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[gangbox] MARCH TO IRRELEVANCE
MARCH TO IRRELEVANCE...the Million Worker March and the decline of the left in the American labor movement
MARCH TO IRRELEVANCE...the Million Worker March and the decline of the left in the American labor movement
By Gregory A. Butler, local 608 carpenter
The "Million Worker March" [MWM] came in about 990,000 short on Sunday, October 17th....
The event, which cribbed it's name from Minister Louis Farrakhan's Black nationalist Washington DC rally 10 years ago (which actually live up to it's name, attendance-wise), had been billed by many left wing labor activists as a great turning point for militant US unionists...kinda like a latter-day Flint Sit Down Strike crossed with the Selma to Montgomery march....
However, it didn't work out like that....
According to news accounts by the Washington Post, Washington Times and ABC News, only 10,000 people showed up at the rally....far less than the organizers had expected..
Nobody, not even the MWM organizers, actually expected a Farrakhan-scale event...but, the MWM's Communications Chair, Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theorist Ralph Schoenman, had predicted in the Washington Times on Friday, October 15 that the rally at the Lincoln Memorial would have at least 100,000 people in attendance....
That didn't happen....
Instead, only a handfull of folks bothered to turn out....and the organizers are already playing the blame game, claiming, bizarrely, that the DC police caused the low turnout, because a handfull of busses were not allowed to unload their passengers at the Lincoln Memorial, and instead had to let the folks off at RFK Stadium, which is just a few subway stops away from the Memorial on the Washington Metro....
Of course, those bus reroutings delayed, at most, about 1,000 people...WHO WERE ALREADY IN DC FOR THE RALLY...
The far more important question is, why did so many workers not attend this rally????
On the face of it, a REAL mass movement, aimed at mobilizing the working class, should have attracted far more than 1 million workers....
There are many abuses faced by the working class in America today....
Millions of workers have seen their jobs "downsized" - that is, they were laid off and either replaced by a machine, or their remaining co-workers have to work longer and harder for the same pay, or the job was "outsourced" to a lower paying subcontractor, or their job went to Mexico or India...
Millions of workers have lost their pensions, and are being forced to pay through the nose for insurance coverage that was once paid for by their employers...
Millions of Black and Latino workers are being stripped of affirmative action protections, with employers going back to the Jim Crow days of racist job discrimination....
Millions of low income workers have been kicked off welfare, or have lost their Section 8 housing assistance, plunging them even deeper into poverty...
Millions of Latino illegal immigrant workers are forced to work for substandard pay, subject to rampant abuses and discrimination...and can be deported at a moment's notice...
Millions of workers are denied their right to union representation, and 20,000 workers a year get fired and blacklisted if they try to organize their co-workers...
Millions of H-1B and H-2A immigrant "guest workers" are held in a form of modern day indentured servitude...they are bonded to a particular employer, who can cut their pay, reduce their benefits, and even sexually harass and assault them without penalty...but, if they dare to complain, or if they displease their employer in any way, they can instantly be deported to their homeland..
Millions of women workers are subject to sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination on the job..and also have to pay out of pocket for often sub-par child care services..and their health insurance coverage frequently refuses to cover abortion and birth control....and, they're paid less than male workers with less experience and education....
Millions of union members have union leaders who are more interested in "class peace" with Corporate America than they are in fighting for workers rights..and they retreat and surrender to the bosses at every turn, and preside over a declining union movement that today barely represents 10% of the US private sector labor force....
And, if that wasn't bad enough, the nation is locked up in three interolocking Middle Eastern imperialistic oil wars, in Afghanistan, Iraq and against the shadowy Saudi Arabian terrorist group < al-Qaeda > ...these wars have led to the lost of over 1,200 young American soldiers lives, and have put somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000+ soldiers in the hospital...(not to mention the 17,000+ Iraqis, and 10,000+ Afghans, who've perished, and the tens of thousand of Iraqis and Afghans who've been maimed)...
Any one of these issues, on their own, would be legitimate cause for intense rage among the workers of America....and we're facing all of them at once....as well as the everyday abuses that the capitalistic system carries out against the working class...
Why didn't the Million Worker March tap into that class rage???
Very simple...the actual purpose of the Million Worker March was to convince militant union workers, in particular militant Black workers, to "vote against Bush" on Election Day...that is, to vote FOR John Kerry..
Basically, the Million Worker March was nothing more than a Get Out The Vote [GOTV] event for the Democratic Party..and MWM keynote speaker Martin Luther King III's speech made that VERY clear, when he called for workers to set up telephone trees to call 20 people and get them to vote "against Bush" (that is, FOR KERRY) and for them to get each one of those 20 people to call 20 people to vote "against Bush" and so on and so on and so on....basically, King called for setting up telephone trees for the Democratic Party..
King's sentiment was echoed by another major speaker at the rally, comedian and 1960's activist Dick Gregory..
And, long before the march happened, the MWM's two top leaders, Teamsters local 808 President F. Christopher "Chris" Silvera and International Longshore and Warehouse Union local 10 BA Clarence Thomas had stated that this event was intended as a GOTV event for the Democrats (Silvera even went so far as to write a letter to the AFL-CIO top leadership, urging them to support the MWM because it was the most "cost effective" Democratic Party GOTV event that the unions could possibly set up)
Now, if the rally had been HONEST about it's intent as a Democratic Party campaign event, that would have been one thing....but, the MWM has been wrapped up in all sorts of leftist rhetoric about political independence for the working class and "Marching in our own name"....
The reason for this deception is simple...if the event was openly billed as a Democratic Party GOTV event, many of the leftist activists and militant unionists the rally organizers wanted to woo would not attend...the radicals would only come if the MWM pretended to be for political indepencence.....
Of course, that kind of dishonesty and hypocracy alienates regular workers...who might have come to the rally in larger numbers if the MWM leaders had possessed the intestinal fortitude to OPENLY support the Kerry-Edwards campaign...or at least to be openly for "Anybody But Bush"....
Beyond that, the MWM's literature stood out for it's lack of anger and militancy for the abuses that workers have suffered in this country...the MWM's leaflets read like labor-oriented Democratic Party literature...they dealt with the problems of our class in a mild and liberal way...and posed no real solutions...and totally left out the only way we can achieve our demands, that is...class struggle...
Considering the fact that almost all of the rally's leaders are African American, the MWM's literature was dead silent on the demands of Black workers in this country...it had nothing to say on affirmative action, welfare reform, racial profiling and the mass incarceration of 1 million Black Americans, all burning issues for African American workers...
Perhaps the rally organizers were pandering to the liberal racism of many White activists, who basically don't care about the horrible persecution that Black Americans suffer every day in this country...and many of whom are basically uncomfortable around Black people...
In the end, the bulk of the 10,000 folks who attended the rally were from the American far left...with very very few ordinary non-leftist workers showing up....
This isn't that surprising...due to the fact that, since the 1940's, almost all of the various socialist, communist and anarchist groups in America have relentlessly isolated themselves from the American working class, preferring to build their social base of support among upscale college students and professionals...
In particular, for the past 60 years, almost all of the left in the USA have avoided the most militant of American workers, that is, Black workers, like the plague....
There are some exceptions, of course...during the 1960's, the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Progressive Labor Party built militant (and often armed) revolutionary unionist organizations among Black workers in the automobile industry, the post office, the health care industry and the construction trades....
But today, the left is almost absent from the working class...and further, the left is de facto racially segregated..and, even among the Black left, with few exceptions, they're almost absent from the working class, and are mainly concentrated among upscale African American college students and professionals..
By and large, the American left are oriented towards the middle class...and are mainly interested in preserving the declining priviliges and incomes of that social class by reforming the capitalist system....
Due to that middle class orientation, the left in this country have no interest in the problems of the working class for the crudely simple reason that, ultimately, the only way the working class' problems can be solved is by ABOLISHING the capitalistic system, and replacing it with a communistic system where workers control the society, the economy and the government....and all social priviliges are abolished...
The middle class orientation of the American far left is clearly reflected in the kind of tactics of struggle they embrace - specifically, peaceful rallies on non working days, that involve picketing empty buildings,and listening to speeches from reform capitalist-oriented leaders in city parks....tactics which, at the end of the day are about begging the rulers to change by peacefully petitioning them...
These tactics quite clearly DO NOT WORK...as the mass rallies before the invasion of Iraq showed quite clearly....millions of folks marched, and begged the corporate rulers of America and England to not invade Iraq...but the rulers launched the invasions anyway....
Beyond that, these tactics are clearly unsuited for the working class, for they do not put our social power on display....
What I mean is...the power of the working class comes from the fact that we do all of the productive labor of the society....without our labor, no goods get produced or transported and no services get provided....
In other words...WE DON'T OWN THE COUNTRY, BUT WE SURE AS HELL RUN IT....
And, if we withdraw our labor, everything comes to a screeching halt....
Remember, the greatest victories the American working class ever won came from strikes...and in particular strikes coupled with insurrections and riots in the streets...
The times in American history when workers have advanced (1870's, 1880's, during World War I, 1930's, during World War II, 1960's) were times when millions of workers were on strike..and those strikes were often coupled with rioting in the streets...
And this is doubly true for African American workers...our greatest victories came from strikes in the 1930's, the threat of a nationwide general strike of Black workers in 1941 (Black socialist railroad union leader A. Phillip Randolph's "March On Washington Movement" of December 1941), and the 1960's rioting by jobless Black workers and workplace occupations and wildcat strikes by Black autoworkers and construction workers)...
As a class, we've never gained a God-damned thing from parading in front of empty office buildings on a Sunday afternoon....those tactics are irrelevant.....and don't even work for the middle class and the students...
Workers power comes from the fact that we are the creators of all wealth in society...and, if we choose to, we can toss aside the rulers who ride atop us and profit from our labor....
As the leftists listened to Democratic Party Get Out The Vote speeches in front of empty Washington DC office buildings Sunday, there were workers locked in REAL struggles....
Like the casino workers an hour and a half up I-95 from the rally site in Atlantic City....
10,000 of them are on strike..as part of a move by their union, the awkwardly named Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees - Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (UNITE - HERE), to have the union contracts of Las Vegas, Detroit and Atlantic City to expire at the same time 3 years from now...
This is part of a broader move by UNITE HERE to have hotel worker contracts in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City expire at the same time 2 years from now....
Unfortunately, UNITE HERE's corporate unionist leaders (who are as racist and sexist as they are pro corporate - the AC casino workforce is largely female and mostly Black, Latino or South Asian Muslim - the union leaders are White males) are terrified of the social power of their members, and have hobbled the strikers from day one...bending to every court injunction (including the one that barred strikers from using swear words on the picketline) and doing nothing to stop guests from being bussed into the casinos by union drivers, and union workers scabbing behind the picket line....
Those workers need the assistance of the entire labor movement, to help them break from their sellout leaders, and to help them use their social power to bring the hospitality corporations to their knees..
But, even with UNITE HERE's misleadership, these workers still have their social power on display, and their rallies, backed up by that social power, easily attract 10,000+ workers, in a small city with less than 200,000 workers...
Even unorganized workers deep in the belly of US imperialism's war machine have the social power to fight (and, ultimately, overturn) this system...a fact illustrated about 10,000 miles due East of the boardwalk of Atlantic City...
At Tallil Air Base, in Nasiryah, Iraq, 19 US Army reservists of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, 13th Corps Support Command staged a mutiny....
They were assigned to what they characterized as a "suicide mission"...to drive unarmored trucks full of helicopter fuel, with no mechanized infantry escort, to an Army air base further north in the "Sunni Triangle" where they felt it was almost certain that Iraqi insurgents would ambush them...
The soldiers, mostly working class Blacks from the South, refused the order...and are now facing court martial on mutiny charges, and are being held in detention, under conditions almost as abusive as those Iraqi detainees have been subject too....
Be that as it may, those 19 enlisted people and non commissioned officers did more to disrupt the war effort than any one of those anti-war protests last spring....
Again proving the point...the social power of the working class,and our potential strength, is best displayed by strikes and uprisings than by parading past empty office buildings on a weekend...
The American left needs to understand this..and to reorient itself away from the middle class and reforming the capitalist system,and towards the working class and overturning capitalism, and replacing that social system with a worker-controlled communistic one, where those who do the productive labor of society will also rule...
One major step towards that social revolution would involve reorienting the American trade unions away from business unionism (the ideology, dominant in every union in this country today, that falsely claims that bosses and workers have a common interest, and the purpose of unions and union leaders is to build "class partnership" between workers and bosses) and to reorient those unions towards something I call "revolutionary unionism"...
I've explained the ideology of revolutionary unionism on the GANGBOX website before, at :
http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/csu1.html
http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/downbylaw.html
http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/contract2001.html
and on the GANGBOX listserv, at:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/22
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2466
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2659
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4655
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4738
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/5059
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7966
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8649
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/9027
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11281
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11583
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/12328
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/12482
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/13389
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/14549
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/16200
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/16682
and
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/18052
Revolutionary unions are oriented towards class struggle...and recongnize the fundamental truth that capitalists and workers are enemies, that the very nature of capitalist economics makes us enemies (that is, our wages are far less than the economic value we create, and the bulk of the value we create goes into the pockets of the capitalists who employ us) and that, until that day when our class is strong enough to overthrow the capitalistic system, and establish a worker-controlled communistic system, the job of unions is to fight the capitalists and gain the highest wages, best benefits and best working conditions we possibly can under this system...
And, of course, all of those gains can only be achieved by withdrawing our labor, or otherwise disrupting the capitalistic system (riots, prisoner uprisings, mutinies by enlisted personnnel in the armed forces ect)....
The cold hard reality is, parading in front of empty office buildings on a Sunday afternoon, listening to speeches by leaders who belive in reforming capitalism..and, above all VOTING FOR CAPITALIST POLITICIANS LIKE JOHN KERRY...are NOT going to lead us to any of those gains...
In fact, they actually impede our class struggling against this system....
The sooner that the American left understands that reality, the sooner they really will be able to mobilize millions of American workers....
Thats it for now.
Be union, work safe.
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By Gregory A. Butler, local 608 carpenter
The "Million Worker March" [MWM] came in about 990,000 short on Sunday, October 17th....
The event, which cribbed it's name from Minister Louis Farrakhan's Black nationalist Washington DC rally 10 years ago (which actually live up to it's name, attendance-wise), had been billed by many left wing labor activists as a great turning point for militant US unionists...kinda like a latter-day Flint Sit Down Strike crossed with the Selma to Montgomery march....
However, it didn't work out like that....
According to news accounts by the Washington Post, Washington Times and ABC News, only 10,000 people showed up at the rally....far less than the organizers had expected..
Nobody, not even the MWM organizers, actually expected a Farrakhan-scale event...but, the MWM's Communications Chair, Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theorist Ralph Schoenman, had predicted in the Washington Times on Friday, October 15 that the rally at the Lincoln Memorial would have at least 100,000 people in attendance....
That didn't happen....
Instead, only a handfull of folks bothered to turn out....and the organizers are already playing the blame game, claiming, bizarrely, that the DC police caused the low turnout, because a handfull of busses were not allowed to unload their passengers at the Lincoln Memorial, and instead had to let the folks off at RFK Stadium, which is just a few subway stops away from the Memorial on the Washington Metro....
Of course, those bus reroutings delayed, at most, about 1,000 people...WHO WERE ALREADY IN DC FOR THE RALLY...
The far more important question is, why did so many workers not attend this rally????
On the face of it, a REAL mass movement, aimed at mobilizing the working class, should have attracted far more than 1 million workers....
There are many abuses faced by the working class in America today....
Millions of workers have seen their jobs "downsized" - that is, they were laid off and either replaced by a machine, or their remaining co-workers have to work longer and harder for the same pay, or the job was "outsourced" to a lower paying subcontractor, or their job went to Mexico or India...
Millions of workers have lost their pensions, and are being forced to pay through the nose for insurance coverage that was once paid for by their employers...
Millions of Black and Latino workers are being stripped of affirmative action protections, with employers going back to the Jim Crow days of racist job discrimination....
Millions of low income workers have been kicked off welfare, or have lost their Section 8 housing assistance, plunging them even deeper into poverty...
Millions of Latino illegal immigrant workers are forced to work for substandard pay, subject to rampant abuses and discrimination...and can be deported at a moment's notice...
Millions of workers are denied their right to union representation, and 20,000 workers a year get fired and blacklisted if they try to organize their co-workers...
Millions of H-1B and H-2A immigrant "guest workers" are held in a form of modern day indentured servitude...they are bonded to a particular employer, who can cut their pay, reduce their benefits, and even sexually harass and assault them without penalty...but, if they dare to complain, or if they displease their employer in any way, they can instantly be deported to their homeland..
Millions of women workers are subject to sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination on the job..and also have to pay out of pocket for often sub-par child care services..and their health insurance coverage frequently refuses to cover abortion and birth control....and, they're paid less than male workers with less experience and education....
Millions of union members have union leaders who are more interested in "class peace" with Corporate America than they are in fighting for workers rights..and they retreat and surrender to the bosses at every turn, and preside over a declining union movement that today barely represents 10% of the US private sector labor force....
And, if that wasn't bad enough, the nation is locked up in three interolocking Middle Eastern imperialistic oil wars, in Afghanistan, Iraq and against the shadowy Saudi Arabian terrorist group < al-Qaeda > ...these wars have led to the lost of over 1,200 young American soldiers lives, and have put somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000+ soldiers in the hospital...(not to mention the 17,000+ Iraqis, and 10,000+ Afghans, who've perished, and the tens of thousand of Iraqis and Afghans who've been maimed)...
Any one of these issues, on their own, would be legitimate cause for intense rage among the workers of America....and we're facing all of them at once....as well as the everyday abuses that the capitalistic system carries out against the working class...
Why didn't the Million Worker March tap into that class rage???
Very simple...the actual purpose of the Million Worker March was to convince militant union workers, in particular militant Black workers, to "vote against Bush" on Election Day...that is, to vote FOR John Kerry..
Basically, the Million Worker March was nothing more than a Get Out The Vote [GOTV] event for the Democratic Party..and MWM keynote speaker Martin Luther King III's speech made that VERY clear, when he called for workers to set up telephone trees to call 20 people and get them to vote "against Bush" (that is, FOR KERRY) and for them to get each one of those 20 people to call 20 people to vote "against Bush" and so on and so on and so on....basically, King called for setting up telephone trees for the Democratic Party..
King's sentiment was echoed by another major speaker at the rally, comedian and 1960's activist Dick Gregory..
And, long before the march happened, the MWM's two top leaders, Teamsters local 808 President F. Christopher "Chris" Silvera and International Longshore and Warehouse Union local 10 BA Clarence Thomas had stated that this event was intended as a GOTV event for the Democrats (Silvera even went so far as to write a letter to the AFL-CIO top leadership, urging them to support the MWM because it was the most "cost effective" Democratic Party GOTV event that the unions could possibly set up)
Now, if the rally had been HONEST about it's intent as a Democratic Party campaign event, that would have been one thing....but, the MWM has been wrapped up in all sorts of leftist rhetoric about political independence for the working class and "Marching in our own name"....
The reason for this deception is simple...if the event was openly billed as a Democratic Party GOTV event, many of the leftist activists and militant unionists the rally organizers wanted to woo would not attend...the radicals would only come if the MWM pretended to be for political indepencence.....
Of course, that kind of dishonesty and hypocracy alienates regular workers...who might have come to the rally in larger numbers if the MWM leaders had possessed the intestinal fortitude to OPENLY support the Kerry-Edwards campaign...or at least to be openly for "Anybody But Bush"....
Beyond that, the MWM's literature stood out for it's lack of anger and militancy for the abuses that workers have suffered in this country...the MWM's leaflets read like labor-oriented Democratic Party literature...they dealt with the problems of our class in a mild and liberal way...and posed no real solutions...and totally left out the only way we can achieve our demands, that is...class struggle...
Considering the fact that almost all of the rally's leaders are African American, the MWM's literature was dead silent on the demands of Black workers in this country...it had nothing to say on affirmative action, welfare reform, racial profiling and the mass incarceration of 1 million Black Americans, all burning issues for African American workers...
Perhaps the rally organizers were pandering to the liberal racism of many White activists, who basically don't care about the horrible persecution that Black Americans suffer every day in this country...and many of whom are basically uncomfortable around Black people...
In the end, the bulk of the 10,000 folks who attended the rally were from the American far left...with very very few ordinary non-leftist workers showing up....
This isn't that surprising...due to the fact that, since the 1940's, almost all of the various socialist, communist and anarchist groups in America have relentlessly isolated themselves from the American working class, preferring to build their social base of support among upscale college students and professionals...
In particular, for the past 60 years, almost all of the left in the USA have avoided the most militant of American workers, that is, Black workers, like the plague....
There are some exceptions, of course...during the 1960's, the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Progressive Labor Party built militant (and often armed) revolutionary unionist organizations among Black workers in the automobile industry, the post office, the health care industry and the construction trades....
But today, the left is almost absent from the working class...and further, the left is de facto racially segregated..and, even among the Black left, with few exceptions, they're almost absent from the working class, and are mainly concentrated among upscale African American college students and professionals..
By and large, the American left are oriented towards the middle class...and are mainly interested in preserving the declining priviliges and incomes of that social class by reforming the capitalist system....
Due to that middle class orientation, the left in this country have no interest in the problems of the working class for the crudely simple reason that, ultimately, the only way the working class' problems can be solved is by ABOLISHING the capitalistic system, and replacing it with a communistic system where workers control the society, the economy and the government....and all social priviliges are abolished...
The middle class orientation of the American far left is clearly reflected in the kind of tactics of struggle they embrace - specifically, peaceful rallies on non working days, that involve picketing empty buildings,and listening to speeches from reform capitalist-oriented leaders in city parks....tactics which, at the end of the day are about begging the rulers to change by peacefully petitioning them...
These tactics quite clearly DO NOT WORK...as the mass rallies before the invasion of Iraq showed quite clearly....millions of folks marched, and begged the corporate rulers of America and England to not invade Iraq...but the rulers launched the invasions anyway....
Beyond that, these tactics are clearly unsuited for the working class, for they do not put our social power on display....
What I mean is...the power of the working class comes from the fact that we do all of the productive labor of the society....without our labor, no goods get produced or transported and no services get provided....
In other words...WE DON'T OWN THE COUNTRY, BUT WE SURE AS HELL RUN IT....
And, if we withdraw our labor, everything comes to a screeching halt....
Remember, the greatest victories the American working class ever won came from strikes...and in particular strikes coupled with insurrections and riots in the streets...
The times in American history when workers have advanced (1870's, 1880's, during World War I, 1930's, during World War II, 1960's) were times when millions of workers were on strike..and those strikes were often coupled with rioting in the streets...
And this is doubly true for African American workers...our greatest victories came from strikes in the 1930's, the threat of a nationwide general strike of Black workers in 1941 (Black socialist railroad union leader A. Phillip Randolph's "March On Washington Movement" of December 1941), and the 1960's rioting by jobless Black workers and workplace occupations and wildcat strikes by Black autoworkers and construction workers)...
As a class, we've never gained a God-damned thing from parading in front of empty office buildings on a Sunday afternoon....those tactics are irrelevant.....and don't even work for the middle class and the students...
Workers power comes from the fact that we are the creators of all wealth in society...and, if we choose to, we can toss aside the rulers who ride atop us and profit from our labor....
As the leftists listened to Democratic Party Get Out The Vote speeches in front of empty Washington DC office buildings Sunday, there were workers locked in REAL struggles....
Like the casino workers an hour and a half up I-95 from the rally site in Atlantic City....
10,000 of them are on strike..as part of a move by their union, the awkwardly named Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees - Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (UNITE - HERE), to have the union contracts of Las Vegas, Detroit and Atlantic City to expire at the same time 3 years from now...
This is part of a broader move by UNITE HERE to have hotel worker contracts in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City expire at the same time 2 years from now....
Unfortunately, UNITE HERE's corporate unionist leaders (who are as racist and sexist as they are pro corporate - the AC casino workforce is largely female and mostly Black, Latino or South Asian Muslim - the union leaders are White males) are terrified of the social power of their members, and have hobbled the strikers from day one...bending to every court injunction (including the one that barred strikers from using swear words on the picketline) and doing nothing to stop guests from being bussed into the casinos by union drivers, and union workers scabbing behind the picket line....
Those workers need the assistance of the entire labor movement, to help them break from their sellout leaders, and to help them use their social power to bring the hospitality corporations to their knees..
But, even with UNITE HERE's misleadership, these workers still have their social power on display, and their rallies, backed up by that social power, easily attract 10,000+ workers, in a small city with less than 200,000 workers...
Even unorganized workers deep in the belly of US imperialism's war machine have the social power to fight (and, ultimately, overturn) this system...a fact illustrated about 10,000 miles due East of the boardwalk of Atlantic City...
At Tallil Air Base, in Nasiryah, Iraq, 19 US Army reservists of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, 13th Corps Support Command staged a mutiny....
They were assigned to what they characterized as a "suicide mission"...to drive unarmored trucks full of helicopter fuel, with no mechanized infantry escort, to an Army air base further north in the "Sunni Triangle" where they felt it was almost certain that Iraqi insurgents would ambush them...
The soldiers, mostly working class Blacks from the South, refused the order...and are now facing court martial on mutiny charges, and are being held in detention, under conditions almost as abusive as those Iraqi detainees have been subject too....
Be that as it may, those 19 enlisted people and non commissioned officers did more to disrupt the war effort than any one of those anti-war protests last spring....
Again proving the point...the social power of the working class,and our potential strength, is best displayed by strikes and uprisings than by parading past empty office buildings on a weekend...
The American left needs to understand this..and to reorient itself away from the middle class and reforming the capitalist system,and towards the working class and overturning capitalism, and replacing that social system with a worker-controlled communistic one, where those who do the productive labor of society will also rule...
One major step towards that social revolution would involve reorienting the American trade unions away from business unionism (the ideology, dominant in every union in this country today, that falsely claims that bosses and workers have a common interest, and the purpose of unions and union leaders is to build "class partnership" between workers and bosses) and to reorient those unions towards something I call "revolutionary unionism"...
I've explained the ideology of revolutionary unionism on the GANGBOX website before, at :
http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/csu1.html
http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/downbylaw.html
http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/contract2001.html
and on the GANGBOX listserv, at:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/22
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2466
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2659
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4655
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4738
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/5059
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7966
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8649
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/9027
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11281
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11583
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/12328
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/12482
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/13389
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/14549
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/16200
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/16682
and
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/18052
Revolutionary unions are oriented towards class struggle...and recongnize the fundamental truth that capitalists and workers are enemies, that the very nature of capitalist economics makes us enemies (that is, our wages are far less than the economic value we create, and the bulk of the value we create goes into the pockets of the capitalists who employ us) and that, until that day when our class is strong enough to overthrow the capitalistic system, and establish a worker-controlled communistic system, the job of unions is to fight the capitalists and gain the highest wages, best benefits and best working conditions we possibly can under this system...
And, of course, all of those gains can only be achieved by withdrawing our labor, or otherwise disrupting the capitalistic system (riots, prisoner uprisings, mutinies by enlisted personnnel in the armed forces ect)....
The cold hard reality is, parading in front of empty office buildings on a Sunday afternoon, listening to speeches by leaders who belive in reforming capitalism..and, above all VOTING FOR CAPITALIST POLITICIANS LIKE JOHN KERRY...are NOT going to lead us to any of those gains...
In fact, they actually impede our class struggling against this system....
The sooner that the American left understands that reality, the sooner they really will be able to mobilize millions of American workers....
Thats it for now.
Be union, work safe.
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good points until the end
Mon, Oct 18, 2004 11:09PM
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