Quote of the issue

For a new ruling class: the workers!

In the midst of a hard-fought seamen’s strike on the US West Coast in 1936-37, James P Cannon, a founding leader of Trotskyism in the US, emphasised that the proletariat can advance its cause only by relying on its own class strength and solidarity against the capitalist class enemy. Ben Hanford, who is referred to in the selection below, was a leader of the US Socialist Party until his death in 1910.

A good deal is said about strike “strategy” — and that has its uses within certain clearly defined limits — but when you get down to cases this strike, like every other strike, is simply a bullheaded struggle between two forces whose interests are in constant and irreconcilable conflict. The partnership of capital and labor is a lie. The immediate issue in every case is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces at the moment....

We pass over entirely the question of who is “right” in the maritime strike, for we believe with Ben Hanford that the working class is always right. From our point of view the workers have a perfect right to the full control of industry and all the fruits thereof. The employers on the other hand — not merely the shipowners; all bosses are alike — would like a situation where the workers are deprived of all organization and all say about their work and are paid only enough to keep body and soul together and raise a new generation of slaves to take their places when they drop in their tracks.

Any settlement in between these two extremes is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power; “justice” has nothing to do with it. The workers will not have justice until they take over the world. The demands of the workers in a strike are to be judged solely by their timeliness and the way they fit realistically into the actual relation of forces at the time.

—James P Cannon, “The maritime strike” (November 1936), reprinted in Notebook of an agitator (1958)