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 3, 2011
For several weeks, young protestors have appeared on the streets of major cities, protesting a range of issues, including the lack of prospects in this society, the predatory role of the banks in the mortgage crisis and the corruption that pervades business and governments, local and national. Some protested the wars. Some noted with revulsion the official murder of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia. Some spoke of the destruction of the schools. Some have called on Obama to set up a special commission to take over the banks. Some completely disdain the official parties. Some called themselves “anarchists,” some called themselves “conservatives.” But there is one idea that seems to pervade all the protests–the one appearing on signs from one coast to another: “enough is enough.”
Starting near Wall Street in New York City, with daily protests, some numbering in the thousands, the protests spread to Boston and the Bank of America headquarters. Other cities, from Los Angles to Cleveland joined in, sometimes with protests numbering in the hundreds, sometimes, only a few dozen.
The protests have been marked by encampments, sit-ins, attempts at “civil disobedience,” arrests, music, marches, picnics–and in some cases, police decisions to make mass arrests: 700 in New York, 24 in Boston on October 1.
Some bourgeois media accounts emphasize that the protests have no clear aim, that they are disorganized, marginal; others that the participants are “scruffy” looking. Whatever.
The fact is these protests are a symptom of a society marked by vast unemployment and underemployment, capitalist society which is slamming the door in the face of the young.
These protests are the symptom of a political system in which the population has no voice, a system which has used the power of the state to lower the standard of living of the population in order to bail out the banks, and to reinforce all those who are already monstrously wealthy.
The protests also speak to the complete cowardice of the official union leaders in the face of an economic crisis that demands an organized fight back.
Are the protests disorganized, are they composed of “marginal” elements? Perhaps. But the organizations of the working class–led by bureaucrats who have made it their mission to put the well-being and profitability of the corporations ahead of the interests of their own members, not to speak of the working class as a whole–have disorganized the whole working class.
Workers should be pleased to see those young people in the street–not because the protestors can change the situation for the working class and other layers of the oppressed, but because there is someone who has shown the courage to say what almost everyone feels: enough is enough.
Yes, it is. Enough of job cuts. Enough of wage cuts. Enough of seeing our standard of living sink down, month after month.
The working class needs to defend itself against the ravages of capitalist society. It needs to fight for its own goals in the midst of the crisis: a job for everyone, a paycheck that allows us all to live as human beings should live. And it must refuse to pay the cost of the crisis that the capitalists and their bankers created.
The working class has the power, in the midst of a social explosion, to impose these goals. In fighting for them, it can also pull after itself all those others who today are marginalized by the capitalists and their government.
Oct 3, 2011
All over the city at the side entrances of churches, kids aged 6 to 18 come in for a free hot meal. No surprise when statistics show that in 2010, one out of four people and more than one out of every three children in Baltimore are living in poverty. And the same is true in three-fourths of the 100 largest cities.
This is the toll of the current recession and job losses. The lack of social struggles has let the balance of power shift even more to the wealthy.
Oct 3, 2011
With unemployment soaring, Governor Snyder announced this week that the state’s economic future is threatened by Michigan’s “obesity problem”–NOT the jobs problem. Wow!
Saying this–while at the same time slashing welfare and threatening to take $6,000 from each state worker–makes it appear he means to tackle obesity by increasing starvation. Seriously.
And just to make it clear, the state has now cut out food stamps for anyone with assets more than $5,000. In other words, all the unemployed and low-paid workers are supposed to stop eating!
Oct 3, 2011
In September, Obama proclaimed that he intended to make the wealthy pay their “fair share” of taxes. It is part of his plan for the U.S. to “live within our means.”
Center stage in his proposal was the so-called “Buffet rule,” named after Warren Buffet, one of the billionaires who pays few taxes and even admits he should pay more! Anyone with more than a million dollars income would have to pay as high a tax rate as does the average taxpayer, which is not the case today. It’s hardly a radical proposal, even if the Republicans call it “class warfare.” And it’s certainly not a real proposal. It would not even take place until Congress rewrites the entire tax code, that is, on the 12th of never!
Obama did propose that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy not be renewed in 2013. But Obama, himself, was the one who pushed through the most recent renewal in December 2010, for two years–when he still had a Democratic controlled Congress.
The whole proposal to “tax the rich” is nothing but a campaign gimmick. Obama knows the Republicans, with whom he worked last year to cut taxes on the wealthy, aren’t about to raise them this year. It’s a win-win situation: the wealthy are safe–and Obama hopes to raise his standing before the election.
By contrast, most other measures which Obama put forth in his plan to “live within our means” will be implemented. They are very precise, detailed in a 70-page document. He wants to reduce the federal deficit by four trillion dollars over ten years.
Half the cuts will come from the recommendations of the bipartisan Congressional committee, which will be submitted to an up or down, yes or no vote by the Congress. If Congress can’t agree, cuts will be applied anyway on various types of government spending–most of which will be cuts against the working class, the poor and small farmers.
The other two trillion will come from a range of measures attacking the health care system. Medicare would be reduced 224 billion dollars over 10 years and Medicaid by 66 billion dollars over the same period. Soldiers and their families would have to pay more for their medical insurance and expenses. Government workers would face cuts in their pensions.
Obama would also cut national flood programs and unemployment insurance, while raising passenger “fees” on airline travel.
He would increase the price of postage stamps and end Saturday postal deliveries, which would lead to big layoffs.
Apparently Obama thinks that if he talks about “making the rich pay,” he can make us forget that he and the Republicans and other Democrats are making working people pay right now.
Oct 3, 2011
The following is from a presentation given at the September Spark public meeting in Detroit.
Yesterday the news was that GM and the UAW had a deal, the first of the three auto contracts to finish negotiations. The deal is, that in exchange for a small up-front bribe, $5000 before taxes, all of the losses inflicted on auto workers since 2003 are supposed to be made permanent. And we are supposed to accept it! Permanent concessions.
It’s not only auto, it’s everywhere. The Detroit Schools Emergency Financial Dictator decreed a 10% pay cut for everyone. And just to be fair, he will take 10% off his own salary, which is $250,000 a year. But he’s still living on prime rib, isn’t he? While for everyone else he’s dishing up more mac and cheese.
The State of Michigan is demanding that its workers take concessions: pay freezes and benefit cutbacks–$6,000 per worker. The state government passed a lifetime limit of 48 months on welfare; 12,000 families will be cut off October 1. Are there jobs for them? No. What will they do? The state doesn’t care. There have to be concessions, say the politicians. Everyone is supposed to take cuts.
Auto workers once fought for wages and benefits that set a standard for the whole working class. What they got, other workers fought to get afterwards. Through their struggles, the auto workers helped pull everyone up.
But when auto workers began to accept concessions several decades ago, that helped start a race to the bottom.
In 1999 came a big concession: GM spun off its parts plants and called them Delphi. In 2000 Ford spun off its parts plants and called them Visteon. Wages were pushed down, benefits lost. The companies were also allowed much more freedom to use temporary and part time workers. The road down took a sharp drop and everyone else has been pushed down in turn.
The working class standard of living is dropping fast on this road. Our share of the value that we produce keeps sliding backwards. A Census Bureau report just came out that for the first time since the Great Depression, the median household income today is less than it was 13 years before. Median income is where half the households in the country are above, and half are below. The whole working class has been shifted down in yearly income, and that means, standard of living. Wages are going down even while the cost of everything–food, gas, clothes, utilities–is going up.
Unemployment is stuck on 9% even in the official rose-colored statistics. It’s more like 20% in reality. That’s a national average. It means that one job has to support many more people. Adult children who are unemployed have to live at home with parents; unemployed parents have to live with any of their kids who have a job. Shelters for the homeless are overflowing.
Concessions mean that public services are cut back, and cut back again. It used to take an unusually bad storm to knock out power. Now the slightest breeze and pow! A branch falls, a line goes down, there aren’t enough repair teams–and the food in your freezer spoils. This coming winter, more people will have to use candles for light, and more people will burn charcoal grills indoors for heat and cooking, in major metropolitan cities in the richest country in the world. In the era of concessions.
In 2009, after years of concessions in auto, Ford workers did something different. They refused more concessions to an obviously wealthy company. They voted down a national agreement proposed by their top union leadership. And not only that. They prevented the leadership from coming back and making them vote again. They did not “vote till you get it right,” as we call it.
National UAW contracts have been rejected before, but before, the voting and counting was controlled by the International and the numbers were “adjusted” to pass by 51 or 53%. In 2009, Ford workers from the ranks mobilized to keep exact tallies of the vote, local by local, and to make sure that locals got in step if they were slow about reporting. The workers kept the running tally public–on Ford’s own Blue Oval internet site. With their finger on the count and on the counters, the vote had to be reported and it was a doozy. 73% NO. Nothing happened despite the threats–“if you turn this down, your plant won’t get that new product.” Nothing–except the workers had something to be proud of. They had seen through the lies and trickery, they dealt with it, they avoided a few of the worst concessions that were forced on GM and Chrysler, and they maintained their morale–not to mention the legal right to strike.
The impulse for that national NO vote began at the Dearborn Truck Plant when Ford halted production and brought in then-UAW-vice-president Bob King to speak in the plant to defend more concessions. He was loudly booed off the floor. All he got out at the mike was “Can you hear me now?” The workers shouted back NO and didn’t stop. Bob had to give up.
That news spread through the thousands of communication channels that the rank and file uses, cell phone to cell phone, neighbor to neighbor, chat room to chat room. When Bob went to Kansas City Assembly he got the same treatment. When then-UAW president Ron Gettelfinger went to his own home plant of Louisville, Kentucky, he got the same treatment. When voting began, Kansas City brought in a huge NO vote, 92%. Word spread. It became a point of honor to see which plant would vote down the contract and by how much. The battle cry in every large plant was “Beat Kansas City!” The workers had found a way to show their dissatisfaction all at once, all across the country, and they did themselves proud. Dearborn Truck right here did “beat Kansas City,” a 93% no vote.
I dwell on this story, even though it is only from one little corner of a big world, to say that it is not true there is nothing you can do. It is true you can’t do it all by yourself. And you can’t set the timing all by yourself. But you can, together with others, push back.
The bosses and politicians can’t do everything they want, as long as there are enough people who take them on, who block them.
There are people hoping the economy will get better by itself. Ain’t happening. Everyone’s pay and benefits are under attack. It’s mine today and yours tomorrow and yours the day after. Then they come around to me again!
The bosses have learned all kinds of tricks to demand more concessions and sacrifice from us. They say their companies aren’t competitive, they can’t hold out, they will go out of business, and they have to go bankrupt unless the unions take over the retiree health care risks. OK the UAW did that. So the companies said hey, what a deal, and in 2009 they came back with “quick rinse” bankruptcies at GM and Chrysler, dumped even more of their pension obligations, turned the screw even harder on active workers–and started showing billions in profits, paying back the government loans at record speed because they are eager to hand out dividends to the elite again. GM has 30 billion dollars in what they call a “fortress balance sheet”–but just 2 years ago they said they were bankrupt? And they got away with it? And they are still getting away with it?
This bankruptcy trick worked so well for them that state governments are trying it and the federal government is trying it–oh, the deficit, the deficit! Never mind that the deficit would be wiped out simply by cancelling the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Never mind that the Obama administration extended those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy–and wants to come back to cut our Medicare, our Medicaid.
In fact the powers that be in the government and in the corporations–working hand in hand, and shifting positions back and forth–have been carrying out a real onslaught against the working class.
This is where the Ford situation is important. In 2009 the workers did not fall for their trickery and their lies. Ford workers imposed their NO vote, and so they are in position to do something–to put more of a brake on this downhill slide. If we want our median wage shifted back upward, we better do everything in our power to support them, too, and everyone else who shows some fight. Support them and join them!
Today the big auto companies, and their partners inside the top union apparatus, are hoping to use the no-strike clause to persuade workers that there is nothing they can do. Of course there is no way that one group of workers is going to roll back the concessions all by themselves. But there is another issue.
Workers can at least demonstrate that we will not be willing partners in cutting our own throats. At GM and Chrysler, workers are being threatened that a NO vote will mean they have to take their chances with an arbitrator. If that is the price of being able to speak our mind and reject a bad deal, then OK. How much worse could it be? No arbitrator has pledged not to increase these wealthy companies’ fixed costs. But Bob King, current UAW president, has. And by all reports so far, in this new deal, he has kept his word.
When the Ford workers voted NO, they were told it would cost them. It didn’t. Clearly they are going to get more money in this contract than GM and Chrysler workers.
Those workers who get up now and speak out, yell, get active, refuse to take it lying down, are of course taking the chance that they will be labeled troublemakers, radical, militant, maybe revolutionary. We need more workers who can say, “I don’t care; if you think this is radical, then OK I’m a radical. You think this is revolutionary? Then call me a revolutionary. So what? The situation is still wrong, isn’t it?”
Those who aren’t afraid of the label will be the ones who make a difference. They will find themselves in the lead when others are ready to step forward. A fight that starts one place can influence others to fight. In times of deep crisis like we are in, the working class is always auditing its forces, taking its own temperature, assessing the situation, getting ready to see what they dare to do.
These are not moderate times. Moderate solutions are not working. It’s time for radical solutions. It’s time for people who aren’t afraid to be labeled radical and revolutionary.
Oct 3, 2011
Forty years ago, prisoners rebelled in Attica, New York state prison. The rebellion lasted five days until it was savagely repressed, leaving 31 prisoners and nine guards dead, all shot by the police.
There had been previous revolts in the prisons. From 1950 until Attica, there were some 50 other prison uprisings. But that didn’t prevent a prison official from declaring in 1966, they were “proud, satisfied and happy” with their system.
In fact, as events were to show, the prisons were becoming a breeding ground for revolt.
By 1970, many prisoners had begun to call themselves “revolutionaries.” The black movement and the U.S. war in Viet Nam led to political radicalization for many. These attitudes had spread throughout the population, including among prisoners.
A new type of prisoner appeared: those condemned in ordinary criminal cases whose political consciousness developed in prison. George Jackson was the best known representative. His book Soledad Brother tells of his development. Jackson was serving a ten-year term in prison for a theft amounting to $70. He supported the radical Black Panthers. He knew that his life was threatened by the U.S. government, which had begun a program targeting the radical wing of the black movement for assassination. In August 1971, George Jackson was shot in the back by a guard in San Quentin prison. The authorities tried to hide this assassination, but the truth came out. It led to a series of riots in many prisons. The Attica revolt was the deepest.
In Attica, 54% of the prisoners were black, but 100% of the guards were white. Prisoners were kept 14 to 16 hours per day in their cells. Their mail was read, their reading censured and they saw their families only through a separation barrier. They had almost no medical care and early releases were arbitrary. The system of plea bargaining, with 75% of those in prison having no trial, increased the feelings of injustice. The accused pled guilty, whether they were or not, in exchange for a promise of a reduced sentence ... which they didn’t always get.
The prison system reflected the society’s inequalities. In 1969, a crime of fraud by someone who had gained $200,000 led to seven months in prison, at worst. On the other hand, the prison term for a burglary yielding $321 was 33 months. Moreover, these sentences were usually harsher for blacks than for whites.
In a sociology class at Attica, prisoners began to discuss the changes they wanted. They organized demonstrations and presented modest demands.
George Jackson’s assassination increased tensions in all the prisons. When Jackson was assassinated, some prisoners in Attica seized a courtyard and held 40 guards hostage. The prisoners invited observers, including a New York Times reporter, to visit the place. One wrote, “The racial harmony that reigns among the prisoners was stunning. The courtyard was the first place that I’ve seen where there was no racism.” A black prisoner declared, “I didn’t think that the whites would join in. I cried at the idea that we were all so close. All united.”
The prison administration stalled any negotiations with the prisoners. On September 13th, Governor Rockefeller gave the green light for an assault by the national guard, prison guards, and local police, armed with automatic rifles, submachine guns and tear gas. In 15 minutes, 31 prisoners and nine guards were killed. The administration claimed at first that the guards had their throats cut by the prisoners, but autopsies proved that they had been killed by police fire.
These events didn’t prevent other movements in the prisons and the creation of support committees for those accused of further crimes at Attica. In the end, the judicial authorities gave up demanding life sentences for the prisoners who survived the assault.
Attica will always be a symbol of both the brutality of which the U.S. government is capable and of the heroism of ordinary people who have decided to make a stand.
Oct 3, 2011
Ten years ago, on October 7, 2001, U.S. warplanes began to bomb Afghanistan.
The U.S. was accusing the Afghan government of harboring al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
The Afghan government collapsed within days. The Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist organization that ran the government, fled Kabul, the capital. In the next few months, the U.S. set up a new Afghan government under the protection of the U.S. military.
But large parts of Afghanistan remained under the control of different warlords as before–warlords who, on and off, have allied themselves with or fought against the U.S. Thus the U.S. got into a long war of occupation. Today, ten years and two presidents later, U.S. officials say that they are looking to negotiate a settlement with the insurgents and get out of Afghanistan.
But who exactly are the insurgents? Attacks against U.S. troops have come from many different sources. For example, the fighters who staged a daring, day-long attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last month turned out to be soldiers of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former U.S. ally. Haqqani, an Islamic fundamentalist warlord based in eastern Afghanistan, commands thousands of fighters. He also runs a criminal network involved in smuggling, kidnappings and collecting “protection money” from contractors.
Haqqani’s relationship with the U.S. goes back three decades. Starting in 1979 under President Carter, the U.S. actively supported Haqqani and other Afghan warlords who were fighting Soviet occupation forces. Many of these warlords were Islamic fundamentalists, who committed such outrageous crimes as killing teachers and burning down schools for educating girls. The Islamic fundamentalist regime of oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. ally, helped finance the warlords. A young member of the Saudi elite, Osama bin Laden, went to Afghanistan and served as a financial courier between the Saudi regime and the U.S. CIA on the one hand, and the various warlords on the other.
Bin Laden later turned against his own master, the U.S. But he is not the only one who has done that. Today in Afghanistan, the U.S. finds itself fighting some of the same warlords that the U.S. has propped up in the past, including Haqqani.
This is not a mistake or some ironic twist of history. It is the consequence of a U.S. foreign policy that is bound by one principle only–extending the control of U.S. big business over more parts of the world, for ever-greater profits. Under such a narrow-minded, reckless policy, today’s allies can easily become enemies tomorrow.
Caught in the middle are peoples around the world, with those in Afghanistan being particularly victimized. For more than 30 years, Afghan people have been bombed and brutalized by two of the world’s biggest military powers, and robbed, raped and harassed by gangs that are supported by one of those powers, the U.S.
A single day of this war against the Afghan population has been a day too many–and it has been more than 30 years now, 365 days a year.
End the U.S. war on Afghanistan. End all U.S. wars. NOW!
Oct 3, 2011
U.S. government geologists say there are huge mineral deposits in Afghanistan, including iron, copper, gold, lithium and recently discovered “rare earth elements” critical in electronics, automobiles, oil refining and several other industries–and in short supply in the world.
For the past seven years, 50 geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey have worked under the armed protection of U.S. military forces to discover and map the rich Afghan mineral deposits–in the middle of the U.S. war there.
While few other U.S.-sponsored Afghan development projects have ever gotten off the ground, the war-ravaged headquarters building of the Afghanistan Geological Survey in Kabul got a 6.5 million dollar U.S.-financed renovation. It now has a modern digital data center and employs 100 full-time scientists and engineers using data gathered on the ground and from specially-equipped U.S. military planes and satellites.
U.S. companies already have invested in Afghan gold deposits, while Chinese and Indian companies are mining copper and iron in Afghanistan.
What a “coincidence!”
In the midst of a war supposedly aimed at finding terrorists, the U.S. finds rare minerals its companies will exploit very profitably!
Oct 3, 2011
For almost two months, U.S. stock markets have gyrated wildly. These huge leaps up and down in stock prices are warning signs that the European debt crisis is spreading to the U.S.
Behind the European debt crisis are the big European banks, which have been speculating on European government debt, forcing European governments to pay them higher and higher interest rates. This has been very profitable for the European banks.
But the U.S. banks have been sharing in the spoils. They are some of the largest stockholders in the big European banks. For example, investment funds run by such Wall Street giants as BlackRock, Wells Fargo and J.P.Morgan Chase are among the biggest stockholders of the French bank, Societé Generale. U.S. banks and money market funds are also major lenders to European banks. And U.S. financial institutions also insure a lot of the government debt that the European banks bought, through the so-called “credit default swaps,” collecting rich premiums for the insurance.
In order to keep the money coming in, the big banks on both continents have been pushing the governments of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy to impose ever harsher austerity measures on their populations: big public sector layoffs, cuts in pensions, and cuts in public and social services. And the banks want governments to “sell” them valuable publicly-owned properties on the cheap–airports, highways, electric utilities.
Government officials pretend that these austerity measures are staving off crisis. But in reality, they only feed the debt bubble for the profit of the banks, making the crisis worse.
There is no answer for the working class in any of the plans proposed by governments or international institutions like the IMF.
No matter what country we talk about, the working class must fight to protect its essential interests–jobs and wages.