Solidarity and unity--
YOU CAN'T WIN SOCIALISM WITHOUT THEM
By Monica Moorehead
A classic labor song states, "Solidarity
forever--for the union makes us strong." The unity of Teamsters
honoring the 70,000 striking/locked-out grocery workers' picket
lines throughout California is just such an act of solidarity.
And it will certainly not be lost on other sectors of the labor
movement struggling against layoffs and a decline in wages and
benefits.
Solidarity among workers is also indispensable in making the
worldwide movement for socialism strong.
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bol she vik Revolution,
stated in his groundbreaking book, "Imperialism: the Highest
Stage of Capitalism," "Workers and oppres sed of the world
unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains."
Lenin was updating Karl Marx's original formulation--workers
of the world unite--based on the rise of imperialist plunder
and oppression.
Socialists, communists and other revolutionaries have held
this banner aloft.
Capitalists create their own gravediggers
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist
camp, many in the movement feared that the solidarity of
workers and oppressed peoples might not return.
There is, however, more and more concrete evidence to show
that broader sectors of society are opening up to the prospect
of building class unity. The avaricious character of finance
capital is objectively laying the basis for this revival of
unity worldwide.
The intensity of capitalist production is driven by the
insatiable quest for profits like never before due to the
technological revolution. This economic trend in turn has
brought about the changed character of the working class
worldwide.
For instance, in the United States, service workers have for
the most part replaced industrial workers as the motor force of
the economy. As a result, workers on the whole face a deepening
trend of lower wages for more hours of work, loss of benefits
and increased poverty. Corp orations have laid off millions of
workers in their fierce competition with their rivals.
This process has deeply affected poorer, developing
countries as well as the richer, imperialist centers.
The bosses' devastating onslaught has also resulted in a
socialization of labor that has brought millions of workers
closer together in the global production process, despite being
thousands of miles apart physically.
Millions of workers from the developing countries have also
been forced to migrate to the imperialist countries to escape
grinding poverty. These immigrants have subsequently energized
the union movements.
The intermingling of once privileged workers with poorer
workers--especially those from other countries--is making
clearer the common reality that labor power is being exploited
to one degree or another by many of the same corporate
conglomerates.
State repression forges the chains
This commonality among workers is something that the ruling
class knows all too well. It is why this tiny clique of
multi-millionaires and billionaires who claim to privately own
all the means of producing everything in society rely on a
highly sophis ticated repressive state apparatus. They have to
try to keep the vast majority of humanity divided and diverted
from throwing off their oppressive rule together.
The main obstacle that stands in the way of the inevitable
transformation of society from capitalism to socialism is the
network of the state--that is the police, the military, the
courts, the prisons, the mainstream media and other
institutions that work in concert with each other to keep
"order" in society. This "order" in essence means protecting
the private property of the super-rich at all costs, with both
repression and backward ideas.
Is it any wonder that so many television shows on prime time
attempt to arouse sympathy and empathy for police officers,
lawyers and judges?
While the state's ultimate goal is to pacify and subjugate
the vast majority of the people, this goal cannot be achieved
without creating artificial divisions within the working class
and other social strata.
No one is born thinking that people of color are less than
human, that women are the private property of men, or that
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are "deviant."
They must be conditioned to think and feel this way--and it's
for a reason. That reason is to keep the ruling class in power
and the working class and oppressed peoples powerless.
How else can anyone begin to comprehend that there are over
2 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a hugely
disproportionate number of them Black, Latino and Native? Or
that women, young and old, are sexually assaulted at least
every 30 seconds in the United States? Or that a same-sex
couple is not afforded the same democratic right to marry as
heterosexual couples?
Class-consciousness on the rise
Two other great Marxists, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
stated in "The Communist Manifesto," published in 1848, that
capitalism is creating its own grave diggers: the working
class.
This means that the workers as a whole face the historic
task of uprooting the archaic capitalist economic system
because as the laboring class they produce all value in
society.
This task, no matter how long the process takes, will come
about through political and mass struggle in many revolutionary
forms.
Right now millions of people around the world, including
those in the United States and other imperialist countries, are
moving toward an anti-imperialist position because of the
deepening Iraqi resistance against the Pentagon's colonial
occupation there.
Many young people who were attracted to the
anti-globalization movement's view of a "kinder, gentler"
free-enterprise system are moving in a more anti-capitalist
direction.
Better-paid workers like the Teamsters are organizing
important solidarity with lower-paid grocery workers, many of
them immigrants, because they are realizing that they have more
in common with these workers than with the bosses.
Worker consciousness can make big leaps, sometimes
overnight, when engaged in the class struggle.
This growing class consciousness sows the seeds of class
unity and solidarity here and throughout the world. That in
turn can lead toward a total transformation of society from one
based on the private ownership of production to the socialized
ownership of production--and that will promote real equality,
cooperation and harmony for all humanity.
Reprinted from the Dec. 11, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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