A MODEST
PROPOSAL-RECRUIT, RUN INDEPENDENT LABOR MILITANTS FOR THE 2018 ELECTIONS
(Updated)
From The American Left History Blog Archives (2008) - On American Political
Discourse
–
Political Commentator
Frank Jackman:
In
2007-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the then
blossoming American presidential campaign, a changing of the guard election on
the Democratic side, since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed
election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the
event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious,
“in my face” obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those few
who really believed, who had talked themselves into, had a vested interest in
touting that it would be a watershed election. That grim reality despite the
hoopla, heavy cash and organizing of the thing, was that once again that
election would essentially be a technician’s election, you know for armchair
strategists and those who like to, for example, figure out how the
Congressional race in the 26th District in Texas will impact the
balance of power in the U.S. House. (I confess that early on in my life that
kind of thing intrigued me too until I got “religion” and worried more about
real live issues and political programs than wonk-ish concerns.)
The
subsequent “sleep-walk” four years of the Obama presidency, the non-watershed
by anybody’s measurement 2012 American presidential election campaign, the
banal mid-term elections of 2014 and the all-around horribly shocking
Clinton-Trump debacle of 2016 recently passed and the unending maelstrom of
world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that now seemingly ancient abandonment
was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well-
paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have)
better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war
economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers’ party that
fights for a workers government. More than enough to do, right?
Part
of my “alternative” offering then of the same old, same of the electoral cycle
was a proposition that the labor movement and its supporters rather than spent
another dime on what even a child can now see is a waste of good dues money on
supporting this or that bourgeois candidate, almost solely Democrats these days
when even the most banal labor skate would face righteous stoning or the fire
for proposing cash donations to Republican candidates, instead run our own
independent candidates for appropriate offices in what for now would be
exemplary campaigns. To that end I motivated my pitch with a few reasons and
the outline of a program. Today as the once again non-watershed 2018 elections (even
if there is a Democratic sea-change in either or both the Houses of Congress) loom
in our faces even before we have devoured the fact of the 2016 elections I
offer an updated version of that program and the urgency to get out independent
labors candidates.
************
1. FIGHT FOR THE
IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST NOW
(OR BETTER YET, YESTERDAY)! U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD! VOTE NO ON THE WAR
BUDGET!
The
never-ending and apparently soon to be resurrected, with or without “boots on
the ground” quagmire in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East
(Palestine, Iran, Syria you name it) is the fault line of American
politics today. Every bourgeois politician has to have his or her feet put to
the fire on this one. Not on some flimsy ‘sense of the Congress’ softball
motion for withdrawal next, year, in two years, or (my favorite) when the
situation is “stable.” Moreover, on the parliamentary level the only real vote
that matters is the vote on the war budget. All the rest is fluff. Militant
labor candidates should make a point of trying to enter Congressional contests
where there are so-called known anti-war Democrats or Republicans (an oxymoron,
I believe) running to make that programmatic contrast vivid.
But,
one might argue, that would split the ‘progressive’ forces. Grow up, please!
That argument has grown stale since it was first put forth in the “popular
front” days of the 1930’s. If you want to end the war fight for this
"no funding" position on the war budget. Otherwise the same people
(yah, those progressive Democrats) who unanimously voted for the last war
budget and are reliably foaming at the bit to vote for the next one get a free
ride on the cheap. By rights this is our issue. Let us take it back.
2. FIGHT FOR A LIVING
WAGE AND WORKING CONDITIONS-UNIVERSAL FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.
It
is a ‘no-brainer’ that no individual, much less families, can live on the
minimum wage of $7/hr. (or proposed $10/hr or despite the good intentions the
“Fight for 15 struggle). What planet do these politicians live on? We need an
immediate fight for a living wage, full employment and decent working
conditions. A step in the right direction and a fight that should be supported
and funded is the recent “Fight for $15.” We need universal free health care
for all. End of story. (Although Obamacare is inadequate and filled with
pitfalls it must be at this point continually defended against those who wish
to dismantle the whole thing and leave millions without insurance again.) The
organized labor movement must get off its knees and fight to organize Wal-Mart
and the South. A boycott of Wal-Mart is not enough. A successful organizing
drive will, like in the 1930’s, go a long way to turning the conditions of
labor and unionization around.
3. FIGHT THE ATTACKS ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT.
Down
with the Death Penalty! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants who make it
here! Stop the Deportations! For the Separation of Church and State! Defend
abortion rights! Full public funding of education! Stop the ‘war on drugs’,
basically a war on blacks and minority youth-decriminalize drugs! Defend
political prisoners! This list of demands hardly exhausts the “culture war”
issues we defend. It is hard to believe that over 200 years after the American
Revolution and the French Revolution we are fighting desperately to preserve
many of the same principles that militants fought for in those revolutions.
But, so be it.
4. FIGHT FOR A
WORKERS PARTY.
The
Donkeys, Elephants and Greens have had their chance. Now is the time to fight
for our own party and for the interests of our own class, the working class.
Any campaigns by independent labor militants must highlight this point. And any
campaigns can also become the nucleus of a workers’ party network until we get
strong enough to form at least a small party. None of these other parties, and
I mean none, are working in the interests of working people and their allies.
The following great lesson of politics today must be hammered home. Break with
the Democrats, Republicans and Greens!
5. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS AND XYZ GOVERNMENT.
THIS
IS THE DEMAND THAT SEPARATES THE MILITANTS FROM THE FAINT-HEARTED REFORMISTS.
We
need our own form of government. In the old days the bourgeois republic was a
progressive form of government. Not so any more. That form of government ran
out of steam about one hundred years ago and has been choking human process
since then. We need a Workers Republic. We need a government based on workers
councils with a ministry (I do not dare say commissariat in case any stray
anarchists or old time anti-communists who came of age in the red scare Cold
War 1950s are reading this) responsible to it. Let us face it if we really want
to get any of the good and necessary things listed above accomplished we are
not going to get it with the current form of government.
Why
the XYZ part? What does that mean? No, it is not part of an algebra lesson.
What it reflects is that while society is made up mainly of workers (of one
sort or another) there are other classes (and parts of classes) in society that
we seek as allies and who could benefit from a workers government. Examples-
small independent contractors, intellectuals, the dwindling number of small
farmers, and some professionals like dentists. Yah, I like the idea of a
workers and dentists government after many years in the dentist chair. The
point is you have got to fight for it.
Obviously
any campaign based on this program will be an exemplary propaganda campaign for
the foreseeable future. But we have to start now. Continuing to support or not
challenging the bourgeois parties does us no good now. That is for sure. While
bourgeois electoral laws do not favor independent candidacies and make things
difficult write-in campaigns are possible.
**********
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The
International Working Class Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The
Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“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 as high in the American labor force as it is just tentatively
recovering from of late, although it is admittedly down from the Great
Recession 2008 highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to
spread the available work around. Socially productive work not make-shift stuff
although we would support an vast expansion of public works to fix the broken
down infrastructure in need of serious and immediate repair. his is no mere
propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution
of available work.
The basic scheme, as was
the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions’ plans
as a result of battles like the General Strike in San Francisco in the 1934, is
that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’
councils that 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 to implement “30 for 40” –with the no
reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under
the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to
establish this work system as a norm 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. Support the recent militant efforts,
including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of
fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in
their Fight For 15.
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. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of
company-owned 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. The key here is to
organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing
comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual
retail stores. 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 defeats
like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the
hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts
or bourgeois recall elections like the unsuccessful one against Governor Scoot
Walker in Wisconsin in the aftermath of the huge defeat of public workers in
Wisconsin funds and talents which could have been used to reorganize the public
workers for union struggles ahead. Unions must keep their independent from
government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence
of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray
Republican) candidates. In 2008, 2012, and 2016 labor, organized labor, spent
over well over 700 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama,
Hillary Clinton and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results
speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more
in this period. For those bogus efforts rather than the serious labor
organizing among low wage workers, the unorganized, the South and Wal-Mart the
labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those
elections was 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 since they have been
very generous with own paychecks. The old norm in need of revival is that the
bureaucrats at all levels should receive no more than the pay of the average
skilled worker they represent.
The hard reality today
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. One of most egregious recent examples that we can recall- the
return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011
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 for bourgeois
candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor when the
deal went down from Bush to Obama to Trump 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 (also think,
think hard, about having to go that far back to get a positive example). That
type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not
on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like the Scoot-Walker
recall effort in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was
overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers
has dwindled to a precious few).
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and
Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of
non-mercenary forces anyway, we argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors
had 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
previously in Libya and now in Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Chad and other proxy
wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq and
other Middle East states we had better straighten out our anti-war,
anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop
escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. No War With
North Korea, Iran! Out of Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East!
Stop The Bombing Campaigns! Defend The Palestinian People! And as always after
16 long years, since 2001 for the forgetful Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal
Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!
Hands Off North Korea!-
American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted 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 North Korea and Iran against the
American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior
partners on this issue, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea) in North
Korea or 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 North Korea and Iran. We will, believe
me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic
fundamentalists in Iran and the Kim regime in North Korea in our own way in our
own time.
U.S. Hands Off The
World! And Keep Them Off!-
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 in 1915 in the heat of war and
paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war
budgets and reneged on that promise by going to prison. The jailhouse the only play
for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The
litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war
budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
North Korea preparations, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get
our 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.
*Fight for a social
agenda for working people! 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. Be
clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate
and wasteful however we will defend that program against those like Trump and
the majority of his Republican ilk r his who wish to dismantle it and leave
millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.
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 from broken
homes and minority homes 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 if you want to find the money quickly
to do the job right), 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 plus dollars, give or take a few
billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up
dramatically while low-cost aid has 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 and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the 2008 crunch has
abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if
not desperately timely like in the recent past. 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 had 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.
*We created the
wealth, let’s take it back. 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 beat down, beat down hard
in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of 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
socialism, to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
As Isaac Deutscher said
in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that
socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are
struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making
and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks
of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the
enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes,
socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that
he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red
banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
ROLL UP YOUR SHEEVES! GET THOSE
ELECTION BALLOT PETITIONS SIGNED! PRINT OUT THE LEAFLETS! PAINT THOSE BANNERS!
GET READY TO SHAKE HANDS AND KISS BABIES