Communist Party Co-chair Joe Sims issued this indictment of America’s biggest corporations — starting with the manufacturers of Coors’s – in a YouTube video released this week by the Party to argue for collective action by this country’s working class to defeat what Sims calls “the fascist caucus.” Sims zeroes in on the role of Big Business in underwriting the reelection of members of Congress who supported the January 6, 2020, attempted coup.
Home Depot, Koch Industries, Chase Manhattan, UPS as well as wholesale beer manufacturers — all household names — are, he maintains, major funders of an ongoing “slow moving coup.” Sims argues that it is these corporate actors, not the so-called white working class, that are the source of fascist danger. “Big Business liked the Trump administration,” he says, “with its massive deregulation, attack on the trade union movement, and loosening of environmental rules.” These policies, he continues, resulted in maximizing profit — “the name of the game.” This meanness is not a character flaw, Sims declares: “It’s built into the system.”
The focus on corporate funding of the coup is important, Sims said, not only to get folks to understand where the source of the problem is, “but also just as important to cut off that funding.” He continued, “Some of the biggest corporations that were funding both the GOP and the Dems,” after the January 6 coup attempt, declared they would not support the members of the House who continue to deny Biden had won the election. Nevertheless, they have continued to contribute to fund these members of the “fascist caucus.”
Sims called for communist and other progressive organizations to form broad coalitions to picket the corporate offices of companies engaged in these fascist-supporting activities.
Joe Sims, 65, was elected to lead the Party’s work with Co-chair Rossana Cambron in 2019. The son of an Ohio steelworker, he was the longtime editor of Political Affairs, CPUSA’s theoretical journal. In the video’s conclusion, he goes on to lay out the Communist Party’s action plan:
“Our goal is to build a movement,” he says. “a movement to support candidates not because of their party affiliation, “but because of the issues they stand for and the people’s ability to influence them” going forward. Thus, he insists, the focus on exposing and ending corporate funding of fascist political forces and the necessity to pass legislation, such as the PRO Act, that will strengthen the hand of labor, and expand the organized sector of the working class.
‘Voting is part and parcel of collective action of a class’
Sims concludes by reframing the issue of voting. “It’s not my individual voice that is heard. It’s about whether our collective voice is heard,” he maintains. Sims takes the famous words of Frederick Douglass – “power concedes nothing without a demand”— one step further: “This demand has to be forced,” the co-chair insists. Voting is one of the working class’s collective tools, he argues, but we also “need to use all collective tools including striking, occupying, constantly keeping the pressure on.”
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