James Haywood responds to Keith Jay’s piece The Only Thing Left To Do arguing for the need to first build a revolutionary marxist core to successfully intervene in the class struggle across the state of Virginia.
After more than a year since publishing “The Only Thing Left to Do” we’ve finally committed to a response on this piece. Much of what Keith Jay write rings true, from the professional-managerial class orientation of academics leftists and the political groups they flock to – such as the Democratic Socialists of America or Socialist Alternative among others – to the historical development of Appalachia and the modern day sentiments of working people across industries, as well as the common culture war narratives referencing the backwards tendencies of Southerners and Appalachian-Americans.
The portrait, no matter who paints it, is bleak. This is true inside Appalachia as well as outside it. These problems of social decay affecting millions of American workers also affect billions of other workers globally, in both the centers of capitalism and the weaker peripheral states . This is the chronic general crisis of capitalism that cannot be solved through capitalist means – “New Dealism”, “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, fascism, ethno-nationalism, or “multiracial democracy”.
Much of the so-called Left rallies behind various manifestations of these capitalist politics, only further reinforcing the bleak reality facing the working class. As has been said before it is easier to imagine the collapse of civilization than a revolution which advances humanity past capitalist barbarism. That so many US leftists rallied around a self described “socialist” in the Democratic Party – Bernie Sanders – as the new messiah able to deliver us from this malaise shows how far the working class and the Left are from even beginning to contend for state power.
While we agree that propaganda alone is insufficient to build working class power, with all things considered we have to recognize the absolute lack of an intellectual foundation with which to begin the arduous process of constituting independent worker power. There is a void of political leadership with a firm rooting in the ABCs of revolutionary marxism and as such all efforts to organize among workers are rudderless. At best our current formations and individual militants, while well intentioned, inevitably tail middle class politics filtered back into the Democratic Party.
All social movements of the last eighty years or more end up back in this place, never making a real break and establishing independent working class politics and organization. All sorts of mental gymnastics are done to rationalize this, especially from those who have made a career of it in the labor unions and in the NGOs. Professional activists and bureaucrats materially benefit from this arrangement. Their form of “liberation” is a neo-Bernsteinian “the movement is everything, the end goal of socialism is nothing”. This is the default trap among organizers, including self professed marxists, communists, socialists, and anarchists. An endless struggle without a strategic vision for decisive victory.
Anyone who’s spent time in this organizer milieu has encountered the vacuous language of “fighting oppression” and “ liberation”, when in material reality all roads lead back to liberalism with a petty bourgeois democratic radical veneer. Attempts to challenge the hollow phrases of leftist organizers are often met with weaponized identities which seek to silence opposition as being “oppressive” themselves. As if asserting one’s social identity can prove the correctness of a thesis.
This has been done in every social movement – from the Womens March, to BLM, to the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements . And it will continue to happen as the preferred means by which middle class activists assert ideological control over every social movement and organization. This is why the ABCs of revolutionary marxism are the crucial basis of political leadership, to provide a grounding, to understand 2+2=4 regardless of a person’s identity, and that “lived experience” is not a legitimate substitute for a scientific understanding of capitalism and how to organize a movement to overthrow it.
No revolutionary (and by revolutionary we mean those who fought for the dictatorship of the proletariat ) ever asserted their identity as proof of the correctness of their theory and practice. Regardless of who says it, the truth is the truth and tokenization of social identity gets us no closer to class power, only serving the opportunists looking to make a career under capitalism as they pander to “the oppressed”.
The New Left has burdened us with this situation after they completed their “long march through the institutions” into tenured positions in the universities, and substituted the revolutionary critique of capital with hollow culturalist ruminations on sexuality and ethnicity, identity and trauma. If only the college campuses were the subversive hotbeds conservatives love to shadowbox, we’d be in a better situation.
Even in the university unions you can see the divide in a membership composition, dominated by white collar workers pushing “social justice” demands conditioned by PMC ideology as the blue collar staff are absent and ignored. The working class is divided, being led by its upper strata, reflecting a middle class orientation couched in corporatist DEI language. As such, union bureaucrats determine the direction of their dwindling unions.
They don’t seek to organize the vast majority of unorganized workers, they waste worker dues on lobbying and campaigning for capitalist Democrats. They seek class collaboration with corporate employers and deny the irreconcilable differences between workers and bosses while destroying any ability to build working class internationalism. The worst enemies of the working class are not the capitalists themselves, but the opportunists within the working class serving the interests of capitalists among workers.
There are ideological and organizational landmines everywhere we turn as marxists, placed there by opportunists within the class to keep workers in line and unable to challenge this social order. We have to first recognize those landmines, we have to first organize ourselves on this shared understanding, free of the corrupting influences which dominate the minds of leftists, organizers, and much of the working class.
This means carving out a free space that will be occupied initially by only a small minority and placing strong ideological barriers around this space to block the intrusion of the default ideology which maintains the status quo of division and passivity. Only then can we effectively intervene within working class struggles and organizations, and accomplish the qualitative breakthroughs which lead to quantitative growth.
Yes we need to go to the masses, we need to win over the majority of the working class but the necessary precondition of this is a strategic systematically structured practice. If we don’t understand revolutionary theory then it is impossible to carry out a revolutionary practice. What this looks like concretely can assume a variety of forms.
With the present situation of the working class characterized by precarious jobs, high turnover and lack of stability, it can be very difficult to get rooted in any single workplace. Even union worksites in Virginia are difficult to find a foothold in. Oftentimes there is a seniority system which privileges older workers at the expense of new hires. Many union contracts permit employers to isolate union workers with full rights and privileges from new hires who in many cases are temporary and easily laid off. Any efforts by marxist workers to struggle against these divisive tactics enabled by union leadership will be met with resistance from both the employer and the union.
Another option is the regional union based model of the Industrial Workers of the World where anyone can be a union member regardless of industry, regardless of whether they are already working at a union job with another union, and regardless of whether they quit one job to go work in another. While the IWW lacks the organizational and financial strength of mainstream unions, this allows a broader and deeper embedding in the working class on a regional basis with the ability to show that unionism isn’t confined to 5 year contracts negotiated at a distance between union lawyers and corporate lawyers, but a means to struggle directly and collectively in solidarity from workers across industries and also the ability to wage struggles within the business unions whose leadership sells out the interests of the working class.
We have a giant terrain to experiment on and to try different tactics. A success in struggle anywhere can facilitate further organizing and struggle in other places, this is successful propaganda. Until we get our bearings and begin to act in unity based on a shared understanding of revolutionary marxism it will be impossible to make real gains for the working class. The working class will remain apathetic so long as no viable alternative exists. It is our job as the initial minority of marxists to lay the foundations for that alternative.
This entails organizing workers economically, organizing workers politically and waging struggle across these fronts through an independent organization while applying the united front strategy. This means tactical alliances with various groupings who may share limited goals with us, while continuing to assert and develop our own independent strategy. The goal is to expose, before a mass audience and in action those who claim to defend worker interests while in fact they manage a compromise to the advantage of capital.
We can also struggle on the political front, through the revolutionary electoral campaigns of an independent workers party across Virginia campaigning at all levels to present the revolutionary workers alternative to the capitalist parties. We can use these campaigns to propagandize and agitate around a revolutionary program of pro-worker demands incompatible with the stability of capitalist class rule. This is what differentiates us from reformists. We do not have to operate under the illusion that winning electoral office and passing “constructive” legislation will resolve the existential issues facing the working class, and we should not let slogans and demands be dictated to us by Democrats and their “radical” and “social movement” tail as inevitably happens through the unions and the NGOs.
We have to struggle for control of working class organizations, popularize our program, and root out the liberal dominance within them. No more union dues to Democrats, no more union endorsements or free labor to Democrat candidates. We must fight for unions to establish independence, to endorse a working class party and working class candidates who can be accountable to the Virginia working class.
All too often the “technical” and “practical” emphasis on organizing downplays the political aspect of this all, as Jane McAlvery and many labor strategists do. They at best advocate trade union consciousness, with the assumption that this economic organization will “automatically” generate a political consciousness. On the contrary, we see time and time again that even the most militant unionism can easily be driven back towards a reformist political program. Workers have to be conscious not just of the need to organize economically, but to organize an independent working class politics. This is the problem of economism so extensively debated by past Marxists.
Many self professed communists in the unions engage in this practice. They wish to focus only on the economic struggle while the struggle for socialism is sidelined because such an injection of socialist politics into the labor unions would create immediate hostility from union leadership who are in the pockets of the Democrats. The results of this orientation can be seen with the rise of the CIO as many communist workers did the organizing of the CIO only for John Lewis to expel them from the unions afterwards. They were not prepared for this precisely because they had sacrificed building an independent political base around the open mass promotion of an independent political program to a policy of conciliation with those who would later secure their elimination.
Then came the neoliberal period where industries were gutted with the aid of union leadership. There was no strategy to confront industrial restructuring head on, no attempt to block the closure of factories as part of a program for workers control of the economy. Just a surrender to the idea that workers must suffer for the capitalists to ensure their profitability because the all powerful rationality of the market demanded it.
At no point did the labor movement assert a worker controlled transition to a planned economy as the only alternative to the long term decline of living standards and workers power imposed by the logic of profit. Such ideas seem fantastical and unrealistic to the average worker today, but that’s because we have completely ceded the ideological terrain to the neoliberal “common sense” which makes the progressive elimination of workers’ security and prosperity into a natural law beyond political contestation. .
We’ve lost the capacity to explain to workers that these issues will never be solved through reformist schemes harkening back to a fantasy past that never existed in the airbrushed, contradiction-free way the reformists imagine it – like the New Deal. We’ve lost the ability to debunk capitalist arguments like the demand to “rebuild the middle class” when that is actually a demand for the further fragmentation and pacification of the working class. We have to educate and agitate on the structural limits of capitalism itself and that no reform will address the root issues that cause working class immiseration and inevitably leads to more crises, more war, more barbarism.
As global resources are depleted, as nuclear armament continues, as pollution and global warming continue unabated we only have so much time left to get this right. Prior generations of communists have never had to face the real threat of global destruction we are experiencing now. The answer is never capitalism with a human face, but only socialist revolution led by the working class and its party. All social issues revolve around the political question of which class has state power and what will that class do with it. That’s the bottom line.
The Virginia Worker 
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