From the Frontlines: Class Struggle and Class War in the US Southeast w/ Cecilia Guerrero
Jan 28, 2025
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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.
Class is a fundamental connector of various oppressions, requiring a unified analysis for effective organizing against systemic inequalities.
Cecilia Guerrero's organizing strategies highlight the importance of intimate community engagement to empower marginalized workers in their struggles.
Aluta Sigue’s approach integrates labor and housing issues, fostering tenant unions that enhance collective action and class struggle awareness.
Deep dives
Understanding Class as a Universal Thread
Class serves as a fundamental connector among various forms of oppression, such as patriarchy, racism, and reproductive injustice. It is not merely an economic distinction but influences political relationships and social organization. The shared experiences of workers from different backgrounds underline the necessity of recognizing common class interests to mobilize effectively. This approach emphasizes that organizing efforts must be anchored in class analysis to forge alliances across diverse groups.
Cecilia Guerrero's experience highlights the importance of being deeply embedded in working-class communities for effective organizing. Growing up in a family of steelworkers, she learned that true political engagement stems from intimate knowledge of the struggles faced by marginalized groups. Her journey underscores the necessity of hands-on work, as seen in her involvement with immigrant communities and the challenges presented by harsh conditions following ICE raids. By aligning with the most exploited and militant workers, organizing efforts can gain momentum and impact.
Adapting Strategies to Local Contexts
Aluta Sigue employs unique strategies tailored to the specific dynamics of Nashville, focusing on intersectional organizing within evolving economic sectors. Their approach emphasizes social investigation to identify leaders among advanced sectors, such as immigrant construction workers and rideshare drivers, who may not be represented in traditional unions. By creating a union for Uber and Lyft drivers, for instance, they confront structural exploitation in the gig economy. This adaptability ensures that organizing efforts reflect local realities and capitalize on existing worker militancy.
Tenants as Essential Allies in Labor Organizing
By forming tenant unions alongside labor efforts, the organization integrates housing and labor issues, which are fundamentally intertwined under capitalism. This strategy serves not only to empower tenants but also to educate them on class struggles and their roles within it. Such unions allow for broader participation from families, fostering an environment where collective action can fashion real change. Building a network of tenant unions illustrates the organization’s commitment to creating holistic support systems for the working class.
Confronting Political Structures with Militant Actions
The organizing efforts under Aluta Sigue emphasize the use of direct, militant methods to challenge existing political structures, especially in the face of a prevailing Republican supermajority. Actions like strikes and public demonstrations aim not just to highlight injustices, but to create tangible disruptions that compel political dialogue on workers' terms. By identifying and galvanizing support from the wider community, they aim to place pressure on legislators to seize their rights. The approach underscores the vital connection between grassroots mobilization and broader political change.
The Urgent Call for a Revolutionary Party
Guerrero emphasizes the pressing need for a unified, revolutionary party to guide the labor movement towards meaningful change. Current efforts demonstrate the inadequacy of identity-based organizing when confronted with systemic class issues. The historical failures of labor movements inform the understanding that a focused political direction is crucial for consolidating power within oppressed communities. Through collective consciousness and action, a revolutionary party could reassert agency in societal struggles and provide a clear path forward.
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.
Intermission music: "Payday at Coal Creek” by Odetta & Larry
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