the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 28, 2024
We are a week away from the 2024 election. The record of the two big parties and all their candidates stands clear. They are defenders of the capitalist system, ruled by its drive for profit.
Capitalism condemns many people to unemployment, temporary or part-time work, forcing others to work overtime, and everyone to work too hard. Exploitation of labor is produced by the capitalists’ drive to amass profit.
This capitalist system creates inflation, driving down our standard of living, giving banks, financial groups and corporations the way to rob society of even more wealth.
All of this has been overseen by the two big parties.
Capitalism condemns people around the world to war. In this country, schools, roads and water systems are starved for funds so military spending can prop up the profits of every big corporation.
But the problem is not just money, it is war, actual, bloody war. Today, the U.S. military is involved in wars in Ukraine and Gaza, in shadow wars throughout Africa and the Middle East. It is preparing for war tomorrow to grab China’s market.
Military spending and these wars are the work of the two big parties.
We won’t change a society so terribly destructive as this one through an election. No, the working class must wrench control from the capitalist class and its two big parties. Workers will have to engage themselves in wide social struggles. They will have to build their own party.
In 2024, we are not yet there, this party does not yet exist. But in this election, working people can show they are fed up with the disasters the two parties have created. They can refuse to throw their vote away, refuse to vote for either party. In some states, they can show they are committed to having their own class build its own party—by voting for candidates who call for a working class party.
The Working Class Party has been on the ballot in Michigan since 2016. Today, there are 15 candidates.
Everyone in Michigan can vote for these two Working Class Party candidates: Mary Anne Hering, running for State Board of Education, and Suzanne Roehrig, for Wayne State University Board of Governors.
More than half the people in the state can vote for a Working Class Party congressional candidate: Liz Hakola in the 1st Congressional District; Lou Palus, 3rd District; Kathy Goodwin, 8th District; Jim Walkowicz, 9th District; Andrea L. Kirby, 10th District; Gary Walkowicz, in the 12th District; and Simone R. Coleman, 13th District.
Six other people are running for State Representative positions: Mark DaSacco, State District 2; Larry Darnell Betts, District 3; Linda Rayburn, District 7; Logan Ausherman, District 8; Hashim Malik Bakari, District 13; and Linda Green-Harris, District 16.
The Working Class Party of Illinois has been on the ballot in one congressional district in Illinois since 2022. This year, Ed Hershey is running in Illinois’s 4th Congressional District.
People who want to see the working class build its own party have worked twice to put Juan Rey on the ballot as an independent congressional candidate—this year in California’s 37th District.
It will not be built in an election. But in voting for these candidates, working people can send this message to the rest of their class: “We need our own party. Hurry up! We need to organize ourselves—and us, we intend to do it!”
Oct 28, 2024
Counting down to election day is like counting down to Christmas. Our election day present will be the end of the political bashing commercials and countless number of trees being cut down to send us election flyers every day.
Maybe next election cycle someone can make climate change an issue and stop cutting down all the forests.
Oct 28, 2024
When Trump made a show of working the fryer at a McDonald’s during a campaign stop, he didn’t wear a hairnet or gloves required by health regulations. Nor did he change into the proper uniform shirt or slip resistant shoes like the rest of the McDonald’s staff. And Trump obviously had trouble taking an order from the take-out window.
No wonder. Trump has been taken care of by a butler for his entire life and can’t even fry an egg. Trump should stick to golf. Because he could never hack it at McDonald’s.
Oct 28, 2024
Trump wears suits from Italy’s Brioni brand, which can run as much as $14,000. It would take a fast-food worker in Pennsylvania, where the McDonald’s is located, working at the state’s $7.25 minimum wage over 1,900 hours to make that much money—and that’s not accounting for taxes. They call this the land of opportunity … for the rich, paid for by the working class.
Oct 28, 2024
Donald Trump is endorsed by Mel Gibson, Kanye West, football hall-of-famer Brett Favre, Hulk Hogan, etc. Kamala Harris is endorsed by Beyoncé, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, etc. What a great way to gain some excitement when many people would rather not hear anything more about the elections.
Did the candidates have to pay? Is that why they got the big-name endorsements? Is this why the 2024 election cycle is approaching 16 billion dollars in spending?
The U.S. election cycle has started imitating the Roman empire, during which the emperors put on circuses for the population so they would forget they didn’t have enough to eat. Want to see a popstar? A football hero? Or do we want paychecks that pay our bills?
Oct 28, 2024
Residents of South Baltimore’s Curtis Bay neighborhood demanded in recent meetings that the state of Maryland not renew the permit for a polluting and dangerous coal pier owned by rail freight giant CSX.
Not only was there an explosion at the terminal in the last days of 2021, but every day coal dust flies from trains entering and leaving the facility. Hundreds of workers there transfer between 1,500 and 2,500 tons or more of coal per hour from trains to ships.
Last year the pier shipped well over two billion dollars worth of coal. Baltimore is the nation’s second largest coal port after Norfolk, Virginia. But neighbors have to keep their windows shut to avoid the toxic dust.
Curtis Bay was once a neighborhood of tree-lined row-houses. The coal yard was built around 140 years ago. After that, the neighborhood housed a Coast Guard yard, a rail wheel factory, an oyster packing plant, chemical factories, an incinerator, and for many years, a huge shipbuilding yard. Neighbors working there produced fortunes for corporations, but today most residents are poor. Nearly two in five do not finish high school.
The neighbors are facing CSX, a huge corporation which made over five billion dollars last year and donates thousands to Maryland politicians. CSX couldn’t care less about the health of people in Curtis Bay. And so the community is fighting for itself.
Oct 28, 2024
Los Angeles players are wearing a patch on their uniforms during the World Series honoring Fernando Valenzuela, the Dodgers’ former pitching ace who died on October 22 at age 63.
No wonder. When Valenzuela first stepped onto the mound in the spring of 1981, he wasn’t just a pitching sensation, so unhittable that he threw one shutout after another. He was a Mexican ballplayer, marketed as Fernandomania by Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, to greatly expand the Dodgers fanbase.
Before Valenzuela, a big part of the population in Los Angeles shunned the Dodgers. Back in the early 1960s, the Dodgers owners had built Dodgers Stadium on stolen land. This land, overlooking downtown Los Angeles, had been a semi-rural village made up of over 1,800 working-class families, mostly Mexican American. In 1951, the city of Los Angeles used eminent domain to evict all of them to make room for what they said was a federally funded public housing project. Most families received a token sum of a few thousand dollars, and they were promised that they could be resettled into those new housing units.
The housing plan was eventually abandoned, but by then most of the neighborhood was already cleared. So, in 1958 city officials offered the land to the Dodgers’ owners for little more than a pretty penny. A year later, only a few holdouts remained in the neighborhood. On May 9, 1959, the city moved to evict the group. TV cameras captured one particularly ugly confrontation in which sheriff’s deputies dragged an entire family from the property.
The way the refugees saw it, the L.A. Dodgers and their stadium had destroyed their community. When the ballpark finally opened in 1962, some threw tomatoes into the parking lot. Many Angelenos swore to never, ever attend a baseball game at the stadium.
But the unhittable pitching of Valenzuela, a 20-year-old Mexican from the small town of Etchohuaquila, changed all that. Attendance swelled to its highest ever. After 22 years of Dodgers’ baseball in Los Angeles, O’Malley had finally cashed in on the pitcher he considered his Mexican Sandy Koufax.
Politicians didn’t miss out on all the hype of Fernandomania, either. In June 1981, President Ronald Reagan invited Valenzuela to a state luncheon with the president of Mexico, José López Portillo, and sat Valenzuela between the two presidents. All the high officials, including the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, etc. lined up to get an autographed baseball from Valenzuela. These were the same politicians who demonized millions of undocumented immigrants of Mexican descent in the U.S.
As for Valenzuela, Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda played him until his once-powerful left arm hung like a torn rubber band—yet another overworked immigrant in Los Angeles, as an L.A.Times columnist, Gustavo Arrellano, wrote. Although Valenzuela went on to play another ten seasons in the majors, he was never the same dominant pitcher.
Oct 28, 2024
The official government statistics show that inflation has cooled down. But that doesn’t mean that workers can afford the basic necessities!
For most people having a car isn’t a choice; it’s the only means to get to work. But cars are more and more out of reach for many workers. Kelly Blue Book reports that as of September, the average new car costs $48,397. Used car prices have dropped slightly in the past two years, but the average one still ranges from $27,000 to $31,000 according to CarGurus. That’s more than a lot of workers make in a whole year!
Funny how the bosses want you at work, but don’t pay you enough to get there—let alone safely.
Oct 28, 2024
Michigan is home to over 300,000 Arab American and North African residents. In media interviews, many are planning to sit home and not vote in November or to NOT vote for Democrats or Republicans at the top of the ticket.
In the tight U.S. Senate race, the Democrat Elissa Slotkin is a former CIA agent. Her Republican Party opponent is a former FBI agent. The Dearborn-based Arab American Political Action Committee urges community members NOT to vote for either candidate, stating, “They are both warmongers and do not deserve your vote.”
Recently a popular community organizer, Ahmed Ghanim, wearing business attire, was told to leave a Democratic Presidential event or he would be put in the back of a police car. He posted on social media, “The Muslim ban is real, and it just happened to me at Harris’s rally today in Royal Oak, Michigan. They kicked me out without any reason, even after I received confirmation to attend and passed a security clearance at the gate.”
The mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, Abdullah Hammoud, explained that funerals are now being held in the city for family members who just died in Lebanon. He estimates that 45% of residents of Dearborn are Lebanese. He said, “How do you tell them: Well, regardless of how you feel … will you come out and cast your vote toward Vice President Harris?”
One Lebanese American resident of Dearborn, who protested Trump’s travel ban in 2016, has lost family to the recent violence in Lebanon. He said in a New York Times interview, “Would you rather your family be banned from entering the country, or would you rather your family be killed by an Israeli airstrike?”
Many Arab American voters clearly are drawing a line to say it is not in their interest to vote for either the Democrats or the Republicans. This is a very important understanding that needs to spread.
No matter which candidate wins, these bloody wars will continue. The same billionaire class which funds these candidates pockets obscene profits from these wars. These wars enforce the brutal economic domination of the U.S. ruling class. Whoever wins will treat each vote as endorsement of their reckless inhumanity.
Oct 28, 2024
Last year Montgomery County issued over 300,000 speed and red light camera tickets. But the county “only” made five million dollars in camera revenue. So officials plan to nearly double the number of speed cameras and increase red light cameras by half. Of course, politicians say all this is to make commuting safer.
We know what would make commuting safer for us here at DPI: not having shift changes at 6 am and 6 pm, in the dark through the rush!
Oct 28, 2024
Nearly 2,400 mental health workers, including therapists, nurses, social workers and addiction counselors, began a strike against Kaiser Permanente on Monday, October 21. This bargaining unit, represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, covers the southern half of California, stretching from Bakersfield to the Los Angeles and San Diego metropolitan areas.
The strikers are demanding better pay and a pension—to match, at least, what Kaiser agreed to for the same classifications of workers in Northern California, after they went on strike two years ago.
Another crucial demand of the strikers is better staffing. Mental health workers say that Kaiser regularly assigns them a dozen or more half-hour meetings per day with their patients. With the prep work before seeing a patient, and the paperwork afterwards, the workers are overwhelmed—to the point that some workers said they are now worried about their own mental health. Union officials reported that 25% of the 1508 therapists hired by Kaiser between January 2021 and August 2024 have left.
Kaiser has been neglecting mental health care for years; it was fined for it by the state of California back in 2013, and again last year. But fines don’t faze Kaiser, a company that has made nearly 9 billion dollars in profit in the past one and a half years alone, and is sitting on more than 54 billion dollars in cash reserves, according to Fitch Ratings.
Kaiser, which calls itself “non-profit” to avoid paying taxes, has amassed this huge fortune by denying its workers better wages and benefits, understaffing departments, gouging patients and denying them the care they need.
Other big health care companies do the same in the face of the worsening mental health crisis in this country. Health care is in the hands of capitalists, whose only goal is more profit.
Oct 28, 2024
In the early morning hours of October 26, residents of Tehran, Iran’s capital, were awakened by the sound of exploding bombs. Israel announced that more than 100 of its fighter jets and drones had attacked targets within Iran.
Commentators noted that this represents a new phase in the ongoing war in the Middle East, because it’s the first time Israel is acknowledging that its planes hit targets within Iran. But commentators also say that there is reason for some hope that the conflict will be contained. Iran’s leaders downplayed the attacks, they say, which may mean that Iran does not want a further escalation of the limited, tit-for-tat attacks between the two countries’ militaries.
Maybe—we don’t know. But some things are certain. It is hard to imagine that Israel would take a major step like this without the knowledge of the U.S., its staunch, generous sponsor. And U.S. officials did say that Israel notified the U.S. of the attack.
The U.S. has its own reasons to see Iran under attack, threatened, subdued. Iran, one of the biggest and most populous countries in the region, used to be a staunch military ally of the U.S.—one of its main cops in this strategic, oil-rich part of the world. But a popular revolt swept away the Shah of Iran in 1979, leading to a new regime in Iran—one which was not controlled directly by the U.S.
Ever since, the U.S. has been trying to pressure Iran, to isolate and weaken it. The decades-long economic embargo the U.S. has imposed on Iran, for example, has crippled the country’s economy and worsened the poverty of the working-class masses in Iran. Despite the claims of U.S. officials, however, the U.S. is not attacking Iran because the country’s reactionary rulers use religion to oppress their own population. In fact, the U.S. has found some of its staunchest allies in the region among the most reactionary religious dictatorships, such as in Saudi Arabia—not to mention Israel itself, whose discriminatory civil laws are based on an ancient religion.
The U.S. has shown the world in this past year that it will not move to restrain Israel’s aggression, which it finances. That is, the U.S. is ready to take the world into ever bigger, deadlier wars to assert and secure its control over the Middle East—and, for that matter, the whole world, around which the U.S. maintains hundreds of military bases.
The U.S. military wages its wars, whether directly or by proxy, to enforce the imperialist policies of the U.S. ruling class—that tiny, tiny minority of the U.S. population which controls the big banks, oil companies, military contractors. But the U.S. government not only makes us pay for these wars with our taxes, it also claims to wage these bloody wars in our name. No, this is not us. We are as horrified as the rest of the world at the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians, most of them women and children, in Gaza over the past year.
The horror in Gaza continues—and keeps spreading to the West Bank, Lebanon, and now Iran—with the full backing of the U.S. government. Nothing coming from the top will change that. Not the upcoming presidential election, for sure. The U.S. has been arming Israel, this tiny country halfway around the world, for decades, and to the tune of billions of dollars. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have consistently carried out this policy, laying the groundwork for today’s wars in the Middle East—all in the service of the U.S. ruling class.
Only the working class, when organized and fighting together in our own interests, can stop the Middle East, and the rest of the world, from slipping further into more chaos, death and destruction.
Oct 28, 2024
This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2934 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Begun this summer, the struggle of the nurses and, with them, the entire health sector in Iran, has spread across the country. From Isfahan to Tehran, demonstrations have spread everywhere and are constantly picking up.
By the end of September, 40 cities and 70 hospitals were affected by the movement. Alongside other healthcare workers, nurses have been calling on the government for several months to improve their working conditions and derisory wages. What’s more, the overtime they are obliged to work goes unpaid. “Inflation is in dollars, our wages in rials [the Iranian currency],” say the nurses. Another of their slogans is: “We don’t want to die on the job anymore,” as several of these women have literally died of exhaustion, victims of “karoshi,” a chronic stress that leads to total exhaustion.
The deaths of three of their colleagues last March, and the murder of Parvaneh Mandani, a nurse at Sepidan Hospital, on August 2, have further fueled the revolt. Several striking nurses have been arrested and are threatened with dismissal by employers, while intimidation by the forces of repression is multiplying.
The struggle of nurses and healthcare workers is not isolated. In fact, workers all over the country and in many different corporations are striking and demonstrating for higher wages, in the face of galloping inflation (over 60% year-on-year), for better working conditions, or simply to obtain payment of their salaries. Truck drivers, copper or coal miners, oil workers ... every month active or retired workers strike or demonstrate.
In this country of 92 million inhabitants, despite threats, despite dismissals, arrests and sometimes heavy prison sentences, the working class has never stopped fighting. These strikes remain in the field of defending workers’ economic interests. But, by their very existence, they take on a political character in the face of the Islamic Republic’s harsh regime, especially two years after the youth revolt triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini and the repression that followed.
The Iranian working class can be an immense force if it becomes aware of its class interests, which go beyond the borders of Iran, and if it finds the way to organize itself into a real political force. One that could not only shake up the regime, but overthrow it.
Oct 28, 2024
This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2934 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
On October 18, the Israeli army shot dead Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ military chief in Gaza, boasting that it had “eliminated the mastermind of the October 7 attacks.”
That it took an ultra-equipped Israeli army over a year to kill Sinwar, the methodical destruction of all Gaza’s buildings and a deadly siege on the enclave’s inhabitants, indicates Hamas’ resilience and the fact that it enjoys at least some support among the Palestinian population. For the past year, the elimination of Sinwar has been presented by Netanyahu and his government as the main justification for the massacre of Gazans. But it has not put an end to the war.
Israeli leaders are continuing their military operations, both in Gaza and Lebanon. They do not even pretend to want to resume the negotiations interrupted since the summer. For the eleventh time in a year, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has traveled to the Middle East to once again call for “a diplomatic solution” ... while weakly threatening to reduce military support for Israel, something the U.S. has never done, quite the contrary, whatever the crimes of Netanyahu and his generals.
The Israeli army has resumed the shelling of the northern Gaza Strip, already carried out a year ago, where 400,000 people are trying to survive on limited and intermittent supplies. Nearly 400 people have been killed, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, and thousands more have flocked to the makeshift hospitals that continue to operate in precarious conditions, often without water or electricity. Humanitarian convoys, which are in short supply, are blocked by Israel. In particular, the Israeli army is besieging the Jabaliya camp, home to many descendants of the 1948 Palestinian refugees. Representatives of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that managed health, supplies and schooling in the refugee camps before October 7, denounce the “indescribable horrors” they have seen in Jabaliya.
In Lebanon, bombing raids continue, targeting almost every region of the country, many districts of Beirut and not only Hezbollah strongholds. More than a million people, out of a total Lebanese population of some 4 million, have been displaced under pressure from the Israeli army. That’s in addition to Syrian refugees who have fled the civil war in their country, and all have to find food and shelter in a country already in crisis, plagued by inflation.
Most of the refugees come from southern Lebanon, where the Israeli army has destroyed numerous villages close to the border, including Christian-majority villages unlikely to be harboring Hezbollah troops. This systematic destruction, coupled with constant pressure on UNIFIL troops to abandon their observer positions, suggests that the Israeli army wants to carve out a no-man’s-land, a buffer zone, occupying a wide strip along its border.
Supported at all costs by American imperialism, whose dogs of war they are in the region, and having verified that Iran is doing everything in its power to avoid going directly to war, and for the time being without any massive internal opposition from their own population, the Israeli leaders have a free hand to continue their dirty war.
Oct 28, 2024
Cuba experienced a massive outage of its electrical system on October 18 and several days after, with at least partial power shortages still ongoing. The outage caused the government to shut down non-vital state services, public schools and businesses for days and is making life difficult for the population. Hurricanes Milton and Oscar have added to the problems the people of Cuba are facing.
The White House was quick to claim that the U.S. was not to blame for the blackouts. Hogwash! Sanctions imposed by the U.S. designating Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” as well as a number of other laws, have played a major role in creating the economic conditions leading to this outage.
Cuba’s electrical system largely uses oil or gas derived from oil as its main fuel source for running its power plants. It has been getting much of that oil from Venezuela, but those supplies have been reduced because of economic difficulties in Venezuela, which are due at least in part by U.S. sanctions on it. Though Russia and China have expressed support for Cuba, and had provided assistance to Cuba in the past, they have not been able to provide the oil Cuba needs. Hurricane Milton added physical obstacles to Cuba’s ability to receive oil shipments when it hit the island.
In addition, many of Cuba’s power plants are old and suffering from a lack of spare parts. This is at least in part connected with U.S. laws punishing shipping companies docking at Cuban ports and investors that might consider investing in Cuba. Any ship that docks at a Cuban port is not allowed to enter a U.S. port for six months afterward. Companies and individuals from countries other than the U.S. that invest in Cuba can be forced by U.S. courts to pay compensation to former owners of properties nationalized by the Cuban government after the Cuban revolution.
Problems like the recent power outage are connected to a more general economic crisis in Cuba, which are also linked to the sanctions imposed by the U.S. Cuba’s tourism industry, which accounts for 10% of Cuba’s economy, has been hard hit. There were 4.7 million tourists who visited Cuba in 2018, but the Cuban government expects that only 2.7 million will have visited this year, a drop of 43%. The U.S. prohibits people who have visited Cuba from participating in its Visa Waiver Program due to its designation as a sponsor of state terrorism, causing many travelers to avoid visiting Cuba.
U.S. imperialism has attempted to punish the Cuban people for its revolution for many decades now. Having lost much of its support from other countries like Russia and China in recent years, the Cuban economy is facing a deeper crisis. The politicians of both parties and the wealthy ruling class they serve in the U.S. are not about to concern themselves with the suffering of the Cuban population that flows from the economic sanctions they continue to impose.
Oct 28, 2024
The candidates for the Working Class Party in Michigan were asked why they were running for their office, and what their qualifications are, for the League of Women Voters Guide. Below, we have reprinted excerpts from some of their answers.
“The working class in this country needs a party that represents us and our needs. The two major parties represent the capitalist owner class who control the economy. Workers produce all the wealth, and when united, could control the way the economy is run.”
“I am running to help link together all the ordinary working people who feel isolated today. Many working people are living life in a brave way, as truthful people, as fighters for justice, caring for others, speaking truth to power. Society wants working class people to be victims. No, working people are the ones who do every job in the world. The working class makes the whole world run. We just need to help more people around us to understand our real value as workers and our real power.”
“The politicians from the two major parties do not represent the majority of people in this country. They only represent the wealthy and their friends. As a candidate of the Working Class Party, I am running to represent the interests of the majority of people in this country—the working class.”
“I have been a part of the working class all my life. Every election cycle, representatives make promises on how to fix the problems of the working class. I believe that the working class is the only class that can change the conditions of our class.”
“I run as a candidate of the Working Class Party because I am a worker. The Republicans and the Democrats both represent and work for the banks, the corporations and the billionaires. These two parties do not work for us.”
“I’m a retired foreman/construction worker of 30 years. I believe it’s time for workers to have their own party. And for resources to reach more people.”
“I was a long-time community college teacher, from Lansing, to Detroit to Dearborn, and have an inside perspective about how and if students come prepared academically from our K-12 system. I have also been politically active, organizing in the working class.”
“I have worked in education for 25+ years and have seen working class families struggle to afford a college education. Education should be a right, free to all who desire to learn. I want to be the representing voice for working class families who are disenfranchised and struggling to afford a college education.”
Oct 28, 2024
The following is the text of a speech given at a Working Class Party rally in Detroit on October 6th.
It is so exciting to be a part of a political party that really stands on a true foundation that is created around you, the working class. As we push this party forward, we are often confronted with the same questions or push back. I was talking with a worker the other day and she loved the idea of what we were doing with the Working Class Party. She took a couple flyers, said she was going to talk to her family and friends. Then she asked me why we weren’t more tied to the unions. My quick reply to her was, workers make up unions, we are tying ourselves to workers; they are the ones that are supposed to run the unions and they are the ones that vote.
Unions are a wonderful means to unify workers to fight for their rights, but they can also be very limiting. Union contracts restrict workers from striking when necessary, limiting strikes to occur only at the expiration of the contracts. Some union contracts prohibit workers from striking at all. The problem is that union fights are limited to just those groups of union workers; the fight is not inclusive to the entire working class.
2023 was considered historic for labor—we were seeing strike updates on the news every evening. A CNN headline said, “2023 was the year of the strike.” The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) headline said, “Major strike activity increased by 280% in 2023.”
If we look back to the strikes in 2023, workers all over were excited about all of the wonderful possibilities these strikes could do to affect the working class. Many saw the strikes as the answer to bringing up the living standards of the working class. The Big Three, Teamsters, UPS, Blue Cross Blue Shield of MI, casino workers, housekeepers, hotel workers. There were strikes in different industries, different unions, and in multiple places all over the country. These were workers fighting for the same things in many different battlegrounds.
In 2024, workers have continued the strike waves. Thirty-two thousand workers walked out of Boeing plants in Washington and Oregon. It was the biggest strike since last fall’s auto strike. Seventeen thousand workers at AT&T in nine southeastern states went on strike, with 8,500 workers set to join them in Nevada and California, and are now awaiting worker approval of their tentative agreement. Hotel workers in Boston carried out several waves of three-day “rolling strikes,” focused on Labor Day. Workers at the Marathon refinery in Detroit went out, and they were soon followed by workers at Eaton Aerospace in Jackson, Michigan. Flight attendants were threatening to strike at American Airlines, as were port workers in East and Gulf Coast ports.
Workers are fighting, but they are fighting within the different companies, in different industries, organized in different unions, going out separately. They nonetheless shared common grievances.
There has been a steady decrease in our standard of living with wages falling further behind inflation for years now. We are seeing constant push for speed-up across all industries and sectors. Workers are asked to do more with less, or work schedules that the bosses call “alternative” but used to squeeze every bit they can out of workers. The big guns of the capitalist class have been carrying out a brutal offensive against the whole working class, for decades now.
Regardless of what union may be fighting, the fight is the same; better wages, pensions, healthcare benefits, workplace safety, job security. Each union fighting in their own little bubble. Each union fighting entire systems, capitalism and government.
We saw how the government intervened back in 2022 when the rail workers took a stand and attempted to strike. Washington jumped right in to break up any thoughts of rail traffic disruption, telling workers they couldn’t show their force and strike. Even more recently with the three-day longshoremen strike. This is a situation that is not yet over, only postponed after government intervention.
If we continue to keep our fights within the union structure, we will continue to lose as a class. Union membership is declining. Laws are being passed to make it harder to be in a union in some states. Most workers aren’t even in a union. Unions can be busted. We need to unify ourselves on a different level, a class level.
We need something that bands us together beyond unions. We need our own mass political party, the Working Class Party. We need a party that will fight against inflation. A party that fights for everyone that wants a job to have a job. We need a party that believes that the working class, who creates the wealth in society, the class that sits at the very heart of the economy, should be the ones in control of that wealth. We need a party that will fight to unite us as one class. Black, white, native born, immigrant, women, men; all of us. Division is the power the bosses use to keep us fighting each other and focused on the crumbs on the ground.
This is the program of the Working Class Party. The party we are trying to build, it is not what we have, yet. We have grown from three candidates to fifteen here in Michigan. We also have active campaigns in Illinois, Maryland and California. This is something to be proud of, but it is a drop in the bucket for what we really need. We need our message to spread to all 50 states. We need working class people all over this country to begin to unite as a class, because that is what the rich do. And they don’t just wait for election cycles to do it. Elections are a means to have our voices heard, but it will be the unity of our people, working class people all over this nation and the world, that will change our situations.
Oct 28, 2024
On October 23, 33,000 Boeing workers belonging to the IAM (International Association of Machinists) voted down another proposal offered by the company, deciding therefore to continue their strike.
The strike had begun September 13 when Boeing workers voted down a contract that had a 25% pay increase over 4 years. After a month, hit by the strike, the company increased its offer to 35%. But workers once again said NO!
In other words, despite the difficulty of being without a paycheck for four weeks, despite Boeing’s threats to lay off 10,000 workers, they refused to give up their fight.
Like other workers facing contracts this year, Boeing workers can see the latest offer doesn’t nearly catch them up to what they have lost. In the ten years since the last contract, the cost of living in the area around Seattle, Washington, where most Boeing workers live, has gone up by 40%. Housing costs have gone up by 100%. And new Boeing workers start with a pay rate that is barely more than the minimum wage for the Seattle area.
But it’s worse. Boeing workers remember that the pensions they lost in 2014—which were frozen for existing workers and eliminated for new hires—have never been restored.
What especially grinds is that in the ten years since workers let themselves be bludgeoned into giving up their pensions, Boeing has made huge profits. Those profits were handed over to wealthy stockholders, through 31 billion dollars in dividends and another 43 billion dollars in stock buybacks.
So, this time, Boeing workers decided to fight for what they need—and not accept what the wealthy owners of Boeing want.
To make that fight, they will be going up against more than just their own bosses. Several big banks and financial institutions have already given Boeing 20 billion dollars in lines of credit, helping the company to outlast the striking workers.
What the Boeing workers are facing is what almost every group of workers face today when they decide to strike. Workers find themselves not only going up against their own boss, but also against the whole capitalist class, who are linked financially and are united in their desire to increase their profits by taking more from the workers’ hide.
In a fight against their workers, every capitalist stands with other parts of their class, supported by the media they control and the state apparatus that serves them.
Maybe that creates obstacles for workers who want to fight. But Boeing workers can have all sorts of prospects. They are part of a class that potentially has power, when it pulls itself together to use it. What the workers make run, they can make stop—and reorganize to suit their own needs.
In the Seattle area, Boeing workers are linked with other parts of the working class, through their families, their neighbors, their churches, their social clubs, their sandlot sports teams, their unions. There is no reason to fight the bosses separately—one industry, or one company, and one union at a time.
Boeing workers, with all their links to other parts of their class, could set a real social struggle in motion, one going past just their own plants. That doesn’t depend on the union apparatus, it depends on whether there are militants, good union militants and others, who understand the need to spread their fight to other workers. If those people exist, the fight that has broken out at Boeing can end up being a fight that envelopes not only Boeing, not only Seattle, not only the aerospace industry, but other parts of the working class which confront the same problems, and have the same desire to impose their demands on a greedy capitalist class.
Oct 28, 2024
Book: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo, 2014.
This award-winning book focuses on a community of poor who live in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. They live in ramshackle huts, and survive however then can: sorting through garbage for 14 hours a day, selling sex, functioning as a middleman, thieving. Nothing is easy. Any success makes one a target of their neighbors or the predatory police or bureaucrats. Corruption is everywhere.
The book engrosses you in the lives of the residents. You see with dramatic intensity the details of each member of a family, their dreams, their successes, or their hopes brutally dashed. By focusing on the various people of this community, you have an unforgettable window into all of Mumbai.
Book: Whose Names Are Unknown: A Novel, by Sanora Babb, 2014.
This long-buried novel explores with brutal detail the life of a farming family, the Dunnes, in the 1930s Oklahoma dust bowl and their forced migration to the fertile but bitterly disappointing orchards and vineyards of California.
The book shows life in the mostly company owned migrant camps and the backbreaking work and starvation wages they had to endure. Even though they face one hardship after another, they never give up hope or their humanity. The book also tells of Communists organizing in the cotton fields, strikes for better wages and working conditions, and the hope of a better tomorrow.
Oct 28, 2024
This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2934 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
As the U.S. presidential election campaign enters its final phase, the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris looks tight in a few key states.
It’s not that outbursts from either side do much to enlighten voters. Trump regularly calls his rival a “mental defective”: a thinly veiled appeal to the racist prejudice that black people are stupid. He also recently called her “a shit vice president” at a rally before discussing the penis size of a deceased golf player .... For her part, Harris is quick to describe Trump as “cruel, unstable and deranged.”
That’s how low the presidential debate is going. Those commentators who see this election as decisive for the future of the world can rest assured that the policies pursued by the next occupant of the White House will bear no relation to what he or she said on the campaign trail. Wading through this nonsense served up by the media, many workers are above all preparing to vote against one candidate despite what the other represents.
There are plenty of reasons to reject Trump: sexist, racist, he drags in his wake an extreme right-wing that could run riot not just in elections, as has already been seen in the attack on the Capitol. But why are some workers prepared to vote for this billionaire, who has the nerve to promise well-paid jobs while congratulating bosses who are laying people off? The exasperation of many wage earners who have seen their standard of living seriously dented by inflation in recent years has a lot to do with it.
Joe Biden and his vice president Harris appear to be responsible for an economy that reduces real wages and puts housing, health care, education and even food out of reach for more and more working class families. All the while, billionaires grow outrageously rich.
Representatives of the Democratic left, such as Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as union leaders, are backing Kamala Harris, describing her as “a fighter for the working class.” It’s unconvincing, because it flies in the face of reality. On the contrary, by asserting herself as a “capitalist,” she seeks the support of Wall Street financiers or that of Republicans hostile to Trump by promising to include them in her future government. Harris thus openly turns her back on working people and gives Trump the opportunity to present himself as their defender.
What’s more, when Harris promises to fight immigration by extending the wall on the Mexican border, or expresses solidarity with Israel, which is waging bloody wars in the Middle East, she is placing herself on the same political terrain as Trump.
In reality, it’s not the voters, with their ballots, who decide the policy that will be pursued in Washington, but the very great fortunes of U.S. capitalism. The richest of the multi-billionaires, Elon Musk, is single-handedly financing Trump’s campaign to the tune of 75 million dollars. But Harris is not to be outdone, raising over a billion, from just as many big capitalists. These people know what they’re buying: they want a presidency that’s devoted to them, whoever they elect.
Oct 28, 2024
The head of The Washington Post newspaper just joined the head of the Los Angeles Times in refusing to endorse the Democratic Party nominee for president. Since both papers are considered “liberal media,” this decision has shocked some journalists and others who pay attention to these newspapers.
It is also a way for these rich owners, Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and Blue Origins, a space project, or Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire in California, to hedge their bets, since Harris and Trump are running neck and neck in the polls. If Trump wins, then these papers will be able to argue they were not biased, as Trump has repeatedly said their newspapers are against him.
With rare exceptions, The Washington Post has endorsed Democratic candidates for decades and decades and decades. The last Republican they endorsed was Eisenhower and that was 70 years ago. In the meantime, the so-called liberal Washington Post managed to ignore the civil rights movement until they couldn’t. They ignored going against the Viet Nam war right up until the Pentagon papers were published in The New York Times. They ignored the vitriol that Senator McCarthy threw at federal government workers until Eisenhower decided enough was enough.
The Washington Post, The L.A. Times or The New York Times, the most important newspapers in the United States, are liberal when it suits the times. Right now they support a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. How supportive were they when thousands of women had illegal abortions prior to 1972? Not very.
If they don’t want to endorse the Democrats this year, it’s because it’s certainly possible the Republicans will win, it’s all about the benjamins, that is, MONEY. How many contracts does Amazon have with the U.S. government and its branches? Amazon, owned by Bezos, delivers for the U.S. postal service. Does Blue Origin get direct research money from the federal government or from DARPA, also run by the U.S. military? Didn’t Soon-Shiong get contracts or doesn’t he expect in the future to get contracts from NIH, the branch of the government doing biotech research? What about Mr. Billionaire Musk, who endorses Trump? Will SpaceX, his company, continue to dominate the war in Ukraine with lovely profitable government contracts?
It’s about money, with the elections, as with everything else. What the population wants and needs is not what the media covers, 99% of the time.