• RedWizardMA
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    12 hours ago

    To quote someone involved in the organizing happening in MN regarding this article:

    Pretty good but, of course, I found these points annoying:

    1. With a revolutionary leadership, the movement could have gone significantly further. The mood and potential for an all-out general strike were 100% present. This could have shut down not only small businesses, schools, and cultural institutions, but the major levers of the economy: transportation, energy, communications, logistics, manufacturing, etc. After Alex Pretti’s murder, this could have spread across the country. The trade union bureaucrats did everything in their power to direct the energy of the masses into safe channels. Pressure from below had forced them to set a date for a “day of action,” but they conspicuously avoided doing anything more. What was required was to widen and spread the neighborhood committees into the workplaces, and above all to link them through elected representatives into a citywide body accountable to the mass assemblies and capable of coordinating the movement. Armed with this program, a Marxist cadre organization of even just 500 or 1,000 members rooted in workplaces across key industries in Minneapolis-St. Paul could have made all the difference.
    1. The only real weakness of the US working class is its lack of a revolutionary party. The roughly 160 million wage and salary workers in America constitute a potentially unstoppable power, but this potential cannot be fully realized unless and until it has a leadership worthy of the name. In Minnesota, we saw the immense creativity of the working class when it is pushed into action, but also the clear limits of spontaneity on its own. To go further, and to eventually win political and economic power, the working class needs a Marxist leadership. A mass revolutionary party could harness the power of the working class to transform society on socialist lines.

    The organizing of the two strikes - both city specific on 1/23 and nationwide on 1/30 - were led on the ground by a Marxist vanguard party: PSL. It was PSL that dedicated over a hundred cadre on the ground to full-time outreach in Minneapolis in the week leading up to 1/23. Then cadre deployed their skills across the country to push for a national day on 1/30 which was hugely successful. It was PSL that made the call to push for 1/30 (at the behest of the Somali student groups who called for it in Minneapolis) and did all the initial work in cities across the country. It was the Marxist leadership and dedicated party cadre of PSL that made this happen. They did it while FRSO in the Twin Cities actively opposed it, abdicating and potential for their leadership of the movement, and while RCA was nowhere to be found.

    Marxist.com is unfortunately a Trotskyist international organization and as such is pretty sectarian at times. There is mass organizing happening in MN, and there is a Marxist party doing their fair share of that organizing. Their other points remain well stated, but their comments on the actual organizing on the ground are strictly not based in reality.