Editors note: There has been a significant misunderstanding over the relationship between Radencommunisten and this letter. This letter, written by one of the members of the Council Communist Collective, in no way represents the opinion of either the Radencommunisten or the CCC. For the opinions endorsed by the publication, please view our charter as well as the main publication.
The movement in the streets
On Friday, June 6th, hundreds of people, latino y blanco igual, took to the street to protest the violent deportation of thousands of immigrants by ICE. On June 8th, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth ordered the deployment of the national guard to quell the protests. On June 10th, 700 Marines were deployed to assist the national guard and ICE. Since then, many cities have begun to protest. Many local organizations and their respective chapters (PSL, 50501) have organized demonstrations for the weekend.
Despite the arrival of federal troops, the protests are still ongoing. The night of June 7th alone almost 200 protesters were arrested.
Amongst the communists, the protests have received an orgy of support, heralded by almost every sector as an advancement in the struggle of the working masses. Amongst the American left, the protests have already been labeled the continuation of the Black Lives Matters protests.
Within the context of this extreme jubilation, it is necessary for communists to make a cool-headed assessment of their character and limitation of the protest movement. Here, rather than sink into the minutiae of the expediency of certain activities – whether they are violent or peaceful etc. – we seek to offer a generalized analysis that recognizes the persistent degenerative tendency within the protests themselves.
The limitations of the movement
The movement is still spiritually dominated by the middle-classes. Despite the predominantly working class base of protesters, the demands of the protest reflect the interests of the petite-bourgeoisie. If workers cannot separate themselves from the section of the bourgeoisie which shares their ethnicity, they will be forced to adopt an inter-classist practice, leading to the eventual defeat of the movement. For any worker, it is necessary to unite with fellow workers on the shared basis of class.
The movement is limited to one sector of the working class. Despite the varied composition of the protests, they have not spread to other sectors of the working class. While militant workers have flocked to the protests themselves, they have not attempted to bring their own sectors of the class into the struggle. Here, participation in street confrontations hinder the associative efforts necessary to organize an independent class-wide movement. For the struggle of the latine workers to succeed, it must spread to the working class at large.
The movement is currently limited to street actions. The fact that the movement takes the form of street battles, heralded by many on the left as its greatest strength, is in fact its greatest weakness. The strike, the greatest weapon of the working class, remains monopolized by the trade-unions. Class-wide self-organization, the greatest strength of the working class, remains caged. For the struggle of the working class to succeed, the riot is an unsuitable tool: the working class must use its strongest tactic, the tactic of the strike, and its greatest strength, the capacity for self-organization, to achieve its goals.
Lessons for workers and the communists
In the class struggle, the greatest barrier for the working class to overcome is itself.
With the above mentioned limitations in mind, it is readily apparent that for the moment, the movement in L.A. will not overcome its own limitations. However, in recognizing what is currently lacking in the movement, it is possible for us to identify which absent factors will come of decisive importance in the future.
In this case, we are given three lessons:
For even a limited sector of the working class to achieve its goals, it must come forward on the explicit basis of class. The illusions of middle-class ideology can only serve to continually frustrate the independent struggle of the proletariat. Workers, no matter how isolated, must unite independently and consciously as workers.
For any one sector of the working class to develop its struggle, it must unite with as many other sectors as possible. As the struggle expands from sector to sector, the power of the working class itself expands exponentially. The expansion of any particular struggle to the entire working class is the largest task of the class struggle itself.
Street actions are the working classes largest weakness. Instead of limiting their confrontation to the police, workers must struggle on all fronts against the bourgeoisie, both in and outside of the workplace. They, on one hand, must refuse to continue working, and, on the other, create new forms of organization with which to manage their own affairs. The best tactic of the working class remains the strike, its greatest strength the capacity for self-organization.
On the failure of communists
While it is certain that the communist movement will learn these lessons, it is unlikely that they will be. In keeping with the comparisons of the events in L.A. to the Black Lives Matter protests, all the same lessons could have been learned in the wake of 2020, but were not.
There too, a strong labor movement was dominated by middle class ideology.
There too, the struggle remained limited to a tight sector of the working class.
There too, the movement was confined to the streets.
But communists, instead of learning from their defeats, have replicated their impotence. The illusion still predominates that the U.S. state – perhaps at the zenith of its power – is bound to topple with one more riot. Each sporadic outbreak of discontent is heralded by communists as the harbinger of revolution, as a new form of “revolutionary violence”. In reality, the development of revolutionary violence is a slow and arduous process, one where the working class continually learns from its successes and failures, culminating in its seizure of its power. The riot is not revolutionary violence: it is the expression of the working class' inability to exert it. The zealous and dogmatic treatment of the riot as the vox populi must be held in part responsible for the poor state of the workers movement.
To the workers and communists currently on the front lines, we send the regards of compañeros in the struggle. But please, realize what violence will free you, and what violence will keep you in chains.
“Revolutionary violence is in essence the opposition of the class of producers to the bourgeois class, the class which, individually or collectively, controls the means of production. This violence must culminate in the dispossession of the bourgeois class and the appropriation of the means of production by the producers themselves.
From this way of looking at revolutionary violence, control of the place of work by the workers –as has been attempted in certain cases in Italy– is a hundred time more violent than any fight with the riot squad, quite simply because it transcends bourgeois economic rationality and looks beyond society as it exists to a new social order in which work is organized by the workers for the own wellbeing. In contrast, guerilla warfare, riots etc. remain within the bounds of the rationality as defined by the system, since do not attack in any direct way capital’s control of the production process” (Chameau, 1975).
M.S.
Chameau, Albert. “A few reflections”, Root and Branch: Rise of the Workers Movement (1978), 500. https://libcom.org/article/few-reflections-albert-chameau