 Today we proclaim that America will never be a socialist or communist country. Now that was declared by President Donald Trump just two years ago, and I didn't do the accent for obvious reasons. But we would disagree, and that may seem very absurd to some. After all, we are saying here that the most powerful country on Earth could see a socialist revolution. With the power of Wall Street overthrown and the United Socialist States of America established. And it may seem ludicrous to those who perhaps still see the United States as a land saturated in anti-communism and reaction, the land of Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare, of Ronald Reagan and the evangelical right, the land of Donald Trump and the KKK. And of course the biggest imperialist power that the world has ever seen. Surely there can't be a revolution in the belly of the beast. Some would even suggest that the American working class is too chauvinistic, too patriotic, and too invested in the domination of the world to overthrow their rulers. In actuality, the United States of America has very revolutionary traditions. After all, its foundation was through a revolutionary struggle against British imperialism. And there is a rich history of radicalism within its labor movement, which is deliberately hidden and falsified by the American ruling class. And I'll be covering some episodes of this tradition in this talk. Indeed, particularly in the wake of the Great Depression in the 1930s, there was a growing anti-capitalist mood in the United States. Many were becoming open to the ideas of communism. And in response to that growing interest, Trotsky wrote a short article titled Should America Go Communist in 1934 for Liberty, which was like a popular mainstream magazine at the time. And in this, he outlines the impact a socialist revolution in America would have on culture, on technology, on the economy, and on a world scale. Such was the mood at the time. It was featured in a mainstream magazine that had a circulation of millions. It would be like having an article on communism in Hello or something. I don't know if that still has a circulation of millions, but anyway. But in this talk, we'll be asking, could America go communist? Well, the IMT would answer in the affirmative. And hopefully by the end of this talk, you'll be able to see why this perspective is more realistic than you think. For one, we need only look at polls to reflect the growing rejection of capitalism and the embracing of not only socialism, but even the idea of communism amongst the American population. A poll conducted by the University of Chicago recently revealed that 54% of respondents strongly agreed with the following statement. A few wealthy people are able to achieve greater and greater wealth while ordinary Americans seem to struggle more with each passing year. Just 12% disagreed with that statement. Well, another poll by YouGov in 2018 found 42% of Americans had a positive opinion of the term socialism and a poll taken the following year found the term communism was viewed favorably by 28% of Generation Z and 36% of Millennials. And of course, polls do have their limitations, but these clearly indicate there's at least a growth of a mood of rejecting capitalism and even support for a communist alternative. And is it any wonder? Despite being the richest country enough, the vast majority of Americans possess none of this wealth. While the top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion, the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined, which is 1.9% of all wealth. These are obscene levels of inequality, similar to those that preceded the Russian Revolution and even the French Revolution. And that fact actually was recently recognized by Harlan Orman, who's a senior advisor to the Atlantic Council, who asked in an article, are we headed for a Bastille-like assault on the government? But it's not just inequality that is provoking a questioning of the system. It's the American society itself feels like it's going backwards. An MIT economist recently warned in a report that America is regressing to have the economic and political structure of a developing nation with the world's largest economy having roads and bridges that look more like those in Thailand and Venezuela. The water system also recently failed in Jackson, Mississippi, leaving millions without clean water. Well, last year and again this summer, there were energy outages all across Texas, leaving millions without power. So this country that beats its chest on the world stage is at home in a state of complete decay. America's infrastructure is collapsing all around it. And while America is still the foremost imperialist power, it is not immune from the long-term decline of capitalism. Even the mightiest oak can succumb to internal rot. Recent years have seen the so-called world's policemen forced to withdraw, for instance, with its tail between its legs from Iraq and Afghanistan. And we even see a growing recognition of this relative decline in US imperialism reflected amongst the upper circles of the ruling class. There is a panic among sections of them that the age of the American empire is coming to an end and that the masses of the world and at home will soon turn on them. And from what heights American capitalism has fallen? It, above all others, benefited greatly from the boom after the Second World War. Its old rival, Britain, had become a second-rate power and the US had emerged unscathed from the war with a hugely expanded industrial base. And as a result, it was able to dominate half the globe, sharing it with the Soviet Union. And it could provide a fairly decent standard of living for their working class as a result. And you saw an unprecedented boom in capitalism lasting almost 30 years. But all good things must come to an end. The post-war boom finished with the world slump of 1973-74. And soon after attacks on the working class began, as capitalism sought to stabilise itself. From the 1980s, this also went hand in hand with the offshoring of jobs as American capital sought cheaper labour. And as a result, since 1979, the US has lost nearly 7 million manufacturing jobs, which has decimated whole towns and cities. And that's a trend that's continued into this century. The American dream has become an American nightmare. But this was only a nightmare for American workers. The American ruling class was having a party. They've been raking it in. And especially following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the opening up of China to the world market, both of which were huge victories for capitalism, the possibilities of this system being overthrown seemed next to zero to many. And for two decades, really, the working class, not just in the US, but really internationally, was on the back foot. It was the end of history, the triumph of liberal capitalism, as Francis Fukuyama declared. And for a whole period, the class struggle appeared to many to be outdated, demoralising a whole generation of activists and labour militants. But inevitably, this idea of the end of history and the American triumphalism that dominated in the 90s was to be revealed as hubris. The 2008 capitalist crisis showed that the boom bus cycle of capitalism had not gone away. And it came like a bolt out of the blue, a deep crisis that rocked American society and had lasting damage. Thousands of jobs were lost, 3.7 million workers lost their homes. However, despite the huge impact of that immediately on the lives of ordinary American workers, there was not this sudden immediate turn towards class struggle. And many opponents of Marxism at the time pointed to this and smugly asked, where's the revolution then? Well, that's a straw man really. It's a caricature of Marxism that we think as soon as a crisis hits, that the working class immediately go on strike and head to the barricades. Often the immediate response to the working class is to try and survive. It can take a while for consciousness to catch up with material conditions. And you saw this also in the wake of the 1929 crash, which I'll get on to you later. But when consciousness does catch up, it does so with a bang. And that bang really started to begin in 2011. There was a huge movement in the state of Wisconsin against the Union Busting Austerity Bill, which even saw workers occupying the state capital in defiance. And later that year, you also saw the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. An anti-capitalist movement really of young workers and students occupying Zagotti Park and Wall Street. And that movement soon spread across the entire world, including to London. And despite the stereotype of Americans being very ignorant and, you know, of worldly affairs, very inward looking, Occupy was very much actually inspired by the events of the Arab Spring. It awakened a whole new layer of workers, many of whom were suffering from unemployment and high student debts to political life. And these millennials, who had been screwed by 2008, and who despite the promises of President Obama of change and hope, saw that really nothing was appearing to be changing and there seemed to be no hope. And that growing discontent that was bubbling up was also to be later expressed in 2014 and again in 2020 around the enormous Black Lives Matter movement. Sparks initially around the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, who was an unarmed black teenager murdered by a police officer. That saw uprisings really in countless states. And the movement surged again in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd and it spread across the entire globe. Now, that movement included all layers of the working class. It was initiated really by black Americans, yes, but workers of all colors and backgrounds came out in solidarity against racism and against police brutality. At one point, 10% of all Americans participated in those protests. We're talking about millions of people here. And it's reflective of the pent-up fury that exists against racism, which is an integral feature of the capitalist system, one that's baked into its very foundations. Eventually, this ever-growing sentiment in American society, this anti-establishment, anti-state status quo feeling that was growing after the 2008 crisis, was also to find its expression on the political plane. And you saw that in the movement behind Bernie Sanders and his run for Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. This campaign and the support it drew in shook the whole establishment from top to bottom. His call for a political revolution against the billionaire class gained a huge echo, but he was crushed by the Democrat establishment. And unfortunately, rather than use the momentum behind him to break with the Democrats and run as an independent, he instead chose to endorse Hillary and it repeated the same mistake in 2020. Even when, in 2020, his supporters put forward the slogan, Bernie or bust, saying that only for him and him alone, he still refused to make an independent run or at least try and use this momentum to launch a new party. And the first time you can very much say was tragic, but to make the same mistake twice is certainly farcical. Now, after all, it is obvious that the Democratic Party is really a misnomer. It's neither Democratic nor a party. It's essentially an electoral machine for one section of the U.S. capitalist class. And by tying his fate to that machine, he has tied his fate to an entity that is viewed with hatred and disgust by millions of American workers and rightly so. It cannot be pushed to the left. It is a bourgeois party through and through. Gore Vidal actually aptly summarized American politics when he said the following, America has one party, the property party, with two right wings. Now, some believe voting for and supporting the Democrats is simply supporting the lesser of two evils. But this lesser evilism only plays into the hands of the bourgeois and only leads to the far right filling the vacuum. In fact, Trump won, you could argue, as a result of Bernie's capitulation. And he really welcomed Bernie throwing his towel in. He actually said, Clinton is so corrupt, there's nobody I'd rather run for president against. I'd rather face her than Bernie. And he could then pose as this outsider candidate, promising to drain the swamp and make America great again. And of course, he played on these racist, sexist, and other reactionary ideas, which appealed to a certain backwards base of the Republicans, mainly middle class and so on. But particularly in Rust Belt states, places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, working class areas that had long suffered, he promised to bring jobs back to America and promised to revitalize their communities. And in the absence of a genuine workers alternative, they looked to this right-wing demagogue and got behind in millions of them. Now, some might simply dismiss these workers as racist and think they could never be one round to socialism. But as Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times in 2020, in a rather fearful tone, right-wing populism may thrive on anti-establishment backlash while leaving capitalist markets in place. But as it cannot deliver on its promises to the economically frustrated, it is just a matter of time before the pitchforks come out for capitalism itself and for the wealth of those who benefit from it. Now those pitchforks are really beginning to come out. That's not just reflected in the polls I mentioned earlier, but also in the resurgence of the American labor movement. Workers who are deemed as unorganizable in occupations thought of as impenetrable to unions are instinctively organizing and taking action en masse. And that's not a new phenomena in the history of the American labor movement. And as Marxists, we should look back at the history and the traditions of a country's labor movement, how it developed, its victories and its defeats. We should look back to periods of a similar nature to the ones we are passing through to draw lessons for the class struggle today. And with this in mind, I think the most relevant period to look back to currently is that of the 1930s, a time when mass unemployment and plummeting real wages led to militant class struggle by new layers of workers. You saw factory sittings. You even saw armed clashes with the National Guard. Now, following the initial shock of the 1929 capitalist crash and a huge unemployment it saw, the working class was initially on the back foot. But once Democrat President Roosevelt got in in 1933, he was under great pressure to alleviate the deep crisis while avoiding social unrest. And so one of his first measures to revitalize capitalism was to free corporations from antitrust laws through the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933. However, companies would only be exempted from these laws if they followed set wages and conditions for their workforces. He was really trying to walk a tightrope here between not inciting class struggle on one side and still trying to solve capitalist chaos on the other. This act also included a clause that allowed workers the right to unionize. Roosevelt perhaps thought that this mood could be safely channeled into the tamed American Federation of Labour, which is the collective body of America's unions. And they had backed his presidential campaign and really grown to become a safe pair of hands with a nice cosy, comfortable bureaucracy at their home. But that clause was really to prove to be a chink in his armor. Many workers did indeed start to join the AFL. But with a slight beginning of a recovery workers started to feel confident in their power and began to strike. There was a wave of these swept across the United States with 1,700 strikes in 1933 and 1,856 strikes in 1934. And this was the real beginning of a birth of class struggle unionism. Now, in particular, there were three significant strikes that rocked the USA in 1934. These were the Autolite Strike in Toledo, Ohio, the West Coast Longshoremen Strike and the Minneapolis Teamster Strike. And all of these contained vital lessons for workers looking to fight back today. Now, the first of these that year was in the city of Toledo, a city that was blighted by unemployment which had really hit the city hard. 70% of workers were unemployed and many of the city's car factories had closed. And so the bosses in the city used that as an opportunity to depress wages. And so following a strike in February which resulted in the bosses reneging their negotiated contract, the workers for car park manufacturer Autolite, half of whom were women, struck en masse in April demanding higher wages and union recognition. But the bosses tried to break the strike with these unemployed workers. However, that move was to seriously backfire. Because around that time and aided by socialists in the American Workers Party, jobless workers had gotten organized into the Lucas County Unemployed League. These unemployed men and women began to organize solidarity with the strikers and stood on their picket lines to bolster their forces in defiance of a court injunction that had been taken out by the bosses to stop that very act. Even when they were arrested for doing so, once released they would simply march back from the courts to the picket lines and do the same. And soon this really started to snowball as a movement to include all layers of the working class and eventually saw thousands on these picket lines. And there were even violent clashes with the police and the National Guard and strike breakers. And in what became known as the Battle of Toledo, at one point two workers were shot dead in a confrontation between the guards and the pickets. But feeling their growing strength and such repression did not deter the strikers who instead upped the ante. At one point some of the women pickets stripped a scab of his clothes and paraded him through the streets which made the front page of the local papers and I imagine put off other scabs. As well as through physical resistance the strikers also tried to break the guardsmen politically. Socialist historian Art Pry noted this saying the following The strikers and their thousands of sympathizers did more than just shame the young National Guardsmen. They educated them and tried to win them over. Speakers stood on boxes in front of the troops and explained what the strike was about and the role the troops were playing as strike breakers. Women explained what the strike meant for them and their families. And the repress reported that as a result of this some of these guardsmen just quit that very day and went home. And so by June the strike could have ballooned into a general strike. As following a rally of thousands of workers and trade unionists from across the city the majority of local unions voted for such a course of action. And seeing this just days after the bosses capitulated and agreed to wage rises of 5%. And the militancy of this strike really cannot be underestimated. These brave workers defied strike-busting legislation not in words but in deeds and as a result of their defiance of anti-worker laws they won around wider sections of the city's working class and broaden the strike's power. And ultimately the capitalist state can only back up the law with physical force but the working class can counter this with organisation, determination and a willingness to fight. And it was on the basis of seeing that defiance that inspired wider layers of the working class to join them in solidarity which really shows how rapidly consciousness can transform in the course of a struggle. This is why the picket line swelled and why the workers were prepared to strike together and ultimately what led to the strike's victory. Now another strike that year was of the Longshoremen on the west coast which resulted in a general strike rocking the city of San Francisco. In the years prior to 1934 however across the west coast the Stalinist Communist Party had been trying and failing to organise dock workers into a revolutionary red union the Marine Workers Industrial Union and this campaign was a result of the Communist International's frankly insane policy of the third period in which the Stalinist bureaucracy had declared the established Social Democratic Parties of Europe and trade unions in America as fascists. That ultra-left perspective then informed these wild tactics of trying to form small revolutionary unions isolated from the wider labour movement and unsurprisingly this tactic was met with little success. As Lenin explained in Left Wing Communism the Communist Party should instead have worked within existing trade union structures and aimed to win the rank and file to their banner via fighting shoulder to shoulder with them while putting forward a revolutionary perspective and arguing for revolutionary strategy and tactics. In fact, the incorrectness of the Stalinist tactic was proven during the lead up to the strike. As by 1933 the Longshoremen were signing up to the larger established AFL Associated International Longshoremen's Association and the International Siemens Union they did not look to this small sectarian union on the outskirts and soon enough those workers were starting to demand the minimum wage of a dollar an hour and the six hour day. Importantly, they also wanted a closed shop and the end of the shape-up and its replacement by union hiring hall. Now the shape-up was the means by which the bosses would hire these dot workers for the day. They would gather in the early hours at the shore where they would then get hand-picked. The situation to be in, not unlike delivery workers and so on to this day and the workers themselves actually referred to it as being like a slave market and the demand to abolish the shape-up was pushed in particular by a radical faction of workers known as the Albion Hall Group led by the Communist Party member Harry Bridges and some other communists and that group had for a while also been publishing a paper, the Waterfront Worker which had grown in influence along the ports and was trying to build support for the strike. But crucially although that paper criticised the established unions, it did not call for joining the Marine Workers Industrial Union the Communist Revolutionary Red Union which put those communists in this Albion Hall Group in divergence with the Communist Party's line at the time. Now following some negotiations, some demands around wages were won but not recognition not a closed shop and not the demand for a union hiring hall. The Albion Hall Group however in the process of these negotiations had come to become elected to the strike committee and with support built up through a long patient explanation and through publishing this paper amongst the rank and file they were able to defy the union leader's call to leave at that agreement and instead mobilise the workers to continue fighting. And as a result and due to all this influence that had been built up in the previous period, you saw a strike begin across the entire Pacific Coast region closing down all West Coast ports which held firm for 83 days and that was even against the wishes of the official union leadership and following the killing of two pickets in a violent clash outside the union's canteen known as Bloody Thursday the strike swelled to thousands culminating in a general strike in San Francisco that saw 150,000 workers out and shortly after that the workers won arbitration with the bosses and the longshoremen voted to end that strike. But if bridges have pursued the original tactics of the communist party to build this small marine workers industrial union then the strike would have been completely to fall under the sway of these union leaders and been sold out. Now another important aspect to their success that I want to touch on was that the Albion Hall groups attempts to cut across the racist tactics of the bosses with class solidarity. Black workers at the time were barred from working on a dock and so a common tactic of the bosses was to use these workers as scabs to break strikes and then once the strike was over they would simply fire them. And so anticipating this, bridges had gone around the black community of the city speaking at churches and community centers and he promised that if black workers supported the longshoremen strike came to their pickets and didn't work as scabs he guaranteed that should the union control hiring then ensure equal opportunity for black workers. As he put it if there were only two longshoremen left working on the docks one would be black and one would be white and that successfully won round the black community and sure enough when the strike was won black workers were welcomed into the union and were working on the ports. Is this appeal to class solidarity that ultimately strengthened the position of all workers black and white and forged lasting unity by appealing to common interests. Unity which lasts to this day with unionized longshoremen shutting down west coast ports in 2020 on Juneteenth in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Now perhaps the most significant strike of 1934 and one from which we can learn the most lessons for today I believe is that of the Minneapolis Teamsters strike. Now this strike was led by the Chotskiest Communist League of America specifically members such as Farrell Dobbs, Ray Miles and Grant Dunn who are all brothers and Carl Skoglund and their forces were relatively small but because they based themselves on genuine Marxist theory as opposed to the empirical approach of the Stalinist Communist Party these small number of Chotskiest were able to orientate correctly with the necessary ideas tactics and methods. In fact the Minneapolis branch of the League in particular was qualitatively strong because of their attention to Marxist theory. Farrell Dobbs spoke of how they spent a good deal of time studying the Marxist classics and discussing how to shape their revolutionary course. James Cannon who played a good role during the early years of American Chotskiism although it was later to make some serious political errors explained the decision to focus their forces in Minneapolis despite the city being infamously anti-union was precisely the presence of these experienced theory-hardened Kader. They were not just good trade unionists they were revolutionary class fighters and so they chose to organize workers in the coal yards into Teamsters Local 574 they brought all workers into the union including laborers as well as coal truck drivers and others into the union and soon they were to go on strike first for recognition which was really the first hurdle in a city known as Scabs Paradise due to low union density but because the strike was organized by Marxists from the get-go they knew they had to be organized on a military-like basis they were essentially prepared for battle they established a headquarters for the strike which included a makeshift hospital and also served as a base to send out flying pickets from which were groups of strikers who'd go out in vans and force Scabs to dump coal they'd try and politically convince them first and if they disagreed then other methods would be taken and being revolutionaries with a Marxist understanding of both the bourgeois press and the bourgeois state they prepared proletarian responses to lies and repression of both they launched a paper called The Organizer that was produced to cut through the local press' lies and explain the reasons behind the strike and report on its progress this reached a circulation of 10,000 to the city's residents and was vital to broadening support for their actions the league also prepared for the violence that would inevitably come down on them from the armed bodies of men following a brutal attack by the police the league armed the pickets with clubs hose pipes and bats donned helmets and prepared for a showdown with hundreds of them ready and so as a result, on the following Monday when the pickets were attacked they responded in kind and it became known as the battle of deputies run as the police deputies had to run away in fear the police then retaliated however and orders from above used their shotguns and dozens of pickets were shot, injured and several killed and as is often the case however this whip of the counter-revolution drove the movement forward outraged by the killings the whole city mobilized behind local 574 offering money and picket line support and workers from other industries in the city stepping in and following a meeting of 15,000 workers a call for a transportation strike was made and with this situation intensifying the governor, Olson declared martial law mobilizing additional 4,000 guardsmen to try and take over the strike as HQ and in response to this the call for a city-wide general strike then went up and the local 574 then placed demands on the local AFL leadership to coordinate this general strike as Trotsky asked how rotten those bureaucrats have become and sought to expose them in the eyes of the increasingly conscious working class of the city and sure enough the local AFL leaders did start to try and divide the teamsters, did sell out the workers and try and dampen things down and regain control of the situation which is the role of trade union bureaucracies Dobbs described these people as complacent bureaucrats enjoying high salaries and lavish expense accounts living in a lush world of their own they took a dispassionate view of the labour movement fearing the workers they sought to regiment the rank and file on a dictatorial basis and as a result of that betrayal the rank and file and the workers of Minneapolis then defied their official leaders and turned to the Trotskyists they got behind them if the Trotskyists hadn't been there in their absence these workers might have just got demoralised by that betrayal and the strike would have been defeated and so when the general strike cut came and it did come it was essentially now a situation of dual power the city's working class led by revolutionaries an effectively running society on one side and the city's bosses and the governor on the other and fearing the worst in this situation and seeing the strength of the workers the employers gave in they gave in to their demands they recognised the union allowed for negotiations and introduced minimum wage rates and this impact of this strike the impact of the victory of this strike was historic it became the first local union of industrial unionism which was soon to sweep across the states and it led to the development of the Congress of Industrial Organisations in 1935 which originally began as a committee within the old American Federation of Labour and these were organisers who had sinned the successes of this strike and under pressure from below were now set on unionising on an industrial basis which means unionising the whole of a particular industry like they had done in Minneapolis the AFL model of craft unionism which is where you organise a particular occupation or trade so all the electricians or all the train drivers but a leading role of the Trotskists in this Minneapolis strike and in the birth of industrial unionism cannot be underestimated in fact when asked why they were successful Teamster and League member Harry de Burr simply said we couldn't have done it without a disciplined revolutionary party it was the crucial influence of the Marxist understanding of the state and the press a grasp of consciousness and how it develops on the basis of events an understanding of how the trade union bureaucracy would behave and how best to organise the workers that led to their success as a result they were able to use the correct methods, tactics and demands to meet the consciousness of the class connect with it and push it forward and given how the working class was beginning to move across the country in that time if they had had the same spread of cadres as they had in Minneapolis in all major cities it's not out of the question that they could have led a revolution and although their numbers grew in Minneapolis following their strike their forces were still too weak to replicate the same success of Minneapolis elsewhere which would have been entirely possible given the objective conditions now today conditions are once again ripening for an explosion in the class struggle we are seeing a resurgence in the US labour movement unlike anything for generations and sometimes you know, I see in the bourgeois press and things that it's just sort of put down solely to the pandemic but this was a process that was beginning before 2020 in 2018 you had 485,000 participate in large scale strikes which was the largest number since 1983 the pandemic merely served to kind of accelerate an already ongoing process and so as lockdown eased last autumn you had what was dubbed striketober with hundreds of thousands of workers and industries from McDonald's workers to farming machinery workers to professors in higher education to Kellogg's factory workers and you also started to see the transformation of older established unions a recent election in the Teamsters saw victory for the left while the rail unions under pressure from below almost struck over summer although they called it off at the last minute and over the last year we've seen incredible unionization drives that have really picked up pace and each breakthrough spurs the rest of the class forward most famously with the Amazon Labour Union these efforts aren't necessarily down to the initiative of communists or socialists or anything but simply material conditions forcing the working class into organizing collectively is an organic process starting from the bottom up and I think this is best expressed actually by Amazon Labour Union organizer Derek Palmer who said they were motivated not by any sense of optimism but by necessity indeed even those deemed unorganizable such as the service workers in coffee shops are coming together and getting organized we've seen the Starbucks workers united union which is organizing partners as the company calls its workers into a union as of August 209 Starbucks have now unionized but this time last year there was no unionized Starbucks stores in all of America all it took was one success in Buffalo, New York and in the space of one month 20 others had filed for union votes and this process is showing no signs of stopping in August a Chipotle restaurant became the first of that chain to ever unionize while last weekend an Apple store in Oklahoma became the second Apple store to unionize in the country and this has immense popular support for instance 75% of Americans believe Amazon needs a union and a recent poll actually found that 68% of Americans approve of unions in general which is the highest level sin since 1965 the US working class is beginning to recover its militant traditions and rediscover its power that when it organizes collectively and moves to take action it can shut things down and it will relearn important lessons in doing so and soon enough will come to the conclusion there needs to be a political solution to fight not just against one capitalist but against the whole capitalist system and as a result the question of a workers party is set to rear its head in the coming period in tandem with the revitalizing labour movement after all for the working class to achieve its aims it must first be organized into a party that can generalize the struggle beyond the industrial and has a political independence from the bourgeois parties so that they can advance their class interest and this is the conclusion drawn from the concentrated experience of 100 years of proletarian struggle and in these circumstances Chotsky's advice to a CIO official in the 1930s is incredibly pertinent in these times in an interview with this trade unionist he said for socialism to be established in the US the labour movement would have to break with their ordinary normal routine methods he said the following the first step is clear all the trade unions should unite and form their own labour party not a labour party in name only but a truly independent political organization of the working class this would then have to wage an uncompromising struggle against the banks the trusts the monopolies and their political agents the republican and democratic parties and the CIO official panicked at this at the time he said you know Roosevelt's still too popular and a labour party should be built in the future which is similar to the arguments of groups like democratic socialists of America today but Chotsky pushed back at that saying the union leaders incorrectly looked to above them instead of to those below and he said that the decay of American capitalism the growth of unemployment and poverty all these basic processes which directly determine the fate of millions of people do not depend on the candidacy or popularity of one president and that the idea of an independent militant labour party that aims to put to an end economic anarchy unemployment and misery to save the people and its culture is capable of inspiring tens of millions indeed Chotsky's advice remains good advice through to this day clearly the US working class is showing its daring and willingness to struggle once again but the conservatism of both the labour bureaucracy on one hand and the weak reformism put forward by groups like the DSA can act as fetters on this struggle these leaders of the trade union movement and the left hold back the working class and keep it in a state of political infancy by failing to build a class independent party which is why comrades of the international Marxist tendency in the USA raised the demand for a labour party a mass workers party as a necessary step for the American proletariat to advance the class struggle forward indeed the class struggle is only set to intensify in the coming period in the United States as all across the world but those lacking a Marxist perspective such as bourgeois academics or media pundits cannot really understand what is on the horizon they have even commented on the prospects of a new civil war in the states multiple books have actually been written on this in the past year seriously putting it forward as a perspective but what these bourgeois academics and commentators are either blind to or dare not to speak allowed is the fact it's not civil war between Trumpists and Democrats that is likely to break out but a class war indeed behind closed doors I think these people fear America could go communist but for America to go communist for the American proletariat to be successful in a class war then like an army it also requires generals and officers that is revolutionary Marxist cadres who studied the history of the class struggle who have a grasp of Marxist theory and can point the way forward the Minneapolis teams to the strike in 1934 offers a glimpse of what is possible when a militant working class is led by capable revolutionary Marxists but that was presupposed by a whole period of educating those revolutionary cadres and just as today the Marxists then came under pressure to abandon this doubling down on Marxist theory and essentially abandon the building of a revolutionary leadership in favor of mass work and simply throwing themselves into the movement James Cannon leader of the communist league even acknowledged the apparent absurdity of their study of theory while capitalism was going up the spout here were the Trotskyists with their documents under their arms demanding that you read books study and discuss and so on but he and we understand there is no substitute for this work of education and building no matter how determined the working class history has shown time and again the missing element is a revolutionary leadership which must be built in advance it cannot be thrown up in the heat of the moment and that's what the international Marxist tendency in the USA is doing today under the bold banner of socialist revolution our comrades do stand on the picket lines they are at the Amazon labor union rallies they are fighting shoulder to shoulder with the working class but at the same time they are not just activists acting blindly they are building an organization of trained Marxists to win the ever growing layer of class conscious workers in youth to a revolutionary organization that is fighting for a socialist program so the Marxist are once again swimming with the stream of history even in America and big class battles pretend but for America to go communist then the communists must grow sink roots into the working class and on the basis of events win their leadership and I'd like to finish actually on a pertinent quote from Eugene Debs who was a leader of the socialist party of America he was a revolutionary and an internationalist and a man who identified with the Bolsheviks from head to toe his vision of the future in 1919 is once again the vision of America's and indeed the whole world's future in 2022 he said the rise of the working class is the red specter in the bourgeois horizon the reign of capitalism and militarism has made of all peoples in flammable material they are ripe and ready for the change the great change which means the rise and triumph of the workers the end of exploitation of war and plunder and the emancipation of the race let it come, let us all help its coming and pave the way for it by organizing the workers industrially and politically to conquer capitalism and usher in the day of the people