Problems and Perspectives of the American Revolution

Being on time, and what a seminar is for

Chair: This afternoon we're going to have a seminar on the problems and perspectives of the American Revolution, and the speaker, or the lead-off speaker, will be James P. Cannon, who's an old-time socialist, the founder of the Socialist Workers Party and the past national chairman of the Socialist Workers Party. Now, there will be certain questions that he will not answer, and certain ones that he will, and he'll decide this as he goes along. But right now, let's start off with Governor [?] Cannon.

Cannon: He should have said, "I'll answer if I can." I want to begin by explaining this delay of 15 minutes. I was here strictly on the dot of 2:30, according to the Bolshevik custom of being on time. And any delay was due to extraneous circumstances, which I will not mention, in order to spare the feelings of the delinquents who will have to face the control commission and explain why you're not ready on time. According to the Bolshevik custom, Lenin and Trotsky were great sticklers for being on time. I had a chance to observe that personally in my visits to Trotsky with the delegation, several times in Mexico City, when he used to have sessions something like this with the delegation from New York and Minneapolis, and all the guards and other comrades doing technical work were invited. When the hour came to begin the seminar, Trotsky would get up and ostentatiously lock the door, so that if anybody was absent, when they came they would have to knock and be reprimanded for being late. Bolshevism in a way is a synonym for efficiency and timeliness. They were on time for the revolution in 1917. Lenin once said a man who doesn't know how to show up on time is like a fellow who comes late for a wedding and finds a funeral in progress, and goes around wishing everybody present many happy returns of the day.

You have wrought a miracle today. I made my first soapbox speech on the corner of Sixth and Main Street in Kansas City 61 years ago. I had a little stage fright and nervousness before I started, but after the first few minutes I got over it, and from that time to this, according to my calculation, I made about 15,000 speeches, and I have never had a trace of stage fright in any one of them until today. Rose can testify I've been quite nervous, because it's a new experience for me. This is the first seminar that I ever presided over or ever attended, as a matter of fact. The only time I went to college was like the thief who said, "Sure, I've been to college." I ran across a campus two jumps ahead of the sheriff.

Now the purpose of the seminar, as we have discussed it and outlined it, is not a call to action, although we are a party of action. It's not an appeal for efficiency, although we pride ourselves on our efficiency. That's one of the ingredients of our party. It's rather an attempt to stimulate thought about new things in America and the world, because without thought brought up to date all the time, efficiency in action often turns into what has been called all motion and no direction. The party is not only an efficiency machine and an action machine, but first of all and above all it's a thinking machine. That's what distinguishes us from many others.

A young socialist then and now

I thought the good way to begin on the general subject of what it means to be a young socialist today, and the perspectives before him, was to discuss it in connection with what it meant to be a young socialist when Rose and I were your age, young, more than 50 years ago. That was still the Victorian age, although the Queen was dead. But the general atmosphere and attitude of the people, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, was Victorian. That was the atmosphere of confidence and optimism in steady, increasing progress, step by step to unlimited goals without any interruptions. The theory of evolution, both social and organic, was conceived of as a steady, slow progress and improvement, without taking note of the fact that organic evolution as propounded by Darwin and social evolution as propounded by Marx and Engels take note of the fact that at various stages in the gradual evolution there are violent explosions which are known as revolutions, which transform the situation fundamentally and then go on evolving further until there's another revolution, or in some cases a counterrevolution.

Now, before the First World War, to be a socialist above all meant to be committed to an idea and an ideal which one served without any ability to demonstrate concretely that you were engaged in a practical task. One of the most effective arguments that used to be made against us 50-odd years ago was, it's a good idea, but we'll never live to see it. Or, it can't be done, the workers won't move. Look at them, how apathetic they are. Nowhere in the world have the workers ever won any real victories. The most they ever won was a few cents more an hour. And we couldn't refute that from practical experience, and we couldn't refute from practical evidence the theory that things were just going to continue as they were but getting a little better from day to day and year to year. So why get excited, even if you're a socialist? You go to a meeting like a religious person goes to Sunday school once a week. And the rest of the week you devote to practical affairs and prepare for the future, to raise a family and look forward to grandchildren and great-grandchildren who eventually, someday or other, will live in a socialist society. There was peace in the world. The great powers had not been in conflict in a military way since 1870. And it looked like this peace was stable and permanent.

And then into this idyllic picture of slow, steady progress came the thunderbolts of the First World War, 1914, exactly 50 years ago this week. And then Rosa Luxemburg reminded people that we have always said, when we said socialism is inevitable, we always coupled it with the assertion that socialism or barbarism is the perspective of the human race, and this world war is barbarism, where the old slogan "Workers of the world, unite" has been transformed into socialist and union workers in different countries murdering each other in the service of the masters. And the First World War took a toll of between 10 and 20 million dead and innumerable wounded and starved and deprived in various ways. And after the First World War then we had the terrible depression, and then we had the Second World War, which cost between 20 and 40 million human lives and innumerable casualties wounded in various ways. And then we had the horror of six million people, men, women, and children, in Germany and Poland and other Nazi-occupied places, being murdered in gas chambers. And we had the unspeakable horror of Stalin's slave labor camps. And we had the unmentionable crime of a whole city full of people in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki destroyed in a single moment with the first atomic bomb.

So things at the end of the First World War were somewhat different than they were in the idyllic days prior to 1914. And it was the obligation of Marxists, who above all are thinkers, whose theory, as Engels said, is a theory of social evolution, whose theory, he said, is not a dogma to be repeated by rote but a guide to action.

What has changed since 1945

And the First World War ended in 1945, with Europe and Japan and a large part of Eastern Europe and Russia in ruins, and America triumphant with the monopoly of the atomic bomb and a minimum of casualties and an abundant prosperity made by supplying goods to the other countries who had sacrificed so many millions in the war. And it was then that a great genius named Henry Luce, the proprietor of Life, Time, and Fortune, came out with a jubilant editorial, waving it over the ashes of the victims of the gas chambers and the battlefields and the slave labor camps, and proclaimed the American century. America was to rule the world as Rome did in her time. But what does it look like today? I have a grandson, and I told him about this fact, that the American century had been proclaimed in 1945. "Now what does that prove?" And he, with a sense of humor and being a good straight man, said, "I don't know, what does it prove?" [Laughter] And I said, "It proves that some centuries are shorter than others." [Laughter]

But 1945 seems aeons and aeons away. What's happened since 1945 is what we as Marxists, students of social reality, which does not remain constant but changes, have to do our thinking about. Marx, in his introduction to the first volume of Capital, said what he had undertaken to prove by his exhaustive examination in his writings was that human society is not a solid crystal but an organism subject to change and constantly changing. And our task in the present hour and in the days that lie ahead is to assess what has changed since 1945 and adjust our thinking, and consequently our perspective, accordingly.

Since 1945, prostrate Europe has risen again, first with American help in order to dispose of their surplus capital and as a protection against the Soviet Union, which, incidentally and most inconsiderately, in the meantime had developed the atomic bomb of their own and destroyed the American monopoly. That's point one: America no longer has the monopoly of atomic weapons or of rockets, and it's very doubtful, if we are to judge by the demonstrations that have taken place in space, whether we have as accurate and deadly rockets as the Soviet Union has. Europe has grown from a dependent colony of the United States to a great industrial power, more or less united in the European Economic Community, and a bitter competitor of the United States in the world market. Japan has risen from the ashes to become a competitor in the world market. The Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries associated with it have also enormously increased their productive capacity. And then, out of a clear sky, as far as the blind were concerned, came the Chinese Revolution, which, with six to seven hundred million people, not only chased the American satrap Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland and brought about a complete social revolution in China, but also at the same time closed China to the world capitalist market, as Russia and Eastern Europe had already been closed.

And then China triggered the further colonial revolutions in Korea, Vietnam. I just don't know how things are in South Vietnam right now, but yesterday they didn't look so good. Yesterday I read the mobs were in the streets and that the latest savior had been replaced by a triumvirate. And we're going in there to defend free people, where you have trouble locating where they are. The South Vietnamese think they must be somewhere else. They're certainly not in Saigon, because they're storming the headquarters of the custodians of their freedom. And the Chinese revolution triggered the colonial revolution throughout Asia and Africa, and finally, against our best wishes, leaped across the wide ocean to Cuba and is fermenting all over Latin America.

And in the meantime American productivity is growing at an astonishing rate, but the market in the world is narrowing. We can't sell goods to Russia, to Eastern Europe, or to China except on a quid pro quo basis. You can't sell goods to Europe except on an exchange basis. The narrowing market with the increasing production raises the question for any Marxist of a point at which overproduction, which was foreseen by Marx more than a hundred years ago, will attack all the capitalist countries, not with a depression such as we knew in 1929 until the beginning of the Second World War, but nobody knows of how great consequences. And then in the midst of this dilemma, when all the economists are scratching their heads and saying, as I read them, they are not asking when is going to come the recession, they mean the depression or the crisis, to complicate things further they have developed something new which greatly increases the productivity of the system while decreasing the manpower required: automation, or as some of the scientists want to call it, cybernation.

Automation, unemployment and the Negro riots

That is automatic machinery coupled to computers, which do the thinking and directing, displaces men faster than the increased demand for goods can keep up with. We know a few rough facts, for example, that in the coal mines two-thirds of the people who made their living traditionally by coal, as their fathers did before them and their grandfathers, two-thirds of the coal miners have been removed from the mines to make room for machines to dig coal. The same thing is happening in the packing houses, which touches me emotionally because my first job was in a packing house. All the great plants in the big centers have not been remodeled. They have just simply been torn down and moved out to the centers where the cattle are fattened, where they are processed by automated plants, and probably a half of the packing house workers, skilled, semiskilled, and half-skilled, are roaming the streets of their old haunts without jobs, without a chance to get them.

Already we have an increasing unemployment. They say five million, but the true figure is probably ten million, as all the honest experts tell you, because the other five million consists of people who've quit looking for jobs. Five million are those who have registered. I've read in a dozen places, I'm not an expert on the question, but I've been reading rather voluminously lately, in discussion with comrades, the increasing abundance of literature that's pouring out on the effectiveness of automation and cybernation. One figure that seems to be generally agreed upon is that every week 40,000 jobs are eliminated in industry right now. That's 2 million a year. And now we're reaping the full benefit of the baby boom following the First World War, and two million surplus babies have become teenagers looking for work that they can't find. And the rate of employment among young vigorous teenagers, dropouts from high school or graduates, makes no difference, who can't find jobs, and among the Negroes it runs to 30, 40 percent of young adolescents.

While the Negro people have been apparently on the surface making advances by their newfound militancy, and by the way, that's new, that's less than 10 years old, the self-assertion of the Negro people outside the framework of the ultrarespectable and reformistic National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, broken out of that in various forms, and made a few gains in a few laws, the condition of the Negro people has actually worsened year by year while they were fighting hardest, making the most apparently important gains on the legal field. And you hear about the riots in Harlem, in Brooklyn, in Rochester, Chicago, and yesterday in Philadelphia. These are riots for the most part triggered by young adolescent Negroes who have no jobs, can't find jobs. And out of their frustration and their desperation and the brutality inflicted upon them by police, they take to the streets in violent action. But they don't gain anything, or at least they haven't gained anything yet, except a promise to confer between the leaders. All the leaders of the various organizations that have sprung up within ten years are against that and try to solve it by negotiation. And they no sooner get a meeting to negotiate with the masters of what they call the power structure, which they ought to call American capitalism, in order to call things by their right name, than a riot breaks out in Philadelphia. Nobody knows where the next one will be.

The Triple Revolution and the danger of nuclear war

And the significant thing is that we are only at the beginning of the automation revolution. They just got started. And it's self-propelling and developing to the point where a group of thinkers, none of whom calls themselves socialists, financed by, and this is the magnificent irony of the whole thing, the Committee for the Study of Democratic Institutions, financed by the Ford Foundation, comes out with a document on the Triple Revolution, in which they document the strides already made by cybernation and extrapolate from that, as thinkers should, to distinguish the trend into the future. And they come to the conclusion that there's no possibility of merely assimilating the present 10 million unemployed, not to speak of the 15 million elderly people who are poor, living on the ragged edge of nothing, but that there will be so many millions more that, if they want to keep their system going, they're going to have to abandon the whole idea of wages for work performed, because there will not be sufficient work, and that they will have to introduce the system of everybody who's born into this world being entitled to compensation equivalent to a comfortable living whether he works or not. And this is the document that's been laid on the table for the consideration of the Marxists, who, I'm sorry to say, didn't think of it at first. But I would be sorrier still to say that some Marxists, because the original thinking began from other sources, were not flexible and subtle and intelligent enough to seize upon the evidence provided by them and make our own extrapolations as to what the perspective is.

Now the perspective as I see it is that this can't go on, because the cybernation or automation revolution is not merely taking place in the United States. It's already well underway in Europe and Japan and the Soviet Union. And America will, in my opinion, in the very near future run up against the fact that the world market is so flooded with goods that they'll have to slow down production. Because for some peculiar reason they don't produce goods for the fun of it. They don't produce goods for utility or for beauty or just for the hell of it. They produce goods for profit, and in order to get profit they've got to sell them. And where in the hell are they going to sell them when the market is clogged, not only by our overproduction but by that of Europe and Japan and the Soviet Union? Now I don't see any possible solution for this except a tremendous showdown, and a modification of the early formula of the socialists of the post-Marxist time who said socialism or barbarism.

Because there has been another revolution taking place alongside the automation revolution, and that's the revolution in weaponry, as the ad hoc committee calls it. That's the development of atomic, nuclear, hydrogen bombs and the means to deliver them any place on earth. You hear the proud boast of the representatives of the military and the government that we already have enough nuclear bombs and the means to deliver them any place on earth. We already have enough to kill every man, woman, and child four or five times over. That's what they call overkill. And then there's the sobering second statement: the Soviet Union's got a lot of these bombs too. And when they talk about a confrontation with the Soviet Union, they say it as if they were discussing a game of chess. I heard McNamara say, and I heard Kennedy say it before them, they said we have the means to destroy the Soviet Union and China, but they have the means to kill a hundred million Americans at the same time, within the first hour, only the first try. And I think when they say a hundred million they mean two hundred million. There exists not only the possibility but the danger, as long as American imperialism has its command of this capacity to destroy the human race, whether by direct firepower, firestorms, or by subsequent fallout of strontium 90, while they have all that, there is no security whatever in this world.

And here I would like to make a slight correction of a remark made by the speaker last night, where he spoke of the colonial revolution as the center of the international revolution. [Inaudible] he should have said "at the present moment," because the colonial revolution can't disarm the American imperialists. Neither can the Soviet Union. They can only deter them. The only ones who can disarm the American imperialists and their arsenal of death-dealing hydrogen and atomic bombs is the American working class. And if they don't do it, you're in yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly danger. Not only you, the whole world is in danger of an accident, or an insane person in one of the submarines deciding it's time to put an end to all this foolishness and to defoliate some of these jungles with a couple of nuclear weapons, which will bring retaliation, because there'd be no way of knowing who fired them and where they come from, and the world can be consumed in an atomic holocaust.

Ten years: the urgency of being a socialist

Now, how long can this last? Our international resolution, "The Dynamics of World Revolution," which is one of the very best documents of our international movement, fully worthy, in my opinion, in succession to the great documents produced by Trotsky, analyzes the whole world problem, and I think essentially correctly, and comes to the conclusion, which is obvious to any thinking person, that there cannot be any final showdown until it takes place in the United States, until the American imperialists are disarmed, and they cannot be disarmed from without, only from within. And they say that by the end of the century the American working class will complete its historic mission. Now I would like to end my preliminary summation by saying my difference with them is time. I agree with that document and I admire it enormously, but I think they are too optimistic on the time span they allow. I think it would be more realistic to say ten years, that we've got ten years in this country to decide whether this terrible risk is going to be continued or whether the American working class is going to disarm the American imperialists and scrap the nuclear weapons and clear the road for a socialist world.

And that gives, to come back to our point of departure, to a young socialist today, as different from our time of 50-odd years ago, it gives to their work a sense of urgency. When you join the socialist movement consciously and understandingly, with a knowledge of the basic premises of Marxism brought up to date and applied to these new problems, which are not fabricated by me but which are known to all or should be known to all because they're printed every day more and more, since I began to think and discuss this question a year ago with comrades in L.A., never a week goes by that we don't get some new information about some new advance of the tremendous potential of both the destructiveness of the nuclear arsenal on the one side and the increased productivity of the automated machinery at the expense of human labor power on the other, we have to come to the conclusion there's a shorter time. So that when you join the socialist movement now, you're joining the battle which in your own lifetime, not your children, not your grandchildren, but in your own lifetime and even before you reach an advanced age is going to be settled, and you have got to be the vanguard of the people that are going to settle it.

So that being a socialist becomes the central purpose of your life and your activity, and everything you do counts, however little it may signify at the moment, whether it's to write a leaflet or distribute a leaflet or to make a speech or attend a meeting or take part in a demonstration, are no less important and perhaps more important. Gather occasionally in seminars or lectures to discuss and above all to think. And in thinking, a true Marxist does not discard any element of reality. And the essence of Marxist politics is not only to begin with reality as it is, but also as it has evolved from the past and as it is evolving toward the future, and always looking to see what's new and what does it signify for us. So the essence of my presentation is, let's have a consideration, a sort of a think session among ourselves. What's new? How is it related to the past? What are we going to do about it today? And what does it signify for our own lives as young revolutionists just beginning to go into action. Thank you.

Questions and discussion

Cannon: One explanation. This is not to be confused with Jackie Gleason's coffee. This is cold tea provided for me by Rose. Any questions or discussion? Sure, take it. Good morning.

Question: What role do you foresee whites playing with regard to the next [?] Negro struggle? What role do you see whites playing in winning through this next period, and aim that 10 years from now?

Cannon: You mean the white people? Well, my opinion is the most important thing that we can do for the Negro struggle is first to put it in this general perspective and see it as a part of the American revolution and not something standing by itself separately. I think that's the first thing, to think about it as an element in the ferment-making for an American revolution of the working class as a whole. Don't forget that the Negroes are practically all workers. They're a part of the working class. Secondly, to recognize the tremendous progressive aspect of the development among the Negroes for self-identification, the attempt to throw off the restricting leadership of the conservative organizations with white philanthropists and liberals calling the shots, and developing their own organizations and their own leadership, encouraging that in every way and recognizing its progressive nature. And the third thing is to remember that our task also is to work among the white workers in defense of the Negro cause, to beat down their prejudice and convince them that the Negro struggle is an ally of the general working class movement leading to the revolution. And they must learn to cooperate.

And I foresee that the next stage of development will be the most advanced and militant Negroes forming their own organizations with their own selected leadership, and then coming to realize they can't do it all. I personally do not believe that's possible, and I think it is misleading the American Negroes to encourage them in the idea that 10 percent of the population, and you haven't got 10 percent because a tremendous percentage of the Negroes are not involved in the struggle, particularly the middle class, the petty bourgeois, professional elements, can do it all alone. They'll do it in union with the American workers and the unionists, but not as in the past, simply by joining and becoming anonymous members. I foresee a united front in which the Negroes will have their own organizations, their own leadership, and a united front with white organizations that have the same objective.

For example, I foresee in the near future the beginning of a tremendous unemployment movement. Oh my God, you've got already 10 million. In no time at all you're going to have 15 or 20 million, and they're not all Negroes. A considerable percentage, but the majority will be whites. I foresee the formation of militant unemployed organizations of white teenagers and others coming together with similar organizations of Negroes led by Negroes in the united front, to begin some action which will make these riots look like a tea party [?]. And that will only be a beginning. Then we begin banging on the doors of the unions, demanding they get into action to help. Not as the labor skates foresee it, they will set up committees to lead the unemployed. Like hell they will. The unemployed are going to lead themselves if we have anything to say about it. And we're going to force the labor unions into line, because with the increasing overproduction, the minute there's a lag in the market they'll begin closing down production, and if the lesson of the previous depression of 1929 to 1939 is any indication, they'll begin pressure on wages, one thing and another.

And these supposedly dormant, apathetic, highly contented, and immovable 17.5 million workers organized in unions are never going to move, I think is a very absurd conception. The minute the pressure begins to be put upon their living standards, they're going to begin to be responsive to action, and to the most radical action. Unless you've participated in a big spontaneous strike or two, or in a revolution such as Cubans [?], you have no idea how quickly men and women can change and become transformed in action. Everybody who writes from Cuba writes about the tremendous élan of people turning out by the million to celebrate the revolution, people who ten years ago had their backs bowed, were completely apathetic. The revolution brought them to life. I've seen that happen in more strikes than one. The just ordinary church-going workers who just went along taking the guff from day to day and year to year until something finally sparked. They cut wages once too often, or they got a little too tough in one department and a group started a strike and it spread. And you see those workers out on the streets, and you see the Wobbly agitators who would be in there in no time at all on every freight train route leading to the city. And our strategy was to get them all in a big mass meeting first and give them a big rousing series of speeches about the necessity of fighting the whole damn system, not merely this boss or this company, but the workers themselves should rule the world. And you'd be surprised how they all responded as if they just heard a revelation.

And don't cross off 17 and a half million organized American workers. They're there. What they need is a little squeeze. And if you see any of them, give them my personal assurance the squeeze is coming. Now let's have some speeches [?] there while I catch [?] my breath. Jeff?

The church and nonviolence

Question: Well, I'm just going to ask you another question. You brought up a fact, an element of what you just said about attrition [?].

Cannon: I think personally, I want you to understand I'm not pontificating here. I'm expressing opinions in what's supposed to be a think session, and anybody's perfectly free to take a different point of view. It's a personal opinion. The church plays a different role in the Negro community than it does in other communities. The modern church in the white community is by and large a sort of social status institution. I don't think you have a great deal of religion. What you have is religiosity. People go to church because it's the proper thing to do. That's where you make contacts for business deals. It's a social center. The percentage of people that are worried about their souls, I personally think, is not so great as it used to be. But even among the poor, who are more religious than the middle class and the wealthy, even they, the people I was talking about in the strikes that I have known in the past, they were rank-and-file people who really took the church rather seriously. But people find a way of reconciling their religion to the necessities of their personal situation in the most remarkable manner. You know what the Catholic Church teaches: if thy neighbor smite thee on one cheek, turn to him the other. But Bill Haywood used to say an Irish Catholic on the picket line is worth a dozen parliamentary socialists. He forgets all about it until he's beat the hell out of as many scabs as he can handle. And then a month later he goes to confession and gets it all cleared up.

But the church among the Negro people, as one of the heritages from slavery, that's the only meeting place they had. That's their social center. That's their life. And the church plays a much bigger role among the Negro people, not so much as a religion as I would say a social center. They've got to meet somewhere. Where do they meet? They've got a church, or they've got a brotherhood of Elks or something like that, or they've got a fraternal order for providing for burial privileges, and that's about it. I mean of their own. They join unions, they're mixed up with white people. They work, they're mixed up with white people. The only place of their own is the churches.

Now I also take with a grain of salt this preachment of nonviolence. That can be partly religiously inspired and partly a protective coloration while they're weak. Even the Wobblies were nonviolent when they were in a minority. They practiced all the things, here's a remarkable thing, all the things that the civil rights movement are doing, practically, were done by the Wobblies. But they didn't preach. They just practiced. They just practiced passive resistance. But once you let them get an even break with a cop or anybody else, they forget all about that, because it was not a part of their doctrine. It was a tactic. Nonviolence as a tactic. And it's interesting to see how, through various cracks and crevices, one way or another, change and modern recognition makes its appearance. Take the difference between CORE and the NAACP. The CORE is more of an action organization than the NAACP, which doesn't take part in any actions if they can avoid it. When it gets really big enough, Roy Wilkins had to go to Birmingham to get himself arrested in order to call attention to his existence. But the job was done by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which is an action organization with a facade, whether real or protective coloration, of nonviolence. But the SNCC goes a step further. They talk of nonviolence not as a principle but as a tactic, don't they? That's a step further. And you'll soon have developing among the Negro people, especially among the youth, a more deliberate policy: be nonviolent while you're in a minority, but when you get a chance, put in a few licks. That'll help. Jamie?

Influencing the nationalists

Question: I'd like to ask, how would it be possible for us in the near [?] future to influence the existing black nationalist group, or the black nationalist vanguard, for our politics from our relatively isolated position?

Cannon: That won't be easy, but you print in your paper your analysis, your thinking, not merely reporting, not merely supporting. That's not the role for Marxists. The Marxists are supposed to analyze. And I have no [inaudible] these articles of Breitman. They are read by the leaders of the nationalist movement. I personally don't like that word, nationalist. I think it's more of a convenience than anything else. I consider the so-called nationalist movement as a struggle for self-identification. They're not going to go to Africa like the Garveyites proposed, and they're not going to ask for a few million acres of desert to be turned over to them to exploit. They're going to solve their problem where the only place they can solve it, right where they are in the United States and in the great cities, and they've got to do it in cooperation with militant white workers. And we will influence it above all by our ideas. Don't forget that. Don't forget that above all our party is an action machine, it's an efficient machine, but first of all, in the tradition of Marxism, it's a thought machine. And we have to analyze every problem in the light of reality and exchange opinions with others. And it's not without significance, you know, that they read The Militant, that Malcolm X even recommends it to others. And it's not simply because we report their struggle sympathetically. It's because we have things to say that they may not have thought about yet. It's absolutely ridiculous to think that you're going to build a revolutionary movement from nothing without regard to the past. Why, God Almighty, there's over a hundred years of Marxist thought behind us. And when we draw on that, draw upon all the experience of the past and generalize from it, we not only have a tremendous advantage over other political tendencies that want to start from scratch, we also render a great service to those who are just beginning.

Transitional demands for the civil rights movement

And the first thing a young militant who suddenly decides this whole damn system has got to go, that's what the SNCC people mean when they say the power structure. This system's got to go down. They haven't learned to say the capitalist system. But when you stop to think that if the civil rights movement secured every demand so far published, the right to eat a hamburger in any greasy spoon in the country, the right to sleep in the Beverly Hills Hotel if you can pay for it, the right to ride in a bus if you got a ticket, what are a few other little things, the right to vote in the Democratic primary in the police state of Mississippi, the right to have two delegates at large in a capitalist party convention. You get all that and what do you got? The capitalists have still got all the industries. They've got all the banks. They've got the railroads. And they've got the military. So don't get overenthusiastic about the achievements of the civil rights movement. It's just getting started and feeling its way. And one of the ways it's got to feel, in my opinion, is how and under what conditions can the militant Negroes find a way to have a dignified and effective and autonomous association with white workers who want to clear this system off the face of the earth. I think that will be the beginning of wisdom.

Question: I think there are some of us who are aware of the [inaudible] capitalists. But one of the questions that I raised last night, and I'd like to get your thinking on it, is the fact that many of us recognize that we would like to have something else other than capitalists in America. But we recognize, as you mentioned, the religion of our people in the United States. We recognize that there are many, many black people who are not prepared at this time to accept a [inaudible] orientation to their problems, but who are [inaudible], and who are militants, who want action. And I think with many of us, the problem arises...

Cannon: Well, I think the comrade posed a question of tactics, that the Negro people generally are not prepared to receive the message of socialism unvarnished in its own language. It looks to me like the SNCC people are working their way around that, and they're a good example. You know, the Manifesto of the First International, written by Marx, he said he left some things out of it because the workers at that time were not yet prepared to hear it. But you work out concrete programs which lead toward it. SNCC speaks more and more about this whole power structure. This whole system has got to be changed in Mississippi and Alabama and so on. That could be a transition and programs of demands which lead toward the revolution. That's the significance of the transitional program of the Fourth International. It sets up a series of demands which correspond to the thinking of the workers at the moment and can be received by them without demanding that they join the Trotskyist party, like the slogan of the sliding scale of hours. A demand for a shorter working day is a revolutionary demand today. It can lead to other things throughout the world. One of the central problems of the revolutionary Marxists is precisely that, working out transitional demands which in themselves do not go beyond the possible acceptance of the workers at the moment, and yet inevitably lead toward a further clash, further collision.

So I would say, this is a personal opinion, I would say that the task of the civil rights movement, the militant elements, is to begin working out a series of demands that go beyond the piddling reforms so far endorsed by the NAACP and the Democratic Party and others. The people who wrote the Triple Revolution managed to put the most revolutionary demands in their document without saying a word about socialism. The demand that if you can't give people work, you've got to give them compensation. It's your responsibility. I believe if our party and the unemployed Negroes would demand, you give us either work or give us compensation fit to live on. It's a just demand. They've got money enough to do it. And it will find widespread acceptance among deprived people, and that will lead to still stiffer demands, in my opinion.

I personally am in favor of the demand of the document called the Triple Revolution, that everybody is entitled to work or compensation. And I don't mean dole or dribbles of welfare benefits that just keep you on the verge of starvation, but you're entitled to compensation to live as a human being in the present affluent society. And I would organize a big campaign around that. I think you'd find the Negroes responsive to that. They're entitled to it. They're human beings. There's plenty there. All you've got to do is count, Jesus Christ, General Motors alone made enough profits to keep half the country, half the people, living comfortably for a year. It's not unreasonable. The thing is to break out of the format of just asking for piddling things. Begin to ask for more, drastically. Demand either better places to live in or no rent until they're fixed. Well, they're approaching that with their rent strike and others. But if they got some assurance that this is a legitimate demand and that the white militants are going to support it to the hilt and are going to demand it for themselves, don't forget there's an awful lot of poor white people in this country too. They're not all in the affluent society, not by a long shot. There's plenty of ground for a united front.

"Automation is new"

While I'm at it, I want to pay a tribute to the Communist Party. The first time I've been able to do this for a long time. Going back to the central theme with which we began, that we're here to think and to discuss, not to make any decisions, just to think and discuss and see if out of the thinking and the discussion and the questioning we can come to some conclusions which will help the party to be more effective in its action and its efficiency. The latest issue of Political Affairs, that's the so-called theoretical journal of the Communist Party, has an entire edition for August devoted to the subject of automation and social change. And every article in it is a comment on the document, The Triple Revolution. And the opening editorial shows a big swing around. When this first came out, the Daily Worker printed it, and then it was followed up by a snippy sectarian article dismissing the old business as utopian and so on. They've come to realize that there's more to it than that. And their editorial beginning has the heading "Automation Is New." Now I think that's a very pregnant sentence. All of our thought about automation should be, automation is new, and it is introducing qualitative changes in the relation of the workers toward the productive process. And from that we certainly got to draw some political conclusions.

In my lectures 12 years ago in Los Angeles on America's Road to Socialism, in the latter part of the book, speaking about the socialist society, I forecast, predicted that there would be continuing improvement in the productive process, and I used the expression, which I had forgotten about until it was called to my attention the other day, that a new industrial, technological, scientific revolution will speed up the process of reducing the hours of labor time necessary for a man to produce all he needs in his lifetime, until the idea of an eight-hour day or even a four-hour day will become an absurdity. There's nothing for him to do. And people will work themselves around to the idea, as I suggested, that maybe a couple of years of work at an eight-hour day in a young man's life would be sufficient to produce all that he will need in the way of material goods for the rest of his life. And they might elect to go into labor service. Now they're drafted into military service for two years and get it over with, and spend the rest of their life in study, in music, in art, or just fooling around, whatever they want to do. They're entitled to it. They've already made their contribution to society. And I congratulate the Communist Party on recognizing the fact that [inaudible]. I predicted this under socialism.

Now the ad hoc committee on the Triple Revolution has told us that even under capitalism, without waiting for us to make the socialist revolution, there has begun a new revolution, which is even more profound, perhaps, in its significance than the original Industrial Revolution. Not merely an extension of the Industrial Revolution but a new leap of such proportions that it has to be called new, the cybernetic revolution. I'm in favor of that and all the benefits that will accrue from it, and I'm still more in favor of all our party comrades thinking about that and helping the party work out a program of demands and activities adjusted to the automation revolution. I didn't get so much, didn't I? Unless somebody wants to make a speech. Yeah, some comrades want to speak. That's good.

An auto worker on the Fremont plant

Speaker from the floor: Does everyone know that we moved a couple of the [inaudible] plants of Oakland to Fremont? And the beautiful gray plant, we call it, 4,500 people work behind those gray walls.

[Tape break]

And you walk in, it's automated. And it's going to be a new plant that will set up other new plants in other areas that are coming. Year to year they'll be building new kinds of motor plants. This is going to be sort of a model plant. And they're going to keep increasing the other ones so they can increase more automobiles without increasing the workers. As you walked into this plant, you had these air-conditioned cooling systems, beautiful air-conditioned dining rooms. You could drink your coffee out in the foyer with the beautiful sunshade. And a year ago [?], [inaudible] the workers went out on a strike. I don't think it was the air conditioning. Something was wrong anyway. This year General Motors comes out about a week and a half ago with a contract. Well, it must have been about 15 pages. [Inaudible] much better than the conditions we had. Beautiful manila envelope, but the 15-cent stamp [?]. And the workers took a 99.5 percent strike vote against the contract. The biggest General Motors strike vote we had. It used to have been in the 97, 98. [Inaudible] we had a thousand men laid off. That meant we had 2,589 people working. And out of that 2,589, there were 29 no's and 2,560 people were yes.

So, going back to automation, right immediately after the war, [inaudible] the big machine begins to drill the holes, various holes, [inaudible] pistons, [inaudible] and all you have to do is put in the fire. [Inaudible] quite a few hundred workers. Well, it continued to grow, and automobiles began to [inaudible] by a million, without increasing [inaudible] the auto industry [inaudible]. Now in this new plant, the workers took the [inaudible], it wasn't the [inaudible]. There were two things: security, job security, plus speedup. These are the two main issues. Worry about the new machines coming in. This is the metal plant. And the gentleman was talking about 10 million cars a year without increasing the manpower. Now they're going to think of building these bodies [?], well, the American Motors is doing it, but they've got something bigger than cybernation that happens already [inaudible] that they can build a whole automobile with a handful of people that'll make the mining industry look like peanuts. No, we're not joking. And this is what the workers are afraid of. So if [inaudible] doesn't get us, it's either going to be the speedup [inaudible] General Motors, or another industry which has continued this automation, cybernation, and which is a speeder [?] will kill it, or this new cybernation deal

[Tape break]

will either stop or [inaudible]. So we have nothing to lose.

The Negro question and revolutionary nationalism

And when we talk about mass unemployment, this is going to be one of them [?]. [Inaudible] is going to solve the problems of white workers and the Negro workers, and he said something about 100-some-odd years ago that the white worker himself will not be able to emancipate himself if the black worker is branded. Vice versa. Didn't you have your hand up then?

Speaker from the floor: Well, I've been [inaudible] and I heard a lot about, when I was in the [inaudible], I heard a lot about the, you probably don't know, there's a [inaudible] action in the revolution and there's conflict between the two, and there's a shifting in the thinking of many, many black people on this. I wish at this time someone could tell me what the [inaudible] movement, or the social purpose part of it. [Inaudible] the Cuban revolution, the revolution in China, and what is the difference between a [inaudible] guy and a [inaudible] guy. I wish someone here did it. I've heard a lot about it but I really don't understand it. I'm here to [inaudible]. I appreciate it very much.

Cannon: Yeah, let's take that under another head sometime. [Inaudible] that kind of question. We can have a [inaudible]. We'll schedule a seminar just on that point.

Speaker from the floor: I'd like to speak on the question of revolutionary nationalism and [inaudible] nationalism.

Cannon [?]: I'm glad to hear that, because this indicates that nationalists themselves recognize that this process of differentiation is taking place. And I would like to add that to the list of things that are new and worthy of our consideration, and worthy of our attention on the discussion level.

Speaker from the floor: I think, and I want to expose this right now, I think that revolutionary nationalism is a contradiction in terms, in essence, and that the revolutionary nationalists themselves are going to discover this very, very quickly. And I'm confident in this because they recognize themselves as Marxist-Leninists. And I would like to emphasize the necessity, or at least pose as a possibility, that black nationalists, especially, I hope you don't take offense if I call you [inaudible], it is his personal responsibility to encourage other black national leaders, black revolutionary leaders, to consider their role as leaders of a total revolution, and particularly the American revolution. Now I do accept leaping over a stage, but Marxist-Leninists have to do this in their minds in order to play the kind of role, not only for the Black Revolution but the American Revolution, which really means the world revolution. And I'm delighted to hear that black nationalists in response to the civil rights revolution [?] can move so rapidly to this point in all the results of only American revolution [?].

[Inaudible: a remark about being heard] I can pick it up if you speak fairly loudly. I got everything except when you turn over that direction.

Speaker from the floor: On the live point of business [?], he was speaking out of City College of San Francisco, and he made a statement when he began, "Black nationalism today is revolutionary internationalism." I'm sure he agrees that you're here. What I wanted to talk about was in the labor movement today. There are some questions that I think are very important, and if Jim wants to comment on this, I hope he will. The effect of automation on many industries, and the use by the employer to split and divide the working class, is creating a section of skilled workers which aren't just an aristocracy of labor in the old sense, but a real solid, rigid group of workers who are defending their privileges and shifting [?] their lives.