The class struggle in the economic arena has sharpened up with the fight for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act!! One of the AFL-CIO's top priorities in the 111th Congress, the Employee Free Choice Act would make it easier for working class people to form and join a union in order to bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions. It would establish stronger penalties against bosses for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during contract negotiations.
Union workers, especially Black and Latino workers, earn higher wages and get more benefits than workers who don't have a voice on their job with a union. And Frederick Engels was right that unions, broad organizations of workers, are "the real class organizations of the proletariat, in which the latter wages its day-to-day struggle against capital." (Engels, Letter to Bebel, 1875)
Communists join the fight for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act!! Gus Hall, the Marxist-Leninist former leader of the Communist Party USA once said: "great weight falls on the union and economic questions--jobs, wages, relief, union rights, strikes...Communists must be resolute, outstanding fighters for these." (Gus Hall, Working Class USA, 1987, International Publishers)
Karl Marx and Engels advocated in the Communist Manifesto that "Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class." Communists must, V.I. Lenin said, "develop the workers' class consciousness by assisting them in the fight for their most vital needs" and in promoting workers' organization.
But the economic struggle will not abolish capitalism by itself. It must be linked with the political struggle to overthrow capitalist rule. And Lenin called for smashing "the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie" by bringing Communist consciousness to the working class. He stressed this repeatedly in What Is To Be Done?. We need a fighting Marxist-Leninist party, the highest form of proletarian class organization, to smash capitalism and build socialism.
What you can do to join the Fight for the Employee Free Choice Act:
Sign the AFL-CIO's online petition at AFL-CIO Online Petition to Fight for the Passage of EFCA.
Get the word out on your blog or myspace page! Go to the AFL-CIO's site: AFL-CIO on EFCA for more information and to find web buttons that you can post!
