Six days after the Minnesota General Strike, I sat in a chilly community center lit by fluorescent light bulbs with over fifty other Minneapolis residents. Similar gatherings took place across the Twin Cities that week. Huddled in community centers, theaters, school gymnasiums, and churches, working-class people with no experience in political activity were taking matters into their own hands.
The question of the hour was what next? How do we escalate the struggle? There was consensus in the room: the movement needed to target the big corporations that were enabling ICE to operate. Halting the operations of Target, Enterprise, Hilton, and other key employers would stop ICE in its tracks and hit these companies where it hurt: their profits.
Ideas were thrown out and their merits weighed. But the discussion kept circling back to the existential question facing the anti-ICE movement. “We all need to be swimming in the same direction, toward the same goal,” one attendee said. “We need an overall strategy,” someone else agreed. As one comrade put it, “the leadership vacuum was outrageously clear.”
That room needed someone prepared to propose a plan of action—a plan that encompassed masses of people beyond one neighborhood—and capable of linking together local efforts across the entire city. For that, you need a network of trained revolutionaries fluent in revolutionary Marxism embedded in every workplace, neighborhood, and campus. In short, the situation was screaming out for a cadre organization.
A blueprint of Bolshevik strategy
In 1902, the great revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, wrote a pamphlet titled What Is To Be Done? At the time, Marxist study circles were popping up across Russia. But they were loose, decentralized, and inexperienced in the class struggle. With remarkable clarity, Lenin saw what was holding back the movement. The solution to the problem was not an organizational or technical one, but a political and ideological one.
What was needed was a party of professional revolutionaries, thoroughly educated and armed with a consistent Marxist outlook, and tightly organized and rooted in every layer of the working class. Although the publications, parties, and people he polemicized against have long faded into irrelevance, the underlying plan of action he laid out is more relevant than ever.
In Minneapolis last month, we witnessed a high level of self-organization among the working class. To take the movement to the next level, all the countless local initiatives needed to be centralized and coordinated as part of a systematic campaign for an all-out general strike. On this basis, existing efforts could have been taken to an even higher level.
To give just one example, there’s been an outpouring of support for organizations providing food and other material support to immigrant workers and their families, unable to leave their homes for fear of being targeted by ICE. Donation centers reported being flooded with contributions. If a citywide strike headquarters were established to coordinate these efforts, it could convert scattered mutual aid into a centralized system to ensure that striking workers and their families are kept well fed and warm during a prolonged struggle.
A systematic campaign for a general strike would require orchestrating a sophisticated division of labor. This, in turn, requires motivating a staggering amount of collective effort through political clarity about the shared goal. As Lenin explains in What Is To Be Done:
In order to unite all these tiny fractions into one whole, in order not to break up the movement while breaking up its functions, and in order to imbue the people who carry out the minute functions with the conviction that their work is necessary and important, without which conviction they will never do the work, it is necessary to have a strong organization of tried revolutionaries.
What is the role of communists in a mass movement?
Lenin argued for Marxists to constantly raise the horizons of the movement, to bring out its class interests, and broaden the scope of its demands. He said every revolutionary should seek to transform themselves not into a trade union secretary but a
tribune of the people who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone.
This means bringing more than just practical proposals for escalating the movement. We must put forward a clear class perspective. Who does it benefit to keep immigrant workers terrified and precarious? The capitalist class, who make superprofits from cheap immigrant labor. Immigrant workers are scapegoated to distract from rising grocery prices, unaffordable rents, and the crushing mountain of consumer debt. Who is laying off workers and raising rents? It’s not immigrants but the billionaires—because their system is based on the relentless pursuit of profit. The US working class’s fight is against them.
As Lenin put it, Marxists must “concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a far larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent.” This struggle could have expanded far beyond Minneapolis and taken the fight for higher wages and better conditions for workers regardless of where they’re born, drawing in even wider layers of workers.
The urgent need to build the party
The experience of the Minnesota General Strike and the struggle against ICE has forged even more class fighters. The conundrum facing the working class movement is striking similar to the contradiction Lenin laid out in 1902:
The fact is that society produces very many persons fit for “the cause,” but we are unable to make use of them all. The critical, transitional state of our movement in this respect may be formulated as follows: There are no people—yet there is a mass of people.
There is no shortage of potential revolutionaries on the streets of every American city, but the majority are atomized and unorganized. They must be urgently gathered and trained. The general staff of a class struggle cannot be assembled and educated overnight. This is why we have no time to spare in recruiting and building up the RCA—the training grounds where tomorrow’s revolutionary leaders are being forged.
Fifteen years after Lenin penned What Is To Be Done?, the Bolshevik Party—a revolutionary party of exactly the sort Lenin laid out the blueprint for his pamphlet—led the Russian working class to power. All revolutionaries must familiarize themselves with this exceptionally valuable handbook for building a party capable of leading the working class to power.