Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Fourth of July Oration." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 369 - 371). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Summer 1982
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Current fashions in world leftism decree that our very own, home-brew, red-white-and-blue working class be regarded with lofty arrogance. No full-blooded anti-imperialist can pass the course in Revolution II without sneering and sniping at U.S. workers.
Indeed, my sisters and brothers in the shops and offices and mines and mills of the USA have been endowed with a new and hyphenated moniker—the “backward-Americans.”
We’re retarded. Furthermore, we’re no damn good at all. The fate of the world is in other, older and better hands, and made-in-USA radicals should shut up. What do we know, anyway? What insurrections and guerrilla operations have we ever mounted? Besides, even if Yankee radicals gave a revolution, none of the workers would come. They’re too dumb.
U.S. toilers, it seems, have yet to shed their diapers. We haven’t got mass socialist or communist parties. We’ve never made it to the little leagues of a Labor Party. We’re even short on syndicalists, anarchists, and other such trade unionists who hate Marxism and political parties but expect The Workers to lead an anti-capitalist revolution for non-socialism. Or something.
Anyway, we’re abjectly bereft of Europe’s perennial kvetches, revisionists, opportunists, accommodationists, ritual radicals, social democrat bureaucrats, and Stalinist hatchet men.
THIS IS BAD????
Such backwardness, you might demur, might not be such a bad thing. Thinking dialectically, it could even be a boon and a benefit. You might say this. Please do.
What’s so great about the “advanced” radical movements in other countries that never get anywhere or that go haywire?
Who needs the world-weary compromisers in the mass reformist parties who have mouthed off about socialismo for a hundred years and never got close to making a revolution? Or to making one that didn’t end up degenerated, deformed, aborted, diseased, distorted, sexist, racist, homophobic, cruel to oppressed nationalities and hellishly undemocratic?
Call me an American chauvinist if you like. But I infinitely prefer the tumult of my own working class, a class that leaps into battle when it finally decides to fight and makes up most dramatically for its late start. This conservative-minded class has the startling habit of suddenly erupting into militance and brilliant innovativeness. It moves further and more swiftly on the strike front than faster-than-a-speeding-bullet you know who. On strategy and tactics it is a world leader.
Ours is an historically youthful class, a self-confident, even smug class, a practical and pragmatic and yet refreshingly romantic class. And it is an undefeated class.
Let’s give credit where credit is due. North American employees have won some of the best conditions, benefits, and pay scales on the face of the earth—wrested them from slavers, robber barons, giant monopolies, and assorted plutocrats in command of the flagship of imperialism. No small feat, that. Attention must be paid. And respect, too.
The first American Revolution of 1776 inspired soaring hopes among huddled masses everywhere yearning to be free.
The second American Revolution, the Civil War, further electrified the exploited millions of the earth; the determination of the workers in the northern and western United States to smash the “peculiar institution” of slavery wove a unique and glorious chapter in human history.
The saga of U.S. labor—from its thrusts at organization even before the Colonial Revolution, through its thunderous development into the National Labor Union of the 19th century, then the AFL, later the IWW, and finally the audacious and irresistible CIO—is a thrilling story of heroism. Workers of North America, who are of all races and stem from widely diversified nations and cultures, have nothing to be ashamed of and much to be proud of.
But my working class, of course, is really no better or worse than anybody else’s working class. My class is equally the product of its own particular history, geography, and culture, and equally the victim of its own lieutenants who labor for the generals instead of the privates and non-coms.
Nevertheless, our revolution can and must be made, with a little help, and a little less intolerance, from our friends abroad. Every revolution today flounders and sours because the U.S. colossus co-opts, encircles, starves, bombs or subverts it. That is why the North American revolution revolution is everybody’s revolution. Don’t sell it short.