Following our introduction to the ICC article we reprinted in the last issue, we received a critical letter, which we publish here and follow with our response. The primary purpose of this correspondence was to address a passage that quickly put forward a hypothesis for understanding the current development of the “Bordiguist” group that publishes The Communist Party in the United States. Its defense of “red syndicalism” could explain the echo it meets by “the fact that the experience of mass strike dynamics by the North American proletariat remains particularly remote - the 1930s...” Readers will find below the comrade’s correction, as well as a broader critique of our positions. Our response offered to engage the author – whom we do not know – in a debate on the issues he, or she, raised. Unfortunately, we have not heard from him or her since. Nevertheless, we thought it would be of general interest to publish this correspondence.

Letter from comrade Ivan

Hello comrades,

Some brief comments on your introduction to the ICC text ’An opportunist intervention towards workers’ struggles in the USA’...

First, I do not think it is true that the ’the North American proletariat’s experience of the mass strike dynamics’ is confined to the 1930s, or that North America did not experience events on par with the class battles in Europe you note took place after 1968. Albeit not on as grand of a scale as i.e. Italy during and after ’the hot autumn’, the USA still faced similar convulsions in the 1970s: the wildcat strike of 10,000 sanitation workers in New York City in 1975, the civil servants’ strikes in San Francisco that partially combined i.e. teachers’ and hospital workers’ struggles alike, and the illegal strike of 200,000 letter carriers in 1970, crushed by the intervention of the army but affecting most major cities. I quote from Time on March 30, 1970: 

“Stamping their feet and clapping their hands, members of Branch 36 broke up their December meeting with raucous cries of ‘Strike! Strike!’ Their mood frightened union officials. ‘We were no longer in control,’ said Executive Vice President Herman Sandbank… An angry call for an immediate strike vote was ruled unconstitutional, and balloting on the question was put off until St. Patrick’s Day. Then, as thousands of their fellow New Yorkers watched the marchers on Fifth Avenue, the letter carriers marched to the ballot boxes and voted 1,555 to 1,055 in favor of a strike. Other locals quickly followed suit. Members of the Manhattan-Bronx Postal Union chased their president, Morris Biller, off the platform when he refused to allow them to take an immediate strike vote…. In a display of impatience with both Congress and their own leadership, some 3,000 members of Chicago’s N.A.L.C. Branch 11 shouted down pleas from union officers to remain on their jobs and voted overwhelmingly to strike. The resistance spread quickly. Postal units in Boston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, San Francisco and several Los Angeles suburbs voted either to continue walkouts already in effect or initiate new ones. At a tumultuous Saturday morning meeting, New York’s N.A.L.C. Branch 36, which had started it all, voted almost unanimously to remain off the job.”

Granted, these rarely expanded along anything other than a narrower, sectoral corridor (and therefore do not perfectly exhibit a ’mass strike dynamic’). However, they are at least as significant as the three main ’general strikes’ of the 1930s in the USA, and posed a stronger challenge to the very controls you liken (correctly) to ’the total and definitive integration of the trade unions into the state’, consummated by the Wagner Act of 1935 and then by the unions’ ’no-strike’ pledge during the war.

Secondly, the remark that the aforementioned ’integration’ was ’in preparation for the 2nd imperialist world war’ appears to me as imprecise and slightly mechanical. It is not strictly wrong, and is actually right, correlating with the principles enumerated below by Paul Mattick:

“…the crisis cannot be reduced to ‘purely economic events’ although it arises ‘purely economically’, that is, from the social relations of production clothed in economic forms. The international competitive struggle, fought also by political and military means, influences economic development, just as this in turn gives rise to the various forms of competition. Thus every real crisis can only be understood in connection with social development as a whole.”

In the epoch of imperialism and state-capitalism, states’ response to crises coincides with, and is, preparations for war. This is even partially grasped by the administrators of exploitation themselves, as i.e. Blinken does not explicitly anticipate war with the PRC, but obliquely connects the program of his administration to the ’new challenges’ posed by a more competitive geopolitical playing field after COVID. Nonetheless, the architects of the union laws of 1935 in the USA, and even of measures that were plainly a form of military mobilization such as the CCC, did not yet consciously conceive of these as preparations for the sanguinary devalorization of 1939-45. They were certainly less conscious of these measures’ utility as preparations for the coming war than i.e. their counterparts in France, whom Bilan brilliantly ascertained were ’the Hitler[s] and Mussolini[s] of democratic France’, as the Popular Front confirmed Bordiga’s ’prophecy’ that the Socialists would come to power ’with a program of the fascist style...’. The Wagner Act and the CCC were responses to a crisis, a), whose resolution was WWII, and b), that created the same volatile situation which rulers recognize can take intensified inter-state confrontation to a military level. So these are ’preparations for the 2nd imperialist world war’, but retroactively and obliquely.

To me, this possibly speaks to a certain level of ’two-dimensional-ness’ in the IGCL’s conception of ’crises’ and the ’solution’ of generalized war.

Our Response to Ivan

The IGCL to comrade Ivan,

Dear comrade,

We have discussed your critical comments on the presentation that our journal makes on the ICC article about The Communist Party’s intervention in working class struggles in the US. We salute your political approach and we appreciate your effort, since it provides historical precisions about the experiences of mass strike in North American as well as the one you make on the “unions’ definitive integration to the US state apparatus”. Both are worth of debating and political clarification.

1) Actually, your remarks on the experiences of the mass strike in the US in the 1970 do not contradict, nor oppose, our understanding of the phenomenon of the mass strike as the “universal form of the proletarian class struggle resulting from the present stage of capitalist development and class relations” (Rosa Luxemburg). It rather comes to “enrich” our understanding and our internal discussions. This is the important point that, for our part, we want to underline first. Nor do they really oppose the fact that differences of experience may exist between different fractions of the international proletariat, here between the North America and Europe’s ones. Now, and may be is it also a concern you had when you wrote us, it is clear that pointing out this possible differences should not make us looking at the dynamics of the class struggle, actually the struggle between the classes, as fixed schema, that would exclude any possibility of mass strike in North America for instance.

The observation we make in the journal aims at explaining or exposing particular specificities, such as the development of the “bordiguist” The Communist Party in the US, because its position on red unions. In this case, our explanation is only an hypothesis. More important, referring to this “difference of tradition” enables us to point out the difficulties we sometime have while debating, particularly on the immediate tactics, with other communist groups, such as the CWO (ICT) for instance, or comrades from countries where the union “closed-shop” system is ruling or not.

For instance, according to the union official rules and traditions, closed-shop or not if so to speak, the individual militants in workplaces will not be faced with the same exact immediate stakes or battles. For example, they will not develop the same immediate “tactics” in regards with the meetings called by the union within the formal framework of the union, that is including only unionized workers. Again generally speaking, in a closed-shop system, the unions’ call for a meeting with unionized only can represent a “step forwards”, an “opportunity” for the militants to intervene at a local and immediate level for gathering workers and “unite” them for the struggle and fight back the unions’ sabotage of any initial struggle or strike. While such unions’ call in a “non-closed-shop system” appears at once, again generally speaking, as a direct attempt to divide the workers. There, individual militants can and must directly denounce this division and call for the alternative of general gathering of all workers of the workplace whatever is their trade, their specialty or specific work and their statute and contract.

The same goes for the intervention of the communist groups. That is why we underlined in the article our support to The Communist Party ‘s orientation for calling to organize general assemblies to vote in the US situation. While, it is not, in general, a central orientation that we put forwards in our intervention in mass or even local mobilizations in places like France, for instance. In the first case, the setting up of general assemblies, that is the gathering of all workers of one workplace, can be a moment, can be a first step, for the struggle to develop and to which the unions openly oppose. In the second, the tradition of holding general assemblies gathering all workers of any workplace, even though attacked and regularly sabotaged by the unions, is still alive for all workers. It does not represent the same stake. For instance, holding a general assembly is not in general an expression, or the result, of an outflanking of the unions. And, it is not always a step forwards. For instance, the left and the leftists do not hesitate to call and even organize general assemblies before the struggle or strike itself. In doing so, they attempt, and often succeed so far, to anticipate and short-circuit the very dynamics of the struggle. That is why we warn against making General Assemblies a fetish – what we call and fight back as “fetishism of self-organization” – whose result is often to divide the workers instead of being a moment of their unification. But this is another debate.

Thus, according to the places, the immediate tactics, such as calling for general assemblies, or intervening in any gathering called by the unions, may differ not only according to the moment and course of the very struggles themselves, but also according to the local “tradition”, is so to speak. Of course, and please, do not take the above immediate tactics as absolute rules to be applied in a dogmatic and mechanical way. The basic concern here is to point out that, because the “historical traditions”, there can be different direct and immediate approaches, tactics, that correspond to the immediate reality, to say it differently, to the immediate and local relation of forces between the classes. The key point is to verify the different tactics are in coherence, do not contradict, the principles and the programmatic positions. For instance, in the US system in particular, but elsewhere too, the communist groups should take care that their militants’ intervention to unions or unionized meetings should not transform itself into participating to and developing a unionist activity and policy, that would strengthen and give credit to any “union life”.

2) The same goes for the second point you raise about the final integration of the unions in the US state apparatus: the comments you make do not contradict the basic point we defend, that is the fact the union’s historical integration to capitalist state was in last instance determined by the perspective of generalized imperialist war. As such, this historical integration worldwide is full part, and even an essential part, of the development of state capitalism. For us, this one is both product and factor of the historical impasse of capitalism whose highest expression is… the imperialist generalized war itself.

Now, we do not see exactly why you think our position is “imprecise and slightly mechanical”. It would be worth you develop. It seems that you defend that “the architects of the union laws of 1935 in the USA (…) did not yet consciously conceive of these as preparations for the sanguinary devalorization of 1939-45.” We do not oppose this peculiar point. Actually, the fact that the main political leaders of the ruling class are totally, partially, or not at all, conscious of the role they are compelled to accomplish is of secondary interest. What ever the degree of consciousness or understanding of the very dynamics towards world war by Roosevelt, the Popular Fronts leaders, Blum, De Man, or Hitler and Mussolini, etc. does not change the fact the communist groups – as Bilan and the Communist Left of Italy or others from the German-Dutch Left did – had to analyze and denounce the fact that the New Deal, the Popular Front, as well as the development of German state capitalism by the Nazis could not have other historical meaning than the preparation to war. [1]

Or is your difference about the fact the New Deal, to speak roughly, was initially only a response to the crisis, first, that could only be resolved, secondly, by the war? Again, and as far as we understand your point, we do not see an opposition to the basic position on this question, which is in the present days of crucial importance: are the capitalist classes compelled to force the march towards a generalized imperialist war? And if so, is this march the determining factor of the whole historical international situation, at first of the class struggle? This is the main question to convince as much as we can the proletarian camp as well as warning the proletariat as a whole.

Could you clear us about what you mean by “these preparations for the 2nd imperialist world war, but retroactively and obliquely”? As well, what do you mean by that to you, our position “speaks to a certain level of ‘two-dimensional-ness’ in the IGCL’s conception of the ‘crises’ and the ‘solution’ of generalized war.”?

3) Finally, we also discussed the interest for the whole proletarian camp in publishing in our journal your comments or a more developed contribution you may write on these points – if possible for you and for us in our next May issue. Do you agree? We can publish the comments as they are. Or they can be edited and complemented by you. Or, if you feel so, you can write a more developed contribution. Technically, the comments you sent are corresponding to one page of the journal. Even though we have not decided yet the content of the next issue, you could write up to four pages. What do you think?

We do not know exactly if you are used and if you know our general positions as well as our conception of the proletarian camp. Generally speaking, we are always “open” to any debate and confrontation of positions with comrades and sympathizers, whether in agreement or critical to our positions. We think the positions of the ones and the others, at first of the communist groups and organizations, but also of individuals of the proletarian camp, are not their “own” but expressions more or less direct of the problems and questions to which the whole proletariat is confronted to, or will be confronted to. As such, they are of “general interest” for it, therefore for all the revolutionary forces. Exposing, debating and even confronting the positions are crucial for the very “existence” and intervention of the revolutionary groups and, even more, for the battle to constitute the party of tomorrow. That is why, according to our possibilities and priorities, we encourage readers and contacts to write and contribute so that we can discuss and debate their positions. That is why, according to our material capacities, there the journal, and our political priorities, we attempt as much as we can to publish their contributions and debate them publicly.

Waiting for your comments and response, fraternally,