Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm
From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!
Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.
Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.
In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!
Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.
Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Support The Saint Patrick's Day Parade Veterans For Peace Efforts To March- March 20th In South Boston
Click on the headline to link to a Smedley Butler Brigade of the Veterans For Peace Website entry concerning the efforts to join the 2011 South Boston Saint Patrick's Day Parade on March 20th.
When: Sunday, March 20, 2011, 2:00 pm
Where: Broadway MBTA Station - Look for VFP Flags • Dorchester Ave. & Broadway • do not attempt to drive - come by T • South Boston
Start: 2011 Mar 20 - 2:00pm
Themes for the Day:
· How is the War Economy Working for You
· Bring the Troops Home, Take Care of Them When They Get Here
· Cut Military Spending, Save Jobs: Teachers, Fireman, Police
· Peace is Patriotic! “Not a Dirty Word”
Please join Veterans For Peace and other peace and social justice organizations for this historic alternative “people’s parade” following the official Saint Patrick’s Day Parade.
Background: Veterans for Peace were denied permission to walk in the “Official Saint Patrick’s Day Parade”. The stated reason was because the Allied War Veterans Council (War Council) did not want the word “peace” associated with the word “veteran”. They also stated that Veterans For Peace were too political for the parade. As if all the politicians, military formations and bands in the parade are not political?
The City of Boston has issued a permit to Veterans For Peace to have The Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade, immediately following the “official parade”. Our parade is a “people’s parade for peace and justice”.
We invite all progressive groups (peace, environmental, women’s rights, civil rights, labor, GLBT etc.) in the greater Boston area to please join us as we follow behind the official parade. The South Boston parade is the largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the country and is estimated to draw one million spectators. This is a huge opportunity for us to get our message out!
For more information please go to: Smedleyvfp.org or email ujpcoalition@gmail.com
For information on how your group can participate, contact:
Pat Scanlon, Veterans For Peace: 978-475-1776
United for Justice with Peace: 617-383-4857
American Friends Service Committee: 617-497-5273
*******
Markin comment:
Normally the efforts of anybody, individually or as an organization, trying to take part into the annual South Boston Saint Patrick’s Day Parade would be a yawner for this writer. Having grown up in a Irish working class neighborhood in suburban Boston and having about ten thousand roots to South Boston back to the “famine ships” of the 1840s when they embarked there with some forebears and now through various second and third cousins I, at least since I have come of leftist political age, have avoided the drunken brawls and other sham Irish stuff associated with Saint Patrick’s Day like the plague.
This situation though is different. This is about defending the public square (even though the august United States Supreme Court has already declared this specific parade a private affair and no subject to free speech guarantees). This is about political exclusion of the Veterans For Peace (as opposed to plenty of space for pro-war veterans and their associations) as was that attempt previously by various Irish gays and lesbians and their supporters to march in this parade that was the subject of the Supreme Court legal decision. That is where our fight is. And that is why this struggle is supportable and why it deserves space here. Although really when we talk about the Irish and Ireland I say the hell with the spirit of Saint Patrick. Rather think of the spirit of the fighters of Easter 1916. That is the real Irish deal. No question.
*******
Activists add second St. Patrick parade
Will follow older S. Boston event
By Billy Baker
Globe Staff / March 10, 2011
South Boston will play host to two St. Patrick’s Day parades this year — the traditional one and, right behind it, an alternative parade that is billing itself as the St. Patrick’s Peace Parade.
The second parade, which will be required to remain one mile behind the main parade, is being organized by an antiwar group, Veterans for Peace. The Peace Parade will include marchers from a gay rights organization, 16 years after the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council went to the US Supreme Court to win the right to block gay groups from marching in the traditional St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Veterans for Peace, which has clashed with parade organizers in the past, had applied to march in the main parade, but was denied by organizers. The antiwar group then won city approval for its own parade along the same route on March 20, the date of the main parade.
“We’re not that type of parade,’’ Philip Wuschke Jr., the organizer of the main parade, said of the antiwar group, which had proposed holding signs that said, “How is the war economy working for you?’’ and “Bring the troops home and take care of them when they get here.’’
“We’ve got military units in the parade, and people that are on the side of the streets have probably been in the military and would be offended,’’ Wuschke said. “We’re not protesting nothing. It’s just a parade.’’
Wuschke took over the parade last year from longtime organizer John “Wacko’’ Hurley, who led the fight to bar gay groups. But Wuschke, a 45-year-old who lives in Stoughton, said there would be no change in policy as a result of the change in leadership.
The Supreme Court decision said private parade organizers could not be required to admit groups that convey a message contrary to that of the organizers.
“We don’t ban gays and lesbians from the parade,’’ Wuschke said. “Just no outright signs. This is not a gay pride parade.’’
Patrick Scanlon, the coordinator for the Greater Boston chapter of Veterans for Peace, said his organization, which has 130 chapters nationwide, was criticized as “too political.’’
“We’re too political because we’re interested in peace?’’ Scanlon asked rhetorically. “This is a parade that features every politician that can walk, and everyone who can’t walk is riding.’’
In 2003, Scanlon’s group was denied permission to march in the parade, but was allowed to march behind it by Boston Police. Parade organizers sued police, arguing they had violated the Supreme Court decision, and won again. A US magistrate judge ruled that if any group wants to participate in the parade without the permission of the Allied War Veterans Council, it must follow the same parade application process to the city as any group would but would need to remain one mile behind to make clear the two parades were separate. This is the first time anyone has applied for a parade permit under that provision.
Scanlon said it’s unclear how many people will march with the Veterans for Peace parade. They were notified of approval on Feb. 26, and Scanlon said they’ve already generated a lot of interest from people associated with the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands that takes place in Somerville and Cambridge each fall.
But a gay rights group has already declared its intention to join the alternative parade. On its Twitter feed yesterday, Join the Impact Massachusetts announced its participation by stating “take back the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.’’ The post contained a link to a Facebook page inviting people to march.
“We would prefer to be in the main parade, but if anybody is being left out we’re going to stand with them because of our history,’’ said Ann Coleman, a Join the Impact Massachusetts cochair and the person behind the initiative to join in the Veterans for Peace parade. Coleman said the group plans to hold signs, including rainbow flags.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who has long boycotted the St. Patrick’s Day Parade because of the ban on gay groups, will not be participating in either parade, according to his spokeswoman, Dot Joyce.
“As always, the city is focused on providing a safe and enjoyable parade day for everyone,’’ was all Joyce would say, “and it sounds like there’s going to be something for everyone in South Boston that day.’’
Billy Baker can be reached at billybaker@globe.com.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
When: Sunday, March 20, 2011, 2:00 pm
Where: Broadway MBTA Station - Look for VFP Flags • Dorchester Ave. & Broadway • do not attempt to drive - come by T • South Boston
Start: 2011 Mar 20 - 2:00pm
Themes for the Day:
· How is the War Economy Working for You
· Bring the Troops Home, Take Care of Them When They Get Here
· Cut Military Spending, Save Jobs: Teachers, Fireman, Police
· Peace is Patriotic! “Not a Dirty Word”
Please join Veterans For Peace and other peace and social justice organizations for this historic alternative “people’s parade” following the official Saint Patrick’s Day Parade.
Background: Veterans for Peace were denied permission to walk in the “Official Saint Patrick’s Day Parade”. The stated reason was because the Allied War Veterans Council (War Council) did not want the word “peace” associated with the word “veteran”. They also stated that Veterans For Peace were too political for the parade. As if all the politicians, military formations and bands in the parade are not political?
The City of Boston has issued a permit to Veterans For Peace to have The Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade, immediately following the “official parade”. Our parade is a “people’s parade for peace and justice”.
We invite all progressive groups (peace, environmental, women’s rights, civil rights, labor, GLBT etc.) in the greater Boston area to please join us as we follow behind the official parade. The South Boston parade is the largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the country and is estimated to draw one million spectators. This is a huge opportunity for us to get our message out!
For more information please go to: Smedleyvfp.org or email ujpcoalition@gmail.com
For information on how your group can participate, contact:
Pat Scanlon, Veterans For Peace: 978-475-1776
United for Justice with Peace: 617-383-4857
American Friends Service Committee: 617-497-5273
*******
Markin comment:
Normally the efforts of anybody, individually or as an organization, trying to take part into the annual South Boston Saint Patrick’s Day Parade would be a yawner for this writer. Having grown up in a Irish working class neighborhood in suburban Boston and having about ten thousand roots to South Boston back to the “famine ships” of the 1840s when they embarked there with some forebears and now through various second and third cousins I, at least since I have come of leftist political age, have avoided the drunken brawls and other sham Irish stuff associated with Saint Patrick’s Day like the plague.
This situation though is different. This is about defending the public square (even though the august United States Supreme Court has already declared this specific parade a private affair and no subject to free speech guarantees). This is about political exclusion of the Veterans For Peace (as opposed to plenty of space for pro-war veterans and their associations) as was that attempt previously by various Irish gays and lesbians and their supporters to march in this parade that was the subject of the Supreme Court legal decision. That is where our fight is. And that is why this struggle is supportable and why it deserves space here. Although really when we talk about the Irish and Ireland I say the hell with the spirit of Saint Patrick. Rather think of the spirit of the fighters of Easter 1916. That is the real Irish deal. No question.
*******
Activists add second St. Patrick parade
Will follow older S. Boston event
By Billy Baker
Globe Staff / March 10, 2011
South Boston will play host to two St. Patrick’s Day parades this year — the traditional one and, right behind it, an alternative parade that is billing itself as the St. Patrick’s Peace Parade.
The second parade, which will be required to remain one mile behind the main parade, is being organized by an antiwar group, Veterans for Peace. The Peace Parade will include marchers from a gay rights organization, 16 years after the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council went to the US Supreme Court to win the right to block gay groups from marching in the traditional St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Veterans for Peace, which has clashed with parade organizers in the past, had applied to march in the main parade, but was denied by organizers. The antiwar group then won city approval for its own parade along the same route on March 20, the date of the main parade.
“We’re not that type of parade,’’ Philip Wuschke Jr., the organizer of the main parade, said of the antiwar group, which had proposed holding signs that said, “How is the war economy working for you?’’ and “Bring the troops home and take care of them when they get here.’’
“We’ve got military units in the parade, and people that are on the side of the streets have probably been in the military and would be offended,’’ Wuschke said. “We’re not protesting nothing. It’s just a parade.’’
Wuschke took over the parade last year from longtime organizer John “Wacko’’ Hurley, who led the fight to bar gay groups. But Wuschke, a 45-year-old who lives in Stoughton, said there would be no change in policy as a result of the change in leadership.
The Supreme Court decision said private parade organizers could not be required to admit groups that convey a message contrary to that of the organizers.
“We don’t ban gays and lesbians from the parade,’’ Wuschke said. “Just no outright signs. This is not a gay pride parade.’’
Patrick Scanlon, the coordinator for the Greater Boston chapter of Veterans for Peace, said his organization, which has 130 chapters nationwide, was criticized as “too political.’’
“We’re too political because we’re interested in peace?’’ Scanlon asked rhetorically. “This is a parade that features every politician that can walk, and everyone who can’t walk is riding.’’
In 2003, Scanlon’s group was denied permission to march in the parade, but was allowed to march behind it by Boston Police. Parade organizers sued police, arguing they had violated the Supreme Court decision, and won again. A US magistrate judge ruled that if any group wants to participate in the parade without the permission of the Allied War Veterans Council, it must follow the same parade application process to the city as any group would but would need to remain one mile behind to make clear the two parades were separate. This is the first time anyone has applied for a parade permit under that provision.
Scanlon said it’s unclear how many people will march with the Veterans for Peace parade. They were notified of approval on Feb. 26, and Scanlon said they’ve already generated a lot of interest from people associated with the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands that takes place in Somerville and Cambridge each fall.
But a gay rights group has already declared its intention to join the alternative parade. On its Twitter feed yesterday, Join the Impact Massachusetts announced its participation by stating “take back the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.’’ The post contained a link to a Facebook page inviting people to march.
“We would prefer to be in the main parade, but if anybody is being left out we’re going to stand with them because of our history,’’ said Ann Coleman, a Join the Impact Massachusetts cochair and the person behind the initiative to join in the Veterans for Peace parade. Coleman said the group plans to hold signs, including rainbow flags.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who has long boycotted the St. Patrick’s Day Parade because of the ban on gay groups, will not be participating in either parade, according to his spokeswoman, Dot Joyce.
“As always, the city is focused on providing a safe and enjoyable parade day for everyone,’’ was all Joyce would say, “and it sounds like there’s going to be something for everyone in South Boston that day.’’
Billy Baker can be reached at billybaker@globe.com.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
Friday, March 11, 2011
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-The Right to Organize Under Attack-All Labor Must Fight Assault on Public Workers Unions!
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
The Right to Organize Under Attack
All Labor Must Fight Assault on Public Workers Unions!
Forge a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
Millions of working people have been made to pay with their jobs, homes and meager social benefits to bail out the Wall Street and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s Great Depression. Amid this devastation, corporate profits last year hit the highest mark in their 60-year recorded history. The banks are wallowing in money and once again handing out millions in bonuses. General Motors, whose survival was purchased through slashing the jobs, wages and benefits of auto workers, boasted nearly $5 billion in profit last year. Having bilked the public purse of countless billions for this “recovery,” Democrats and Republicans are now whipping up an outcry against public workers unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions have been ravaged by the deindustrialization of America and the attendant one-sided class war kicked off with the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981. The United Auto Workers—once the symbol of working-class power in this country—has been reduced to less than a third of its once 1.5 million members. With the rate of unionization in the private sector falling below 7 percent, public workers are now the majority of union members in the U.S. Many of them are constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike—and striking is the most important weapon a union has.
It is not just Republicans, high on their midterm election sweep, who are taking a sledgehammer to the unions. The Obama administration kicked things off with its assault on the seniority rights and other gains of teachers unions, followed most recently by imposing a two-year wage freeze on two million federal government workers. From the White House to state capitols and city halls across America, the capitalist rulers are out to further shackle and maim the unions, if not destroy them outright.
This is a war being fought by the capitalist rulers around the world, as workers are being forced to pay for the global Great Recession. The British Economist (6 January), reveling in the carnage, reported:
“Many governments (for example in Ireland, Greece and Spain) are cutting public-sector pay. Others (for example in Japan and America) are freezing it. Greece is increasing the retirement age from 58 to 63 and making it possible to fire public servants. Britain is cutting government departments by as much as a quarter, and is reviewing pensions.
“In the United States several rising Republican governors are keen to turn the short-term struggle over pay and benefits into a bigger battle about trade-union power. New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty have both eagerly taken on the new ‘privileged class’ of public sector workers.”
In Europe, the capitalist offensive has been met with defensive, at times massive, class struggle. Most recently, amid a nationwide general strike on February 23, demonstrators protesting government austerity in Greece were attacked by riot cops firing tear gas projectiles. But as we wrote in “Ireland Ravaged by European Economic Crisis” (WV No. 970, 3 December 2010), “the effectiveness of the workers’ struggles has been hampered by the political bankruptcy of the workers’ reformist leadership, who accept the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows.”
In the U.S., tens of thousands of teachers and other public workers have mobilized in sick-outs and protest actions in response to a union-busting bill pushed by Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker, which would amount to a frontal assault on public unions’ very right to exist (see article, page 1). With Republican lawmakers mounting similar plans in Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana and elsewhere, Gerald McEntee, the president of AFSCME, which shelled out nearly $90 million for Democratic Party candidates in the November elections, complained, “I see this as payback for the role we played in the 2010 elections.”
It is indeed “payback”—for the trade-union misleaders’ class collaboration, which has sapped the fighting power of organized labor by chaining it to the parties of the capitalist class enemy. No less than the Republicans, the policies of the purported “friend of labor” Democrats are determined by the capitalist class. Those Democrats who survived the midterm “shellacking,” largely thanks to the efforts of the trade-union bureaucracy, are not to be outdone in “balancing the budget” out of the wages, pensions and other benefits of government workers as well as savaging already threadbare social programs for the poor. New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo inaugurated his election with a one-year wage freeze on state workers, 900 layoffs and the promise of thousands to follow. In California, Jerry Brown celebrated his second time around in the governor’s office by announcing that over three billion dollars would be cut from welfare and health care benefits for the poor, as well as $750 million from services for the disabled.
For its part, the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy couples its overwhelming fealty to the Democrats with preaching one-sided “shared sacrifice” and pushing “America First” protectionist poison. With their chauvinist appeals, these “labor lieutenants of capital” help line up working people behind U.S. imperialist interests. For America’s capitalist rulers, workers are fodder for profit at home while poor, minority and working-class youth are cannon fodder abroad. The struggles of working people and minorities against capitalist exploitation and oppression cannot be divorced from opposition to all U.S. imperialist depredations.
Busting the Unions, Starving the Poor
In racist capitalist America, the spectre of the hard-working taxpayer whose pockets are being picked to fund the “undeserving” has long been raised to shred social programs seen as benefitting black people, immigrants and the poor. Now the capitalist masters are wielding this stick against public workers unions. What’s at stake is not simply the survival of these unions, many of which are made up predominantly of blacks and other minorities and women. On the line are the very lives of working people, the poor, the sick and the aged who depend on such paltry social services as this capitalist government continues to provide. There is no more vivid a snapshot of the potential impending catastrophe than Detroit.
The former Motor City, where hundreds of thousands of unionized black auto workers once had the semblance of a decent job, is now a vast urban wasteland. By some estimates, black male unemployment is nearly 65 percent. Detroit’s population has sunk from 1.8 million to 850,000, with 40 percent of the city written off as “unoccupied” by the city’s political masters. A year ago, an article in the Washington Post (3 January 2010) described conditions: “The decline of the auto industry and the nation’s economic slide have left many residents here trapped, without work, in houses they can’t sell, in neighborhoods where they fear for their safety, in schools that offer their children a hard road out.”
While black industrial workers were the first to be written off by the bourgeoisie as a “surplus population”—their labor no longer needed to produce profits and their very lives considered dispensable—such ruin now increasingly stalks the nation. Almost 14 million people are officially unemployed, and that discounts those millions trying to scrape by with part-time jobs and the millions more who have been cast into permanent joblessness.
This crisis is the product of the workings of the anarchic system of capitalism, based on production for profit derived out of the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labor (i.e., profit) as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. This phenomenon was noted at the birth of industrial capitalism by Karl Marx, who described its devastating effect nearly 150 years ago in Capital: “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.”
Many workers today feel that the best they can do is to try to hold on to their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the working class, that demoralize and set them one against the other in a fight to survive, can and will also propel the proletariat forward to unity in battle together with its allies against the capitalist class enemy. This was seen in the midst of the Great Depression in the 1930s, when, at a brief upturn in the economy, workers began to wage bitter class battles to organize industrial unions, sacrificing, if necessary, their jobs, their freedom and their very lives.
The social power of public workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern industrial economy. For example, transit workers in metropolitan centers like New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago can cripple these financial and corporate centers.
While the bourgeois media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against public workers unions, the truth is that if these workers waged some hard class struggle they would have plenty of allies among the unemployed, black people, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the capitalist rulers. “Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’.”
What stands in the way of the labor movement engaging in militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy. Peddling the lie that the workers have common interests with the capitalist exploiters and their state, they have allowed the industrial unions to be hacked to pieces and are lying down in the face of the war against public unions, if not actively collaborating in it. Even when forced to offer some resistance to the assaults of capitalist politicians like Wisconsin’s governor Walker, the bureaucrats subordinate the workers to the capitalist Democratic Party, and most of them are willing to concede to virtually all the government’s economic demands to cut wages and benefits.
The Labor Lieutenants of the Capitalist Class
The leaders of the public unions pledge their allegiance to “balancing the budget” of the capitalist government, the executive committee of the capitalist class. AFSCME leader McEntee has promised that “Public Employees stand ready to help state and local governments get through the economic storm.” Joining this chorus, a spokesman for the biggest New York State government workers union, the Civil Service Employees Association, responded to Governor Cuomo’s wage freeze by stating: “It sounds like he’s trying to set a tone that we need to all do our part. We don’t have a problem with doing our part” (New York Times, 3 January).
The role of the trade-union bureaucracy was captured by Leon Trotsky, who together with V.I. Lenin was co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution: “The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the ‘democratic’ state how reliable and indispensable they are in peacetime and especially in time of war.” When the “good times” were rolling on Wall Street, the public union misleaders assisted state and local governments in holding the line on increased wages and other benefits with the promise of greater pension fund contributions—a form of deferred wages. These funds in turn became a honeypot for high-rolling bankers and hedge fund managers, in league with state pension plan managers, for some of their riskiest investments, like credit default swaps and complex mortgage securities. When these imploded, pension funds were burned. State governments, many of which underfunded pension payments, are now screaming that they are being robbed by public workers, whose average pension is about $20,000 a year. Anyone who looks can see whose hand is in whose pocket.
The capitalist masters have virtually obliterated defined-benefit pensions in industry, which obligated corporations to make fixed retirement payments for private sector unions. Now they are trying to enlist these workers in the war against “greedy” public workers. An op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (4 January) titled “Labor’s Coming Class War” declared:
“The notion that Wall Street and Main Street are fundamentally at odds with one another remains a popular orthodoxy. So much so that we may be missing the first stirrings of a true American class war: between workers in government unions and their union counterparts in the private sector.”
For evidence, this voice of finance capital points to Steve Sweeney, an organizer for the Ironworkers union, more than 40 percent of whose members are out of work. Sweeney is credited with “pushing for reform of state-employee pay and benefits” in his other capacity as the Democratic Party president of the New Jersey State Senate. The article goes on to gloat that New York governor Cuomo “may have found a surprising ally” in Gary LaBarbera—president of the 100,000-strong Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York.
Joining business and real estate magnates in the “Committee to Save New York,” which is raising millions to bankroll Cuomo’s war against government unions, LaBarbera argued: “This is not about bashing public-sector unions. But without a fiscally sound environment, we will not be able to attract new businesses to the city” (New York Times, 9 December 2010). This is but a raw expression of the labor bureaucracy’s class-collaborationist policies, which tie the fate of the workers to the fortunes of the capitalist class and its state.
In the face of a growing army of unemployed, the gutting of pensions, the lack of health care and the elimination of other social programs and benefits, the answer of the trade-union bureaucrats is to pit worker against worker in the struggle to survive. In fact, the “fiscally sound” calculations of the capitalist rulers don’t simply include savaging public unions and the poor. Taking aim at all unions, Republican politicians in the Indiana legislature earlier this month introduced a union-busting “right to work” bill modeled on similar laws in the South, where the unionization rate is the lowest in the country.
A Class-Struggle Program
It is in the crucible of heightening class conflict that a new workers leadership in the unions can be forged. This is not simply a question of militancy in defense of the existing unions. If the workers are to struggle not only in their own interests but in the interests of all the oppressed, there must be a hard political struggle to replace the present sellouts who sit on top of the unions. They must be replaced with workers’ leaders who are able to not only win battles on the picket lines but who are also uncompromising in their dedication to the liberation of humanity from the exploitation, all-sided misery and war that are inherent to a system based on production for profit rather than human need. Striving to forge such a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of the fight for a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose aim is no less than doing away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.
The very defense of the unions mandates a fight to organize the unorganized, from the mass of immigrant workers to the open shop South. To wage such a battle means fighting against the race-color caste oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of capitalist rule in this country. A class-struggle leadership of the unions would be rooted in the understanding that the fight for black freedom is inextricably tied to labor’s cause and would take up the defense of foreign-born workers, demanding an end to deportations and full citizenship rights for all immigrants. It would take up the fight for free, quality health care for all, for the extension of unemployment benefits until there are jobs and for all pensions to be guaranteed by the government.
During the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War, Leon Trotsky wrote the Transitional Program, laying out, in Trotsky’s words, “transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.” These demands are not only relevant but vital to the proletariat today.
Against the catastrophe of mass unemployment, which threatens the devastation of the working class, Trotsky called for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay to spread the available work and for a massive program of public works. A fight to rebuild the decaying infrastructure of America—the roads, dams, subway systems, schools and hospitals—would unite private and public unions together with the unemployed in a common struggle for jobs and the rehabilitation of decent services for the population. It would also mobilize the power of labor in the interests of the ghetto and barrio poor in the rotting inner cities, striking a blow against the racial and ethnic hostilities whipped up by the rulers to divide and weaken working people.
General Motors claimed that it could no longer afford to pay union pensions and health benefits for retirees and new hires. Based on this fraud, the auto barons got bailed out. The average wages and benefits of many of the surviving union membership are on a par with those of workers at non-union plants. Earlier, the airline, steel and industrial magnates also declared bankruptcy and were assisted by the courts in ripping up union contracts. Now a proposal is being mooted to allow state governments to declare bankruptcy so that they too can cancel their “debt obligations,” like the billions they owe in pensions. To expose such highway robbery by the corporations, the banks and the government, Trotsky argued that the workers demand that the capitalists open their books and “reveal to all members of society that unconscionable squandering of human labor which is the result of capitalist anarchy.”
Against the swindles of the finance capitalists who control the economy, Trotsky called for the expropriation of the banks: “Only the expropriation of the private banks and the concentration of the entire credit system in the hands of the state will provide the latter with necessary actual, i.e., material resources—and not merely paper and bureaucratic resources—for economic planning.” Trotsky was not talking here about the capitalist state, which exists to defend the rule and profits of the bourgeoisie. As he put it, “the state-ization of the banks will produce these favorable results only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers”—i.e., a workers government.
No Illusions in the Capitalist State
The trade-union bureaucracy peddles the myth that the capitalist state is “neutral” and can be made to answer the needs of the working class if purported labor-friendly Democrats are put in office. They claim that the very organization of industrial unions was due to legislation enacted by the Democratic Party government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rather than the hard-fought struggles of the workers.
Specifically, the labor tops point to the 1935 Wagner Act, which they claim granted industrial workers the right to organize. The Wagner Act was passed in the aftermath of three victorious citywide strikes in 1934—all of them led by communists—that led to the founding of the CIO industrial unions. It was designed to head off the organizing drive by union militants and “reds” and to set up a government mechanism to subordinate the unions to the capitalist state. As Trotsky wrote in his 1940 article, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay”:
“In the United States the trade union movement has passed through the most stormy history in recent years. The rise of the CIO is incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary tendencies within the working masses. Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree, however, is the fact that the new ‘leftist’ trade union organization was no sooner founded than it fell into the steel embrace of the imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet.”
The very leaders of the new industrial union movement, including the Stalinist Communist Party, crippled it through their support to Roosevelt. The Communists and other militants were rewarded by being driven out of the unions in the red purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which solidified the power of the unvarnished pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy that has since driven these unions into the ground.
Well into the second half of the 20th century, union organization of government workers was uncommon if not outright prohibited. If the 1935 Wagner Act partly acknowledged and sought to regulate organizing rights and collective bargaining in private industry, it specifically exempted public employees from the right to join unions without reprisal. FDR himself wrote that the idea of strikes against the government “by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”
In 1962, John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988, granting most public sector employees the right to collectively bargain. Kennedy’s order specifically prohibited strikes, as did Richard Nixon’s 1969 order modifying it. In 1970, over 200,000 postal workers went on a nationwide wildcat strike. Nixon called in the military, but quickly learned you can’t sort the mail with bayonets. The strike led to the formation of the American Postal Workers Union and the right to collective bargaining by postal workers. However, the ban on strikes remained and was strengthened by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA).
The misleaders of public workers unions present the formation of their unions, too, as the result of the largesse of the Democratic Party. The son of the author of the Wagner Act, former New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner, is credited with giving city workers the right to organize in 1958. In fact, their right to organize was won in a climate of rapidly increasing militancy, beginning with a 1955 sanitation strike led by AFSCME DC 37 against autocratic Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.
A hard-won and popular strike by welfare social workers in 1965 was followed by the victorious 1966 transit strike, in which Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 leader Mike Quill tore up a court injunction ordering the strike to end, famously announcing on his way to jail, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes and we would not call off the strike.” That strike spelled the end of the 1947 Condon-Wadlin Act forbidding public worker strikes in New York State. Defiance by Quill and other bureaucrats notwithstanding, union officials generally hide behind the ubiquitous no-strike laws like the Taylor Law, which, with its massive fines and jail time for union leaders, replaced Condon-Wadlin in New York.
In 1981, as 13,000 PATCO air traffic controllers went on strike, Ronald Reagan dusted off plans hatched by his predecessor, Democrat Jimmy Carter, and fired the entire workforce, dragging their leaders off to jail in chains. His basis in law was the 1978 CSRA. Organized labor could have beaten back Reagan’s strikebreaking, but the union bureaucracy refused to mobilize labor’s power to shut down the airports. The smashing of PATCO became the model for the capitalists’ decades-long drive to gut the labor movement and intensify the rate of exploitation to prop up their flagging profitability. For the labor tops, the PATCO surrender became their model as well, ushering in decades of give-back contracts and two-tier wage systems with lower pay scales for newly hired younger workers.
It is a measure of the union bureaucracy’s fealty to the capitalist state that AFSCME and other public sector unions organize the very police forces whose purpose is the violent suppression of the workers’ struggle. The economic whip of unemployment and increasing destitution for the working class and oppressed has gone hand in hand with the vast expansion of police powers in the U.S., where the main growth industry has been prisons. Yet the sadistic jailers of the overwhelmingly black and Latino youth in America’s overflowing prisons are themselves often union members.
These hired guns of the capitalist state have no place in the workers movement. Just look at this country’s prison guards, who are organized by AFSCME, SEIU, Teamsters and other unions. In California, they have been the moving force in the racist “war on crime” and such reactionary laws as “three strikes, you’re out,” which have made the state of California a world leader in the number of people behind bars. But there is little bellyaching from the budget slashers over the billions that are poured into maintaining the prison hellholes. These are a critical part of the edifice of organized violence by which the capitalist state enforces its rule.
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
The 2005 New York City TWU strike, which garnered widespread public support, all but shut down this world financial center for some 60 hours. A key strike issue was defense of the union pension for new hires, which was under attack by the bosses long before the current recessionary “budget crisis.” The workers, who had walked out in defiance of the slave-labor Taylor Law, were stabbed in the back by the leaders of other New York City unions and the TWU International leadership and, in the end, sold out by their own union misleaders. This has had a corrosive effect on the workers, breeding cynicism. Nonetheless, notwithstanding the massive fines meted out against the union and its membership under the Taylor Law, the workers kept their pension—because they struck.
This helps to illustrate why billions have been spent over the past decades to wipe out even the semblance of organized labor. Even such a minimal, if supportable, law as the Employee Free Choice Act—which would allow workers to organize through a simple card check as against the prolonged “secret ballot” procedures that give employers additional time to mobilize to crush pro-union sentiment—ignited a well-funded corporate barrage in opposition and is now all but dead. The reason is a simple calculation. Despite the sellouts of the labor tops, a unionized worker continues to make a median wage that is $200 more a week than a non-union worker.
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. The question of turning them into fighting organizations for the working class, which will take up the fight for black freedom, for immigrant rights and for the defense of those whose very lives have been written off by the exploiters and their state, is a political one. As Trotsky wrote more than 70 years ago: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”
Two possible roads lie before the working class. There is the bureaucracy’s acceptance that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of American capitalism, which has led to disaster. Or there is the class-struggle road of mobilizing the power of the working class in the necessary battles against the capitalist masters. In the course of such struggle, under a leadership that arms the working class with an understanding of the nature of capitalist society, the workers will become imbued with the consciousness of their historic interests as a class fighting for itself and for all of the oppressed. Such consciousness requires a political expression. That means the fight to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose purpose is not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation but to rid the planet of the source of that devastation, capitalism itself, and the state that preserves it.
4 March 2011
The Right to Organize Under Attack
All Labor Must Fight Assault on Public Workers Unions!
Forge a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
Millions of working people have been made to pay with their jobs, homes and meager social benefits to bail out the Wall Street and corporate magnates whose financial swindles kicked off the worst economic crisis since the 1930s Great Depression. Amid this devastation, corporate profits last year hit the highest mark in their 60-year recorded history. The banks are wallowing in money and once again handing out millions in bonuses. General Motors, whose survival was purchased through slashing the jobs, wages and benefits of auto workers, boasted nearly $5 billion in profit last year. Having bilked the public purse of countless billions for this “recovery,” Democrats and Republicans are now whipping up an outcry against public workers unions as supposedly living high off the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.
The industrial unions have been ravaged by the deindustrialization of America and the attendant one-sided class war kicked off with the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981. The United Auto Workers—once the symbol of working-class power in this country—has been reduced to less than a third of its once 1.5 million members. With the rate of unionization in the private sector falling below 7 percent, public workers are now the majority of union members in the U.S. Many of them are constrained by the bosses’ laws from going on strike—and striking is the most important weapon a union has.
It is not just Republicans, high on their midterm election sweep, who are taking a sledgehammer to the unions. The Obama administration kicked things off with its assault on the seniority rights and other gains of teachers unions, followed most recently by imposing a two-year wage freeze on two million federal government workers. From the White House to state capitols and city halls across America, the capitalist rulers are out to further shackle and maim the unions, if not destroy them outright.
This is a war being fought by the capitalist rulers around the world, as workers are being forced to pay for the global Great Recession. The British Economist (6 January), reveling in the carnage, reported:
“Many governments (for example in Ireland, Greece and Spain) are cutting public-sector pay. Others (for example in Japan and America) are freezing it. Greece is increasing the retirement age from 58 to 63 and making it possible to fire public servants. Britain is cutting government departments by as much as a quarter, and is reviewing pensions.
“In the United States several rising Republican governors are keen to turn the short-term struggle over pay and benefits into a bigger battle about trade-union power. New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty have both eagerly taken on the new ‘privileged class’ of public sector workers.”
In Europe, the capitalist offensive has been met with defensive, at times massive, class struggle. Most recently, amid a nationwide general strike on February 23, demonstrators protesting government austerity in Greece were attacked by riot cops firing tear gas projectiles. But as we wrote in “Ireland Ravaged by European Economic Crisis” (WV No. 970, 3 December 2010), “the effectiveness of the workers’ struggles has been hampered by the political bankruptcy of the workers’ reformist leadership, who accept the inevitability of capitalist austerity while seeking to soften the blows.”
In the U.S., tens of thousands of teachers and other public workers have mobilized in sick-outs and protest actions in response to a union-busting bill pushed by Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker, which would amount to a frontal assault on public unions’ very right to exist (see article, page 1). With Republican lawmakers mounting similar plans in Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana and elsewhere, Gerald McEntee, the president of AFSCME, which shelled out nearly $90 million for Democratic Party candidates in the November elections, complained, “I see this as payback for the role we played in the 2010 elections.”
It is indeed “payback”—for the trade-union misleaders’ class collaboration, which has sapped the fighting power of organized labor by chaining it to the parties of the capitalist class enemy. No less than the Republicans, the policies of the purported “friend of labor” Democrats are determined by the capitalist class. Those Democrats who survived the midterm “shellacking,” largely thanks to the efforts of the trade-union bureaucracy, are not to be outdone in “balancing the budget” out of the wages, pensions and other benefits of government workers as well as savaging already threadbare social programs for the poor. New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo inaugurated his election with a one-year wage freeze on state workers, 900 layoffs and the promise of thousands to follow. In California, Jerry Brown celebrated his second time around in the governor’s office by announcing that over three billion dollars would be cut from welfare and health care benefits for the poor, as well as $750 million from services for the disabled.
For its part, the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy couples its overwhelming fealty to the Democrats with preaching one-sided “shared sacrifice” and pushing “America First” protectionist poison. With their chauvinist appeals, these “labor lieutenants of capital” help line up working people behind U.S. imperialist interests. For America’s capitalist rulers, workers are fodder for profit at home while poor, minority and working-class youth are cannon fodder abroad. The struggles of working people and minorities against capitalist exploitation and oppression cannot be divorced from opposition to all U.S. imperialist depredations.
Busting the Unions, Starving the Poor
In racist capitalist America, the spectre of the hard-working taxpayer whose pockets are being picked to fund the “undeserving” has long been raised to shred social programs seen as benefitting black people, immigrants and the poor. Now the capitalist masters are wielding this stick against public workers unions. What’s at stake is not simply the survival of these unions, many of which are made up predominantly of blacks and other minorities and women. On the line are the very lives of working people, the poor, the sick and the aged who depend on such paltry social services as this capitalist government continues to provide. There is no more vivid a snapshot of the potential impending catastrophe than Detroit.
The former Motor City, where hundreds of thousands of unionized black auto workers once had the semblance of a decent job, is now a vast urban wasteland. By some estimates, black male unemployment is nearly 65 percent. Detroit’s population has sunk from 1.8 million to 850,000, with 40 percent of the city written off as “unoccupied” by the city’s political masters. A year ago, an article in the Washington Post (3 January 2010) described conditions: “The decline of the auto industry and the nation’s economic slide have left many residents here trapped, without work, in houses they can’t sell, in neighborhoods where they fear for their safety, in schools that offer their children a hard road out.”
While black industrial workers were the first to be written off by the bourgeoisie as a “surplus population”—their labor no longer needed to produce profits and their very lives considered dispensable—such ruin now increasingly stalks the nation. Almost 14 million people are officially unemployed, and that discounts those millions trying to scrape by with part-time jobs and the millions more who have been cast into permanent joblessness.
This crisis is the product of the workings of the anarchic system of capitalism, based on production for profit derived out of the exploitation of the working class. The obscenely wealthy capitalists appropriate the results of the workers’ labor (i.e., profit) as their own, while working people are left to wonder if they will have a job tomorrow. This phenomenon was noted at the birth of industrial capitalism by Karl Marx, who described its devastating effect nearly 150 years ago in Capital: “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.”
Many workers today feel that the best they can do is to try to hold on to their jobs. But the same conditions that grind down the working class, that demoralize and set them one against the other in a fight to survive, can and will also propel the proletariat forward to unity in battle together with its allies against the capitalist class enemy. This was seen in the midst of the Great Depression in the 1930s, when, at a brief upturn in the economy, workers began to wage bitter class battles to organize industrial unions, sacrificing, if necessary, their jobs, their freedom and their very lives.
The social power of public workers is not that of industrial workers, who can directly stop the wheels of production and thus of profit from turning. But public unions include transportation, utility and other workers who provide the means and services by which the economy runs—the infrastructure vital for a modern industrial economy. For example, transit workers in metropolitan centers like New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago can cripple these financial and corporate centers.
While the bourgeois media whips up a propaganda barrage about “public outrage” against public workers unions, the truth is that if these workers waged some hard class struggle they would have plenty of allies among the unemployed, black people, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the capitalist rulers. “Public opinion” is, in the end, determined by the ebbs and flows of the class struggle. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin stressed: “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’.”
What stands in the way of the labor movement engaging in militant class struggle is the union bureaucracy. Peddling the lie that the workers have common interests with the capitalist exploiters and their state, they have allowed the industrial unions to be hacked to pieces and are lying down in the face of the war against public unions, if not actively collaborating in it. Even when forced to offer some resistance to the assaults of capitalist politicians like Wisconsin’s governor Walker, the bureaucrats subordinate the workers to the capitalist Democratic Party, and most of them are willing to concede to virtually all the government’s economic demands to cut wages and benefits.
The Labor Lieutenants of the Capitalist Class
The leaders of the public unions pledge their allegiance to “balancing the budget” of the capitalist government, the executive committee of the capitalist class. AFSCME leader McEntee has promised that “Public Employees stand ready to help state and local governments get through the economic storm.” Joining this chorus, a spokesman for the biggest New York State government workers union, the Civil Service Employees Association, responded to Governor Cuomo’s wage freeze by stating: “It sounds like he’s trying to set a tone that we need to all do our part. We don’t have a problem with doing our part” (New York Times, 3 January).
The role of the trade-union bureaucracy was captured by Leon Trotsky, who together with V.I. Lenin was co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution: “The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the ‘democratic’ state how reliable and indispensable they are in peacetime and especially in time of war.” When the “good times” were rolling on Wall Street, the public union misleaders assisted state and local governments in holding the line on increased wages and other benefits with the promise of greater pension fund contributions—a form of deferred wages. These funds in turn became a honeypot for high-rolling bankers and hedge fund managers, in league with state pension plan managers, for some of their riskiest investments, like credit default swaps and complex mortgage securities. When these imploded, pension funds were burned. State governments, many of which underfunded pension payments, are now screaming that they are being robbed by public workers, whose average pension is about $20,000 a year. Anyone who looks can see whose hand is in whose pocket.
The capitalist masters have virtually obliterated defined-benefit pensions in industry, which obligated corporations to make fixed retirement payments for private sector unions. Now they are trying to enlist these workers in the war against “greedy” public workers. An op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (4 January) titled “Labor’s Coming Class War” declared:
“The notion that Wall Street and Main Street are fundamentally at odds with one another remains a popular orthodoxy. So much so that we may be missing the first stirrings of a true American class war: between workers in government unions and their union counterparts in the private sector.”
For evidence, this voice of finance capital points to Steve Sweeney, an organizer for the Ironworkers union, more than 40 percent of whose members are out of work. Sweeney is credited with “pushing for reform of state-employee pay and benefits” in his other capacity as the Democratic Party president of the New Jersey State Senate. The article goes on to gloat that New York governor Cuomo “may have found a surprising ally” in Gary LaBarbera—president of the 100,000-strong Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York.
Joining business and real estate magnates in the “Committee to Save New York,” which is raising millions to bankroll Cuomo’s war against government unions, LaBarbera argued: “This is not about bashing public-sector unions. But without a fiscally sound environment, we will not be able to attract new businesses to the city” (New York Times, 9 December 2010). This is but a raw expression of the labor bureaucracy’s class-collaborationist policies, which tie the fate of the workers to the fortunes of the capitalist class and its state.
In the face of a growing army of unemployed, the gutting of pensions, the lack of health care and the elimination of other social programs and benefits, the answer of the trade-union bureaucrats is to pit worker against worker in the struggle to survive. In fact, the “fiscally sound” calculations of the capitalist rulers don’t simply include savaging public unions and the poor. Taking aim at all unions, Republican politicians in the Indiana legislature earlier this month introduced a union-busting “right to work” bill modeled on similar laws in the South, where the unionization rate is the lowest in the country.
A Class-Struggle Program
It is in the crucible of heightening class conflict that a new workers leadership in the unions can be forged. This is not simply a question of militancy in defense of the existing unions. If the workers are to struggle not only in their own interests but in the interests of all the oppressed, there must be a hard political struggle to replace the present sellouts who sit on top of the unions. They must be replaced with workers’ leaders who are able to not only win battles on the picket lines but who are also uncompromising in their dedication to the liberation of humanity from the exploitation, all-sided misery and war that are inherent to a system based on production for profit rather than human need. Striving to forge such a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of the fight for a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose aim is no less than doing away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.
The very defense of the unions mandates a fight to organize the unorganized, from the mass of immigrant workers to the open shop South. To wage such a battle means fighting against the race-color caste oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of capitalist rule in this country. A class-struggle leadership of the unions would be rooted in the understanding that the fight for black freedom is inextricably tied to labor’s cause and would take up the defense of foreign-born workers, demanding an end to deportations and full citizenship rights for all immigrants. It would take up the fight for free, quality health care for all, for the extension of unemployment benefits until there are jobs and for all pensions to be guaranteed by the government.
During the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War, Leon Trotsky wrote the Transitional Program, laying out, in Trotsky’s words, “transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.” These demands are not only relevant but vital to the proletariat today.
Against the catastrophe of mass unemployment, which threatens the devastation of the working class, Trotsky called for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay to spread the available work and for a massive program of public works. A fight to rebuild the decaying infrastructure of America—the roads, dams, subway systems, schools and hospitals—would unite private and public unions together with the unemployed in a common struggle for jobs and the rehabilitation of decent services for the population. It would also mobilize the power of labor in the interests of the ghetto and barrio poor in the rotting inner cities, striking a blow against the racial and ethnic hostilities whipped up by the rulers to divide and weaken working people.
General Motors claimed that it could no longer afford to pay union pensions and health benefits for retirees and new hires. Based on this fraud, the auto barons got bailed out. The average wages and benefits of many of the surviving union membership are on a par with those of workers at non-union plants. Earlier, the airline, steel and industrial magnates also declared bankruptcy and were assisted by the courts in ripping up union contracts. Now a proposal is being mooted to allow state governments to declare bankruptcy so that they too can cancel their “debt obligations,” like the billions they owe in pensions. To expose such highway robbery by the corporations, the banks and the government, Trotsky argued that the workers demand that the capitalists open their books and “reveal to all members of society that unconscionable squandering of human labor which is the result of capitalist anarchy.”
Against the swindles of the finance capitalists who control the economy, Trotsky called for the expropriation of the banks: “Only the expropriation of the private banks and the concentration of the entire credit system in the hands of the state will provide the latter with necessary actual, i.e., material resources—and not merely paper and bureaucratic resources—for economic planning.” Trotsky was not talking here about the capitalist state, which exists to defend the rule and profits of the bourgeoisie. As he put it, “the state-ization of the banks will produce these favorable results only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers”—i.e., a workers government.
No Illusions in the Capitalist State
The trade-union bureaucracy peddles the myth that the capitalist state is “neutral” and can be made to answer the needs of the working class if purported labor-friendly Democrats are put in office. They claim that the very organization of industrial unions was due to legislation enacted by the Democratic Party government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rather than the hard-fought struggles of the workers.
Specifically, the labor tops point to the 1935 Wagner Act, which they claim granted industrial workers the right to organize. The Wagner Act was passed in the aftermath of three victorious citywide strikes in 1934—all of them led by communists—that led to the founding of the CIO industrial unions. It was designed to head off the organizing drive by union militants and “reds” and to set up a government mechanism to subordinate the unions to the capitalist state. As Trotsky wrote in his 1940 article, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay”:
“In the United States the trade union movement has passed through the most stormy history in recent years. The rise of the CIO is incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary tendencies within the working masses. Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree, however, is the fact that the new ‘leftist’ trade union organization was no sooner founded than it fell into the steel embrace of the imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet.”
The very leaders of the new industrial union movement, including the Stalinist Communist Party, crippled it through their support to Roosevelt. The Communists and other militants were rewarded by being driven out of the unions in the red purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which solidified the power of the unvarnished pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy that has since driven these unions into the ground.
Well into the second half of the 20th century, union organization of government workers was uncommon if not outright prohibited. If the 1935 Wagner Act partly acknowledged and sought to regulate organizing rights and collective bargaining in private industry, it specifically exempted public employees from the right to join unions without reprisal. FDR himself wrote that the idea of strikes against the government “by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”
In 1962, John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988, granting most public sector employees the right to collectively bargain. Kennedy’s order specifically prohibited strikes, as did Richard Nixon’s 1969 order modifying it. In 1970, over 200,000 postal workers went on a nationwide wildcat strike. Nixon called in the military, but quickly learned you can’t sort the mail with bayonets. The strike led to the formation of the American Postal Workers Union and the right to collective bargaining by postal workers. However, the ban on strikes remained and was strengthened by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA).
The misleaders of public workers unions present the formation of their unions, too, as the result of the largesse of the Democratic Party. The son of the author of the Wagner Act, former New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner, is credited with giving city workers the right to organize in 1958. In fact, their right to organize was won in a climate of rapidly increasing militancy, beginning with a 1955 sanitation strike led by AFSCME DC 37 against autocratic Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.
A hard-won and popular strike by welfare social workers in 1965 was followed by the victorious 1966 transit strike, in which Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 leader Mike Quill tore up a court injunction ordering the strike to end, famously announcing on his way to jail, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes and we would not call off the strike.” That strike spelled the end of the 1947 Condon-Wadlin Act forbidding public worker strikes in New York State. Defiance by Quill and other bureaucrats notwithstanding, union officials generally hide behind the ubiquitous no-strike laws like the Taylor Law, which, with its massive fines and jail time for union leaders, replaced Condon-Wadlin in New York.
In 1981, as 13,000 PATCO air traffic controllers went on strike, Ronald Reagan dusted off plans hatched by his predecessor, Democrat Jimmy Carter, and fired the entire workforce, dragging their leaders off to jail in chains. His basis in law was the 1978 CSRA. Organized labor could have beaten back Reagan’s strikebreaking, but the union bureaucracy refused to mobilize labor’s power to shut down the airports. The smashing of PATCO became the model for the capitalists’ decades-long drive to gut the labor movement and intensify the rate of exploitation to prop up their flagging profitability. For the labor tops, the PATCO surrender became their model as well, ushering in decades of give-back contracts and two-tier wage systems with lower pay scales for newly hired younger workers.
It is a measure of the union bureaucracy’s fealty to the capitalist state that AFSCME and other public sector unions organize the very police forces whose purpose is the violent suppression of the workers’ struggle. The economic whip of unemployment and increasing destitution for the working class and oppressed has gone hand in hand with the vast expansion of police powers in the U.S., where the main growth industry has been prisons. Yet the sadistic jailers of the overwhelmingly black and Latino youth in America’s overflowing prisons are themselves often union members.
These hired guns of the capitalist state have no place in the workers movement. Just look at this country’s prison guards, who are organized by AFSCME, SEIU, Teamsters and other unions. In California, they have been the moving force in the racist “war on crime” and such reactionary laws as “three strikes, you’re out,” which have made the state of California a world leader in the number of people behind bars. But there is little bellyaching from the budget slashers over the billions that are poured into maintaining the prison hellholes. These are a critical part of the edifice of organized violence by which the capitalist state enforces its rule.
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
The 2005 New York City TWU strike, which garnered widespread public support, all but shut down this world financial center for some 60 hours. A key strike issue was defense of the union pension for new hires, which was under attack by the bosses long before the current recessionary “budget crisis.” The workers, who had walked out in defiance of the slave-labor Taylor Law, were stabbed in the back by the leaders of other New York City unions and the TWU International leadership and, in the end, sold out by their own union misleaders. This has had a corrosive effect on the workers, breeding cynicism. Nonetheless, notwithstanding the massive fines meted out against the union and its membership under the Taylor Law, the workers kept their pension—because they struck.
This helps to illustrate why billions have been spent over the past decades to wipe out even the semblance of organized labor. Even such a minimal, if supportable, law as the Employee Free Choice Act—which would allow workers to organize through a simple card check as against the prolonged “secret ballot” procedures that give employers additional time to mobilize to crush pro-union sentiment—ignited a well-funded corporate barrage in opposition and is now all but dead. The reason is a simple calculation. Despite the sellouts of the labor tops, a unionized worker continues to make a median wage that is $200 more a week than a non-union worker.
The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. The question of turning them into fighting organizations for the working class, which will take up the fight for black freedom, for immigrant rights and for the defense of those whose very lives have been written off by the exploiters and their state, is a political one. As Trotsky wrote more than 70 years ago: “The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”
Two possible roads lie before the working class. There is the bureaucracy’s acceptance that the workers must “sacrifice” to preserve the profits and rule of American capitalism, which has led to disaster. Or there is the class-struggle road of mobilizing the power of the working class in the necessary battles against the capitalist masters. In the course of such struggle, under a leadership that arms the working class with an understanding of the nature of capitalist society, the workers will become imbued with the consciousness of their historic interests as a class fighting for itself and for all of the oppressed. Such consciousness requires a political expression. That means the fight to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose purpose is not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation but to rid the planet of the source of that devastation, capitalism itself, and the state that preserves it.
From The Partisan Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart Now!
Markin comment:
As noted below when the liberals abandon class-war prisoners like Lynne Stewart because "justice has been done" or because the case is just too "hot" working class militants and their supporters stand their ground. Just like James Cannon, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Marx taught us. Free Lynne Stewart and her co-defendants now!
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
Vindictive Transfer to Texas Prison
Free Lynne Stewart Now!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
Last December, radical lawyer Lynne Stewart was transferred to FMC Carswell prison in Fort Worth, Texas. The government vindictively denied her request to be sent to a prison in Connecticut, instead locking her up more than 1,000 miles away from her family and core of supporters in New York. Known for her decades-long defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state, Lynne Stewart was incarcerated for zealously defending her client, an Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s.
Stewart, along with her interpreter Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar, was convicted in February 2005 of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism and to defraud the U.S. government. What constituted “material support” was Stewart’s statement to a Reuters reporter that her client urged his supporters in the Islamic Group to reconsider their cease-fire with the Mubarak dictatorship. As we wrote at the time of the conviction in WV No. 842 (18 February 2005): “The verdict gives the government a green light to prosecute lawyers for the alleged crimes of their clients, thereby shooting the basic right to counsel to hell.… And if nobody can get a lawyer to zealously defend him from prosecution, then fundamental liberties, from the right to a trial and an attorney, to even the right of free speech and assembly, are choked.”
Stewart was originally sentenced to 28 months in prison. On 15 July 2010, federal district judge John Koeltl, who was directed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to resentence Stewart, more than quadrupled her original sentence. This is a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no letup in the massive attacks on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart is currently appealing her conviction before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. As for her codefendants, Yousry is imprisoned on a term of 20 months while Abdel Sattar was additionally convicted of conspiracy to “kill and kidnap persons in a foreign country” and is locked away for 24 years. None of them should have been charged or spent a day in prison.
In sentencing Stewart to ten years, the government is essentially seeking to impose a death sentence on this 71-year-old woman who has been battling breast cancer and chronic diseases. Her transfer to FMC Carswell places her health at even greater risk. The reality of “Federal Medical Center Carswell” prison has been extensively documented by Betty Brink, an award-winning journalist with the Fort Worth Weekly. Brink has written numerous exposés chronicling the deaths of prisoners through “medical mistakes, substandard care and unconscionable delays” in treatment, to use the words of a former Carswell doctor. Eight prison employees have been convicted of rape and other crimes against the inmates at this women’s prison.
Speaking at the January 21 New York City Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners, Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, conveyed a defiant message from her: “I’m going to continue speaking out about what’s wrong with this government.” He had recently returned from Texas, and described the ordeal both he and Lynne went through just to be able to see each other, with prison officials forcing him to wait more than three hours to get into the visiting room. Poynter thanked the PDC—which recently added Stewart to its monthly stipend program—for continuing to defend her when some liberals abandoned her cause. He also read Lynne’s greetings to the event, in which she roundly denounced the FBI persecution of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, pro-Palestinian activists and other leftists (see “FBI Infiltration Exposed” WV No. 973, 4 February):
“We stand strong with the resisters who elect not to become part of the same prosecution team that has terrorized the world. Now the so-called Department of Justice (ha!) has decided to focus on support groups of the world’s peoples and also on ecoterrorism. Why? Because they can! It sends a message to the people that it’s dangerous; don’t join, don’t resist. That message once again must be shouted down, first by the resisters who will go to jail and second by us, the movement who must support them by always filling those cold marble courtrooms to show our solidarity and speaking out so that their sacrifice is constantly remembered.”
The defense of Stewart and her codefendants is an elementary duty for socialist opponents of U.S. imperialism. Yet in their capitulation to “respectable” bourgeois liberals who sought to separate Stewart’s defense from that of her codefendants, Workers World Party, Socialist Action and the Party for Socialism and Liberation have abandoned the defense of Yousry and Abdel Sattar, refusing to raise the call for their freedom. National Lawyers Guild attorney Liz Fink, who quit the legal team just days before Stewart’s resentencing, filed court papers that despicably attempted to exonerate Stewart by framing up Yousry! The prosecution seized on this in the resentencing to mock the defense team. Stewart, to her credit, directed the defense attorney to reply that those were Fink’s words, not Stewart’s.
Lynne Stewart must not become another forgotten person locked up in this country’s vast prison system. The government vendetta against her and the other class-war prisoners is intended to intimidate and silence opponents of racist oppression, capitalist exploitation and imperialist war. It is in the vital interest of the labor movement and all defenders of civil liberties to demand immediate freedom for Lynne Stewart, Mohamed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
The PDC has contributed to Stewart’s legal defense fund and encourages others to do the same. Send donations to: Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York 11216. Letters can be mailed to: Lynne Stewart, #53504-054, FMC Carswell, Federal Medical Center, P.O. Box 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127.
As noted below when the liberals abandon class-war prisoners like Lynne Stewart because "justice has been done" or because the case is just too "hot" working class militants and their supporters stand their ground. Just like James Cannon, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Marx taught us. Free Lynne Stewart and her co-defendants now!
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
Vindictive Transfer to Texas Prison
Free Lynne Stewart Now!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
Last December, radical lawyer Lynne Stewart was transferred to FMC Carswell prison in Fort Worth, Texas. The government vindictively denied her request to be sent to a prison in Connecticut, instead locking her up more than 1,000 miles away from her family and core of supporters in New York. Known for her decades-long defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state, Lynne Stewart was incarcerated for zealously defending her client, an Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s.
Stewart, along with her interpreter Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar, was convicted in February 2005 of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism and to defraud the U.S. government. What constituted “material support” was Stewart’s statement to a Reuters reporter that her client urged his supporters in the Islamic Group to reconsider their cease-fire with the Mubarak dictatorship. As we wrote at the time of the conviction in WV No. 842 (18 February 2005): “The verdict gives the government a green light to prosecute lawyers for the alleged crimes of their clients, thereby shooting the basic right to counsel to hell.… And if nobody can get a lawyer to zealously defend him from prosecution, then fundamental liberties, from the right to a trial and an attorney, to even the right of free speech and assembly, are choked.”
Stewart was originally sentenced to 28 months in prison. On 15 July 2010, federal district judge John Koeltl, who was directed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to resentence Stewart, more than quadrupled her original sentence. This is a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no letup in the massive attacks on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart is currently appealing her conviction before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. As for her codefendants, Yousry is imprisoned on a term of 20 months while Abdel Sattar was additionally convicted of conspiracy to “kill and kidnap persons in a foreign country” and is locked away for 24 years. None of them should have been charged or spent a day in prison.
In sentencing Stewart to ten years, the government is essentially seeking to impose a death sentence on this 71-year-old woman who has been battling breast cancer and chronic diseases. Her transfer to FMC Carswell places her health at even greater risk. The reality of “Federal Medical Center Carswell” prison has been extensively documented by Betty Brink, an award-winning journalist with the Fort Worth Weekly. Brink has written numerous exposés chronicling the deaths of prisoners through “medical mistakes, substandard care and unconscionable delays” in treatment, to use the words of a former Carswell doctor. Eight prison employees have been convicted of rape and other crimes against the inmates at this women’s prison.
Speaking at the January 21 New York City Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners, Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, conveyed a defiant message from her: “I’m going to continue speaking out about what’s wrong with this government.” He had recently returned from Texas, and described the ordeal both he and Lynne went through just to be able to see each other, with prison officials forcing him to wait more than three hours to get into the visiting room. Poynter thanked the PDC—which recently added Stewart to its monthly stipend program—for continuing to defend her when some liberals abandoned her cause. He also read Lynne’s greetings to the event, in which she roundly denounced the FBI persecution of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, pro-Palestinian activists and other leftists (see “FBI Infiltration Exposed” WV No. 973, 4 February):
“We stand strong with the resisters who elect not to become part of the same prosecution team that has terrorized the world. Now the so-called Department of Justice (ha!) has decided to focus on support groups of the world’s peoples and also on ecoterrorism. Why? Because they can! It sends a message to the people that it’s dangerous; don’t join, don’t resist. That message once again must be shouted down, first by the resisters who will go to jail and second by us, the movement who must support them by always filling those cold marble courtrooms to show our solidarity and speaking out so that their sacrifice is constantly remembered.”
The defense of Stewart and her codefendants is an elementary duty for socialist opponents of U.S. imperialism. Yet in their capitulation to “respectable” bourgeois liberals who sought to separate Stewart’s defense from that of her codefendants, Workers World Party, Socialist Action and the Party for Socialism and Liberation have abandoned the defense of Yousry and Abdel Sattar, refusing to raise the call for their freedom. National Lawyers Guild attorney Liz Fink, who quit the legal team just days before Stewart’s resentencing, filed court papers that despicably attempted to exonerate Stewart by framing up Yousry! The prosecution seized on this in the resentencing to mock the defense team. Stewart, to her credit, directed the defense attorney to reply that those were Fink’s words, not Stewart’s.
Lynne Stewart must not become another forgotten person locked up in this country’s vast prison system. The government vendetta against her and the other class-war prisoners is intended to intimidate and silence opponents of racist oppression, capitalist exploitation and imperialist war. It is in the vital interest of the labor movement and all defenders of civil liberties to demand immediate freedom for Lynne Stewart, Mohamed Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar.
The PDC has contributed to Stewart’s legal defense fund and encourages others to do the same. Send donations to: Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York 11216. Letters can be mailed to: Lynne Stewart, #53504-054, FMC Carswell, Federal Medical Center, P.O. Box 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127.
From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-Zimbabwe: Hands Off Leftists, Trade Unionists!
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
Zimbabwe: Hands Off Leftists, Trade Unionists!
The following joint statement was issued by the Spartacist League/Britain and Spartacist South Africa, sections of the International Communist League, on February 27.
The Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B) and Spartacist South Africa (SSA) condemn the arrests on 19 February of some 52 trade unionists, students, workers and activists attending a meeting of the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe. We vehemently protest the fact that these men and women were arrested in a raid on a lecture in Harare by police and were detained and tortured. Outrageously, they now face treason charges, which can carry the death penalty, for the simple reason that they organised a meeting in solidarity with the mass mobilisations that overthrew the dictators Mubarak and Ben Ali in Egypt and Tunisia. These arrests are a blatant attempt to suppress protest and strike fear into left organisations who oppose the government. It is in the direct interests of the working class to oppose this naked act of state repression.
As Marxists, the Spartacist League/ Britain opposes the sanctions and other machinations practiced by the racist British ruling class against Zimbabwe. From the time of Cecil Rhodes’ bloody quest to establish a “British Africa” from Cairo to the Cape, to the racist “independent” Ian Smith government, to the sanctions against Zimbabwe today, imperialist Britain never hesitated to use bloody force to assert its control and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of black Africans killed during the independence struggle in Zimbabwe.
The present British government led by David Cameron and the Labour regimes that preceded it couldn’t care less what the Robert Mugabe regime does to workers and peasants. Their only concern is that the enormous wealth that is extracted from the exploitation of black labour continues to flow into the coffers of the City of London and Wall Street.
As revolutionary internationalists in South Africa, the dominant regional economic power, SSA fights for solidarity by the South African workers movement with its class brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe and throughout the region. In particular, we fight for the workers to vigorously oppose the South African government’s harassment and threat of impending deportations against hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean immigrants; we demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
We demand the immediate release of the detainees in Zimbabwe and the dropping of all charges.
4 March 2011
Zimbabwe: Hands Off Leftists, Trade Unionists!
The following joint statement was issued by the Spartacist League/Britain and Spartacist South Africa, sections of the International Communist League, on February 27.
The Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B) and Spartacist South Africa (SSA) condemn the arrests on 19 February of some 52 trade unionists, students, workers and activists attending a meeting of the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe. We vehemently protest the fact that these men and women were arrested in a raid on a lecture in Harare by police and were detained and tortured. Outrageously, they now face treason charges, which can carry the death penalty, for the simple reason that they organised a meeting in solidarity with the mass mobilisations that overthrew the dictators Mubarak and Ben Ali in Egypt and Tunisia. These arrests are a blatant attempt to suppress protest and strike fear into left organisations who oppose the government. It is in the direct interests of the working class to oppose this naked act of state repression.
As Marxists, the Spartacist League/ Britain opposes the sanctions and other machinations practiced by the racist British ruling class against Zimbabwe. From the time of Cecil Rhodes’ bloody quest to establish a “British Africa” from Cairo to the Cape, to the racist “independent” Ian Smith government, to the sanctions against Zimbabwe today, imperialist Britain never hesitated to use bloody force to assert its control and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of black Africans killed during the independence struggle in Zimbabwe.
The present British government led by David Cameron and the Labour regimes that preceded it couldn’t care less what the Robert Mugabe regime does to workers and peasants. Their only concern is that the enormous wealth that is extracted from the exploitation of black labour continues to flow into the coffers of the City of London and Wall Street.
As revolutionary internationalists in South Africa, the dominant regional economic power, SSA fights for solidarity by the South African workers movement with its class brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe and throughout the region. In particular, we fight for the workers to vigorously oppose the South African government’s harassment and threat of impending deportations against hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean immigrants; we demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
We demand the immediate release of the detainees in Zimbabwe and the dropping of all charges.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-No Illusions in Democratic Party!-Wisconsin Showdown Over Union Rights
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
No Illusions in Democratic Party!
Wisconsin Showdown Over Union Rights
On February 26, some 100,000 pro-union demonstrators flooded the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, following nearly two weeks of protests against Republican governor Scott Walker’s proposed union-busting bill, which would strip public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights. The massive demonstrations began on Valentine’s Day, when over 1,000 workers and University of Wisconsin students occupied the state Capitol building rotunda. They flooded into the lawmakers’ chambers, with hundreds camping at the Capitol every night since. This action sparked the teachers unions to organize sick-outs, causing schools to close across the state. Sensing a draconian threat to their livelihoods and rights, tens of thousands of unionists and their families as well as students and other supporters have flocked to Madison on a daily basis demanding, “Kill the Bill!”
It is in the vital interest of the entire labor movement to defend Wisconsin’s public employee unions and spike the union-busting “budget repair bill.” This deadly law would eliminate public sector collective bargaining on any issue besides wages, limit raises to no more than cost-of-living increases, and require public sector unions to endure mandatory annual recertification votes that would threaten the very existence of these unions. Under the bill, employee payroll deductions for health care would be dramatically increased. Workers would be required to pay 50 percent of the contributions to the pension fund, resulting in a pay cut of 5 to 12 percent. Walker, a Republican of the reactionary Tea Party ilk, has threatened to start laying off 12,000 workers beginning this week if his bill does not pass.
“It’s about the assault on labor, an assault on the working human being; to take and throw away the contract and say it’s balancing the budget is bull crap,” said a member of Wisconsin’s American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). In short order, Scott Walker confirmed this observation. Believing, gullibly, that he was in a phone conversation with right-wing billionaire and Tea Party backer David Koch, Walker confessed to having considered planting troublemakers among the pro-union demonstrators while praising Ronald Reagan’s 1981 smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike and destruction of the union; Walker said that this was “our” PATCO “moment.” Indeed, the impact of such legislation is demonstrated in Indiana, where all collective bargaining for public unions was banned six years ago. Since that time, as the governor of that state brags, union membership for state workers has nose-dived by 90 percent.
There will either be class struggle or defeat. In his phone call with the ersatz David Koch, Governor Walker articulated a strategy of simply letting the protests play out. What is needed is hard class struggle to defeat this union-busting attack. The massive, hugely popular Madison protests show that there is widespread outrage over the savage cutbacks and that workers are ready to fight.
On February 21, the South Central Federation of Labor (SCFL), composed of delegates from 97 public and private sector union locals representing 45,000 workers in Madison and southern Wisconsin, unanimously passed a motion stating: “The SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his ‘budget repair bill’.” In another motion, SCFL rejected any bargaining concessions on wages, benefits and union rights. At the same time, SCFL president Jim Cavanaugh was quick to explain that the group’s support for a “general strike” was just advisory: “We’re just a support organization, and the actual local unions would have to decide if they wanted to escalate things to the point of a strike.” Recommendations will not do the trick. The Wisconsin labor movement needs to prepare for statewide strike action if this attempt to gut the unions is to be defeated.
But the Wisconsin public union tops have centered their whole strategy on pressuring the capitalist politicians to “compromise” by merely deleting the portions of Walker’s bill that gut their collective bargaining rights. Blathering about the need to “share the sacrifice,” these labor lieutenants of capital have pledged their support to all the wage and benefit givebacks Walker wants to wring from the unions. On February 21, the teachers union bureaucracy called off the school sick-outs—themselves a weak form of protest that sets individual teachers up for victimization.
It is necessary to defend each and every gain that the labor movement has won—from wages and benefits to pensions to the right for unions to exist. But that cannot be done by playing by the bosses’ rules. Beginning with the very right to form unions, all the major gains that labor has wrested from the bosses in the past century were once themselves “illegal” by the norms of bourgeois “law and order.” The class-struggle methods through which our rights were won—from massive picket lines to factory occupations to hot-cargoing struck goods—were also “illegal,” and are today! Hard-fought strikes galvanize the rest of the labor movement and, when victorious, tear up the bosses’ anti-strike laws and injunctions.
With similar restrictions and cuts against labor on the legislative agenda in many states (see article, page 1), the showdown in Wisconsin—the first state to legalize public sector unions, in the 1950s—has riveted the attention of workers nationally and internationally. In the U.S., private sector unions have mobilized in force alongside public sector workers around the Midwest. From New Jersey to Oklahoma and elsewhere, labor has rallied against similar anti-union legislation. In Columbus, Ohio, over 5,000 trade-union demonstrators filled Capitol Square.
With the global economic crisis grinding down working people and the oppressed throughout the world, mobilizations against exploitation and oppression quickly resound. Many in Wisconsin have identified their struggles with those of the working masses of Egypt, with some carrying signs denouncing Walker as a Mubarak-type dictator. In turn, messages of solidarity have been sent to Wisconsin from Egyptian workers and activists.
In Wisconsin, Democratic Party politicians have heavily promoted the protests to burnish their image as “friends of labor” in Midwest swing states. Fourteen Democratic state senators fled across the border to Illinois in a maneuver to deprive Walker of a quorum to ram the bill through the Republican-controlled state legislature. President Barack Obama has claimed to sympathize with public workers, asserting that it would be wrong “to vilify them or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees.” That takes a lot of chutzpah from an imperialist Commander-in-Chief whose assaults on the United Auto Workers, relentless attacks on teachers unions, and two-year wage freeze on federal employees have set the stage for the current round of state and local attacks on public sector unions.
In distributing Workers Vanguard to the Madison protesters, our comrades have warned against any illusions in the Democrats. No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and the class enemy of workers, black people, immigrants and the oppressed. While the Tea Party reactionaries want to smash the unions outright in order to extract the maximum concessions, the Democrats pretend to be “friends” of labor to better hoodwink the workers and maintain labor “peace,” while extracting the same economic concessions.
The union tops—a component of the Democratic Party—are fully committed to the system of capitalist exploitation. In the private sector, these types have for decades agreed to the savage cutbacks of wages and benefits and the job-slashing attacks deemed by the bosses to be vital to the health of corporate America. This class collaboration has fueled the steep decline of the once-powerful industrial unions, which were built in the giant class battles of the 1930s. Now public sector unions face the same attacks along with the threat of a nationwide spate of “right to work” legislation to assure the withering of their union membership. In short, the union bureaucracy’s subordination of the class struggle to the dictates of the bosses has set the stage for those forces on the right that seek the destruction of public sector unions.
The union tops are fond of portraying labor struggles as a fight to maintain the “middle class,” thus obscuring the class divide in this country. In turn, the Tea Party types portray their struggle as a fight to maintain the middle class against encroachments of the labor movement. In reality, what is at issue is the inherent class conflict of workers against their capitalist exploiters.
Walker’s bill exempts firefighters and cops from the cutbacks, supposedly in the interest of public safety. Firemen, who have joined the demonstrations at the Capitol, are workers whose job it is to save lives and prevent destruction. The cops and prison guards are not workers. They are the hired thugs of the capitalist rulers, front-line enforcers of the racist capitalist “justice” system. Marxists understand that far from being “neutral,” the capitalist state is at bottom nothing more than an apparatus of violence—the cops, army, courts and prisons—for enforcing the bosses’ class rule. This is no mystery to the bourgeois politician Walker, who has threatened to call out the National Guard to quell militant labor action. But the public sector unions like AFSCME have recruited cops and prison guards, deadly enemies of the working class, into the unions by the tens of thousands. Cops, prison guards out of the trade-union movement!
In channeling the workers’ anger into the dead end of bourgeois pressure politics, the union bureaucrats are aided by a host of reformist “socialist” outfits. Groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative (SAlt) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation have uncritically cheered the Madison protests while upholding the losing strategy of pressuring the Democrats to “fight the right” and “tax the rich” to balance the budget. In a February 19 statement on its Web site, SAlt cravenly wrote, “We can’t rely on the Democratic Party to maintain a principled stand unless they feel the fire of the movement spreading underneath them. After all, would the Senate Democrats have even taken their stand if the working people of Wisconsin hadn’t risen up in the first place?” For the ISO, the demonstrations have “transformed U.S. politics in a way that won’t disappear, whatever happens with Walker’s legislation.” Or as Jesse Jackson put it in addressing a crowd at the state Capitol, “This is a Martin Luther King moment, this is a Gandhi moment.” The continuing miseries of black Americans and of the Indian masses show that this is not the way forward.
Labor needs a fighting leadership that will break the chains that tie the unions to the capitalist Democrats—a class-struggle leadership that understands that the whole capitalist system of racism, war and exploitation must be thrown on the garbage heap of history. This is part of the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government and for a socialist egalitarian society in which those who labor will rule. Speaking of the victorious 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, which were key to establishing the Teamsters as an industrial union, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon noted in The History of American Trotskyism (1944):
“Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity. Consequently, they expected from the start that the union would have to fight for its right to exist; that the bosses would not yield any recognition to the union, would not yield any increase of wages or reduction of the scandalous hours without some pressure being brought to bear. Therefore they prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight.”
4 March 2011
No Illusions in Democratic Party!
Wisconsin Showdown Over Union Rights
On February 26, some 100,000 pro-union demonstrators flooded the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, following nearly two weeks of protests against Republican governor Scott Walker’s proposed union-busting bill, which would strip public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights. The massive demonstrations began on Valentine’s Day, when over 1,000 workers and University of Wisconsin students occupied the state Capitol building rotunda. They flooded into the lawmakers’ chambers, with hundreds camping at the Capitol every night since. This action sparked the teachers unions to organize sick-outs, causing schools to close across the state. Sensing a draconian threat to their livelihoods and rights, tens of thousands of unionists and their families as well as students and other supporters have flocked to Madison on a daily basis demanding, “Kill the Bill!”
It is in the vital interest of the entire labor movement to defend Wisconsin’s public employee unions and spike the union-busting “budget repair bill.” This deadly law would eliminate public sector collective bargaining on any issue besides wages, limit raises to no more than cost-of-living increases, and require public sector unions to endure mandatory annual recertification votes that would threaten the very existence of these unions. Under the bill, employee payroll deductions for health care would be dramatically increased. Workers would be required to pay 50 percent of the contributions to the pension fund, resulting in a pay cut of 5 to 12 percent. Walker, a Republican of the reactionary Tea Party ilk, has threatened to start laying off 12,000 workers beginning this week if his bill does not pass.
“It’s about the assault on labor, an assault on the working human being; to take and throw away the contract and say it’s balancing the budget is bull crap,” said a member of Wisconsin’s American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). In short order, Scott Walker confirmed this observation. Believing, gullibly, that he was in a phone conversation with right-wing billionaire and Tea Party backer David Koch, Walker confessed to having considered planting troublemakers among the pro-union demonstrators while praising Ronald Reagan’s 1981 smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike and destruction of the union; Walker said that this was “our” PATCO “moment.” Indeed, the impact of such legislation is demonstrated in Indiana, where all collective bargaining for public unions was banned six years ago. Since that time, as the governor of that state brags, union membership for state workers has nose-dived by 90 percent.
There will either be class struggle or defeat. In his phone call with the ersatz David Koch, Governor Walker articulated a strategy of simply letting the protests play out. What is needed is hard class struggle to defeat this union-busting attack. The massive, hugely popular Madison protests show that there is widespread outrage over the savage cutbacks and that workers are ready to fight.
On February 21, the South Central Federation of Labor (SCFL), composed of delegates from 97 public and private sector union locals representing 45,000 workers in Madison and southern Wisconsin, unanimously passed a motion stating: “The SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his ‘budget repair bill’.” In another motion, SCFL rejected any bargaining concessions on wages, benefits and union rights. At the same time, SCFL president Jim Cavanaugh was quick to explain that the group’s support for a “general strike” was just advisory: “We’re just a support organization, and the actual local unions would have to decide if they wanted to escalate things to the point of a strike.” Recommendations will not do the trick. The Wisconsin labor movement needs to prepare for statewide strike action if this attempt to gut the unions is to be defeated.
But the Wisconsin public union tops have centered their whole strategy on pressuring the capitalist politicians to “compromise” by merely deleting the portions of Walker’s bill that gut their collective bargaining rights. Blathering about the need to “share the sacrifice,” these labor lieutenants of capital have pledged their support to all the wage and benefit givebacks Walker wants to wring from the unions. On February 21, the teachers union bureaucracy called off the school sick-outs—themselves a weak form of protest that sets individual teachers up for victimization.
It is necessary to defend each and every gain that the labor movement has won—from wages and benefits to pensions to the right for unions to exist. But that cannot be done by playing by the bosses’ rules. Beginning with the very right to form unions, all the major gains that labor has wrested from the bosses in the past century were once themselves “illegal” by the norms of bourgeois “law and order.” The class-struggle methods through which our rights were won—from massive picket lines to factory occupations to hot-cargoing struck goods—were also “illegal,” and are today! Hard-fought strikes galvanize the rest of the labor movement and, when victorious, tear up the bosses’ anti-strike laws and injunctions.
With similar restrictions and cuts against labor on the legislative agenda in many states (see article, page 1), the showdown in Wisconsin—the first state to legalize public sector unions, in the 1950s—has riveted the attention of workers nationally and internationally. In the U.S., private sector unions have mobilized in force alongside public sector workers around the Midwest. From New Jersey to Oklahoma and elsewhere, labor has rallied against similar anti-union legislation. In Columbus, Ohio, over 5,000 trade-union demonstrators filled Capitol Square.
With the global economic crisis grinding down working people and the oppressed throughout the world, mobilizations against exploitation and oppression quickly resound. Many in Wisconsin have identified their struggles with those of the working masses of Egypt, with some carrying signs denouncing Walker as a Mubarak-type dictator. In turn, messages of solidarity have been sent to Wisconsin from Egyptian workers and activists.
In Wisconsin, Democratic Party politicians have heavily promoted the protests to burnish their image as “friends of labor” in Midwest swing states. Fourteen Democratic state senators fled across the border to Illinois in a maneuver to deprive Walker of a quorum to ram the bill through the Republican-controlled state legislature. President Barack Obama has claimed to sympathize with public workers, asserting that it would be wrong “to vilify them or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees.” That takes a lot of chutzpah from an imperialist Commander-in-Chief whose assaults on the United Auto Workers, relentless attacks on teachers unions, and two-year wage freeze on federal employees have set the stage for the current round of state and local attacks on public sector unions.
In distributing Workers Vanguard to the Madison protesters, our comrades have warned against any illusions in the Democrats. No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and the class enemy of workers, black people, immigrants and the oppressed. While the Tea Party reactionaries want to smash the unions outright in order to extract the maximum concessions, the Democrats pretend to be “friends” of labor to better hoodwink the workers and maintain labor “peace,” while extracting the same economic concessions.
The union tops—a component of the Democratic Party—are fully committed to the system of capitalist exploitation. In the private sector, these types have for decades agreed to the savage cutbacks of wages and benefits and the job-slashing attacks deemed by the bosses to be vital to the health of corporate America. This class collaboration has fueled the steep decline of the once-powerful industrial unions, which were built in the giant class battles of the 1930s. Now public sector unions face the same attacks along with the threat of a nationwide spate of “right to work” legislation to assure the withering of their union membership. In short, the union bureaucracy’s subordination of the class struggle to the dictates of the bosses has set the stage for those forces on the right that seek the destruction of public sector unions.
The union tops are fond of portraying labor struggles as a fight to maintain the “middle class,” thus obscuring the class divide in this country. In turn, the Tea Party types portray their struggle as a fight to maintain the middle class against encroachments of the labor movement. In reality, what is at issue is the inherent class conflict of workers against their capitalist exploiters.
Walker’s bill exempts firefighters and cops from the cutbacks, supposedly in the interest of public safety. Firemen, who have joined the demonstrations at the Capitol, are workers whose job it is to save lives and prevent destruction. The cops and prison guards are not workers. They are the hired thugs of the capitalist rulers, front-line enforcers of the racist capitalist “justice” system. Marxists understand that far from being “neutral,” the capitalist state is at bottom nothing more than an apparatus of violence—the cops, army, courts and prisons—for enforcing the bosses’ class rule. This is no mystery to the bourgeois politician Walker, who has threatened to call out the National Guard to quell militant labor action. But the public sector unions like AFSCME have recruited cops and prison guards, deadly enemies of the working class, into the unions by the tens of thousands. Cops, prison guards out of the trade-union movement!
In channeling the workers’ anger into the dead end of bourgeois pressure politics, the union bureaucrats are aided by a host of reformist “socialist” outfits. Groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative (SAlt) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation have uncritically cheered the Madison protests while upholding the losing strategy of pressuring the Democrats to “fight the right” and “tax the rich” to balance the budget. In a February 19 statement on its Web site, SAlt cravenly wrote, “We can’t rely on the Democratic Party to maintain a principled stand unless they feel the fire of the movement spreading underneath them. After all, would the Senate Democrats have even taken their stand if the working people of Wisconsin hadn’t risen up in the first place?” For the ISO, the demonstrations have “transformed U.S. politics in a way that won’t disappear, whatever happens with Walker’s legislation.” Or as Jesse Jackson put it in addressing a crowd at the state Capitol, “This is a Martin Luther King moment, this is a Gandhi moment.” The continuing miseries of black Americans and of the Indian masses show that this is not the way forward.
Labor needs a fighting leadership that will break the chains that tie the unions to the capitalist Democrats—a class-struggle leadership that understands that the whole capitalist system of racism, war and exploitation must be thrown on the garbage heap of history. This is part of the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government and for a socialist egalitarian society in which those who labor will rule. Speaking of the victorious 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, which were key to establishing the Teamsters as an industrial union, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon noted in The History of American Trotskyism (1944):
“Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity. Consequently, they expected from the start that the union would have to fight for its right to exist; that the bosses would not yield any recognition to the union, would not yield any increase of wages or reduction of the scandalous hours without some pressure being brought to bear. Therefore they prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight.”
From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free Oscar López Rivera!-Parole Denied for Puerto Rican Independence Fighter
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
Parole Denied for Puerto Rican Independence Fighter
Free Oscar López Rivera!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
We reprint below a February 12 letter from the Partisan Defense Committee to the U.S. Parole Commission demanding the release of Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera. López Rivera was denied parole on February 18 and remains incarcerated in the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The Partisan Defense Committee joins those across the country and around the world calling for the release of Oscar López Rivera. Mr. López Rivera is a principled and courageous political prisoner who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1981 for struggling for the independence of his native Puerto Rico. After moving to the mainland as a youth, he was drafted into the Army where he served with distinction. He became a well-respected community activist in Chicago, where he fought for bilingual education and an end to anti-Latino discrimination in education and public utilities.
Mr. López Rivera has now been incarcerated for nearly three decades, subjected to the oppressive conditions in maximum security prisons in Marion, IL, and then Florence, CO. He has described his situation as being enclosed like a zoo animal in a cell eight feet wide by nine feet long for an average of 22 hours a day. This cruelty must end now.
In 1999 Mr. López Rivera was one of many Puerto Rican political prisoners who was offered conditional clemency by then President Bill Clinton. But he rejected the chance to reduce his sentence out of solidarity with Carlos Alberto Torres and Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres, two of his compañeros who were not included in the clemency offer.
As has become the norm for the continued incarceration of political prisoners, Mr. López Rivera has been accused of showing no “remorse” or “contrition.” Mr. López Rivera has no reason to apologize for his part in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. The people of Puerto Rico have every right to demand an end to the more than a century of colonial oppression meted out by the United States of America. We demand that Oscar López Rivera be released immediately and unconditionally.
4 March 2011
Parole Denied for Puerto Rican Independence Fighter
Free Oscar López Rivera!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
We reprint below a February 12 letter from the Partisan Defense Committee to the U.S. Parole Commission demanding the release of Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera. López Rivera was denied parole on February 18 and remains incarcerated in the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The Partisan Defense Committee joins those across the country and around the world calling for the release of Oscar López Rivera. Mr. López Rivera is a principled and courageous political prisoner who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1981 for struggling for the independence of his native Puerto Rico. After moving to the mainland as a youth, he was drafted into the Army where he served with distinction. He became a well-respected community activist in Chicago, where he fought for bilingual education and an end to anti-Latino discrimination in education and public utilities.
Mr. López Rivera has now been incarcerated for nearly three decades, subjected to the oppressive conditions in maximum security prisons in Marion, IL, and then Florence, CO. He has described his situation as being enclosed like a zoo animal in a cell eight feet wide by nine feet long for an average of 22 hours a day. This cruelty must end now.
In 1999 Mr. López Rivera was one of many Puerto Rican political prisoners who was offered conditional clemency by then President Bill Clinton. But he rejected the chance to reduce his sentence out of solidarity with Carlos Alberto Torres and Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres, two of his compañeros who were not included in the clemency offer.
As has become the norm for the continued incarceration of political prisoners, Mr. López Rivera has been accused of showing no “remorse” or “contrition.” Mr. López Rivera has no reason to apologize for his part in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. The people of Puerto Rico have every right to demand an end to the more than a century of colonial oppression meted out by the United States of America. We demand that Oscar López Rivera be released immediately and unconditionally.
From The Partisan Defense Committee-Support Fight to Free Private Bradley Manning
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
Support Fight to Free Private Bradley Manning
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
The release by WikiLeaks of some 250,000 State Department cables has provoked a vicious campaign of retaliation by the rulers of U.S. imperialism against both WikiLeaks and Army Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking secret material. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been held under house arrest in Britain since mid December, faces patently trumped-up accusations of “rape” and “sexual molestation” in Sweden. On February 24, a British court ordered his extradition, a decision Assange is fighting. Manning is being held under torturous conditions of solitary confinement at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia.
Manning incurred Washington’s wrath when a video of a U.S. war crime in Baghdad was posted last April by WikiLeaks. It showed an Apache helicopter gunning down and killing at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, as the pilots gloated over the carnage. Manning is a courageous individual who—if he was, indeed, the source of the leaks—performed a laudable service by lifting, however slightly, the veil of secrecy and lies that shrouds the imperialists’ machinations.
Manning was put on “suicide watch,” meaning that he was stripped of all his clothes except his underwear, and his glasses were taken away, leaving him in “essential blindness,” as he put it. He is now under “prevention of injury watch.” He is given no sheet or pillow and is confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. Even his one hour of exercise is done in solitary. Guards check on him every five minutes and his cell is constantly lit, including when he tries to sleep. A 24 January Amnesty International report stated: “Manning is classed as a ‘maximum custody’ detainee, despite having no history of violence or disciplinary offences in custody. This means he is shackled at the hands and legs during all visits and denied opportunities to work, which would allow him to leave his cell.”
Workers and the oppressed throughout the world must champion the cause of Private Manning and demand his immediate freedom. The Partisan Defense Committee has contributed to Bradley Manning’s defense and encourages others to do the same. Send checks earmarked “Manning defense” to: The Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Avenue #41, Oakland, CA 94610.
4 March 2011
Support Fight to Free Private Bradley Manning
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
The release by WikiLeaks of some 250,000 State Department cables has provoked a vicious campaign of retaliation by the rulers of U.S. imperialism against both WikiLeaks and Army Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking secret material. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been held under house arrest in Britain since mid December, faces patently trumped-up accusations of “rape” and “sexual molestation” in Sweden. On February 24, a British court ordered his extradition, a decision Assange is fighting. Manning is being held under torturous conditions of solitary confinement at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia.
Manning incurred Washington’s wrath when a video of a U.S. war crime in Baghdad was posted last April by WikiLeaks. It showed an Apache helicopter gunning down and killing at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, as the pilots gloated over the carnage. Manning is a courageous individual who—if he was, indeed, the source of the leaks—performed a laudable service by lifting, however slightly, the veil of secrecy and lies that shrouds the imperialists’ machinations.
Manning was put on “suicide watch,” meaning that he was stripped of all his clothes except his underwear, and his glasses were taken away, leaving him in “essential blindness,” as he put it. He is now under “prevention of injury watch.” He is given no sheet or pillow and is confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. Even his one hour of exercise is done in solitary. Guards check on him every five minutes and his cell is constantly lit, including when he tries to sleep. A 24 January Amnesty International report stated: “Manning is classed as a ‘maximum custody’ detainee, despite having no history of violence or disciplinary offences in custody. This means he is shackled at the hands and legs during all visits and denied opportunities to work, which would allow him to leave his cell.”
Workers and the oppressed throughout the world must champion the cause of Private Manning and demand his immediate freedom. The Partisan Defense Committee has contributed to Bradley Manning’s defense and encourages others to do the same. Send checks earmarked “Manning defense” to: The Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Avenue #41, Oakland, CA 94610.
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Third World Congress (1921)-The Communist International and the Red International of Trade Unions
Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Third World Congress Of The CI (1921)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
Third Congress of the Communist International
The Communist International and the Red International of Trade Unions
The Struggle Against the Amsterdam (scab) Trade-Union International
Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
12 July 1921
I
The bourgeoisie keeps the working class enslaved not only by means of naked force, but also by subtle deception. In the hands of the bourgeoisie, the school, the church, parliament, art, literature, the daily press – all become powerful means of duping the working masses and spreading the ideas of the bourgeoisie into the proletarian milieu.
One of the ideas which the ruling classes have succeeded in inculcating into the working masses is trade-union neutrality – the idea that trade unions are non-political organisations and should have no party affiliations.
Over recent decades and, in particular, since the end of the imperialist war, the trade unions in Europe and America have become the largest of the proletarian organisations, in some countries uniting the entire working class. The bourgeoisie is well aware that the future of the capitalist system in the next few years depends on the extent to which the trade unions free themselves from bourgeois influences. Hence the frantic efforts of the international bourgeoisie and its social-democratic hangers-on to maintain, at all costs, the hold of bourgeois social democratic ideology over the trade unions.
As the bourgeoisie cannot openly call on the workers’ trade unions to support the bourgeois parties, it urges the unions not to support any party, the revolutionary Communist Party included. The sole aim of the bourgeoisie, however, is to prevent the trade unions from supporting the Communist Party.
The idea that trade unions should be neutral and apolitical has a long history. For decades the trade unions of Great Britain, Germany, America and other countries have believed in this idea. The priest-ridden Christian trade unions, the leaders of the bourgeois Hirsch Duncker trade unions, the respectable and peace-loving British trade unions, the members of the free trade unions of Germany and many syndicalists – all have come to accept it. Legien, Gompers, Jouhaux, etc. have been preaching neutrality for years.
In reality the trade unions have never been and could never have been neutral, even had they tried. Not only is trade-union neutrality harmful to the working class, but it cannot possibly be maintained. In the struggle between capital and labour, no mass workers’ organisation can remain neutral. The trade unions cannot remain uncommitted in their relations with the bourgeois parties and the parties of the proletariat. The leaders of the bourgeoisie are perfectly aware of this. But, just as it is essential to the bourgeoisie that the masses believe in life after death, so is it essential that they also believe that trade unions can be apolitical organisations and neutral in their relations with the workers’ Communist Party. In order to maintain its rule and squeeze surplus value from the workers, the bourgeoisie needs not only the priest, the policeman, the general and the informer, but also the trade-union bureaucrat and the kind of ‘workers” leader that teaches trade-unionists the virtues of neutrality and non-participation in political struggle.
Even before the imperialist war broke out, the more politically educated workers in Europe and America had begun to see through the idea of neutrality. The inadequacy of this teaching became even more obvious as the class contradictions deepened. When the imperialist slaughter began, the old trade-union leaders were forced to drop their masks of neutrality and openly take sides, each with their own national bourgeoisie.
During the imperialist war the social democrats and syndicalists who had for years preached that trade unions were apolitical placed their organisations at the service of the murderous policy of the bourgeois parties; those who had yesterday preached trade-union ‘neutrality’ now became the undisguised agents of certain political parties, but parties of the bourgeoisie, not parties of the working class.
Now that the imperialist war has ended, these same social-democratic and syndicalist trade-union leaders are trying once more to hide behind the mask of trade-union neutrality. Now that the war emergency is over, these agents of the bourgeoisie are adapting themselves to the new situation; they are trying to divert the workers from the path of revolution onto a path that profits the bourgeoisie alone.
Economics and politics are inseparably linked. This connection is particularly close in epochs such as the present. All important questions of political life should interest not only the workers’ party, but also the proletarian trade unions, and, similarly, all important economic questions should interest both trade union and workers’ party. When the French imperialist government calls up certain age-groups in order to occupy the Ruhr basin and crush Germany, can the French proletarian and trade-union movement say that this is a purely political question which does not concern the trade unions? Can a revolutionary French trade-unionist remain neutral on such a question? Or, to take another example: if a purely economic movement develops in Britain such as the present coal-miners’ strike, can the Communist Party say that this is just a trade-union question that does not concern it? At a time when millions of unemployed are faced with the struggle against poverty and need, when the question of requisitioning the homes of the bourgeoisie to relieve the housing shortage has to be raised, when the broad masses of workers are forced by circumstances to consider the question of arming the proletariat, when, first in one country and then in another, the workers organise the seizure of factories – at such a time, to say that the trade unions must not interfere in the political struggle and must remain neutral in relation to political parties means in practice to serve the bourgeoisie.
Despite the wide variety of names adopted by the political parties in Europe and in America, they can, on the whole, be divided into three groups: 1) parties of the bourgeoisie 2) parties of the petty bourgeoisie (mainly the social-democratic parties) and 3) parties of the proletariat (the Communists). Those trade unions which proclaim themselves neutral in relation to the three above-mentioned groups of parties in practice support the parties of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie.
II
The Amsterdam Trade-Union International is the organisation in which the Second International and the Two-and-a-Half International have met and joined hands. The bourgeoisie everywhere looks to this organisation with hope and trust. The neutrality of the trade unions is the fundamental principle of the IFTU. It is no accident that the bourgeoisie and its hangers-on – the social democrats and the right-wing syndicalists – are trying to rally the broad working masses in Western Europe and America under the slogan of trade-union neutrality. The Second International, which was more obviously political and openly went over to the side of the bourgeoisie, has completely collapsed, while the IFTU, which is attempting to hide its true colours once more behind the cover of neutrality, is having a certain success. Under the flag of neutrality, the IFTU carries out the dirtiest and most difficult missions of the bourgeoisie. The miners’ strike in Britain, for example, was crushed by the infamous J.H. Thomas, who is both chairman of the Second International and one of the best-known leaders of the IFTU. The IFTU is a party to the lowering of workers’ wages and to the organised robbery of the German workers as payment for the sins of the German imperialist bourgeoisie.
The workers’ leaders – Leipart, Grassman, Albert Thomas, Jouhaux, J.H. Thomas, Wissell, Bauer, and Robert Schmidt – have agreed on a division of labour. Some of them, who were previously leaders of the trade unions, have now entered bourgeois governments, serving as ministers, commissars, etc., while others, of the same flesh and blood, head the IFTU and preach neutrality in the political struggle to their trade-union members.
The IFTU is at the present time the main supporter of international capital. The struggle against capitalism cannot be waged successfully unless the need to fight this conception of the trade unions as apolitical and neutral is grasped. Before the most effective methods of struggle against the IFTU can be worked out, it is essential first and foremost to establish a clear and exact definition of the relations between the Party and the trade unions in each country.
III
The Communist Party is the vanguard of the proletariat. Its members have fully understood how the proletariat is to be liberated from capitalist oppression and have consciously accepted the Communist programme.
Trade unions are mass organisations of the proletariat. They are increasingly developed into organisations which unite all the workers of a given branch of industry; they include in their ranks not only dedicated Communists, but also workers who have little interest in politics and workers who are politically backward and who only gradually, through their own experience, come to understand what Communism means. In many respects the role of the trade union varies according to the stage the revolution has reached. But at every stage the trade unions are organisations which rally broader layers of the masses than does the Party. Their relation to the Party is to some extent like that of the provinces to the centre. In the period before the seizure of power, the truly revolutionary trade unions organise the workers, primarily on an economic basis, to fight for gains which can be won under capitalism. However, the main object of all their activity must be the organisation of the proletarian struggle to overthrow capitalism by proletarian revolution. At a time of revolution the genuinely revolutionary trade unions work closely with the Party; they organise the masses to attack capitalist strongholds and are responsible for laying the foundations of socialist production. After power has been won and consolidated, economic organisation becomes the central focus of trade-union work. The unions devote almost all their forces to the task of organising the economy on a socialist basis and are effectively transformed into a practical school of Communism. At all three stages of the struggle the trade unions must support the proletarian vanguard – the Communist Party – which leads the struggle of the proletariat. To achieve this end, the Communists and their sympathisers must organise cells within the trade unions; these cells are completely subordinate to the Communist Party as a whole.
The tactic formulated by the Second Congress of the Communist International of setting up Communist cells in each trade union has over the past year proved itself to be correct. Significant results have been achieved in Germany, Britain, France and Italy and in a number of other countries. The fact that considerable numbers of the less experienced workers have recently been leaving the free unions in Germany, out of disappointment at not receiving any direct advantages, should not alter the principled position taken by the Communist International on the participation of Communists in the trade-union movement. Communists must explain to the proletariat that their problems can be answered not by leaving the old trade unions for new ones, or by staying outside the unions, but by revolutionising the trade unions, ridding them of reformist influence and the treacherous reformist leaders, and transforming them into a genuine stronghold of the revolutionary proletariat.
IV
The principal task of all Communists over the next period, is to wage a firm and vigorous struggle to win the majority of the workers organised in the trade unions. The Communist must not be discouraged by the present reactionary mood of the labour unions, but must try to overcome all resistance and by actively participating in their day-to-day struggle, win the unions to Communism. The true measure of the strength of a Communist Party is the influence it has on the mass of trade-unionists. The Party must learn how to influence the unions without being tempted to put itself forward as their guardian. Only the Communist cells of the union are subject to Party control; the union as such is independent of any control. The Communists have to rely on the persistent, selfless and intelligent work on the part of the Communist trade-union cells in order to make the trade unions as a whole willing and eager to follow their advice.
In France the trade unions are at present going through a period of healthy ferment. The working class is gradually beginning to recover strength after the crisis in its ranks, and is learning to recognise the treachery of the social-reformists and syndicalists for what it is.
Some of the revolutionary syndicalists in France are still prejudiced against the idea of political struggle and a proletarian political party. They still subscribe to the principle of neutrality as expressed in the well-known Amiens Charter of 1906. This incorrect and vulnerable position held by a wing of the revolutionary syndicalists is potentially dangerous for the movement. If this wing were to gain the majority in the unions, it would not know how to act and would be helpless against the agents of capital, the Jouhauxs, the Dumoulins, etc.
The revolutionary syndicalists will lack a firm line until the Communist Party itself develops a consistent policy. The French Communist Party must seek to co-operate in a friendly fashion with the most politically advanced of the revolutionary syndicalists. It is, however, essential that the Party rely primarily on its own members, forming Communist cells wherever it has two or three members. The Party must initiate an immediate agitational campaign against the concept of neutrality. It must explain in a friendly but firm way the incorrect aspects of revolutionary syndicalism. This is the only approach that can revolutionise the French trade-union movement and bring about the close co-operation of the Party and the movement.
In Italy the situation has certain specific aspects. The rank-and-file members of the trade unions are revolutionary, but the leadership of the Confederazione del Lavoro is in the hands of out-and-out reformists and centrists whose sympathies are with the IFTU. The first task of the Italian Communists is therefore to organise a firm struggle within the trade unions around day-to-day issues to expose systematically and patiently the treachery and indecision of the leaders, thereby wresting the trade unions from their control.
The Italian Communists should adopt the same attitude towards the revolutionary syndicalists as the French Communists.
In Spain the trade-union movement is very revolutionary in outlook, but has no clearly defined goal. The Communist Party is young and relatively weak. The Communists must do everything possible to secure a firm footing in the trade unions, giving active support and advice, conducting a vigorous campaign of agitation within the unions and establishing firm links between their party and the unions as a first step towards co-ordinating the struggle.
Important developments are taking place within the British trade-union movement. The unions are rapidly adopting a revolutionary orientation. The mass movement is growing, and the old trade-union leaders are being thrust aside. The Party must do its utmost to establish itself firmly in the largest unions (the miners’ unions etc.). Party members must be active in their unions and must work consistently and hard to extend Communist influence. Every effort must be made to forge closer contacts with the masses.
The same revolutionary process is occurring in America, though more slowly. Communists must on no account leave the ranks of the reactionary Federation of Labour [composed in the main of skilled workers]. On the contrary, they should seek to gain a foothold in the old trade unions with the aim of revolutionising them. It is vital that they work with the IWW members most sympathetic to the Party; this does not, however, preclude arguing against the IWW’s political positions.
In Japan abroad trade-union movement is developing spontaneously, but so far no clear leadership has emerged. Japanese Communists must support this movement and exert a Marxist influence upon it.
In Czechoslovakia our Party has the support of the majority of the working class, but the trade-union movement is still largely in the hands of the social-patriots, and is furthermore split along ethnic lines. This is the result of poor organisation and indecisive policies on our part. The Party must make a great effort to improve the situation and win the leadership of the trade-union movement. The formation of Communist cells in the unions and of a central trade-union body for Communists of all nationalities is absolutely essential. Every effort must also be made to unite the various politically divided unions.
In Austria and Belgium the social-patriots have skilfully managed to achieve a firm influence on the trade unions. In these two countries the trade-union movement is the main arena of struggle, and therefore the Communists should direct all their attention to this area of work.
In Norway the Party has the support of the majority of workers and must now strengthen its position in the trade unions and rid the leadership of its centrist elements.
In Sweden the Party has to contend not only with reformism, but also with petty-bourgeois currents in the socialist movement.
In Germany the Party is on the right road to winning over the trade unions gradually. On no account should concessions be made to those who advocate withdrawal from the trade unions. This would play into the hands of the social-patriots. All attempts to exclude Communists from the unions must be stubbornly resisted, and every effort must be made to win the majority of the organised workers.
V
These considerations determine the relations to be established between the Communist International on the one hand and the Red Trade-Union International on the other.
It is the task of the Communist International to direct not only the political struggle of the proletariat in the narrow sense of the word, but the general struggle for liberation, whatever forms it may take. The Communist International must be more than the arithmetical total of the Central Committees of the Communist Parties of the various countries. The Communist International must inspire and unite the work and struggle of all proletarian organisations, both the purely political and the trade-union, co-operative, Soviet and cultural organisations, etc.
The RILU, unlike the scab Amsterdam International, can in no circumstances stand above politics or adopt an attitude of neutrality. Any organisation that wanted to be neutral in relation to the II, the “Two-and-a-Half” and III Internationals would inevitably become a pawn in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The programme of action of the International Council of the Red Trade Unions which is outlined below, and which the Third World Congress of the Communist International is to present to the first Congress of the Red Trade Unions, will be defended in practice by the Communist Parties and the Communist International alone. For this reason, if for no other, the Red trade unions that wish to revolutionise the trade-union movement in every country and honestly and firmly carry out the movement’s new tasks will have to work in close contact with the Communist Party, and the International Council of Red Trade Unions will have to co-ordinate all its work with that of the Communist International.
The respect for neutrality, independence, apoliticism and non-partisanship that some honest revolutionary syndicalists in France, Spain, Italy and certain other countries harbour is nothing other than a concession to bourgeois ideology. The Red trade unions will be incapable of defeating the scab Amsterdam International or of overthrowing capitalism unless they repudiate once and for all the bourgeois ideas of independence and neutrality.
In order to conserve strength and concentrate striking power, the ideal solution would be the formation of a single proletarian International, uniting in its ranks both political parties and other forms of working-class organisation. Undoubtedly this is the organisation of the future. However, in the present transitional period, given the diverse types of trade union that actually exist, the essential need is for an independent international association of Red trade unions which supports the general outline of the platform of the Communist International, but sets less strict conditions for membership than the Communist International can allow.
The Third Congress of the Communist International pledges wholehearted support to the International Council of Red Trade Unions which is to be organised along these lines. To ensure closer contact between the Communist International and the RILU, the Third Congress of the Communist International proposes that it should be permanently represented by three members on the International Council of Red Trade Unions and vice versa.
The programme of action which the Communist International would like to see accepted by the Constituent World Congress of the Red Trade Unions is along the following lines:
Programme of Action
1 The acute world economic crisis, the catastrophic fall of wholesale prices, the overproduction of goods coupled with their actual scarcity, the aggressive anti-working-class policy pursued by the bourgeoisie, which aims at lowering wages and throwing the workers back decades – all this has led to discontent among the masses on the one hand and to the bankruptcy of the old trade unions and their methods of struggle on the other. The revolutionary, class-conscious trade unions the world over are confronted with new tasks. In this period of capitalist disintegration new forms of economic struggle have to be adopted and the trade unions have to pursue an aggressive economic policy in order to counter the capitalist attack and go over to the offensive.
2 The main tactic of the trade unions has to be the direct action of the revolutionary masses and their organisations against the capitalist system. The gains the workers make are in direct proportion to the degree of direct action taken and of revolutionary pressure exerted by the masses. By direct action is meant all forms of direct pressure on the employers and the state – boycotts, strikes, street demonstrations, the seizure of factories, armed insurrection and other revolutionary activities which unite the working class in the struggle for socialism. The aim of the revolutionary class trade unions is therefore to make direct action an instrument in the education and military training of the working masses for the social revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
3 The most recent years of struggle have shown especially clearly the weakness of the trade-union organisations. The fact that workers in the same enterprise belong to several different unions reduces their ability to struggle. An unremitting fight therefore has to be fought to restructure the unions so that each union represents a whole branch of industry instead of a single trade. “Only one union in a factory” – this is the organisational slogan. The fusion of unions should be carried out in a revolutionary way – the question should be discussed directly by the members of the unions at the factories and subsequently by district and regional conferences and national congresses.
4 Each factory must become a stronghold of the revolution. The traditional forms of contact between rank-and-file members of the unions (through dues collectors, representatives, delegates) must be superseded by the formation of factory committees. All workers, whatever their political convictions, should participate in the election of the factory committees. RILU supporters should strive to involve all the workers of the factory in the elections of their representative body. Any attempt to elect exclusively like-minded comrades to the factory committees, thus excluding the broad masses who remain outside the Party, should be sharply condemned. This would be a Party cell rather than a factory committee. The revolutionary workers must influence the general meeting and the factory committee through the Party cells, the committees of action and the work of their rank-and-file members.
5 The first question which needs to be put before the workers and the factory committees is the issue of maintenance money that employers should pay workers made redundant. In no circumstance should factory owners be allowed to throw workers out onto the streets without bearing any of the consequences. They ought to pay full redundancy pay. The unemployed and, to an even greater extent, the employed workers should be organised around this question. They should be shown that the problem of unemployment cannot be solved as long as capitalist relations exist and that the best method of beating unemployment is to fight for social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
6 At the present time the closure of factories and the reduction of the working day are two of the most important weapons used by the bourgeoisie to force the workers to accept lower wages, longer hours and the ending of factory agreements. The lock-out is increasingly becoming the form of ‘direct action’ used by the organised employers against the organised working masses. The unions must fight the closure of factories and demand that the workers have the right to investigate the reasons behind the closure. Special control commissions to deal with raw materials, fuel and orders must be established to carry out on-the-spot checks of the raw materials in stock, the materials essential to production and the bank balance of the factory or institution.
Specially elected control committees must undertake a thorough investigation of financial relations between the concern in question and other concerns – this raises in a practical way the need to open the books.
7 Factory occupations and work-ins are also forms of struggle against the mass closure of factories and wage cuts. In view of the prevailing lack of consumer goods, it is particularly important that production be maintained and unions should not permit the deliberate closure of factories. Other methods of putting pressure on capital can and must be used, in accordance with local conditions, the industrial and political situation, and the intensity of the social struggle. The administration of factories occupied by workers should be placed in the hands of factory committees and union representatives specially picked for the purpose.
8 The economic struggle should be fought around the slogan of raising wages and working conditions far above pre-war levels. Attempts to reintroduce pre-war working conditions must be resisted in a determined and revolutionary manner. The working class must be compensated for the privations of war-time by an increase in wages and an improvement in labour conditions. Capitalist arguments about foreign competition should always be disregarded: the revolutionary trade unions must approach the question of wages and labour conditions from the standpoint of the protection and the welfare of the labour force and not from the standpoint of competition between the exploiters of different nations.
9 If capitalist policy, as a result of the economic crisis, is leading to wage cuts, the revolutionary trade unions should make sure that their forces are not divided by wages being lowered first in one factory then in another. The workers in the socially useful branches of the economy (miners, railway workers, electricity and gas workers) must struggle from the start so that the resistance to the capitalist attack affects the key centres of the country’s economic life. All types of resistance, from guerrilla actions to general national strikes of individual basic industries, can be used.
10 The trade unions must consider in practical terms the question of preparing and organising industrial strike action in particular industries on an international scale. The temporary standstill on an international scale of transport or coal-mining is a powerful weapon against the reactionary intentions of the bourgeoisie. The trade unions must follow world events closely in order to choose the most appropriate moment for economic struggle. They must not for a moment forget that international action of any kind is only possible with the formation of international trade unions that are genuinely revolutionary and have nothing in common with the scab Amsterdam International.
11 The revolutionary movement must strongly criticise the absolute faith in the value of collective agreements preached by opportunists everywhere. The collective agreement is nothing more than an armistice. The owners always violate these agreements at the earliest opportunity. This religious attitude towards collective agreements is evidence that bourgeois ideology is firmly rooted in the minds of the leaders of the working class. Revolutionary trade unions must not reject collective agreements, but they must understand that their value is limited, and must be prepared to break the agreements when this benefits the working class.
12 The struggle of the workers’ organisations against the individual employer or groups of employers should, while adapting itself to national and local conditions, also draw on all the experience acquired in previous struggles for working-class emancipation. Every important strike, for example, needs to be thoroughly prepared. Furthermore, from the outset the workers must form special groups to fight the strike-breakers and combat the provocative action of the various kinds of right-wing organisation which are encouraged by the bourgeois governments. The Fascists in Italy, the German technical emergency relief, the civilian organisations in France and Britain whose membership is composed of former officers and N.C.O.s – all these organisations have as their object the destruction and suppression of all working-class activity, not only by providing scab labour, but by smashing the working-class organisations and getting rid of their leaders. In such situations the organisation of special strike militias and special self-defence groups is a matter of life and death.
13 These defence organisations should not only resist the factory owners and the strike-breaking organisations – they should take the initiative in stopping the dispatch of goods to and from the factory where the strike is in progress. The transport workers’ union should play a particularly prominent role in such activity: it is its responsibility to hold up goods in transit, which can only be done, however, with the full support of all the workers in the area.
14 In the coming period the entire economic struggle of the working class must be conducted around the slogan of workers’ control over production. The workers should fight for the immediate introduction of workers’ control and not wait for the government and the ruling classes to think up some alternative. An uncompromising struggle has to be waged against all attempts by the ruling classes and the reformists to create intermediary labour associations and control commissions. Only when strict control over production is introduced can results be achieved. The revolutionary trade unions must resolutely fight against the way the leaders of the traditional unions, aided and abetted by the ruling class, use the idea of ‘nationalisation’ to blackmail and swindle the workers.
These gentlemen talk about peaceful socialisation only to divert the workers from revolutionary activity and social revolution.
15 Ideas of profit-sharing are put forward in order to play on the petty-bourgeois aspirations of the workers, diverting their attention from their long-term goals. Profit-sharing means that workers receive an insignificant part of the surplus value they produce, and the idea should therefore be subjected to harsh and rigorous criticism. “Not profit-sharing, but an end to capitalist profit” should be the slogan of the revolutionary unions.
16 In order to reduce or break the fighting power of the working class, the bourgeois states have resorted, under the pretence of protecting vital industries, to the temporary militarisation of industrial factories and whole branches of industry. Compulsory arbitration and conciliation commissions have been introduced, allegedly to prevent economic crises, but in actual fact to defend capital. In the interests of capital, direct taxation has been introduced, which places the burden of the war expenditure entirely on the shoulders of the workers and turns the employer into a tax-collector. The trade unions must put up a fierce fight against these state measures that serve only the interests of the capitalist class.
17 When they struggle for better labour conditions and living standards for the masses and the introduction of workers’ control, the Red unions should remember that these problems cannot be lastingly settled within the framework of capitalist relations. As the revolutionary trade unions win concessions from the ruling classes, step by step, forcing them to pass social legislation, they must make it clear to the working masses that only the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat can solve the social question. They must use every action, every local strike, every conflict, however minor, to argue their point. They must draw the lessons from the experience of struggle, raising the consciousness of the rank and file and preparing the workers for the time when it will be necessary and possible to achieve the social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
18 Every economic struggle is a political struggle, i.e., a struggle that concerns the class as a whole. However great working-class participation, the struggle can only be revolutionary and bring the proletariat maximum benefit if the revolutionary trade unions work in a close and unified fashion with the Communist Party of the country in question. The theory and practice of dividing the working-class struggle into two independent halves is extremely harmful, particularly in the present revolutionary situation. Every action requires the greatest possible concentration of forces, which can only be achieved if the working class, and all its Communist and revolutionary elements, give their utmost to the revolutionary struggle. If the Communist Parties and the revolutionary class-conscious trade unions work separately, their action is doomed to failure and defeat. It is for this reason that unity of action and close contact between the Communist Parties and the trade unions are prerequisites for success in the struggle against capitalism.
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Third Congress of the Communist International
The Communist International and the Red International of Trade Unions
The Struggle Against the Amsterdam (scab) Trade-Union International
Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
12 July 1921
I
The bourgeoisie keeps the working class enslaved not only by means of naked force, but also by subtle deception. In the hands of the bourgeoisie, the school, the church, parliament, art, literature, the daily press – all become powerful means of duping the working masses and spreading the ideas of the bourgeoisie into the proletarian milieu.
One of the ideas which the ruling classes have succeeded in inculcating into the working masses is trade-union neutrality – the idea that trade unions are non-political organisations and should have no party affiliations.
Over recent decades and, in particular, since the end of the imperialist war, the trade unions in Europe and America have become the largest of the proletarian organisations, in some countries uniting the entire working class. The bourgeoisie is well aware that the future of the capitalist system in the next few years depends on the extent to which the trade unions free themselves from bourgeois influences. Hence the frantic efforts of the international bourgeoisie and its social-democratic hangers-on to maintain, at all costs, the hold of bourgeois social democratic ideology over the trade unions.
As the bourgeoisie cannot openly call on the workers’ trade unions to support the bourgeois parties, it urges the unions not to support any party, the revolutionary Communist Party included. The sole aim of the bourgeoisie, however, is to prevent the trade unions from supporting the Communist Party.
The idea that trade unions should be neutral and apolitical has a long history. For decades the trade unions of Great Britain, Germany, America and other countries have believed in this idea. The priest-ridden Christian trade unions, the leaders of the bourgeois Hirsch Duncker trade unions, the respectable and peace-loving British trade unions, the members of the free trade unions of Germany and many syndicalists – all have come to accept it. Legien, Gompers, Jouhaux, etc. have been preaching neutrality for years.
In reality the trade unions have never been and could never have been neutral, even had they tried. Not only is trade-union neutrality harmful to the working class, but it cannot possibly be maintained. In the struggle between capital and labour, no mass workers’ organisation can remain neutral. The trade unions cannot remain uncommitted in their relations with the bourgeois parties and the parties of the proletariat. The leaders of the bourgeoisie are perfectly aware of this. But, just as it is essential to the bourgeoisie that the masses believe in life after death, so is it essential that they also believe that trade unions can be apolitical organisations and neutral in their relations with the workers’ Communist Party. In order to maintain its rule and squeeze surplus value from the workers, the bourgeoisie needs not only the priest, the policeman, the general and the informer, but also the trade-union bureaucrat and the kind of ‘workers” leader that teaches trade-unionists the virtues of neutrality and non-participation in political struggle.
Even before the imperialist war broke out, the more politically educated workers in Europe and America had begun to see through the idea of neutrality. The inadequacy of this teaching became even more obvious as the class contradictions deepened. When the imperialist slaughter began, the old trade-union leaders were forced to drop their masks of neutrality and openly take sides, each with their own national bourgeoisie.
During the imperialist war the social democrats and syndicalists who had for years preached that trade unions were apolitical placed their organisations at the service of the murderous policy of the bourgeois parties; those who had yesterday preached trade-union ‘neutrality’ now became the undisguised agents of certain political parties, but parties of the bourgeoisie, not parties of the working class.
Now that the imperialist war has ended, these same social-democratic and syndicalist trade-union leaders are trying once more to hide behind the mask of trade-union neutrality. Now that the war emergency is over, these agents of the bourgeoisie are adapting themselves to the new situation; they are trying to divert the workers from the path of revolution onto a path that profits the bourgeoisie alone.
Economics and politics are inseparably linked. This connection is particularly close in epochs such as the present. All important questions of political life should interest not only the workers’ party, but also the proletarian trade unions, and, similarly, all important economic questions should interest both trade union and workers’ party. When the French imperialist government calls up certain age-groups in order to occupy the Ruhr basin and crush Germany, can the French proletarian and trade-union movement say that this is a purely political question which does not concern the trade unions? Can a revolutionary French trade-unionist remain neutral on such a question? Or, to take another example: if a purely economic movement develops in Britain such as the present coal-miners’ strike, can the Communist Party say that this is just a trade-union question that does not concern it? At a time when millions of unemployed are faced with the struggle against poverty and need, when the question of requisitioning the homes of the bourgeoisie to relieve the housing shortage has to be raised, when the broad masses of workers are forced by circumstances to consider the question of arming the proletariat, when, first in one country and then in another, the workers organise the seizure of factories – at such a time, to say that the trade unions must not interfere in the political struggle and must remain neutral in relation to political parties means in practice to serve the bourgeoisie.
Despite the wide variety of names adopted by the political parties in Europe and in America, they can, on the whole, be divided into three groups: 1) parties of the bourgeoisie 2) parties of the petty bourgeoisie (mainly the social-democratic parties) and 3) parties of the proletariat (the Communists). Those trade unions which proclaim themselves neutral in relation to the three above-mentioned groups of parties in practice support the parties of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie.
II
The Amsterdam Trade-Union International is the organisation in which the Second International and the Two-and-a-Half International have met and joined hands. The bourgeoisie everywhere looks to this organisation with hope and trust. The neutrality of the trade unions is the fundamental principle of the IFTU. It is no accident that the bourgeoisie and its hangers-on – the social democrats and the right-wing syndicalists – are trying to rally the broad working masses in Western Europe and America under the slogan of trade-union neutrality. The Second International, which was more obviously political and openly went over to the side of the bourgeoisie, has completely collapsed, while the IFTU, which is attempting to hide its true colours once more behind the cover of neutrality, is having a certain success. Under the flag of neutrality, the IFTU carries out the dirtiest and most difficult missions of the bourgeoisie. The miners’ strike in Britain, for example, was crushed by the infamous J.H. Thomas, who is both chairman of the Second International and one of the best-known leaders of the IFTU. The IFTU is a party to the lowering of workers’ wages and to the organised robbery of the German workers as payment for the sins of the German imperialist bourgeoisie.
The workers’ leaders – Leipart, Grassman, Albert Thomas, Jouhaux, J.H. Thomas, Wissell, Bauer, and Robert Schmidt – have agreed on a division of labour. Some of them, who were previously leaders of the trade unions, have now entered bourgeois governments, serving as ministers, commissars, etc., while others, of the same flesh and blood, head the IFTU and preach neutrality in the political struggle to their trade-union members.
The IFTU is at the present time the main supporter of international capital. The struggle against capitalism cannot be waged successfully unless the need to fight this conception of the trade unions as apolitical and neutral is grasped. Before the most effective methods of struggle against the IFTU can be worked out, it is essential first and foremost to establish a clear and exact definition of the relations between the Party and the trade unions in each country.
III
The Communist Party is the vanguard of the proletariat. Its members have fully understood how the proletariat is to be liberated from capitalist oppression and have consciously accepted the Communist programme.
Trade unions are mass organisations of the proletariat. They are increasingly developed into organisations which unite all the workers of a given branch of industry; they include in their ranks not only dedicated Communists, but also workers who have little interest in politics and workers who are politically backward and who only gradually, through their own experience, come to understand what Communism means. In many respects the role of the trade union varies according to the stage the revolution has reached. But at every stage the trade unions are organisations which rally broader layers of the masses than does the Party. Their relation to the Party is to some extent like that of the provinces to the centre. In the period before the seizure of power, the truly revolutionary trade unions organise the workers, primarily on an economic basis, to fight for gains which can be won under capitalism. However, the main object of all their activity must be the organisation of the proletarian struggle to overthrow capitalism by proletarian revolution. At a time of revolution the genuinely revolutionary trade unions work closely with the Party; they organise the masses to attack capitalist strongholds and are responsible for laying the foundations of socialist production. After power has been won and consolidated, economic organisation becomes the central focus of trade-union work. The unions devote almost all their forces to the task of organising the economy on a socialist basis and are effectively transformed into a practical school of Communism. At all three stages of the struggle the trade unions must support the proletarian vanguard – the Communist Party – which leads the struggle of the proletariat. To achieve this end, the Communists and their sympathisers must organise cells within the trade unions; these cells are completely subordinate to the Communist Party as a whole.
The tactic formulated by the Second Congress of the Communist International of setting up Communist cells in each trade union has over the past year proved itself to be correct. Significant results have been achieved in Germany, Britain, France and Italy and in a number of other countries. The fact that considerable numbers of the less experienced workers have recently been leaving the free unions in Germany, out of disappointment at not receiving any direct advantages, should not alter the principled position taken by the Communist International on the participation of Communists in the trade-union movement. Communists must explain to the proletariat that their problems can be answered not by leaving the old trade unions for new ones, or by staying outside the unions, but by revolutionising the trade unions, ridding them of reformist influence and the treacherous reformist leaders, and transforming them into a genuine stronghold of the revolutionary proletariat.
IV
The principal task of all Communists over the next period, is to wage a firm and vigorous struggle to win the majority of the workers organised in the trade unions. The Communist must not be discouraged by the present reactionary mood of the labour unions, but must try to overcome all resistance and by actively participating in their day-to-day struggle, win the unions to Communism. The true measure of the strength of a Communist Party is the influence it has on the mass of trade-unionists. The Party must learn how to influence the unions without being tempted to put itself forward as their guardian. Only the Communist cells of the union are subject to Party control; the union as such is independent of any control. The Communists have to rely on the persistent, selfless and intelligent work on the part of the Communist trade-union cells in order to make the trade unions as a whole willing and eager to follow their advice.
In France the trade unions are at present going through a period of healthy ferment. The working class is gradually beginning to recover strength after the crisis in its ranks, and is learning to recognise the treachery of the social-reformists and syndicalists for what it is.
Some of the revolutionary syndicalists in France are still prejudiced against the idea of political struggle and a proletarian political party. They still subscribe to the principle of neutrality as expressed in the well-known Amiens Charter of 1906. This incorrect and vulnerable position held by a wing of the revolutionary syndicalists is potentially dangerous for the movement. If this wing were to gain the majority in the unions, it would not know how to act and would be helpless against the agents of capital, the Jouhauxs, the Dumoulins, etc.
The revolutionary syndicalists will lack a firm line until the Communist Party itself develops a consistent policy. The French Communist Party must seek to co-operate in a friendly fashion with the most politically advanced of the revolutionary syndicalists. It is, however, essential that the Party rely primarily on its own members, forming Communist cells wherever it has two or three members. The Party must initiate an immediate agitational campaign against the concept of neutrality. It must explain in a friendly but firm way the incorrect aspects of revolutionary syndicalism. This is the only approach that can revolutionise the French trade-union movement and bring about the close co-operation of the Party and the movement.
In Italy the situation has certain specific aspects. The rank-and-file members of the trade unions are revolutionary, but the leadership of the Confederazione del Lavoro is in the hands of out-and-out reformists and centrists whose sympathies are with the IFTU. The first task of the Italian Communists is therefore to organise a firm struggle within the trade unions around day-to-day issues to expose systematically and patiently the treachery and indecision of the leaders, thereby wresting the trade unions from their control.
The Italian Communists should adopt the same attitude towards the revolutionary syndicalists as the French Communists.
In Spain the trade-union movement is very revolutionary in outlook, but has no clearly defined goal. The Communist Party is young and relatively weak. The Communists must do everything possible to secure a firm footing in the trade unions, giving active support and advice, conducting a vigorous campaign of agitation within the unions and establishing firm links between their party and the unions as a first step towards co-ordinating the struggle.
Important developments are taking place within the British trade-union movement. The unions are rapidly adopting a revolutionary orientation. The mass movement is growing, and the old trade-union leaders are being thrust aside. The Party must do its utmost to establish itself firmly in the largest unions (the miners’ unions etc.). Party members must be active in their unions and must work consistently and hard to extend Communist influence. Every effort must be made to forge closer contacts with the masses.
The same revolutionary process is occurring in America, though more slowly. Communists must on no account leave the ranks of the reactionary Federation of Labour [composed in the main of skilled workers]. On the contrary, they should seek to gain a foothold in the old trade unions with the aim of revolutionising them. It is vital that they work with the IWW members most sympathetic to the Party; this does not, however, preclude arguing against the IWW’s political positions.
In Japan abroad trade-union movement is developing spontaneously, but so far no clear leadership has emerged. Japanese Communists must support this movement and exert a Marxist influence upon it.
In Czechoslovakia our Party has the support of the majority of the working class, but the trade-union movement is still largely in the hands of the social-patriots, and is furthermore split along ethnic lines. This is the result of poor organisation and indecisive policies on our part. The Party must make a great effort to improve the situation and win the leadership of the trade-union movement. The formation of Communist cells in the unions and of a central trade-union body for Communists of all nationalities is absolutely essential. Every effort must also be made to unite the various politically divided unions.
In Austria and Belgium the social-patriots have skilfully managed to achieve a firm influence on the trade unions. In these two countries the trade-union movement is the main arena of struggle, and therefore the Communists should direct all their attention to this area of work.
In Norway the Party has the support of the majority of workers and must now strengthen its position in the trade unions and rid the leadership of its centrist elements.
In Sweden the Party has to contend not only with reformism, but also with petty-bourgeois currents in the socialist movement.
In Germany the Party is on the right road to winning over the trade unions gradually. On no account should concessions be made to those who advocate withdrawal from the trade unions. This would play into the hands of the social-patriots. All attempts to exclude Communists from the unions must be stubbornly resisted, and every effort must be made to win the majority of the organised workers.
V
These considerations determine the relations to be established between the Communist International on the one hand and the Red Trade-Union International on the other.
It is the task of the Communist International to direct not only the political struggle of the proletariat in the narrow sense of the word, but the general struggle for liberation, whatever forms it may take. The Communist International must be more than the arithmetical total of the Central Committees of the Communist Parties of the various countries. The Communist International must inspire and unite the work and struggle of all proletarian organisations, both the purely political and the trade-union, co-operative, Soviet and cultural organisations, etc.
The RILU, unlike the scab Amsterdam International, can in no circumstances stand above politics or adopt an attitude of neutrality. Any organisation that wanted to be neutral in relation to the II, the “Two-and-a-Half” and III Internationals would inevitably become a pawn in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The programme of action of the International Council of the Red Trade Unions which is outlined below, and which the Third World Congress of the Communist International is to present to the first Congress of the Red Trade Unions, will be defended in practice by the Communist Parties and the Communist International alone. For this reason, if for no other, the Red trade unions that wish to revolutionise the trade-union movement in every country and honestly and firmly carry out the movement’s new tasks will have to work in close contact with the Communist Party, and the International Council of Red Trade Unions will have to co-ordinate all its work with that of the Communist International.
The respect for neutrality, independence, apoliticism and non-partisanship that some honest revolutionary syndicalists in France, Spain, Italy and certain other countries harbour is nothing other than a concession to bourgeois ideology. The Red trade unions will be incapable of defeating the scab Amsterdam International or of overthrowing capitalism unless they repudiate once and for all the bourgeois ideas of independence and neutrality.
In order to conserve strength and concentrate striking power, the ideal solution would be the formation of a single proletarian International, uniting in its ranks both political parties and other forms of working-class organisation. Undoubtedly this is the organisation of the future. However, in the present transitional period, given the diverse types of trade union that actually exist, the essential need is for an independent international association of Red trade unions which supports the general outline of the platform of the Communist International, but sets less strict conditions for membership than the Communist International can allow.
The Third Congress of the Communist International pledges wholehearted support to the International Council of Red Trade Unions which is to be organised along these lines. To ensure closer contact between the Communist International and the RILU, the Third Congress of the Communist International proposes that it should be permanently represented by three members on the International Council of Red Trade Unions and vice versa.
The programme of action which the Communist International would like to see accepted by the Constituent World Congress of the Red Trade Unions is along the following lines:
Programme of Action
1 The acute world economic crisis, the catastrophic fall of wholesale prices, the overproduction of goods coupled with their actual scarcity, the aggressive anti-working-class policy pursued by the bourgeoisie, which aims at lowering wages and throwing the workers back decades – all this has led to discontent among the masses on the one hand and to the bankruptcy of the old trade unions and their methods of struggle on the other. The revolutionary, class-conscious trade unions the world over are confronted with new tasks. In this period of capitalist disintegration new forms of economic struggle have to be adopted and the trade unions have to pursue an aggressive economic policy in order to counter the capitalist attack and go over to the offensive.
2 The main tactic of the trade unions has to be the direct action of the revolutionary masses and their organisations against the capitalist system. The gains the workers make are in direct proportion to the degree of direct action taken and of revolutionary pressure exerted by the masses. By direct action is meant all forms of direct pressure on the employers and the state – boycotts, strikes, street demonstrations, the seizure of factories, armed insurrection and other revolutionary activities which unite the working class in the struggle for socialism. The aim of the revolutionary class trade unions is therefore to make direct action an instrument in the education and military training of the working masses for the social revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
3 The most recent years of struggle have shown especially clearly the weakness of the trade-union organisations. The fact that workers in the same enterprise belong to several different unions reduces their ability to struggle. An unremitting fight therefore has to be fought to restructure the unions so that each union represents a whole branch of industry instead of a single trade. “Only one union in a factory” – this is the organisational slogan. The fusion of unions should be carried out in a revolutionary way – the question should be discussed directly by the members of the unions at the factories and subsequently by district and regional conferences and national congresses.
4 Each factory must become a stronghold of the revolution. The traditional forms of contact between rank-and-file members of the unions (through dues collectors, representatives, delegates) must be superseded by the formation of factory committees. All workers, whatever their political convictions, should participate in the election of the factory committees. RILU supporters should strive to involve all the workers of the factory in the elections of their representative body. Any attempt to elect exclusively like-minded comrades to the factory committees, thus excluding the broad masses who remain outside the Party, should be sharply condemned. This would be a Party cell rather than a factory committee. The revolutionary workers must influence the general meeting and the factory committee through the Party cells, the committees of action and the work of their rank-and-file members.
5 The first question which needs to be put before the workers and the factory committees is the issue of maintenance money that employers should pay workers made redundant. In no circumstance should factory owners be allowed to throw workers out onto the streets without bearing any of the consequences. They ought to pay full redundancy pay. The unemployed and, to an even greater extent, the employed workers should be organised around this question. They should be shown that the problem of unemployment cannot be solved as long as capitalist relations exist and that the best method of beating unemployment is to fight for social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
6 At the present time the closure of factories and the reduction of the working day are two of the most important weapons used by the bourgeoisie to force the workers to accept lower wages, longer hours and the ending of factory agreements. The lock-out is increasingly becoming the form of ‘direct action’ used by the organised employers against the organised working masses. The unions must fight the closure of factories and demand that the workers have the right to investigate the reasons behind the closure. Special control commissions to deal with raw materials, fuel and orders must be established to carry out on-the-spot checks of the raw materials in stock, the materials essential to production and the bank balance of the factory or institution.
Specially elected control committees must undertake a thorough investigation of financial relations between the concern in question and other concerns – this raises in a practical way the need to open the books.
7 Factory occupations and work-ins are also forms of struggle against the mass closure of factories and wage cuts. In view of the prevailing lack of consumer goods, it is particularly important that production be maintained and unions should not permit the deliberate closure of factories. Other methods of putting pressure on capital can and must be used, in accordance with local conditions, the industrial and political situation, and the intensity of the social struggle. The administration of factories occupied by workers should be placed in the hands of factory committees and union representatives specially picked for the purpose.
8 The economic struggle should be fought around the slogan of raising wages and working conditions far above pre-war levels. Attempts to reintroduce pre-war working conditions must be resisted in a determined and revolutionary manner. The working class must be compensated for the privations of war-time by an increase in wages and an improvement in labour conditions. Capitalist arguments about foreign competition should always be disregarded: the revolutionary trade unions must approach the question of wages and labour conditions from the standpoint of the protection and the welfare of the labour force and not from the standpoint of competition between the exploiters of different nations.
9 If capitalist policy, as a result of the economic crisis, is leading to wage cuts, the revolutionary trade unions should make sure that their forces are not divided by wages being lowered first in one factory then in another. The workers in the socially useful branches of the economy (miners, railway workers, electricity and gas workers) must struggle from the start so that the resistance to the capitalist attack affects the key centres of the country’s economic life. All types of resistance, from guerrilla actions to general national strikes of individual basic industries, can be used.
10 The trade unions must consider in practical terms the question of preparing and organising industrial strike action in particular industries on an international scale. The temporary standstill on an international scale of transport or coal-mining is a powerful weapon against the reactionary intentions of the bourgeoisie. The trade unions must follow world events closely in order to choose the most appropriate moment for economic struggle. They must not for a moment forget that international action of any kind is only possible with the formation of international trade unions that are genuinely revolutionary and have nothing in common with the scab Amsterdam International.
11 The revolutionary movement must strongly criticise the absolute faith in the value of collective agreements preached by opportunists everywhere. The collective agreement is nothing more than an armistice. The owners always violate these agreements at the earliest opportunity. This religious attitude towards collective agreements is evidence that bourgeois ideology is firmly rooted in the minds of the leaders of the working class. Revolutionary trade unions must not reject collective agreements, but they must understand that their value is limited, and must be prepared to break the agreements when this benefits the working class.
12 The struggle of the workers’ organisations against the individual employer or groups of employers should, while adapting itself to national and local conditions, also draw on all the experience acquired in previous struggles for working-class emancipation. Every important strike, for example, needs to be thoroughly prepared. Furthermore, from the outset the workers must form special groups to fight the strike-breakers and combat the provocative action of the various kinds of right-wing organisation which are encouraged by the bourgeois governments. The Fascists in Italy, the German technical emergency relief, the civilian organisations in France and Britain whose membership is composed of former officers and N.C.O.s – all these organisations have as their object the destruction and suppression of all working-class activity, not only by providing scab labour, but by smashing the working-class organisations and getting rid of their leaders. In such situations the organisation of special strike militias and special self-defence groups is a matter of life and death.
13 These defence organisations should not only resist the factory owners and the strike-breaking organisations – they should take the initiative in stopping the dispatch of goods to and from the factory where the strike is in progress. The transport workers’ union should play a particularly prominent role in such activity: it is its responsibility to hold up goods in transit, which can only be done, however, with the full support of all the workers in the area.
14 In the coming period the entire economic struggle of the working class must be conducted around the slogan of workers’ control over production. The workers should fight for the immediate introduction of workers’ control and not wait for the government and the ruling classes to think up some alternative. An uncompromising struggle has to be waged against all attempts by the ruling classes and the reformists to create intermediary labour associations and control commissions. Only when strict control over production is introduced can results be achieved. The revolutionary trade unions must resolutely fight against the way the leaders of the traditional unions, aided and abetted by the ruling class, use the idea of ‘nationalisation’ to blackmail and swindle the workers.
These gentlemen talk about peaceful socialisation only to divert the workers from revolutionary activity and social revolution.
15 Ideas of profit-sharing are put forward in order to play on the petty-bourgeois aspirations of the workers, diverting their attention from their long-term goals. Profit-sharing means that workers receive an insignificant part of the surplus value they produce, and the idea should therefore be subjected to harsh and rigorous criticism. “Not profit-sharing, but an end to capitalist profit” should be the slogan of the revolutionary unions.
16 In order to reduce or break the fighting power of the working class, the bourgeois states have resorted, under the pretence of protecting vital industries, to the temporary militarisation of industrial factories and whole branches of industry. Compulsory arbitration and conciliation commissions have been introduced, allegedly to prevent economic crises, but in actual fact to defend capital. In the interests of capital, direct taxation has been introduced, which places the burden of the war expenditure entirely on the shoulders of the workers and turns the employer into a tax-collector. The trade unions must put up a fierce fight against these state measures that serve only the interests of the capitalist class.
17 When they struggle for better labour conditions and living standards for the masses and the introduction of workers’ control, the Red unions should remember that these problems cannot be lastingly settled within the framework of capitalist relations. As the revolutionary trade unions win concessions from the ruling classes, step by step, forcing them to pass social legislation, they must make it clear to the working masses that only the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat can solve the social question. They must use every action, every local strike, every conflict, however minor, to argue their point. They must draw the lessons from the experience of struggle, raising the consciousness of the rank and file and preparing the workers for the time when it will be necessary and possible to achieve the social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
18 Every economic struggle is a political struggle, i.e., a struggle that concerns the class as a whole. However great working-class participation, the struggle can only be revolutionary and bring the proletariat maximum benefit if the revolutionary trade unions work in a close and unified fashion with the Communist Party of the country in question. The theory and practice of dividing the working-class struggle into two independent halves is extremely harmful, particularly in the present revolutionary situation. Every action requires the greatest possible concentration of forces, which can only be achieved if the working class, and all its Communist and revolutionary elements, give their utmost to the revolutionary struggle. If the Communist Parties and the revolutionary class-conscious trade unions work separately, their action is doomed to failure and defeat. It is for this reason that unity of action and close contact between the Communist Parties and the trade unions are prerequisites for success in the struggle against capitalism.
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