Revolutionary Youth and the Road to the Proletariat

(Prepared for the National Convention of Students for a Democratic

Society, Chicago, Illinois, June, 1969)

... the composition of the politically guiding vanguard of every class, the
proletariat included, also depends both on the position of this class and
on the principal form of its struggle. Larin complains, for example, that
young workers predominate in our Party, that we have few married
workers, and that they leave the Party. This complaint of a Russian
opportunist reminds me of a passage in one of Engels’ works . . .
Retorting to some fatuous bourgeois professor, a German Cadet, Engels
wrote: ’Is it not natural that youth should predominate in our Party, the
revolutionary Party? We are a party of innovators, and it is always the
youth that most eagerly follows the innovators. We are a party that is
waging self-sacrificing struggle against the old rottenness, and youth is
always the first to undertake a self-sacrificing struggle.’ No, let us leave it
to the Cadets to collect the ’tired’ old men of thirty, revolutionaries who
have ’grown wise’, and renegades from Social-Democracy (Communism).
We shall always be a part of the youth of the advanced class. – V. I.
Lenin, written at age 36

The most basic truth that all revolutionaries must grasp, the starting
point for our action, is the fact that the principal contradiction in the
world today is between the oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa, and
Latin America and the imperialists headed by U.S. imperialism.
What distinguishes Marxists from pseudo-Marxists is the question of
support for the national liberation struggles of oppressed peoples,
and for the struggle of the working class to achieve leadership within
those liberation movements. Within the U.S. this means support for
the third world liberation struggles, headed by the Black people’s
movement, and for the leading role of Black and other third world
workers.
Two, equally dangerous, errors are committed by opposing
tendencies within the revolutionary anti-imperialist movement in
the mother country. The first is to deny altogether the colonial
oppression of Black and other oppressed peoples in this country,
reducing their struggles to a mere part of the struggles of the
working class, whose present consciousness and level of struggle is
far lower than that of the great majority of the oppressed peoples. In
practice this means selling out the Third World Liberation
movements. The opposite error is to recognize only the colonial
nature of the oppression of Third World peoples in this country, to
fail to understand fully class division within the oppressed nations
and the dual nature of the oppression of the working class of these
internal colonies, and, therefore, to fail to support the fight for
working class leadership within the liberation movements. In
practice this tendency also means selling out the peoples of the
internal colonies by allowing the bourgeois forces within the
liberation movement – who are bolstered by their ties with the
imperialist ruling class – to usurp the leadership of the movement.
For revolutionaries in the mother country the crucial question is:
How can we build the greatest possible support, within the mother
country, for the third world liberation struggles, inside and outside
the United States, and how can we help prevent the co-optation or
reversal of the revolutionary development of these movements? We
cannot allow ourselves to be reduced to mere spectators, however
enthusiastic, of the third world liberation struggles. But, on the other
hand, we cannot allow our subjective desire to personally support
these struggles to prevent us from building a movement for mass
support. We believe that, in the immediate period, the greatest
assistance mother country revolutionaries can give h to spread our
present anti-imperialist movement to the masses of people,
especially the working class, who are beginning to experience, in
sharpening terms, “the heightening contradictions of moribund U.S.
imperialism. And, in the long run, the best, indeed the only, way we
can help consolidate the victory of the world proletariat is to
overthrow the system of U.S. monopoly capitalist imperialism and
replace it with socialism. We believe that this can only be done by
fighting for the leading role of the proletariat, by developing a basic
strategy for initiating and carrying out the fight for proletarian
leadership.
The power of Marxism, in its development through Mao Tsetung
thought, is demonstrated in the fact that increasingly within SDS –
the largest anti-imperialist movement in the mother country –
nearly everyone calls themselves Marxist. And many are genuinely
seeking to learn and apply the ideology of the international
proletariat: Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought. This
tendency has gained such strength and momentum that even the
enemies of the proletariat and its ideology are forced to dress up
their arguments in Marxist-sounding language. In fact, most
everyone wants to be in the working class. The burning question is
how to get there: to go out and actually integrate ourselves with
working people, or to change the definition of working class so that
we can all fit in, just as we are.
For several years now the debate has not been whether the working
class is the main force in the revolution, but exactly what is meant by
the term “working class” and within that classification, what section
or strata will be the leading force in overthrowing the imperialist
ruling class and building socialism. For a short time the theoreticians
of the so-called “new working class” had considerable influence
within SDS and the student and youth, movement as a whole. But
the obvious fact that these privileged strata of the “new working
class” – highly skilled technicians, engineers, teachers, journalists,
social workers, etc. – do not have the greatest stake in making the
revolution, nor the greatest power to do it, along with the fact that
these very same strata in the Soviet Union, and other East European
countries, have been shown to be the social basis for revisionism and
the restoration of capitalism, has almost entirely blown away the
“new working class” theory.
Still, the question of which section of the working class will be the
leading force in the revolutionary movement – and specifically, the
validity of the classical Marxist view of the industrial proletariat as
the main force of proletarian revolution – continues to rage within
our movement. We do hold to the “classical” Marxist view. As
Marxists, however, we recognize our responsibility to defend and
explain this position in terms of concrete conditions of U.S.
imperialism and U.S. society today, taking into account the very real
changes in the world situation and in the productive and social
forces that have undeniably occurred since the time of Marx.
Lenin, in reviving and defending the fundamental principles of
Marxism, insisted that Marxism was not an abstract dogma, but a
living science; that the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions is
the living soul of Marxism.” So, in defeating the line of the Russian
Narodniks – anarchist intellectuals who argued that capitalism was
not only undesirable but unnecessary in Russia and that a rural,
communal form of “communism” could be built directly out of the
collapse of feudalism – Lenin did not insist that it was an iron law
that capitalism must develop everywhere, that capitalism was the
inevitable intermediary between feudalism and socialism. He
demonstrated, instead, by concrete analysis of the Russian economy,
that capitalism was already developing in Russia, that this
development already was irreversible, and that socialism could only
be constructed on the foundations laid by the developing capitalist
edifice. Today, in the face of arguments and analyses that claim to
show that changes in the material base of modern-day U.S.
capitalism have reduced the size and revolutionary potential of the
industrial proletariat, we will try to base our case for the leading role
of industrial workers on concrete examination of these arguments
and concrete analysis of the actual position of the industrial
proletariat and the entire working class in the U.S. imperialist
system today.
First, to deal with the question of what is the working class – who is
a worker and who is not. Here again, everyone invokes Marx and
“Marxist” analysis. For example, in a recent article in New Left
Notes (May 13, 1969), Jim Mellen says:
Marx’s prophecy of the development of capitalist society into two classes,
a large ruling class and a small ruling bourgeoisie, has nearly come
true ... If class membership is determined by relationship to the means of
production, in a Marxist fashion, then the vast majority of the people in
this country, who own no means of production and are forced to sell
their labor power to someone who does, are members of the working
class.”

If we take Mellen’s statement literally, then not only cops, but

military brass and all other pigs – including Hayakawa – who own
no means of production and sell themselves to the ruling class are
part of the working class. And he is aware of the confusion that his
own simplistic analysis creates, especially when he gets to the
question of the middle strata:
In speaking of students, middle-level management, highly skilled labor
and professionals, many radicals would like to create a residual middle
category and call it petit bourgeois. First, this is a non-Marxist
classification – not based on relationship to the means of production.
Second, the ideology which characterizes these groups is certainly not
petit bourgeois anti-monopolist consciousness, but (to the extent that it
is not proletarian ideology) it is ruling class, monopolist (what has come
to be called corporate liberal) ideology.

Besides recognizing only one aspect of petty bourgeois ideology

(anti-monopoly consciousness, which coexists with and does not
always dominate, anti-working class, procapitalist consciousness)
Mellen’s statement is mere mystification. He merely describes the
subjective attitude of these groups (in ambivalent terms), while
criticizing in “Marxist fashion,” their classification as petty bourgeois
– without offering an alternative class category for these middle
groups or strata.
It is difficult to classify these middle strata, but wishing them into
the working class won’t do. Class analysis, especially for classes and
strata that are grouped between the industrial proletariat and the
monopoly capitalists cannot be done so neatly as dropping eggs in
baskets. A real analysis of both the objective position and attitudes of
these middle strata towards the proletariat and the proletarian
revolution can only be more effectively accomplished through
combining study with concrete struggle among these strata.
Mellen’s ”Marxist fashion” class analysis is inconsistent and at best
half-Marxian analysis. Relationship to the means of production is
indeed the basic criterion for determining social class. But it is not
the only one. Relationship to other groups in society is also very
important. So is the ability to exercise a degree of control over means
of production and the classes that relate to them, even without
actually owning the means of production – like managers in the U.S.
and their revisionist counterparts in the Soviet Union. There is a
material basis for the allegiance of managers to their imperialist
masters and it is exactly this objective position that Mellen ignores in
his “class analysis.”
Though Mellen speaks of relationship to the means of production
and maintains an air of being in the camp of the Marxists – in fact,
he rests almost his entire case on only a single aspect of this
relationship. To Mellen, ownership or lack of ownership of the
means of production is the single criterion of relationship to the
means of production; the sale or purchase of labor power is the
single demarcation between classes and class strata. Though
Mellen’s intentions may be positive, he should realize that his one-
sided concentration on the question of ownership puts him
uncomfortably in the same bag as the counterrevolutionary
revisionists of the Soviet Union. They pose as “Marxist-Leninists”
also by fulminating on “relationship to the means of production” and
“prove” the non-existence of classes in the Soviet Union by
considering only the question of ownership of the means of
production. But this sleight of hand “Marxism” should not blind
anyone to the true class position of this revisionist clique. They are a
ruling class, new Tsars, in spite of the fact that they don’t own a
single share of stock.
A very crucial factor in the class analysis of any sector of society is
the degree of independence enjoyed by its members. For instance,
doctors who work in a large corporation hospital may sell their labor
power to the Kaiser Corporation, but they enjoy a great deal of
independence within that situation, and they have a real chance to
leave Kaiser and go into private practice. Unlike this doctor, or the
worker’s supervisor, or even a 26th Vice President of General
Electric (who owns no stock), a worker has no choice but to sell his
labor power, has no real control over when, where, how and with
whom he works. Yes, Marx and Engels noted in “The Communist
Manifesto” that the development of capitalism has a tendency to
“proletarianize” formerly “independent” professionals. But, today,
there is still a large residue of this middle stratum that is
independent and whose class position is definitely petty bourgeois.
And even the formerly independent professionals, now to a degree
proletarianized, still show ambivalence that separates them from the
working class. The teacher in the overcrowded classroom, the social
worker with the large case load, do engage in class struggle, even
unionize; sometimes their struggles are very sharp and very helpful
to the working class.
But even when that struggle is sharpest these members of the
“working class” insist on their ”professional” status in relation to the
laboring masses. They are not misguided here, or just being
backward workers – they are reflecting their true class position
which is between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Of course,
as the imperialist system rots even further and its crisis deepens
under the impact of external and internal contradiction, and as the
working class becomes stronger and more conscious of revolutionary
necessity and develops leadership and organization, more of these
intermediate strata will join the revolutionary ranks. Some will
become important, selfless leaders and fighters, but the group as a
whole will remain divided, up to the hour of victory. The importance
of class analysis lies in being able to find allies from among the
various classes and strata, distinguish friends from enemies, and to
change our tactics as changes occur. We need to refine our
experience to be able to distinguish better the divisions in our
society. To blur over class differentiation and to reduce classes to an
indefinable mass will not help us unite all who can be united (from
various classes) against monopoly imperialism.
Mellen is so anxious to fit almost everyone – and all youth – into the
working class that he is forced to obscure facts and twist concepts.
He claims, for example, that the small capitalists in the U.S. are
almost insignificant. A walk down almost any street in any major city
or town in the country (here we are not even talking about the
several million small farmers) is enough to refute this argument.
Presently in the U.S. there are about 3.4 million nonagricultural
businesses employing 50 people or less – 540,000 of these
employing between 8 and 19 people and over 2.6 million employing
less than 8 people. This is an actual increase over 1945 when the
corresponding figures were 2.9 million, 221,500, and 2.6 million.
Even granting that some of these small businesses are in effect
“franchises” of larger corporations, the essential position of their
owners and/or managers is still petit bourgeois, not proletarian. The
petty bourgeoisie is not only still significant in its size, but its
ideological influence (sometimes anti-monopoly, but always pro-
capitalist, private property ideology) is still very strong within the
working class, especially its skilled upper strata. On the one hand,
the average life of a small business in the U.S. is about five years:
these small units of capital are continually crushed and their owners
ruined and driven into the working class or absorbed into the
monopolies as managers. But, on the other hand, these small
businesses are also continually regenerated out of the managers of
monopoly and the ranks of the workers: plumbers who go into
business for themselves, carpenters who become small contractors,
cooks who open up a small cafe, or teamsters who buy their own rigs
and work on a contract basis, even professors who develop a new
product or a slick scheme (one of these last really made it and is now
Asst. Secretary of Defense.) To blur over this phenomenon is to
weaken our understanding of the real situation within the working
class and society as a whole and to seriously cripple our ability to
build a revolutionary movement based on the real situation and
needs of the people, especially the working class.
It falls into the trap set by the ruling class and its academic agents. In
the 1950’s bourgeois sociologists bent every effort (and fact) to
dissolve the working class into the “middle class” (and this ruling
class trick is still being tried, though with diminishing success). Now
Mellen wants to turn the process on its head and dissolve the petty
bourgeoisie into the working class. Mellen’s mistake is as harmful to
the revolutionary movement as the bourgeoisie’s deliberate
falsification. And it leads him into some silly pseudo-analysis. For
example, in order to fit all students into the working class, he is
forced to argue that “the Student, by studying, creates value within
himself in the form of skilled labor power.” He might as well say that
a baby sucking on a bottle creates value in himself. Labor power, in a
Marxist fashion, enters the scene when the worker puts it on the
market to be purchased by a capitalist. If our student never sells his
“skilled labor power” but is murdered by a pig in a demonstration, or
if he suddenly inherits $1 million worth of stock in Standard Oil, this
“value” he is creating is never realized as labor power, never creates
any surplus value and counts for nothing. No, like our example of the
baby, the student is still bottle-fed, although the formula is different.
The first time he will produce any value is when he applies his labor
power to the creation of a commodity for the market.
Further, Mellen claims that “the overwhelming majority of American
youth (say 18-24) are students, soldiers and unemployed.” In fact,
60% of males in this group are employed, only 8% are unemployed
and about 15% are actually in the military. (U.S. Dept. of
Labor, Handbook of Labor Statistics, 1968). Even allowing for
bourgeois distortion and for a fairly large number of male students
in the 18-24 group who work while attending school, Mellen is still
incorrect. And these figures are for non-white as well as white youth,
so the number of employed white male youth is even higher than
60%. Among women, 18-24, white and non-white, almost 50% are
employed. And, in the age group 25-34, over 80% of both white and
non-white are employed, most full-time.
Mellen’s acrobatic “Marxism,” his dilution of the Marxist conception
of value, his one-sided view of “relations of production” and his
disregard for fact – all these are necessary to lay the basis for his
primary concern: the negation of the leading role of the industrial
proletariat. Marx and Engels always drew a clear distinction between
productive and unproductive labor – between the agricultural and
industrial workers who are exploited to create surplus value, and
workers who sell their labor power but create no value. This is not a
frivolous distinction, but one based on the understanding of the fact
that the profit of the capitalist rests, ultimately, on his ability to
depress the condition of the worker at the point of production. Not
only the profits of capitalism but the livelihood of everyone in
society, including other, nonproductive workers, depends,
ultimately, on the value that is created by the exploited industrial
workers – and to a lesser extent in this day of advanced technology
by the agricultural worker. Today this is an international
phenomenon so that the mere examination of the imperialist country
and its internal class structure leaves out the superexploitation of
colonized workers and blurs the nature of the internationalized
contradiction between productive workers and other classes and
strata. But understanding that the source of capitalist profit lies in
the exploitation of the industrial worker – “at the point of
production” – while certainly necessary to indicate the strategic
position of the industrial proletariat as that force in society that can
cut the arteries of capitalist power, is not sufficient to encompass the
theoretical basis for revolutionary communism or even the leading
role of the industrial proletariat. The Economist political trend also
understands and bases its theory on it. Nor does Mellen avoid
Economism by broadening the definition of the working class –
actually he is eclectically accommodating, in this manner, other
positions of his (that cannot be characterized as Economism) to
Economist political theory. (Economism does not deny armed
struggle – in old Russia any workers who went on strike were in for a
bloody struggle and the Economists had to recognize that.)
Lenin in What Is To Be Done? (written in 1902) blew away the
Economists in the labor movement who argued that the road to
socialism lay entirely in the economic struggle of the working class
for higher wages and improved working conditions under capitalism.
In that brilliant essay Lenin pointed out that the industrial
proletariat is the leading class in modern society not because it is
involved in a struggle for more wages “at the point of production,”
but because its socialization in labor, and its consistent exploitation
and struggle against exploitation, as well as its strategic position
within the economy and the network of class relations, enables it to
grasp the ideas of Marxism most firmly, identify most clearly the
social forces in society – who are the friends and who are the
enemies of the people – and to carry through an all-class struggle to
overthrow the old order. And in this connection political struggle is
qualitatively superior to purely economic struggle, and that it is the
duty of revolutionary communists to join the economic struggles of
the workers in order to help them grasp political conclusions and to
raise the level of economic struggle to the level of all-around political
struggle against the State.
(We mean, of course, by all around political struggle against the
State, not the Harold Wilson/Labour Party version. Economic
demands wrapped in a package and raised to a political level will still
be bourgeois politics if those economic demands are not viewed as a
by-product of the struggle for socialism. Reformism, based on
economic demands, often expressed very “politically” is at the heart
of Economism.)
Mellen’s apparent subjective desire to deny the leading role of the
industrial proletariat is the root cause of his errors in analysis. Thus,
he takes a static view of how surplus is accumulated, implying that
the basic contradiction between the worker and his employer has
been all but eliminated. And he does this not only in talking about
U.S. workers, but about the entire world proletariat. First of all, he
states that “Two things developed out of competitive capitalism: The
system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism.” (our italics)
If this isn’t just a sloppy grammatical mistake, it is a very serious
political error, committed also by the “new working class”
theoreticians. Imperialism is monopoly capitalism, the highest stage
of capitalism. At a certain point in the development of capitalism, the
national market is no longer large enough to meet the profit needs of
the capitalist, can no longer assure him a profitable return for
additional investment. So he is forced to export, not finished
commodities, but capital itself, beyond the borders of the native
country and market. This occurs throughout the economy, and in all
capitalist countries, so that fierce competition is set up among
various units of capital, dominated by finance capital, all seeking to
control, carve and recarve the world and bend its development to
their own profit needs. This quite naturally necessitates wars –
between imperialist powers and, increasingly, between various
imperialist powers and the peoples of the colonies and semi-
colonies.
At times Mellen seems to reflect at least a partial understanding of
this, but his apparently incomplete understanding leads him to
fundamentally confuse the nature of the Third World Liberation
struggles, including the Black Liberation struggle in this country.
While he correctly notes that “the driving thrust of imperialism to
control and develop suitable investment opportunities means a
steadily deteriorating quality of existence of the workers of the whole
world,” he can turn right around and, invoking the straw man of
“Economism” declare that “the struggles of the people do not occur
at the point of production.” The struggles of Third World peoples are
primarily national struggles against feudalism and imperialism –
and in their final stages, however, protracted, occur primarily as
military struggles. But before they reach the stage of military
struggle they, in fact, mainly do occur “at the point of production” by
peasants on the feudal estates and ”at the point of production” in the
shops and factories of the urban centers. The struggle of Blacks for
liberation in this country is also a national struggle, whose most
active contingents are not industrial workers, but street people,
workers without stable employment that the Panthers refer to as
“field niggers.” Mellen projects this present circumstance into the
mother country and puts forth a strategy based on it:
For the youth of the mother country, the class struggle manifests itself
around issues like the draft, the ruling class’ uses of the university, police
and other agents of the ruling class, for social control. Throughout
society institutions designed to stabilize and serve capitalism are
breaking down and struggle ensues. “If the breakdown of the U.S.
capitalist system is not necessarily going to come as a huge depression,
but as a gradual deterioration of the social structure, then our
revolutionary movement must be prepared for the eventuality not just of
a general strike, but of a gradual raising of the level of struggle around
various issues resulting in a general protracted civil war.

(It is a side issue, but in order not to acquiesce in a misreading of

Marxism-Leninism, only some anarchist theoreticians see the
general strike as the final act of overthrow of the capitalist system.
Marxist-Leninists see the general strike as just one form of struggle,
sometimes achievable and useful in the development of unity,
consciousness and fighting strength. It would take a rare
combination of circumstances, where the capitalist class has become
deprived of almost any strength, before a general strike could
immediately trigger the death of capitalism.)
We do not deny that bourgeois society in this age of declining
imperialism is coming apart at the seams; nor that a civil war is
likely to break out in the U.S.; nor, least of all, that the struggle will
be protracted. But we do believe that this civil war will come when
the U.S. has more totally fallen apart in the midst of a great
depression or other vast economic and political crises, such as a
devastating defeat in war, for instance, and the ruling class can no
longer rule in the same old way, nor the lower classes live under the
old system. And none of this argues against the leading role of the
industrial proletariat. Actually if in the time of devastating crisis the
proletariat has not assumed the leadership of the struggle and has
not developed its multi-class, Marxist-Leninist Party, the
monopolists will be able to weather even the most devastating crisis,
and in one form or another, retain command.
Mellen is really arguing that the industrial proletariat will be in the
rear guard of the revolutionary movement of the “working class.”
This is why he has to torture all youth to fit them into the working
class in order to maintain that the leading role will be played by
youth who in their overwhelming majority, according to Mellen’s
mistaken figures, are supposed to be in school, the army and
unemployed.
Isn’t this what he really means when he says, “Since industrial labor
is only a segment of the broader working class and since it is not yet
playing a vanguard role in the class struggle, a proper perspective on
labor struggles requires that they be seen as only one front on which
we are fighting. What we need is an analysis and an argument
concerning what sectors of the total working class can develop
consciousness and lead the rest”? What, in fact, this leads to,
although by a different path, is the same elitism of the “new working
class theoreticians.” Mellen, too, is arguing that those who are in
motion at present – especially the students – will continue to lead
“the rest of the working class” in struggle.
Let’s go back to the international situation – the liberation struggles
of the Third World – examine Mellen’s fundamental error there, and
then work back to what is a more correct strategy for our own
movement. It is true that the immediate struggle of the people of
Vietnam, and of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America
generally, is the struggle for national liberation. This requires the
unity of all patriotic classes, including all but the feudal landlords
and the allies, front men and puppets of the imperialists. But this
struggle must be led by one of two main class forces: either the
national bourgeoisie, which is opposed to imperialist power because
the dominance of foreign finance capital prevents the development
of a strong native capitalist class; or by the proletariat, in alliance
with the peasantry. If the national bourgeoisie leads, it will be unable
to carry the struggle through to complete victory and it will be
ultimately forced to make its peace with imperialism or be crushed
by it (Kenya under Kenyatta, Indonesia under Sukarno). If the
proletariat leads, in alliance with the peasantry, the imperialists can
be thoroughly defeated: national liberation can be fully consolidated,
and the foundation for socialism firmly laid.
This is the experience of the Vietnamese today and of the Chinese in
their struggle for national liberation and socialism. In both cases, the
leading role is played by the proletariat and its party, the Communist
Party, despite the fact that the bulk of the military struggle goes on in
the countryside among the peasants.
In China, for example, between 1946 and 1949, the line of the poor
peasants was to expropriate even the middle peasants, giving more
individual plots of land to the poorer peasants. But the Communist
Party, putting forward the advanced line of the proletariat,
successfully opposed the poor peasant line in order to maintain an
alliance with the middle peasants, defeat the Kuomintang and their
imperialist masters, and bring to the fore the class struggle between
the urban proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This was the only road to
the dictatorship of the proletariat and the building of socialism.
Thus, although the proletariat was not the main fighting force in the
military field, its political line and the leadership of the party
representing its interests, was in fact the leading force throughout
the Chinese revolution. And, once again in the Chinese Proletarian
Cultural Revolution, it was the students who moved first and then
the peasants and the workers last of all. But, even during the stage of
student rebellion the line of the proletariat – making the schools
serve the people, eliminating bourgeois forms of competition and
flunk-out, combining study with work, eliminating privilege and
bureaucracy – was the guiding force. And when the working class, as
a whole, did grasp the line of the Cultural Revolution and put it into
practice, it raised it to a much higher level, was able to seize power in
institution after institution from those taking the capitalist road, and
develop new forms of socialist superstructure, so that the mass
slogan and practice became, “The working class must exercise
leadership everything.”
It was the genius of Mao Tsetung that, during the entire course of the
Chinese revolution, through all its twists and turns, setbacks as well
as advances, he was able to take the lead in putting forward the line
representing the interests of the proletariat and in arousing the
masses of the people to grasp this line and put it into practice. In
doing this Mao avoided the twin errors of dogmatism and
pragmatism. When the students, and then peasants, moved before
the workers, as has happened several times in the course of the
Chinese revolution, Mao did not try to halt the students or peasant
movements and order them to wait for the workers and take their
rightful place at the head of the movement. Instead he encouraged
the rebellions of the students and peasants, fought for proletarian
leadership within them, put forward a line which represented the
interests of the proletariat as a class and urged the rebels to spread
the movement among the workers themselves. On the other hand,
because the students or even the peasants moved before the
proletariat, Mao did not try to concoct a new theory or new analysis,
either to make the students or the peasants the leading force, or to
pin a proletarian badge on them and make them part of – in fact, the
leading part of – the working class itself. The road to the proletariat,
the means of getting the working class to exercise its leadership in
everything, at all stages of struggle, this was the only road to victory
in the Chinese revolution, and in all struggles of oppressed people for
national liberation and socialism.
Algeria provides the closest approximation to the Mellen model –
where the intellectuals and the privileged strata led the revolutionary
movement, relying on the lumpenproletariat and part of the
peasantry as their main force. The aborted Algerian revolution was
an attempt to win national liberation and build a kind of socialism
without the leading role of the proletariat and the proletarian
dictatorship. The Algerian experience, in contrast to the Chinese and
Vietnamese, confirms the fact that the movement of the lumpen
sections and the peasantry, led by the privileged strata, especially the
intellectuals, can cause trouble for their colonial master, can even
wreak havoc on the colonial mother country for awhile, but must still
end up accommodating itself to the imperialist control, because it
cannot carry the struggle for national liberation and socialism to the
end. (This is why the French imperialists still control the oil, and
dominate the economy of “independent” Algeria.)
How does this apply in the U.S.? Let’s take the Black liberation
struggle. Here again, Mellen confuses the forces that move first with
the leading force. Among black people here, as among the Chinese
people, the students, the peasants (sharecroppers, tenant farmers in
the South) and the so-called “lumpen elements” (semi-permanently
unemployed workers, many of them migrants or children of
migrants from the rural South) have, in the present period, been in
motion and involved in sharp struggles, including small-scale
military struggle with the pigs, before the black industrial workers
have moved in their masses. The Panthers have concentrated mainly
on the “brothers on the block.” But, from the very beginning, the
Panthers have put forward a proletarian line – identifying the real
enemy, the imperialist ruling class, stressing the international
character of the struggle, making class distinctions in dealing with
the oppressor white nation, pointing the way toward cooperation
with potential allies, and posing disciplined organization as a direct
and necessary alternative to spontaneity.
Why is this the line of the proletariat? The brother on the block,
hustling, making it as he can, comes into contact with pigs, small
shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, landlords, etc. – who are almost all
white. Naturally he tends to develop an undiscriminately anti-white
outlook. His life is fragmented and highly individualized – a personal
struggle for survival – and his vision of society is very limited by this
experience. The Black industrial worker lives in the same community
as the brother on the block(who may literally be his blood brother),
shares much of the same oppression but also suffers national
oppression and superexploitation in highly organized and socialized
work – often for the monopolies that make up the U.S. ruling class.
The Black industrial workers, as a class suffering this dual
oppression, are in the best position to grasp the ideology of
Marxism-Leninism: to be able to distinguish the interests of the
white worker from those of the white capitalist; to understand the
need for organization and discipline; and to be able to sustain, in a
collective way, the struggle against the real enemy. Although the
Black workers have been the last to grasp the revolutionary
nationalism of Huey and the Panthers, and other proletarian forces
within the Black liberation movement, there is an increasing
development toward revolutionary consciousness and struggle
among Black industrial workers, who are uniting around their
struggles brothers on the block and broad segments of the Black
people as a whole.
The argument for the leading role of the Black industrial proletariat
is stated by John Watson, of the Detroit League of Revolutionary
Black Workers, in a recent interview in New Left Notes, in far more
concise and compelling terms than we can do:
As workers, as black workers, we have historically been and are now an
essential element in the American economic scene. Without black slaves
to pick the cotton on the Southern plantations, the primitive
accumulation of capital which was necessary to develop industry in both
Europe and America would never have been accomplished. Without
black workers slaving on the assembly lines in the city of Detroit, the
automobile plants would not be able to produce cars in the first place,
and therefore wouldn’t be able to make the tremendous profits which
they have been making. “Therefore, we feel that the best way to organize
black people into a powerful unit is to organize them in the factories in
which they are working. We feel that black workers, especially, have the
power to completely close down the American economic system. In order
to implement that power, we have to become organized. “In one factory
you have 10,000 people who are faced with the same brutal conditions
under the same system from the same bastards every day, eight hours a
day, six or seven days a week. When you go out into the community, the
interests of the people, let’s say in a particular neighborhood, more than
likely are going to be much more greatly dispersed than the interests of
the workers are. That is, people have different keepers, they are faced
with a number of different kinds of problems throughout the
community, and they don’t represent the same sort of homologous mass
as 10,000 people in a factory do. Therefore, just in terms of expediency
there are greater possibilities in the organization of the plant.
And when you consider even farther than that, when you do organize
significant sectors of the community, the kinds of actions which can be
taken are not as effectively damaging to the ruling class as the kinds of
action which can be taken in the plant. For instance, when you close
down Hamtramick Assembly Plant, you do a number of things
 automatically. If you close it down for a day you cost Chrysler
Corporation a thousand cars. That considered in relationship to their
investment, means the loss of a sizeable sum of money. “Also, when you
close down a large automobile plant, you automatically can mobilize the
people in the streets, 5,000 or 10,000 people at a single blow. Whereas
when you attempt to organize the community, especially if you go from
house to house or block to block, it is much more difficult to gather
together that many of the people at the same time.
Finally, we feel that in conjunction with the organization of workers in
plants you automatically have the development of community
organization and community support. After all, workers are not people
who live in the factory 24 hours a day. They all go home and live
somewhere in the community. We have found that it’s almost an
inevitable and simultaneous development that as factory workers begin
to get organized, support elements within the community are also
organized. We feel that it is necessary to have broad community support
in order to be able to effectively organize within the plant and effectively
close down significant sectors of the economy.

So, although the sharpest struggle is still between the brothers on the
block and the pigs who directly and brutally oppress them every day,
the leading role of proletarian ideology and the increasing activity
among the industrial workers themselves, provide clear indication
that the Black industrial proletariat will ultimately be the leading
force in the Black Liberation Movement.
One of the increasing trends in moribund imperialism within the
U.S. – as it drives Black people off the Southern farmlands, and as
the new technology of the monopolies creates new skilled jobs for
many white workers (blue and white collar) – is the concentration of
Black and other oppressed peoples in the most exploited sections of
the industrial proletariat. In the State of California, for example,
nearly 50% of the industrial proletariat (and a very large part of the
rural working class) are Blacks and Latins. In many of the Detroit
auto plants, on the huge assembly lines of unskilled workers, Black
workers often make up 75% of the work force. And, generally, in
auto, steel, longshore, and some places in textiles, Third World
workers make up anywhere from 20% to 50% of the masses of
unskilled workers. This progressive concentration of Third World
workers in the superexploited sections of the industrial proletariat,
along with the national oppression they are subjected to in their
communities, and even on the job, puts them in the position of being
the leading force, not only of the Third World liberation movements
in this country, but of the U.S. proletarian revolution as a whole.
With these facts in mind we can deal with the notion – which still
has considerable popular currency in our movement – that the
industrial proletariat has been bought off; that it either actually
benefits from imperialism, or is so bribed by the imperialists that at
best it will fall in line at the rear of the revolutionary ranks
somewhere far down the road to revolution. But even if we set aside
the Black and other Third World industrial workers and speak only
of the white industrial workers, the idea that they are, in their great
majority, bought off by imperialism does not hold water and, indeed,
is a curious argument coming from our movement, which still
consists primarily of people far more privileged under imperialism
than ail but a very small number of industrial workers. If we have
been able to resist temptation and are delivered from evil – have
been able to cast off much of bourgeois ideology, to make sacrifices
in struggling against the imperialist enemy – is it so hard to conceive
that the working class as a whole, and the industrial proletariat in
particular, could see the light and pick up the banner of
revolutionary struggle? And shouldn’t last year’s French events
indicate that this is a great deal more than a pious hope?
While the present political consciousness of most industrial workers
is not as high as that of most activists in the student movement,
there are still many ways in which their understanding of the
imperialist system – especially the violent nature of the state and the
absolute domination of the government by the rich – is more
advanced, less marred by bourgeois illusions, than the
understanding of most college students. But before going into the
question of privilege, let’s deal with one other major argument
against the leading role of the industrial proletariat.
It is often claimed that the industrial proletariat is so reduced in size
today that, even if it is not bought off, it is no longer the largest, most
strategic single class in society. While it is true that over the last 50
years the relative number of industrial workers has decreased, the
trend is not nearly so great as is sometimes suggested. Today,
workers in manufacturing (20 million) make up over 25% of the
non-agricultural work force. Combining these with workers in
mining, transportation, contract construction, and public utilities,
the number of industrial workers represents 43% of the
nonagricultural civilian work force with the remaining 57% in trade,
finance, services and government employment (U.S. Dept. of Labor,
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1966). Fifty years ago (1919) the
percentages were exactly the reverse (industrial workers, 57%; other
workers, 43%), and workers in manufacturing represented 40% of
the working force. But it is still true today, as these figures indicate,
that the industrial proletariat is the largest, and certainly most
strategic, single class in society.
But is this class as a whole, or in its great numbers, bought off? It is
true, as Lenin pointed out, that imperialism, particularly an
imperialism as powerful as the U.S. today, creates strata of privileged
workers, from among the ranks of the most skilled and highly
organized. And it is by looking at these privileged strata of the
industrial working class, and projecting their privileged position
onto the rest of the class, that the theory of the industrial workers as
the bribed tool of reaction is defended. Many within our movement
had this position reinforced by a misreading of the pamphlet, The
Movement and the Workers, by C. Van Lydegraff. And although Van
Lydegraff’s intention was certainly not to argue that the industrial
proletariat will not ultimately be the leading force of the
revolutionary movement, his pamphlet is written in such a way as to
leave itself open to that misinterpretation. It is true that a number –
and not a tiny minority, although far from a majority – of the U.S.
white industrial workers make enough money to buy an apartment
house or two, or a little stock – and in this sense they do share in the
plunder of the imperialist system. But even these skilled workers, the
vast majority of whom still must sell their labor power in order to
live, are hit hard by automation, recessions and other anarchies of
capitalist production, in its highest, imperialist stage. (This has been
especially true in recent years of workers in mining and the printing
and typographical trades, for example). Of course, the ruling class,
when it finds itself unable to smash the organizing efforts of
industrial workers and the gains won through militant organization,
tries to turn these gains against the proletariat as a whole. Of course,
it encourages selfish interests among these better organized workers,
and, in the short run, it meets with some success. But it does not
provide any long-range security for these workers; it continually
seeks ways to hack away at their gains – through raising taxes and
prices, layoffs, speed-ups – and in times of slow-down or crisis for
the capitalist economy, it turns to union busting and the use of the
state to break strikes, etc., etc. All this is happening to the U.S.
industrial proletariat. That’s why the past two years have witnessed
more wildcat walkouts than the previous twenty years. Last year
alone saw 5,000 strikes. That’s why there is general ferment,
especially among young workers – which even the ruling class is
talking about in uptight terms. In a recent Fortune article (March,
1969), for example, we are warned that in New York at least:
Not only are younger members (of unions) pressing for higher wages
than retirement benefits stressed by old-line union leadership, but
also the young men resent the autocratic manner in which many of
the unions are run. ’It’s part of the generation gap,’ Lindsay recently
said. ’The rank and file are turning down the recommendations of
their leaders. The younger people in the unions are interested in
different things.’” It is the job of revolutionaries to make these
“different things” internationalism, working class solidarity, the
defeat of the imperialist enemy, and ultimately the dictatorship of
the proletariat.
The U.S. imperialist system is in grave crisis and on the brink of
much deeper crisis. Not only because it is being challenged
throughout the Third World, on which it depends for fantastic
superprofits, but because even its former junior partners, Japan and
West Europe, are turning on it. This is why U.S. magnates in steel, to
cite just one industry, are clamoring for higher tariffs against
Japanese and other steel imports. The U.S. competitive advantage
over its capitalist rivals has vanished: the U.S. trade balance which
for years was several billion dollars and growing, has been reduced
to less than a billion and is shrinking. The investment in foreign
countries and the spread of U.S. military installations around the
world, have put large amounts of U.S. dollars in the hands of foreign
creditors, at a time when the gold supply has been cut by 60%. The
devaluation of the pound, and the move to devalue the franc which
are part of the monetary system propped up by the U.S. dollar – all
this spells serious trouble for the U.S. ruling class. And the Vietnam
war has greatly worsened the inflationary spiral and with it the
monetary crisis: and the end is not yet.
All this takes its toll on the working class. While wages have never
been higher, prices have gone out of sight, and the tax structure is
simply insane. The average worker finds 20% of his paycheck stolen
from him in federal withholding, and another 20% is clipped in sales
and state income taxes and a host of “hidden” taxes like additions to
his telephone and light bills. Any system that has to tax the primary
producer 40% of his wages has given up any claim to rationality.
This extortion will increase. Already Nixon’s advisors are working up
apian to lay off several million workers and freeze wages in order to
“stop inflation.” Nixon is also working with Congress to get
legislation passed denying rank and file union members the right to
vote on contract negotiations. When the working class – already
terribly strung out on credit (it is largely responsible for the $300
billion household debt in the U.S.) is hit by the ruling class’
“austerity measures” and increasing authoritarianism, the present
restlessness will be broadened and deepened. The industrial
workers, always most directly and hardest hit by the crises in
capitalism, will suffer the most severe setbacks from either
“austerity” or accelerated inflation or both at once.
None of this means that the working class in general and the
industrial workers in particular will automatically become
revolutionary, or even “radical.” But it does mean that the
possibilities for revolutionaries to go among workers, especially
those hardest hit, and arouse them to militant struggle and
developing revolutionary understanding will be greatly enhanced.
The ruling class is well aware of this, and of the grave danger it poses
to its rule. A month ago, the head of the Steel Institute told his fellow
tycoons that if the students, SDS revolutionaries, and other
“radicals” were not prevented from linking, “this could mean the end
of capitalism.” This why J. Edgar Faggot rants and raves about the
growth of proletarian, Marxist-Leninist ideology in SDS, and why the
labor lackeys of the ruling class, all the way from Victor Reisel to
George Meany to Walter Reuther are uptight about SDS and the
Panthers joining workers’ picket lines and reaching out more and
more to the working class. The ruling class would rather not have
communists hanging around the workers when it really starts
sticking it to them.
While white workers are privileged under imperialism (as compared
to Black and Third World workers), the great majority do not benefit
from imperialism. To use an analogy, the entire world proletariat is
in jail under imperialism. But the colonized workers (and peoples) of
the world are in “the hole”; unskilled white workers are in a regular
cell, and many skilled white workers can be considered guards, who
actually live parasitically off the oppression of the rest and join in
oppressing them.
The Mellen thesis distorts the world situation by distorting the
nature of imperialism. Implicit in his article is some sort of an
assumption that U.S monopoly capitalism is relatively and basically
meeting the needs of its industrial workers “at the point of
production.” Imperialism, however, according to this view, oppresses
not only the people of the Third World (at home and abroad)
especially the young street people, but also the youth of the mother
country, who have to face the draft, the “police and other agents of
the ruling class for social control.” But imperialism is one system –
monopoly capitalism, the highest stage of capitalism – and it is
neither stable nor meeting the basic needs of its industrial workers
“at the point of production” or anywhere else.
The enemy of the U.S. worker is exactly the same as that of the
Vietnamese workers and peasants. That is why it is both possible and
necessary for revolutionaries to join the working class and develop,
among workers, internationalism and solidarity with their class
brothers in this country and throughout the world. It will be
advanced industrial workers who will be able to grasp the
revolutionary ideology that is developing in the student movement,
and lead the proletariat as a whole in struggle to expose and defeat
the enemy and prepare the way for the industrial proletariat to lead
the revolutionary movement to the dictatorship of the proletariat
and socialism.
THAT IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT ABOUT THE YOUTH IN THE
WORKING CLASS. Not that they are part of a new super-alienated
class – youth – or that all youth are now in the proletariat, but that
young workers, like young people from other classes, growing up in a
period when U. S. imperialism is being successfully challenged by
liberation struggles of Third World peoples – inside as well as
outside the U.S. – are able to grasp more quickly than older workers,
and older people generally, the bankruptcy of the imperialist system.
Youth, in any class, are always the most audacious. They are the first
to take initiative in exposing the enemy and struggling against him.
But young workers, because of their class position – and because
they are often concentrated in the same work center as Third World
workers – are able to transfer the alienation of youth, which does cut
across class lines, into concrete action that can spread throughout
the entire working class.
The question before SDS and the movement generally today is: what
is the road to the proletariat. How can we build working class
leadership in the struggle against U.S. imperialism? For SDS this
certainly does not mean that we should stop or cut back in support of
Third World liberation. In fact, we should accelerate and heighten
our activity. But, at the same time, we must recognize that next to
Third World people, youth in the working class, especially among
industrial workers, are the main road to arousing and activating the
entire working class. This is especially true of young wives and
women generally in the working class, who can take the lead in
tearing apart the entire fabric of privilege that divides and conquers
the working class as a whole.
The purpose of this paper is to present the case for the leading role of
the proletariat and outline the implications of that thesis for the
development of a Revolutionary Youth Movement. Of necessity we
have neglected the particularities of organizing other strata and this
document should not be confused with a special program nor with
an overall class analysis. Suffice it to say that we dissociate ourselves
from any view that denies that the student movement is a
component part of the revolutionary struggle of the people, that
denies it will spark other movements, that denies it is correct to
continue work on the universities as well as expanding the
movement to working class schools, state and community colleges
and high schools; or that it is incapable of developing a revolutionary
sector guided by proletarian ideology. On the contrary, it is precisely
within the student movement, and even more fully, within the Black
Liberation movement that embryonic revolutionary ideology is being
forged as witnessed by this convention.
The extension of that movement to the proletariat is both necessary
and inevitable. The question is: Will workers’ rebellions develop
spontaneously or will conscious revolutionary communists by their
integration with workers transform that spontaneous rebellion into a
disciplined iron fist, capable in alliance with others of smashing the
state power of the imperialist ruling class? Revolutionary youth must
go wherever workers are concentrated, initiate struggle and build
cadre there. This means, in addition to schools, the army and
working class communities. And it means the shops where large
numbers of Black and white workers are concentrated in production
or transportation. Even while working with students, guys in the
army, women in the community, and unemployed men and women,
we should be putting forth proletarian ideology, building anti-
imperialist consciousness and promoting forms of struggle in the
interests of the working class as a whole. And, on the other hand, our
work with industrial workers should avoid the pitfalls of economism.
Our most important task is to find the advanced workers who can
grasp revolutionary ideology, lead the masses of workers against lay-
offs, speed-ups, inflation, taxes, and denial of democratic rights to
union members, etc., and can build among them class solidarity and
proletarian internationalism: an understanding of the need to
repudiate sham, short-term privilege for the long-term benefit of the
class as a whole. Central to this will be the fight in support of Black
liberation and against white supremacy and male supremacy on the
job and in the community. Workers who are already willing to
repudiate short-term selfish interests whenever they stay out on
strike for more than a few weeks (in which case they lose more in
wages than they can win back), can be brought around to repudiating
false privilege that destroys class solidarity and internationalism –
and prevents their advance. In all our work, while uniting the
greatest numbers possible against the imperialist enemy, we should
be concentrating on cementing our ties with industrial workers –
firmly putting our movement on the road to proletarian leadership in
the struggle to defeat the ruling class and build socialism.