Cadre Excerpts
Hammer and Hoe
Negroes Ain’t Black—But Red!: Black Communists and the Culture of Opposition...
An Invisible Army: Jobs, Relief and the Birth of a Movement......
Organize or Starve! Communists, Labor and Antiradical Violence......
Teamster Rebellion
Plan of Battle......
The Opening Wedge......
Local 574 Wins......
Reclaiming Revolution: Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM)
From “Hammer and Hoe” by Robin D. G. Kelley
Negroes Ain’t Black—But Red!: Black Communists and the Culture of Opposition, pg 92
…Alabama’s black cadre of unskilled and semiskilled industrial workers, sharecroppers, domestics and housewives had rural roots and no previous experience with radical movements…Because the movement was built from scratch by people without a Euro-American left-wing tradition, Alabama’s black cadre interpreted Communism through the lenses of their own cultural world and the international movement of which they were now a part. Far from being a slumbering mass waiting for Communist direction, black working people entered the movement with a rich culture of opposition that sometimes contradicted, sometimes reinforced the Left’s vision of class struggle. The party offered more than a vehicle for social contestation; it offered a framework for understanding the roots of poverty and racism, linked local struggles to world politics, challenged not only the hegemonic ideology of white supremacy but the petit bourgeois racial politics of the black middle class, and created an atmosphere in which ordinary people could analyze, discuss, and criticize the society in which they lived…
During a brief tour of Birmingham at the Communist Party’s invitation, radical playwright John Howard Lawson heard an “older” comrade explain to a young recruit the importance of patience, humility and study: “There ain’t one of us here was born a Communist; we learned it and it ain’t easy to learn.” The unidentified activist who caught Lawson’s attention summed up a critical (and often overlooked) component of Communist political culture. From the outset Communist organizers created educational structures to turn ordinary workers into Marxists.
An Invisible Army: Jobs, Relief and the Birth of a Movement, pg 20.
Having little faith in petitions and boycotts, Communists organized neighborhood relief committees to present their demands to the Birmingham welfare board and to deal with members’ specific grievances on an individual basis. These committees also fought evictions and foreclosures, but unlike militants in New York or Chicago, they tried to avoid confrontations with authorities by adopting more evasive tactics, ranging from flooding landlords with postcards and letters to simple reasoning. Representatives of the unemployed councils often dissuaded landlords from evicting their tenants by describing the potential devastation that could occur once an abandoned house became free-for-all or firewood. When a family’s electricity was shut off for nonpayment, activists from the unemployed council frequently used heavy-gauge copper wires as “jumpers” to appropriate electricity from public outlets or other homes. Council members also found ways to reactivate water mains after they had been turned off, though the process was more complicated than pilfering electricity. At least in once instance, a group of black women used verbal threats to stop a city employee from turning off one family’s water supplies.
…The unemployed campaign was the key to the Party’s growth and consolidation in Birmingham; by the end of 1933, the Party’s dues-paying membership in Birmingham rose to nearly five hundred, and its mass organizations encompassed possibly twice that number. The relief campaign was crucial to the formation of a local cadre, serving especially to increase the number of black female members, who often proved more militant than their male counterparts. Furthermore, the various tactics developed in the relief campaign, from open confrontation to hidden forms of resistance, would later prove invaluable to local Communists continuing their work in the mines, mills, and plantations of the black belt.
“Organize or Starve! Communists, Labor and Antiradical Violence” pg 61.
The Communists were unimpressed by the National Industry Recovery Act, arguing that it was intended to force workers into company unions. Alabama Party leaders criticized the act for not covering agricultural and domestic workers and for imposing regional wage differentials, accurately predicting that industrialists would respond by replacing black labor with whites rather than pay blacks the sanctioned minimum wage. Nonetheless, Birmingham Communists responded eagerly to the sudden surge of labor activity, and by mid-1933 organizing the unorganized replaced joblessness as their primary issue. At the CPUSA’s Extraordinary National Conference held in New York in July, delegates issued an “Open Letter to All Members of the Communist Party” calling for an intensification of trade union work. Birmingham Communists signaled the new emphasis on organized labor by holding an unemployed and trade union conference two weeks before the 1933 elections.
Although most of its organizers were arrested before the meeting began, the conference was supposed to be a forum to discuss the labor movement’s future and to develop strategies for establishing rank-and-file committees within the unions. The Party further highlighted the new line by nominating two TCI employees to run for Birmingham city commission in the 1933 elections. Mark Ellis, a young, white, trade union organizer and Communist candidate for commission president, shared the ticket with black TCI steel worker David James, who ran for associate commissioner. Their campaign platform focused mainly on building the labor movement and securing the right to organize. They continued to advocate more relief and an end to evictions of unemployed workers and vowed to cut the police budget, arguing that it would not only free money for municipal relief projects but reduce antilabor repression and police brutality throughout the city.
From “Teamster Rebellion” by Farrell Dobbs
“Plan of Battle” pg 58 & 59.
To get started in this promising situation two steps were necessary: first, Local 574 had to be induced to accept new members beyond its existing job-trust circle; then a drive could be launched to organize the mass of unorganized workers in the industry and open a struggle for union recognition.
The leaders of the Communist League in Minneapolis approached these tasks with a well-thought-out conception of the dynamics of class struggle based on a study of the interrelationship between the situation’s positive and negative features. Workers were radicalizing under the goad of economic depression. To mobilize them for action it was necessary to start from their existing level of understanding. In the course of battle a majority could be convinced of the correctness of the Communist League’s trade-union policy. They would come to understand that misleadership within the AFL was largely responsible for the fact that not a single strike had been won by any union in the city during the previous decade. To drive the point home it was imperative to show in the opening clash with the bosses that a strike could be won.
The key to all this was the infusion of politically class-conscious leadership into the union through the cadres of the Communist League. Of course, they could not assume immediate leadership of the union. Their role as leaders would have to develop and be certified through the forthcoming struggles against the employers. To facilitate that objective it was necessary that all party members in the city understand and support the projected Teamster campaign. Toward that end the whole concept was thoroughly discussed in the party branch and firm agreement was reached on the steps to be taken. It was also necessary to decide in advance who would speak publicly for the party and lead its members in the union during the campaign.
“The Opening Wedge” pg 73
As the political vanguard of the class, the revolutionary party constitutes a bridge in historic consciousness for the workers. It absorbs the lessons of the class struggle, victories as well as defeats, preserving them as part of its revolutionary heritage. The party’s cadres are the mechanism through which this “class memory” is infused into labor struggles on the given contemporary scene. The Communist League cadres could fulfill this role in the trucking industry if they could link themselves with the militant workers through the trade-union movement. In their approach to this problem the comrades made a distinction between formal and actual leadership.
“Local 574 Wins” (pg 244-245)
The Communist League fraction within Local 574 functioned as a single unit. Equal voice and vote was accorded to all comrades, whether they were leaders or rank-and-file members of the union. Party members in other spheres of activity were similarly organized into separate fractions in each case. These fractions were in turn part of a general branch of the party which in the given instance embraced all comrades in the city. The structure enabled those in a particular field of activity to concentrate in an organized way on their specific work. At the same time it provided a corrective for any tendency to become too narrowly engrossed in specialized activity at the expense of one’s broader political education and outlook.
In the case of Local 574, for example, the union problems were so pressing and so complex that comrades could easily get so one-sidedly preoccupied with them that they slighted other political and organizational matters. Being part of a general membership branch helped them to offset this danger. They were drawn into broader patterns of political thinking and into the party’s multifaceted educational processes. As a result, trade-union comrades became more proficient in their own special assignments and the party was better able to help them do their job.
From “Reclaiming Revolution: Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM)” (pg 71)
STORM made mistakes in our practice as a cadre organization. We did not understand clearly enough the distinction between cadre organization, revolutionary parties, revolutionary organization and vanguard organization. This made for a cloudy organizational self-conception and a misperception from without as a self-proclaimed vanguard.
Looking back, that misperception was largely our responsibility. We hoped that other activists would choose trust, not suspicion, as their default position when there was something confusing or concerning about the group. But it is fundamentally the responsibility of the cadre organization to be clear about how it intends to relate to the rest of the movement. We should have been clearer that we were neither a party nor a vanguard organization. We were a cadre organization that was working to build revolutionary mass organizations and to lay the groundwork for a future revolutionary party (or parties) by building a broad revolutionary internationalist trend.
We were also not clear how our organizational form and role would need to evolve as conditions in the movement changed. Some former members view STORM’s dissolution as a failure to adapt to meet the movement’s changing needs.
Lessons: Cadre organizations are valuable and necessary mechanisms for the development of a revolutionary movement. They provide a space for people to develop as revolutionaries, to develop a cross-sectoral vision for the revolutionary movement, to hold each other accountable and to be more politically grounded in their mass work.
A cadre organization need not be a vanguard organization. There is no single “correct” organizational model, applicable to all cadre organizations in all historical periods.
Different cadre organizations will play different roles based on historical conditions – including the skills, experiences and relationship of their members. How a cadre organization should function depends greatly on concrete conditions. For example, a cadre organization must play a radically different role when the movement is in a period of relative ebb than when the movement is poised to take power.
In the current period, cadre organizations can play an important role in building the movement and training revolutionary leaders. But such organizations will be hard to sustain given the lack of “revolutionary momentum.” Of course, this does not mean that we should not build cadre organizations. It simply means that we must be clear about the goals and role of such organizations.
Any cadre organization built in this period – while the left is fragmented and the mass movement is at a relatively low level – will have to change radically to remain relevant and viable as the movement grows and develops.
Outstanding Question
•What kinds of cadre organizations are needed in this particular historical period?
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