AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Sunday, March 02, 2014

Lessons of the Unionization of Meatpacking-Fast Food Workers Need a Fighting Labor Movement Workers Vanguard No. 1040	21 February 2014

Protests in the past year by fast-food workers demanding a pay increase have highlighted the poverty-level wages and contemptuous abuse dealt out by the corporate bosses to this growing segment of the working class. The roughly four million men and women who run the grills and front the counters at McDonald’s, Burger King and other giant chains make barely $9 per hour and average about 26 working hours a week, putting them well below the poverty line if they have a family to support. In the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis, such poverty-level work accounts for three out of every five new jobs. These are also often the only employment that black and immigrant youth—and, increasingly, laid-off older workers—can get.

The workers who have joined in the fast-food protests, in some cases walking off the job to do so, understand that it is necessary to fight. Yet the hundreds of thousands of small fast-food outlets are the point in the restaurant industry where workers are the weakest. To unionize fast-food workers and win significant gains in wages and benefits poses the need to mobilize the power of workers who are strategically positioned along the supply chain that provides the frozen hamburger patties, French fries and so on to the retail outlets. And that means a struggle against the meatpacking and trucking bosses to again make those industries bastions of union power.

But this is far removed from what the labor traitors at the head of the unions have in mind. Instead, they are pursuing a strategy, announced with great fanfare at the AFL-CIO convention last September, that is a substitute for the direct organization of workers into unions. The new strategy consists of alliances with “alt-labor” organizations—community groups that organize workers outside collective bargaining—as well as recruitment to the Working America lobbying organization. Mobilizing community groups to exert pressure on the bosses can be a useful tactic, but only if it is an auxiliary to hard class struggle—a perspective that is anathema to the pro-capitalist labor tops.

The bureaucrats’ strategy is epitomized by their current campaign on behalf of fast-food workers, as well as by protests against Wal-Mart centered on the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), which sponsors OUR Walmart, has repeatedly declared that it has “no intent to have Wal-mart recognize or bargain with UFCW or OUR Walmart.” This is part of what has come to be called “minority unionism.” Instead of seeking to win union recognition by signing up a majority of workers at particular work sites, the bureaucrats aim to win over isolated individuals at many sites. These small groups of workers bravely risk company retaliation by walking off the job to join protests like the November Wal-Mart Black Friday events that aim to shame the company. What such “strikes” do not seek to do is to shut down the bosses’ operations until they are forced to come to terms with the workers.

The premise adopted by the union officialdom is that existing anti-labor legislation is so restrictive that ways must be found to work around the laws without directly confronting them. Yet everything of value the workers movement has won has been achieved by mobilizing the ranks of labor in hard-fought struggle against the capitalists and their whole body of anti-labor legislation. The labor bureaucracy is a relatively privileged layer that long ago separated from its base, the union membership. The labor misleaders long ago renounced the class-struggle methods that built the unions, from picket lines that mean business to secondary boycotts and plant occupations. Through their support to the capitalist system and the Democratic Party, the labor bureaucrats serve to tie the unions to the class enemy and its state, which from the White House on down is not a neutral body “of the people” but an organ of capitalist rule.

Though union power in the food industry has been significantly weakened since the high point of unionization, the UFCW and SEIU service employees union, along with the Teamsters, retain footholds in the slaughterhouses and processing plants. From there to the warehouses and on to the fast-food outlets, there is a critical “cold chain” that must be maintained to prevent spoilage. Fleets of refrigerated (reefer) trucks carry the lion’s share of this produce.

Shutting down the slaughterhouses and processing plants and tying up the cold chain would quickly stop the flow of billions of dollars of profits. Mobilizing the social power of that industrial workforce could lay the basis for a drive to re-unionize trucking and the meatpacking industry and, based on those strongholds, back up struggles by fast-food workers. The history of unionization of the meatpacking industry provides a graphic example of the kind of hard class struggle that is needed to organize the unorganized and revitalize the labor movement.

Class Struggle and Multiracial Unity

The meatpacking industry was historically centered in Chicago, with major slaughterhouses in other rail centers like Kansas City and St. Louis, and was dominated by the Beef Trust with its Big Four: Armour, Swift, Wilson and Cudahy. Beginning in the late 1800s, the Beef Trust defeated attempts to unionize the massive Chicago stockyards by promoting divisions among the workers. While East European immigrants were set against Irish, German and native-born workers, what proved fatal to unionizing efforts was the racial division between white and black workers. That division was fostered by the craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) leaders, with their hostility to unskilled labor and racist animosity toward blacks, many of whom were hired by the bosses to break strikes. As recounted in the 1985 film The Killing Floor, a key stockyard organizing drive was destroyed by the anti-black Chicago riots of 1919, which were encouraged by the packing bosses. Two years later, a strike by the AFL’s Amalgamated Meat Cutters union (AMC) was quickly crushed.

The road to a militant, integrated industrial union of meatpacking workers was paved by the Unemployed Councils organized in the depths of the Great Depression by the Communist Party (CP). The CP had been formed as a revolutionary organization inspired by the October 1917 workers revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party. However, the CP politically degenerated in parallel with the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union beginning in 1923-24. Nevertheless, American Communists retained in distorted form the beneficial influence of the Bolshevik-led Communist International’s insistence that the party actively take up defense of the oppressed black population.

In the early 1930s, the CP’s energetic defense of the Scottsboro Boys against legal lynching in Alabama won it widespread respect among black people North and South. The Unemployed Councils fought evictions of jobless workers by mobilizing flying squads to move them back in and organized mass demonstrations demanding increased relief for the unemployed. Uniting black and white, immigrant and native-born workers in common struggle, these actions brought the party authority in Chicago’s Black Belt and undercut the racist backwardness of the whites. Thus the CP acquired a base among black packinghouse workers that proved critical to later union organizing efforts, in which the CP played a prominent role.

When an uptick in the Depression economy enabled workers to raise their heads again, strikes began to break out. A successful 1933 sit-down strike by Hormel meatpacking workers in Austin, Minnesota, galvanized the stockyards and presaged the great explosion of working-class struggle in 1934 that saw victorious citywide strikes in San Francisco, Toledo and Minneapolis. Those strikes, all led by reds, laid the basis for organizing millions of workers into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the following years.

These victories were won not by relying on government labor boards and mediators, whose job it was to get strikers back to work by pretending to be neutral arbiters, but by doing whatever was necessary to keep the bosses’ struck operations shut down. In Minneapolis, truckers led by Trotskyists, who had been driven out of the CP for upholding its founding revolutionary program, instituted flying pickets to stop scab trucks in a series of strikes that won union recognition. Organizing the unemployed to join mass picket lines, the truckers defeated scabherding police in pitched battles and defied a National Guard occupation. The Trotskyists then spearheaded a successful campaign to organize over-the-road truck drivers across the Midwest. Key to that victory was a hard-fought, five-month 1938-39 strike in the open shop stronghold of Omaha, Nebraska. Those battles opened the way for the organization of over-the-road drivers nationwide.

The struggles that forged what was to become the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) were directly inspired by the mass pickets and factory occupations in 1936-37 that brought auto, rubber and steel workers into the CIO. The CIO’s Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee won unionization through such militant actions as work stoppages on the killing floors, preventing freshly slaughtered meat from being moved, as well as a sit-down strike at Armour in Kansas City. Officially founded in 1943, the UPWA was perhaps the most integrated union in the U.S., with a history of fighting for the rights of black people. That history holds crucial lessons for organizing the open shop South, where deep, vicious racist discrimination has always served to divide workers and keep unions out.

With the onset of the anti-Soviet Cold War following World War II, the capitalist rulers enlisted the tops of the trade unions in the witchhunt that drove leftists and other militants out of the unions. At the same time, the bourgeoisie instituted a series of ever more restrictive anti-labor laws that banned secondary boycotts, labor solidarity action like refusing to touch scab goods, sympathy strikes and effective picketing. But as the union battles of the 1930s showed, a determined use of these weapons of class struggle can render such anti-labor laws moot.

The Great Retreat

As part of the bosses’ postwar anti-labor offensive, the considerable gains represented by unionization of the meatpacking and trucking industries came under attack. By the early 1960s, the new Interstate Highway system enabled meatpacking companies, no longer reliant on rail transport, to move their slaughterhouses out of the urban centers into rural areas where unions were weaker. New plants were built that further broke down the butchering process to simple, repetitive “dis-assembly line” cutting steps, greatly reducing the need for skilled labor. As the old stockyards closed down, the UPWA sought refuge by merging with the AMC.

In the same period, the ruling class set its gun sights on the Teamsters, then the most powerful union in the country. In 1964, the Teamsters’ National Master Freight contract covered some 450,000 truckers. Today, in the aftermath of the union-busting offensive unleashed by Democratic president Jimmy Carter and liberal icon Senator Ted Kennedy’s deregulation of the trucking industry in 1980, it covers only about 30,000, most of them in one company, YRC Worldwide.

In 1969, Iowa Beef Packers (later known as IBP, Inc.), one of the first of a new breed of union-busting outfits that later came to include agribusiness giants like ConAgra and Cargill, provoked a strike at its new, low-wage flagship facility in Dakota City, Nebraska, by AMC Local 222, which had recently won a certification election at the plant. After a bitter battle, the AMC tops instructed the Dakota City local to accept a contract that preserved the union but allowed the company to pay far less than the pay rate in the union’s master agreement with the Big Four. Over the next 25 years, only two contracts at the plant were settled without a strike or a lockout.

During a 1982 strike, the governor called in the National Guard to protect scabs, and a court order banned the combative picket lines set up by the union, by then part of the UFCW. We wrote at the time:

“Unions throughout the region must mobilize their ranks in mass picketing at the plant. Damn the injunction; picket lines mean don’t cross! Elementary labor solidarity demands that not one truck, Teamster-driven or otherwise, must move in or out of the Dakota City plant. Not one unionist must touch Iowa Beef products—Hot cargo scab goods!”

—WV No. 311, 6 August 1982

The UFCW tops, however, relied on an impotent petition to the governor to call off his dogs. In the end, the workers were forced to accept a 12 percent pay cut.

A subsequent UFCW organizing drive targeting more than ten IBP plants failed. IBP subsequently recognized the union only at a Joslin, Illinois, plant in 1988, where the contract was based on the drastically worsened conditions brought about by the defeat in Dakota City. IBP has since been absorbed into the Tyson Foods empire, and the Dakota City and Joslin facilities are the only Tyson beef plants organized by the UFCW.

Spearheaded by IBP’s union-busting success, the rest of the industry followed suit. In what then-UFCW International president William Wynn called a “controlled retreat,” the union bureaucrats made concession after concession. Master agreements virtually disappeared from the industry, and “by the mid-1980s, most of the gains achieved by meatpacking unions over the previous fifty years had disappeared” (Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, Immanuel Ness, The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, 2009). By the time UFCW Local P-9 walked out of Hormel’s pork processing plant in Austin, Minnesota, in August 1985 to fight against demands for more crippling concessions, the UFCW tops had already allowed wages in the industry to be cut by half and speedup was brutal.

The ranks of P-9 fought with courage and determination, reviving militant tactics like roving pickets to shut down other Hormel plants. They did so in the face of an anti-union offensive launched under the Reagan administration with the smashing of the PATCO air controllers strike in 1981. But the UFCW members were betrayed by the policies of both the local and international union leaderships.

The top UFCW leadership withheld money raised for the strikers, publicly denounced the strike as “mass suicide” and actively herded scabs across P-9’s picket lines. In March 1986, Wynn ordered the union to end the strike and cut off strike benefits. The UFCW International then put P-9 into receivership. In September 1986, a contract on the company’s terms was signed by UFCW Regional Director Joe Hansen, now the union’s International president. Meanwhile, the local union leaders relied on a campaign of demonstrations seeking to pressure stockholders, consumer boycotts and the like. Their “corporate campaign” was counterposed to mobilizing trade unionists and others who had shown their support for P-9 in the kind of hard class struggle needed to beat the union-busters. A quarter of a century later, the union bureaucrats continue their strategy of surrender, most recently repackaged for Wal-Mart and the fast-food industry.

Today packinghouse and processing plant workers are driven to fight against hellish conditions harking back to the Chicago stockyards exposed by Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel, The Jungle. Following the defeat of the Hormel strike, the company built a wall right through the factory separating the lower-skill, front-end killing floor from the processing side and “contracted” with its own shell company to run it at even lower wages with a heavily Latino immigrant workforce. With the line sped up from 750 to 1,300 hogs an hour by 2006, carpal tunnel, cuts and other injuries became routine. One part of the process caused an autoimmune disease that crippled many workers with neurological damage.

Since the late 1960s, the agribusiness bosses have consciously hired immigrants, particularly from Mexico and Central America, many of them undocumented workers. Such workers who try to organize face deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.). In December 2006, I.C.E. carried out one of the largest immigration raids in its history, rounding up nearly 1,300 immigrant workers in six Swift plants, five of which were organized by the UFCW.

The previous month, black and white workers at Smithfield Foods’ pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, struck in defense of Latino fellow workers fired by the company in its war against a UFCW organizing drive. Despite I.C.E. raids, the union gained recognition at Tar Heel in 2008. This underscores the crucial need for the labor movement to champion the defense of immigrant workers and demand full citizenship rights for all who have made it to the U.S.

Industries like fast-food have become emblematic of the grinding poverty into which vast numbers of workers have been driven. What is desperately needed is to revitalize the labor movement as a fighting force. Above all, the class-collaborationist labor tops must be swept out and replaced by a class-struggle leadership. This is a necessary part of the fight to build a workers party committed to leading all the exploited and oppressed in sweeping away the capitalist order.

Labor and the Color Bar in the Jim Crow South Workers Vanguard No. 1040	21 February 2014

TROTSKY

LENIN

(Quote of the Week)

Writing when Jim Crow segregation defined the South, veteran American Trotskyist Richard Fraser underlined that the fight to organize unions requires conscious struggle against the racist discrimination wielded by the capitalists to divide labor. While such struggle was key in the building of industrial unions in the North as well as in the mines and steel mills in Birmingham, Alabama, Fraser noted that organizing the “open shop” South had run aground under the leadership of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy. Six decades later, organizing the South remains a strategically important task for the labor movement.

At each point, the fundamental interests of the industrial working class and of the Negro people are tied together. At no point is this revealed more strongly than in the problems of unionism.

Working class solidarity is a mighty antidote to race prejudice. Without the overthrow of prejudice unionism itself is always in danger. This is demonstrated in the great struggles against the giant corporations of auto, rubber, steel. Here the working class was forced, in spite of prejudice, to present a united front to the employers or meet sure defeat. This action was the beginning of the overthrow of race prejudice, just as it was the beginning of industrial unionism....

If industrial unionism could not exist upon a racial basis, neither can it be maintained on a regional basis. The low wages of the South are a constant pressure upon all unions throughout the country. Furthermore, the Bourbon dictatorship is the most consistent and steadfast of all the sources of anti-labor reaction in the country....

The open-shop Jim Crow South is therefore lifted as a Sword of Damocles over the head of the labor movement. But the example of the city of Birmingham proves that it is by no means impossible to organize in the South.

Nevertheless, the CIO has failed in all its major attempts. This can only be explained by the limitations of the program of the union bureaucracy.

The organization of a labor movement in the South among the basic industrial and agricultural workers there must take its point of departure from a break with capitalist politics and capitalist parties.

—Richard S. Fraser, “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (1953), printed in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990

Framed-Up Protesters Face 30 Years-Free the NATO 3! Workers Vanguard No. 1040	21 February 2014

CHICAGO—In an attack on the right to political protest, Jared Chase, Brent Betterly and Brian Church, known as the NATO 3, were convicted by a Cook County jury on February 7 on two frame-up felony counts of possessing Molotov cocktails and two misdemeanor “mob action” charges. The three were victimized in a sting operation as part of the cops’ efforts to quash protest against the May 2012 gathering of NATO imperialist war criminals in Chicago. Prosecutors had tacked on bogus charges of “conspiracy to commit terrorism,” which the jury rejected, giving the state a partial setback. Nevertheless, Chase, Betterly and Church, who have been imprisoned on $1.5 million bail, now face possible 30-year prison sentences.

This was a chemically pure case of police entrapment. From start to finish, the real instigators of the purported plot were the cops. Undercover agents Nadia Chikko and Mehmet Uygun infiltrated the Occupy group with whom the defendants, who had driven up from Florida, were bunking. The agents provocateurs hatched a plan, pushed it forward and assembled some Molotov cocktails, goading and dragging Betterly, Church and Chase along at every step. Despite two weeks of intense surveillance, not a single piece of evidence was produced pointing to the NATO 3 as the ones who assembled the Molotov cocktails (made from beer bottles), as charged in the indictment. The setup was undertaken as Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy whipped up an atmosphere of fear-mongering and hysteria leading into the NATO summit, assembling a massive display of police power to intimidate protesters (see “Defend Anti-NATO Protesters!” WV No. 1003, 25 May 2012).

The defense noted that the Molotov cocktails “were always in possession of the under-cover police who suggested their own provocative ideas for how to use the bottles.” The “evidence” submitted by the state was Church’s fingerprints from a bottle supplied by the cops, who plied the defendants with liquor. It appears that the only actual evidence of law-breaking was the purchase of alcohol for minors by the police. And among the “weapons” presented by prosecutors was a seven-foot piece of plywood with the words “Austerity ain’t gonna happen” painted on it and a slingshot, the latter allegedly to be used for breaking windows at Obama’s re-election campaign headquarters.

Even the conservative Chicago Tribune (25 January), which was hostile to the anti-NATO protesters, expressed skepticism about the purported evidence against the three. Oozing with contempt for the defendants, the article stated that “the portrait that emerges from undercover recordings and courtroom testimony isn’t of a deadly terrorist cell looking to spark widespread fear but of bumbling young men led by a stoner trying to impress a female police officer on her first undercover assignment.” Once the verdict came down, the Tribune declared in a February 10 editorial that the men were a danger to society and called for the judge to throw the book at them.

What the jury could not buy were the charges of “conspiracy to commit terrorism” based on the Illinois terrorism statute. This is one of many such laws passed in the U.S. following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when a “war on terror” was declared as a rationale for the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and for escalating repression and snooping at home. Calling the proceedings a “terrorist show trial,” the NATO 3’s defense team aptly noted that the state’s definition of terrorism was so vague and broad that it could include “labor strikes, peaceful occupations and sit-ins, political protests and boycotts.” As for “conspiracy,” this is what the government uses to nail those it wants to silence yet cannot charge with demonstrable criminal acts. Organizing against slavery was “conspiratorial,” and labor unions used to be considered illegal conspiracies in this country.

Representatives of the Partisan Defense Committee, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist League, attended the Chicago trial, which had a thick air of intimidation of the NATO 3’s supporters. Admission was effectively curbed as those wishing to attend the trial had to register and submit to a background check on site. No papers, buttons, T-shirts or anything else indicating support for the defendants were allowed into the courtroom. The conviction of the NATO 3 is a threat to leftists, labor organizations, immigrants, and all would-be opponents of this racist capitalist system.

Sentencing is set for February 28. The PDC urges WV readers to join us in contributing to the NATO 3 defense fund. Donations can be made at www.wepay.com/donations/freethenato3. Free the NATO 3 now!

*COINTELPRO and the New York Times-1971 Break-In Turned Over FBI’s Rocks* Workers Vanguard No. 1040	21 February 2014

If a Pulitzer Prize were awarded for euphemizing government terror and repression, the smart money would surely be on the New York Times. A recent case in point is its article “Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows” (7 January), written in anticipation of the release of The Burglary by Betty Medsger, a book that reveals the identities and motivations of those who carried out a 1971 break-in of a small Pennsylvania FBI office. The subsequent exposure of the secret documents they seized ultimately led to the disclosure of the agency’s COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program).

The Times renders anodyne the FBI’s deadly program of surveillance, disruption, burglary, provocation, frame-up and outright murder, including the killing of 38 members of the Black Panther Party. The Times writes that “since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups.” For the bourgeoisie’s newspaper of record, the crime of crimes was “a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.” While such government intrusion into people’s private lives is both repellent and a measure of the capitalist state’s contempt for anyone advocating black rights, the full story of COINTELPRO is immensely more deadly.

Just as with the belated liberal opposition to the McCarthyite anti-Communist witchhunt of the 1950s, the Times’ problem is that the “wrong” people were put on the rack along with “legitimate” targets. COINTELPRO was launched in 1956 against the Communist Party; it was later extended to the Socialist Workers Party, Puerto Rican nationalists, anyone fighting for black rights, the American Indian Movement and protesters against the U.S. counterrevolutionary war in Vietnam. In a feat of journalistic gymnastics, the Times manages to write about COINTELPRO without a mention of the Feds’ foremost victim—the Black Panther Party (BPP). FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the Panthers to be the “greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” and vowed in 1968 that “the Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.”

This was no idle threat. The BPP, which represented the best of a generation of black radicals, was destroyed through a combination of FBI/cop terror and its own vicious factionalism exacerbated by COINTELPRO dirty tricks. For the New York Times, those Panthers killed as a direct result of COINTELPRO do not exist. Not “Little” Bobby Hutton, the Panthers’ first recruit, who was gunned down by Oakland cops in 1968. Not L.A. Panther leaders “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins, who were shot dead by members of the cultural nationalist United Slaves organization of Ron Karenga, inflamed by letters forged by the FBI threatening Karenga in the name of the BPP. Not Chicago Panther leaders Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, assassinated in a December 1969 police raid based on floor plans of Hampton’s apartment supplied by an FBI informant. Not Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), who survived a nearly identical assassination attempt four days later only to spend 27 years in prison on bogus murder charges—the FBI concealed wiretap logs showing he was 400 miles away at the time of the killing—before his release in 1997.

For the Times, all this is just a little blood under the bridge. But we remember COINTELPRO’s victims, some of whom are still behind prison walls today, among them American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier and Panther supporters Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter. We remember Herman Wallace, who died in 2013 after spending 41 years in solitary confinement on bogus charges in Angola Penitentiary; his Panther comrade Albert Woodfox remains incarcerated.

Unearthing COINTELPRO

Betty Medsger, a reporter for the Washington Post at the time of the FBI burglary, was among a handful sent the documents and was the first to publish them. These included a 1970 memorandum calling on agents to step up interviews of antiwar activists and other dissidents in order to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and...further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox.” Another was an order by Hoover that all black campus organizations be monitored. Hoover declared that “increased campus disorders involving black students pose a definite threat to the Nation’s stability and security,” necessitating more and better intelligence “on Black student Unions and similar groups which are targeted for influence and control by violence-prone Black Panther Party and other extremists.”

Hoover’s directive reflected the bourgeoisie’s fear that the failure of the liberal-led civil rights movement to satisfy black aspirations for equality was driving activists into what in FBI parlance were “black extremist groups.” Malcolm X, the left-moving Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and even black comedian Dick Gregory were all caught in the COINTELPRO web.

What would prove to be the most significant disclosure emerging from the burglary of the unguarded FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, was a memorandum bearing a routing slip with the esoteric designation “COINTELPRO.” Although it mustered some attention, nobody knew what it meant at the time, nor would they until December 1973, when NBC reporter Carl Stern obtained a few heavily edited FBI documents through a Freedom Of Information Act order. In early 1975, Senate hearings convened by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church provided a broader, but still expurgated, picture of FBI, CIA and U.S. military spying, terror and provocations.

The courageous act of the eight men and women who risked jail to unearth documentation of FBI crimes was a real service to the working class, the oppressed and all who would protest the barbarity of capitalist imperialism. Two of the activists had previously put their lives on the line in the service of their liberal convictions as volunteers registering black people to vote during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. Nonetheless, while the Vietnam War was radicalizing a generation of youth, the burglary’s mastermind, William Davidon, and his colleagues were squarely in the pacifist, “peace is patriotic” right wing of the antiwar movement.

Medsger notes that Davidon’s motivation was “to prove or disprove the persistent rumor that the government was spying on Americans for reasons unrelated to suspicion of crime.” Prove to whom? FBI planting of informants and provocateurs in left, civil rights and antiwar groups was no secret to the activists in those movements. As expressed in the name they adopted, “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the F.B.I.,” the burglars’ political outlook was the belief that protest and exposure could influence those in power to rein in the supposed excesses of the government’s political police.

Medsger’s well-researched and enjoyable book purveys the view that Hoover’s FBI was a rogue agency. As Marxist revolutionists, we understand that the capitalist state exists to defend through organized violence the class rule and profits of the ruling class. This requires an apparatus of repression, of which the FBI is part. A commonplace among liberals is that Hoover’s superiors in the White House and Justice Department were kept in the dark. But as Attorneys General, Robert F. Kennedy authorized wiretaps on Martin Luther King, while in 1967 Ramsey Clark issued directions to expand COINTELPRO operations against “Black Nationalist Organizations,” specifically targeting the Congress of Racial Equality, SNCC and other groups.

The NSA, CIA and military intelligence were also spying on leftists and black activists, and many big-city police departments had their own Red Squads, working with the FBI and carrying out their own COINTELPRO-like operations. The hundreds of pages of FBI files on class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal record information provided by the Philadelphia police Intelligence Division. Mumia, a Black Panther spokesman in his youth and later a supporter of the MOVE commune, has been in prison for 32 years, an innocent man framed up on murder charges. For 30 of those years, he was on death row.

Congressional Oversight: The Fox and the Chicken Coop

Medsger’s prescription is oversight by Congress, with the 1975-76 Church Committee hearings as a model. Those hearings were called in response to the growing uproar following the 1972 burglary of Democratic Party national headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., by operatives of the Nixon administration. The Watergate conspirators incurred the wrath of powerful forces by spying on the respectable bourgeois politicians of the Democratic Party. This was a violation of the accepted rules of the game—rules that have always permitted vicious persecution of leftists, labor leaders and black militants.

The Church Committee’s “reforms” were part of restoring public confidence in the government and its democratic facade after the damage inflicted by the U.S. imperialists’ stunning military defeat in Vietnam and by the Watergate revelations. But they were also intended to rationalize an apparatus of repression that had become unwieldy and evidently unable to tell the difference between Ho Chi Minh and what one might call the real antiwar housewives of Beverly Hills. In 1976, Attorney General Edward Levi implemented FBI guidelines that honed the agency’s targets to a more manageable number of victims.

Also emerging from the hearings was the establishment of the Senate and House Committees on Intelligence, whose “oversight” has consisted of rubber-stamping virtually every intelligence program. Ostensibly to curb NSA/CIA spying, Congress passed the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), setting up a special secret court to vet requests for wiretaps in the name of “national security.” Not only has the court authorized all but 11 out of 34,000 surveillance requests, it has given blanket endorsement of the Bush/Obama NSA program monitoring all phone and Internet communications.

Medsger and the burglars share the view that the FBI should be investigating organized crime and corruption rather than suppressing dissent. As Medsger puts it, “Hoover had distorted the mission of one of the most powerful and most venerated institutions in the country.” As we wrote shortly after the Church hearings, “It is their class allegiance which blinds the liberals to the simple fact that these agencies’ central purpose is to do the dirty work considered inappropriate to the ‘normal’ administrative mechanisms of bourgeois democracy” (“What Is the ADEX File?” WV No. 151, 1 April 1977). Hoover’s FBI was doing precisely what it was formed to do.

The U.S. entry into World War I, the first interimperialist world war, gave impetus to the creation of a far-flung domestic espionage apparatus. But the deadly apparatus employed by this country’s political police—with its vast army of spies and informers, wiretaps and mail interceptions—really took shape in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. At its center was the newly formed Bureau of Investigation and its General Intelligence Division (GID) headed by Hoover. Within months, the GID had compiled a list of 55,000 names. Initially aimed at antiwar dissidents, left-wing Socialists and members of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, the political police went on to pursue the fledgling Communist movement, targeting black militants as well.

In 1935, amid a new wave of working-class radicalization, the investigative bureau was recast by liberal icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the FBI. Beginning in the mid ’30s, Roosevelt quietly encouraged Hoover to conduct surveillance of domestic fascists and communists. In 1939, with the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the president expanded the FBI’s jurisdiction to include all cases of suspected domestic sabotage, espionage and subversion. When the Supreme Court outlawed wiretapping, Roosevelt ordered Hoover to keep at it.

The courageous act by the 1971 FBI burglars naturally invites comparison to the actions by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden that, at great personal sacrifice, exposed to public scrutiny some of the international and domestic crimes of the U.S. imperialists and their government. What is obvious, however, is that none of the exposures or reforms stemming from the era of the break-in have impeded the U.S. government from wielding a police and spy apparatus that today dwarfs anything J. Edgar Hoover could have imagined. Our aim as Marxists is to build a revolutionary workers party—a tribune of the people—dedicated to leading the working class in sweeping away capitalist class rule and replacing it with a workers government. Then and only then will the enormous cache of the government’s secrets and the extent of the capitalist rulers’ terror at home and abroad be made plain for all the world to see.

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As Rulers Debate Minimum Wage Hike-Profits Soar, Workers Go Under-Fight, Don’t Starve! For a Workers’ America! Workers Vanguard No. 1040	21 February 2014

Six years after plunging the world into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Wall Street is making out like the bandits they are. Corporate profits are breaking historical records as devastation continues to stalk the working class, black people, the poor, the sick, the young and the aged. Millions are unemployed, the army of part-time, temporary and casual labor is swelling and even many of those who have full-time jobs number among what are called the “working poor.” According to studies by the World Bank and other capitalist agencies, the U.S. now ranks worse than Nigeria on the scale of income inequality. “Low-wage America” has now become the buzzword for everyone from the White House and the bourgeois media to the reformist left.

There is nothing new or unique about the grinding poverty into which vast numbers of workers have been driven as wages on the whole continue to drop, continuing a trend that began in the 1970s. In Capital Vol. 1 (1867), Karl Marx explained the workings of the capitalist system of production for profit, in which the means of production are the property of the few who appropriate for themselves the wealth produced by the workers’ labor: “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, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”

The imperialist rulers reveled in the counterrevolutionary destruction of the former Soviet workers state as proof that Marxism is a “failed experiment.” But the landscape of the U.S. and other advanced as well as backward capitalist countries today is a stark snapshot of the increasing mass misery described by Marx.

Like the police chief in Casablanca who is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on in Rick’s gin joint, President Obama has now discovered “a dangerous and growing inequality” in America. Following up on the pledge made in his State of the Union address, on February 12 Obama signed an executive order raising the minimum wage of workers employed by federal contractors to $10.10 an hour. Despite all the fanfare, his pontification that “in the richest nation on earth, nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty” rang less than hollow. Not only will just a few thousand workers be affected—and then only under new federal contracts—but even with this pay increase they will still be making poverty-level wages.

Peddling “friend of the little guy” snake oil is nothing new for the Democratic Party, which is no less a party of capitalist rule than the ravingly anti-labor Republicans. While Obama rarely played this card when bailing out the banks and auto bosses, the president currently finds this a useful ploy, particularly for reviving the Democrats’ fortunes in the November midterm elections. Although a good number of CEOs are determined to keep wages at rock bottom, not to mention the Tea Party troglodytes who decry raising the minimum wage as a new installment of “class warfare,” the demand for a higher minimum wage has support across a wide political spectrum.

For clerical reactionary Pat Buchanan, a higher minimum wage is the means to further slash social programs for the poor by allowing people to “provide for their living without assistance from the government.” The aim of cutting back government “handouts” is also cited by wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz in promoting a ballot initiative for California’s November elections to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2016. Unz, who authored the 1998 California proposition banning bilingual education for immigrant youth, also wants to make “minimum wage jobs more attractive to ‘Americans’ and thus reduce the flow of immigrants entering the country illegally to take jobs no one else wants” (SFGate.com, 25 January).

For his part, liberal Seattle venture capitalist Nick Hanauer argues in a Bloomberg (19 June 2013) article titled “The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage” that “the fundamental law of capitalism is that if workers have no money, businesses have no customers.” The fact that the vast majority of the population has little money to spend is a problem for the U.S. economy, which is overwhelmingly based on consumer spending. But the fundamental law of capitalism is hardly the adage, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” On the contrary: the fundamental drive is to sink wages so that the capitalist owners can increase their profits by seizing greater and greater proportions of the wealth produced by the workers. Correspondingly, the level of wages at any given time is determined by the relationship of forces between these two decisive classes of capitalist society.

Through mobilizing their collective power, workers can fight to wrest a greater share of the product from the capitalists, who seek to pay out just enough in wages to sustain the workers they exploit. But with the unions headed by a bureaucracy that promotes the profitability of American capitalism, labor struggle is at a nadir. The fruit of the labor misleaders’ class collaboration has been decades of broken strikes and busted unions, helping to drive down wages for the working class as a whole.

The Calculus of the Class Struggle

While the level of deprivation of the working class has been magnified recently, compounded by soaring costs in health care and higher education, the downhill slide in wages did not begin with the 2007-08 economic collapse but started in the early-mid 1970s. With its treasury drained by the long, losing war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants and its former economic dominance challenged by the rising industrial might of Germany and Japan, the U.S. ruling class launched a campaign to increase profitability through jacking up the exploitation of workers. Speedup, wage-slashing and the institution of “two-tier” wages and benefits for new hires increased the rate of exploitation. Auto, steel and other manufacturing production was moved from the heavily unionized Northeast and Midwest to low-wage plants in the “open shop” South and to neocolonies in Latin America and Asia.

Workers resisted by carrying out many hard-fought strikes. But these were overwhelmingly broken, in no small part thanks to sabotage by trade-union bureaucrats. As union after union went down in defeat, the U.S. rulers were encouraged to believe that they could get away with doing anything to the working class and the poor. Today, some of the more farsighted elements of the bourgeoisie are beginning to worry that continuing to drive people into ever greater misery could lead to a social explosion.

In “The Case for a Higher Minimum Wage” (8 February), the New York Times editorial board promotes the hike as “essential to a functional economy” as well as to restoring “public confidence” in American capitalism. Robert Reich, labor secretary under Bill Clinton, put it more baldly. In a column titled “Working Class Down—But Not for Long” (S.F. Chronicle, 7 February), Reich opines that “reform is less risky than revolution, but the longer we wait, the more likely it will be the latter.” As an alternative, this “let’s make a New Deal” liberal harks back to the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democratic Party administration, which enacted the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act establishing a federal minimum wage.

Like every gain the workers have ever made, this was won not through legislative lobbying or appeals to the “good conscience” of the exploiters but through class struggle. Fearing that the explosion of labor battles in the midst of the 1930s Great Depression could lead to a challenge to capitalist rule, Roosevelt pushed through various measures designed to deflect the upsurge into safer channels. The federal minimum wage was enacted at a time when workers were flocking into the newly organized, militant industrial unions to fight the near-starvation wages imposed by the employers.

Just as surely, the minimum wage, minimal as it always was, has been whittled down in the course of the one-sided class war against the unions. In 1968, the hourly federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, was the equivalent of $10.70 today. Now it stands at $7.25 an hour. Meanwhile, unionization in the private sector has fallen to under 7 percent from a high of 35 percent in the 1950s.

Abolish Wage Slavery!

We are for an increase in the minimum wage, as we are for any benefit that ameliorates the conditions of the exploited and oppressed. But any gains, however marginal, that may be legislated today are only as good as the ability of the workers to preserve and extend them. Otherwise, they will be about as real as the federal safety and other regulations that are routinely flouted by the bosses.

For the labor bureaucracy, however, it is all a matter of seeking legislative redress courtesy of the supposed “friends of labor” in the Democratic Party. This strategy is epitomized by the SEIU service workers leadership’s campaign to push Congress and state legislatures to raise the minimum wage. Along the same lines, Socialist Alternative’s newly elected Seattle City Council member, Kshama Sawant, whose central campaign slogan was “Fight for 15,” now serves on a mayoral advisory committee with the rich entrepreneur Hanauer and other local capitalists to work out just how high the city’s minimum should be raised.

The working class must fight to resist attacks on wages, benefits and jobs. Communists champion the felt needs of workers, minorities and the poor—for jobs at good wages; for quality, fully government-funded medical care for all; for quality, integrated schools and housing; for a livable retirement—seeking to link such demands to the fight to overturn the system of capitalist wage slavery. We call for jobs for all through shortening the workweek at no loss in pay, for fully indexing wages to inflation and for a massive program of public works to rebuild this country’s crumbling infrastructure. These demands, which will not be met by this decaying capitalist system, point squarely to the need for a workers government to expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class and use the wealth produced by labor for the benefit of the many and not the profit of the few. The urgent task is to sever labor’s ties to the Democrats and to build the working-class party needed to lead the exploited and oppressed in socialist revolution.

In his 1865 work Value, Price and Profit, Marx noted that the working class must not passively give in to the capitalists’ efforts to reduce wages to a minimum. However, he continued:

“Quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects...that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’”

President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning

Because the public deserves the truth and whistle-blowers deserve protection.

We are military veterans, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, students, and citizens.

We ask you to consider the facts and free US Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.

As an Intelligence Analyst stationed in Iraq, Pvt. Manning had access to some of America’s dirtiest secrets—crimes such as torture, illegal surveillance, and corruption—often committed in our name.

Manning acted on conscience alone, with selfless courage and conviction, and gave these secrets to us, the public.

“I believed that if the general public had access to the information contained within the[Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy,”

Manning explained to the military court. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”

Journalists used these documents to uncover many startling truths. We learned:

• Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.

• Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.

• Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.

• Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.

For service on behalf of an informed democracy, Manning was sentenced by military judge Colonel Denise Lind to a devastating 35 years in prison.

Government secrecy has grown exponentially during the past decade, but more secrecy does not make us safer when it fosters unaccountability.

Pvt. Manning was convicted of Espionage Act charges for providing WikiLeaks with this information, but the prosecutors noted that they would have done the same had the information been given to The New York Times. Prosecutors did not show that enemies used this information against the US, or that the releases resulted in any casualties.

Pvt. Manning has already been punished, even in violation of military law.

She has been:

• Held in confinement since May 29, 2010.

• Subjected to illegal punishment amounting to torture for nearly nine months at Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 13—facts confirmed by both the United Nation’s lead investigator on torture and military judge Col. Lind.

• Denied a speedy trial in violation of UCMJ, Article 10, having been imprisoned for over three years before trial.

• Denied anything resembling a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to change the charge sheet to match evidence presented, and enter new evidence, after closing arguments.

Pvt. Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you would protect whistle-blowers. We urge you to start upholding those promises, beginning with this American prisoner of conscience.

We urge you to grant Pvt. Manning’s petition for a Presidential Pardon.

FIRST& LAST NAME _____________________________________________________________

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Please return to: For more information: www.privatemanning.org

Private Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.