"America, Where Are You Now...."- Stepphenwolf's The Monster-Take Two

A YouTube Film Clip Of Stepphenwolf Performing Monster. Ah, Those Were The Days

Commentary/CD REVIEW

Steppenwolf: 16 Greatest Hits, Steppenwolf, Digital Sound, 1990

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

The heavy rock band Steppenwolf, one of many that was thrown up by the musical counter-culture of the mid to late 1960's was a cut above and apart from some of the others due to their scorching lyrics provided mainly, but not solely, by gravelly-voiced lead singer John Kay. Some bands played, consciously played, to the “drop out” notion of times, drop out of rat-race bourgeois society and it money imperative, its white picket fence with little e white house visions (from when many of the young, the post-World War II baby-boomer young, now sadly older), drop out and create a niche somewhere, some physical somewhere perhaps but certainly some other mental somewhere and the music reflected that disenchantment, Much of which was ephemeral, merely background music, and has not survived (except in lonely YouTube cyberspace). Others, flash pan “music is the revolution,” period exclamation point, end of conversation bands assumed a few pithy lyrics would carry the day and dirty old bourgeois society would run and hide in horror leaving the field open, open for, uh, us. That music too, except for gens like The Ballad Of Easy Rider, is safely ensconced in vast cyberspace.

Steppenwolf was different. Not all the lyrics worked, then or now. Not all the words are now some forty plus years later memorable. After all every song is written with current audience in mind, and notions of immortality for most songs are displaced. Certainly some of the less political lyrics seem entirely forgettable. As does some of the heavy decibel rock sound that seems to wander at times like, as was the case more often than not, and more often that we, deep in some a then hermetic drug thrall, would have acknowledged, or worried about. But know this- when you think today about trying to escape from the rat race of daily living then you have an enduring anthem Born To Be Wildthat still stirs the young (and not so young). If Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone was one musical pillar of the youth revolt of the 1960's then Born To Be Wild was the other.

And if you needed (or need) a quick history lesson about the nature of American society in the 1960's, what it was doing to its young, where it had been and where it was heading (and seemingly still is as we finish up the Afghan wars and the war signals for intervention into Syria and Iran, or both are beating the war drums fiercely) then the trilogy under the title "The Monster" (the chorus which I have posted above and lyrics below) said it all.

Then there were songs like The Pusher Man a song that could be usefully used as an argument in favor of decriminalization of drugs today and get our people the hell out of jail and moving on with their lives and other then more topical songs like Draft Resister to fill out the album. The group did not have the staying power of others like The Rolling Stones but if you want to know, approximately, what it was like for rock groups to seriously put rock and roll and a hard political edge together give a listen.

Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom

(Monster)

Once the religious, the hunted and weary

Chasing the promise of freedom and hope

Came to this country to build a new vision

Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope

Like good Christians, some would burn the witches

Later some got slaves to gather riches

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

And once the ties with the crown had been broken

Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean

Many the lives which had come to an end

While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland

We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

The blue and grey they stomped it

They kicked it just like a dog

And when the war over

They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has it's share of injustice

Kind was the spirit in many a way

But it's protectors and friends have been sleeping

Now it's a monster and will not obey

(Suicide)

The spirit was freedom and justice

And it's keepers seem generous and kind

It's leaders were supposed to serve the country

But now they won't pay it no mind

'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy

And now their vote is a meaningless joke

They babble about law and order

But it's all just an echo of what they've been told

Yeah, there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watchin'

Our cities have turned into jungles

And corruption is stranglin' the land

The police force is watching the people

And the people just can't understand

We don't know how to mind our own business

'Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us

Now we are fighting a war over there

No matter who's the winner

We can't pay the cost

'Cause there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watching

(America)

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

© Copyright MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--

Born To Be Wild

Words and music by Mars Bonfire

Get your motor runnin'

Head out on the highway

Lookin' for adventure

And whatever comes our way

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

I like smoke and lightning

Heavy metal thunder

Racin' with the wind

And the feelin' that I'm under

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

Like a true nature's child

We were born, born to be wild

We can climb so high

I never wanna die

Born to be wild
Born to be wild

© MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--

THE PUSHER

From the 1968 release "Steppenwolf"

Words and music by Hoyt Axton

You know I've smoked a lot of grass

O' Lord, I've popped a lot of pills

But I never touched nothin'

That my spirit could kill

You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round

With tombstones in their eyes

But the pusher don't care

Ah, if you live or if you die

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, I say The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man

You know the dealer, the dealer is a man

With the love grass in his hand

Oh but the pusher is a monster

Good God, he's not a natural man

The dealer for a nickel

Lord, will sell you lots of sweet dreams

Ah, but the pusher ruin your body

Lord, he'll leave your, he'll leave your mind to scream

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, God damn the Pusher

I said God damn, God, God damn The Pusher man

Well, now if I were the president of this land

You know, I'd declare total war on The Pusher man

I'd cut him if he stands, and I'd shoot him if he'd run

Yes I'd kill him with my Bible and my razor and my gun

God damn The Pusher

Gad damn The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man\

© Irving Music Inc. (BMI)

--Used with permission--

Cops Are Enemies of Workers

Workers Vanguard No. 1052 19 September 2014 TROTSKY LENIN Cops Are Enemies of Workers (Quote of the Week) The 1934 Trotskyist-led Minneapolis Teamsters strikes made the city a union town and laid the basis for forging the Teamsters into a powerful industrial union. To win, the truckers and their allies had to face down the cabal of business owners known as the Citizens Alliance backed by the cops, their deputies and the National Guard. In the following excerpt from his account of those struggles, Farrell Dobbs, a striking worker won to Trotskyism, generalized from that experience to explain the role of the police.   Under capitalism the main police function is to break strikes and to repress other forms of protest against the policies of the ruling class. Any civic usefulness other forms of police activity may have, like controlling traffic and summoning ambulances, is strictly incidental to the primary repressive function. Personal inclinations of individual cops do not alter this basic role of the police. All must comply with ruling-class dictates. As a result, police repression becomes one of the most naked forms through which capitalism subordinates human rights to the demands of private property. If the cops sometimes falter in their antisocial tasks, it is simply because they—like the guns they use—are subject to rust when not engaged in the deadly function for which they are primarily trained. —Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion (1972)

Anti-Woman Crusade Marches On-For Free Abortion Available to All! Workers Vanguard No. 1052	19 September 2014

Anti-Woman Crusade Marches On-For Free Abortion Available to All!

 

In the first half of this year, state governments passed 21 restrictions on women’s right to abortion, adding to the more than 200 such restrictions imposed between 2011 and 2013, more than in the entire previous decade. Among them are waiting periods (including a just-instituted 72-hour wait in Missouri), parental consent requirements, bans on consultations with doctors over the phone and limits on coverage of abortion in health insurance plans. With Republican state legislators spearheading the attacks on abortion, bourgeois feminists are once again trying to corral supporters of abortion rights into voting for the Democrats in the mid-term elections. But in office, the Democrats themselves imbibe “family values” moralism and have helped set the stage for the reactionary onslaught against women’s rights.

The anti-abortion forces have shifted tactics of late, pushing laws known as Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) that aim to erect insurmountable barriers to keeping abortion clinics open. These tactics have been so successful that the anti-abortion terrorists of Operation Rescue brag that a record 87 surgical abortion clinics closed in 2013, 12 percent of the national total. Some of these laws force clinics to expand procedure rooms, widen hallways to match ambulatory surgical centers and institute other medically useless but hugely expensive building upgrades. Planned Parenthood had to spend over $750,000 to upgrade their clinics in Pennsylvania to comply with one such law. For smaller providers, such costs are prohibitive and many are forced to shut down.

Other laws, now on the books in 20 states, compel abortion providers to have an official relationship with a local hospital. For many clinics this is impossible; religious-run hospitals refuse to deal with them and for-profit hospitals see no money to be made off them. In Ohio, after a new anti-abortion law went into effect last year, six of the state’s 14 abortion clinics closed, in multiple cases because they were unable to obtain transfer agreements with local hospitals. The remaining clinics are in limbo since the state has not renewed their expired licenses.

In late July, a federal appeals court blocked a Mississippi law that would have closed the state’s last abortion clinic as its doctors were unable to obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals. The ruling wasn’t that the law per se was too restrictive, but only that having no in-state abortion clinics would place an undue burden on other states to meet Mississippi women’s right to abortion under Roe v. Wade. The rights supposedly enshrined in Roe v. Wade are thus reduced to the right to have one abortion clinic in an entire state.

The Democrats and bourgeois feminists seek to limit the struggle for abortion rights to a sanitized electoral movement that does not go beyond defense of Roe v. Wade. They represent the concerns of middle-class and bourgeois women, who can afford to pay and don’t want their “right to choose” infringed. But for poor and working-class women, “choice” doesn’t amount to much if you don’t have the money for the procedure, insurance won’t cover it and you have to travel a long distance because the local clinic has been shut down. And without access to abortion, an unexpected pregnancy can be devastating, with all the extra costs of raising a child and the added challenges to holding down a job.

In fact, Roe v. Wade falls far short of granting a blanket right to abortion. The ruling allows states to regulate abortions in the interests of women’s health or those of the fetus at later stages of pregnancy. The bible-thumpers have driven a horse and cart through these loopholes, using the pretext of protecting women’s health to close down clinic after clinic.

While abortion should be merely a question of basic health care, the anti-women bigots view it as a threat to the patriarchal family, the main source of women’s oppression and a key prop of capitalist class rule. Unrestricted access to abortion and contraception is essential for all women to exercise control over whether and when they will have children. There is an urgent need for mass struggle to defend abortion rights. As Marxists, we fight for free abortion on demand as part of a system of quality health care for all that is free at the point of delivery.

Texas, Wendy Davis and the Democrats

After an omnibus anti-abortion law known as HB2—a veritable checklist of TRAP restrictions and more—was passed in Texas last summer, the number of the state’s abortion clinics was halved to around 20. A requirement that abortion clinics meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers was due to go into effect on September 1, which would have further reduced the number to seven. While that section of the law was struck down by a federal judge on August 29, the state is appealing the ruling. The judge also ruled that two shuttered clinics be allowed to reopen because the closures had left women in vast areas of South and West Texas unable to access abortion services.

In the legislative debate over HB2 last year, Democratic state senator Wendy Davis was catapulted into the national limelight by attempting to block the bill with an 11‑hour filibuster. She has now parlayed that prominence into a campaign for Texas governor. On her campaign website, the widely touted “abortion-rights champion” Davis presents the issue simply as “Fighting Against Closure of Women’s Health Centers,” taking pains not to mention the “A” word to avoid offense. Since her filibuster, Davis has made it clear that she supports state bans on late-term abortions with limited exceptions. Such bans are the thin edge of the wedge in the wholesale assault on abortion rights.

With the Republican zealots around, it does not take much for the Democrats to pose as allies of women. But, even though the Republicans may forthrightly prefer to keep women “barefoot and pregnant,” the Democratic Party—the other party of U.S. capitalist rule—also panders to religious reaction. A case in point was when President Barack Obama attempted to reverse the FDA’s approval of over-the-counter access to “Plan B” contraception for teens. In 2010, Obama signed an executive order to ensure that federal funds from his signature health care legislation “are not used for abortion services.” By that law, every state insurance exchange must offer a plan that excludes abortion. Women who want abortion coverage have to pay a surcharge.

While the Democrats often claim that their hands are tied by Republican control of one or another branch of government, that’s just an excuse to cover for their complicity in the rollback of abortion rights. For example, the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding for abortions has been renewed every year since the time of the Democratic Carter administration regardless of which party controlled Congress or the White House. By now it should be obvious to all but the willfully blind that reliance on the Democrats is no way to defend abortion rights.

Feminist Redbaiting Alive and Well

At the end of July, the Stop Patriarchy group launched an “Abortion Rights Freedom Ride” through Texas, calling for “abortion on demand and without apology.” The “freedom ride” consisted of a series of “people’s hearings” and protests mainly directed at Republican politicians. Stop Patriarchy, which the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) initiated, was met with a campaign of vicious redbaiting by liberals and feminists.

The group Texans For Reproductive Justice was set up in opposition to Stop Patriarchy, stating: “We believe that Stop Patriarchy’s hyperbolic and confrontational style puts the most vulnerable Texans in danger, and confuses and ostracizes those who would be our allies.” Heather Busby, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, said: “You don’t have just one protest and affect change; you’re not going to have a ‘revolution’ over abortion rights. You have to change the culture and reduce stigma.” Clearly, the bourgeois feminists were irked that Stop Patriarchy’s rhetoric and tactics might antagonize the good people of Texas and maybe even cost Wendy Davis and other of their “allies” votes in November.

The feminists have preached the same impotent reliance on the Democrats and “softly, softly” incremental change for decades. In the early 1990s, when Operation Rescue was blockading abortion clinics, abortion-rights activists repeatedly mobilized in mass clinic defense. Those militant actions were consciously demobilized by NOW and NARAL, which actively worked with the cops to exclude leftists and to enforce “non-violence” pledges for clinic defenders. After 12 years of Reagan/Bush reaction, the bourgeois feminists saw the Democratic Clinton administration as their chance to gain some clout and did not want any reds rocking the boat.

One scheme was to pressure the Democrats to implement so-called buffer-zone laws to keep the Operation Rescue terrorists away from the clinics. The Supreme Court struck down the Massachusetts variant of such laws in June. The ruling was welcomed by anti-abortion bigots, who see it as a godsend that opens the door to heightened harassment of patients and clinic workers. A month later, the state’s governor signed a new buffer-zone law taking account of the Court’s objections. We have always opposed such laws because they substitute reliance on the capitalist state for militant clinic defense. As we warned, “such laws will be used to bust strikes and quash political protests by leftists, workers and minorities” (WV No. 580, 16 July 1993) and, in fact, from the start they were used to arrest clinic defenders along with anti-abortion bigots.

The American feminist establishment is the voice of bourgeois and well-off petty-bourgeois women whose only quarrel with capitalist society is that it denies them full access to the boys’ club of ruling-class power. As noted in a recent article on prominent German socialist Clara Zetkin in our theoretical journal Spartacist (No. 64, Summer 2014): “Feminists seek to change society, and thus the position of women, by changing social relations within the existing capitalist society. We understand that to liberate the exploited and oppressed, you have to change the class relationships to the means of production, that is, abolish private property altogether.” In essence, that is the difference between reform and revolution.

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Several of the Stop Patriarchy activists were arrested at the protests, and we demand that any charges pending be dropped. But for all their “in your face” tactics and “revolutionary” phrasemongering, the Maoists of the RCP have no program at all for liberating women. The freedom ride kicked off with a protest at the Republican Party office in Houston and ended with a series of actions outside Republican governor Rick Perry’s mansion. The aim of this activity, according to a Stop Patriarchy statement published in the Austin Statesman (4 August) that disappears the Democrats, was “to change hearts and enlighten minds.” Such a “fight the right” focus in the thick of election season amounts to backhanded support to the other party of capitalist exploitation and oppression.

The oppression of women is rooted in the institution of the family, a vehicle for the inheritance of private property for the ruling class and the means of reproduction of labor to be exploited. Along with religion, the nuclear family also plays a key role in helping to regiment the population and instill social conservatism. The liberation of women can only be realized with the overthrow of the capitalist order, which would lay the basis for replacing the stultifying nuclear family through socialization of housework and childcare in collective institutions. The one force, based on its role in production, that has the numbers, social power and class interest to carry out this revolutionary transformation of society is the working class.

Virulently hostile to a revolutionary proletarian perspective, the opportunistic RCP seeks out other class forces to hitch its wagon to. In recent years, the RCP and Stop Patriarchy have campaigned to “End Pornography,” aping the anti-sex feminists who argue that pornographic images cause rape, murder and other violent crimes against women. And the arbiter of what constitutes porn is none other than the RCP’s cult leader Bob Avakian, who also has creepily precise ideas about what sexual practices and even what underwear (no thongs!) are acceptable. Sex should be a purely private matter, subject only to the mutual consent of the participants. Neither the state, the churches nor Chairman Bob should have any say over what people look at or do in the bedroom.

The RCP’s reactionary anti-porn campaign buys into the very bourgeois “family values” that the anti-abortionists revel in. Those values have served as a battering ram for generalized social and political reaction. The war on abortion rights is part of the bipartisan assault on the rights and living conditions of working people—from union-busting and mass layoffs to skyrocketing medical costs and the shredding of what is left of the social safety net.

Nonetheless, many working people are opposed to abortion, one example of the backward consciousness inculcated by the capitalist rulers through the church pulpits, bourgeois media and education system. What is needed is a revolutionary party to make the working class conscious of the need to fight independently of the class enemy for its own interests as well as those of women and all the oppressed, not least for free, quality health care for all, including abortion on demand, and 24-hour childcare. Capitalism is unable to satisfy even the most basic needs of the working masses and must be swept into the dustbin of history.

Democrats Buy Votes with Minimum-Wage Ploy-Fight Poverty Wages Through Class Struggle! Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers- Free All The Striking Fast Food Protesters! Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers: No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people. But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action.  Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles.  Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union!         http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/09/04/boston-fast-food-workers-rally-for-wages-unions/bc1ZqZIgwsVcOw0QHIV74M/story.html          Workers Vanguard No. 1052

19 September 2014

Democrats Buy Votes with Minimum-Wage Ploy

Fight Poverty Wages Through Class Struggle!

 

On September 5, the day after thousands of fast-food workers staged rallies for higher pay and a union in some 150 cities, family and friends of Maria Fernandes gathered at her funeral service in New Jersey. The 32-year-old woman had died while catching some sleep in her car in between part-time shifts at three area Dunkin’ Donuts, which all paid her the minimum wage. As was the case with Fernandes, most new employment has been in low-paying service industries like fast food, where jobs are no longer held by kids looking for a little gas money. The median age of that workforce is 28, with more than a quarter caring for dependents, 70 percent working part-time and many holding second jobs in a scramble to make ends meet. At the available starvation-level wages, employees cannot possibly pay out-of-pocket medical expenses, put aside money for their children’s education or save anything for retirement.

With the net median paycheck now roughly $27,000 a year, many American workers, who tend to vote for Democrats, are in dire straits. Well aware of this widespread suffering and faced with the prospect of losing ground to the Republicans in November, the Democrats have attempted over the past year or so to refurbish their image as the party of the working man by promoting campaigns to raise the minimum wage. In reality, the Democratic Party is simply the other main party of the U.S. capitalist exploiters.

“Refurbish” is the operative word here, as President Obama is, with justice, known for having lavished billions on the fat-cat bankers at the onset of the Great Recession while doing nothing to remedy the plague of joblessness and declining living standards that have followed in its wake. Soon after his election, Obama—with the able assistance of then-United Auto Workers president Ron Gettelfinger—bailed out the giant auto companies while forcing the union to accept tens of thousands of layoffs and sign on to a six-year no-strike pledge. The wage for most new hires was more than halved to $14 (now $16) an hour.

On Labor Day, President Obama cynically pontificated, “Give America a raise” while claiming that his hands are tied in this regard for the foreseeable future by the House Republicans. Taking a page from his former employer in the White House, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, noteworthy for his layoffs of thousands of union teachers in the aftermath of their 2012 strike and his continuing campaign to slash their pensions, has recently raised the minimum wage for city employees working for private contractors to $13 an hour. The Lord taketh away and then he pretends to giveth.

Whether the minimum-wage ploy will draw people to the polls is still to be determined, but it cannot be denied that the issue of hiking wages at the bottom has animated many. Most Americans, including Republican voters and self-designated conservatives in the labor force, are for it. Fast-food workers have turned out to hundreds of demonstrations over the past two years, risking their jobs in the process. Given the continued decline in wages and benefits, many workers are hoping for an improvement, however slight, in their dismal prospects.

Support to minimum wage hikes has also been promoted by many in bourgeois quarters who argue that giving people more disposable income will help stimulate the economy or reduce dependency on government subsidies and food stamps. This year alone, the minimum wage has been increased to at least $10.10 an hour in four states, and smaller increases have been passed in three other states. Similar campaigns are underway in South Dakota, Alaska, Arkansas and Nebraska.

Obama’s nickel-and-dime proposal for $10.10 an hour, if ever enacted, would raise the federal minimum wage from a crushing $7.25 and give full-time workers a yearly salary of roughly $21,000, still hardly enough to eke out an existence. The federal minimum wage has seen its real value fall by more than a quarter since its peak in 1968, when it was over $10 in today’s dollars. More “generous” measures are slated for the ballot this November in San Francisco and elsewhere, coming on the heels of the Seattle City Council passing a purported $15 an hour minimum-wage ordinance at the beginning of the year.

Obviously, we are for increases in the minimum wage. But it should be recognized that what has been and is being offered is woefully inadequate. What is really needed is an all-out mobilization of the working class to fight for sharply higher wages as well as for access to free, quality medical care and full pensions for all. History has shown that the gains of working people and the oppressed—including better wages and basic democratic protections—were won through determined class struggle and battles in the street. However, for decades the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy has caved in to the wage-slashing attacks of the bosses, helping to drive down everyone’s wages. Meanwhile, they continue to throw millions into Democratic Party coffers.

The drive for profits is the motor force of the capitalist system and results in the increasing immiseration of the working masses at one pole and the increasing wealth of the owners of the means of production at the other. The general trend is to “reward” workers for their productive activity by paying them barely enough to be able to return to the job the next day, while the bosses get all the rest. But given their central role in production, workers can bring the flow of profits to a grinding halt. As such, the proletariat is the only force with the collective social power and objective interest to overthrow the bourgeois masters. Until that happens, the tendency of the capitalists to sink wages will always be reasserted with a vengeance whenever working-class struggle ebbs.

“Socialists” Shortchange Working Class

Latching on to the minimum-wage increases being pushed by Democrats, Kshama Sawant of Socialist Alternative (SAlt), who ran openly as a socialist, made the issue a central focus of her successful election campaign to the Seattle city council last year. Underscoring the actual liberal content of Sawant’s platform, this demand was also taken up in the 2013 campaign of Democrat Ed Murray for mayor of Seattle. Since the passage of the ordinance, Sawant and her cothinkers have hyped it as a “historic moment” and the outcome of a “real fighting voice in City Hall.” The lesson, according to SAlt, is that reforms are “winnable” through electoral campaigns; so long as you don’t sound too radical, you will get something concrete.

In fact, the Seattle ordinance came with a number of escape hatches. Crafted carefully, it contains such a conciliatory phase-in period that $15 won’t actually be reached until between 2017 and 2021 depending on the size of the company. Accounting for the current rate of inflation, the minimum wage will be well below $15 in today’s dollar terms by the end of the phase-ins. The ordinance that passed had been watered down to assuage the concerns of business elites and Democratic Party city council members, resulting in a bill that is even weaker than the one put forward by Mayor Murray’s advisory committee.

When SAlt is not engaging in inane hyperbole it does, at times, admit that the ordinance has more than a few loopholes. Among these are tip and health care credits that allow businesses to pay less for longer, and a lower wage for teenage workers. The wage increase doesn’t begin until April 2015 and from that point involves a two-year phase-in for big companies and up to a six-year phase-in for small companies, defined as any enterprise with fewer than 500 employees!

As a member of the mayor’s handpicked advisory committee, Sawant was the one who recommended the phase-in for small businesses, with the goal of not appearing “extremist” to Seattle’s petty bourgeoisie. During the final vote, Sawant tried to dodge some of the concessions by putting forward a series of amendments. But after all were rejected, she touted the compromise as a “victory.” San Francisco’s mayor, the liberal Democrat Ed Lee, has proposed a $15-an-hour ballot measure that would take effect faster and without the same exceptions—no weak-kneed “socialist” conciliator he.

Reformists of SAlt’s ilk are fond of declaring their intent to drive the liberals and Democrats to the left. In actuality, the only motion these social democrats display in their quest for a “reasonable” compromise with the powers that be is to the right. With SAlt now taking its “15 Now” campaign nationwide, these inveterate reformists undoubtedly went gaga when on Labor Day President Obama stated: “Until we’ve got a Congress that cares about raising working folks’ wages, it’s up to the rest of us to make it happen.”

By SAlt’s lights, the 15 Now campaign is the modern-day version of the great class battles of the 1930s, presented as the “reflection of what workers and the labor movement have won on the streets.” This is to equate a bake sale with a general strike. From the get-go, the whole exercise in Seattle was about legislative wheeling and dealing. The 15 Now coalition was formed in mid January, two months after the elections. Its members then held meetings and rallies to popularize the demand, all carefully calibrated not to rock the boat or embarrass their ally in the mayor’s office. The coalition levied a “threat” to gather signatures for an alternate “stronger” ballot proposal, but dumped even that idea after the weaker measure passed.

In their 30 June article “The Fight Against Inequality Reaches New Heights” (socialistalternative.org), SAlt details 15 Now’s actual strategy: petitions, neighborhood action committees and backing candidates who make a pretense of running independently of the Democrats (which for them has always included those of the small-time capitalist Green Party). What it calls “democratic, visible, grassroots tactics” are, in plainer language, the permissible forms of begging for crumbs from so-called friends of labor in the Democratic Party.

SAlt is peddling the snake oil that such activity will bring the “resurgence of the workers’ movement.” In reality, revitalizing labor will require breaking through the legal constraints of bourgeois rule. SAlt, however, would have workers pulled closer in the orbit of the Democratic Party, which operates to suppress labor struggle through the agency of the union bureaucracy. With Sawant declaring that “the $15 demand marks a decisive challenge to capitalism,” one can only wonder why many bourgeois politicians see no problem in supporting it.

Abolish the Wage System!

Since long ago, the labor tops have essentially renounced the class-struggle methods that actually built the unions, such as picket lines that bring business to a grinding halt and plant occupations. As a consequence of this recipe for defeat, unionized workers have suffered one setback after another while the masses of non-union workers fall into further destitution. The union misleaders devote little energy to organizing the unorganized, and having voluntarily disarmed, they are frequently defeated when they do make an effort.

Today, Mary Kay Henry, president of the SEIU service workers union, expresses support to fast-food workers who want to unionize, without committing the SEIU to doing so. On the ground, the SEIU has pursued “alternate” strategies like boycotts and community advocacy peppered with mini-rallies and civil disobedience by the workers, which no doubt have drawn attention to their plight. But these workers have no defense against possible employer repercussions. And what the labor bureaucrats do not say is that it will take shutting down the outlets through strike action to secure real gains.

In line with their legalistic pursuits, the sights of the SEIU tops are entirely set on the National Labor Relations Board issuing a favorable ruling against McDonald’s, which ought to be considered a joint employer rather than an anthill of thousands of franchises. Whatever the ruling, Henry & Co. have given no indication that they are going to do anything more to bring these workers into the union.

The organization of the atomized fast-food workforce poses the need to mobilize the power of unionized workers along the supply lines of the fast-food chains, where once-strong union concentrations, such as in trucking and meatpacking, have been eroded by the craven policies of the union bureaucrats. A hard struggle to organize fast-food workers would rapidly fuel a resurgence of union strength in those industries.

The SEIU tops are now using the “$15” rhetoric to leverage the Democratic Party into supporting higher minimum wages as a substitute for waging a fight to extract higher pay from the bosses. In a September 5 interview with Democracy Now!, Henry stated that workers “were incredibly thrilled that the president of the United States is saying that what they’re doing makes complete sense.” After sitting back in the face of the wage-slashing, anti-union onslaughts accompanying the Great Recession, labor misleaders look to the very forces—the president, Congress and state and city legislatures—that were responsible for these attacks on workers, especially unionized teachers.

SAlt criticizes the “business union approach” of the union bureaucrats and begrudgingly admits that in order to organize on a mass scale there would “likely” need to be “mass strike action.” But their conclusion is that the role of strikes today is to simply “back up fights for increased wages on the legislative plane.” In making a fetish of electoral politics, SAlt is at one with the labor statesmen.

Sawant’s actions belie even this failed attempt to sound militant. One of the proposed 15 Now ballot initiatives that she had pushed included an opt-out clause exempting HERE hotel workers from the new minimum wage. The reason: HERE officials wanted the option of negotiating lower wages to preserve health benefits, with one spokesman invoking the union’s supposed “unique relationship with the boss.” A similar exemption for unionized workforces was included in the $15/hour measure passed last November in the nearby suburb of SeaTac, penned by the sellout bureaucrats themselves. These exemptions are an affirmation by the union tops that they will not challenge the wretched compensation they have negotiated in subservience to employer demands.

Reformists like those in SAlt have always claimed that the way forward is to look for “realistic” solutions in the here and now, i.e., liberal panaceas. The 15 Now campaign is no different. But any reform wrested from the capitalists today will be easy pickings tomorrow in the absence of the mobilization of the working class to defend and extend its gains.

The goal of revolutionary Marxists is to link the daily struggles for immediate demands to the need to abolish the entire capitalist system of wage slavery that keeps the masses in a state of perpetual want. 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 the country’s crumbling infrastructure. Such demands will not be delivered through liberal pressure politics.

In Value, Price and Profit (1865), Karl Marx makes the point that the working class must fight the encroachments of the capitalist system or be “degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation.” He goes on to emphasize that anything short of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism would be merely “applying palliatives, not curing the malady.” Workers need to understand that: “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!’” It is necessary to forge the revolutionary internationalist proletarian party of socialist revolution, the only force that will carry that banner with conviction.

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-American Poets  

Trees (1913)

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

 

Prayer of a Soldier in France (1918)

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).

Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).

I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.

(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy Agony of Bloody Sweat?)

My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).

Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.

So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.