What Next? Political Implications of the Triple Revolution Manifesto and a Practical Program

A document from the other side of the fence

Chair: ... the discussion on the Triple Revolution formally, so far as this West Coast Vacation School is concerned, though I have no doubt that it will also enter into the discussions tomorrow on the Negro revolution, because that constitutes one third and perhaps more of the Triple Revolution. The speaker tonight, summarizing the discussion of today, is James P. Cannon, national chairman of the Socialist Workers Party, a founding member of the IWW, a founding member of the Communist Party of America, a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party. He spent many long years in the labor movement as a union organizer and as a socialist agitator, propagandist, teacher, and writer. The title of his presentation tonight is "What Next? Political Implications and a Practical Program for Action That Flows from the Triple Revolution Manifesto." That is certainly a mouth-filling title, and what we are about to hear will fill our minds and serve to instruct us in the future. James P. Cannon.

Cannon: After such a flattering introduction, I can hardly wait to hear what I'm going to say. But being an Irishman, I know that it's loaded with a lot of blarney. Although we like to hear it, we don't take it too seriously, because we feel he meant at least 10 percent.

Now, the document under discussion today, introduced by Mr. Worthy [?] this morning, which most of you have read, I assume, by now, is in my opinion perhaps the most important new contribution to social thought that's been made this year and perhaps for several years in this country. It's all the more significant and, in my opinion, all the more effective and useful because of its source. This devastating indictment of the social system as it operates in America today did not come from a group of disgruntled radicals, revolutionists, but from a group of thinkers who wrote it for the benefit of the rulers of this country, calling their attention to some facts which they had digested and analyzed, and explaining to them that something would have to be done, far more seriously and of a far more thoroughgoing nature than they had even contemplated yet. While they were the real bosses of the country, they were so busy counting their extra profits they had forgotten to ask themselves the old question that the alarmist politicians used to ask: whither are we drifting? But the men who assembled at Santa Barbara, in our own state, in that rich man's town, in plush quarters, assembled and, you might say, computerized some of the facts and gave them a terrible-looking tape.

Just because of its origin in Santa Barbara, at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which is a highly respected subordinate branch of the Fund for the Republic, it has already been widely publicized and its central theme has not been missed by anybody. Its central theme is that it is necessary to change the value standards of modern society as a result of the multiplied productivity of modern production made possible by automation linked to computers, which they call the cybernetic revolution. Its central theme is that the old Protestant ethic of income only for work, productive work performed, must give way to the right of every citizen to an adequate income, because work for all cannot be provided no matter what they do, and the possibility of employing people in a given number grows less as the computers are multiplied and made more efficient and labor is displaced.

The Triple Revolution Manifesto is a warning from inside their house that if they do not change their standard of value, if they do not recognize that the people displaced by automation are entitled to compensation sufficient to assure a decent living, they are headed for a crisis of chaos and disorder. Those are the words of the scholars, not those of a soapbox agitator from the IWW. Those are the words of the scholars who were working, I'm happy to say, at the expense of an institution paid for out of funds left by the late Henry Ford, and that proves something to me. That proves that Ford's worth more dead than alive.

Now what should we, radicals, revolutionists, and fighters for the rights of Negroes in the human rights movement, what should we do with this document that has been prepared from the other side of the fence, so to speak? I say we should grasp it with both hands without any further delay and put it to our own uses. And that goes not only for the party that I represent. I think it applies equally to the Negro movement, which has reached a point in its development where it has either got to do some more thinking for itself or appropriate some of the thinking of others, as I am proposing we do. And these others are the signers of the document on the Triple Revolution.

Taking what is good wherever we find it

It doesn't come easy for American radicals to take ideas from other people. There's a certain traditional conservatism which goes by the name of sectarianism. By the way, sectarianism is often misunderstood. A lot of people think it means extreme radicalism. I had a talk with Comrade Trotsky once about that. I recall that Lenin had said that ultra-leftism is just the other side of the coin from opportunism. Trotsky was asking me to stop over in England on the way to the World Congress in 1938, where they had four different groups calling themselves Trotskyists, and asked me to see if I could use my good offices to effect a unification among them, at least long enough to have them send a united delegation to the founding congress of the Fourth International. And I had been reading some of their literature, and I said to Comrade Trotsky, "You know, I get the impression that all these groups are afflicted with the traditional sectarian sickness of British radicalism, and it's a conservative sectarianism."

And he answered me quite abruptly. He said, "Well, you know, it's very hard to find a revolutionary sectarian. Why, we used to be so damn radical in this country that before the First World War, along about 1912 or '13, when Victor Berger, the reformist socialist from Milwaukee, was elected as the first socialist congressman, one of his first actions was to introduce a bill for old-age pensions. And the left wing of the Socialist Party and the IWW denounced this at the top of their voices as nothing but a damn reform, and we wouldn't take anything less than the whole socialist package. Even the great Bill Haywood himself wrote an article in the International Socialist Review with the heading 'Against Old Age Pensions.'" I wouldn't dare to show an article like that to a recipient of Social Security today.

Do you know that the American Federation of Labor, under the philosophy of Gompers and later of William Green, had a schematic conception that the government should keep out of the relations between the unions and the employers altogether? And that when the terrible crisis of 1929 and the '30s broke out and a demand began to be made for unemployment insurance, by this time by the radicals who'd learned a little something, it was officially opposed by William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor, on the ground that that would mean government interference in what should be the free play of collective bargaining between helpless unions and all-powerful bosses. I have not yet heard, and I don't think there is one case on record, of a member of the AFL-CIO today who has not only refused to take his unemployment check, but who's been five minutes late to collect it. I don't think so. We've learned a little.

And we've got to learn to take what's good wherever we can find it. That's one of the things that we learn from Lenin, one of the many things. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks took over the government of Russia, they represented the majority of the working class organized in the Soviets, but they needed the support of the peasantry, which was the overwhelming majority of the country. I will just quote directly from a remark made by Trotsky in an article he wrote in 1923. He said, "Bolshevism began with the program of the restitution of bits of land to the peasants, replaced this program with that of nationalization, and then made the agrarian program of the Social Revolutionists its own in 1917." The party of the Social Revolutionists was the peasant party, bitterly opposed to the Bolsheviks. And the Bolsheviks took their land program and put it into law as a decree. And the Social Revolutionary politicians howled bloody murder: "You're stealing our program." And Lenin, who with all of his other great merits had a sense of humor, answered them with a straight face but a twinkle in his eye. He said, "Did we ever promise that if you had anything good we wouldn't take it?" So that's our precedent, so to speak, for appropriating the program of the Triple Revolution.

The richest country and the most insecure

Now I think you've been told before, and you've read, if you read anything that's published in this country, that we are the richest country in the world. And you know from all the evidence around you every day, brought to a focus by the two conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties, that we're not only the richest country in the world but we're also the most conservative country. But this document on the Triple Revolution reminds us of what some of us had already known: that there's a terrible instability about this rich and powerful country. A terrible feeling of insecurity and fear on every side, not only among the poor, not only among the workers who've got jobs, but also among those who've got money and are afraid they're not going to be able to keep it. That's the real motive force behind the Goldwater movement: fear, insecurity. They've got more money than they can count, but they want to make sure they can keep it all. So they want to abolish the income tax, cut government spending, do away with public welfare and all the rest that cost money, out of fear for the future.

We had a film here, was it last night or the night before, a film on the results of automation, taken not yesterday but seven years ago, 1957. There was an hour-long film presided over by Edward R. Murrow, showing scenes of the automatic processes in bakeries and other industries. They showed, I think, two meetings. One was a meeting of bakers, after he had shown us a bake shop with loaves of dough coming down on two endless rivers of a moving belt, moving from the origin place without a human intervention anywhere, down to the ovens and then coming out baked as bread. And there was a meeting of union bakers discussing that. And they were not children. They looked like substantial men of families, of 40 and 50, and they were discussing what is this going to do to us. There's one thing you could see on the faces of all these men who in the prime of life ought to be the picture of confidence and optimism: fear was on every face. And everyone who spoke up at the meeting wondered what's going to happen to us if we lose our jobs, our seniority, and our medical benefits, and our pension rights, and so on. And the same thing was repeated in a meeting of auto workers on the same theme. And that was seven years ago, when the cybernation revolution was just trying out its wings for the first time.

Since then it has moved at an accelerated speed, and you can imagine from the facts and the figures which are given to us by the authors of the Triple Revolution Manifesto how the men in the shops with jobs and seniority rights, how secure they feel and how happy and contented they may be. Then we heard our comrade speak the other day, when we were talking about the state of the unions, how the man in his shop at Chevrolet had voted 98 or 99.5 percent for strike. They got jobs. They're privileged in comparison to the unemployed. They got seniority. They got pension rights, medical benefits. And yet they are so dissatisfied that they were angry at the union for calling for a showdown first with Chrysler. They wanted a strike in Chevrolet first. And the Ford workers voted almost exactly by the same percentage to be the first to go out on strike. In this richest country in the world, where they tell us everybody ought to be happy.

Another important document contributed to social thought in the past year has been the book written by Michael Harrington, a social democrat, former social worker, called The Other America, a study of poverty in America. I've been reading that book the last month very closely and attentively, and it's a harrowing revelation. He gives the government figures upside down, cross-checked, and proved in every other way, that at least 25 percent of the population of this richest country in the world live below the poverty level. That means about 40, 45 million people in this rich and powerful country. Forty-five million human beings that America has not provided a decent existence for. It's the old and the sick and the young and the unemployed.

Now we have the figures on unemployment given to us. We've got two sets of figures. One is the official government set, which says the rate of employment is about 5 percent, hovering around that, a little above and below, in a period of boom. And the authors of the Triple Revolution say, not in my language but in their own polite academic language, that's all a damn lie. The rate is not 5 percent, it's closer to 10 percent, because the government figures include only those who are registered in applying for work. And there are at least the same number who have gotten tired of looking for work, have given up and quit. And they're not only taken off the payrolls of the factories, they're even taken off the list of the unemployed. They're the forgotten people.

The projection of these figures in the document on the Triple Revolution shows that this is going to mount, allowing for what I consider the impossible, allowing the present industrial boom to continue or even go a little higher, that the number of jobs eliminated by cybernation on the one side and the oversupply of products of the baby boom of the first postwar years coming into the market is going to add anywhere from 2 to 3 million to the unemployed list every year. This is only 1964. Where are we going to be in 1970, if we live that long? With maybe a couple of million more added every year to the unemployment list, or the unemployment slag heap, as some call it. And if, what is far more likely, in view of the fact that Europe and Japan are also increasing their productivity through automation and cybernation, and that the world market competition gets more severe and America can't sell its goods abroad as freely as it has in the postwar years, they run into a recession or a depression, whatever they want to call it, and have to close down some of their production, you're going to have a tremendous reservoir of millions and millions and millions of people without prospect, without hope.

The authors of this document, gentlemen and scholars as they are, go so far as to say that all the talk about creating new jobs is a cruel hoax; that they're not creating new jobs. On the contrary, they're cutting out more jobs all the time.

Unity of the oppressed, not racial conflict

Now I see this seething mass not as a number of figures in a government statistic but as a mass of human misery and frustration and desperation and anger that's going to look for some kind of action, some kind of solution. And there you have the raw material ready to hand either for a fascist movement led by some demagogue who will promise them anything they want, or a revolutionary movement that will offer them a realistic program of struggle to change things fundamentally. And I see, in the fact that this development of the productive system at the expense of the employment of workers hits the Negroes twice as hard as it hits the whites, in the anger, in the protests, the frustration, and even the desperation that rises out of these terrible ghettos, I can see the danger of a racial conflict which will be completely destructive all the way around. And I take it to be one of our central tasks as Marxists to strive with all our might to see that the movement of protest takes a different direction, the direction of unity of the oppressed Negroes and the unemployed and oppressed white people in a common battle, and not in a racial conflict.

Now, brotherhood has been preached, I guess, for at least 2,000 years, but I don't know much brotherhood that's ever been achieved that way. You hear every pompous politician, even including Barry Goldwater, say the way to end the racial conflict is to bring about a change in the hearts of men. Try that on a Kluxer [?] or a cracker. Try changing the heart of people who profit by the superexploitation of the Negroes. It doesn't work that way. But brotherhood has existed in this world. You see it whenever you're out on the picket line. You see brothers who may not like each other very well in the shop, but when they're out on the picket line protecting their jobs and their welfare against scabs, they work together in great shape. The basis for unity in action, the basis for brotherhood, if you want to extend it to its ultimate extreme, is common interest and common need. And when you have that, you've got something to go on.

This was illustrated for me very graphically by a story told me by Herbie Hill, the labor secretary of the NAACP. He was down in Birmingham at the time of the big struggles there, investigating particularly the state of the unions and how the Negroes were represented in the different unions, and he said he discovered that the most desegregated union in Birmingham, where the Negroes were employed most freely and on equal terms, was the Brotherhood of Teamsters. And he went to see the head business agent and he asked him, "How come that you, different from some other unions here, don't discriminate against Negroes?" He said, "Well, I'll tell you, boy." Now this is my language I'm quoting literally. He said, "We ain't Negroes, but when we fight these goddamn bosses we need all the muscle we can get, and some of these black boys have sure got it."

He told me another story along the same line, almost, of a big husky Negro steelworker just coming off a hard day's work, getting on a bus and plopping himself down in the front seat. And the bus driver turned to him and he said, "Now listen, boy, be reasonable. Let's not have any trouble. Go to the back of the bus." And the Negro steelworker just stood up to his full height and looked down at the bus driver and he said, "Boy, let me tell you something. I ain't one of these peace-loving Negroes you've been hearing about." And the bus driver pushed down the button and the bus rolled on.

Now I say the basis for brotherhood, or at least for cooperation, for alliance, for united action, is common interest and common need, and I think that obtains among the great bulk of the white workers, especially the unemployed and the poor and the lower rungs at least of the workers in the unions, and they number many millions. While this is somewhat of an intrusion on the subject of tomorrow, it's covered in the Triple Revolution as one element of it, the struggle for human rights. I'm a firm believer in the idea, not only a believer, I'm convinced in my knowledge, that all whites are not the same, and that there's a great deal of difference between a man who is walking home with his last unemployment check in his pocket and the owner of the plant that laid him off, and a distinction ought to be made between them. There's a common interest with one; there's eternal enmity for the other.

The labor movement has not been written off

Now it's become rather commonplace nowadays for some people to cross off the American labor movement with its 17 and a half million members. I just read a piece the other day that just ruled that out of order. They don't count. They're conservative, contented, privileged. They're never going to do anything. I say those who doubt the capacity of the American workers to play their historic role in the great social struggles yet to come ought to remember or read about the '30s and the '20s. We went through a prolonged boom in the '20s, when throughout the entire postwar period after the First World War, with the exception of a recession in 1921, which was soon overcome, up till 1929 there was a booming economy, and the unions actually declined in membership. There wasn't a trace of militancy except in the depressed industries like textile and some parts of the coal field. And a lot of people were saying the same thing then: you've got to write off the working class. And as a matter of fact, the unions didn't extend into the basic industries at all. They were restricted only to a narrow fringe of skilled craftsmen, for the most part. And even in Minneapolis, union building tradesmen had to sit by and see the two biggest downtown buildings going up, built by nonunion labor. It was pretty hard to be a revolutionary communist in those days. It's pretty hard to go up against the general feeling of passivity and against the people continually saying the workers will never do anything. They'll never rise.

Until came the depression of 1929. I think you've all heard about that. You probably got scars from it somewhere, you or your family. That depression lasted, with slight upturns, for ten years. But that depression hit a working class that was not organized in a single one of the basic industries. The only unions they had were company unions. That is, unions organized by the company with their own stooges in charge of them. A cruel hoax that the workers hated worse than no union at all. The workers were completely unorganized and atomized, and it took them five or six years, and it took an upturn in the economy when a number of them got back into the plants, before they could begin to manifest a little fighting spirit. In the meantime, wages had been slashed mercilessly by the bosses. They went back to jobs at miserable wages and intolerable conditions.

And then in 1934 a few things began to happen. There were sporadic strikes around the country which were smashed. The regular formula was to call out a lot of hoodlums, cops, militiamen, detectives, whatever they needed, club a couple of hundred strikers, kill a few of them, break the strike. Until the Autolite strike in Toledo in the spring of '34, led by the Musteites, a radical political organization, who were also the leaders of an unemployment movement, the Unemployed Leagues, which they brought into cooperation with the pickets of the plants. And a strike was won by militant action. And then the Minneapolis strikes in 1934. And then at the same time the general strike in San Francisco, spearheaded by the maritime workers, which shook this country, because these were three militant strikes that weren't broken but were won. And I read the other day in a biography of John L. Lewis, I think it's by Saul Alinsky, who said that John L. Lewis noticed these three strikes and saw in them a future trend, and that that influenced him greatly towards throwing his support towards the Committee for Industrial Organization that later became the CIO. And from that beginning mushroomed the uprising of the workers, which culminated in the sit-down strikes in 1936, '37, '38, rubber, steel, auto, and finally in 1941 the organization of the Ford plant and the solid construction of the CIO. I've always called the rise of the CIO a semi-revolution. If there had been adequate leadership, nobody knows where it might have ended.

Who will spark the next upsurge?

Now, who's going to spark it? I just simply discount the idea that the workers will not move if the squeeze is put on them. In the long drawn-out postwar boom since World War II, propped up by enormous military expenditures, foreign loans, and other government spending, you know the 50 million odd dollar military budget is the real cushion upon which the whole economy rests. If disarmament were declared tomorrow and they stopped spending money for military preparations, there would be the biggest crisis in history. Now, in the light of the material given to us in this document on the Triple Revolution, where they predict chaos and turmoil unless people are provided with compensation where they can't be provided with jobs, I think it's fitting for us who try to think about social problems, and try by our thinking and our actions to influence the course of development, to ask who will spark the next upsurge of the American working class as a whole.

My personal opinion is that it will take a somewhat different direction than it did in the '30s. That it is quite likely, as a matter of fact I think almost certainly, going to begin with the organization of the unemployed. You can't have 10 million people out of work month after month and year after year, and then their number increasing one, two, or three million every year, without somebody deciding to do something about it. And the obvious thing will be to organize the unemployed, as attempts were made in the '30s. There was one unemployment council movement led by the Communist Party. There was another big Unemployed League movement led by the Musteites. There was a third unemployed organization led by the Socialist Party people. And here is a peculiar phenomenon that maybe many of you have forgotten or haven't heard: that many of the young firebrands who went into this unemployed movement were college students who had graduated or dropped out with no place to go, no jobs in sight, who went into the unemployment movement, and there, under the direction of the various political organizations, learned how to organize, learned how to talk, learned how to conduct themselves in meetings, learned how to act as leaders. And then later, when the industrial rise took place in the mid-'30s under the pump priming of the New Deal, when the factories began to open, these same young college boys, many of them, scores and hundreds of them, went into the factories and became the prime movers of the CIO.

Now I think they'll do something like that again this time. That the unemployment movement of the '30s will be repeated on a greatly magnified scale. I don't see any reason today, right today, why in Harlem and other ghettos, where 50 percent of the teenage youth are unemployed according to the figures given from many sources, where the rate of employment among the Negro adults is twice that of the whites, where they live in these overcrowded, rat-infested houses that are ready to fall apart and are so cramped and miserable that they go out on the streets because it's more comfortable to stand on the street corner than to stay in the house, I can't see any reason why they don't begin right away organizing something more than the mere demand for civil rights, which formally has been granted, while their economic conditions have been deteriorating year by year, in the whole period since 1956, since the civil rights movement began to develop following the Montgomery boycott. This is the terrible, crying, brutal paradox: that the more militant the Negroes have become, the more they have organized, the more they have asserted themselves, and the more legal gains they have made, the worse has become their economic condition, year by year. That's what's behind these flare-ups, which are simply lightning flashes, heat lightning signifying greater storms.

I can't see why they don't start organizing. And I don't see why there should be any conflict between Negroes and whites. The whites have got to recognize once for all that the Negro people are fed up with the traditional system of organizations dominated by white liberals. They want to have their own organizations and they want to have their own leaders, and if we're going to have any cooperation between them and white workers we've got to recognize that trend and say it's progressive. I think they make a certain mistake. They've been terribly disillusioned and let down by the white liberals who are on hand everywhere calling all the shots until trouble starts, and then ducking out or saying you're going too far. And they tend to judge, I guess, all white people by the white liberals. But you know, Heywood Broun, who got into the labor movement in the '30s, helped a lot. The founder, I guess you could call him, of the Newspaper Guild, a great help to the CIO unions wherever they were in trouble. He gave a definition of a liberal, I think, that's going to stick forever. He said a liberal is a man who reaches for his hat when the fight starts. Now I think it's a good thing if the Negro people have learned that and get disillusioned with them and build their own organizations, beginning, I think, with the natural, logical, wide-open field for them, which is the unemployment movement. I don't see why they can't organize it from block to block in Harlem.

A transitional program: jobs or compensation

And here I come to a disagreement with a minor point in the manifesto on the Triple Revolution. Among the other things they suggest, without realizing what they were doing, they suggested that the trade union leaders should interest themselves in the unemployment question and negotiate for them. I say that's about the worst thing that could happen to the unemployed. All the negotiating that the labor skates will do for the unemployed is to negotiate them out of the plant to make room for the seniority men. That's what they do in every contract. Every contract that's hailed as a great innovation, beginning with the longshore contract to the steel contract and other places, is an agreement to safeguard the jobs of seniority men at the expense of the younger, the newer, the poorer.

I saw Reuther on the film, this was seven years ago, this automation film, and he was pontificating in an interview with the Admiral [?] about automation. He didn't seem to have a line of worry on his face. He looked well padded, well groomed, his hair all in order with his greasy kid stuff. And he was talking like a business executive. He's saying something has got to be done, labor, management, and government have got to get together and work out something. That's seven years ago. They haven't worked out anything yet. And they never will. The unemployed have got to have their own autonomous organizations.

And then the question arises immediately, we're going to take a hand in this, I hope: what can be the program of the first unemployment organizations? I know the workers of America are not ready to hear the full socialist message, and those comrades in our own ranks of a sectarian bent who answer the arguments of the Triple Revolution by saying nothing will do any good but socialism haven't got anything to say to the worker who isn't ready to hear the socialist program. What we have got to find is what Trotsky called a transitional program that will correspond to their present understanding and their present acceptance. And I think the program outlined in the Triple Revolution, that everyone is entitled to work or compensation, will be accepted generally by workers, both black and white, if they're unemployed. I don't think you'll find many that are the least bit worried about somebody calling it a dole. This is not a dole. This is payment for the fact that you're a citizen of this country and that you've got a right to live. It's not a beggar's dole. It's a human right.

And the demonstrations for jobs, it's like pounding your face against a stone wall when you know and they know and everybody knows there are no jobs. They've got to say jobs or compensation. That's the way it's got to be formulated. And if they answer, how can we give you compensation if you don't produce anything, we say, all right, give us jobs. All right, we can't give you jobs. Well, what do you want us to do? We're human beings. We're citizens of this great free country. Now let's have a slice of some of the benefits. You've got plenty of money. Take it out of General Motors profits. Cut $20 million out of your military budget and spend it on maintaining the human rights and human dignity of your unemployed citizens thrown out of your factories. Or let the moon alone for a while and spend $20 million making the earth get delivered [?]. Why, the organizers and agitators of the unemployment movement under this transitional program have an irresistible argument that will be accepted by the intelligent workers everywhere and for which the bosses can't give much of an answer.

Ever since this document was published nearly six months ago, they have been repeatedly commenting on it, but I have never seen anywhere any serious attempt to refute it, not even this latest article in Life magazine. It's been more widely circulated than you realize. Advertising Age, which is an organ of big business, reprinted the thing entirely and even went so far as to provide the type for this pamphlet we have here. The business community has heard all about this. And I think they're waiting to see what the workers are going to do about it, especially the unemployed workers.

The Freedom School convention in Mississippi

Now, when I agreed to give this speech a week or ten days ago, I knew that I was going to say that this program should be adopted by our party and by other radical organizations and by the Negro movement. Because I sense a great stalemate in the Negro movement. That their program is too limited for the needs. They have got to adopt a social program. It doesn't do the Negroes huddled in this horrible ghetto much good to tell them we're out fighting like hell to get you the right to vote, which they've had for years in New York, or the right to desegregate schools, which they know is not going to be done, and the right to eat a hamburger in a greasy restaurant. What they want is jobs. They want to make a living, or they want to live somehow. The trouble with the Negro population of this country is not merely discrimination, although that's terrible. The trouble with them is what George Bernard Shaw said many years ago: the trouble with the poor is their poverty, and the trouble with the rich is their uselessness. And I think that the Negro organizations have got to turn their attention toward developing a social program.

And I was going to let it go at that, my first thoughts, until I picked up last week's Militant. And after reading that, I must make a slight correction. I have not seen in any organization in the labor movement or the Negro movement or the radical movement anywhere an outright editorial statement supporting the Triple Revolution's program. Then I picked up last week's Militant, and here's what I read. Under a dateline of all places, Meridian, Mississippi: "A Freedom School Convention assembled here August 6th to 8th. The delegates to the convention, most certainly the first of its kind in Mississippi, and for that matter in any state of the South," listen, "were teenage Negro Freedom School students." They came to a convention in Meridian, Mississippi, where the three civil rights fighters were murdered. And following that they assembled in a Freedom convention, and what do you think they adopted as one of the resolutions? Just listen to this. "Among the significant demands raised by the convention were a public works program on the one hand and," quote, "a guaranteed income of at least $3,000 annually for every citizen." Here in Meridian, Mississippi, teenage Negro children have put themselves at the very head of the entire humanistic movement of America as the first to raise a specific demand for a guaranteed annual income for every citizen.

And further support to labor was indicated in the following plan. Quote: "We will encourage and support more strikes for better jobs and adequate pay. During the strikes the employer should be enjoined from having others replace the striking workers." Now there's a hit and a miss. One, they're for strikes and support of strikes, and they don't specify only strikes involving Negroes. It's strikes involving workers, both white and black. That's a hit. The miss is, in my opinion, where they say the employer should be enjoined from having others replace the striking workers. That is, they should get a court injunction. I know a better way. Just get some colored men with muscle from the Teamsters Union in Birmingham and some Irish Catholics who've forgotten their religion for the moment and put them on a picket line. That's the way to keep scabs out of a plant. Mass picketing.

But I salute these young teenagers who have adopted for the first time a social program which I am convinced is going to be the transitional program of the entire movement of the disinherited in this country. The transitional program of the demand for either jobs or compensation. And the very fact that they come out in support of strikes without specifying the color of the people involved shows they're reaching out for allies among the white working class, and God knows they need them.

Allies: the lesson of the Russian Revolution

Minorities have played great roles in revolutions in the past, but they haven't always won. They've won in those cases where they recognize the need for allies. Now everybody knows that the greatest revolution in history was made in Russia in the name of the working class in 1917, but not everybody knows that the total number of industrial workers in Russia in 1917 was less than 3 million. Three million industrial workers in a sea of peasants, about 150 million at the time. Now how did they overcome this terrible disparity? They didn't do it by fighting the peasants. They did it by seeking an alliance with them. They needed allies, and they offered to the peasants, if you come with us in the revolution, you can take that land you're working for the landlord and chase him to hell off of there. Their great slogans that they rallied them with were peace, bread, land, something everybody understood. And when foreign intervention came and the White Guards tried counterrevolution and they had to organize a huge army to beat off the invaders from many of the imperialist nations and the White Guards at the same time, they did it with an army primarily of peasants, because the peasants were given something to fight for, the land and the promise of peace, when they chased off the White Guards, which they did eventually, although it took them four years to do it.

Lenin's genius didn't confine itself to accepting the Social Revolutionaries' land program in order to win the alliance with the peasants. He brought forward his program about the rights of nationalities to self-determination. He recognized there's such a thing as a national spirit among the many countries that had been absorbed and assimilated in the old Russian Empire, and they proclaimed the right of self-determination. They could decide for themselves whether or not they would come into the Soviet Union, and by the very fact of offering that to them they made allies out of them. And with such allies, the peasants, the oppressed nationalities, and the petty bourgeoisie in the towns and the intellectuals, by offering something to them and inviting them to collaboration, they turned the minority of three million workers into a majority that was able to carry through the revolution and to reorganize the whole social system from top to bottom.

Now, the demand for jobs or compensation, not a dole but, as they say in Meridian, Mississippi, $3,000 a year for every citizen who is unemployed, is a political demand. It's not to be addressed to some corner supermarket or some used car lot, demanding they put on another salesman or two. It's a political demand addressed by mass demonstrations before the political institutions of the country: the city hall, the state capitals, and the national capital in Washington.

Who will lead?

I'm not much of a utopian or given to indulging in mistaking wishes for possibilities, but I can foresee a great mass of unemployed Negroes marching out of Harlem to meet a similar mass of unemployed whites and march together, each under its own leadership, down to the city hall to tell the mayor they want jobs or compensation. I can see great marches up to the capital of the state of New York in Albany and marches to Washington. And out of demonstrations of that kind, not only will there be a great proliferation of militancy and confidence, but there will come a spirit of solidarity based on common interests and common needs that will bind the Negro and white workers together, not in the name of an empty formula, but in the name of necessity to protect each other. I can foresee that movement knocking on the doors of the union offices and the union meeting halls and asking the organized workers on the job to lend their support to this demand. And I can see great masses of employed union workers saying, well, it's a damn good idea. I'd like to see that done. I'll vote for it. If I lose my job tomorrow, I'd like to step into a situation where I can get compensation. And not merely limited to half pay on unemployment insurance, which runs out in six months and then leaves me hungry, but as a matter of right as a citizen.

There's the basis there. I don't say it's going to be realized in one jump, but there's the basis of common interest between the employed and the unemployed. The unemployed have got nothing whatever to lose by supporting such a thing as that. They can see a mutual benefit in it. And what we're looking for, of course, out of all of this is where can we get a mass movement started on the way to do a much more complete job than merely providing compensation. And who will lead it? Who will lead this movement? Well, I say those will lead who can. Those will lead who think. Those will lead who see what's new in the situation and what it portends for the future and are able to learn and to change and to adapt themselves to new conditions and new possibilities.

I have followed very attentively the evolution of Malcolm X from his previous position, after his visit to Africa, his consultation with various leaders there and his own experience: a change from withdrawal, sectarian religious withdrawal from the mass movement, to a proposal that all Negro organizations cooperate. To the statement that he's not against white people as such, he's just against the white people that are on his back. His declaration that this is an international struggle, and he's trying to enlist the support of the African nations to bring the scandal of discrimination against American Negroes before the United Nations. A man who's capable of learning and changing is capable of learning more and changing more. And that has to apply to us too. We've got to learn and to change, and to hope that by the exchange of ideas and experiences among all people who've got bitter grievances against this system will come out a common program, a common program that will bind us all together into a great invincible force.

The transitional program of compensation as a citizen will lead to stronger demands as gains are made. And with each advance, confidence in the masses will grow and things will begin to be called by their right names, which you don't hear now in this present atmosphere of conservative fear and insecurity. The word social revolution will be uttered and will resound in this country and be spoken out loud, and the word socialism, which you hear all over Africa and Asia today, will be heard in the streets of America. It will ring out like the old Liberty Bell in Philadelphia on the first Fourth of July, with its clamor to proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all inhabitants thereof. And the movement rallied around such words as social revolution and socialism will learn to sing again. And that'll be the sign that it's coming alive and that it's young and confident of its future.

And won't it be wonderful to be alive and to be young in that day? I think of the words of Wordsworth the poet about the first days of the great French Revolution, which began the change of the world, the downfall of the old outlived feudal system. He said, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." And I think of the words of another noble poet of the people, I guess the poet that I love above all others, Shelley, the poet who sang of freedom and who exhorted the oppressed everywhere to rise up in unvanquishable numbers and try to give them confidence, in words that used to be quoted by an old friend of mine in the IWW named Jack White. He used to wind up his speeches with that note of confidence from Shelley:

Fear not, the tyrants shall rule forever, Nor the priests of the bloody faith. They stand on the brink of a mighty river Whose waves they have tainted with death. It is fed from the springs of a thousand dells; About them it rages and foams and swells, And their thrones and their scepters I floating see Like wrecks on the shores of eternity.

Many thrones and scepters have gone down the river of history since Shelley wrote those noble words. And some are yet to come. The biggest and heaviest and ugliest and most oppressive of all is in this country. And we should not doubt, we should not fear that this tyrant will rule forever. It will also go down on the river of history, and that will be what they call the great day in the morning. And people will really sing on the way to that day: "Ain't nobody gonna turn me around."

Close of the session

Chair: [inaudible] The usual procedure is that we have discussion, questions from the floor, but as Jim says he just about had it, and I think that unless there is some pressing reason, unless someone here needs to have his say after Jim has spoken, I think we'll dispense with that. We will continue discussion tomorrow on the Negro revolution and the civil rights movement. And I think now we can put things in order again and we can proceed to carry on the discussion privately, or if you want to talk to Jim privately. And then after an interval we will set up the screen and we will show the film Take This Hammer, which is the story of James Baldwin's visit to San Francisco when he toured the Negro ghetto in that city. It's a great film. And now we will knock off and set things in order.