Let’s begin with our history of the Congress of Industrial…

Question Answered step-by-step Let’s begin with our history of the Congress of Industrial… Let’s begin with our history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Alabama communists. So as we’ve talked about, we know that the Congress of Industrial Organizations did whole work or organizing– was sort of at odds with Saul Alinsky and the Catholic Church and was, throughout the country, taking up popular demands and largely run by rank and file workers who were communists or socialists or had left political ideologies and saw union organizing as the potential for workers to take over the means of production and to make a kind of society that prioritized the needs and lives and identities of the working class.So we’re going to focus on the story of the Alabama communists and the International Communist Party as documented in the book Hammer and Hoe by Robin DG Kelley. So the Communist Party in Alabama began with several key black organizers who were mine workers and sharecroppers in rural Alabama and several white organizers from the Communist Party groupings in the Northeast. And so the different types of mass organizing that the Communist Party engaged in, first, were through mine worker organizing. So at the time, leftists of a variety of stripes thought that mine worker organizing and organizing in strategic industrial companies made sense for building the maximum amount of power among workers.At the time, workers were organized and their lives were shaped by what were called company towns. So workers lived in shanty houses owned by the companies they worked for. They had no land of their own. Their food– the food that they farmed– came from land that the company also owned. Or the food that they ate came from provisions or rations provided by the company. And all of their work was dictated by the boss of the mine or of the company.And so this made organizing workers incredibly difficult because workers who organized and went out on strike faced not only actual physical repression or physical violence from the company police or the bosses, but they also faced eviction when they organized. So organizing workers in the mines was incredibly difficult and often had very serious risks. But the Communist Party persisted, nonetheless, and developed a whole host of leaders out of mine worker and industrial union organizing.But they also, during this time– the 1920s and ’30s– many people were out of work due to the economic crisis. So they also organized the unemployed through unemployed councils and organized the unemployed councils to fight the Red Cross and the other relief agencies that were receiving government rations and cash assistance to be then distributed to unemployed workers. So sometimes those agencies which we would think of as today’s nonprofits weren’t distributing the resources provided to them quickly enough to unemployed workers, and so their families were going hungry.So often, the party and unemployed workers would lead marches on these institutions to try to increase the amount of provisions or unemployment support given to workers. So when we talked about the New Deal, it was this kind of organizing that influenced the development of social insurance that became a part of the New Deal, and the federal employment guarantee programs that became part of the New Deal were also a result of this kind of organizing and labor unrest.And then the third kind of organizing of the poor that the Communist Party did in Alabama was the formation of the SCU, or the Sharecropper Unions. And sharecropping was a process by which– similar to company towns– typically white landowners owned farmland and allowed black workers to rent farmland and small shacks to live in on that land and then farm the land. But the payment for that was that the sharecroppers would have to give a large percentage of the proceeds of their products, selling their products that they grew on the land, back to the white landowner.So both white and black folks in the South and in Alabama were sharecroppers. And the party organized both white and black sharecroppers during this period. So they were organized into sharecroppers unions with regular meetings, similar to the unemployed councils and similar to the industrial unions and similar to, as we talked about, the formal direct democracy as a means of decision making.So the other key organizing strategy that the Communist Party uses during this time period was the International Legal Defense, or the mass defense strategy. So they had what we would call a front organization, meaning a kind of organization that doesn’t explicitly identify as politically left but that provides a service or a need in the community around a particular issue. So the International Legal Defense was the Communist Party’s legal arm that sought to create both internal organization among people who were fighting the criminal justice system or also sought retribution for people wronged by the criminal justice system. So they had what they called a mass defense strategy, which was a combination of fighting in the court system and fighting the unfair charging of black men in the court system under the Jim Crow South– or in the Jim Crow South and combined that legal strategy with the organizing across the country of mass protests in support of the wrongly convicted black men and boys who were on trial.So the most famous example of this is the Scottsboro Boys. So the Scottsboro Boys were a group of black teenagers who, while riding a train, were accused falsely by two white women of rape and then were sentenced to death. And interestingly, the NAACP, which we see as an either apolitical at times or typically politically liberal community organization that organizes primarily black people around the aim of civil rights and primarily middle class black people around the aim of civil rights– we see the NAACP attorneys first take up the Scottsboro Boys case. They lose the case. The Scottsboro Boys remained convicted to death.And then the International Legal Defense meets with the boys families and takes up the case, takes up– their attorneys take up arguing the case and argue an appeal to try to get the Scottsboro Boys off death row. And ultimately, the defense, the ILD, and the ruling in the Scottsboro Boys case, they had what becomes a beginning of the precedent for the right to an attorney– is what leads to our modern system of public defense.So the decision in Gideon, in the Supreme Court decision about an indigent man much later that leads to the right of all poor people and of all people in the US to an attorney, cites the precedent of the Scottsboro Boys case. So we see the Communist Party, again, having an outsized influence, ultimately, in the shaping of modern public defense, but also just in the shaping of modern US society here through that process.So the CIO is also present in Alabama at this time and throughout the US is developing militant labor organizing and rank and file union organizing. And we see the CIO start to– and the CIO unions– start to act as a political organization during this period. They develop a political action committee. They do what Gindin calls social movement unionism. They take up popular demands like we saw in Winston-Salem with tobacco workers– the Tobacco Workers Local 22– and the organizing around the ending of racial segregation. So we see, in tandem with the social movement unionism and the mass defense strategy of the Communist Party in Alabama and in the South, we see also the CIO developing a similar strategy of union organization and social movement unionism.The other key thing about the Alabama communists that’s sort of a departure from the international communist movement is that the international communist movement defines the right of black self-determination in the US South as key to organizing black people. So the idea of self-determination, in this sense, would be the black belt, in the US where black people are the majority of an area’s population, that black people should be able to secede from the nation and form governments and a nation that serves their needs rather than the needs of the white population at large.So though this never happens, this kind of vision for a totally transformed society free from white supremacy becomes the root of the vision of Communist Party organizing for black communists in Alabama in the South during this period. So David Roediger, who we learned about from his argument, Seizing Freedom, about slaves emancipating themselves, also writes a review of this book where he refers to the Communist Party during this period in Alabama as the “party of deliverance” for black people in Alabama– so really getting to the root of this idea that self-determination would mean deliverance from daily white vigilante violence against black people, violence from the bosses, the incredibly oppressive system of sharecropping, and the reliance on relief aid from local agencies like the Red Cross. So the idea of deliverance would be leaving all of that behind.So next let’s talk about another revolutionary union movement but at a slightly different time period. So similar to our conversation about the United Auto Workers and the connection to the labor movement and the Civil Rights Movement, in 1968, we see black autoworkers lead a multiracial wildcat strike that partially shuts down Chrysler’s main plant outside of Detroit. And this is a particularly exciting moment in US history because it is early in the organizing of the new left and right at this crucial period in the Civil Rights Movement where, to everyone else in the world, it must have appeared that the United States was on fire.There were riots in countries across– in cities across the country, black people violently demanding an end to racial discrimination and to white chauvinism and white supremacy. And so it’s particularly interesting that at this time the DRUM, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, forms out of that anger and the largest uprising of black people in Detroit in 1937.But it actually, originally– the workers at the Chrysler plant– their organization came out of the meeting of two black revolutionaries in college who came up with an organizational form that they thought they could– where they could carry out a transnational revolutionary set of politics. So they were informed both by Marxism and by black nationalism. And ultimately, the Dodge Revolutionary Movement does become that revolutionary form that they believe it can be. It culminates in the development of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which you read about when you read that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor article about racism.So we see this– like the CP in Alabama– we see the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement having a much longer legacy than the short life of the organization and influencing both the union movement and the movement for civil rights and black power further down the line than just the years it was alive. So again, the DRUM came out of student organizing. It took some of its direction from revolutionary Marxists, like Grace Boggs, who Adrienne Maree Brown talks about her husband, James Boggs, who was also a Chrysler worker. So it takes its direction from those types of Marxists like James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, whose Marxism was also informed by nationalism– to go back to Chela Sandoval when we talked about oppositional consciousness. Organizers doing transformative justice and transformative organizing work are often marrying the ideas of different revolutionary tendencies.So before the student organization that eventually becomes DRUM forms DRUM, they also– their largest other action is the protest of the police killing of black sex worker Cynthia Scott. So this, again, is where we see the intersection of community and labor organizing and student organizing. We see a variety of different kinds of organizing made possible simply by the political education and militancy of black people and black workers in this particular period.So let’s talk a little bit about the National Welfare Rights Organization, our last piece of history for today. In the 1950s, as African-American women start to come onto the welfare rolls en masse and white supremacy and white chauvinism escalates in advance of the Civil Rights Movement as African Americans participate further in politics and in society in the United States and white animosity against them grows, we see welfare– the kinds of welfare reforms that would eliminate black women, particularly single mothers, from the welfare rolls. And in response to this, the National Welfare Rights Organization forms. And its goal is to fight for greater democratic control over welfare regulations, for increased payments on welfare, and for justice and an end to racial discrimination in government assistance.So the National Welfare Rights Organization grows incredibly quickly and has about 25,000 members at the peak of its membership. And in 1969, they pick as their target Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan and began organizing to try to push the Nixon administration to create greater democracy and ownership by the people actually receiving assistance over the welfare distribution system. So this becomes an unfinished project.While the NWRO wins some of their demands in part, they never completely realize the project of full democratic control of welfare. And what we then see in the 1990s under the Clinton administration is a complete undoing of the gains of organizations like the NWRO during welfare reform, where we see Clinton pass a variety of moralizing pieces of legislation as a part of welfare reform that eventually destabilized the lives of welfare recipients and certainly don’t offer any more democratic control over welfare regulations.We also see something that’s common in all of our social movements– as David Roediger talked about– the fragility and delicate nature of the work we provide as organizers. Internally in our organizations, we have to also be aware of that. So in NWRO, the predominantly white staff and the predominantly black members and welfare recipients, toward the end of the life the organization, want to take the organization in different directions. So the black feminists and welfare recipients see black feminism as the key organizing strategy and organizing ideological tendency that they want to organize around, while the white staff don’t see that as key and want to continue with the more policy-based organizing that the NWRO had done.And so the lesson for us, again, is thinking about what is the way that we can hold the nuance of the organizing work and embody this sort of both-and philosophy and can handle organizational tension or shift the organizational form– so hiring the members as staff or shifting the way that we do the work to keep the organization around.How did the CIO and the Alabama Communists combine labor and community organizing to meet the needs of their people?Why is this an effective strategy for organizers seeking to transform the world? Psychology Social Science Social Psychology SWGS 6005 Share QuestionEmailCopy link Comments (0)