Getting organized to change the world

THE SIGNS of frustration with the status quo in America--substandard wages, racist law enforcement, the ongoing devastation of the planet, to name a few--are everywhere. And there are examples of resistance, too--sometimes in unexpected places.

No one knew Ferguson, Mo., would be become ground zero for the struggle against police violence and racism until a rebellion poured out into the streets in August to protest the murder of unarmed Black teenager Mike Brown.

But it's not surprising that a Ferguson happened somewhere. The daily abuse of African Americans in U.S. cities across the country was already well known before Brown's killing, as the families of victims of killer cops from New York City to Oakland can attest. And as the urban rebellions of the 1960s showed, it only takes one spark, however small, for the situation to erupt.

At Columbia University, protests against the university administration's refusal to confront sexual assault on campus became suddenly and dramatically visible in September, capturing national attention. But as the organizers at Columbia know, it was a movement that was months in the making.

To take one more example, the People's Climate March in September was historic for its sheer size alone--some 300,000 filling a Manhattan street for dozens of blocks to protest corporate and government policies that are killing the planet. But the march was also significant for the breadth of climate justice organizing and organizations that it revealed: indigenous activists, students, community organizations, socialists, unions, Palestinian solidarity groups and more.

THE HISTORY of the struggle for a better world is filled with examples like this--of groups springing up to meet the needs of a new layer of radicalizing activists, respond to their questions and ideas and give expression to their new demands for the movement.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), for example, was born out of the lunch counter sit-ins, which started in February 1960 in Greensboro, N.C., when four Black college students went to the local Woolworth's and demanded service at a segregated counter.

Within weeks, the sit-ins had spread across the South, and within months, leaders of the student-led uprising had met to form an organization that would both challenge the snail's pace of the legal strategy for ending Jim Crow segregation and breathe new life into the tactics of mass civil disobedience introduced in the Montgomery Bus Boycott five years before.

Howard Zinn called them "the first radicals of the decade" in his history SNCC: The New Abolitionists, pointing out: "They came from unexpected places: they were mostly Black and therefore unseen until they became the most visible people in America; they came out of Greensboro, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn., and Rock Hill, S.C., and Atlanta, Ga."

These young student activists created their own organization to speak for their ideas and goals--to reflect the new radicalization around the struggle for civil rights and their determination to directly confront the institutions of racism in the South. Their debates about tactics and strategies in the struggle would reshape how the whole civil rights movement, and much more beyond, looked at its activities.

In the process of their organizing--from the Freedom Rides to the Freedom Summer Project--these once "unseen" people forced civil rights onto the national agenda. Later, many of them laid the building blocks for the Black Power movement as it reverberated through Northern cities.

In the wake of the murders of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, many people are drawing similar conclusions about the need for organization to sustain a new anti-racist struggle.

This organizing is a welcome development--the hope is that it can lead to the rebuilding of a left that has been in decline for decades. And for socialists, it's part of a discussion about building revolutionary socialist organization, which is part of the struggles of today, but has a vision for a completely different society.

DURING THE times when political struggles are on an upswing, it's usually obvious that organization is important. But during the times in between, when its importance is often less obvious, organization can actually be even more central.

Struggles don't grow in strength evenly and ever more powerful, like adding new floors on an ever-growing skyscraper. In the real world, struggles rise and fall--with those involved learning lessons quickly during the high points of mass mobilization and unrest, then facing periods of little or no activity, and even setbacks, when those lessons fall away.

In the thick of an upswing in struggle, it can be hard to imagine the movement ever slowing down, much less being reversed. And by the same token, during the low points, it can sometimes seem impossible to imagine others ever fighting on a mass scale.

One job of political organization, as socialists see it, is to provide continuity during these different periods that we must inevitably confront.

The tiny minority of rulers at the top benefit greatly when the lessons at the high points in class struggle disappear almost as quickly as they first materialized. Therefore, there aren't many high schools teaching students about Seattle General Strike of 1919 or the Flint Sit-down Strike in 1936-37.

As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote: "The memory of the laboring masses is truly short and the hypocrisy of the rulers immeasurable! The historical memory of the bourgeoisie lies in its traditions of rule, in institutions, the law of the land, and in accumulated skills of statesmanship. The memory of the working class is in its party"--that is, within the living political organization built by people who commit themselves to the future of the working class movement.

So revolutionary socialists try to draw out the lessons of every struggle, win or lose, and carry them forward to inform the next struggle. They learn about and share the hidden history and lessons of past struggles--especially the most revolutionary struggles of the past when workers have contended for power.

IF YOU'VE ever been corrected for using a butter knife instead of a screwdriver, then you know the meaning of the phrase "the right tool for the job." This applies to political organization as well. There are many different ways to organize, and these different ways reflect the aims of the organization.

For socialists, our ultimate goal is the creation a totally different society--one based on meeting people's needs rather than profit. This can only be accomplished by overturning the old society, where the few profit at the expense of the many. The capitalist system is based on the majority of the population--the working class--being forced to selling their labor power to a tiny elite who own all the resources and workplaces--the ruling class.

The working class must be put in the driver's seat, so that it can enjoy the full benefits of its labor and make economic and political decisions about a new society. But this can only be accomplished by the working class itself--by what Karl Marx called "the self-emancipation of the working class."

With this future goal in mind, revolutionary socialists today seek to build the kind of organization that gathers together others around the cause of socialism. They seek to strengthen every struggle that makes the working-class struggle stronger and helps people reach revolutionary conclusions, or at least come closer to them. And they never lose sight of the long-term goal: winning a socialist society.

To say that not everyone agrees we need to get rid of capitalism is an understatement--at most times under capitalism, most of the working class doesn't think so. And among those who do think we need to get rid of it, many have a hard time imagining how it's possible, and still others aren't sure what to replace it with.

So a large part of the job of socialist organization today is explaining what's wrong with capitalism, what we mean by socialism, drawing lessons from the past that shows what workers' power looks like, and convincing others why they should be socialists, too. We do so by all the means at our disposal--through our publications, our meetings, discussions with people we work with every day, participation in activism around a variety of issues.

The reality is that workers don't come to revolutionary conclusions automatically--and sometimes they arrive at conclusions that are against their own interests. For instance, the working class is divided by backward ideas that pits different workers--Black, white, men, women, LGBT, immigrants, disabled--against one another.

The Russian socialist Lenin argued that revolutionary socialists had to be "the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects."

The revolutionary organization helps organize and build solidarity with struggles that confront these divisions as they are expressed in society--and it makes arguments with people who hold backward ideas that make our side weaker. Thus, socialists always take a stand against racism and imperialism--not just because this is the right thing to do, but because not doing so makes the working-class struggle weaker.

In the aftermath of Mike Brown's murder in Ferguson, American Postal Workers Union officials released a statement condemning the Ferguson police and urging their members to speak out as well. To do otherwise would have been to turn a blind eye to the racist harassment that Black families--including those with family members working for the U.S. Postal Service--face every day at the hands of the police.

Sometimes, making a principled stand against tyranny and oppression can means taking a position that is unpopular--such as the ISO's opposition to the "war on terror" launched following the September 11, 2001, attacks. But to do otherwise would have been giving ground to the U.S. government drive for a never-ending war around the world.

SOCIALISTS SEE that stances against racism and imperialism make our side stronger, and help expose the injustice and inequality of the system. Other political organizations don't view things the same way, however.

The Democratic Party, for instance, may occasionally take up causes that improve the lives of working-class people, in order to maintain its reputation as the "party of the people"--an entirely undeserved reputation, once you look more closely at its history. Individual Democratic politicians may agree with these causes in principle. But at its core, the Democratic Party isn't an organization interested in fundamental change--it's one dedicated to upholding the status quo.

So while a socialist organization asks its members to actively build their group every day, the Democratic Party would rather its members stay passive--until they are asked to vote every few years, or maybe give money to candidates. Likewise, the decision about whether to speak out against police violence or wars abroad isn't a principle, but a cold calculation to the people who run the Democratic Party.

So while many Democratic Party politicians call themselves "reformers," socialists are more dedicated to actually fighting for reforms than they ever will be. In every struggle that improves the lives of the workers--for better wages and working conditions, for reproductive justice, against the destruction of the social safety net--socialists take part to the fullest extent that they can.

And in each struggle, large and small, we trying to try find the next link in the chain, the next step in the struggle. We don't stand on the outside and judge how sufficiently "radical" the demands of the movement are. We work alongside others with the goal of moving together to the next step, and then the next, and the next after that. Because we know that winning one demand often makes people thirsty for more--for bigger and often more radical struggles.

We actually want to win measures that improve people's lives, of course. But something else is important: During these struggles, the people involved in them learn valuable lessons--about who their allies are and who is the enemy, about exactly how neutral the supposedly neutral state really is, about what the system will finally concede when it's forced to do so.

And most important of all, they learn that they have power.

One of the most prevalent ideas of capitalism is that the running of society needs to be left to the experts--that workers cannot possibly make important decisions about the running of society. This idea is impressed on us from an early age and carries on until we are old--that there are people with the education and experience we don't have who are qualified to occupy the corporate boardrooms and walk the halls of Congress.

During struggle, workers learn that all this is a lie.

So socialists have historically been involved in all kinds of struggles--the fight for the eight-hour day, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, the civil rights movement, the opposition to U.S. imperialist wars, and on and on. But in the meanwhile, we are also helping to build the fight for a socialist future--and part of that is persuading others why they should join us in that struggle and become socialists, too.