state intelligentsia and state media apparatus will gloss over, obfuscate, misdirect, or reframe the meaning of these disappearances to uphold the medieval concept of "the king can do no wrong." Further, the traumatizing and politicizing impact this might have on the broader Black community or workers will never even be mentioned by these state parrots.

It is an apostasy for a communist party, hiding behind some quotes of Marx, to raise their fists ostensibly for the working class, to leave us Black workers to live on more "trickle-down" theories that what will benefit the broader working class [which has not benefitted by the way] will lift up Black workers.

This tone deafness is why those Black New Orleans workers opposed the CIO and Operation Dixie.

***

In place of taking up the radical left baton, not only on behalf of Black workers, but on behalf of the many children sunk into poverty, the rising numbers of homeless caused by state sectors accommodation to the housing industry, on behalf not just on just wages but the equally important social investment - in place of all these things, too many on the left who attained leadership positions sound more like endowed researchers in anthropology speaking on parts of the animal kingdom rather than organizers mobilizing workers into a force to be reckoned with.

And why? Simply, it must be reasoned at this point these leaders do not want to mobilize this force to threaten the state power they are so tethered to at the waist. 

One has to wonder how many are leftover informants and state-police plants.

This is why I say their antiracism is not enough, and their cries for "justice" pathetic. 

The best hope we have at this juncture, which has been long coming - I do not mean to suggest this crisis is new and of the 21st century - is a vanguard movement of the working class, for the working class, lead by the working class. And it must be socialist in its core and communist in its aspiration. If it cannot appreciate the predicament of women workers, or Black and Brown workers; if it cannot appreciate the colonial status of such captured peoples as Hawaiians, Chamorros, or Puerto Ricans and how this status is integral to the what the US is and integral to the dire situation of those colonial peoples, then this vanguard will amount to nothing.

This is why the United States sorely needs a communist party, and while it may have one in name, it has none in substance. That is why the historical reports featured in its party newspaper can't shine a candle on what it's doing today. The contrast between past and present respectively fills you with awe but then deflates and demoralizes.

Cde. Chris Hani, in whose name and spirit I pen these thoughts, was head of the South African Communist Party until his assassination in 1993. He had previously been overwhelmingly elected to the Executive Committee of the African National Congress, and before that had been chief of staff of the anti-apartheid armed struggle.

Like many of his comrades, he felt betrayed and alarmed when the armed struggle was call off without proper consultation of the alliance. He argued it was too soon to lay down the weapons.

The best hope of the left - that vanguard party needing to be reborn - has similarly laid down its weapons too soon and ceded too much ground to the rightward backwardness of settler-colonialism. In doing so it has rendered itself meaningless to the working class broadly, but also to the sectors hardest hit and in most need of radical mass struggle. This is not an easy, but rather a painful, wrenching announcement. Because our lives and our well being are at stake.



Footnotes

[1] Bruce Nelson, "Class and Race in the Crescent City: The ILWU from San Francisco to New Orleans," THE CIO'S LEFT-LED UNIONS, Steve Rosswurm, editor [Rutgers]

[2] John U Ogbu and Herbert Simmons, "Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implications for Education," [Univ. of California]

[3] Kim Scipes, "The AFL-CIO, NED, Solidarity Center & US Labor Imperialism" and "The AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers:  Solidarity or Sabotage," laborvideo interview conducted by Steve Zeltzer




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