Members of the Central Committee of the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, other comrades and friends:
Those of us from the Black Workers Congress who have participated in this conference would like to express our appreciation to the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization for inviting us to participate (in this conference) and sharing with us a great deal of information that we needed, giving us this opportunity to learn so much about your struggle and experience.
It is new to the present generation, the current generation of working class people in our communities and it’s new to our respective organizations. We are just beginning to take hold of these tools and beginning to link ourselves to the working class, struggle with the working class, and learn from the working class. We’re just now beginning to understand that Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-Tung Thought is the tool by which the working class in this country will liberate itself and we’re certainly just beginning to learn that it is the tool to be applied to our concrete reality.
Many people in our organization, the Black Workers Congress, have come to the realization of the necessity of applying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-Tung Thought from concrete struggle in trying to find a way to liberate themselves from exploitation and oppression. Our organization has cone to realize that the fundamental problem inside the U.S. is between capital and labor and that the solution to this problem is proletarian revolution. We recognize that the working class in this country is multi-national and that to accomplish the task of proletarian revolution requires a proletarian party that represents and leads the whole class. We feel that our work is consistent with that objective but we understand clearly that this proletarian party will not cone about through a declaration by us but that in fact, it will only come about as a result of the collective practice of those of us who engage in struggle with the working class. We recognize that there had been a Communist Party in the U.S. before. But for years the leadership of the Party was not based in the working class nor were proletarian politics in total command. And as a result of that we now have the revisionist Communist Party U.S.A. We insist on understanding their experience and avoiding their same mistakes. Further, because of the racist nature of U.S. society, Third World people have been subjected to super-exploitation and oppression. Meaning that they have been relegated to the hardest, dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in industry. These jobs represent a high degree of socialization, and have great strategic value from the standpoint of living blows to U.S. imperialism.
In particular to the Black worker, I think it should probably be desirable, I think I will digress a little bit and talk about the urban Black worker, who we think is unique in a sense and that is not by way of boasting but just a phenomenon that we think needs to be clearly understood. I’m not suggesting that people here don’t understand that but just in terms of our view of the Urban Black worker, I feel it probably would be desirable for me to run down our view.
Most of the people here in attendance are probably 15, some 20 years younger than I am. So the question may he asked, what brings a person my age, my experience to a congress like this. To understand that I’d have to go back to about 1960. 1960 was the year that I got out of the U.S. army and was the year that John F. Kennedy was elected president. The liberal wing of the bourgeoisie took power in this country and developed a liberal fiscal policy. I was discharged from the army in March, 1960 and returned to Detroit to appear to find employment from March to September. By September of that year, the economy had begun an upswing. I won’t go into too many details but there are some things that I recall. The first thing is that Kennedy got passed a law which extended unemployment compensation to unemployed workers.
During the period 1955-1960, there was tremendous unemployment in the Black communities across the country, particularly in Detroit, Chrysler had people laid-off for as long as 13 years, with as much as 13 years seniority, for periods of 3-5 years. With this change in fiscal policy, there was an influx of Black workers in the plant and into various jobs that had previously been denied to them Also, early in this administration, the Equal Opportunities Act was passed which was supposed to open up jobs to minority people in this country. You will recall also that about that time, the Civil Rights movement was beginning in the South, resulting in tremendous struggle, a tremendous mass movement throughout the South, involving masses of Black people, poor people, working people in the South, in clashes with the state and with its reactionary power structure in the southern part of the country. In the North, the urban areas were outraged. Many of us put together food, clothing and money to send south to support the movement. We all had a feeling of frustration and powerlessness. This outrage led was a major part of the frustration that led to the outbreak of urban rebellions. At the same time, beginning in 1962 in the major industrial plants in this country a tremendous transformation began to take place in the industrial process. There is a peculiar phenomenon that the ruling class recognized and sought to take advantage of. It operates somewhat in the South now. You’ll find in the South probably and in some cities that service workers are more militant than Black workers who have come from the farms and have gotten jobs in the plants because the wages were so much higher than service workers and from their previous working experiences. This transformation in the plant worked something like this: In the 1950’s there’s a Chrysler plant in Detroit, (they have 26 Chrysler plants in Detroit, by the way), but there’s a Chrysler plant in Detroit called Dodge Main, which has in the total complex, 10,000 workers, approximately 60% of whom are Black. And what had begun to happen was as the plant went from Black to white the company began a practice of replacing 2 white workers with 3 white workers with one Black worker. This kind of super-exploitation became a widespread phenomenon in the major industrial plants. At the same time they were replacing 3 men with one, they were also speeding up the line, speeding up production, increasing production. So, the Black workers in the plant began to struggle and began to create forms of organizations. These organizations were designed to bring pressure on the union and on management. And there are remnants of these organizations today in almost every major industrial installation where there is a substantial number of Black employees. You’ll find an equal opportunity organization, a Black caucus or some form of Black organization that struggles for equality on the job.
The context of these developments that begin, in our view, the fight for Marxism-Leninism in the Black communities among the Black working class as the ideology of the Black working class.
For us in the Black Workers Congress and we think for all Marxist-Leninists, the crucial question at this time is leadership in the Third World working class community and especially the leadership of the Black working class community.
There is a bitter, ideological fight going on in the Black community at this time. The trend towards fascism in this country has set in motion a move by liberal reformers to capture control of all potentially revolutionary movements. The Black movement is no exception to this. We see Congressmen Dewey at the head of African liberation Day. We see an influx of opportunists of various stripes into the Black community across the country. We are confident that proletarian forces will win this fight.
We agree with the analysis that at this time, there is a natural division of labor in the U.S. Our analysis is that it is the correct way of building towards the proletarian party at this time. We may be mistaken on this but this is one of those questions that has to be put to the test of practice.
I know for a lot of people at this conference there have been a number of questions that have been left unanswered. Questions such as how does this division of labor work in practice where there are different nationalities working in the same locale. First of all, the organization in the workplace is different from the pre-party formation. We think it is correct to build Third World mass organizations or caucuses in plants and we think our practice and in particular, the practice of HRUM shows that this is correct. Second, all questions can’t be answered through discussion. Some things will just have to test out to find out what works. We have come to the recognition of the necessity of applying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought and now we have to go out and apply that which we have recognized.
The Black Workers Congress is about 2 years old. During this time, we have undergone many changes, lost many comrades and strengthened our understanding of the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought. Still our understanding is at a very low level. Many of our comrades have to use dictionaries to read the books on our cadre’s reading list. But we are confident that we are on the path to proletarian revolution. We are confident that we are on the path to the proletarian revolutionary party. It is our feeling that this meeting sets the stage for the beginning of this kind of unity among revolutionary Marxism-Leninist-Maoists where it is necessary to build the forms and institutions for successful proletarian revolution in this country. We must build the unity of the proletariat. We must build a proletarian party, the highest form of class organization of the proletariat.
LONG LIVE THE HEROIC WORKING CLASS OF THE U.S.