Building the Communist Party: Crisis and struggle in the South

by Scott Marshall

This article was reprinted from the August 2, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

RALEIGH, N.C. - From Memphis to Raleigh we've been getting an education in how the crisis of capitalism is churning up the South. Jarvis Tyner, a vice president of the Communist Party USA, and I are traveling through Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama as a part of our national recruiting drive. We're meeting a lot of great people who have joined the Party in the last few months.

Here are some examples:

The lack of unions in the building trades in much of the South keeps construction wages low. A new member in Memphis told us about how many of the helpers on the jobs he works on don't make enough money to maintain a car. He said that many have to give up their jobs because they can't follow the work when new sites are started too far from where they live. He said that while his contractor used to carry five full time laborers, now he's the only one left who still has his car and can follow the work.

In Nashville comrades are very involved in fighting wasteful development projects. Huge grocery stores and shopping malls are springing up all over the place. As one comrade put it, "we're being 'malled.'"

These contractors displace working people, tear up good land and build giant concrete structures full of super stores that we don't need and don't want. In addition one of the latest fights in Nashville involves tearing up a Native American burial site. While a broad effective community coalition has grown up, they are stymied by a Nashville city council that seems to be owned by the developers.

In Nashville we also learned more about the crisis of health care for Native American peoples. Some folks in Nashville have to travel up to five hours to the Cherokee reservation in the Great Smoky Mountains to get basic health coverage.

There seem to be union organizing drives going on all over the place. In Charlotte the UNITE union is mounting a campaign to organize Cannon Mills, one of the largest textile makers in the South.

In Chapel Hill and Greenville the United Electrical (UE) workers are organizing housekeeping and maintenance workers at the University of North Carolina. Even in small towns like Wilson, the Plastic workers union is organizing a plant that makes food processing equipment. There are also aggressive organizing drives going on in Charlotte, which has boomed as a banking and finance center in the South.

All over North Carolina there is a fight raging against the large corporate hog farmers. These super-sized corporate hog growers are polluting the water table. These huge corporate operations create massive hog waste lagoons with raw sewage causing severe health dangers to humans and other farm animals.

The strong civil rights tradition lives on with literally hundreds of grass roots struggles raging all over the South around issues of rural poverty, environmental racism, labor's rights, jobs and police repression.

In the midst of literally thousands of such fights in the South, the Communist Party is reestablishing itself in the region. New clubs are being established. Members are being put in touch with each other to begin hooking up statewide.

Everywhere we go we find interest in the Communist Party. As one new comrade put it, "Where have you guys been? I've been looking for this all my life. I think I've always been a Communist."