From the Frontlines: Class Struggle and Class War in the US Southeast w/ Cecilia Guerrero

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Jan 28, 2025

Cecilia Guerrero, chair and founding member of A Luta Sigue, shares her transformative journey from northern Mexico to Nashville, advocating for labor rights. She highlights the interconnectedness of class with various oppressions and the importance of grassroots organizing among diverse worker groups in the South. Discussing the need for solidarity and independent structures, she critiques contemporary political challenges and emphasizes community empowerment. Guerrero also touches on the historical significance of youth activism in revolutionary movements and the impact of musical reflections on labor struggles.

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INSIGHT

Class Defines Friend and Enemy

Class is the ultimate determining factor separating friend and enemy in a class society, defined by how one sustains and reproduces themselves.
Classes share common ways of life, political interests, and societal positions, making class-based organizing crucial for aligning political interests.

ANECDOTE

Cecilia Guerrero's Journey to Organizing

Cecilia Guerrero, chair and founding member of Aluta Sigue, grew up in a family of steelworkers involved in labor organizing.
Her experiences with the US-funded war on drugs, working with immigrant communities, and witnessing the 2019 Mississippi ICE raids shaped her dedication to worker power in the Southeast.

INSIGHT

Social Investigation and Class Analysis

Effective organizing requires social investigation and class analysis to understand the dynamics and relationships between different classes.
This analysis helps identify friends and enemies, prioritize mass work, and adapt to shifting conditions, aligning with the objective power of the working class.

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Class is the thread that ties different systems of oppression together—whether it’s patriarchy, national oppression, racist oppression, reproductive injustice, anti-trans oppression. Although these forms of oppression impact individuals, they operate on systemic levels. These forms of oppression cannot be understood as single, isolated, or parallel struggles—they are all manifestations of class society and can only be abolished with the end of class society. Class is what ties it all together.

When we understand this, we can begin to appreciate the importance of class-based organizing. We begin to understand why it’s crucial to identify class positions, class interests, and class politics when we talk about organizing workers, organizing tenants, or organizing around any issue within capitalism.

This is what we’ll be focusing on in today’s episode in this second installment of our “From the Frontlines” series—where, far from simply analyzing these ideas from an armchair, we’ll be talking about them with someone who has spent many years organizing and building worker power—particularly in the Southeast of the United States.

Cecilia Guerrero is a 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.

In this conversation we explore what it’s like organizing a wide variety of working class people in Nashville, Tennessee—from Uber and Lyft drivers to construction workers—most of whom are refugees and immigrants. We talk about the importance of injecting militancy and radical politics into labor organizing, of the failures of liberalism and the Democratic party, how A Luta Sigue identifies revolutionary classes and individuals and helps to incubate them and coordinate campaigns, organizing under Trump, the need for a communist party in the United States, and much, much more.

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Related Episodes:

Intermission music: "Payday at Coal Creek” by Odetta & Larry

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