Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Showing posts with label working class solidarity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label working class solidarity. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm
From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!
Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.
Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.
In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!
Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.
Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.
Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm
From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!
Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.
Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.
In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!
Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.
Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm
From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!
Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.
Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.
In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!
Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.
Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.
Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm
From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!
Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.
Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.
In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!
Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.
Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Sunday, March 13, 2011
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Saturday, March 12, 2011
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Friday, March 11, 2011
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-The Right to Organize Under Attack-All Labor Must Fight Assault on Public Workers Unions!
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
The Right to Organize Under Attack
All Labor Must Fight Assault on Public Workers Unions!
Forge a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
Millions of working people have been made to pay with their jobs, homes and meager social benefits to bail out the Wall Street and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s Great Depression. Amid this devastation, corporate profits last year hit the highest mark in their 60-year recorded history. The banks are wallowing in money and once again handing out millions in bonuses. General Motors, whose survival was purchased through slashing the jobs, wages and benefits of auto workers, boasted nearly $5 billion in profit last year. Having bilked the public purse of countless billions for this “recovery,” Democrats and Republicans are now whipping up an outcry against public workers unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions have been ravaged by the deindustrialization of America and the attendant one-sided class war kicked off with the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981. The United Auto Workers—once the symbol of working-class power in this country—has been reduced to less than a third of its once 1.5 million members. With the rate of unionization in the private sector falling below 7 percent, public workers are now the majority of union members in the U.S. Many of them are constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike—and striking is the most important weapon a union has.
It is not just Republicans, high on their midterm election sweep, who are taking a sledgehammer to the unions. The Obama administration kicked things off with its assault on the seniority rights and other gains of teachers unions, followed most recently by imposing a two-year wage freeze on two million federal government workers. From the White House to state capitols and city halls across America, the capitalist rulers are out to further shackle and maim the unions, if not destroy them outright.
This is a war being fought by the capitalist rulers around the world, as workers are being forced to pay for the global Great Recession. The British Economist (6 January), reveling in the carnage, reported:
“Many governments (for example in Ireland, Greece and Spain) are cutting public-sector pay. Others (for example in Japan and America) are freezing it. Greece is increasing the retirement age from 58 to 63 and making it possible to fire public servants. Britain is cutting government departments by as much as a quarter, and is reviewing pensions.
“In the United States several rising Republican governors are keen to turn the short-term struggle over pay and benefits into a bigger battle about trade-union power. New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty have both eagerly taken on the new ‘privileged class’ of public sector workers.”
In Europe, the capitalist offensive has been met with defensive, at times massive, class struggle. Most recently, amid a nationwide general strike on February 23, demonstrators protesting government austerity in Greece were attacked by riot cops firing tear gas projectiles. But as we wrote in “Ireland Ravaged by European Economic Crisis” (WV No. 970, 3 December 2010), “the effectiveness of the workers’ struggles has been hampered by the political bankruptcy of the workers’ reformist leadership, who accept the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows.”
In the U.S., tens of thousands of teachers and other public workers have mobilized in sick-outs and protest actions in response to a union-busting bill pushed by Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker, which would amount to a frontal assault on public unions’ very right to exist (see article, page 1). With Republican lawmakers mounting similar plans in Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana and elsewhere, Gerald McEntee, the president of AFSCME, which shelled out nearly $90 million for Democratic Party candidates in the November elections, complained, “I see this as payback for the role we played in the 2010 elections.”
It is indeed “payback”—for the trade-union misleaders’ class collaboration, which has sapped the fighting power of organized labor by chaining it to the parties of the capitalist class enemy. No less than the Republicans, the policies of the purported “friend of labor” Democrats are determined by the capitalist class. Those Democrats who survived the midterm “shellacking,” largely thanks to the efforts of the trade-union bureaucracy, are not to be outdone in “balancing the budget” out of the wages, pensions and other benefits of government workers as well as savaging already threadbare social programs for the poor. New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo inaugurated his election with a one-year wage freeze on state workers, 900 layoffs and the promise of thousands to follow. In California, Jerry Brown celebrated his second time around in the governor’s office by announcing that over three billion dollars would be cut from welfare and health care benefits for the poor, as well as $750 million from services for the disabled.
For its part, the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy couples its overwhelming fealty to the Democrats with preaching one-sided “shared sacrifice” and pushing “America First” protectionist poison. With their chauvinist appeals, these “labor lieutenants of capital” help line up working people behind U.S. imperialist interests. For America’s capitalist rulers, workers are fodder for profit at home while poor, minority and working-class youth are cannon fodder abroad. The struggles of working people and minorities against capitalist exploitation and oppression cannot be divorced from opposition to all U.S. imperialist depredations.
Busting the Unions, Starving the Poor
In racist capitalist America, the spectre of the hard-working taxpayer whose pockets are being picked to fund the “undeserving” has long been raised to shred social programs seen as benefitting black people, immigrants and the poor. Now the capitalist masters are wielding this stick against public workers unions. What’s at stake is not simply the survival of these unions, many of which are made up predominantly of blacks and other minorities and women. On the line are the very lives of working people, the poor, the sick and the aged who depend on such paltry social services as this capitalist government continues to provide. There is no more vivid a snapshot of the potential impending catastrophe than Detroit.
The former Motor City, where hundreds of thousands of unionized black auto workers once had the semblance of a decent job, is now a vast urban wasteland. By some estimates, black male unemployment is nearly 65 percent. Detroit’s population has sunk from 1.8 million to 850,000, with 40 percent of the city written off as “unoccupied” by the city’s political masters. A year ago, an article in the Washington Post (3 January 2010) described conditions: “The decline of the auto industry and the nation’s economic slide have left many residents here trapped, without work, in houses they can’t sell, in neighborhoods where they fear for their safety, in schools that offer their children a hard road out.”
While black industrial workers were the first to be written off by the bourgeoisie as a “surplus population”—their labor no longer needed to produce profits and their very lives considered dispensable—such ruin now increasingly stalks the nation. Almost 14 million people are officially unemployed, and that discounts those millions trying to scrape by with part-time jobs and the millions more who have been cast into permanent joblessness.
This crisis is the product of the workings of the anarchic system of capitalism, based on production for profit derived out of the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labor (i.e., profit) as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. This phenomenon was noted at the birth of industrial capitalism by Karl Marx, who described its devastating effect nearly 150 years ago in Capital: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole.”
Many workers today feel that the best they can do is to try to hold on to their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the working class, that demoralize and set them one against the other in a fight to survive, can and will also propel the proletariat forward to unity in battle together with its allies against the capitalist class enemy. This was seen in the midst of the Great Depression in the 1930s, when, at a brief upturn in the economy, workers began to wage bitter class battles to organize industrial unions, sacrificing, if necessary, their jobs, their freedom and their very lives.
The social power of public workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern industrial economy. For example, transit workers in metropolitan centers like New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago can cripple these financial and corporate centers.
While the bourgeois media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against public workers unions, the truth is that if these workers waged some hard class struggle they would have plenty of allies among the unemployed, black people, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the capitalist rulers. “Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’.”
What stands in the way of the labor movement engaging in militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy. Peddling the lie that the workers have common interests with the capitalist exploiters and their state, they have allowed the industrial unions to be hacked to pieces and are lying down in the face of the war against public unions, if not actively collaborating in it. Even when forced to offer some resistance to the assaults of capitalist politicians like Wisconsin’s governor Walker, the bureaucrats subordinate the workers to the capitalist Democratic Party, and most of them are willing to concede to virtually all the government’s economic demands to cut wages and benefits.
The Labor Lieutenants of the Capitalist Class
The leaders of the public unions pledge their allegiance to “balancing the budget” of the capitalist government, the executive committee of the capitalist class. AFSCME leader McEntee has promised that “Public Employees stand ready to help state and local governments get through the economic storm.” Joining this chorus, a spokesman for the biggest New York State government workers union, the Civil Service Employees Association, responded to Governor Cuomo’s wage freeze by stating: “It sounds like he’s trying to set a tone that we need to all do our part. We don’t have a problem with doing our part” (New York Times, 3 January).
The role of the trade-union bureaucracy was captured by Leon Trotsky, who together with V.I. Lenin was co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution: “The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the ‘democratic’ state how reliable and indispensable they are in peacetime and especially in time of war.” When the “good times” were rolling on Wall Street, the public union misleaders assisted state and local governments in holding the line on increased wages and other benefits with the promise of greater pension fund contributions—a form of deferred wages. These funds in turn became a honeypot for high-rolling bankers and hedge fund managers, in league with state pension plan managers, for some of their riskiest investments, like credit default swaps and complex mortgage securities. When these imploded, pension funds were burned. State governments, many of which underfunded pension payments, are now screaming that they are being robbed by public workers, whose average pension is about $20,000 a year. Anyone who looks can see whose hand is in whose pocket.
The capitalist masters have virtually obliterated defined-benefit pensions in industry, which obligated corporations to make fixed retirement payments for private sector unions. Now they are trying to enlist these workers in the war against “greedy” public workers. An op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (4 January) titled “Labor’s Coming Class War” declared:
“The notion that Wall Street and Main Street are fundamentally at odds with one another remains a popular orthodoxy. So much so that we may be missing the first stirrings of a true American class war: between workers in government unions and their union counterparts in the private sector.”
For evidence, this voice of finance capital points to Steve Sweeney, an organizer for the Ironworkers union, more than 40 percent of whose members are out of work. Sweeney is credited with “pushing for reform of state-employee pay and benefits” in his other capacity as the Democratic Party president of the New Jersey State Senate. The article goes on to gloat that New York governor Cuomo “may have found a surprising ally” in Gary LaBarbera—president of the 100,000-strong Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York.
Joining business and real estate magnates in the “Committee to Save New York,” which is raising millions to bankroll Cuomo’s war against government unions, LaBarbera argued: “This is not about bashing public-sector unions. But without a fiscally sound environment, we will not be able to attract new businesses to the city” (New York Times, 9 December 2010). This is but a raw expression of the labor bureaucracy’s class-collaborationist policies, which tie the fate of the workers to the fortunes of the capitalist class and its state.
In the face of a growing army of unemployed, the gutting of pensions, the lack of health care and the elimination of other social programs and benefits, the answer of the trade-union bureaucrats is to pit worker against worker in the struggle to survive. In fact, the “fiscally sound” calculations of the capitalist rulers don’t simply include savaging public unions and the poor. Taking aim at all unions, Republican politicians in the Indiana legislature earlier this month introduced a union-busting “right to work” bill modeled on similar laws in the South, where the unionization rate is the lowest in the country.
A Class-Struggle Program
It is in the crucible of heightening class conflict that a new workers leadership in the unions can be forged. This is not simply a question of militancy in defense of the existing unions. If the workers are to struggle not only in their own interests but in the interests of all the oppressed, there must be a hard political struggle to replace the present sellouts who sit on top of the unions. They must be replaced with workers’ leaders who are able to not only win battles on the picket lines but who are also uncompromising in their dedication to the liberation of humanity from the exploitation, all-sided misery and war that are inherent to a system based on production for profit rather than human need. Striving to forge such a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of the fight for a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose aim is no less than doing away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.
The very defense of the unions mandates a fight to organize the unorganized, from the mass of immigrant workers to the open shop South. To wage such a battle means fighting against the race-color caste oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of capitalist rule in this country. A class-struggle leadership of the unions would be rooted in the understanding that the fight for black freedom is inextricably tied to labor’s cause and would take up the defense of foreign-born workers, demanding an end to deportations and full citizenship rights for all immigrants. It would take up the fight for free, quality health care for all, for the extension of unemployment benefits until there are jobs and for all pensions to be guaranteed by the government.
During the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War, Leon Trotsky wrote the Transitional Program, laying out, in Trotsky’s words, “transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.” These demands are not only relevant but vital to the proletariat today.
Against the catastrophe of mass unemployment, which threatens the devastation of the working class, Trotsky called for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay to spread the available work and for a massive program of public works. A fight to rebuild the decaying infrastructure of America—the roads, dams, subway systems, schools and hospitals—would unite private and public unions together with the unemployed in a common struggle for jobs and the rehabilitation of decent services for the population. It would also mobilize the power of labor in the interests of the ghetto and barrio poor in the rotting inner cities, striking a blow against the racial and ethnic hostilities whipped up by the rulers to divide and weaken working people.
General Motors claimed that it could no longer afford to pay union pensions and health benefits for retirees and new hires. Based on this fraud, the auto barons got bailed out. The average wages and benefits of many of the surviving union membership are on a par with those of workers at non-union plants. Earlier, the airline, steel and industrial magnates also declared bankruptcy and were assisted by the courts in ripping up union contracts. Now a proposal is being mooted to allow state governments to declare bankruptcy so that they too can cancel their “debt obligations,” like the billions they owe in pensions. To expose such highway robbery by the corporations, the banks and the government, Trotsky argued that the workers demand that the capitalists open their books and “reveal to all members of society that unconscionable squandering of human labor which is the result of capitalist anarchy.”
Against the swindles of the finance capitalists who control the economy, Trotsky called for the expropriation of the banks: “Only the expropriation of the private banks and the concentration of the entire credit system in the hands of the state will provide the latter with necessary actual, i.e., material resources—and not merely paper and bureaucratic resources—for economic planning.” Trotsky was not talking here about the capitalist state, which exists to defend the rule and profits of the bourgeoisie. As he put it, “the state-ization of the banks will produce these favorable results only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers”—i.e., a workers government.
No Illusions in the Capitalist State
The trade-union bureaucracy peddles the myth that the capitalist state is “neutral” and can be made to answer the needs of the working class if purported labor-friendly Democrats are put in office. They claim that the very organization of industrial unions was due to legislation enacted by the Democratic Party government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rather than the hard-fought struggles of the workers.
Specifically, the labor tops point to the 1935 Wagner Act, which they claim granted industrial workers the right to organize. The Wagner Act was passed in the aftermath of three victorious citywide strikes in 1934—all of them led by communists—that led to the founding of the CIO industrial unions. It was designed to head off the organizing drive by union militants and “reds” and to set up a government mechanism to subordinate the unions to the capitalist state. As Trotsky wrote in his 1940 article, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay”:
“In the United States the trade union movement has passed through the most stormy history in recent years. The rise of the CIO is incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary tendencies within the working masses. Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree, however, is the fact that the new ‘leftist’ trade union organization was no sooner founded than it fell into the steel embrace of the imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet.”
The very leaders of the new industrial union movement, including the Stalinist Communist Party, crippled it through their support to Roosevelt. The Communists and other militants were rewarded by being driven out of the unions in the red purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which solidified the power of the unvarnished pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy that has since driven these unions into the ground.
Well into the second half of the 20th century, union organization of government workers was uncommon if not outright prohibited. If the 1935 Wagner Act partly acknowledged and sought to regulate organizing rights and collective bargaining in private industry, it specifically exempted public employees from the right to join unions without reprisal. FDR himself wrote that the idea of strikes against the government “by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”
In 1962, John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988, granting most public sector employees the right to collectively bargain. Kennedy’s order specifically prohibited strikes, as did Richard Nixon’s 1969 order modifying it. In 1970, over 200,000 postal workers went on a nationwide wildcat strike. Nixon called in the military, but quickly learned you can’t sort the mail with bayonets. The strike led to the formation of the American Postal Workers Union and the right to collective bargaining by postal workers. However, the ban on strikes remained and was strengthened by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA).
The misleaders of public workers unions present the formation of their unions, too, as the result of the largesse of the Democratic Party. The son of the author of the Wagner Act, former New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner, is credited with giving city workers the right to organize in 1958. In fact, their right to organize was won in a climate of rapidly increasing militancy, beginning with a 1955 sanitation strike led by AFSCME DC 37 against autocratic Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.
A hard-won and popular strike by welfare social workers in 1965 was followed by the victorious 1966 transit strike, in which Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 leader Mike Quill tore up a court injunction ordering the strike to end, famously announcing on his way to jail, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes and we would not call off the strike.” That strike spelled the end of the 1947 Condon-Wadlin Act forbidding public worker strikes in New York State. Defiance by Quill and other bureaucrats notwithstanding, union officials generally hide behind the ubiquitous no-strike laws like the Taylor Law, which, with its massive fines and jail time for union leaders, replaced Condon-Wadlin in New York.
In 1981, as 13,000 PATCO air traffic controllers went on strike, Ronald Reagan dusted off plans hatched by his predecessor, Democrat Jimmy Carter, and fired the entire workforce, dragging their leaders off to jail in chains. His basis in law was the 1978 CSRA. Organized labor could have beaten back Reagan’s strikebreaking, but the union bureaucracy refused to mobilize labor’s power to shut down the airports. The smashing of PATCO became the model for the capitalists’ decades-long drive to gut the labor movement and intensify the rate of exploitation to prop up their flagging profitability. For the labor tops, the PATCO surrender became their model as well, ushering in decades of give-back contracts and two-tier wage systems with lower pay scales for newly hired younger workers.
It is a measure of the union bureaucracy’s fealty to the capitalist state that AFSCME and other public sector unions organize the very police forces whose purpose is the violent suppression of the workers’ struggle. The economic whip of unemployment and increasing destitution for the working class and oppressed has gone hand in hand with the vast expansion of police powers in the U.S., where the main growth industry has been prisons. Yet the sadistic jailers of the overwhelmingly black and Latino youth in America’s overflowing prisons are themselves often union members.
These hired guns of the capitalist state have no place in the workers movement. Just look at this country’s prison guards, who are organized by AFSCME, SEIU, Teamsters and other unions. In California, they have been the moving force in the racist “war on crime” and such reactionary laws as “three strikes, you’re out,” which have made the state of California a world leader in the number of people behind bars. But there is little bellyaching from the budget slashers over the billions that are poured into maintaining the prison hellholes. These are a critical part of the edifice of organized violence by which the capitalist state enforces its rule.
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
The 2005 New York City TWU strike, which garnered widespread public support, all but shut down this world financial center for some 60 hours. A key strike issue was defense of the union pension for new hires, which was under attack by the bosses long before the current recessionary “budget crisis.” The workers, who had walked out in defiance of the slave-labor Taylor Law, were stabbed in the back by the leaders of other New York City unions and the TWU International leadership and, in the end, sold out by their own union misleaders. This has had a corrosive effect on the workers, breeding cynicism. Nonetheless, notwithstanding the massive fines meted out against the union and its membership under the Taylor Law, the workers kept their pension—because they struck.
This helps to illustrate why billions have been spent over the past decades to wipe out even the semblance of organized labor. Even such a minimal, if supportable, law as the Employee Free Choice Act—which would allow workers to organize through a simple card check as against the prolonged “secret ballot” procedures that give employers additional time to mobilize to crush pro-union sentiment—ignited a well-funded corporate barrage in opposition and is now all but dead. The reason is a simple calculation. Despite the sellouts of the labor tops, a unionized worker continues to make a median wage that is $200 more a week than a non-union worker.
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. The question of turning them into fighting organizations for the working class, which will take up the fight for black freedom, for immigrant rights and for the defense of those whose very lives have been written off by the exploiters and their state, is a political one. As Trotsky wrote more than 70 years ago: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”
Two possible roads lie before the working class. There is the bureaucracy’s acceptance that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of American capitalism, which has led to disaster. Or there is the class-struggle road of mobilizing the power of the working class in the necessary battles against the capitalist masters. In the course of such struggle, under a leadership that arms the working class with an understanding of the nature of capitalist society, the workers will become imbued with the consciousness of their historic interests as a class fighting for itself and for all of the oppressed. Such consciousness requires a political expression. That means the fight to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose purpose is not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation but to rid the planet of the source of that devastation, capitalism itself, and the state that preserves it.
4 March 2011
The Right to Organize Under Attack
All Labor Must Fight Assault on Public Workers Unions!
Forge a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
Millions of working people have been made to pay with their jobs, homes and meager social benefits to bail out the Wall Street and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s Great Depression. Amid this devastation, corporate profits last year hit the highest mark in their 60-year recorded history. The banks are wallowing in money and once again handing out millions in bonuses. General Motors, whose survival was purchased through slashing the jobs, wages and benefits of auto workers, boasted nearly $5 billion in profit last year. Having bilked the public purse of countless billions for this “recovery,” Democrats and Republicans are now whipping up an outcry against public workers unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions have been ravaged by the deindustrialization of America and the attendant one-sided class war kicked off with the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981. The United Auto Workers—once the symbol of working-class power in this country—has been reduced to less than a third of its once 1.5 million members. With the rate of unionization in the private sector falling below 7 percent, public workers are now the majority of union members in the U.S. Many of them are constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike—and striking is the most important weapon a union has.
It is not just Republicans, high on their midterm election sweep, who are taking a sledgehammer to the unions. The Obama administration kicked things off with its assault on the seniority rights and other gains of teachers unions, followed most recently by imposing a two-year wage freeze on two million federal government workers. From the White House to state capitols and city halls across America, the capitalist rulers are out to further shackle and maim the unions, if not destroy them outright.
This is a war being fought by the capitalist rulers around the world, as workers are being forced to pay for the global Great Recession. The British Economist (6 January), reveling in the carnage, reported:
“Many governments (for example in Ireland, Greece and Spain) are cutting public-sector pay. Others (for example in Japan and America) are freezing it. Greece is increasing the retirement age from 58 to 63 and making it possible to fire public servants. Britain is cutting government departments by as much as a quarter, and is reviewing pensions.
“In the United States several rising Republican governors are keen to turn the short-term struggle over pay and benefits into a bigger battle about trade-union power. New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty have both eagerly taken on the new ‘privileged class’ of public sector workers.”
In Europe, the capitalist offensive has been met with defensive, at times massive, class struggle. Most recently, amid a nationwide general strike on February 23, demonstrators protesting government austerity in Greece were attacked by riot cops firing tear gas projectiles. But as we wrote in “Ireland Ravaged by European Economic Crisis” (WV No. 970, 3 December 2010), “the effectiveness of the workers’ struggles has been hampered by the political bankruptcy of the workers’ reformist leadership, who accept the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows.”
In the U.S., tens of thousands of teachers and other public workers have mobilized in sick-outs and protest actions in response to a union-busting bill pushed by Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker, which would amount to a frontal assault on public unions’ very right to exist (see article, page 1). With Republican lawmakers mounting similar plans in Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana and elsewhere, Gerald McEntee, the president of AFSCME, which shelled out nearly $90 million for Democratic Party candidates in the November elections, complained, “I see this as payback for the role we played in the 2010 elections.”
It is indeed “payback”—for the trade-union misleaders’ class collaboration, which has sapped the fighting power of organized labor by chaining it to the parties of the capitalist class enemy. No less than the Republicans, the policies of the purported “friend of labor” Democrats are determined by the capitalist class. Those Democrats who survived the midterm “shellacking,” largely thanks to the efforts of the trade-union bureaucracy, are not to be outdone in “balancing the budget” out of the wages, pensions and other benefits of government workers as well as savaging already threadbare social programs for the poor. New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo inaugurated his election with a one-year wage freeze on state workers, 900 layoffs and the promise of thousands to follow. In California, Jerry Brown celebrated his second time around in the governor’s office by announcing that over three billion dollars would be cut from welfare and health care benefits for the poor, as well as $750 million from services for the disabled.
For its part, the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy couples its overwhelming fealty to the Democrats with preaching one-sided “shared sacrifice” and pushing “America First” protectionist poison. With their chauvinist appeals, these “labor lieutenants of capital” help line up working people behind U.S. imperialist interests. For America’s capitalist rulers, workers are fodder for profit at home while poor, minority and working-class youth are cannon fodder abroad. The struggles of working people and minorities against capitalist exploitation and oppression cannot be divorced from opposition to all U.S. imperialist depredations.
Busting the Unions, Starving the Poor
In racist capitalist America, the spectre of the hard-working taxpayer whose pockets are being picked to fund the “undeserving” has long been raised to shred social programs seen as benefitting black people, immigrants and the poor. Now the capitalist masters are wielding this stick against public workers unions. What’s at stake is not simply the survival of these unions, many of which are made up predominantly of blacks and other minorities and women. On the line are the very lives of working people, the poor, the sick and the aged who depend on such paltry social services as this capitalist government continues to provide. There is no more vivid a snapshot of the potential impending catastrophe than Detroit.
The former Motor City, where hundreds of thousands of unionized black auto workers once had the semblance of a decent job, is now a vast urban wasteland. By some estimates, black male unemployment is nearly 65 percent. Detroit’s population has sunk from 1.8 million to 850,000, with 40 percent of the city written off as “unoccupied” by the city’s political masters. A year ago, an article in the Washington Post (3 January 2010) described conditions: “The decline of the auto industry and the nation’s economic slide have left many residents here trapped, without work, in houses they can’t sell, in neighborhoods where they fear for their safety, in schools that offer their children a hard road out.”
While black industrial workers were the first to be written off by the bourgeoisie as a “surplus population”—their labor no longer needed to produce profits and their very lives considered dispensable—such ruin now increasingly stalks the nation. Almost 14 million people are officially unemployed, and that discounts those millions trying to scrape by with part-time jobs and the millions more who have been cast into permanent joblessness.
This crisis is the product of the workings of the anarchic system of capitalism, based on production for profit derived out of the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labor (i.e., profit) as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. This phenomenon was noted at the birth of industrial capitalism by Karl Marx, who described its devastating effect nearly 150 years ago in Capital: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole.”
Many workers today feel that the best they can do is to try to hold on to their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the working class, that demoralize and set them one against the other in a fight to survive, can and will also propel the proletariat forward to unity in battle together with its allies against the capitalist class enemy. This was seen in the midst of the Great Depression in the 1930s, when, at a brief upturn in the economy, workers began to wage bitter class battles to organize industrial unions, sacrificing, if necessary, their jobs, their freedom and their very lives.
The social power of public workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern industrial economy. For example, transit workers in metropolitan centers like New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago can cripple these financial and corporate centers.
While the bourgeois media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against public workers unions, the truth is that if these workers waged some hard class struggle they would have plenty of allies among the unemployed, black people, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the capitalist rulers. “Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’.”
What stands in the way of the labor movement engaging in militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy. Peddling the lie that the workers have common interests with the capitalist exploiters and their state, they have allowed the industrial unions to be hacked to pieces and are lying down in the face of the war against public unions, if not actively collaborating in it. Even when forced to offer some resistance to the assaults of capitalist politicians like Wisconsin’s governor Walker, the bureaucrats subordinate the workers to the capitalist Democratic Party, and most of them are willing to concede to virtually all the government’s economic demands to cut wages and benefits.
The Labor Lieutenants of the Capitalist Class
The leaders of the public unions pledge their allegiance to “balancing the budget” of the capitalist government, the executive committee of the capitalist class. AFSCME leader McEntee has promised that “Public Employees stand ready to help state and local governments get through the economic storm.” Joining this chorus, a spokesman for the biggest New York State government workers union, the Civil Service Employees Association, responded to Governor Cuomo’s wage freeze by stating: “It sounds like he’s trying to set a tone that we need to all do our part. We don’t have a problem with doing our part” (New York Times, 3 January).
The role of the trade-union bureaucracy was captured by Leon Trotsky, who together with V.I. Lenin was co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution: “The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the ‘democratic’ state how reliable and indispensable they are in peacetime and especially in time of war.” When the “good times” were rolling on Wall Street, the public union misleaders assisted state and local governments in holding the line on increased wages and other benefits with the promise of greater pension fund contributions—a form of deferred wages. These funds in turn became a honeypot for high-rolling bankers and hedge fund managers, in league with state pension plan managers, for some of their riskiest investments, like credit default swaps and complex mortgage securities. When these imploded, pension funds were burned. State governments, many of which underfunded pension payments, are now screaming that they are being robbed by public workers, whose average pension is about $20,000 a year. Anyone who looks can see whose hand is in whose pocket.
The capitalist masters have virtually obliterated defined-benefit pensions in industry, which obligated corporations to make fixed retirement payments for private sector unions. Now they are trying to enlist these workers in the war against “greedy” public workers. An op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (4 January) titled “Labor’s Coming Class War” declared:
“The notion that Wall Street and Main Street are fundamentally at odds with one another remains a popular orthodoxy. So much so that we may be missing the first stirrings of a true American class war: between workers in government unions and their union counterparts in the private sector.”
For evidence, this voice of finance capital points to Steve Sweeney, an organizer for the Ironworkers union, more than 40 percent of whose members are out of work. Sweeney is credited with “pushing for reform of state-employee pay and benefits” in his other capacity as the Democratic Party president of the New Jersey State Senate. The article goes on to gloat that New York governor Cuomo “may have found a surprising ally” in Gary LaBarbera—president of the 100,000-strong Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York.
Joining business and real estate magnates in the “Committee to Save New York,” which is raising millions to bankroll Cuomo’s war against government unions, LaBarbera argued: “This is not about bashing public-sector unions. But without a fiscally sound environment, we will not be able to attract new businesses to the city” (New York Times, 9 December 2010). This is but a raw expression of the labor bureaucracy’s class-collaborationist policies, which tie the fate of the workers to the fortunes of the capitalist class and its state.
In the face of a growing army of unemployed, the gutting of pensions, the lack of health care and the elimination of other social programs and benefits, the answer of the trade-union bureaucrats is to pit worker against worker in the struggle to survive. In fact, the “fiscally sound” calculations of the capitalist rulers don’t simply include savaging public unions and the poor. Taking aim at all unions, Republican politicians in the Indiana legislature earlier this month introduced a union-busting “right to work” bill modeled on similar laws in the South, where the unionization rate is the lowest in the country.
A Class-Struggle Program
It is in the crucible of heightening class conflict that a new workers leadership in the unions can be forged. This is not simply a question of militancy in defense of the existing unions. If the workers are to struggle not only in their own interests but in the interests of all the oppressed, there must be a hard political struggle to replace the present sellouts who sit on top of the unions. They must be replaced with workers’ leaders who are able to not only win battles on the picket lines but who are also uncompromising in their dedication to the liberation of humanity from the exploitation, all-sided misery and war that are inherent to a system based on production for profit rather than human need. Striving to forge such a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of the fight for a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose aim is no less than doing away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.
The very defense of the unions mandates a fight to organize the unorganized, from the mass of immigrant workers to the open shop South. To wage such a battle means fighting against the race-color caste oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of capitalist rule in this country. A class-struggle leadership of the unions would be rooted in the understanding that the fight for black freedom is inextricably tied to labor’s cause and would take up the defense of foreign-born workers, demanding an end to deportations and full citizenship rights for all immigrants. It would take up the fight for free, quality health care for all, for the extension of unemployment benefits until there are jobs and for all pensions to be guaranteed by the government.
During the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War, Leon Trotsky wrote the Transitional Program, laying out, in Trotsky’s words, “transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.” These demands are not only relevant but vital to the proletariat today.
Against the catastrophe of mass unemployment, which threatens the devastation of the working class, Trotsky called for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay to spread the available work and for a massive program of public works. A fight to rebuild the decaying infrastructure of America—the roads, dams, subway systems, schools and hospitals—would unite private and public unions together with the unemployed in a common struggle for jobs and the rehabilitation of decent services for the population. It would also mobilize the power of labor in the interests of the ghetto and barrio poor in the rotting inner cities, striking a blow against the racial and ethnic hostilities whipped up by the rulers to divide and weaken working people.
General Motors claimed that it could no longer afford to pay union pensions and health benefits for retirees and new hires. Based on this fraud, the auto barons got bailed out. The average wages and benefits of many of the surviving union membership are on a par with those of workers at non-union plants. Earlier, the airline, steel and industrial magnates also declared bankruptcy and were assisted by the courts in ripping up union contracts. Now a proposal is being mooted to allow state governments to declare bankruptcy so that they too can cancel their “debt obligations,” like the billions they owe in pensions. To expose such highway robbery by the corporations, the banks and the government, Trotsky argued that the workers demand that the capitalists open their books and “reveal to all members of society that unconscionable squandering of human labor which is the result of capitalist anarchy.”
Against the swindles of the finance capitalists who control the economy, Trotsky called for the expropriation of the banks: “Only the expropriation of the private banks and the concentration of the entire credit system in the hands of the state will provide the latter with necessary actual, i.e., material resources—and not merely paper and bureaucratic resources—for economic planning.” Trotsky was not talking here about the capitalist state, which exists to defend the rule and profits of the bourgeoisie. As he put it, “the state-ization of the banks will produce these favorable results only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers”—i.e., a workers government.
No Illusions in the Capitalist State
The trade-union bureaucracy peddles the myth that the capitalist state is “neutral” and can be made to answer the needs of the working class if purported labor-friendly Democrats are put in office. They claim that the very organization of industrial unions was due to legislation enacted by the Democratic Party government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rather than the hard-fought struggles of the workers.
Specifically, the labor tops point to the 1935 Wagner Act, which they claim granted industrial workers the right to organize. The Wagner Act was passed in the aftermath of three victorious citywide strikes in 1934—all of them led by communists—that led to the founding of the CIO industrial unions. It was designed to head off the organizing drive by union militants and “reds” and to set up a government mechanism to subordinate the unions to the capitalist state. As Trotsky wrote in his 1940 article, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay”:
“In the United States the trade union movement has passed through the most stormy history in recent years. The rise of the CIO is incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary tendencies within the working masses. Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree, however, is the fact that the new ‘leftist’ trade union organization was no sooner founded than it fell into the steel embrace of the imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet.”
The very leaders of the new industrial union movement, including the Stalinist Communist Party, crippled it through their support to Roosevelt. The Communists and other militants were rewarded by being driven out of the unions in the red purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which solidified the power of the unvarnished pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy that has since driven these unions into the ground.
Well into the second half of the 20th century, union organization of government workers was uncommon if not outright prohibited. If the 1935 Wagner Act partly acknowledged and sought to regulate organizing rights and collective bargaining in private industry, it specifically exempted public employees from the right to join unions without reprisal. FDR himself wrote that the idea of strikes against the government “by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”
In 1962, John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988, granting most public sector employees the right to collectively bargain. Kennedy’s order specifically prohibited strikes, as did Richard Nixon’s 1969 order modifying it. In 1970, over 200,000 postal workers went on a nationwide wildcat strike. Nixon called in the military, but quickly learned you can’t sort the mail with bayonets. The strike led to the formation of the American Postal Workers Union and the right to collective bargaining by postal workers. However, the ban on strikes remained and was strengthened by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA).
The misleaders of public workers unions present the formation of their unions, too, as the result of the largesse of the Democratic Party. The son of the author of the Wagner Act, former New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner, is credited with giving city workers the right to organize in 1958. In fact, their right to organize was won in a climate of rapidly increasing militancy, beginning with a 1955 sanitation strike led by AFSCME DC 37 against autocratic Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.
A hard-won and popular strike by welfare social workers in 1965 was followed by the victorious 1966 transit strike, in which Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 leader Mike Quill tore up a court injunction ordering the strike to end, famously announcing on his way to jail, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes and we would not call off the strike.” That strike spelled the end of the 1947 Condon-Wadlin Act forbidding public worker strikes in New York State. Defiance by Quill and other bureaucrats notwithstanding, union officials generally hide behind the ubiquitous no-strike laws like the Taylor Law, which, with its massive fines and jail time for union leaders, replaced Condon-Wadlin in New York.
In 1981, as 13,000 PATCO air traffic controllers went on strike, Ronald Reagan dusted off plans hatched by his predecessor, Democrat Jimmy Carter, and fired the entire workforce, dragging their leaders off to jail in chains. His basis in law was the 1978 CSRA. Organized labor could have beaten back Reagan’s strikebreaking, but the union bureaucracy refused to mobilize labor’s power to shut down the airports. The smashing of PATCO became the model for the capitalists’ decades-long drive to gut the labor movement and intensify the rate of exploitation to prop up their flagging profitability. For the labor tops, the PATCO surrender became their model as well, ushering in decades of give-back contracts and two-tier wage systems with lower pay scales for newly hired younger workers.
It is a measure of the union bureaucracy’s fealty to the capitalist state that AFSCME and other public sector unions organize the very police forces whose purpose is the violent suppression of the workers’ struggle. The economic whip of unemployment and increasing destitution for the working class and oppressed has gone hand in hand with the vast expansion of police powers in the U.S., where the main growth industry has been prisons. Yet the sadistic jailers of the overwhelmingly black and Latino youth in America’s overflowing prisons are themselves often union members.
These hired guns of the capitalist state have no place in the workers movement. Just look at this country’s prison guards, who are organized by AFSCME, SEIU, Teamsters and other unions. In California, they have been the moving force in the racist “war on crime” and such reactionary laws as “three strikes, you’re out,” which have made the state of California a world leader in the number of people behind bars. But there is little bellyaching from the budget slashers over the billions that are poured into maintaining the prison hellholes. These are a critical part of the edifice of organized violence by which the capitalist state enforces its rule.
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
The 2005 New York City TWU strike, which garnered widespread public support, all but shut down this world financial center for some 60 hours. A key strike issue was defense of the union pension for new hires, which was under attack by the bosses long before the current recessionary “budget crisis.” The workers, who had walked out in defiance of the slave-labor Taylor Law, were stabbed in the back by the leaders of other New York City unions and the TWU International leadership and, in the end, sold out by their own union misleaders. This has had a corrosive effect on the workers, breeding cynicism. Nonetheless, notwithstanding the massive fines meted out against the union and its membership under the Taylor Law, the workers kept their pension—because they struck.
This helps to illustrate why billions have been spent over the past decades to wipe out even the semblance of organized labor. Even such a minimal, if supportable, law as the Employee Free Choice Act—which would allow workers to organize through a simple card check as against the prolonged “secret ballot” procedures that give employers additional time to mobilize to crush pro-union sentiment—ignited a well-funded corporate barrage in opposition and is now all but dead. The reason is a simple calculation. Despite the sellouts of the labor tops, a unionized worker continues to make a median wage that is $200 more a week than a non-union worker.
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. The question of turning them into fighting organizations for the working class, which will take up the fight for black freedom, for immigrant rights and for the defense of those whose very lives have been written off by the exploiters and their state, is a political one. As Trotsky wrote more than 70 years ago: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”
Two possible roads lie before the working class. There is the bureaucracy’s acceptance that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of American capitalism, which has led to disaster. Or there is the class-struggle road of mobilizing the power of the working class in the necessary battles against the capitalist masters. In the course of such struggle, under a leadership that arms the working class with an understanding of the nature of capitalist society, the workers will become imbued with the consciousness of their historic interests as a class fighting for itself and for all of the oppressed. Such consciousness requires a political expression. That means the fight to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose purpose is not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation but to rid the planet of the source of that devastation, capitalism itself, and the state that preserves it.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-No Illusions in Democratic Party!-Wisconsin Showdown Over Union Rights
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
No Illusions in Democratic Party!
Wisconsin Showdown Over Union Rights
On February 26, some 100,000 pro-union demonstrators flooded the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, following nearly two weeks of protests against Republican governor Scott Walker’s proposed union-busting bill, which would strip public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights. The massive demonstrations began on Valentine’s Day, when over 1,000 workers and University of Wisconsin students occupied the state Capitol building rotunda. They flooded into the lawmakers’ chambers, with hundreds camping at the Capitol every night since. This action sparked the teachers unions to organize sick-outs, causing schools to close across the state. Sensing a draconian threat to their livelihoods and rights, tens of thousands of unionists and their families as well as students and other supporters have flocked to Madison on a daily basis demanding, “Kill the Bill!”
It is in the vital interest of the entire labor movement to defend Wisconsin’s public employee unions and spike the union-busting “budget repair bill.” This deadly law would eliminate public sector collective bargaining on any issue besides wages, limit raises to no more than cost-of-living increases, and require public sector unions to endure mandatory annual recertification votes that would threaten the very existence of these unions. Under the bill, employee payroll deductions for health care would be dramatically increased. Workers would be required to pay 50 percent of the contributions to the pension fund, resulting in a pay cut of 5 to 12 percent. Walker, a Republican of the reactionary Tea Party ilk, has threatened to start laying off 12,000 workers beginning this week if his bill does not pass.
“It’s about the assault on labor, an assault on the working human being; to take and throw away the contract and say it’s balancing the budget is bull crap,” said a member of Wisconsin’s American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). In short order, Scott Walker confirmed this observation. Believing, gullibly, that he was in a phone conversation with right-wing billionaire and Tea Party backer David Koch, Walker confessed to having considered planting troublemakers among the pro-union demonstrators while praising Ronald Reagan’s 1981 smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike and destruction of the union; Walker said that this was “our” PATCO “moment.” Indeed, the impact of such legislation is demonstrated in Indiana, where all collective bargaining for public unions was banned six years ago. Since that time, as the governor of that state brags, union membership for state workers has nose-dived by 90 percent.
There will either be class struggle or defeat. In his phone call with the ersatz David Koch, Governor Walker articulated a strategy of simply letting the protests play out. What is needed is hard class struggle to defeat this union-busting attack. The massive, hugely popular Madison protests show that there is widespread outrage over the savage cutbacks and that workers are ready to fight.
On February 21, the South Central Federation of Labor (SCFL), composed of delegates from 97 public and private sector union locals representing 45,000 workers in Madison and southern Wisconsin, unanimously passed a motion stating: “The SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his ‘budget repair bill’.” In another motion, SCFL rejected any bargaining concessions on wages, benefits and union rights. At the same time, SCFL president Jim Cavanaugh was quick to explain that the group’s support for a “general strike” was just advisory: “We’re just a support organization, and the actual local unions would have to decide if they wanted to escalate things to the point of a strike.” Recommendations will not do the trick. The Wisconsin labor movement needs to prepare for statewide strike action if this attempt to gut the unions is to be defeated.
But the Wisconsin public union tops have centered their whole strategy on pressuring the capitalist politicians to “compromise” by merely deleting the portions of Walker’s bill that gut their collective bargaining rights. Blathering about the need to “share the sacrifice,” these labor lieutenants of capital have pledged their support to all the wage and benefit givebacks Walker wants to wring from the unions. On February 21, the teachers union bureaucracy called off the school sick-outs—themselves a weak form of protest that sets individual teachers up for victimization.
It is necessary to defend each and every gain that the labor movement has won—from wages and benefits to pensions to the right for unions to exist. But that cannot be done by playing by the bosses’ rules. Beginning with the very right to form unions, all the major gains that labor has wrested from the bosses in the past century were once themselves “illegal” by the norms of bourgeois “law and order.” The class-struggle methods through which our rights were won—from massive picket lines to factory occupations to hot-cargoing struck goods—were also “illegal,” and are today! Hard-fought strikes galvanize the rest of the labor movement and, when victorious, tear up the bosses’ anti-strike laws and injunctions.
With similar restrictions and cuts against labor on the legislative agenda in many states (see article, page 1), the showdown in Wisconsin—the first state to legalize public sector unions, in the 1950s—has riveted the attention of workers nationally and internationally. In the U.S., private sector unions have mobilized in force alongside public sector workers around the Midwest. From New Jersey to Oklahoma and elsewhere, labor has rallied against similar anti-union legislation. In Columbus, Ohio, over 5,000 trade-union demonstrators filled Capitol Square.
With the global economic crisis grinding down working people and the oppressed throughout the world, mobilizations against exploitation and oppression quickly resound. Many in Wisconsin have identified their struggles with those of the working masses of Egypt, with some carrying signs denouncing Walker as a Mubarak-type dictator. In turn, messages of solidarity have been sent to Wisconsin from Egyptian workers and activists.
In Wisconsin, Democratic Party politicians have heavily promoted the protests to burnish their image as “friends of labor” in Midwest swing states. Fourteen Democratic state senators fled across the border to Illinois in a maneuver to deprive Walker of a quorum to ram the bill through the Republican-controlled state legislature. President Barack Obama has claimed to sympathize with public workers, asserting that it would be wrong “to vilify them or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees.” That takes a lot of chutzpah from an imperialist Commander-in-Chief whose assaults on the United Auto Workers, relentless attacks on teachers unions, and two-year wage freeze on federal employees have set the stage for the current round of state and local attacks on public sector unions.
In distributing Workers Vanguard to the Madison protesters, our comrades have warned against any illusions in the Democrats. No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and the class enemy of workers, black people, immigrants and the oppressed. While the Tea Party reactionaries want to smash the unions outright in order to extract the maximum concessions, the Democrats pretend to be “friends” of labor to better hoodwink the workers and maintain labor “peace,” while extracting the same economic concessions.
The union tops—a component of the Democratic Party—are fully committed to the system of capitalist exploitation. In the private sector, these types have for decades agreed to the savage cutbacks of wages and benefits and the job-slashing attacks deemed by the bosses to be vital to the health of corporate America. This class collaboration has fueled the steep decline of the once-powerful industrial unions, which were built in the giant class battles of the 1930s. Now public sector unions face the same attacks along with the threat of a nationwide spate of “right to work” legislation to assure the withering of their union membership. In short, the union bureaucracy’s subordination of the class struggle to the dictates of the bosses has set the stage for those forces on the right that seek the destruction of public sector unions.
The union tops are fond of portraying labor struggles as a fight to maintain the “middle class,” thus obscuring the class divide in this country. In turn, the Tea Party types portray their struggle as a fight to maintain the middle class against encroachments of the labor movement. In reality, what is at issue is the inherent class conflict of workers against their capitalist exploiters.
Walker’s bill exempts firefighters and cops from the cutbacks, supposedly in the interest of public safety. Firemen, who have joined the demonstrations at the Capitol, are workers whose job it is to save lives and prevent destruction. The cops and prison guards are not workers. They are the hired thugs of the capitalist rulers, front-line enforcers of the racist capitalist “justice” system. Marxists understand that far from being “neutral,” the capitalist state is at bottom nothing more than an apparatus of violence—the cops, army, courts and prisons—for enforcing the bosses’ class rule. This is no mystery to the bourgeois politician Walker, who has threatened to call out the National Guard to quell militant labor action. But the public sector unions like AFSCME have recruited cops and prison guards, deadly enemies of the working class, into the unions by the tens of thousands. Cops, prison guards out of the trade-union movement!
In channeling the workers’ anger into the dead end of bourgeois pressure politics, the union bureaucrats are aided by a host of reformist “socialist” outfits. Groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative (SAlt) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation have uncritically cheered the Madison protests while upholding the losing strategy of pressuring the Democrats to “fight the right” and “tax the rich” to balance the budget. In a February 19 statement on its Web site, SAlt cravenly wrote, “We can’t rely on the Democratic Party to maintain a principled stand unless they feel the fire of the movement spreading underneath them. After all, would the Senate Democrats have even taken their stand if the working people of Wisconsin hadn’t risen up in the first place?” For the ISO, the demonstrations have “transformed U.S. politics in a way that won’t disappear, whatever happens with Walker’s legislation.” Or as Jesse Jackson put it in addressing a crowd at the state Capitol, “This is a Martin Luther King moment, this is a Gandhi moment.” The continuing miseries of black Americans and of the Indian masses show that this is not the way forward.
Labor needs a fighting leadership that will break the chains that tie the unions to the capitalist Democrats—a class-struggle leadership that understands that the whole capitalist system of racism, war and exploitation must be thrown on the garbage heap of history. This is part of the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government and for a socialist egalitarian society in which those who labor will rule. Speaking of the victorious 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, which were key to establishing the Teamsters as an industrial union, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon noted in The History of American Trotskyism (1944):
“Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity. Consequently, they expected from the start that the union would have to fight for its right to exist; that the bosses would not yield any recognition to the union, would not yield any increase of wages or reduction of the scandalous hours without some pressure being brought to bear. Therefore they prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight.”
4 March 2011
No Illusions in Democratic Party!
Wisconsin Showdown Over Union Rights
On February 26, some 100,000 pro-union demonstrators flooded the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, following nearly two weeks of protests against Republican governor Scott Walker’s proposed union-busting bill, which would strip public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights. The massive demonstrations began on Valentine’s Day, when over 1,000 workers and University of Wisconsin students occupied the state Capitol building rotunda. They flooded into the lawmakers’ chambers, with hundreds camping at the Capitol every night since. This action sparked the teachers unions to organize sick-outs, causing schools to close across the state. Sensing a draconian threat to their livelihoods and rights, tens of thousands of unionists and their families as well as students and other supporters have flocked to Madison on a daily basis demanding, “Kill the Bill!”
It is in the vital interest of the entire labor movement to defend Wisconsin’s public employee unions and spike the union-busting “budget repair bill.” This deadly law would eliminate public sector collective bargaining on any issue besides wages, limit raises to no more than cost-of-living increases, and require public sector unions to endure mandatory annual recertification votes that would threaten the very existence of these unions. Under the bill, employee payroll deductions for health care would be dramatically increased. Workers would be required to pay 50 percent of the contributions to the pension fund, resulting in a pay cut of 5 to 12 percent. Walker, a Republican of the reactionary Tea Party ilk, has threatened to start laying off 12,000 workers beginning this week if his bill does not pass.
“It’s about the assault on labor, an assault on the working human being; to take and throw away the contract and say it’s balancing the budget is bull crap,” said a member of Wisconsin’s American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). In short order, Scott Walker confirmed this observation. Believing, gullibly, that he was in a phone conversation with right-wing billionaire and Tea Party backer David Koch, Walker confessed to having considered planting troublemakers among the pro-union demonstrators while praising Ronald Reagan’s 1981 smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike and destruction of the union; Walker said that this was “our” PATCO “moment.” Indeed, the impact of such legislation is demonstrated in Indiana, where all collective bargaining for public unions was banned six years ago. Since that time, as the governor of that state brags, union membership for state workers has nose-dived by 90 percent.
There will either be class struggle or defeat. In his phone call with the ersatz David Koch, Governor Walker articulated a strategy of simply letting the protests play out. What is needed is hard class struggle to defeat this union-busting attack. The massive, hugely popular Madison protests show that there is widespread outrage over the savage cutbacks and that workers are ready to fight.
On February 21, the South Central Federation of Labor (SCFL), composed of delegates from 97 public and private sector union locals representing 45,000 workers in Madison and southern Wisconsin, unanimously passed a motion stating: “The SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his ‘budget repair bill’.” In another motion, SCFL rejected any bargaining concessions on wages, benefits and union rights. At the same time, SCFL president Jim Cavanaugh was quick to explain that the group’s support for a “general strike” was just advisory: “We’re just a support organization, and the actual local unions would have to decide if they wanted to escalate things to the point of a strike.” Recommendations will not do the trick. The Wisconsin labor movement needs to prepare for statewide strike action if this attempt to gut the unions is to be defeated.
But the Wisconsin public union tops have centered their whole strategy on pressuring the capitalist politicians to “compromise” by merely deleting the portions of Walker’s bill that gut their collective bargaining rights. Blathering about the need to “share the sacrifice,” these labor lieutenants of capital have pledged their support to all the wage and benefit givebacks Walker wants to wring from the unions. On February 21, the teachers union bureaucracy called off the school sick-outs—themselves a weak form of protest that sets individual teachers up for victimization.
It is necessary to defend each and every gain that the labor movement has won—from wages and benefits to pensions to the right for unions to exist. But that cannot be done by playing by the bosses’ rules. Beginning with the very right to form unions, all the major gains that labor has wrested from the bosses in the past century were once themselves “illegal” by the norms of bourgeois “law and order.” The class-struggle methods through which our rights were won—from massive picket lines to factory occupations to hot-cargoing struck goods—were also “illegal,” and are today! Hard-fought strikes galvanize the rest of the labor movement and, when victorious, tear up the bosses’ anti-strike laws and injunctions.
With similar restrictions and cuts against labor on the legislative agenda in many states (see article, page 1), the showdown in Wisconsin—the first state to legalize public sector unions, in the 1950s—has riveted the attention of workers nationally and internationally. In the U.S., private sector unions have mobilized in force alongside public sector workers around the Midwest. From New Jersey to Oklahoma and elsewhere, labor has rallied against similar anti-union legislation. In Columbus, Ohio, over 5,000 trade-union demonstrators filled Capitol Square.
With the global economic crisis grinding down working people and the oppressed throughout the world, mobilizations against exploitation and oppression quickly resound. Many in Wisconsin have identified their struggles with those of the working masses of Egypt, with some carrying signs denouncing Walker as a Mubarak-type dictator. In turn, messages of solidarity have been sent to Wisconsin from Egyptian workers and activists.
In Wisconsin, Democratic Party politicians have heavily promoted the protests to burnish their image as “friends of labor” in Midwest swing states. Fourteen Democratic state senators fled across the border to Illinois in a maneuver to deprive Walker of a quorum to ram the bill through the Republican-controlled state legislature. President Barack Obama has claimed to sympathize with public workers, asserting that it would be wrong “to vilify them or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees.” That takes a lot of chutzpah from an imperialist Commander-in-Chief whose assaults on the United Auto Workers, relentless attacks on teachers unions, and two-year wage freeze on federal employees have set the stage for the current round of state and local attacks on public sector unions.
In distributing Workers Vanguard to the Madison protesters, our comrades have warned against any illusions in the Democrats. No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and the class enemy of workers, black people, immigrants and the oppressed. While the Tea Party reactionaries want to smash the unions outright in order to extract the maximum concessions, the Democrats pretend to be “friends” of labor to better hoodwink the workers and maintain labor “peace,” while extracting the same economic concessions.
The union tops—a component of the Democratic Party—are fully committed to the system of capitalist exploitation. In the private sector, these types have for decades agreed to the savage cutbacks of wages and benefits and the job-slashing attacks deemed by the bosses to be vital to the health of corporate America. This class collaboration has fueled the steep decline of the once-powerful industrial unions, which were built in the giant class battles of the 1930s. Now public sector unions face the same attacks along with the threat of a nationwide spate of “right to work” legislation to assure the withering of their union membership. In short, the union bureaucracy’s subordination of the class struggle to the dictates of the bosses has set the stage for those forces on the right that seek the destruction of public sector unions.
The union tops are fond of portraying labor struggles as a fight to maintain the “middle class,” thus obscuring the class divide in this country. In turn, the Tea Party types portray their struggle as a fight to maintain the middle class against encroachments of the labor movement. In reality, what is at issue is the inherent class conflict of workers against their capitalist exploiters.
Walker’s bill exempts firefighters and cops from the cutbacks, supposedly in the interest of public safety. Firemen, who have joined the demonstrations at the Capitol, are workers whose job it is to save lives and prevent destruction. The cops and prison guards are not workers. They are the hired thugs of the capitalist rulers, front-line enforcers of the racist capitalist “justice” system. Marxists understand that far from being “neutral,” the capitalist state is at bottom nothing more than an apparatus of violence—the cops, army, courts and prisons—for enforcing the bosses’ class rule. This is no mystery to the bourgeois politician Walker, who has threatened to call out the National Guard to quell militant labor action. But the public sector unions like AFSCME have recruited cops and prison guards, deadly enemies of the working class, into the unions by the tens of thousands. Cops, prison guards out of the trade-union movement!
In channeling the workers’ anger into the dead end of bourgeois pressure politics, the union bureaucrats are aided by a host of reformist “socialist” outfits. Groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative (SAlt) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation have uncritically cheered the Madison protests while upholding the losing strategy of pressuring the Democrats to “fight the right” and “tax the rich” to balance the budget. In a February 19 statement on its Web site, SAlt cravenly wrote, “We can’t rely on the Democratic Party to maintain a principled stand unless they feel the fire of the movement spreading underneath them. After all, would the Senate Democrats have even taken their stand if the working people of Wisconsin hadn’t risen up in the first place?” For the ISO, the demonstrations have “transformed U.S. politics in a way that won’t disappear, whatever happens with Walker’s legislation.” Or as Jesse Jackson put it in addressing a crowd at the state Capitol, “This is a Martin Luther King moment, this is a Gandhi moment.” The continuing miseries of black Americans and of the Indian masses show that this is not the way forward.
Labor needs a fighting leadership that will break the chains that tie the unions to the capitalist Democrats—a class-struggle leadership that understands that the whole capitalist system of racism, war and exploitation must be thrown on the garbage heap of history. This is part of the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government and for a socialist egalitarian society in which those who labor will rule. Speaking of the victorious 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, which were key to establishing the Teamsters as an industrial union, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon noted in The History of American Trotskyism (1944):
“Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity. Consequently, they expected from the start that the union would have to fight for its right to exist; that the bosses would not yield any recognition to the union, would not yield any increase of wages or reduction of the scandalous hours without some pressure being brought to bear. Therefore they prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight.”
From The Rag Blog- 'March Madness' takes on new meaning:Peddling the irrational in American politics-By Danny Schechter
'March Madness' takes on new meaning:
Peddling the irrational in American politics
By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2011
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold -- William Butler Yeats
The term class war has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.
The worse things get, the harder it is for people to agree on what to do.
This is a month known in the USA for the “March Madness” college basketball finals, but the madness seems now to be oozing from sports arenas into political capitols.
In the Middle East, all the political turmoil will ultimately impact on a regional economy built on the flow and price of oil, contends author/historian Michael Klare:
Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core.
Back in the once thought of as “stable” United States, the economic crisis has finally spurred a confrontation between right and left with noisy protests following threatened crackdowns on union rights to collective bargaining, and cutbacks on social programs.
Conservatives hype the austerity programs that divided and created chaos in Ireland as the model Americans should be following.
Writes Terrance Heath,
The irony is that the things that the Heritage (Foundation) praises about Ireland's economy are what drove it to the brink of extinction... Ireland followed the same tax-cutting, deregulating conservative economic path to its misfortune that led America to its own. That Ireland stands as an example of austerity's epic failure, makes it even more mystifying that conservatives keep spotlighting the clearest example of the disastrous impact of conservative economic policy.
Activists in the sweltering heat of Egypt hold up signs praising protesters in Wisconsin while the shivering public workers in the snow of Madison talk about struggling "like an Egyptian."
Who would have thunk?
The poet Yeats once wrote that things fall apart when the center doesn’t hold, and his words seem prophetically appropriate to the unraveling now underway in the U.S. with fierce political combat paralyzing the Congress and rhetoric escalating into a realm beyond the rational.
Even as a film won an Academy Award for calling the collapse of the economy an “inside job,” there is no consensus on the causes of the financial crisis.
The debate about what to do, and whether or not to punish wrongdoers, rages on even as the media looks away from the consequences -- the armies of permanently unemployed and growing foreclosures.
Politicians only worry about public budgets, not the private pain of their constituents.
An ideological fight over policy footnotes is considered de rigueur but the suffering of those unable to cope with cutoffs of benefits, rising gas and food prices, and growing despair, is considered a “bummer.”
Many Democrats want so badly to move on that they avoid discussions of Wall Street crime and massive fraud. The President sees all that as unproductive because his new focus is to “win the future.” Believe it or not, that slogan comes from a book by Newt Gingrich.
The White House deliberately stayed away from protests in Wisconsin, later scolding the Democratic Party apparatus after learning that it was urging supporters to back worker protests. For them, such pro-union activism was decidedly off-message, reports The New York Times.
And so much for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report with 633 pages of documented analysis about how the system imploded. That was last week’s non-story.
Republicans want to change the subject and have found new theories to divert attention and/or make the debate so complicated that no one except some Ph.D.'s can follow it.
And even they have problems doing so.
Fed head Ben Bernanke who ignored calls to stop mortgage fraud when it might have made a difference now says that the crisis was caused by China.
It’s all their fault!
The Chinese meanwhile buy up American debt and keep our system going.
The right conspiracy theorists have a new explanation to amuse themselves with as well: the crisis was caused by terrorists.
The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies, reports:
Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system...
Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran.
That just about throws all the “bad guys” they could come up with into one big barrel of ducks to shoot at. Never mind, that this “revelation” is vague and totally undocumented.
On the left, artists explore apocalyptic themes, not a serious activist response. One new exhibit is called “The Days of this Society Are Numbered."
Inspired by a famous statement by French thinker Guy Debord, proclaiming that THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED, this exhibition plays with the notion that at the beginning of the XXI century one is experiencing a period of fin de siècle, in which the state of affairs is questioned and a collective anxiety is emerging, a situation caused by the feeling of political, economic, and cultural crisis that is permeating the Western world and is creating a social entropy.
Perhaps there is something in the water or the political ether that precludes any agreement on facts, much less a consensus on what to do about them.
Resolve on punishing mortgage fraudsters has gotten caught up in arcane debate over obtuse contractual language. Even as “pervasive fraud” was documented by the FBI, no one, least of all the regulators, can agree on who is responsible and what the fines and penalties should be.
It’s clear that denial is not just a river in Egypt. Reports The New York Times, “as the negotiations grind on, there are signs that the banks have still not come to grips with the problems plaguing the foreclosure process.”
The newspaper of record does not look at the record to note that big banks may have no interest in coming “to grips” with charges that they defrauded their customers.
All of this “debate” functions like a fog machine to insure that the public doesn’t know what is happening, and to insure that the class at the top is not treated like the class at the bottom as Naked Capitalism.com’s Yves Smith observes:
It is one thing to point out a sorry reality, that the rich and powerful often get away with abuses while ordinary citizens seldom do. It’s quite another to present it as inevitable.
It would be far more productive to isolate what are the key failings in our legal, prosecutorial, and regulatory regime are and demand changes. The fact that financial fraud cases are often difficult does not mean they are unwinnable.
Winnable or not, there seems to be rational calculation -- even a carefully constructed strategy -- behind the increasingly irrational political debate.
Perhaps it’s a form of a calculated lack of “intelligent design” that belongs right up there with classic political strategies in which invented realities and message points become believable they more they are repeated.
George Bush once contrasted a fact-based political order with his preferred faith-based one. That’s why all the exposes of his WMD claims in Iraq rolled off his back and never stuck.
The madness this month is like a chicken that has come home to roost, reminding us again that the only time we can tell when a politician is lying is when his or her lips start moving.
[News Dissector and blogger Danny Schechter directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film assessing the financial crisis as a crime story. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.
The Rag Blog
Peddling the irrational in American politics
By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2011
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold -- William Butler Yeats
The term class war has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.
The worse things get, the harder it is for people to agree on what to do.
This is a month known in the USA for the “March Madness” college basketball finals, but the madness seems now to be oozing from sports arenas into political capitols.
In the Middle East, all the political turmoil will ultimately impact on a regional economy built on the flow and price of oil, contends author/historian Michael Klare:
Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core.
Back in the once thought of as “stable” United States, the economic crisis has finally spurred a confrontation between right and left with noisy protests following threatened crackdowns on union rights to collective bargaining, and cutbacks on social programs.
Conservatives hype the austerity programs that divided and created chaos in Ireland as the model Americans should be following.
Writes Terrance Heath,
The irony is that the things that the Heritage (Foundation) praises about Ireland's economy are what drove it to the brink of extinction... Ireland followed the same tax-cutting, deregulating conservative economic path to its misfortune that led America to its own. That Ireland stands as an example of austerity's epic failure, makes it even more mystifying that conservatives keep spotlighting the clearest example of the disastrous impact of conservative economic policy.
Activists in the sweltering heat of Egypt hold up signs praising protesters in Wisconsin while the shivering public workers in the snow of Madison talk about struggling "like an Egyptian."
Who would have thunk?
The poet Yeats once wrote that things fall apart when the center doesn’t hold, and his words seem prophetically appropriate to the unraveling now underway in the U.S. with fierce political combat paralyzing the Congress and rhetoric escalating into a realm beyond the rational.
Even as a film won an Academy Award for calling the collapse of the economy an “inside job,” there is no consensus on the causes of the financial crisis.
The debate about what to do, and whether or not to punish wrongdoers, rages on even as the media looks away from the consequences -- the armies of permanently unemployed and growing foreclosures.
Politicians only worry about public budgets, not the private pain of their constituents.
An ideological fight over policy footnotes is considered de rigueur but the suffering of those unable to cope with cutoffs of benefits, rising gas and food prices, and growing despair, is considered a “bummer.”
Many Democrats want so badly to move on that they avoid discussions of Wall Street crime and massive fraud. The President sees all that as unproductive because his new focus is to “win the future.” Believe it or not, that slogan comes from a book by Newt Gingrich.
The White House deliberately stayed away from protests in Wisconsin, later scolding the Democratic Party apparatus after learning that it was urging supporters to back worker protests. For them, such pro-union activism was decidedly off-message, reports The New York Times.
And so much for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report with 633 pages of documented analysis about how the system imploded. That was last week’s non-story.
Republicans want to change the subject and have found new theories to divert attention and/or make the debate so complicated that no one except some Ph.D.'s can follow it.
And even they have problems doing so.
Fed head Ben Bernanke who ignored calls to stop mortgage fraud when it might have made a difference now says that the crisis was caused by China.
It’s all their fault!
The Chinese meanwhile buy up American debt and keep our system going.
The right conspiracy theorists have a new explanation to amuse themselves with as well: the crisis was caused by terrorists.
The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies, reports:
Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system...
Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran.
That just about throws all the “bad guys” they could come up with into one big barrel of ducks to shoot at. Never mind, that this “revelation” is vague and totally undocumented.
On the left, artists explore apocalyptic themes, not a serious activist response. One new exhibit is called “The Days of this Society Are Numbered."
Inspired by a famous statement by French thinker Guy Debord, proclaiming that THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED, this exhibition plays with the notion that at the beginning of the XXI century one is experiencing a period of fin de siècle, in which the state of affairs is questioned and a collective anxiety is emerging, a situation caused by the feeling of political, economic, and cultural crisis that is permeating the Western world and is creating a social entropy.
Perhaps there is something in the water or the political ether that precludes any agreement on facts, much less a consensus on what to do about them.
Resolve on punishing mortgage fraudsters has gotten caught up in arcane debate over obtuse contractual language. Even as “pervasive fraud” was documented by the FBI, no one, least of all the regulators, can agree on who is responsible and what the fines and penalties should be.
It’s clear that denial is not just a river in Egypt. Reports The New York Times, “as the negotiations grind on, there are signs that the banks have still not come to grips with the problems plaguing the foreclosure process.”
The newspaper of record does not look at the record to note that big banks may have no interest in coming “to grips” with charges that they defrauded their customers.
All of this “debate” functions like a fog machine to insure that the public doesn’t know what is happening, and to insure that the class at the top is not treated like the class at the bottom as Naked Capitalism.com’s Yves Smith observes:
It is one thing to point out a sorry reality, that the rich and powerful often get away with abuses while ordinary citizens seldom do. It’s quite another to present it as inevitable.
It would be far more productive to isolate what are the key failings in our legal, prosecutorial, and regulatory regime are and demand changes. The fact that financial fraud cases are often difficult does not mean they are unwinnable.
Winnable or not, there seems to be rational calculation -- even a carefully constructed strategy -- behind the increasingly irrational political debate.
Perhaps it’s a form of a calculated lack of “intelligent design” that belongs right up there with classic political strategies in which invented realities and message points become believable they more they are repeated.
George Bush once contrasted a fact-based political order with his preferred faith-based one. That’s why all the exposes of his WMD claims in Iraq rolled off his back and never stuck.
The madness this month is like a chicken that has come home to roost, reminding us again that the only time we can tell when a politician is lying is when his or her lips start moving.
[News Dissector and blogger Danny Schechter directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film assessing the financial crisis as a crime story. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.
The Rag Blog
Saturday, June 26, 2010
*The Latest From The "Transport Workers Solidarity Committee" Website- "Actions In Defense of The Palestinian People On The West Coast Docks"
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the "Transport Workers Solidarity Committee" Website- "Actions In Defense of The Palestinian People On The West Coast Docks."
Markin comment:
Every action by the international working class, including unionized dock workers who have a militant history on the American West Coast docks, to slow down the Israeli war machine, even if only symbolically, is a step in the right direction. Totally End The Blockade of Gaza! All Honor To The Flotilla Blockade Breakers! Down With U.S Aid To Israel! Defend The Palestinian People!
Markin comment:
Every action by the international working class, including unionized dock workers who have a militant history on the American West Coast docks, to slow down the Israeli war machine, even if only symbolically, is a step in the right direction. Totally End The Blockade of Gaza! All Honor To The Flotilla Blockade Breakers! Down With U.S Aid To Israel! Defend The Palestinian People!
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