Click on the headline to link to the <i>West
Coast Port Shutdown</i> website. </b>
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<b>An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
<b>From The Transitional Program Of The Leon
Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938</b><b>Sliding Scale of
Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours</b>
****
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor
movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists
back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union
at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As
I have pointed out in remarks previously made
as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown
on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling
class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including
at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we
are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses,
including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings about who our friends, and
our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a
better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our
overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in
order to gain our demands
******<b>An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
<b>Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back!
Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!</b>*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*<b>Jobs For All Now!</b>-“30 For 40”- A
historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression
the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just
plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty
hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work
around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a
more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided
through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its
capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This
would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s
with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via
computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the
social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available
work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets.
The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no
capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to
fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for
solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both
public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of
the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries
like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line
and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs
with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race
to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be
organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries,
hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a
dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously
low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even
lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic
workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to
organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race
to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of
an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going
to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks,
hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a
revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial
union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be
though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that
organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize.
Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the
hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or
bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from
government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the
masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now
more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of
pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or
better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here
those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of
concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic
afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist
system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and
methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the
politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics
of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism,
the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming
from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth
International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as
slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick.
Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume
an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a
sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an
automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat
cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into
chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society.
The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a
society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a
society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at
every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the
time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a
sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should
bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual
responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among
all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is
defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the
old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the
movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the
present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the
“unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in
addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically
denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal”
collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding
the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of
life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of
the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands
inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish.
“Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the
relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of
this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers
will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* <b>Defend the independence of the working
classes!</b> No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican)
candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars
trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak
for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent
packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another
presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of
labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid
to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is
not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any
form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than
class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the
appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most
egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two
weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent
announcement by the company of record profits.
That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather
their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we
are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to
using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom
have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political
purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the
class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing
the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example,
of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall
referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other
resources should go.
*<b>End the endless wars!</b>- As the so-called draw-down
of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the drawdown of
non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed,
and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising
start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in
2006). As the endless American-led wars
(even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out
our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on
the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And
Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are
ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions
that are a prelude to war well before
the dust has settled on the now
unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan
withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam
leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran
against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their
junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international
working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to
call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me
we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic
fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots”
that the American imperialists, or one or another of their
junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic
slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For
The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht,
who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first
opposition to the war budgets (let’s
see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China
preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn
imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution
may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money.
Well….okay.
*<b>Fight for a social agenda for working
people!</b>. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally
based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple
glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime
concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems,
has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to
the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all.
Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe
have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to
their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the
colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One
Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based
society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s
citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together.
Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and
minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing
skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving
many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private
institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the
government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid
of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and
let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a
democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that
college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few
billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up
dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the
future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a
socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of
indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their
young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in
the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads.
Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that
is what they want. We didn’t make the
housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has
also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot
application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as
well.
*<b>We created the wealth, let’s take it
back.</b> Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on
his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus
appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of
society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was
historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms
of production, has turned into its opposite
and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned
by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them
out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic
agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face
economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is
the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the
struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it
with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government
to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be
accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent
working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders
act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party,
however, will get us nowhere unless it
fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of
human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed
must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers
Of The World, Wobblies) website
http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in
common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among
millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class,
have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the
workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of
production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries
into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever
growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of
affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of
workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars.
Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into
the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the
working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its
members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work
whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an
injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage
for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary
watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away
with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for
everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when
capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are
forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Beulah "Sippie" Thomas grew up in Houston, Texas where she sang and played the piano in her father's church. While still in her early teens she and her younger brother Hersal and older brother George began playing and singing the Blues in tent shows that travelled throughout Texas. In 1915 she moved to New Orleans and lived with her older brother George and got married to Matt Wallace in 1917. During her stay there she met many of the great Jazz musicians like