WORKERS WORLD PARTY CONFERENCE
'Party members fight on all fronts'
Excerpts from a talk by Leslie Feinberg
Until I met the Party, the most powerful
organizations I had belonged to were unions. I began working in
the factories, as a butch lesbian, when I was 14. After working
in non-union plants, no one had to convince me how vital unions
were. The plant manager and foreman couldn't fire me on a whim.
And I didn't have to beg for a raise, hat in hand.
Being in a union taught many of us the need for unity. But
belonging to a union didn't revolutionize our consciousness. As
co-workers, some of us disagreed about the Pentagon bombing of
Vietnam. Some whites held onto racist ideas. Others were
anti-gay, sexist or anti-Semitic.
I met Workers World in Buffalo when I was 22 years old. My
anti-communist friends had fed me warnings that if I joined the
organization I'd have to march in lock-step to the Party line.
The people who told me that actually prided themselves on being
independent thinkers. But everyone has a line. And in
capitalist society, it's the CNN line, and the Democratic and
Republican line that molds and shapes many people's
thinking.
Does Workers World have a Party line? You're damn right we
do. What kind of Party would we be if we didn't? Just a vehicle
for opportunism, committed to nothing. Now that doesn't mean we
agree on everything. But racism is not a debatable subject in
our Party. Neither is the oppression of women or lesbian, gay,
bi, and trans people.
When Lenin talked about the Party line he was referring to
the taut string that a brick layer uses to guide building a
foundation. Our Party line helps us build our revolutionary
foundation--our political program--a highly refined world view
that helps us to assess and analyze world developments.
The idea of workers and oppressed peoples having their own
revolutionary Party for leadership gives capitalists
nightmares. They say it's an organization in which a little
group of leaders bark commands and everyone else salutes. But
that's not a Leninist party, that's the U.S. Army!
Lenin said that organization is the greatest weapon for the
working class. The capitalist state is centralized. They can
bomb the peoples of the Balkans and Iraq simultaneously and
still be ready to push back protests in support of Mumia in the
U.S.
We have to be centralized, too. We can spin on a dime to
respond to attacks on our class here in the U.S. and around the
world. Once we've made a decision, we close ranks and strike as
one fist.
A cadre means someone who understands the Party's political
program and is deeply committed to it, someone who's absorbed
the lessons--not just of the struggles that have affected their
own life--but all the struggles the party's engaged in.
Cadre can make a bigger difference in the movement by virtue
of being in the Party, because they can go into action in a
coordinated way. And when they do, they become powerful gears
that make bigger wheels turn.
Centralization means we can divide our forces. For example,
when our Party was a main catalyst in proposing and carrying
out the Town Hall and April 24 Millions for Mumia events, NATO
started bombing Kosovo.
Individual activists, no matter how hard-working and
self-sacrificing, can only be involved in one or two struggles.
Each member of our Party can't take part in every struggle
either. But in order to take on the capitalist class as a whole
we have to fight them on every front. And only a centralized
Party can do that.
The bond that is forged between us as members of our Party
is a precious one--we are comrades. That's the relationship
cemented between people who fight back against each other's
oppression as though it were their own.
The way the Party is structured--and our revolutionary
affirmative action--helps to ease potential friction that
exists in such a heated way outside the organization. You'll
see that in the proportion of nationally oppressed members,
women, gay and lesbian, bisexual and trans people in our
leadership.
This Party is strong. We've all built this Party with our
sweat and our blood and our money. And that's why we feel a
loyalty and patriotism to this organization that no Pentagon
general or president could ever inspire any working person to
feel for that red-white-and-blue imperialist rag of a flag and
all the corporate plunder and oppression that it
represents.
Your strength and consciousness will make this Party more
powerful. But in turn, your own strength and consciousness will
be magnified by being in a centralized, revolutionary
Party.
So I leave you with this question: If you are committed to
ending injustice and inequality once and for all; if your eye
is on the prize of liberation; if you are won to the vision of
socialism: Then how can you spend one more day outside the
Party?
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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