Building rank-and-file caucuses and intermediate workers’ organizations—along both national and multinational lines—is an important part of communists’ work among the proletariat. This article describes one experience in trying to build such organizations in a work place, successes and failures in understanding and applying the mass line that either moved forward or held back the work, and the harmful effects of “left” sectarianism and adventurism.
In the place where I work, conditions are bad, to say the least. We have the ever-present racism, shortage of workers and speed-ups (which go hand in hand), and harassment. Work consists of redistributing goods from bulk packages to small, thin, assorted items. My first place of work in this company was a central building where the final phase before delivery was done.
Because of the country’s worsening economic crisis, the company was losing money, but fast. So we faced another common condition: lay-offs and firings. “After all, if you don’t want to work, there are plenty out there who will.” Famous last words most working people have heard.
I started out on the night shift which was 90% Black, with the rest mostly white. The same for management. There was an age split as well as a racial one, which made pulling together any kind of right-good action difficult. The older whites were against the young long-hairs, and most of the older Blacks feared for their job security too much to have anything to do with those who wanted to get something started–at first.
The Black foreman on the night crew was one more obstacle to overcome.
Looking up from my work, there, plain as day, would be younger white workers doing easy jobs that older Black workers were kept from. The double standard prevailed here as it does in all phases of capitalistic life.
White workers took longer breaks, came back late from lunch, and when they were late for work the foreman would often look the other way. Any flimsy excuse from the whites was enough to justify an absence or two.
Grievances were filed, people were being fired or suspended. Individualistic actions brought on frustration, not changes. We were made to work with unsafe equipment, safety rules were not observed, and the foreman rode our backs to make his work sheet look good.
Finally, the brothers saw the need to unite, and a Black caucus was formed. Many of the ideas put forward by caucus members were a bit unsystematic—such as “off the foreman,” tearing down the building, or busting up foremen’s and supervisors’ cars–a bit unsystematic. Still, it was a start. As a Black caucus, we saw ourselves representing the problems that existed for other workers, white as well as Black and other Third World.
During the early history of our group, the older white workers were somewhat stand-offish, the younger ones didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and the older Blacks took a wait-and-see attitude. A lot of good work was done. At first, some victories seemed small, but, added up, they became large.
We went to union meetings and struggled to get new people elected. And we raised issues on the shop floor. White workers began to show their support by signing petitions that we circulated about speed-ups and health conditions. They also supported our demands against racism. For example, a brother who was an open caucus member was accused of starting trouble. It seemed that for some time this white worker was making sly and off the wall remarks about this brother. So one day the brother jumped in his collar.
Sometime later, papers were being processed for this brother’s dismissal, when white workers stepped forward on his behalf. The brother began to understand that white workers could be relied upon and unity was needed, but, at the same time, racism had to be fought tooth and nail.
At first, union meetings were shouting matches. We told a lot of people in union leadership what we thought of them and let off a lot of steam. But we learned that this wasn’t enough; we had to have a strategy that worked out, and offer other concrete plans than those of the union officials. Small victories and some setbacks helped to raise our awareness.
The group continued together, but we made some serious mistakes. The first and foremost was not relating to the sisters. (Some of the brothers related to them, but in the wrong way.) We didn’t look at them as women working beside us and doing a good job, but rather as women who happened to work where we did and who shouldn’t mind hearing anything we wanted to say. Some of the brothers, mostly not members of the caucus, saw the sisters as someone to lay a heavy rap on. But the sisters, being who they are, knew where that was coming from. So, because of our attitude, none of our demands ever included the special needs of women, and they didn’t get involved.
Another mistake was that while a lot of people started giving their support, we didn’t involve them thoroughly enough in the caucus and thereby weakened our base. We took up the complaints of workers not in the caucus, but not always in a systematic way. And we brought outside political issues into the shop all out of perspective. For these reasons, we lost strength and were open to attack from the company. It took time, but the company rearranged our work, shuffled us around to different buildings, and fired several of us, including me.
Of all the brothers, I was the last to face firing. I received my walking papers two weeks in advance. From that time on, I did constant rapping to fight my firing. Using the ground-work laid by the caucus, I kept my case and those of the other brothers on people’s minds. Fellow workers hassled the foreman and supervisor at every chance. They applied pressure on the union and made it fight on my behalf. When the case came up, the foreman and supervisor backed down. (The other brothers had taken other jobs by then.)
Transferred to the day shift, I didn’t go into the work place this time ranting and raving about political and unrelated issues and sticking out like a sore thumb. I became one with the rest of the workers, learning to struggle on a a day-to-day basis, trying to understand more the way the other workers felt the common aches and pains of day-to-day living that we all face as working people.
This isn’t to say that you don’t speak of political issues, for that is the role of a communist, to tie together seemingly unrelated struggles–like political prisoners, strikes in other factories, having unions pass resolutions against the war, pointing out the difference between your shop and one in a socialist country, etc., etc. Examples in everyday life are endless. I also found that on shop matters, the workers knew much more than I had thought. As Mao says, you “learn from the masses,” which is something that even people like myself, who have been workers all their lives, have to learn.
Before long, the same working conditions which had brought the night crew together in the first caucus, were instrumental in bringing together the workers on the day shift. The foreman demanded that we move sacks which the Jolly Green Giant couldn’t budge. The mini-trucks had faulty brakes, and on a slanted floor that’s not too cool. We were timed on how fast we could fill certain bins. Some of the women who needed their jobs could keep them only by acting “friendly” to the foreman.
The major move which brought us together was during 80 degree weather. All the windows and doors were closed because of bomb scares! (We work for a company which is hated not only by its workers, but by a lot of people, especially in the anti-war movement.) We asked to have some relief from the dust and stuffy air, but were told that it would take a full day going through channels. A spontaneous work slow-down—and within one hour the doors, vent’s, windows and loading doors were all opened.
An informal group formed, multi-national in make up, which grew into the present caucus. There were other political workers besides myself. We tried to avoid the mistakes of the first caucus by letting the workers take the lead themselves. Women are active, and there’s a regular newsletter.
Our main problem now is finding the way to be more visible. Except for personal contacts, people can only relate to us through the newsletter. We have discussed this at length and come up with several ideas. The most important is that the newsletter isn’t our main base of unity. Our main struggle is on the plant floor.
The paper is a tool to further those struggles. The paper was becoming our mass work; the only reason we were meeting was to discuss the production of the newsletter.
We realized we shouldn’t discontinue the paper, because people looked forward to it, but we decided it would come out every two months, with much more effort to put out a better line and not just have articles for the sake of having a monthly newsletter.
At one point there was a split around the newsletter. There was one person, out of the student movement, who wanted to put a gun or something to do with killing in each issue of the newsletter. At first, a major part of the production was left to this one person, and he, being an opportunist, took advantage of his position to express his own opinion and line, a line that had in the very beginning isolated the first caucus.
A line that again tried to bring outside issues into the plant in an undialectical manner, with no connection to struggles in the plant.
While he had his way, the paper looked like a combination of the Shopping News, the Police Gazette, and war news. It was confusing, to say the least. Many students go into plants and struggle to acquire a working class outlook. But this guy refused to acquire any kind of class outlook, except that of a suburban Che Guevara.
He also tried to divide the caucus by playing on my weaknesses, and this was an important lesson for me about being disciplined. Each time I missed a meeting, he spoke about my lack of leadership. He tried to flatter other workers by telling them they were more important than this or that member of the caucus. He tried to take people out of the caucus into a study group that they didn’t see the need for, and he tried to appeal to their anger with an adventurist line.
But this was not the first time we had run into such opportunists. They always seem to come around, after other people have done a lot of hard work to build real organization. And we have learned from having to deal with opportunists in our experience with the first caucus.
Not long after the first, all-Black caucus formed, I met a brother who was a member of a caucus at his place of work. We seemed to hit it off pretty well and have political agreement. Both of us talked of the need for some kind of organization for Black workers in our area, like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was in Detroit at that time (early 1971). We set up a meeting between our two groups, and I brought the League film, “Finally Got the News.” Both groups were eager to get something going.
After two more meetings, we set up a study group. About this time, the brother introduced me to someone he said was a heavy Marxist. This new brother seemed very apt, so leadership of the study circle was left up to him. This brother could quote the Red Book as if he wrote it himself. What’s more, he repeated it at a rapid rate. The study group consisted of reading the Red Book and memorizing phrases, recited during meetings–beating people over the head with Marxist-Leninist theory (so-called). Through this brother’s methods of intimidation, the whole thing became very competitive, because no one wanted to be made a fool of if they didn’t know their lines.
Slowly, people from our caucus began to become restless. They were telling me they couldn’t see sitting still for four or five hours while some dude acted out his role as the Billy Graham of the Red Book set.
I was the last to see the damage this brother had done to the people in both groups. People began to drop out. He called them liberal and not true Marxists. They weren’t–they were working people who wanted to gain more political understanding, not become “theoreticians.” We had ended up in narrow “circle” politics that actually turned workers off Marxism, seeing it as dogma and not a real guide for their struggle.
This “theoretician” began showing his true colors little by little. First, by sneaky attacks on the RU and telling the working people the only thing they could do was to immediately form a workers’ party, a Communist workers’ party. He overlooked completely the need for a mass movement and mass struggle. Sure, we need a Communist Party, but how are we going to get it? By sitting around all night and memorizing things? His line was that if you weren’t “out front with your politics,” the workers wouldn’t join you. To him, “out front” meant things like putting a hammer and sickle on your newsletter.
While he did a lot of damage, I learned a lot from his wrecking role. I understand a lot more about the “mass line,” about relying on the workers and learning from them. I have been up-front about being a communist and what it means for us as workers. And, in our multinational caucus now, workers–Black, Chicano and white–are not only leading struggles in the shops, but many of them have become interested in Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.
They have seen that it really can help unite the workers to win real victories, and can explain the broader picture of what’s going on in the world and how it relates to our day-to-day situation. Several of the caucus members have joined a workers’ study circle, led by myself and another RU comrade, and they are very enthusiastic.
Although our present caucus is multinational, there is still a need for Black caucuses, as well. The first Black caucus fell apart mainly because of my mistakes, not because it wasn’t needed. Black people, from the days of slavery, have poured our sweat and blood into building this country and giving the capitalists the surplus to expand and build their empire. And we have a right to our full share in all the country can produce. This will take a workers’ revolution and socialism to win.
But right now, Black people are demanding our rights, and the national liberation struggle taking place in the communities and on the job calls for Black organizations to help build a revolutionary mass movement that can sweep away the enemy and achieve socialism. Multinational organizations like our present caucus are also needed to unify the workers. The question we still have to solve is how to develop both of these kinds of organization to build real unity among all workers, and between all workers and other sections of the people.