Organian's Open Salon Blog

From Occupy Wall Street to a General Strike Movement!

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:01:18 -0500

This was written for the December 12, 2011 port shutdown in Oakland, California, but its basic message remains important.

Why Workers Should Support the December 12

West Coast Port Shutdown, and What We Need To Do Next

The Occupy movement’s decision to shut down the ports on the West Coast on December 12 has been criticized by mainstream media, union officials, and even some labor activists who consider themselves progressive. They complain that Occupy does not represent union workers; that the port shutdown action has not been officially endorsed even by the ILWU, much less by the labor councils in the port cities; and that the action will hurt the people who work at the ports, who are part of the “99%.” They argue that if Occupy wants to support the labor movement, it should follow the instructions of the labor bureaucrats rather than acting on its own.

To this we respond: BULLSHIT! These criticisms ignore the fact that the present labor bureaucracy, hog-tied by its links to the Democratic Party and its craven fear of violating the oppressive Taft-Hartley anti-strike law, has demonstrated time and time again that it is incapable of fighting effectively for the interests of even those few workers who belong to a union, much less the interests of the working class as a whole.

That is why, having run out of patience waiting for the union leadership to take action in the face of the current economic crisis, the working class of Oakland took action on its own on November 2, and kicked Wall Street where it counts by shutting down the Port of Oakland! The union tops refuse to demonstrate our power through mass direct action, but the workers of Oakland showed that as a class, we can, and we will!

Workers Must Break with the Democrats

Yes, there is a class war going on, and the 99% did not start it. The corporate plutocracy has been waging an all-out war against organized labor for decades, to the point where 89% of workers no longer belong to a union. Their latest ploy is to blame public workers and their unions for the current structural crisis of capitalism—as if the demands of teachers, firefighters, and public health workers for a fair wage and a threadbare pension were responsible for crashing the biggest economy in the world.

As a result, over the past decades the situation of working people and the poor in the United States has gone from bad to worse. While this was happening, the “leadership” of the union movement did nothing to fight back directly, instead contributing money, volunteers, and votes to the Democratic Party. They have continued in this vein even while Democratic politicians have cut budgets, slashed social services, and imposed takebacks on public workers. When Obama promised “hope” and “change,” the union tops cheered, and they will back him again in 2012.

But by now it is crystal clear that channeling our discontent into electoral campaigns brings working people nothing but false hope, and change for the worse. The Democrats have promised us health care reform; jobs; the Employee Free Choice Act to boost union organizing; and environmental protection. They have delivered precisely NOTHING. We are still faced with a shrinking job market, a lower standard of living, home foreclosures, budget cuts, tax cuts for the rich, and bailouts for the banks. And still the union leadership backs the Democrats, refusing to assert labor’s political independence and fight back with mass working class actions.

Today’s Labor “Leadership” Is Unsupportable

The core focus of today’s port shutdown is the fight to defend the ILWU 21 dock workers in Longview, Washington, and to promote organizing of the truck drivers at all the ports. The situation of the truck drivers is shameful; they cannot organize for better wages and working conditions because the law has falsely labeled them “independent contractors” who cannot bargain collectively under the antitrust laws. But their situation is only the tip of the iceberg of attacks on workers, both union and non-union, by the corporate fat cats. All of us must organize to fight back against the ongoing attacks on our standard of living and our civil and human rights.

Unions led this struggle in the distant past, but under today’s leadership, we cannot rely on them to do so again. On November 2, unions responded to Occupy Oakland’s call for a port shutdown with letters of support for what they called a “Day of Action,” but not one dared to defy Taft-Hartley by calling their members to walk out in unison and create a real general strike. Instead, they told workers to take vacation time if they wanted to participate.

In the run up to December 12th, the labor leadership’s role has gotten worse. The ILWU leadership has taken a stand against their own rank and file and against the community that supports them. Under pressure from the Port Management Association and the Democratic Party, the Alameda County Labor Council even went so far as to consider a resolution opposing the port shutdown. The resolution was tabled, and some labor activists are trying to give the Labor Council left cover by calling the resulting “neutrality” a mini-victory. As the late historian Howard Zinn put it, however, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

We Need an Independent, Militant Leadership

The Occupy movement should be commended for firing a warning shot in the class war fight-back. But as the often brutal police crackdowns on the Occupy encampments have demonstrated, tents and consensus-based general assemblies are not a sustainable or effective way to defeat the bodies of armed men that the corporate-controlled state has at its command. In order to fight back and win, what we need is a General Strike Movement. Union militants dedicated to the advancement of our class cannot place faith in the populist, cross-class Occupy movement.

Occupy cannot accomplish the necessary task of galvanizing rank-and-file workers to defeat business and corporate unionism and turn our organizations into a weapon that can and will wage a militant struggle for the interests of the entire working class. We must reinvigorate and democratize organized labor, and raise up a new cadre of class struggle driven leaders who will work with the rank and file to smash Taft-Hartley and mount united mass strike actions. Such a movement, combined with the fight for working class political independence, must be put front and center on labor’s agenda today!

To achieve genuine working class political independence, rank-and-filers must organize to create representative bodies composed of democratically elected workers’ deputies who are subject to immediate recall. We must form factory committees, neighborhood councils, and inter-factory and inter-district workers’ councils.

We must also lend our support to the unemployed and marginalized elements of the population in their self-organization efforts. When workers join with the oppressed communities to oppose their common enemy, we all benefit. This was shown by the ILWU Local 10 strike in October 2010, in protest of racist police brutality and the murder of Oscar Grant, which forged the ties between labor and the oppressed that contributed so greatly to the success of the November 2 port shutdown. Together, we can work jointly on the tasks of seizing control of the economy, reorganizing it to serve human needs instead of private profit, and defending ourselves against counterattacks by the agents of corporate capital.

Our Struggle Must Be Internationalist

The Occupy movement was inspired in part by the struggles of the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and the Middle East during the Arab Spring. Those struggles relied on support from working class strikes and the defection of rank-and-file members of the armed services to the side of the protesting masses. Workers in the United States need to learn many of the same lessons in working class independence, rank and file organizing, and workers’ democracy.

The Arab Spring also offers us another, equally important lesson. Despite the sacrifice and struggle of the Egyptian and Libyan masses, their lack of an alternative leadership left a vacuum into which the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie and the top army leadership have stepped, only to renew the repression of the people. This development exposes the limitations of pacifism and leaderlessness.

In addition, the globalization of capital makes it more important than ever for those who wage the struggle against capital to form ties with our counterparts around the globe. The workers’ movement cannot succeed unless it develops an internationalist consciousness, in solidarity with our brother and sister workers overseas. It is in all of our common interest to defeat the imperialist wars and interventions waged by the United States, NATO, and their allies.

• Confront and smash Taft-Hartley and all anti-labor laws through political and general strikes!

• Break with the Democrats and all capitalist parties! There is no lesser evil! There is no legislative solution!

• Build a fighting workers’ party that can wage a militant direct action struggle for a workers’ government!

• Jobs for all! Share the work: 30 hours work for 40 hours pay! Implement a sliding scale of wages and prices!

• Full citizenship rights for all immigrant workers! Defend immigrants against La Migra and ICE!

• Organize workers’ defense guards based on labor and the oppressed Black and Brown communities!

• No foreclosures! Open foreclosed homes to workers and the unemployed! Forgive all student loan debt!

• Open the books of the major finance houses and corporations! Seize the stolen wealth hoarded by the 1%!

• Nationalize finance capital, the big banks, and the major corporations, without indemnification and under workers’ control!

• Form democratic workers’ assemblies to prepare and organize for the seizure and operation of the economy!

HUMANIST WORKERS FOR REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM

Dec. 12, 2011

www.HumanistsForRevolutionarySocialism.org • hw4rs@yahoo.com

Abolishing Corporate Personhood Is Not Enough!

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 02:01:45 -0500

This is the text of a flyer I handed out at Occupy events in Oakland and San Francisco on Friday January 20, which was billed as a day of protest against the Citizens United decision.

Abolishing Corporate Personhood Is Not Enough!

Form a Fighting Workers’ Party to Lead Our Struggle!

We Need to Build for a Nationwide General Strike and Fight for a Workers’ Government!

Even if we do away with “corporate personhood,” big business and the rich will still control the politicians and the government, just as they did before Citizens United. We need an entirely new system, organized to meet the human needs of the 99% rather than to generate profits for the 1%! Only by building a fighting workers’ party and taking mass direct action under its leadership can we achieve goals such as these:

Full employment at prevailing union rates for all who are willing and able to work! Spread the available jobs to more workers by requiring the bosses to give us 40 hours’ pay for 30 hours of work!
No layoffs! When the bosses lay off workers, workers should go on strike and occupy their workplaces. If the bosses try to close down the business, workers should take it over and run it under their own control.
Stop all foreclosures and evictions! Housing is a human right! Forgive all debt on homes that are worth less than the mortgage because of the real estate crisis caused by Wall Street greed. Move the homeless and those in overcrowded or low quality housing into foreclosed and vacant homes.
Forgive all student loans! The government must provide high quality, universal public education at no charge, from daycare and pre-school through the graduate level. Place all publicly funded educational institutions under the control of teachers, parents, and students old enough to participate.
No budget cuts! Restore and increase budgets for welfare, child care, health clinics, schools, and all public services and benefits. Full pension and health care benefits for all retired workers, public and private sector alike.
Quality free universal health care at no charge from prenatal to the grave! The only way to provide health care for all is to remove the profit motive. Abolish health insurance and for-profit pharmaceutical makers, and put all health care under the control of health workers and patients!
Protect the environment! Take all possible steps now to minimize climate change! Fight for workers’ control of industry in order to transform the current, outmoded technology of industrial production to totally green and sustainable technology.
End attacks on undocumented workers! End the ICE raids! Free all detained undocumented workers! Full employment rights for all workers! Let workers choose where to work by demanding that all workers who do the same work get the same contract, same wages, and same working conditions, regardless of country!
No more “too big to fail”! No more giving away tax money to rescue Wall Street and big business from their own gambling losses! Nationalize all failing industries under workers’ control and without compensation!
Break with the Democrats! Fight for the political independence of the working class! Replace the sell-out labor bureaucrats who give our hard-earned money to Democratic Party politicians, and refuse to organize genuine militant strikes! We need to build a fighting workers’ party based on democratically run unions and organizations of the oppressed and the unemployed.
US troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the world! No war against Iran! Money for human needs, not imperialist control of oil and other natural resources!

The Problem Is Capitalism, Not Corporate Personhood

The Occupy movement has called for a day of protest against “corporate personhood” on January 20. Occupy is right that politicians serve big business and the rich, and that our “democratic” system does not meet the basic needs of ordinary workers (the “99%”). But the slogan “Corporations are NOT people; money is NOT speech” implies we can fix that problem by getting rid of the United States Supreme Court’s decision inCitizens United.

This is not true. The problems in our society cannot and will not be cured just by doing away with “corporate personhood.” Big businesses and rich people controlled “our” government long before Citizens United. The Supreme Court decision just made it simpler and more direct for them to do so. So undoing Citizens United would not change much. It would only force the wealthy and powerful to fall back on the tactics they were using very successfully before the Citizens United decision.

Getting rid of corporate personhood would not change the basic imbalance of power in our society. The problems we face are built into the structure of the capitalist economic system, under which the means of production (factories, mines, technology, etc.) are privately owned, and the people who own the means of production use them in the way that will make the most profit, rather than choosing to make the things that people need most. Corporations are just one of the many possible kinds of private ownership of the means of production. Even if we got rid of corporations altogether, our system would still treat protecting private property and maximizing profits as the top priority. Capitalists have no interest in housing the homeless, employing the jobless, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, protecting the environment, or educating the young. There is always more profit to be made doing other things. This is not because of corporate personhood, but because of the capitalist system itself.

It is capitalism, not corporate personhood, that is responsible for the current worldwide depression. Why? Big businesses moved most of their manufacturing out of the developed countries, where workers’ standard of living was relatively high, because they could make higher profits by building factories in countries like China, where wages were lower. Meanwhile, Wall Street used the money that flowed back to the United States to gamble for profit on speculative bubbles like mortgage-backed securities. When the bubble burst, the economy tanked.

We Need More than Bandaid Reforms

Calling for reforms like “abolish corporate personhood” and “tax the rich” implies that the social problems of our country (not to mention the global economic crisis) can be solved by limiting big business’s political campaign contributions and forcing rich people to hand over more tax dollars to the government. This is a pipe dream. The truth is that these reforms will do little or nothing to solve our economic, environmental, and human needs problems, bring peace to the world, or create a genuinely democratic political system.

Reforms have been passed many times, as a result of mass pressure from groups like organized labor and the civil rights movement. But when the capitalists start to see their profits falling, they always take back the reforms. Right now, for example, they are using the bad economy as an excuse to attack organized labor; privatize public schools; cut welfare and other services to the poor; and trash social security, environmental protection, and other government services.

In order to cure a disease, doctors go after the cause, not just the symptoms. In order to build the kind of society we all want to see, we first have to grasp the simple fact that what lies at the root of the world’s problems is not corporations or rich people, but the profit-driven economic system as a whole—that is, capitalism. To fix the problems in our economy, our environment, and the world, we need to eliminate the cause – the capitalist profit system – and replace it with an economy based on human needs, not quarterly profit. If we do not develop a program that unites us in an open struggle against the capitalist system itself, the Occupy movement is doomed to be demoralized and eventually defeated.

How to Attack Capitalism at Its Roots

How can we organize for real, lasting change? There is one thing that capitalism still needs from us: our labor. The most effective weapon we have in this struggle is our ability to refuse to allow big business to profit from our labor—that is, to go on strike. The Egyptian people know this well; the Tahrir Square occupations last spring that overturned the Mubarak dictatorship were supported by labor strikes throughout Egypt’s industrial sector. To succeed, we must follow their example!

So to win this fight for once and for all, we need more than demonstrations in support of reforms. We need to develop the Occupy movement into a nationwide set of popular/worker/labor assemblies that meet to plan and prepare for a nationwide, political, indefinite general strike, with the aim of taking power into the hands of working people and their allies. Strikes alone are not a panacea, but in the process of organizing for a strike like this, we will lay the foundation for the formation of a mass workers’ party—not an electoral party, but a unified body that fights for a workers’ government. Only a workers’ government can replace capitalism with a new system that is based on workers’ self-management, workers’ planning for human needs, and workers’ democratic control.

And, because capitalism is a global system, we need to make connections with our brother and sister workers internationally. Just as the original Occupy Wall Street action was inspired in part by the Arab Spring, we need to join forces with, inspire, and be inspired by the mass movements of working people everywhere. We are all oppressed by the same tyrant: the capitalist system! We must all work together to overthrow it and replace it with a system that focuses on meeting human needs, improving the quality of life for all people, and repairing our damaged planet, rather than the accumulation of profit, privilege, and power in the hands of a few.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Humanists-for-Revolutionary-Socialism/80134436166

www.HumanistsForRevolutionarySocialism.org

Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism • hw4rs@yahoo.com

January 2012 • Labor Donated

Disappointed in Obama?

Thu, 9 Dec 2010 00:12:37 -0500

I have read so many news stories and blog posts about how people who consider themselves progressives are deeply disappointed in Obama that I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Didn't you KNOW this would happen? I certainly did, and I tried to tell you.

Folks, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Your hearts may be in the right place, but you will not see any of your laudable goals realized as long as you keep putting your faith in the Democratic Party - or, to put it more broadly, in the illusion that real change can be achieved through the electoral process, and without doing away with the capitalist profit system.

I don't have time right now to explain further, but you can read back through some of my earlier blog posts to get an idea of why I'm saying this. I plan to try to get more active again on OS, and I hope that those of you who used to read and comment on my musings will come back around and share your thoughts. I'd particularly be interested in ideas about how to get the message out that those of us who want to see real change are going to have to do the hard work of confronting the plutocracy not just through demonstrations and rallies, but also through mass, united, direct action in the workplaces, schools and colleges, and communities, and eventually at the barricades. It just ain't gonna happen any other way.

Obama’s Health Care Reform: Neither Health Care Nor Reform

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 22:08:36 -0400

I've been shamefully neglectful of Open Salon lately, for the usual reasons (i.e., being overwhelmingly busy with other things). But just in case you thought I'd dropped off the face of the earth, here's a slightly edited version of a little piece on health care reform I wrote about two months ago, for publication elsewhere, that I thought my OS friends might not see if I didn't post it here as well. Comments are, of course, most welcome.

______________

As many left organizations (e.g., Socialist Organizer, Socialist Worker, Spark, Workers Vanguard ) have already stated, Obama’s so-called “health care reform” bill is totally unsupportable. Sources as mainstream as PBS’s Frontline series have confirmed that Congress passed the bill only after the health insurance industry spent huge amounts of money making absolutely sure that nothing in it would threaten the industry’s obscene profits. The legislation does nothing to guarantee affordable access to actual health care services, or to change the US’s costly, inefficient health care delivery “system.” Instead, its principal effect will be to redirect hundreds of billions of dollars away from individual workers and into the already bulging pockets of private, for-profit health insurance companies.

I will not repeat here all of the details about the bill’s shortcomings that have already been discussed elsewhere. (See, e.g., articles on the topic by our own Mick Arran; Rose Ann DeMoro for the Huffington Post; and Physicians for a National Health Program.) What I want to do is hit the highlights, and then make a few additional points that, in our view, have not been adequately emphasized by other commentators on this issue.

The bill requires people to purchase health insurance, but does not require employers to provide it. Moreover, the bill does nothing to guarantee that the insurance policies which people are able to buy will be affordable, or that copays and deductibles will be low enough to enable people to get access to health care if they need it. The highly touted subsidies for low-income people (which are, in effect, subsidies for the health insurance industry) will be available only to the lowest-income layer of the working poor; everyone else who does not have access to an employer-subsidized group policy will face a choice between buying expensive individual health insurance or paying a penalty. (See this AP article.) Even for the people who do receive subsidies, there is no mechanism to ensure that after paying their share of the cost of health insurance, they will have enough money left to pay for deductibles and copays – which the legislation allows insurers to set at whatever level they wish. The requirement that people with pre-existing conditions be allowed to buy health insurance does not ensure that the insurance companies will not cancel such people’s policies, or raise their premiums sky-high, if they start to need expensive care.

One of the bill’s provisions is particularly ironic. It requires insurance companies to allow existing policyholders to purchase coverage for their children until age 26, an additional three years over the previous cutoff. The only reason this was even an issue in the first place is that between the skyrocketing cost of higher education and the high rate of unemployment among youth, more and more young people are being forced to remain economically dependent on their parents after they complete their education. Many recent high school and college graduates cannot find a decent job (or any job at all), and those who do find work are often so heavily burdened with educational debt that they cannot cover all of their living expenses. This aspect of the bill may be helpful to some families – particularly relatively privileged workers whose employers subsidize their family’s health insurance – but they would not need that help if it were not for the decline of the US economy and the attacks on public education and workers’ standard of living. Meanwhile, those whose employers do not provide health insurance subsidies for dependents, and those who do not have health insurance at all, will not be able to take advantage of this provision, even though their young adult children are even more likely to be without health care coverage.

Now for the broader perspective. First, by cementing the private, for-profit health insurance industry firmly into the system, and giving it billions of additional dollars to spend on “campaign contributions” (bribes) and “political advertising” (propaganda), the legislation makes it even less likely that any meaningful change in the private, for-profit nature of the US health care system will be possible in the foreseeable future. Thus, this bill cannot be supported as a first step in the right direction. On the contrary, it virtually guarantees that the health care system in the US will remain one of the most backward in any highly developed country. (In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked the United States health care system as number 37 in overall health system performance. Sources: WHO report; rankings derived from report. See also this very entertaining protest song on the subject.)

Second, given that this bill’s principal beneficiary is the health insurance industry and the other big players in the for-profit health care industry (i.e., hospitals and drug and medical equipment manufacturers), it is important to understand why the Republicans in Congress – who normally (like the Democrats) side with big business and the profit system at every opportunity – nevertheless opposed this bill. Marxists and even “progressives” should have no illusions that the Republicans’ opposition must mean that the bill does something right. Rather, the Republican opposition to the bill was a pure act of political gamesmanship. As the Republicans anticipated, the bill has infuriated and energized the extreme right-wing “Tea Party” political milieu, particularly because of its mandate that everyone purchase health insurance whether or not they need or want it. The Republican opposition to the bill had less to do with the legislation’s actual content than it did with Republican hopes that when the “Tea Party” types go to the polls in 2010 and 2012, they will reward the Republican Party by voting it back into office.

Finally – and here is the only silver lining in the cloud – there is a lesson to be drawn from this experience. The workers and their “progressive” petty bourgeois allies who wanted real health care reform are furious that Obama could not get Congress to pass even minimal reform proposals as the “public option,” and that he was willing to sell out women’s reproductive rights and the rights of immigrants in order to achieve a purely political victory that does nothing to help the people who voted for him. This gives the Marxist left an opportunity to expose the Democrats, to urge workers to break with them and form an independent fighting workers’/labor party. Ultimately, the health care reform debacle pounds more nails into the coffin of workers’ illusions in Obama and the Democratic Party, removing another roadblock to understanding that nothing short of a complete overthrow of the profit system is capable of achieving progressive goals such as universal, meaningful access to health care.

In short, the big bourgeoisie just laid down the law. No health care for the masses. So long as the rule of the capitalists continues, working people will not get adequate quality health care for all. Health care will not be won in the halls of Congress; it will be won only in hard-fought battles at the point of production. This will require mass strikes, coordinated across industries. Instead, our union “leaders” are busy negotiating away our health benefits and those of the new hires, thereby breaking worker solidarity between the young and the old.

True, the system is strangling on its own incompetence, but it needs a little kick over the edge. That kick can only come in the form of the self-organized working class creating new organs of democracy and action – at every job site, in every office, factory, school, and college, and in the community. Workers at the point of production organized can stop capitalism in its tracks, reorganize the economy and provide quality health care for all. We need strikes for health care. They may start as economic strikes demanding better working conditions for nurses or decent benefit packages for industrial and service workers, but they will only win when they become both generalized and political, embracing demands such as:

· Free, high quality, lifetime health care for all, including all immigrants regardless of status!

· Free abortion and birth control on demand for women of all ages!

· Health care is a human right, not a profit center! Abolish the health insurance industry!

· Nationalize the health care delivery system under workers’ control!

· Break from the Democrats and build a fighting workers’ party!

March 4 Update: Demands

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 13:01:46 -0500

As an update to my previous post about the March 4 Day of Action, below are the demands adopted yesterday by the East Bay March 4 Outreach Committee in Oakland, California. I recommend them to organizing committees for March 4 actions elsewhere as a model.

All Out on March 4!

Defend Public Education!

· Fully funded, free public education from preschool through graduate school and adult education

· Open admissions

· No privatization; no charter schools

· No union-busting

· End No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top

· Student, faculty, staff, parent, and working class community control over the entire public education system, from preK-12 through graduate school and adult education

Protect Jobs and Social Services!

· Full funding for all public and social services

· Restore all cuts and expand vital public programs

· No foreclosures

End War and Close Prisons!

· Money for jobs and education, not war and incarceration

Defend Immigrants’ Rights!

· Full citizenship rights for immigrants

· No ICE raids, no deportations