Letters

Letter from Richard Mellor in California

You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel depressed at times. We’re living through a period of capitalist decay, a social system that has reached the limits of what it can offer ordinary people. Much of this depression comes from a familiar feeling — the sense that we can’t influence events, that history is happening to us rather than with us. The Institute for Labor and Mental Health once called this surplus powerlessness, and the term still fits.

Part of the problem is that there’s no national organisation with real social power to turn to, no broad network of militant groups like those that existed in the 1930s. It’s easy to feel isolated in the absence of visible leadership or mass movements.

But that doesn’t mean we’re incapable of acting. We can start small: talking with friends, co-workers, and neighbours; studying the rich traditions of working‑class history; learning how past generations fought racism, sexism, and division to build unity.

Despite the history of racism and sexism injected into society by the ruling class in order to undermine workers’ unity, the US labour movement has a deep well of experience, and it’s ours to draw from.

We can also use the organisations we do have. Our unions can become vehicles for change. If we are in a union we can build rank and file caucuses and adopt fighting programs that demand what workers actually need —not what the Democratic Party or its allies atop organised labor deem is acceptable. 

The strategies that built the CIO and industrial unionism in the 1930s weren’t magic; they were practical, collective, and rooted in workers’ own initiative and power.

The antidote to political depression begins with accepting that the world we live in can be changed. History shows that systems end and new ones are built. Acting consciously, at whatever level our resources allow, is how we break the isolation and helplessness that capitalism produces.

And we should be clear, mass movements aren’t created by charismatic individuals or tiny groups claiming to have all the answers; a healthy democratic mass movement cannot be manufactured. It emerges because the capitalist class is compelled to attack workers, and workers respond. That dynamic hasn’t disappeared.

I have no doubt that the working class will rise to meet the challenges ahead. There are no guarantees – there never have been – but we are very much alive, and history is still ours to shape.

Workers of all countries unite.

Richard Mellor is editor of the US socialist website, Facts for Working People, which can be found here.

[Feature graphic from Wikimedia Commons, here]