Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM,
September 30, 2011. I will occasionally post important updates in this space if
they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The
Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy
Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take
It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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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 this high in the American
labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the
available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way
forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the
case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, 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”
so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers
government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a
demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the
labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just
over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of
the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new
plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive
amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to
globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that
desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the
service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that
have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low
wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before
heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing,
especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this
industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to
organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually
occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of
workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions
of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory
here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as
auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an
idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be
easier to organize a workers’ revolution
that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public
and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on
collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor
boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. 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 labor, organized
labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other
Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts
the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and
is, as we come up to the 2012 presidential election cycle) that the Democrats
(mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the- back
give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically
savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top
of the movement.
The hard reality is that the
labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle,
know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every
other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’
profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers
to work after two weeks last summer (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 period for
bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor
from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using
union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them
now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing
the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor
causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011
anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s
money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections, like in Wisconsin,
as substitutes for class struggle
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied
troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces
anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather
spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our
opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if
behind the scenes, as in Libya and other proxy wars) continue we had better
straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have
any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All
U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda
war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well
before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will
hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other
occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial
monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran
is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in
the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for
non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal
with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in
Iran in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American
imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this
wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One
Person For The Wars! Honor World War
I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The
litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war
budgets (let’s see, right now winding up
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you
get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget.
Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving
the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*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.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under
student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many
Harvards!
This would again be a
no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the
educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue
that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of
reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough
for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher
educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal
preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness.
Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in
hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the
bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college
administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus
workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt
is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is
counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while
services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly
educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society,
desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to
the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let
the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in
America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single
family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they
want. We didn’t make the housing crisis
in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst).
The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application
processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*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 the next level of human progress
on a world-wide scale.
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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!
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