Upstream - The Democratic Party w/ Cecilia Guerrero

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

In this episode Cecilia Guerrero joins us to pick apart the sordid origins and class orientation of the Democratic Party. Cecilia Guerrero is chair and founding member of A Luta Sigue, an organization based in Nashville, Tennessee which incubates and trains young people and workers within advanced sectors of the working class to build and lead their own class struggle organizations. The conversation opens with a history of the Democratic Party, which is also a history of the development of US capitalism. Cecilia takes us back to the formation of the Democratic Party and describes the role it played in opposition to the Republican Party during slavery and up to the Civil War. She then outlines how the party shifted and evolved up through the Robber Barron days around the turn of the century up to WWI.  We then explore how the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), despite its successful origins, succumbed to opportunism and failed to be a vehicle for the working class in the United States. This resulted in the New Deal Democratic alliance being widely recognized as a working class party, despite, of course, being nothing of the sort. This shift paved the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt's program of throwing crumbs to the working class while working on behalf of the bourgeoisie to reform and stabilize capitalism. Cecilia goes on to describe how the Democratic Party has now fully embraced the role that it took on under FDR—promising watered down reforms to an increasingly exploited and immiserated proletariat as a release valve for their anger while never delivering meaningful change. She describes how the Democratic Party inserts itself into radical movements only to co-opt and neutralize them, providing examples from Ferguson to Nashville, where she herself organizes.  We then discuss the Democrats role in upholding imperialism through their history of supporting imperial exploit, particularly their uncompromising reliance on sanctions, predatory development schemes, and other forms of economic warfare. Finally, we discuss what needs to happen in order for us to break out of this two-party duopoly of capitalism and build a party that truly represents the working class.  Further resources: A Luta Sigue Workers Unity League Southern Youth Solidarity Network: Lessons from the 1934 San Francisco General Strike  Nashville People Power History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (bolsheviks): Short Course The Results and Significance of the US Presidential Elections. Lenin, 1912 After The Elections In America, Lenin. 1912 Letter to the Workers of Europe and America, Lenin. 1918 Struggle Against Opportunism in the Labor Movement – For a Socialist United States. William Dunne, 1947 Related episodes: From the Frontlines: Class Struggle and Class War in the US Southeast w/ Cecilia Guerrero Immigration, ICE, and Working Class Rebellion w/ Cecilia Guerrero A Marxist Perspective on Elections w/ August Nimtz Atlantic Slavery and the Plantation System w/ David McNally International Workers' Day w/ John from Working Class History Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism w/ Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante US Labor & Imperialism Pt. 1: the War Against Communism w/ Jeff Schuhrke Western Marxism w/ Gabriel Rockhill The Intellectual World War w/ Gabriel Rockhill China Pt. 9: Taiwan w/ Charles Xu and Feiyung Sun Black Scare / Red Scare with Charisse Burden-Stelly Iran Pt. 2: The Impacts of Economic Strangulation w/ Elina Xenophontos Migration as Economic Imperialism w/ Immanuel Ness Intermission music: "The Democrats" by Carsie Blanton Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

The ruling class begins to take their crumbs back like the next day the FDR leaves office. Truman and other Democrats becomes president using the same rhetoric and narrative as FDR, but without an independent and proletarian Communist Party, he doesn't have to pretend anymore. He let the country into the Cold War against the Soviet Union and built a machinery for the Red Scare. And during his presidency, Congress passes the Tuck-Hardley Act, which takes away many of the protections from the New Deal and bans many kinds of strikes,

like the most effective kinds of strikes he banned, you know, the Congress ban, significantly weakening labor law. And so the workers are left with significantly weaker unions and without the revolutionary and independent proletarian party. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. A show about political economy and society. invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. The story of the Democratic Party is in many ways the story of the rise of U.S. capitalism. It's a story about betrayal, about opportunism, deception, co-optation, and repression. It's the story of why we have no real Labor Party in this country, no representation for the working class, and why no matter how much we vote or how much we donate, conditions for working people, for exploited and oppressed people, all throughout this country, just keep getting worse.

In this episode, we're joined by Cecilia Guerrero for a conversation on the Sorted Origins and class orientation of the Democratic Party. Cecilia Guerrero is chair and founding member of Aluta Sigler, an organization based in Nashville, Tennessee, which incubates and trains young people and workers within advanced sectors of the working class to build and lead their own class struggle organizations. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support.

Subscribe to our Patreon for Buy. weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist Political Education podcasts are not easy to find, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Della, in conversation with Cecilia Guerrero. Cecilia, welcome back to Upstream. We're so happy to have you back on the show. And we've had you on our series, mostly talking about Mexico, but we've also had you a few other times.

And for anyone who's missed those previous conversations, can you start by introducing yourself? Yes, of course. Very happy to be here again. My name is Cecilia Guerrero, and I organize in the southeast of the United States with an organization called Alutasige, based in in the Southeast. We integrate with the community and identify working class people who are already leading class trouble, like a tenant leader who has the trust of our neighbors

or a single mom who led her coworkers on strike against the boss. And so those are the people that we spend our time, our energy and resources, training and supporting. We have helped groups like the Tennessee Drivers Union, Poder Popular, Nashville People Power, Southern Youth Solidary Network, and recently the Workers' Unity League. And so the overarching mission of all of our projects is to instill a working-class identity through education and class struggle. Thank you for that intro. And this conversation is going to focus on the

Democratic Party of the United States. And so maybe start out with a history, a brief history of the Democratic Party. What is it important that we voice or that we share? Yes, so I'm going to try to be brief, but it's difficult because the history of the Democratic and Republican parties is a history of the development of U.S. capitalism. So historically, many of us do know that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery, led by the plantation owner class of the South. And so at the beginning of the United States, there were many classes contending with each other. We have like the industrialists in the north and the slave owners in the south, right? Those are the main ones. And so the Democratic Party has its roots in the Democratic Republican Party, founded by Thomas Jefferson.

And so, you know, it was led by the plantation owner class, and the wealth of these plantation class depended on an agrarian economy based on the slavery mode of production, which is in antagonism to the development of capitalism. Right? So you see these early Democrats opposing a strong federal government, advocating for states' rights, because the development of capitalism is tied to the development of an integrated national economy, right? Through the development of industry, railroads that connect the different parts of a country with each other, of national banks, right? And so, you know, in this early Democratic Party, it went through the different transitions, right? It went through factions, depending on who favor a strong federal government, who didn't, until we got to the modern Democratic Party, which is the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson, right, which was established in 1828. And so in 1828, Andrew Jackson runs a presidential campaign portraying himself as the candidate of the quote-unquote common man opposing monopolies, banks, the Eastern elite, right? That's how he called them. And, you know, in reality, what he was opposed to was to the development of capitalism

because it was against the interest of the slaveholding class who led his party. And he was a slaveholder himself, right? So while Andrew Jackson acted like the candidate of the common man, he also advocated for the colonial expansion and genocide against black and indigenous people. He was the president of the Trail of Tears. And even before he became president, he massacred and displaced whole villages of black seminals in Florida. And so Jackson gave this image of democratizing politics with a populist style that relied on the mobilization of voters, of newspapers, of patronage. networks, which he used to organize a mass base of white men from the north and south into the Democratic Party. And so this is important because this pattern actually repeats. This coalition,

led by the Democratic Party, rely heavily on the class collaboration of southern plantation owners and poor white farmers and white workers from northern cities, including many German and Irish immigrant workers. And so Jackson cater to white workers from the north, not because he was truly trying to represent them, right? But because he was exploiting the class contradictions within the capitalist states, within the capitalist territories, right? So, you know, if you are an Irish,

worker, an Irish immigrant worker in the north, in Boston, in New York, right? You hate the capitalist class that is exploiting you, right? And you are also suffering from discrimination, anti-Catholic, anti-Irish discrimination. So the Democratic Party took advantage of that and provided them a path to assimilate to find jobs in city government and give them other benefits like food, rental assistance, protection against discrimination, right? And so the Democratic Party gained this reputation as like the pro-immigrant party, but only when the immigrants were from Western Europe. And they could exploit their biases and their chauvinism against black, brown, indigenous people, right? And so that gave them a base of support in the north, which they needed because the party was led

by the plantation owners from the south. Not all European immigrant workers agreed to betray their class, but many did, and those who supported black people were punished. And so during this time, in the years, like during and after Andrew Jackson, the tensions between the capitalist and the slaveholding class increase. And these tensions were usually connected to the expansion or the annexation of new territories into the United States, like the territories that came from like half of Mexico in the mid-1800s.

And so every territory raised this question of which economy is going to be dominant in this territory? Is it going to be capitalism or is it going to be slavery? And so the southern slave owners feared that if their motor production became trapped in the in the old south, they would lose power in government, right? So they were trying to defend slavery and expand slavery. While you have a capitalist class that is trying to expand capitalism, that's inherently contradictory. And eventually that ended up leading up to the civil war.

And so the civil war was a war to abolish slavery and establish capitalism as the main mode of production. The Republican Party was led by, the northern capitalists while the Democratic Party was led by the southern slaveholders. And so the civil war causes these splits within the white workers of the north, especially European immigrants, right, like the Irish immigrants. And so one of the clearest examples of what I'm talking about is the New York City draft riots of 1863, which were led by Irish workers that were angry that the rich northerners, like the rich capitalists in the north, they could buy their

way out of the draft. And so they started to riot. And initially, they were targeting only military and governmental buildings, which were symbols of the unfairness of the draft, and attacking only those individuals who were interfering with their actions. But, however, some rioters began to shift their attacks towards black people and towards white people who supported them. And so these anti-black violence was enabled and encouraged by the Democratic Party. Because if you look at the newspapers of that time, all of these machinery built by the Jackson administration, these newspapers were calling the civil war a quote-unquote like black war using gracious slurs and spread the fear that if slavery was abolished, black people were going to move to the north and take white workers' jobs.

And it's important to know, right, that those that participated in the anti-black killings during the riots were not just Irish workers, but also Lumpin or gangs who the New York Democrats also had strong relationships with and relationships that were cultivated by the pro-slavery New York Democrats, like the New York Mayor Fernando Wood. And so just as the pro-slavery Democrats took advantage of the class tensions between white workers and capitalists in the north, the Republican capitalists also take advantage of the class struggle raging in the U.S. South. However, the collaboration between Republicans and black southerners looked very different. Black slaves were not bribed and were not passive actors during the Civil War. The capitalists were not their moral saviors, like the mainstream narrative wants us to believe. In the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, slaves freed themselves, right? Quite literally. They were a decisive force in the outcome of the civil war. They were revolutionary forces, right? In a textbook sense, they withdrew their labor, they led violent rebellions. They gathered intelligence. They escaped and joined union ranks in the hundreds of thousands and forced the capitalists to adopt their demands

and push them to adopt their demands in their platform, right? They moved the capitalist program during the Civil War from just limiting the expansion of slavery to total abolition. And so after the Civil War, the main contradiction in the United States passes from being slavery to being capitalism. And capitalism expands rapidly throughout the country, right?

The U.S. expended steel, oil refining, electrical power, and railroads. At the same time, the South remains heavily agrarian. While black people's struggle against slavery had been decisive, the Republican government

failed to grant them access to land or political or military protection to combat the reaction of the old plantation class, who were not fully expropriated and still have much of their land wealth and influence. So in southern agriculture, slavery was replaced with the system of sharecropping, which was highly exploitative and left millions of sharecroppers in a cycle of perpetual debt and provided cheap agricultural products to the northern states. And also, you know, with the consolidation of a national market, we start seeing higher concentration of capital

and start seeing monopolies and these associations of monopolies, right? And so, you know, you start seeing big players like Carnegie in steel, Rockefeller in oil, Vanderbilt, in rail, J.P. Morgan in finance and large factories connected to everything else. And so, you know, capitalism is a system that produces based on profit and not need. So every now and then, capitalists just make too much stuff. And, you know, this was the case back then. They rushed and built too many railroads and speculated on land way faster that the profits could keep up.

What happens then? You see a massive economic crisis in 1873, which kicked off a depression. And workers just start becoming so fed up, right? And so we start seeing organized resistance by an increasingly more conscious working class. You know, we saw the great railroad strike of 1877, the Haymarket Rebellion for the eight-hour work week in 1886, the 1890 Cold Creek War against the use of convict leasing in Tennessee, the Pullman County Railroad Strike of 1894. And during this time, workers are not just fighting against the company, but also against their government, both Democrat and Republican alike. You see Republicans, you know, like Robert Rutherford Hayes, right,

who was the president during the Great Railroad Strike. What does he do? He sent federal troops to repress the strike. Cleveland, a Democrat who was president during the Pullman County Railroad strike, what does he also do? He also sends federal troops to repress the workers, right? Who were organizing the American Railway Union by Eugene Debs. So the majority of the workers in the country knew that neither party represented them. So workers began experimenting with independent parties, such as the Socialist Labor Party, the Farmers Alliance, the Populist Party, and the Socialist Party of America, right,

who had members like W.E.B. Du Bois and Eugene Debs. And so by the end of the 19th century, U.S. capitalism had outgrown continental expansion and needed new colonies, new markets, raw materials. And so this was a period of colonial expansion, right, of the Spanish-American War, of the occupation of Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, the Philippines, and other expansionist projects throughout Latin America. And so, Lenin perfectly describes this stage in imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. So basically, in summary, since the civil war, the U.S. capitalism developed. And by the 1900s, the U.S. had become a proper capitalist imperialist nation. And this is very important to understand how the Democratic and the Republican parties developed throughout the 1900s to today. Thank you for that amazing overview and history. And yeah, I really heard both the history of American capitalism, right, and the transition from slavery to capitalism, as well as this idea.

that, you know, there is no thing other than racialized capitalism because you really articulated the connection between racism and capitalism as well as imperialism in its history. And also that capitalism is not a historical, that we really need to look at the history of it to understand who has power and who the capitalists are today and really understanding, you know, the intersectionality of the working class and what's going on around the globe. So thank you for that overview. And I also appreciated hearing about the alternatives to the Republican and the Democratic Party. And, you know, speaking of the alternatives that you mentioned, the alternative parties, at some point the Democratic Party seemed to have made a quote-unquote shift to the left.

At least that's how the narrative is portrayed of today. If we hold Democrats and Republicans, the Democratic Party is seen as the left. So can you tell us that story, you know, tell us how that happened, why that happened, and then, of course, break down for us the difference between the narrative and the reality. Yes, for sure. And yeah, I mean, on that note of racial capitalism, I even stopped using the word racial capitalism because I'm like, okay, name one capitalism that isn't racial. So, yes, I really resourism. I really resourism. And talking about the left and the shift, the so-called shift, right? The mainstream bourgeois narrative explaining the so-called ideological shift between the Republican and Democratic parties

reduces everything to an electoral struggle for the black and white votes and puts the emphasis on the quote-unquote Southern strategy within the Republican Party, which was an electoral strategy to appeal to racist white voters from the South who were. angry about the passing of civil rights legislation. And so this analysis is simplistic and reduces this historical process to a matter of electoral chess, right? Like you take my votes, I take your votes kind of deal. It is ignorant of political economy and ignorant of class struggle. And so, you know, as I was mentioning before, as capitalism reaches the monopoly stage in the 1900s, exploitation intensifies and workers

become more conscious, more militant, and posing a real threat to the capitalist class. And so a new trend emerges amongst capitalists posing the question of whether capitalism is to continue to exist, led by Teddy Roosevelt, the uncle of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And so Teddy becomes president in 1901. He was a Republican born into the Roosevelt family of New York city. His father was a wealthy merchant and philanthropist, and his mother, Martha, came from a southern slaveholding family in Georgia. And so in 1902, there was a major cold strike in Pennsylvania, led by the members of the United Mine Workers of America. It lasted five months from May to October, and it mattered because the coal that was mined by these miners, anthracite, was what was used to

heat homes, hospitals, railroads, and factories in the Northeast, and winter was approaching. So there was a real fear that people were going to run out of coal. And the main demand of the miners was union recognition, right? And what makes this strike unique was that it was one of the first major times in which the president of the United States didn't just send the armed forces to crush the strike, but instead acted as a neutral mediator between employers and workers. workers claiming to represent quote unquote public interest. On one side, you have the workers and in the other the railroad and mining executives and J.P.

Morgan, right, who wasn't a mine operator, but a representative of finance capital, who had significant influence over rail and cold interest because, you know, he's, he was the one financing those projects. And so, Teddy works really close with J.P. Morgan and uses the influence of finance capital to bring industrial capitalists to the table to make a deal. He makes workers and executives engage in this bureaucratic process of arbitration until a compromise was reached in 1903. And so in the end of these, the workers win some minor wins, such as a small wage increase,

but they didn't get what they actually wanted, which was the recognition of their union. And so, you know, Teddy in a letter to the governor of Massachusetts, expressed fear that unregulated capital would lead to working-class riots and unrest and develop into a quote-unquote social war. And so what he was trying to do with this mediation strategy was to stabilize capitalism through reform. And so the time after Teddy's presidency was a time of significant. fractures within the Republican Party, specifically fractures that were around different approaches to how to handle monopolies. Do we want to regulate monopolies? Do we want to let them be? How so,

right? And so in the four years later, in 1910, Teddy publishes a manifesto called New Nationalism, which calls for regulating monopolies and for a government that represents all classes, which is entirely idealistic because classes are in conflict with each other, especially monopolies and workers. In the manifesto, he calls for judging each man not as a member of a class, but for his merits, right? And he forms a new party called the Progressive Party and runs as an independent for the election of 1912, right? The Democratic Party at the time also took advantage of the internal fractures inside the Republican Party. And Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, wins the election, right?

And so while Teddy didn't win, he actually influenced Wilson's campaign messaging. So in response to Teddy's like new nationalist manifesto, Wilson publishes his own manifesto called New Freedom, where he also portrays himself as an enemy of monopolies and he claims to go even a step further. He was like, you are trying to regulate monopolies. to dismantle them, la-l-la-la. Right? And he also claims to be an ally of black people and wins the support of W.A.B. Du Bois. But whenever he comes in power, he just does the entire opposite, right? And so in 1912, Lenin actually writes some pieces, right, on the U.S. elections, where he

criticizes the two-party system and Roosevelt's trend of capitalist reformism as a mean of combating the spread of socialism. And he notices that while both of these old parties were stuck in the past, Roosevelt was actually looking towards the future. Like he was able to see the future and was able to pose and raise the issue of the very existence of capitalism, right? Roosevelt was attempting to save capitalism by deceiving the proletariat through superficial reforms. And so he also says that, you know, so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working class, i.e. a genuinely socialist party. And so what happens with Wilhelm Wilson? The decay of the capitalist imperialist system, its electoral

foreigns become even more apparent, right? Wilson had ran on an anti-war platform, and what does he do? He leads the United States into World War I, which by the way, World War I was entirely, almost entirely funded by J.P. Morgan. And it was an imperialist war, a war between powerful countries fighting over colonies, and World War I had no benefits to the working class, and it was going to be the working class who was going to force to die in it. At the same time, the opportunity within the labor movement became more apparent to the workers as well. Because on one hand, you had socialist labor leaders who took a principal anti-war stand, like Eugene Debs, the railroad organizer.

And, you know, Eugene Debs died in prison as a result of his famous speech where he denounced U.S. involvement in World War I and encouraged workers to evade the draft. And on the other hand, you had opportunistic labor leaders like Samuel Gumpers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, or AFL, a right-wing federation of craft unions, which is one of the predecessors to the AFL-CIO, the National Labor Federation. And so AFL president, Samuel Gompers,

enthusiastically supports World One and asks workers to avoid strikes or any labor unrest so they could boost wartime production. And he actively campaigned against principal socialist organizations and leaders like Eugene Debs, like the industrial workers of the world, IWW, and on the other hand, you also had opportunists like John Lewis, the president of the United Mind Workers of America, who founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, another federation of unions that is also part of the predecessors of the AFL CIA and who is often portrayed

by the modern labor movement as a very progressive guy. He also collaborated with the government during World War I. And so while the U.S. workers were betrayed by the opportunistic labor leaders and bourgeois politicians, the workers of Russia, led by the Bolsheviks, not only got out of the war, but they took over their country. And it was in this context that the Communist Party of the USA was formed. And just like any party, there were internal contradictions within it, but it effectively becomes the recognized party of the working class. And it was founded by the merger of two groups that had split from the socialist party,

who were both in opposition to the war and in support of the Bolsheviks. And so, you know, what does the CPU? does for the working class? The CPUSA leads the working class to a series of massive strikes and fights, right? The 1929 Gastonia strike of textile workers in North Carolina that triggers a series of textile strikes across the country. The unemployed councils that organize unemployed workers

and let the fight against eviction and unemployment benefits, educating unemployed workers against scabbing, right? A scab is somebody who agrees to work at a work site with an active strike and breaks the picket line and makes the strike less effective, right? They often target a lot of unemployed workers and the Communist Party provided the education for that to not happen. And following the orders of the Communist International to organize the Black Belt, the CPOSA also organizes the Shared Croppers Union in Alabama and in the South, which was one of the strongest black-led projects in the country.

They also organized against Jim Crow against lynching, one of the most famous cases being the Scotsboro Voice campaign. One of the most talked about strikes as well is the great San Francisco General Strike of 1934, which was organized by militant longshoremen under the leadership of the party, which spanned all of the West Coast and where the longshoremen had to fight against the employers, the government, and the establishment union leaders, right? all of whom attempted to break the strike. Other examples also include the Harlan County War, which was a period of intense rebellion by Kentucky minors in the 30s. And so, you know, the communists provided leadership

and kept the struggle alive in all of these cases even after the more established leaders gave up. However, then you see World War II. And there was an international call by the coming turn to organize a united front of the working and progressive forces against fascism. And so this meant that working class parties will collaborate with social, democratic, or democratic socialist forces, but in a very specific manner. And so Dimitrov was very clear on the conditions for such a type of united front,

the conditions that such a type of united front will have to adhere by, right? Very clear. One, the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie must already be sufficiently disorganized and paralyzed so that the bourgeoisie cannot prevent the formation of an organized struggle against reaction and fascism. Two, the widest masses of working people, particularly mass trade unions, must be in a state of revolt against fascism and reaction, although even if they are not ready to fight for socialism under the leadership of a communist party. Number three, the rank and file of the organizations led by Social Democrats or Democratic Socialists must already be radicalized enough where a considerable proportion of them demand rootless measures against the fascist and are ready to fight with the communist against fascism

and openly oppose the reactionary section of their own organizational leadership that is hostile to communism. And so, in other words, the United Front that Dimitrope was talking about is a strategy to organize the working class and progressive forces under the independent leadership of the Communist Party, right? And to show the workers who's the real leader, right? And prepare the country to wage a socialist revolution. And Comrade Dimitroh demonstrated very well what fascism was, right? It was a reaction, an organized reaction against a strong socialist movement, by the vanguard of the imperialists, right, who use fascism as a desperate attempt to stop the socialist revolution, right? And stop the establishment of socialism.

So the United Front strategy had to be a tool to survive, to expand, win legitimacy, and eventually take step power. And so some countries do this right, right? Like China, Albania, right? In China, the Communist Party led Second United Front against Japanese occupation, and then they defeated the Japanese aggressors, and then they win legitimacy, and later when a civil war against the bourgeois coming tank takes over China. And in Albania, the Communist Party led a united front

while under Italian and later German occupation. What happens? They kick out the fascists, they defeated reactionaries, and they take over Albania. And Yugoslavia is a similar example. So you have like China, Albania, Yugoslavia, and others that do apply this correct. but in many countries, mostly imperialist countries.

The United Front was misapplied and led to the degeneration of the Communist parties and their dissolution in the capitalist parties. And the United States was like one of the most clear examples. And so to understand how this happened, we need to understand that all parties, like all things, have internal contradictions. And so the CPUSA had leaders who never stop upholding the necessity for an independent working class,

but it also had leaders who were opportunistic and betrayed the socialist cause. And so the leader, the opportunistic leader, and the leader of the opportunistic camp was Errol Browder, who was the general secretary at the time, and led the CPUSA into a coalition with the New Deal Democrats, led by FDR. And so the New Deal Democratic Alliance became the dominant political force in the United States for decades, and they are the reason why the Democratic Party became known as the pro-worker or pro-union party today, right? And what happened was a total betrayal. The CPUSA lost its independence,

stopped fighting for socialist revolution, and gave upon the most basic demands by the working class, and especially the black and brown working class to appeal to the Democrats, right? And let's look at what happened with the black organizing. To appeal to the Democratic Party, the Communist Party liquidated the Alabama sharecroppers Union, right? And so around the mid-30s,

Browder hands over the Communist Party machinery to John Lewis, like the same opportunistic leader who founded the CIO, who was one of the precursors to the Labor Federation AFL-CIO, who failed to oppose World War I. And according to the AFL-CIO website, he had been raised as a Republican, but after FDR was elected, he allied with the Roosevelt Democrats. And so the communists had for a very long time operated inside CIO unions, but kept their political independence, right? So this is a practice by many communists. They had permeated the rank and file of the CIO.

And it was in fact the communist organizers who built the CIO from the ground, who gave them the legitimacy as like a good union, as an industrial union, and who had kept the militancy of this union alive, right? And so what happens then in the 30, is that Browder hands over the machinery of the CPUSA and agrees to do the following, right? Browder agrees to abolish all of the communist cells or groups inside the CIA unions.

Two, he sends all of the best communist organizers to work on the John Lewis to do the heavy lifting of the labor organizing and propaganda for the CIA, to do exclusively economic work. So like focusing on wages and benefits and not over socialist demands, not over political education, nothing that will benefit the entire working class. Three, all of the most revolutionary projects by the CPUSA were liquidated, including the black-led Alabama sharecroppers union, which was dissolved into John Lewis, his agricultural union.

All black organizing in the south was canceled. In the north, black organizing projects are also linked. and black communists are being asked to join the middle-class NAACP, which is not exactly the place for black proletarian revolutionaries. And so this leads to the CP USA losing 80% of its black membership in New York alone. Then number four, finally, the CPUSA stopped putting their own candidates on the ballot and joined the electoral party of the AFL and the CIO, called the American Labor Party, which is not a rule.

real independent party, but it's kind of like what we know as an electoral fusion party, which is kind of how the Working Families Party operates today. So basically, you had the American Labor Party will endorse like a New Deal Democrat, and then they would have their own separate ballot, but the candidates were the same, you know, they were also New Deal Democrats. And so what did the Communist Party or the international working class got in return? nothing, like no guarantees. The CIO even got to keep a clause in their constitution that lumps communists with KKK members and fascists

and prohibits them from joining the Union. During an interview with the House of an American activities and anti-communist government agency, Lewis was asked why he worked with communists, and he said, who gets the bird, the hunter, or the dog? Meaning that he, the hunter, was using the communist or the dog to get the bird or the working class. And so eventually Browder ends up dissolving the CPUSA in 1944,

which received significant criticism from the USSR through a letter sent by the French communists under the instruction. Most called the act the liquidation of the independent political party of the working class. And although there was an effort to reconstitute it, the CPUSA never went back to its militant and revolutionary years. He lost the working class, right? Throughout this process of liquidation, it expels some of its most militant members, right, such as CPUSA founder, William Dunn, black communist Harry Haywood, Ruth McKinney, Bruce Minton.

These comrades were told that they were too sectarian, too dogmatic, that they were told that they were making exaggerated, one-sided attacks against the Democratic Party, where he was the Republicans who were the main centers. of reaction, which sounds familiar. And so we ended up with this narrative that FDR was this great president, but let's analyze his actions. Like, what did he actually do? He failed to pass or publicly support anti-lynching legislation

because he was too afraid of upsetting the white Southern Democrats. He helped deport two million Mexicans and backstabed sharecroppers. while he was supposed to be the leader of the so-called anti-fascist New Deal Democratic coalition, he was actually responsible for the success of fascism in Spain. So when the Spanish Republic was fighting a civil war against the fascist forces of Franco, Roosevelt adopted a quote-unquote moral embargo, called for neutrality acts, and banned the cell of weapons to vote parties. And who does this benefit it? These benefited the fascist forces, because it blocked the

Spanish Republic from getting weapons to fight the fascist, while the fascist forces were receiving plenty of weapons from Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and from American corporations, such as Ford, General Motors, and Vigoyo. And after Franco, the fascist wins the war and takes over Spain, Roosevelt recognizes his government and lifts the embargo. And it is the win of Franco that helps solidify and emboldened the fascist bloc and sets the stage for World War II. This was the guy who was supposed to protect us from the rise of fascism. And so the labor reforms of FDR resemble both the approach of his son called Teddy and also the approach of the Democratic Party pre-Civil War.

One, it throws some crumbs at white workers at the expense of non-white workers, taking advantage of racial chauvinism, sabotaging solidarity. And two, these labor reforms are meant to mediate between labor and capital, acting like a pressure valve for working class rebellion, preventing revolution. So these communist organizing and rebellions created a credible threat for revolution. So FDR passes the National Labor Elections Act, or NLRA, legalizing non-communist unions and setting up a process for collective bargaining, where unions could settle grievances through contract negotiations backed by capitalist courts and a board appointed by the president. And so this was great for the anti-communist unions to boost their membership,

but it also came at the cost of adding non-strike clauses to most of their contracts. And in the original language of the NLRA, FDR is very clear that he's trying to implement these reforms in order to prevent the obstruction of the free flow of commerce, right? And he was like, you know, we need to allow workers to organize. We need to eliminate and prevent the obstructions of the free flow of commerce that happen when workers engage in strikes and other forms of industrial unrest, right? And so the NLR also excluded domestic workers and farm workers who are majority black, Mexican, Central American, Filipino, migrants and Chicanos, right? And millions of European immigrants who used to fight discrimination became middle class, right, or poorly mobile.

And very few non-white workers actually were able to make it through the unions. And when they did, there was a big limitation because they were limited by this labor law that only allows you to make demands around wages or benefits instead of against racism or sexism. And so this led to the rise of insurgent organizations, right? Like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the 70s who had to fight not just against the auto companies, but against the union leadership itself.

And like, you know, just as I am finishing up with this question because there was just so much to cover. Like what happens again, like after FDR, right? The ruling class begins to take their, crumbs back like the next day the FDR leaves office. Truman and other Democrats becomes president using the same rhetoric and narrative as FDR, but without an independent and proletarian Communist Party, he doesn't have to pretend anymore. He let the country into the Cold War against the Soviet Union and built a machinery for the Red Scare,

right, which led to 26,000 FBI investigations against suspected communists. 5 million background checks, 560 government workers fired, the communists being perched from the labor unions, 144 indicted, 105 convicted, many leaders deported or jailed. And during his presidency, Congress passes the Tavreley Act, which takes away many of the protections from the New Deal and bans many kinds of strikes, like the most effective kinds of strike he banned. you know, the Congress band significantly weakening labor law. And so the workers are left with significantly weaker unions and without the revolutionary and independent proletarian party. And so what happened to the opportunistic leaders? What happened to John Lewis from the CIA, right?

You know, after the NLRA pass, he tried to organize the South, founded an education center in Tennessee, which later became the Highlander Center, the education hub for the civil rights movement. He starts this Operation Dixie to organize the South, quote unquote, but fails because the CIA no longer has the trust of southern workers. And so he went back to being a Republican. And since we brought up Highlander Center,

it's important to bring up the civil rights movement, since this is the main reason we are told that the two imperialist parties shifted constituencies. and it definitely contributed, right? But there's definitely more to the story. So during the Cold War, the U.S. was in communism, claiming that the U.S. was a freer country, that Soviet Russia, but at the same time, the country was plagued with conditions of apartheid

and genocide against black people. There was a growing civil rights movement, and the threat that black people could come back to communism. And in fact, you know, the government would frequently pit civil rights leaders and black celebrities against black communists, right? Like, just look up the famous case at the House of an American activities and see how the government asked famous baseball player Jackie Robinson to testify against Paul Robinson.

So, you know, the issue of civil rights creates significant fractions inside the Democratic Party. And Lyndon Johnson, who sized the Civil Rights Act, says, you know, after signing civil rights legislation, he said, like, well, we lost this out for a generation, meaning that they lost the Dixiecrats. So in summary, the Democrats supported civil rights as their own type of mediation with black voters, kind of like the mediation that they engage

in the mid-1930s with white workers. So just like the labor concessions created a white middle class, the civil rights concession created a black middle class. But what about black workers, black logistics workers, hospitality manufacturing service workers, on-house black workers, many of whom are criminalized and cannot vote. Well, like since the beginning of this country, there's been certain lines that the state does not allow you to cross without violence.

For MLK, that line was supporting the Memphis Sanitation Strike. The same Democratic Party president Lyndon B. Johnson who passed the Civil Rights Act is the one who orders his assassination. So it is very clear that MLK made the ruling class very afraid simply by supporting a black-led strike. The imperialist class of which a Democratic Party is an organon fears a strong working-class movement, and black workers are a necessary component of that movement. And you know, just one last fact is that during the last presidential election in 2024, Memphis, a town with a large percentage of black voters

in the town where MLK was assassinated by the Johnson administration saw the lowest voter turnout since the year MLK was murdered by the FBI in 1968. Wow. Wow, thank you for that for sharing, yes, how the Democratic Party

has come to be framed as the party on the left. And within that history, I appreciated knowing or getting to hear the history of the Communist Party of the USA. And a few things that stood out, one, that analogy about the hunter and the dog and the bird. Just such a powerful metaphor for how throughout the history that you just shared, there's been the Democrats have used different populations, whether it's the Communist Party or, you know, Irish workers or black people, you know, for gain, right, and who really benefited. And another thing that really stood out to me,

you said, bipartisan politics is one of the best strategies for preventing a genuine socialist party in the U.S. And that really stood out to me, too, and something that we feel to this day, right, the power of bipartisan politics here in the U.S. And also I appreciated more about the history of the AFL-CIO, and I do want to point people to a complimentary conversation we had with Jeff Shirky about the history of the AFL-CIO and its connection with imperialism and anti-communism abroad. So we'll link to that as well. So, you know, let's go into the present, bring us to the present, and tell us about the role the Democratic Party plays in the U.S. political system today. How would you, how would you introduce its role today?

In summary, Democrats continue to be the party of mediation of co-optation, right? After Teddy Roosevelt became to push for his reform strategy, Lenin said that they are two sides of any trend to reform capitalism. One, the bourgeois bigwigs and politicians who deceived the masses with promises of reform. and two, the cheated masses who feel that they cannot go on living the old way and follow the quack with the loudest promises. That's true today. So since the 1930s, the Democratic Party has used other bourgeois anti-communist trends to recruit and deceive a more diverse section of the people, right? Like postmodernism. There's even some writings by the CIA where they describe these kind of like left, anti-communism that is based in individual experience and expression, and they have used some of

these tendencies as well to recruit a diverse base of anti-communist voters and supporters, and to deceive the masses. However, their base is now every day less and less working class. Why? I mean, the people don't forget. It was Democrat Bill Clinton who passed the 1994 crime bill that led to the mass incarceration amongst black people. Go Intel Pro, the strategy by the FBI, to persecute murder, particularly black organizers in the 60s and 70s. It was enforced by the Democrats and Republicans alike. It was a Democrat, Obama, who bailed out the banks while people lost their homes. With their intervention in Latin America in the late 2000s, Democrats caused a wave of mass migration

from Central America, from Haiti, and that deported everybody, while calling themselves the allies of immigrants. Today, both imperialist parties have a large network apparatus composed of labor unions, non-profits, like the 501c3s, 501s, think tanks, media channels, political action committees, both imperialist parties work in the service of the same capitalist imperialist clause that is causing all of our misery. Kamala Harris's brother-in-law and campaign

advisor, Tony West, is the top lawyer for Uber. If you look at the corporate donors of each parties, many U.S. monopolies donate almost equal parts to both parties, including war-profiters like Raytheon technologies or healthcare monopolies like Blue Cross Blue Shield. Democrats get money from Blackstone and other venture capitalists from Microsoft. This is who they are accountable to. And so when you put this into context, there shouldn't be a question of why were the Democrats who empower Israel to commit a genocide against the Palestinian people, right? And you know, Today, the Democratic Party utilizes that apparatus

to continue to co-op progressive movements and isolate the leaders of this progressive movement. So I'll focus domestically first, right? Look at what happened in Ferguson. You had an organic and local mass uprising against police brutality, which made headlines across the country. And immediately, you had middle-class Democratic Party

activists, parachute into town and derail conversation absorb the media attention and make the people of the US forget about the demands of the more radical and original labor movement. The middle-class activists run for Democratic Party office like the Ray in Baltimore, or they run whole careers out of money-grifting schemes like Sean King or end up, you know, like Patrice Cullors drinking champagne in the mansions while the the original radical activists from Ferguson are forgotten and found dead in their cars, like Darren Seals, who was found shot to death in his storage vehicle in September 2016, while Obama was still in office.

And at least six of the original leaders of Ferguson Uprising were found dead between 2014 and 2018. So the Democratic Party has not just co-opted the black and labor struggles. They have made their way into other struggles, you know, always working with a portion of the base of such struggles, right? Usually like the more middle-class elements and completely isolating the working-class elements. The Latino movement is one example. They co-opted it with Cesar Chavez. Today, they are very shocked at Cesar Chavez misogyny. But this was nothing new.

Undocumented activists have been screaming that this man sucked for years. Cesar Chavez was a Democratic Party darling who co-opted. The Delano Grape Strike originally led by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, AWAC, which was led by Filipino organizers, Larry Italywan, Philip Veracruz, Pete Belasco, Chavez was a staunched chauvinist as well, right? He used lures to refer to undocumented workers, and when his movement takes over the strike, he breaks the solidarity in the farm worker movement.

He sabotages it. And today, the Democratic Party has also found its way to co-op the immigrant rights movement, right? Appealing to the more upwardly mobile activists and throwing undocumented workers and their demands under the bus. As, you know, the anti-ice and Palestinian movements came prominence, the Democratic Party co-ops the aesthetics and the narrative, but none of the material benefits for undocumented people or Palestinians.

And this is especially true whenever a Republican is in office and Democrats are trying to get back to office. Because like Lenin said, the politicians won the cushy jobs the winning party in the US hands out to its supporters. So especially in the four years of a Republican presidency, they engaged in the following pattern. One, in the first two years, you see Democratic Party nonprofit parachute

and absorb the energy with empty and symbolic actions or with work that feels like ambulance chasing without a clear strategic goal. And, you know, this is very particularly true, or maybe just like a very particular experience of mine in the immigrant rights movement where you see organizations are like only coming to existence during a Republican administration, right, as if Democrats didn't deport people. And number two, the Democratic Party non-profits raise enough money to drown the demands and the work of grassroots activists, right? they effectively become the movement, you know? Maybe they claim that they're raising money for legal defense or mutual aid. And, you know, a lot of these lacked enough transparency.

And usually the middle class activists that might fall for these strategies or for these campaigns, many who are well-intentioned, despite the fact that they're well-intentioned, most of them are not integrated enough in the affected communities to really know where the money really goes, right? Like, this happens. And so throughout all this time, the Democratic Party nonprofits build large contact lists of potential Democratic Party voters. You know, that's just what happens, right? And number three, in the election year, you start seeing these nonprofits switch gears, right? And begin to put all their energy into their 501C4s or the electoral arms, which many of them have.

They channel all of the energy into another electoral cycle, pushing for candidates that claim to support the issue that people care about to begin with. Then Democrats are elected into office and the demands of the grassroots movements are once again forgotten. And each day, this co-optation just becomes more obvious because the working class of this country was left without his political party. without a viable Communist Party. The proletariat was left without the vehicle they needed to fight against the capitalist reaction that came in later years.

Today, almost all of the crumbs that the people won through the labor movement of the 1930s, the civil rights movement, and the mass movements that came after have been taken away. Even the white middle class is disappearing, right? Like unemployment, underemployment are soaring.

And what happened to the labor movement? The labor laws became so complex that they require that unions develop bureaucracies and hire lawyers to just navigate the systems. And these bureaucracies became intertwined with capitalists themselves and in some cases involved with elements of the mafia, right? Which is just historically true in public information. Because the unions were left without communists, without class conscious workers fighting for the class as a whole, they were left with corrupt union leadership, who will never organize the workforce with the rigor and discipline of the communists

because they don't need to. You know, this union bureaucracy doesn't think twice before engaging in back-door deals with the boss, cheating workers out of good contracts, working overtime to prevent strikes or call them off before workers get their demands met, claiming easy victories, avoiding confrontation with the capitalist enemies,

And so Lenin calls this bureaucracy the, quote-unquote, labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. Just look at what happened when Joe Biden, like the quote-unquote most pro-union president in history, broke a railroad strike in 2022. And while many of us called out so-called progressives like AOC for helping break this strike, very few of us examine the role that the union leadership itself had, in breaking the strike. AOC was like, oh, railroad workers United, which is the militant industrial like rail worker movement, told me to break the strike. That wasn't true.

We don't know what happened, but she was probably talking to one of the union leaders, the official, the establishment union leaders. And before the 2022, there was the 2011 railroad strike, which Obama broke. And so today, unions like SCIU, the Service Employees International Union, and the National Educators Association, N.A.

are amongst the largest donors to the Democratic Party. And in some cases, the leadership of these unions is indistinguishable to the democratic government in many liberal cities. SCIU, for example, has been working with Democrats in liberal states to undermine gig worker organizing. SCIU made a deal with Uber and the Democratic Party point.

politicians in places like Massachusetts and California to undermine real rank-and-file rights-share unions by trapping right-share workers in SCIU control unions with limited collective bargaining without the same benefits as employees and offering major concessions for the right-share companies. These right-share companies are even handing out their entire contact list to SCIU, giving them an unfair advantage and adding language in legislation. that disqualifies long-standing, rank-and-file, right-share unions from getting to be the ones that get the certification to represent their own members.

And so what happens with this? A CIA is complicit in the expansion of the gig economy. And now we're seeing that many other industries are starting to adopt the gig worker model. Industries like nursing, like other areas of the logistics industry, right? That's frightening. That affects the entire working class. And when labor leaders there to speak out against the Democratic Party machinery,

they're punished and isolated. Look at the Jacovin article that came out about Chris Molls because he dared to criticize AOC. Democrat labor leaders criticized for crashing the Met Gala, right? Like they criticize him for crashing the Met Gala, right? And they say, oh, we are superior because we took part in a collective action against Jeff Benzos at the same time as Chris engaged, in a solo direct action at the gala. But what was this collective action by the established unions?

It was a parallel gala, right? Like the quote unquote gala without billionaires organized by SCIU, which what it did is like it effectively put all of the union leaders and rank and file together in a room talking to each other and contained. Far from where they could disrupt Jeff Bezos, right? And he's met gala. And you know, I do agree that collective actions are more powerful than individual actions. But why didn't the union leaders not there to confront the

capitalist? I rather an individual worker leader confronting the boss than a union bureaucracy working for the capitalist to contain the working class away from class struggle. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Cecilia Guerrero. We'll be right back. They won't help you if you are in pain. They'll ask you for your vote. They'll tell you they are broke. Then send a lot of money to Ukraine. And also Israel.

Republicans will obviously kill you. But at least you know where they are at. They'll shoot you in the head. Make sure that you are dead. The Democrats will shoot you in the back. And also in the balls. But this is the best democracy we've ever had. we've ever had anywhere

if you're a billionaire boys if you're a billionaire have a stick in both my eyes everybody screams and hollers and either way the planet fucking frog but this is the best democracy we've ever had

it's the best democracy we've ever had anywhere that was the Democrats by Carcy Planton now back to our conversation with Cecilia Guerrero You mentioned that you were focusing on the national, and you really focused on the domestic outlay, particularly relationship with labor here in the U.S. I'd love to turn towards the global perspective, because you did say they're both imperialist parties. So can you talk more about Democrats' relationship or approach to politics internationally? I'm thinking about the war on Iran, but also imperialist parties. But also imperialist. Interventions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. So can you can you turn us towards the global and the history and present reality of the Democratic Party? Yeah, let's look at Iran, for example,

right? So the Democrats notice that the people reject the war of imperialist aggression against Iran and are trying to position themselves as the anti-war party before the elections. But when you look at their policy, these disagreements between the revolution, Republican and the Democrat imperialists are only at the tactical level. The Republicans prefer the terror tactics of open warfare, right, to maintain U.S. imperialist domination. While the Democrats prefer low-intensity warfare through sanctions and the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, which what they do is bribe the oppressed countries with financial, quote-unquote, and blackmails them into starvation.

The Roosevelt playbook teaches Democrats that open warfare breeds resistance, as we have seen, with the strength of Iran's national resistance against imperialist aggression. The Democrats know that that is a threat to the empire. The Democrats' main argument publicly around Iran is that the war lacked congressional approval, right?

That's just nothing but theatrical. Like, since he became public that Trump was planning to evade Iran, what do Democrats do? In February, they voted to pass $1.2 trillion of increased military funding through September of 2026. Under Bill Clinton, the U.S. placed the first round of sanctions against Iran, right? And in 2008, the Democratic majority in Congress authorized funds for first Bush and then Obama to carry covert over overreact operations. in Iran. And let's talk about sanctions too, right? Like sanctions kill more people than open warfare. You know, according to some estimates by like the Lancet Global Health, 28 million people have been killed by U.S. and European sanctions between 1971 to 2021. That is more than five times the number

of battle-related casualties. So the U.S. labor movement, as an appendage of the empire, has also played a role in the imperialist aggression against other countries. You know, like look at most recently, The Solidarity Center by the AFL-CIO has helped covert operations by U.S. intelligence in overthrowing Latin American governments and received funding by the National Endowment for Democracy. You know, the Solidarity Center is implicated in attempts to overthrow

Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002 and helped stage a coup in Haiti in 2004. And before the Solidarity Center existed, the AFL-CIO itself directly was involving the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile, right, to name another example. So the Democrats have led the destabilization of many third world nations, right, because they are an imperialist party. They're never going to not be one, right? it was during the Obama administration that ISIS was allowed to secure heavy weaponry and destabilized portions of Syria and Iraq through the directive of Secretary Hillary Clinton,

right, of intervention. In Honduras, it was the 2009 coup that the Obama administration helped orchestrate. Clinton was also the chief architect of the NATO intervention in Libya to remove Gaddafi. The Democratic Party is never going to take a stand against him. imperialism. They might provide some concessions to domestic workers, but it's never going to be concessions for the international working class. And you better believe they're never going to do real concessions for undocumented workers, for black workers, for the most exploited workers in our society and the most essential workers in our society, right? So is this who we trust to

take a stand on Palestine, on immigration? Like, they call. mass migration. And, you know, that is one of the things that we need to have very clear about who the Democratic Party is. Yeah, I really hear you that the difference between the two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, is tactical. And yes, very much this is true that warfare can be both military, overt, and also economic. And thank you for laying out all of those examples and the harm that has been caused. And, you know, we've talked about the domestic, the national, and now we've talked about the Democrats' role internationally. Let's go to a more hyper-local context, your context in Nashville, which I love that as I'm listening to all

of this, the work that you do kind of really brings it into place and really is kind of a microcosm of the macrocosm, right, in terms of your work doing labor organizing, and then also just what's going on in Nashville in general. So, yeah, please share a little bit about if we bring this to the hyperlocal level, your context in Nashville, what could we learn there and what can we understand about the Democrats' role? Yes, for sure. Yeah, I'm going to receive a lot of lovely messages for this one. But what we have dealt locally is a reflection of everything. You know, we have been talking about and I can give some very concrete examples. One, so at the beginning of this year, our town had to deal with winterstone fern and, you know, the town was so poorly prepared for it.

A majority of households lost power and it was seven degrees Fahrenheit outside in Tennessee, right? So, and people were without power for up to two weeks. So people died. Like, Like people actually died. And of course, like we started to see that a lot of linemen, line workers were angry online. So we hit the ground and started to talk to line workers, you know, who were on the job. And started to try to just like reach out to be like, okay, what is going on? What is happening here? And so we spoke to many line workers on the ground who were telling us that they were ready to help with the storm response,

but had been rejected by our city's utility monopoly, who said that they didn't want to pay for their union wages, right? And these were electricians, they were line workers affiliated with the IBEW, which is an electrician's union. There were other line workers that were supporting with the storm response. They were represented by SCIU, which has a significantly weaker contract than the workers at IBEW. So the line workers like spoke to us and say like, you know, there were hundreds of crews ready to help.

The city does not have enough line workers to respond to the winterstorm firm like appropriately. Right. And we spoke to like people who were on the ground. Like we spoke to a rank and file member who was in charge of leading the storm response locally. So he knew. We spoke to crews from locally from out of state. we spoke to different people who were on the ground, and they were all saying the same thing. And so we started to uplift the line worker testimonies and just let the call for the city to hire more line workers, right? And the call became like incredibly popular. It really resonated because people were freezing to that.

And so, you know, some of the line workers, especially, you know, like the guy who is like leading the response against the storm, they speak to press as well. You know, they speak to the Tennessean, they speak to even, you know, Fox News and different and like local media. What happened? We thought that that was a very uncontroversial take because people were freezing. The Democrats and some of the social Democrats mobilized their machinery to delegitimize the line workers and also us and also our organization, right? Progressive newspapers controlled by the Democratic. party officials like the Nashville scene, which rights felt to be this like very progressive force locally, they start to say that these were all rumors, that people were just spreading rumors, that they had

nothing to do, they called the misinformation, but they didn't really reach out to the workers to verify their testimonies. They just kind of dismiss the accounts as like not credible, right? And then they start to uplift the narrative of the executives of the utility monopoly. And they present the narrative of the utility monopoly as the truth, right? And this is the fact. It wasn't just Democrats, right? It was their machinery. So you had SEU, the leadership at the SEU.

And you even had the leadership at the international level at the IBEW. you come out and come up with statements against the rank and file calling it all rumors they even go on a promotional like a PR ad with the utility company right and saying like we're so proud to work with this utility company when have you ever seen a union go on and do ads with the boss like promoting the boss like even in our current state in the labor movement the majority of established unions don't dare to that much. And like, you know, you are never going to see like, you know, the UAW doing an ad for Ford or even the Timsters do an ad for Amazon, right?

Like, we're proud of working with Amazon. No, like, you're not going to see that happening, but they did. And then they start to send their influencers and media to slender, slender organizations and slender the line workers themselves. A member of the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. this influencer and banker, it starts discrediting and slandering the line workers that gave testimony to press, right? Basically, it starts going on and doing videos where he exposes the personal Facebook accounts of this line worker and saying, like, will you trust him? He's a Trump supporter, like, look at these posts from before,

which is just entirely unprincipled. And that's just actually not how you switch people to your side. I don't care about the line workers' policies. He was there. This guy from the executive committee of the Democratic Party starts making jokes that, oh, we're going to get you fired to the line worker. At the same time, as the Democratic Party influencers, like this member of the executive committee of the Democrats, is making these jokes.

The international at the IBEW is threatening the rank and file for speaking up, and is in fact threatening them with their jobs, right? And so they did all of these. And this exacerbated public outreach, actually, multiplying the antagonism between the people and the utility company and between like the rank and file and the union leadership, right? Because, you know, we were called like anti-union for standing up and highlighting and providing a platform for the demands of the line workers of the rank and file.

And we were called anti-union for that, but that's not what the union is. The union is supposed to be the working class, the rank and file, right? Politicians also come out against the line workers, right? And so months later, there was a lot of public records that were released. And the public records revealed that we had been correct all along. The city did not have enough line workers. and in fact had only 100 line workers to basically fix most of the households in town. So it was impossible.

The executives who had been defended by the business unions, by this union's leadership, and by the Democratic Party press, were personally responsible for rejecting the line workers. Like they were the ones who denied the line worker crews and then they were saying another thing in the media. There were also some of the things that were revealing that was at the monopoly utility company, instead of paying for more line workers, they hired an army of PR consultants, prioritizing saving face over saving lives, right? And customers paid higher electricity bills that month. And, you know, everybody was wondering, like, did we pay for actually, like, the line workers, or did we pay for the PR firms that the utility company hired?

And that's one example. The second example, early this year as well, members from Poder Popular, like read a piece from Wire Magazine that lists all of the new ICE offices from across the country. Two of them in our city. We find out that one of them is owned by the Tennessee Democratic Party congressman bought Freeman. The members find this out. And also happens to be the Tennessee's largest landowner. This Democratic politician happens to come from a family regarded as the largest donors to the Tennessee Democratic Party campaigns. You know, they donate from like high school young Democrats clubs to like every level of government.

And he also happens to be like a really horrible slumlord with a track record of taking public funds to build like affordable housing, quote unquote, right, where the tenants are treated horribly. So that guy was the new landlord for ICE in our town. And we started to come up with the demands and started to break the story. What happens is that he also happens to control that quote-unquote progressive news outlet called the Nashville scene. And in there, the Nashville scene claims that they're the ones that broke the story and tried to change the angle. Later, like a week later or so, we got from an anonymous source. screenshots from a conversation, like a chat conversation between Democratic Party politicians and labor leaders, the political director from SCIU. And so politicians are saying in this chat,

hey, yo, we notice that this group is pushing for these demands and this campaign. So we need to find a group to take over this campaign, basically to co-op this campaign. So this conversation is showing a pattern, right, that we have known to be truth and that we have already, you know, we have many accounts of them doing, which is that every time we push forward a series of demands that are deemed too radical or too progressive, Democratic Party officials in our city and their machinery,

they work to find another group to take over a campaign and co-op the demands. And that's what they were doing and they got caught doing. And effectively, they get, a more liberal, like immigrant rights group to try to take over the demands. But at this point, they have been significantly delegitimized by the people, since what they did to the line workers. In similar fashion, our members have put forward demands, for example, for decommodified housing, right?

Like calling out the public investments in for-profit developers, like Bob Freeman, the islandlord, to build this fake afford. housing that doesn't really keep people housed, right? But that takes public funds to fund these projects and then ends up evicting everybody, right? And, you know, we have, you know, Poder Popular has led significant campaigns to organize debt and unions and housing campaigns, and they were the ones that, you know, last year put the demand for the commodified housing forward and center in front of the city government. What happens is the Democratic Party officials come in and get all of the other more liberal non-profits in a room, many of whom opposed

our demand for the commodified housing and asked them to take over the campaign. And they agree. But ask them, as they do every time, every time that they call up one of our campaigns, they ask to modify the demands. So with the campaign against Bob Freeman, the ICE landlord, we call for a boycott of the Nashville scene, his publications. We call for a boycott. We call for for an investigation on his properties. And the demand becomes, you know, just like, just call Bob Freeman, a very vague thing, right? Call Bob Freeman and tell him to stop renting to ice.

In the case of decommodified housing, the demand shifted from, we want a real investment in housing that is away from for-profit developers, but specifically we want you to stop investing money on these for-profit developers, right? what the demand shifted to was the demand for a position for a researcher to look into the question of decommodified housing right for this researcher to just get paid by the city for a year

or more to just do some research into tell us things that the people already know right and so just delay the energy focus the energy in this fake job fake position without a real material investment in the people. And that's what many Democrats in their nonprofit machinery calls a win. We have seen how the AFL-CIO themselves have refused to support workers who have been retaliated and said that they don't want to support because if they support our union, that they will lose access to the Democratic Party mayor.

And so those are just some few examples, but I think it can paint the picture on kind of what we're dealing with. Yeah, it's an excellent case study. And as you're saying, I'm really hearing the examples of co-optation, mediation, and the way that demands are defanged and shifted to be, quote, unquote, more palatable, right? And then the power is taken away from the grassroots organizing. And, you know, there may be people listening who are like, yes, I know this. or I've sensed this. I've been already distancing myself or critical of the Democratic Party. For

others, this may be new, this history and an understanding and maybe an unlearning, right? There's a lot of unlearning in this conversation around labor, around Hugo Chavez, around the Democratic Party and the history. You know, what may come up for people next is, and so what? Like, so what's, they're fired up, they're incensed, right, from everything that you're sharing. What are the actions? What's the response, right? And I think there's a few pathways. And the first one that I want to explore is reforming the Democratic Party, right?

This idea of, in your view, could there be a path or actions to do some, you know, kind of truth and reconciliation of the history of the Democratic Party? And then reformations that really could lead to the Democratic Party truly represent. the working class, or in your view, is that not the right strategy and it's something else? So tell us first about, you know, what we can do about all this and, and particularly in light of attempts or the strategy of reformation. So let's address first, like, the reforming of the Democratic Party. And I do want to say, I know that there's a lot of people that are very well-intentioned that do see a path forward with this strategy. And there are several options for how that can go. And I'm just going to look at history, right? I am not going to speak out of feelings. I'm just going to say, like, there are historical precedents for this strategy.

One, we have a round two of the New Deal Democratic Coalition with the second time being a farce, in the words of Karl Marx in the 18 Brumer. The best some workers, like AKA primarily white workers, got from the New Deal years was like some crumbs and successful election campaigns, which resulted in some policy wins that were later taken away. Today, the objective conditions are different than they were in the 1930s. The Democratic Party can no longer afford the same kind of concessions to some sections of the working class because U.S. imperialism is. under threat. And we are under a general crisis of imperialism in the United States. It's dealing with the fact that its colonies and semi-colonies are waging struggles and are resisting imperialism at a rate that we hadn't seen before. So, you know, the Democratic Party might try to bribe

some workers in the big coastal cities as it has done since before the Civil War. The Democratic Party bribing the workers of New York, Boston, Philadelphia. It's really nothing new. It's like as American as apple pie since Andrew Jackson, right? Like that has been their thing, fighting for some section of the voters, those that are movable, neglecting the black workers, etc. But these bribes won't last long because the crisis of imperialism. This time is bigger than ever before. Like we are on the verge of another depression. I mean, the healthcare industry is like single-handedly keeping the unemployment levels in the U.S. above the threshold for a depression, right?

And that's going to be taken away with all the government cuts. The AI bubble is going to burst. And we already see like mass layoffs happening everywhere. Deportations, mass deportations are happening. Like they happen during every crisis, every depression, right? Because the surplus population is no longer needed. it. So that's one route. Two, it can look like Germany when the Social Democratic Party came to power in 1918. Its leaders, Friedrich Evert and Philip Scheidemann, I never can pronounce

that correctly, but you get me, when the Social Democratic Party goes to power in Germany, misleading the workers of Germany, pushing for similar things as FDR did, like strong labor unions, democratic rights as long as it was in communism, right? That could be one route. And in fact, it was the social democratic government, which labeled the real communists of Germany's Spartacus League as radical terrorists. And later assassinate its leaders, Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Lipnick, right? So these social democrats were the ones that killed Rosa Luxembourg when they came to power.

And, you know, when they kill Rosa Luxembourg, right? Like when they killed the real leadership of the working class in Germany, that is what leads to the defeat of the working class movement in Germany, you know, which set the stage for the rise of Nazi Germany as the working class was left without a true proletarian party. On number three, in the best case scenario, we get Salvador Allende. And what happened to Salvador Allende after gaining party? To win via the electoral route means to leave the bourgeois machinery intact, to leave the class enemies intact.

And what have we learned about that since the civil war, right? What happened? They retaliate. Right? And in history, there has never been a peaceful transition of power from one class to another, right? right, from an exploited class to an exploited class or vice versa. Socialism isn't about some reforms or about welfare or about nationalization, right? It's about the working class taking state power.

So I worry about hearing Bernie, for example, calling for the nationalization of Amazon. That's actually a terrible idea under a bourgeois government because to nationalize industry, while a capitalist imperialist class, let alone, like the sole hegemonic imperialist power, like the number one enemy of the world, the United States, if you nationalize Amazon or another highly profitable industry, that means that that capitalist class is now in control of the profits of Amazon. And the workers with the fruits of their labor are feeding a machinery that is meant to oppress them. And that's what fascism is, right?

Like, it's a word that gets thrown around so easily. Like, oh, it's fascist, fascist. We are actually not fascist yet. The United States is not fascist yet. The ruling class does not need fascism just yet because it can still deceive the working class. We don't have a strong socialist movement. And it hasn't merged the industrial machinery with the state machinery, right,

which is a very important component of fascism, the merger of industry and state. So it is not about nationalizing Amazon, because who gets to the side what they do with those profits? If it's not the people, you better believe that they're not going to use them for anything good. They're going to use them for surveillance, for militarization, for more repression. And so what's the solution, right? We need to remember that political parties represent classes. They represent social classes.

usually a principal class and allied classes. A proletarian party can include members of the Petit Bourgeoisie or Mero class because they also benefit from a socialist program. But a party cannot represent antagonistic classes, right? You cannot represent both monopolies and the workers that they exploit. And that's what the Democrat and Republican parties claim to do, right? And like Lenin was very, very clear on this in his letter to European and American workers, right? The bourgeois parliament, even the most democratic one, it is a tool of the

capitalists for the suppression of the millions of working class people and small businesses, right? And, you know, the socialists, the fighters of the emancipation of the working people from exploitation, how to utilize the bourgeois parliaments as a platform, a vase for propaganda, agitation, and organization, right? But now that the history has brought up the question, With the Bolshevik revolution of destroying the whole of that system, Lenin says, right? Like I'm quoting him, of overthrowing and suppressing the exploiters, of passing from capitalism to socialism, it would be a shameful betrayal of the proletariat, deserting to its class enemy, the bourgeoisie, and being a traitor and a renegade to confine oneself to bourgeois parliamentarism,

to bourgeois democracy, to present it as democracy in general, to obscure its bourgeois character, to forget that as long as capitalist property exists, universal suffrage, universal vote, is an instrument of the Buzha state. Right? And so I think that if there is anybody out there that would like to continue the conversation, you should definitely hit us up,

specifically hit up one project that was started why some of the members that we have supported in the past, the Workers' Unity League. And so I will provide a link for people to reach out to the Workers Unity League. And basically, it's a project that it's a combination of a long process of surveying and integration in different industries to yield a working class demands,

specifically working class set of demands for workers in the South that we have put together. And I think one of the most important things that we can do right now is to be attuned to the working class movement. government. Workers need to relearn the political strike. They need to relearn what it means to engage in class struggle besides like superficial actions. Like we need to learn the art of organization of strategic confrontation, right? Of creating independent demands that are not shaped by what is possible according to the imperialist parties to what is possible according to what the Democrats and Republicans allow. us to do. And then I also want to take an invitation to study the history of our class, study the history of the United States labor movement, study the history of other revolutionary

movement. And I'm also going to share a link that a group of young people from the Southern Youth Solidary Network made on the lessons from the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, which was one of the most important strikes in U.S. history. And so the video is on YouTube. YouTube and I will really encourage people to watch it. Yes, we will link to all of those materials in the show notes. And yeah, thank you for those invitations. To close, I just want to ask you maybe instead of the structural response to this work, the personal.

So as we're having this conversation, what might come up for folks is, you know, fear of political repression and of just all the tactics that you've shared from the Democratic Party as well as other political forces. So just to close, you know, how do you move through the world and do this work? How do you respond to this potential fear or these actual very real acts of political repression that many experience today? Fear exists, but the thing is, is that we are going to struggle either alone, or through organization. We are going to feel the rat of the imperialist class one way or another.

Like, you're already in trouble. It's already going to get ugly. And the only strategy that we have to actually survive is to organize a powerful working class movement. And the thing is, the only protection that we have is when we are integrated with the working class. And that is one of the reasons why anti-communists and the government try to smear communists, try to attack them with personal attacks. They are trying to isolate them from the masses. They are trying to kick them out of the trade unions.

And so maybe you are not, maybe you feel like you are not ready to take action, right? But one thing that you can do is that if you are seeing those types of attacks against communists, you should not take part of them. you should stand with them, right? You should not allow the government to use the same kind of tactics to isolate the people that are ready to stand with the working class, right? And, you know, at the end of the day, though, we are in the most powerful imperialist power in the world, in the only imperialist power with hegemony. We are responsible for what our government does, right? we are responsible. And the reality is there's too many cowards in the United States. Just too many cowards.

Right. Like everybody's concerned about their individual feelings, their individual emotions, and nobody's really thinking about the working class, right? Because a lot of these activists, a lot of these middle class activists are not integrated or connected with the real struggles of working class people. And that is a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like we're never going to be powerful. We're never going to have a chance if we are not integrated and deeply connected to the issues of the working class. So, I mean, I think that one thing that keeps me going is the fact that we have the people. We are integrated with the people. And we need to trust the people.

We need to trust the masses. We need to trust that we'll figure it out. We need to trust that socialism is inevitable, and if it's not through us, it's through the next person. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Cecilia Guerrero, chair and founding member of Aluta Sigre, an organization based in Nashville, Tennessee, which incubates and trains young people and workers within advanced sectors of the working class to build and lead their own class struggle organizations.

please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to the one and only Carcy Blanton for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for biweekly bonus episodes. episodes, access to our entire backcabologue of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper

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