Lessons from Pittsburgh

Excerpts from a talk by Sharon Black at the WWP National Conference, Nov. 14.

A job is a right! We’re going to fight, fight, fight!

This is more than just a demand.

It is a concept based on the fact that we, the working class, produce everything. There isn’t a single thing in this auditorium that wasn’t made or built by workers. It is our social, collective labor that gives everything its value.

It’s on this basis that a job is a property right.

It is the contradiction between this socialized labor and the privately owned means of production by a parasitic class—for profit only—that is at the very root of the present economic crisis.

We have a right to seize and occupy the plants and the workplaces!

We have a right to stay in our homes rather than let the banks foreclose them!

In 1937, Frances Perkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Labor secretary, recognized that workers had a property right to their job. She was responding towards the latter part of the sit-down strikes and plant occupations of that period. She proclaimed this under the hot breath of the mass struggle.

On our Party’s 50th anniversary it’s important to reflect on how our legacy guides us in today’s struggles, especially the recent Jobs March and Tent City at the G-20 Summit.

One of the keys to its success that is so much a part of our Party’s legacy was grasping the connection between the national question and the class question.

There is so much that can be said about all of the work that went into community outreach: the door-to-door distributions, the meetings with key Black activists, and of course the mobilization’s relationship with the Rev. Tom Smith of the Monumental Baptist Church—particularly his courageous act of opening up the church grounds for the Tent City in the historic Hill District—Pittsburgh’s African-American community.

There was a complex political strategy involved that called for opening up and facilitating the involvement and leadership of the Black community itself.

Reviving Dr. King’s legacy for full employment gave those in the Black community who wanted to struggle around jobs an avenue to do so during a period when the historic election of the first Black president weighs heavily in people’s consciousness.

That was one aspect of the question. The other was about challenging the movement—particularly the anti-war and anti-globalization forces. Initially the challenge was to take on the struggle for jobs—but ultimately it was about “Who would come to the Hill and stand in solidarity with the community?”

In essence the jobs march was not only about jobs—it was also an anti-racist march.

Challenging the movement, whether mild in manner or bold, turned out to be the right thing and it should be noted that even if their numbers were small, the very best of the movement did come, including many white youth who were attracted on the basis of what we stood for.

Understanding the national question and the fight against racism will become even more important as the capitalist crisis deepens in this country and virulent racism and anti-immigrant sentiments are whipped up by the ultraright.

We ourselves have to be keenly aware of it as we deepen our fight against the capitalist government—that we will simultaneously need to be ready to be on the front lines of fighting racism directed against Obama, who symbolizes for the right wing the gains made by Black people.

What the Tent City highlighted is that the best way of conducting the class struggle is to be aggressive in fighting racism and promoting the leadership of the most oppressed.

It’s as Comrade Sam Marcy said a long time ago, “If white revolutionaries fight hardest against racism and in support of the national question, it will afford the oppressed comrades the opportunity to push the class struggle harder.”

This same formulation can be equally extended to the masses.

The Jobs March and Tent City brought together poor white Southern workers, who were newly jobless and homeless, with Black workers. This was probably the first time in their lives that the whites had marched under a Dr. King banner. It was in the crucible of the struggle that unity was forged.

We cannot leave the white workers to the racists and the ultraright!

The fact is that the entire working class is deeply indebted to the most oppressed, whether it is the immigrant workers who revived May Day along with the militant tactic of sitting in and occupying the Republic Windows and Doors factory, or the revolutionary Black workers who forged the fight in the auto plants and so much more.

In the book, “Solidarity Divided,” there is a story about an exchange between a Service Employees International Union staff member and a representative of the South African Congress of Trade Unions. To the question of what is the role of the unions, the SEIU delegate exclaimed, “To represent the interest of its members.” The COSATU member diplomatically corrected him, “The role of the union is to represent the entire working class.”

Workers can no longer afford to fight alone industry by industry, region by region, or even country by country in an era of capitalism that has gone global.

The unions must fight for the entire working class.