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New York
January 18, 1983
To the Political Committee
Dear Comrades:
I request that two points be added to the next PC agenda. The following are suggested titles of these points and a brief summary of the proposals.
Since our convention in August 1981, the number of unemployed workers has risen steadily, reaching totals surpassed only in the Great Depression. For many millions of workers and their families unemployment is the central question in their lives and in “American life.” The fear of unemployment grips a majority of the employed workers. No one seriously expects any improvement in this situation during the year 1983.
At the end of 1982, official statistics showed 13 million unemployed. Of these 2.3 million had been out of work for more than six months, 1.6 million were classified as “discouraged” and not looking for work, 1.2 million had never worked and were looking unsuccessfully for jobs, 10.8 million previously employed were registered and actively seeking work. This is a situation for which the present generation in unprepared and which the labor movement is afraid to face. But these facts and the social consequences cannot long be denied or ignored.
Twenty percent of Blacks are unemployed.
Forty-two percent of all those presently unemployed receive no unemployment compensation.
Two million people are homeless.
One million have been cut out of food stamps.
750,000 children have been cut out of the free school lunch program.
In some industrial cities jobless rates are as high as or even higher than the national rates in the Thirties. The percentage of Blacks presently unemployed is as high as the national average as a whole was during some years of the Great Depression. Unemployment has done more than reactionary legislation to wipe out affirmative action gains won by minorities and women in the 1960s and '70s.
The workers hardest hit by employment are those we are most interested in reaching: women, oppressed minorities, and the youth. (Youth today are hit proportionately harder then in the Great Depression when the employers tended to lay off the older workers first because they did not have seniority protection in unorganized plants.)
The unemployed are also the most natural constituent of any antiwar and solidarity movement that knows how to counterpose the fight for jobs and public works to military appropriations. Because of the highly political nature of the demands of any organized unemployed movement, we will find here great receptivity to the labor party idea and to joint labor-unemployed political campaigns.
During the past year a few international unions and other union bodies have given at least lip service to the need to organize their unemployed members and in some cases have provided union resources and facilities for temporary or provisional unemployed committees, services to help jobless members get assistance from national and local government agencies.
Also last year the Communist Party began a campaign to organize the unemployed under union auspices where possible or through groups that are not formally part of the union movement.
Although both the union bureaucracies and the Stalinists intend to harness the unemployed to the Democratic Party, 1982 did see the beginning of unemployed organizations in scores of different cities, and some effective (although still small-scale) demonstrations, rallies, and marches. There is no doubt that as unemployment lines lengthen the response will be bigger and louder. Mass action around this question seems inevitable as unemployment insurance benefits run out and other “cushions” are reduced for millions of people.
What should the SWP do?
How should we relate to the unemployed in action as well as in propaganda? What should our own unemployed members do when the possibility exists for organizing unemployed committees in their plants or industries?
1) Our press ought to pay a lot more attention to the conditions of the unemployed, the needs of the unemployed, and the struggles of the unemployed. It is not enough to write about this once a month. Others are writing about this problem that overshadows everything else in the lives of millions of people. Not only the Stalinists are organizing and campaigning for their solution to this problem. The Social Democrats are moving into high gear on this issue. The Jan. 8, 1983, issue of the AFL-CIO American Federationist is devoted entirely to the question of jobs, and to the labor bureaucracy's “Agenda for Recovery.” Their agenda does not include mass action. But it does outline in considerable detail the urgent need for a federal works program, and it calls for Congress to provide massive funds for such a program.
This call by the officialdom of the AFL-CIO for a huge public works program helps legitimize the demand. The Democratic Party will not champion such a demand at this time, and if workers expect to win jobs in this way they will have to find others besides Democrats and Republicans to represent them in Congress.
Our transitional program supplies the answers the unemployed are looking and hoping for, and we must use it more in our propaganda and agitation, flushing it out and bringing it up to date in the light of current conditions. Our press ought to have at least one or two writers who will follow all the developments in this field closely and be able to write about them concretely and in such a way that the paper will become more attractive to the many workers we can reach in the unemployment insurance and welfare offices, as well as workers still on the job.
2) Since we are in favor of organizing the unemployed through the unions when possible and since we are in favor of our members going through the experiences of the working class, we should encourage all members presently unemployed to participate in efforts to organize the unemployed in committees or groups that are part of or related to the union movement; and we should provide political and or organizational leadership through our industrial fractions or through some other party structures, which in some cases might take the form of unemployed fractions, depending on circumstances it is not necessary to explore here.
In order to carry out this work effectively it will be necessary to educate our members on our goals in such fields as unemployed work and help eliminate any notions that such work is inherently “reformist,” or in some other way unsuited to revolutionary activity.
These proposals are not based on any prediction that a large or “permanent” unemployment movement is certain to emerge in 1983. Such predictions are unnecessary and serve no useful purpose. These proposals are based on the fact that there are many unemployed workers of the kind we are most interested in meeting and recruiting, and that our participation in unemployed organizing efforts is one of the effective ways we can reach them — useful for the education and development of our own members and helpful in supplying a revolutionary direction to unemployed workers who are and will be looking for ways to fight for answers to their problems.
In addition to getting our propaganda and press into the hands of unemployed militants, we can benefit and they can benefit by our unemployed members working and fighting alongside them in struggles that will educate both them and us.
Comrade Jack Barnes's talk at the YSA convention in Chicago New Year's eve publicly expressed a number of important political and theoretical positions which have never been voted on by party conventions or the National Committee and which are in conflict or at variance with positions adopted and defended by our party for decades.
A large part of the party, in my opinion, is concerned or troubled by the way in which these new and controversial positions are being introduced, without the benefit of internal discussion before they are made public. When this concern is voiced, supporters of the majority tendency reply either that these questions can be discussed in the Lenin study classes (an obviously unrealistic place) or that they should wait until the opening of the preconvention discussion period (which may not occur until around May Day).
There is no need to wait until the preconvention discussion begins, and there are many clear advantages in the areas of party education and improved party morale that will accrue from opening an internal literary discussion on the positions presented by Comrade Barnes that could last from now until the start of the preconvention discussion.
The discussion I propose — limited to written articles in a party discussion bulletin — would be the most orderly and healthy method of handling the clarification and discussion that are needed, and would in no way disrupt or hamper the functioning of the branches and fractions in our various political activities and campaigns. A precedent for such a literary discussion in a non-preconvention discussion period (and maybe even a model so far as its form was concerned) was the gay liberation debate that was conducted in the nine numbers of SWP Discussion Bulletin, Volume 30, from June through September 1972.
Comradely,
/s/Frank Lovell
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