My post today is going to be kind of a "bitch" column.
Sam Webb has called me "that bitch from Duluth" so I might as well live up to this name.
You have probably noticed I haven't been doing my blog for awhile.
I have both reasons and excuses. Some legitimate some probably not.
The reason I haven't been blogging is I just haven't had time. Between work, taking care of the kids, the activities of our Duluth-Superior Club of the CPUSA and trying to have a little personal time just to enjoy life a little I just haven't had time to blog and do a lot of other things I would like to get done.
On top of a hectic life just like the rest of you have as the District Organizer for the Minnesota/Dakotas District of the CPUSA sometimes I feel like just sitting in a rocking chair and crying because I want to do more and I can't.
Problems people are living through are nothing short of nightmares. It is hard to believe any system can be so mean and cruel to people.
We are getting a lot of calls and e-mails from people looking for help with this problem or that problem.
I am sorry, we just aren't in a position to offer help to people for individual problems. I wish we had the members and resources to help everyone that comes to us asking for our help or to get involved with their causes all of which are truly very legitimate and things that need to be done.
What Democrats and Obama have done to make life a living hell for working people by cutting people off of unemployment compensation, refusing to provide welfare and other forms of assistance, to stop evictions, to help working class families survive this "down" period or whatever you want to call this recession, depression, economic slump. It is just terrible that the Democrats and the labor unions refuse to shoulder their burden of the problems in assisting people. It is like Obama and these Democrats think our main role in life is to help them no matter how much helping them hurts us.
Let me tell you. The Democrats and the unions have far greater resources than our little Communist Party can ever dream of having.
Some people seem to think because we have a title for a position involving our activities in the Communist Party we must get paid for our work. We don't. None of us in the Minnesota/Dakotas District of the Communist Party USA get paid for anything. When we go to meetings we pay for our own gas. When we send letters we pay for our own stamps. Some people think we have a lot of money because they see news reports of the Communist Party USA spending over a million bucks to fix up the national office. I can't say where this money came from even though I think this money came from some kind of payoff to take us out of the fights. We here in the Minnesota/Dakotas District get no funding from the national office. They don't even answer the phone when we call them. This is a problem for us. It is a problem for all of you. We need your help to help us solve our problems so we can all work more effectively together to solve all our problems.
If these people in New York are sitting on a nest egg they received as a bribe to undermine the struggles of working people we don't want any of that money even if it was offered to us. It isn't offered to us because we refuse to betray working people and cheerlead for Barack Obama and the Democrats when they are hammering us.
The problems we are having in the Communist Party USA are not secret problems. Anyone can read about the problems all over the internet including a few postings I have made in the past.
We aren't keeping our problems a secret because we aren't a secret little cult. We are a working class organization. What we think is public. What we do is public. Our finances are public. Our problems are public.
We are all working people with the same problems just like the rest of you. Some of our members are losing their homes. Others have lost their homes. We have struggled with some people to help them save their homes. We have helped people fight for their unemployment benefits when millionaire lawyers like those who treat politics as a game refuse to help. Many of us have lost our jobs. Many of us have huge health care bills. Most of us like most of you have problems just trying to hold our families together under a roof with regular meals and clothes and pay the bills from pay check to pay check.
There are hundreds of union offices all across Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Michigan filled with high paid staff who could be doing much more than they are. But they do nothing except talk a good talk and go back to hide in their back offices sitting in their easy chairs all paid for with our dues. We don't like this any better than you do.
On top of all of this as if this were not enough we are fighting in our own Communist Party against a bunch of good for nothings who are no better than the leaders of the AFL-CIO or the Democratic Party or any of these organizations that spend their time soliciting volunteers to stuff envelopes asking people for money under the false pretenses claiming they are doing things when they do nothing.
What we can do right now is help people organize Communist Party clubs where they live, work and go to school.
These clubs then do what they can to work on solving problems.
I feel bad to see people being thrown out of their jobs on the Iron Range and across Minnesota and the Dakotas. We are getting calls and e-mails from people in Wisconsin and Michigan besides in our own District that includes Minnesota, North and South Dakota. We even have been getting requests for help from people in Chicago and Iowa and just this morning I opened my e-mail and I received a long letter from a young worker in Arkansas asking for help. His family is in the most tragic circumstances through no fault of their own. Unemployed after working for the Caterpillar Company for many years.
Our District Committee is set up for work doing two main things. Help coordinate the activities of our clubs and to help build new clubs in our district. We can't do any more. The resources are not available for us to do more.
All of our members and our clubs are immersed in struggles of one kind or another. Most all work in two primary areas as agreed. Peace and for health care reform. Clubs have their own local issues they work on together in addition to these.
Some of our members work inside the Democratic Party and some outside of it when it comes to political activities. We are very up front about this. We do not hold to some of the ridiculous views of most of the phony left Trotskyite and anarchist groupings. To us we work with and among working people where ever we can where they are active and this means working in the Democratic Party to push forward our solutions to problems and raising issues and concerns. We take this approach to our work in unions and all other organizations. We always have worked in this way and we always will no matter what kind of ruckus these other outfits make from the sidelines of the class struggle.
It is the clubs and the members of these clubs who then work according to the tasks they set for themselves to determine how they can best work with people and other organizations. Our District Committee helps clubs with their educational work and we try to make sure our clubs have or are able to attain the resources they need to fulfill the tasks they establish.
Our clubs are mostly very small groups of people from 3 to 6 members. We have a few with more members but still not like 20 or 30 people. We wish we had 150 clubs of just ten people each spread out across our District but the simple fact is that we do not.
This is why quite some time ago our District Committee took the position of advising our clubs to begin closing memberships in their clubs except to the people they have been working with over a long period of time who want to join and we told the clubs to encourage other people to work with our District Committee in helping to build new clubs of the Communist Party USA.
I think most people understand that for us to accomplish the kind of growth we need to have the influence we need in order to build up the kind of movements to take on the corporations and their political parties like the Democrats and Republicans and to toss out these worthless union leaders who take our dues and do nothing in return or even those in our own party who spend lavishly remodeling their offices but find the urgent and pressing problems of working people some how beyond and outside of their world and realm of thinking that it is going to take a heck of a lot of our own efforts to overcome all of this.
I think we are getting all these requests for help from people because they understand we are working people just like them facing and experiencing the same problems of everyday life they are having difficulties with.
I can only say to people that I will pass on your requests for help and assistance to the people in our local clubs; where we don't have clubs then our District leadership including myself and several others are willing to help you build such clubs.
The Communist Party is intended to be a network of clubs made up of working people and others who share our thinking that are think tanks and centers of working class activity who go out and educate others as to the reasons problems exist and to help draw people together around their common problems in quest of working together seeking solutions to those problems.
Our main problem as we see it is that capitalism needs to be eliminated with the solution being socialism.
On this road to socialism we all experience problems that need to be resolved. In tough economic times like these working people have more problems and bigger problems. Our view is that working people need to come together in large and powerful mass organizations not just around these individual problems. We then need to band these organizations together with larger organizations seeking solutions to problems that affect many more people.
There are people who don't share our thinking our methods and our goals. This is there problem not ours.
For years we have been taunted from the sidelines by every little Trotskyite group and anarchist sect and the high paid union leaders who hide out in their offices only to appear to make a speech about how much they are going to do and we are going to fight to the very bitter end. All a bunch of hot air. They and their methods have gotten working people no place. On one end are the Obama supporters. On the other end are those who think running down a street breaking bank windows is the solution.
We are convinced that our methods and the way we work get results.
Because our methods and the way we are organized get results we have no reason to change how we do things. People who do not agree with our methods and our approach towards how we organize are free to proceed on their own.
All of our members are very involved to the extent circumstances allow them to participate in the activities of their clubs and each of these clubs carries out its functions in a way that we have agreed to work together as a district.
As I have stated previously our organization is hampered because of the problems at the national level so our district committee has the extra and additional burden of doing many of those things that should be done by our national organization and this national organization at this time does not respond to the needs of the clubs or the district in plugging us into things regionally or nationally and internationally because of the sorry state of affairs among the national leadership our party is out of the loop which creates additional problems in areas of our work like in the peace movement.
Am I bitching? You bet.
These leaders in New York like Sam Webb have even taken our newspaper away from us. We are working with others to get out a leaflet about this healthcare fiasco very quickly. Perhaps today yet or by Friday for sure. Just getting out 25,000 leaflets takes some doing and costs some money. We make do as we can. We ask others to pitch in and help and in this way we get things done. I'll be posting the leaflet on my blog here and I am sure our other bloggers will be doing the same. Feel free to copy and send it around. Better yet print it off on your printer and photocopy what you can pass out to your friends. This is the way we need to work together. If you don't like something about the leaflet then write your own or edit ours to your liking.
We do move forward no matter what the problems we just ask people to understand that we are not in a position to drop those things we are doing to start working on another problem.
What we will do is help you organize a club of the Communist Party so you can become part of our growing network of resistance while working on your problem in response to whoever is creating problems for you and other working people be it the banks, the mine owners, the auto companies, insurance companies, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the local welfare office, hospital or nursing home administrators, people elected to public office or those they appoint, or in many cases your own union leaders.
We must be honest. Most of the problems we are experiencing as working people have no quick fix. The struggles will be long and drawn out.
Sometimes a problem can be solved by making a phone call. Writing a letter. Just knowing the proper form to fill out. Knowing the right person in the proper government agency to talk to.
Most problems will not be solved to easy.
Most problems will not be solved by submitting a petition with lots of names.
Most problems will not be solved with one picket line or even a vigil that goes on week after week.
Most problems will not be solved with one big demonstration.
Most problems will be solved to one extent or another when we learn how to properly combine all of these kinds of activities into well organized and coordinated campaigns that keep joining together getting bigger and bigger.
People in power rely on people giving up. This is one thing about us Communists. We will never give up.
Working people create every bit of the wealth and we are entitled to the right to justice and everything that word stands for.
We will attain that justice we are entitled to if we learn to work together.
If you think the Communist Party is the kind of organization you would be interested in joining and helping us to build with other working people we want to work with you.
I don't want to bitch about things. I do want to be up front about the way things are. When all is said and done we have only ourselves to rely on to build the kind of movements we need to stand up and fight for our rights.
Let's see what can be done to build a Communist Party club in your neighborhood or where you work or go to school. Our District Committee will help you do this.
Rita
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