United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) Them and Us :

[blindpig]

Behind the Decline of the US Left
NOVEMBER 25, 2022


Artwork designed by Starbucks Coffee for worker’s t-shirts during the Black Lives Matter furor, January 2020. Photo: Twitter/@Starbucks.

By Stansfield Smith – Nov 23, 2022

The left has not become marginalized because of exhaustion or infighting. Its decline was caused by the US government’s more than century long police state operations, purging the left from its historic home in the working class movement, so that it now has only tenuous connection with the organized working class. The national security state – the actual US government – has constantly worked to neutralize anti-imperialist and class conscious working class voices, and instead promoted a “compatible left” in their long-term strategy to divide and control the left.

The working class, particularly the sector in industrial production, had significance for the left not because workers are progressive in their thinking, but because they possess the power no other social forces have: they can vanquish the rule of capital by halting production, shutting off the capitalists’ ability to generate surplus value, life blood of their system. The entire economy halts if these workers, those engaged in manufacturing (primarily factory workers), but also construction, electric power and utility workers, miners, dockworkers, truck drivers, warehouse workers – amounting to 20% of the US working class – stop working. That is why Marx, Engels and Lenin regarded the working class as the revolutionary force in this phase of human history, and the paramount task of the left is to fight to win its leadership.

In the US, the trade unions are the only mass self-defense organizations of the working class, built through painful and bloody class struggles against the bosses and their government. Gains for human rights result from struggles by the exploited and oppressed, including the organizing of unions, the fight for improved living standards, greater rights for Blacks and women, often won through strike battles that were a class vs class civil war.

The working class left wing

There has always existed a militant layer of workers who resisted, committed to destroying the main cause of their torments, the capitalist class. Most of these fearless organizers of the workers movement found their guide to action in Marxism, which clarified the proletariat’s pivotal role in transforming society.

These activists exemplified the class struggle left wing of the workers movement, where we would find what is now called “the left” 75-130 years ago, in the Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party, Communist Party, and others.

Today’s left has long been separated from leading working class struggles against the bosses. While imposed on us through US government purges, the isolation continues today seemingly almost by choice.

Before, leftist leaders were working class activists: Big Bill Haywood, Gene Debs, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, Elizabeth Gurley Finn, William Foster, Joe Hill. They risked everything to help organize and lead workers’ battles, including the Colorado, Lawrence and Paterson strikes, and the 1919 steel strike. The “Red Scare” repression of 1917-1920 and the Palmer Raids crushed the movement, with some 6,000 deported or imprisoned.

A generation later, in 1934, four strikes shook the country: longshore and maritime workers on the west coast, the textile workers in the southeast, the Toledo Auto-Lite workers, and the Minneapolis Teamsters. Those labor battles were virtual civil wars, pitting the workers against the bosses and their government, and led in part by working class left wing organizations — the Communist Party, Muste’s American Workers Party, and the Trotskyist Communist League of America. Soon came the labor struggles creating the CIO, which relied heavily on the exemplary work of Communist organizers. (Whose class character difference from much of the left today is seen in the first part of Seeing Red).

These working class leftists formed the backbone of the new stewards organizations of industrial unions, shared information and analysis across union and industry lines, and collectively pushed for broader mobilizations. All through these periods, the left meant the left wing leadership element in the working class movement.

The ruling class purges the trade union left wing

With the ending of World War II, came a massive strike wave: 3.5 million trade unionists in 1945, then 4.6 million in 1946, the most in US history. US capitalist rulers responded with a ferocious counterattack against the working class and peasant upsurge around the world and at home.

In 1947 the US government imposed the Taft-Hartley Act, preventing solidarity strikes or secondary boycotts (crucial in forging the unions), denied federal employees the right to strike, and outlawed Communists and their defenders from the labor unions. The trade unions as a whole did not challenge this witch hunt.

Then in 1949, shortly after the people’s victory in China, the CIO leadership launched its own purge of the working class left wing, expelling eleven unions, including its third largest, the United Electrical Workers, totaling one million members. This soon brought a halt to the growth of the CIO and the labor movement. The trade unions, by condoning and participating in this purge, were making themselves irrelevant as the force to remake society.

What is called the McCarthyite Red Scare went far beyond targeting Communists. The Chamber of Commerce “said that the real danger came from non-Communists, ‘those who engage in pro-Communist activities’ such as fighting for higher wages, housing, or the repeal of the thought-control Smith Act” (Labor’s Untold Story, p. 349fn). All those who struggled for social and economic justice and civil liberties could be targets.

Herman Benson, a Workers Party union activist at the time, noted “In those days [the 1930s-40s], radical intellectuals and radical workers were bound in a fraternity…They shared more than common ideals; they often shared membership in the same party or group.” But because of the witch hunt, “Around 1950, intellectuals and union dissidents went rocketing off in opposite directions.” (The World of the Blue-Collar Worker, p. 221)

Not only government destruction of the trade union left wing undermined the workers struggle against capitalist assaults. Prosperity also acted as a conservatizing force. The US, the only industrialized nation not destroyed in World War II, dominated world markets, enabling the bosses to grant continual wage increases to placate the working class. The average yearly increase (now completely unheard of) was 3.4% in real wages for unionized industrial workers, combined with ever better health coverage and vacation time. The trade union movement grew increasingly bureaucratized and went into political retreat, ruled over by pro-imperialist layer. As Kim Scipes pointed out:

Labor’s foreign policy leadership is wedded to the idea of Empire: they believe that the United States should dominate the world, that unlimited financial resources should be dedicated to ensuring this, and that all other considerations are secondary or less. (p. 113) …one more “service” the AFL-CIO provides to the Empire…it undercuts opposition to the imperial project from within the United States, and especially limits the power of the most organized section of American society, organized workers…the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy program neutralizes arguably the key leadership in our society that has the ability to mobilize American workers against the imperial project. (p. 119)

The unions were blunted as fighting instruments for the 99%. Workers’ control over production (job conditions on the floor, control over the pace of work, control over work safety conditions) was rolled back. The needs of unorganized workers, women, Blacks, immigrants, the fight to win broad social programs such as health care for all, and opposition to US overthrow of foreign governments were neglected. The trade unions often no longer led important social and political struggles.

Popular movements detour around the tamed trade unions

With the left wing purged from the unions, fighters in the 1950s – 60s Black rights struggles, against the US war on Vietnam, the environmental movement, the Chicano, gay and women’s liberation struggles lost their most powerful ally and had to detour around these working class mass organizations. The trade union bureaucracy generally opposed participating in these struggles, sometimes even attacking them.

As a result, these political movements won significant concessions from the ruling class without mobilizations by organized labor. To new generations arising since the 1960s it seemed that the working class and its trade unions were not the foundation for building a left wing leadership, nor even necessary to advance social struggles. For generations of youth, including industrial workers, the trade union movement did not appear as the fundamental class enemy of the capitalist class, but as part of the Establishment.

Some politicized youth from the 60s did recognize its revolutionary power and sought jobs in industry, becoming activists in the trade union movement. However, even during the 1970s labor upsurge, Labor Notes Kim Moody points out,

there were no nationally recognized leaders or organizations that straddled the movement as a whole. Nor was there the sort of radical core of organized leftists that has provided so much of the indispensable grassroots leadership, at the shop-floor level and across the movement as a whole, as there had been in earlier labor upheavals. Socialists and other radicals played important roles in some rank-and-file organizations [Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), Miners for Democracy (MFD), United National Caucus (UNC) in the UAW, Steelworkers Fightback] but their numbers were few, and none of their organizations were strong enough to provide anything like national leadership and direction to the movement as whole….Nor did the leading rank-and-file organizations of the era, like TDU, MFD, UNC, or Steelworkers Fightback, make serious attempts to relate to one another, let alone organize umbrella organizations that might help them to provide mutual support. (Understanding the Rank-and-File Rebellion in the Long 1970s, in Rebel Rank and File, p. 144)

No organized working class left wing coalesced, providing national grassroots leadership during the 1970s labor upsurge. Since then we refer not to the working class left wing, but to a disembodied “left,” with no substantial connection with the industrial working class.

Era of trade union defeats and concessions began in the 1980S

Two major ruling class assaults on the workers movement put an end to the labor upsurge of the 1970s, beginning an era of significant setbacks. The UAW leadership swallowed the Carter administration’s Chrysler “bailout,” settling for a contract that broke the Big Three pattern agreement covering workers at GM, Ford and Chrysler.

Reagan’s firing of all 13,000 striking PATCO workers in 1981 followed. This evoked only a tepid response from AFL-CIO chiefs, leading to a devastating defeat for the workers movement. Soon to follow were defeats such as the Greyhound strikes, Phelps-Dodge (1983-86), Hormel and UFCW P-9 (1985), Eastern Airlines (1989), and the Bridgestone-Firestone, Caterpillar and Staley strikes (1992-95).

Kim Scipes comments:

this belief in the U.S. Empire has prevented AFL-CIO leadership from even attempting to address the worsening economic conditions and resulting social situation that has been developing in this country since the early 1970s….The only thing the AFL-CIO leadership has done in response to the worsening economic conditions is to spend millions and millions of dollars to elect Democratic politicians, especially presidents, into political office. (p. 113-114)

The working class struggle was paying a heavy price for its lack of an organized left wing leadership, in contrast to the early 1900s and the 1930s.

Yet some battles were successful, such as the UPS (1997) and Verizon strikes (2016), and A Day Without Immigrants (May 1, 2006). While the 2011 Madison, Wisconsin labor occupation of the State Capitol inspired working people around the country, it was derailed, with state public sector unionization plunging from 50% in 2011 to 22% by 2021. The 2012 Chicago teachers strike won by championing issues benefiting both its members and the communities they serve, igniting a series of teacher strikes elsewhere.

These labor battles could not have succeeded without some class struggle left wing presence pushing them forward. But the different struggles produced no way to coordinate, no recognized national leaders. There was no organized connection between this current in the labor movement and what is called the left today.

The myth of US deindustrialization

The capitalist effort to extract more and more surplus value from the working class has not let up since Marx’s writing of Capital. For instance, US auto companies sought to replace the lax standard of 45-52 seconds of actual work per minute in car assembly with Toyota’s model of 57 seconds of actual work per minute by extracting 5-12 more seconds of work per minute, which increased the surplus value produced per worker by $29,215 a year (Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition, p. 34- 35). We may overlook it, but the capitalist class has never stopped increasing the rate of exploitation of the US working class.

The inaccurate leftist view that the US empire is declining is partly based on alleged US deindustrialization. That would imply the industrial working class is losing its central revolutionary role for Marxists. Moody disputes this deindustrialization story: while manufacturing employment has decreased 40% just between 1979-2014, this has been offset by continual increases in labor productivity, a higher rate of surplus value extraction through “lean production.” The workforce in steel production did fall 65% from 1980-2017, yet work-hours to produce a ton of steel fell more, 85%. The US still produces 75% of its own steel. The overall national industrial production index grew from 52 in 1979 to 105 now, with the 2017 level being the reference point of 100. The US is actually manufacturing more than ever, even though its world share has dropped from 22% in 2004 to 16.8% in 2020. What has declined is the number of unionized private sector workers: just under 7.0% today, down from almost 35% in 1953.

The left goes off course and marginalizes itself

Now, long after the left wing’s purge from the trade union movement, there has been no campaign to rebuild it. Today’s left exists in a separate domain from the industrial working class, more oriented to the university than to the shop floor, further enfeebling the left. Today’s left does focus on issues such as US foreign interventions, women’s, Black and immigrant rights — not as part of the trade union movement, but outside it, which vastly weakens these movements’ social weight. Only a very small percent of those who identify as Marxist, whether in left groupings or not, are part of the industrial working class, or even seek to be. Yet Marx explained here the working class left wing must be to inflict terminal damage to the relentless capitalist class warfare against workers at home and abroad.

Lenin said the task of the party is “to organize the class struggle of the proletariat and to lead this struggle, the ultimate aim of which is the conquest of political power by the proletariat and the organization of a socialist society.” (my emphasis; Collected Works, v. 4, p. 210-21). When leftists are not there, part of the class struggle left wing of the labor movement, they abdicate the most essential task for Marxists. Moreover, not being a trade union left wing activist disorients your worldview on what social forces today we consider can change society. We would be orienting ourselves not towards broadening the class consciousness and self-confidence of working class fighters who produce surplus value, Marx’s approach, but instead towards what he explained were less impactful sectors of the US population.

This inevitably causes leftists to sideline ourselves in leading the struggle for basic social change. No longer a working class left wing, we have become reduced to leftist groupings and circles. Lenin pointed out that left groupings – all that we have today — “are not a party of a class, but a circle.” (CW, v. 31, p. 57), and insisted that “we are the party of the revolutionary class, and not merely a revolutionary group…” (CW, v. 31, p. 85). He adds, “our parties are still very far from being what real Communist Parties should be; they are far from being real vanguards of the genuinely revolutionary and only revolutionary class, with every single member taking part in the struggle, in the movement, in the everyday life of the masses.” (CW, v. 32, p. 522-523).

Today’s left and liberal-left intellectuals have become so disconnected from the working class movement that they no longer regard our working class as the great countervailing power to corporate America. Too many feel the working class may be the force that will overthrow capitalism and build a more just society, but not the working class we have: it is too backwards, bought-off, too white privileged. The left made their estrangement from the working class evident in their hostility to the protests of working people in Ottawa against dysfunctional covid restrictions.

Since we do not orient in practice to the industrial working class as the agent of social change, it follows we are turning elsewhere. In the last half century we found it in mass movements, in the progressive or “left of center” sector of the US population. These the Democrats also appeal to, making the Democrats seem the “lesser evil,” and leftists have reciprocated by looking for ties with seemingly progressive Democratic politicians. This “leftist” approach became pronounced as fear of Trumpism grew.

This progressive milieu is seen by much of the left as a pressure group to push Democrats “left” against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) bosses and the Republican Party. That puts the left in a position of weakness, especially as mass movements, such as Black Lives Matter, dwindle. Inexorably, the left has steadily shifted rightwards over the years.

Ruling class control over the movement

While there is widespread sentiment for a party that represents the 99%, we must confront the corporate elite, their national security state and their Democratic and Republican machines having US society under lockdown. The corporate rulers do not intend to allow a working peoples party and possess many tools to prevent it.

With their Democratic and Republican party machines, they control the state apparatus of rule: the legal system, the open and covert police agencies, the military, the mass media, most of the country’s wealth, and the national security state — the actual government. They control elections through funding, deciding who gets media airtime, who gets favorable press and who smeared.

The rulers are ingenious at neutralizing movements independent of their two parties, whether the anti-Iraq war movement, the Occupy movement, the MeToo Marches, Tea Party protests, Black Lives Matter, or the Ottawa trucker protests. They can even control the left through selective repression and corporate foundation funding of a “compatible left.”

National Security State Censoring of Anti-Imperialist Voices the Latest Phase of their Long-Term Strategy to Divide and Control the Left


Ruling class police state continuous and unconstitutional repression

In Democracy for the Few “The Repression of Dissident,” Parenti notes the “boundless” resources of the “law” to derail mass protest movements. Activists can be spied on, victimized by grand jury witch hunt investigations, by serious beatings and death threats, arrested on trumped up charges, faced with exorbitant bail and long jail time (Obama used against whistleblowers, Leonard Peltier), by confiscation or freezing of their funds ($64 million imposed UMWA because of a 1989 strike), by offices being raided and destroyed (Black Panthers), by government run media smear campaigns (Russiagate against Trump, or against Gary Webb), by constant police harassment (Malcolm X), by government murder (Martin Luther King), by police death squad murders (as with 34 Black Panthers), or by FBI front groups (KKK killing four anti-Klan activists in Greensboro), by bannings from internet media (many of our alternative media groups and writers today), jailed for constitutional free speech (Julian Assange, Eugene Debs), by bans from using the mails (Margaret Sanger’s Woman Rebel), denied any speaking engagements (Paul Robeson), by revoking passports (Robeson), by being banned from entering the United States (Charlie Chaplin, Arnold August), by mass deportations (IWW, Palmer Raids), death sentence frame-ups (Mumia Abu Jamal, Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe Hill, Haymarket martyrs), with blacklisting (Hollywood Ten), and jailings (Communist Party members), funding “compatible” leftists to smear you, FBI infiltration and disruption (such as Cointelpro, now under a different name), denial of ballot status (Green Party), exclusion from election campaign debates (all non-corporate candidates), drug frame-ups, by freezing of bank accounts (Ottawa protest leaders), time-consuming trials that paralyze their organizations, exhaust their funds, consume their energies, destroy their leadership (Socialist Workers Party, 1940; Communist Party 1949). Or being publicly threatened with mass execution: The Los Angeles Times wrote in September 1917, “The IWW conspire against the government of the United States and…every day commit actual treason…and ought to be shot as actual traitors to the country which has given them life and liberty.” These are but a sampling of ruling class police state methods to crush working class opposition.

Activists in movements that do threaten the status quo learn they are not free but live under a police state. Lefties know at some level that building a progressive party and a new leadership means the more effective you are, the more the above methods will be used to stop you.

Consequently, we opt for something safer and seemingly more feasible: working for any social changes that we feel are viable under the present system – or diverted into peripheral issues such as identity politics. This may be why most leftists have not committed ourselves to the working class fight for national health care or a livable minimum wage. Exercising your First Amendment rights – never actually upheld* – means you give up your somewhat comfortable and safe life for one of combating government operations to destroy you. Bernie Sanders clearly recognized this, given his capitulation from his previous views calling for a new, progressive political party.

The Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns did show mass attraction for socialism. Hundreds of thousands attended his events around the country, millions were organized to vote for him. Here was a base that could help build a mass opposition party to oligarchic rule. (But he stayed loyal to the DNC, did not use his huge supporter lists to launch a new party, instead turning it over to the party bosses).

Pressing issues do exist to unite left forces and the working class in a collective fight for demands we all benefit from: the labor campaign for national health care, or for a livable minimum wage. The left today has not focused on these basic needs, yet what could more galvanize working people than gaining health care for all?

Reconstructing a working class left wing

The trade unions have the tools to fund and build a working people’s party. In 2020, organized labor spent more than $1.8 billion to help elect candidates of the two corporate parties, besides mobilizing thousands of foot soldiers to campaign. The unions possess $29 billion in net assets. Consequently, the consciousness is there, the willingness, and the funding, where we fail is in reconstructing a working class left wing.

Our left that is declining, step-by-step surrendering to the Democratic Party, becoming “left” propagandists for their anti-Trumpism or for their regime change wars, is the left that arose disconnected from the working class. It has never been possible to build a left wing that didn’t arise directly from the battles of the working class. Building a left outside of that arena is a pointless Sisyphean task, like reforming the Democratic Party.

Kim Moody noted, “For half or three-quarters of a century, socialists have been over on one side, and unions have been on the other, and there hasn’t been much interconnection.” What we have witnessed has been a too-long detour from our home base. As long as we delay and keep our focus in other social milieus, not on the producers of surplus value, we only continue to sideline ourselves. Working people become active when no longer endurable work or life conditions propel them to act, assuming they feel meaningful change can result. A new, qualitatively different left wing from today will re-emerge, as it had previously, growing out of inevitable working class fightbacks forced upon them by the capitalist class driven to relentlessly increase their exploitation. We should be there preparing.

* There are endless examples of how much the First Amendment has been dismantled, given it states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

https://orinocotribune.com/behind-the-d ... e-us-left/

The 60s was the era of rampant individualism(mea culpa) to the detriment of the collective working class, a ruling idea of the bourgeoisie and largely beneficial to that class. Our individualism is best realized in the matrix of community, not outside or dominating it.

Communists have additional responsibilities to organizing labor: They must build serious cadre for the upcoming struggle and they must radicalize the politics of the working class.

It's a tough gig but somebody must do it or we are lost.

[blindpig]

The US Senate just voted to force rail workers to work without sick days

The Senate struck down a measure that would have provided rail workers with seven sick days, already a step down from the 15 sick days they were demanding

December 02, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch


Activists protest in front of the US capitol on behalf of rail workers (Photo: Ben Zinevich)

On December 1, the United States Senate voted to force rail workers to accept a tentative agreement that provides no paid sick leave, which is the central demand of unionized workers. This agreement had been pushed by the Biden administration in a bid to prevent rail workers from utilizing their right to strike in their struggle against rail companies, which currently deny many rail workers any sick leave. The Senate struck down a measure pushed by progressives in the House of Representatives, which would have added seven days of paid sick leave. The measure would have passed in the Senate as it was approved by 52 in favor and 43 against, were it not for a filibuster, which required the bill to pass by 60 votes. Therefore, it seems as if workers will be forced to accept the agreement as is, without sick days.

Joe Manchin, infamous for striking down major progressive legislation pushed from his own Democratic Party, voted down the seven day measure. Notably, six Republicans voted for the measure: Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Mike Braun, John Kennedy, and Lindsey Graham.

Many workers had rejected the tentative agreement earlier this month, including some organized under SMART-TD, the largest rail workers union. The tentative agreement excluded any sick leave and only added one extra day of personal leave. Workers are demanding as many as 15 days of paid sick leave. The US government is essentially poised to force these workers to work under a contract they had rejected.

The tentative agreement had been sold by Biden and leading congressional politicians as a way to avert a railway strike which could be economically devastating. “We cannot let our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers deny workers the benefits of the bargain they reached, and hurl this nation into a devastating rail freight shutdown,” said Biden in a November 28 statement.

But some point out that workers have a legal right to strike in the US, and that rail companies such as Warren Buffet’s BNSF were pushing cruel policies which penalized employees if they fell sick or had a family emergency. As per a YouGov poll, a plurality of people in the US (39%) favors prioritizing workers’ rights over economic growth in regards to a potential rail strike.



https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/12/02/ ... sick-days/

If that wretch Bernie Sanders were so against this measure why didn't he filibuster?

Just what one would expect from a 'democratic socialist', ineffectiveness and treachery. The cult of Sanders is built entirely upon appearance not substance.

[blindpig]

University of California Unions and Moving Beyond Ordinary Trade Unionism
№ 1/77.I.2023

The University of California (UC) in the United States is a system of universities that are ranked among the best in the world. It is a collection of 10 “public” university campuses located in the state of California.[1] While these universities are outstanding according to bourgeois standards in terms of scientific work and public education, a lot of the universities’ aspects are incredibly problematic and are manifestations of private property relations.

If one were to look at the university from outside, the public image of the UC system is good. In conversations, people are generally impressed if you tell them that you work at the university, so working for the university is good for social status. However, if you ask the workers there, they generally give you a different story about the low wages and the disrespect displayed by the university managers toward the workers. Like many other workplaces, it is difficult to feel proud to work there after an initial excitement. Moreover, often progressive public initiatives done by the UC system are actually the result of organizing, protesting, and pressuring decision makers by the rank-and-file students, academics, and workers.

The University system relies on cheap labor. Like any other employer in the capitalist system, it strives to accumulate profits and stock market investments.[2] It cuts costs by laying off people and converting positions to part-time with no benefits, which unions at the university are fighting to stop. Wages are driven down to the minimum and are sometimes even below the minimum, in which case, the situation becomes so unbearable that the workers spontaneously organize, go on strike, and fight for collective bargaining agreements (contracts) that stipulate wage increases over a period of 5 years. Then, after a contract expires, the fight between a union and the employer begins anew. The unconscious proletariat are then stuck inside this loop of contract fights and intermission.

While we should never belittle such clashes because they are the beginning of the naked class struggle, we see that it is rather foolish for the proletariat to try to fight the same fight over and over again.

Recently, the university system has experienced a strike wave by many different unions that represent the different types of workers at the universities, which shows the public briefly that the University is also ultimately an exploiter despite all its rhetoric and public relations. The combination of ever-growing inequality, social democratic rhetoric, and Trump’s election have forced many young Americans into active political participation. One after another, people realized in the trade union movement that, truly unlike Feuerbach’s conception of people, we CAN influence and shape our environment if we work together properly. Unlike the pseudoscientists[3] that are the academic economists who still proselytize us about the market and money as the omnipotent God who always justly punishes and rewards according to the laws of supply and demand, we CAN influence wages and working conditions. Their theories are shown to be lies to keep us exploited as was recognized in the 19th century by progressive people who looked through David Ricardo’s work. Such is the best lesson one can experience in the trade union movement within the University of California system. One feels like a human again by going on these strikes and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the workers.

The most recent strike by academics has been the most impressive one in the series to crown the previous strikes. The previous strikes and contract victories by other unions consisting of nurses, state employees, technical & research staff, librarians, and academic lecturers have inspired the graduate students themselves to stand up. The students committed a 5-week strike to force the University administrators to make concessions in terms of wages and other benefits. All in all, a fantastic learning experience for young Americans, which will create a new generation of academics who are able to not only imagine collective action and social movements, but to actually participate in them, and to recognize the power of such collective action. This Is the result of an advancement of consciousness that nobody can take away from the workers, and it is more valuable than any wage increase if one were to look at the long-term goal of communism. A generation of leaders in these unions are also formed, whose social consciousness and initiative is even higher.

Unfortunately, after the contract ratification by a popular vote, the fervor will die down. However, for the most conscious proletariat from the university, their struggle must not stop at this stage. These proletarian leaders must go further than their peers and delve headlong into communism as laid out by the tradition of Marxism-Leninism and prepare themselves for revolutionary struggle by studying communism and other fields of knowledge that gave us the theory of communism in the first place. As Plato said, some individuals must do double duty: not only they must work like everyone else but also perform the public duty that their education allows them. In this case, they must train themselves to lead the masses from the darkness of private property and exploitation.

A recent article (paywalled, but you don’t need it) in the Los Angeles Times prompted me to write this essay.[4] The article in the Times reports that some members of the graduate students say that the current tentative agreement is not good enough, even though it is widely acknowledged as a historical agreement. I have heard this kind of talk (that the agreement is not good enough) many times, but the contract will be ratified by a popular vote by the union members later on regardless of a few dissensions.

When one reads some of the opinions of the dissenters, they actually seem quite reasonable, but what is the problem? In strike movements, as long as they do not have some circleism, the leadership knows the situation better than the rank-and-file. The rank-and-file must obey the leadership in order for the movement to have maximum effect. The proletariat’s strength is in unity and a proper, centralized organization. If the union leadership sees that the current agreement is the most that they can get away with after weighing the potential gains and further commitment, then the rank-and-file must obey. In a strike, as time goes on, people’s enthusiasm drops over time, and so the leadership must have a pulse on the enthusiasm and also the economic cost to the workers. The rank-and-file must obey the decision so that the group can move forward. So, we have criticized the first problem, but such is a rank-and-file problem that will probably always appear in any strike. However, more importantly, we observe that a part of this problem actually stems from a certain ignorance that will be discussed below, and it is an ignorance that by no means only affects the rank-and-file.

Here, we must perform some self-criticism of our mindset & ignorance. Yes, the dissenter is correct that the contract is good enough for many people but not good enough for a few. However, there is also the fact that our wretchedness isn’t the result of our immediate employers exclusively.

The city of Los Angeles is known for its homelessness problem. A huge part of wages that is paid to the workers goes to rent. The landlords have driven up the rent so much that a lot of workers can’t afford to live near the university where they work. Some university campuses have their own apartments for students but many people have to live in places owned by private landlords. In the 18th century, an economist called Adam Smith once wrote that the “[L]andlords’ right has its origin in robbery.”[5] According to the analysis of Smith and another economist called Jean-Baptiste Say, the landlord demands rent for nature, population growth, and university prestige that he himself had absolutely no hand in creating. In other words, the landlord is a parasite pure and simple. After much verbiage, reasoning, nuance, and excuses, Smith still could not recognize the very heart of the issue–private property relations.

Dear reader, have you noticed that the rent does not go down, even when the economy closes down and people can’t find any work? A jobless region can hardly be called productive or fertile, but the rent doesn’t go down at all! The location affects prices but what allows the landlord to collect rent (which is a branch of surplus value) is ultimately private property relations and the bourgeois state that enforces these relations through deception (or “education”) and violence. That is the heart of the issue.

One can argue that landlords are so lazy now that they don’t even want to spend time to adjust the rent down to the amount that the people can actually afford. One can also rightly argue that the landlords know that they will instead be compensated by the state through a rent assistance program, which happened twice in the city of Los Angeles. Of course, we knew that the bourgeois state would not cancel debt, but instead to recognize the sanctity of debt because it is a state that enforces the sanctity of private property. The recent popular talk of debt cancellation is a pipedream under the bourgeois dictatorial state, and is idealism at its finest. Debt elimination can only happen under the dictatorship of the exploited class, as it happened in the 1917 October Revolution, or in ancient times where certain “tyrants” ruled, for example[6]. To spread the idea of debt cancellation without properly putting the necessity of revolution in the same speech is a wasted opportunity. Just Imagine all those latest books, articles, and videos which could have made the masses understand the necessity of a communist revolution! What a waste of opportunity! Why did this happen? It is because of a general ignorance and also a specific ignorance of Marxism-Leninism/communism among the proletarian leaders. Plain and simple. How do we fix it? Well, I think we all know the answer.

The reader should know that almost all new economic theories and political analyses suffer from the same issue no matter how insightful they are (but most are not insightful at all) in illustrating the actual mechanism of a bourgeois economy, they all suffer from a refusal to recognize the need for conquering state power and the need of establishing a dictatorship of the exploited. Ultimately, this error stems from an idealistic worldview, opposed to the materialist worldview; on the other hand, idealism also makes the economic theories themselves problematic, which we will not go into here.

Let us return to the analysis of our ignorance. Not only that we must recognize our oppression by the landlords and capitalist, but also financial institutions. In America, many graduates are debt-strapped by financial institutions whose “job” is to punch some keys on a keyboard to generate loans for students and then profit off of them. And why did the student need to borrow money? It’s because their parents can’t afford an education for them. Why? It’s because they were exploited by capitalists to such a degree that they cannot afford education for their children to keep the next generation of exploitation going without borrowing from the exploiters. The next time when he hears the conservatives whinge and moan about free college program pushed by modern-day Mensheviks, my reader should tell them that since the bosses have stolen so much of the workers’ labor, now the only way to create the next generation of obedient workers is if the state pays for education on their behalf.

The reader must be thinking if the author of this article is going to name their favorite pet issue. No, he is not. The point he is trying to illustrate is that the issues of rent, wage, debt, childcare, inability to address climate change, broken prison system, broken education system, etc are all connected at one essential central point: private property relations and the state that enforces such a relation. We can fix all your favorite social problems somewhat quickly when we explode the capitalist state and erect a new proletarian state in its stead. It is unrealistic to organize around one issue as the naive climate activists love to do and to disregard science of social development and the need for revolutionary change. Only with a revolutionary change and a dictatorship of the proletariat enforced by active suppression of the bourgeoisie and their hangers-on at all fronts can we even begin to truly solve the many issues we are facing. Otherwise, it’s all bandaid on a wound. You may organize a few crowds here and there, but you will get tired and achieve little when the state constantly fights against you. It’s better to eliminate the bourgeois state dictatorship altogether first, then solve the problems. It may be easy for the reader to see this as he/she is reading this article, but the challenge is to overcome complacency and to educate oneself in the science of Marxism. Learning Marxism-Leninism and applying Marxism-Leninism can be difficult challenges, but luckily, since Marxism is a science, it will bear the best fruit as one invests time in it to study and organize. We understand that even successfully conquering the bourgeois consciousness drilled into one’s own mind by the schools, the universities, and the culture in general is quite difficult, but I guarantee the honest and conscientious reader that it is very much worth it. Only with Marxism can one see through all the recent actionism and begin to truly see what is needed to be done scientifically.

Only revolution and communism can bring the proletariat out of the darkness. If the advanced workers want happiness for all, then they need to see more than two inches beyond their noses and recognize the long term goal of humanity, which shouldn’t be too much to ask for the “intellectuals” at the UC system. Above all, we should NOT expect to be able to live well by ANY victorious union contract fight; only a communist movement can bring us the good life, and we, speaking of the leaders, must be fully aware of this fact at all times. That is my criticism and the chief problem of putting our hopes on a union contract or some legislation, which ultimately stems from our ignorance. Yes, even with this kind of ignorance, the people who hold these opinions are still one step up from the passive or outright reactionary worker.

Imagine a frog being slowly heated in a tall pot. That is the situation now. The frog keeps leaping up and down but it can’t quite leap out of the pot. Every time the frog lands onto the bottom of the pot, some of the frog’s skin gets burned by the bottom of the pot while the rest of the cells in his body feel heat. This frog is the proletariat, and the cells that get burned to death are the individual unlucky proletarians (the people who find the contract inadequate). The obvious solution for the frog is to knock over the pot and escape rather than trying to land at the bottom with another part of its body or to keep leaping in place.

The proper view of the trade union struggle and trade union victories is that the victories of these struggles give us more breathing room to study communism and to convince ourselves of its correctness (i.e. to convince ourselves of the need to knock over the pot and to make preparation for such an action). As long as we are unaware of our next task beyond banal trade unionism (i.e. to leap up and down inside the pot repeatedly), no matter how historic it is (i.e. how high our most recent leap was), we will never go forward in actually escaping the pot.

In this light, we strongly encourage and invite honest and conscientious proletarians to read and learn about the Proryv magazine’s Scientific Centralist position because we are a group that stays the truest to the historical spirit of Marxism-Leninism. At this moment, in the United States, we focus on self-education and on making an environment to train authoritative communists for the struggle of communism in the 21st century. As we gain competent cadre, we will have more activities. Furthermore, because we hold the scientific Marxist-Leninist line, we are the greatest enemies of Trotskyists, social democrats (democratic socialists or whatever Mensheviks call themselves these days), Revcom hystericals, Maoists, Hoxhaists, and irrelevant anarchists. All these groups suffer from an inability to recognize reality, scientific illiteracy, outright opportunism, or even fascist terrorism in the case of Trotsky. We encourage individuals within these groups to recognize the fatal problems of these groups and to take the scientific path instead. Finally, if you are a dishonest, power-hungry, lazy, or democratically-inclined person, please join one of these other groups and leave us alone because kicking you out in the future will have wasted our time.

In the future, If we were to build unions, ideally, we need to create unions that are centralized organizations that are in turn led by a Communist Party that consist of the most belligerent, focused, battle-tested, thoroughly-trained, self-disciplined, self-educated, and most self-sacrificing group of working class leaders who are experts at exploiting different capitalist factions and adapting to every situation in terms of both attack and retreat. The ultimate aim is to create enough quality leaders and centralized organizations to ultimately explode the bourgeois dictatorial state by starting a revolution in a revolutionary situation. Yes, it will be difficult in the United States, but if Marxist science and the dialectical nature of the world is any indication, history is on our side; and we can also get creative. The decay of capitalism is assured because the United States is increasingly unable to plunder the world, as the recent Western-backed Ukrainian adventure has shown.[7] Indeed, even the current strikes that just happened in many places had been unthinkable just a few years ago. We need to work on the task of actively preparing proletarian leaders if we are to conduct ourselves as true leaders of the proletariat.

Dear reader, maybe you are not fully convinced but you know that you are an honest and conscientious person. Well, please start studying Marxism-Leninism and be convinced! Please read some of our articles. The daily humdrum of study separates the babbler and the doer. Until we build a leadership consisting of scientists, communism and the true potential & true freedom of humanity will remain a pipedream. WIthout a working class party that is guided by dialectical materialism, all the horrors of capitalism visit the proletariat without the proletariat drawing the essential lessons from these horrors. Only a true Marxist party can make sense of historical events through a dialectical materialistic scientific worldview, can provide an appropriate forward direction for the proletariat, can focus the proletariat in such a direction, can perform mass agitation to bring the unconscious proletariat into communism, and can forge a revolutionary working class that can overcome capitalism. Today, the United States is the heart of world reaction and capitalism. Yes, it is most difficult to perform revolution here, but at the same time, all of humanity will achieve true happiness rather quickly if the center of world capitalism and world reaction falls to communism.

Huoshan

14/01/2023

________________
[1] Quote marks for the word public because it is actually run like a business.
[2] The university system has 30 billion USD in reserves during a presentation I attended some time ago.
[3] As a scientist myself, I find humor in the fact that economists attach so much importance to green pieces of paper (and not even, since people use digital currency most of the time and not paper and coins), but miss energy, labor, and other real resources in the background. Why? For these people, capitalism is eternal even though it provides an extra unnecessary constraint on all economic endeavors and is dominated by private interests. An honest economist would see capitalism as asinine and unworkable, but that’s always an overestimation on our end.
[4] Watanabe, Teresa. 2022. “Dissension brews among striking UC union members over tentative agreement.” Los Angeles Times. December 18th. Accessed December 20th. https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... -agreement
[5] See Marx’s 1844 work “Rent of Land.” In the work, Karl Marx simply lets Adam Smith do all the talking. Still, modern academic economists are so devolved that they avoid Smith’s conclusions like the devil avoids holy water.
[6] The term “tyrant” was also used in Ancient Greece by the oligarchy to describe certain populist kings who took power and forgave masses’ debts to allow the economy to revitalize. See Dr. Michael Hudson’s work on this. However, we disagree with the professor and the ancient civilizations that history is circular. We are not interested in running in circles. As Marxist science has shown in the 19th century, history proceeds forwards, not circular, and conscientious people must become communists to speed this process.
[7]Please see our latest article on the Ukrainian situation: https://prorivists.org/eng_ukraine-war/

The University of California (UC) in the United States is a system of universities that rank among the best in the world. This is a collection of ten "public" campuses located in the state of California. These universities are outstanding by bourgeois standards in terms of research and education, but many aspects of their activities are incredibly problematic and are indicative of private property relations.

If you look at the university from the outside, then the public image of UC is good. In conversations, people tend to be impressed if you tell them you work at a university. However, if you ask the employees there, in most cases they will tell you a different story about low wages and disrespect shown by the university management towards employees. Here, as usual, after the initial excitement from getting a new job passes, you begin to look at everything more soberly. And everything positive at the university is the result of various protests and strikes of ordinary students, teachers and workers, and not the goodwill of the leadership.

The university system relies on cheap labor. Like any other employer in the capitalist system, the university seeks to accumulate profits and investments, cut costs by laying off people and transferring positions to part-time jobs without any additional payments. The unions of the university are struggling with such things. Wages are reduced to a minimum, and sometimes even below the minimum, in which case the situation becomes so unbearable that workers spontaneously organize, go on strike and fight for collective agreements (contracts) that provide for wage increases within five years. Then, after the expiration of the contract, the struggle between the union and the employer begins anew. The proletariat is stuck in this constant struggle for more or less fair contracts.

Although we should never belittle the significance of such clashes, since they are the beginning of an undisguised class struggle, we see that it is rather foolish for the proletariat to try to fight the same struggle over and over again.

Recently, the university system has experienced a wave of strikes by many different unions representing different types of workers, which in short shows the public that the university, for all its rhetoric and status, is also ultimately an exploiter. The combination of ever-growing inequality and the popularity of social democratic rhetoric coupled with the election of the right-wing conservative Trump has forced many young Americans to actively participate in politics. One by one, people in the trade union movement realized that, indeed, contrary to Feuerbach's concept of people, we CAN influence and shape our environment if we work together in the right way. Unlike pseudo-scientific economists who still preach to us about the market and money as an almighty god, who always justly punishes and rewards according to the laws of supply and demand, we CAN influence wages and working conditions. There comes a realization that their theories are lies aimed at exploiting us, as it was shown back in the 19th century by progressive people who got acquainted with the works of David Ricardo. This is the best lesson to be learned from the union movement in the UC system. A man feels like a man again by participating in these strikes and standing shoulder to shoulder with the workers. who got acquainted with the works of David Ricardo. This is the best lesson to be learned from the union movement in the UC system. A man feels like a man again by participating in these strikes and standing shoulder to shoulder with the workers. who got acquainted with the works of David Ricardo. This is the best lesson to be learned from the union movement in the UC system. A man feels like a man again by participating in these strikes and standing shoulder to shoulder with the workers.

The most recent academic strike was the most impressive in a series that crowned previous strikes. Previous strikes and contract victories by other unions made up of nurses, civil servants, technical and research personnel, librarians, and academic teachers inspired graduate students to fight. Students arranged fivea week-long strike to force the university administration to make concessions in terms of wages and other benefits. All in all, this is a fantastic experience for young Americans and will create a new generation of scientists who can not only represent collective action and social movements, but actually participate in them and recognize the power of such collective action. This is the result of a development of consciousness that no one can take away from the workers, and it is more valuable than any increase in wages, if you look at the long-term goal of communism. These unions also form a generation of leaders with high social consciousness and initiative.

Unfortunately, after the victory and the signing of the collective agreement, the ardor will subside. However, for the most conscious proletariat from the university, their struggle should not stop at this stage. These proletarian leaders must go further than their peers, immerse themselves in communism, in the theory of Marxism-Leninism, and prepare themselves for the revolutionary struggle by studying communism and other fields of knowledge. As Plato said, some people have a double duty: they must not only work like everyone else, but also fulfill the social duty that their education allows them to. In this case, they must train to lead the masses out of the darkness of private property and exploitation.

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times prompted me to write this essay. It reports that some activists are unhappy with the current preliminary agreement reached by the union as a result of the struggle. I have heard this talk many times (that the agreement is not good enough), but later the members of the union voted for it, despite some disagreements.

When you read the opinions of those who disagree, they actually seem quite reasonable, but what's the problem? In strike movements, the rank and file must submit to competent leadership if the movement is to have maximum effect. The strength of the proletariat lies in unity and a proper, centralized Marxist organization. If the leadership of the union sees that the current agreement is the maximum that can be achieved, then the rank and file members of the union must comply. During a strike, people's enthusiasm decreases over time, and therefore management must be aware of the enthusiasm as well as the economic cost to workers.

The dissenter is right that a contract is good enough for many people, but not good enough for a few. However, there is also the fact that our unhappiness is not solely the result of our immediate employers.

The city of Los Angeles is known for its homelessness problem. A huge part of the wages that are paid to workers goes to rent. Landlords have raised rents so much that many workers cannot afford to live near the university where they work. Some college campuses have their own apartments, but many have to live in premises owned by private landlords. In the 18th century, an economist named Adam Smith once wrote that "the right of lords has its origin in plunder." According to the analysis of Smith and another economist named Jean-Baptiste Say, the landowner demands rent for nature, population growth, and the prestige of the university, which he himself has made absolutely no effort to create. In other words, the landlord is a pure parasite. After much verbiage, reasoning,

Dear reader, have you noticed that rents don't go down even when the economy is in crisis and people can't find jobs? Even in those regions where there is no unemployment, the rent does not decrease at all! Location affects prices, but what allows a landlord to collect rent is ultimately a private property relationship that is enforced through deceit (or "education") and violence. This is the essence of the problem.

It could be argued that landlords are now so lazy that they don't even want to take the time to get their rent down to what people can actually afford. It could also be argued that landlords know they will instead receive compensation from the state through the Rent Assistance Program, which has happened twice in the City of Los Angeles. Of course, we knew that the bourgeois state would not abolish debt, but instead recognize the inviolability of debt, because it is the state that ensures the inviolability of private property. The recent popular talk of debt relief is empty talk under a bourgeois dictatorial state and idealism at its finest. The liquidation of debts can only take place under the dictatorship of the exploited class, as happened, for example, during the October Revolution of 1917 or in ancient times when "tyrants" ruled. To spread the idea of ​​debt relief without properly stating the need for a revolution is a missed opportunity. Just imagine all these latest books, articles and videos that could make the masses understand the need for a communist revolution! What a waste of opportunity! Why did this happen? This is due to general ignorance as well as ignorance of Marxism-Leninism/Communism among proletarian leaders. Clear and simple. How can we fix this? Well, I think we all know the answer. who could make the masses understand the need for a communist revolution! What a waste of opportunity! Why did this happen? This is due to general ignorance as well as ignorance of Marxism-Leninism/Communism among proletarian leaders. Clear and simple. How can we fix this? Well, I think we all know the answer. who could make the masses understand the need for a communist revolution! What a waste of opportunity! Why did this happen? This is due to general ignorance as well as ignorance of Marxism-Leninism/Communism among proletarian leaders. Clear and simple. How can we fix this? Well, I think we all know the answer.

The reader should be aware that almost all new economic theories and political analysis suffer from the same problem, no matter how shrewd (but most of them are not so shrewd) in illustrating the real mechanism of bourgeois economics. All of them suffer from the refusal to recognize the need for the conquest of state power and the need to establish the dictatorship of the exploited. Ultimately, this error stems from an idealistic worldview as opposed to a materialistic worldview; on the other hand, idealism also makes economic theories themselves problematic, which we will not go into here.

Let's return to the analysis of our ignorance. At a minimum, we must recognize our oppression by the capitalists, including financial institutions. In America, many graduates are saddled with the debt of financial institutions whose "job" is to press a few keys on a keyboard to issue loans to students and then profit from them. Why do students need to borrow money? Because their parents cannot afford an education for them. Why? Because they consume exactly as much as the capitalists allow them to. They are exploited by the capitalists to such an extent that they cannot afford an education for their children without borrowing from the exploiters.

The next time you hear conservatives complaining about the free college program promoted by the modern Mensheviks, you can tell them that because the bosses suck so much labor out of the workers, now the only way to create the next generation of obedient workers is if the state pays them. education.

The problems of rent, wages, debt, childcare, climate change, a terrible prison system, education, etc. are connected with one important central point: the relations of private property and the state, which ensures their existence. We can solve all your social problems rather quickly if we do away with the capitalist state and build a new proletarian state in its place. It is unrealistic to organize around one issue, as naive climate change activists like to do, and ignore the science of social development and the need for revolutionary change. Only with revolutionary changes and the dictatorship of the proletariat, backed up by the active suppression of the bourgeoisie and its hangers-on on all fronts, can we begin to truly solve many of the problems that we are facing. Otherwise, it's like fighting the symptoms, not the disease. You can organize a few speeches here and there, but you will get tired and achieve little when the state is constantly fighting against you. First, the bourgeois state dictatorship must be abolished altogether.

It may be easy for the reader to understand this when he reads the article, but the challenge is to overcome complacency and learn the science of Marxism. Studying Marxism-Leninism and applying Marxism-Leninism can be a difficult task, but fortunately, since Marxism is a science, it will bring the best results. If a person will invest time in the study of Marxism and the organization of work.

Successfully defeating the bourgeois consciousness shaped by schools, universities and culture in general is quite difficult, but I guarantee the honest and conscientious reader that it is worth it. Only with the help of Marxism can one see the light, having overcome actionism, and begin to truly understand what needs to be done from a scientific point of view.

Only revolution and communism can lead the proletariat out of darkness. If frontline workers want happiness for all, then they need to learn to see beyond their noses and recognize the long-term goal of humanity, which should not be required of "intellectuals" in the UC system.

First of all, we should NOT expect to be able to make a difference through union struggle. Only the struggle for communism can bring us a good life, and we, speaking of leaders, must always be fully aware of this fact. This is my criticism, and the main problem is that we put our hopes on union activity or some kind of legislation, which ultimately stems from our ignorance. Yes, even with such ignorance, people who hold these opinions are still one step ahead of passive or overtly reactionary workers. But this is not enough.

Imagine a frog being slowly heated over a fire in a tall pot. This is the situation now. The frog keeps jumping up and down, but it can't fully jump out of the pot. Every time a frog lands on the bottom, part of the frog's skin is burned while the rest of its body cells feel warm. This frog is the proletariat, and the cells that burn alive are individual unfortunate proletarians (including people who find the contract inadequate). The obvious solution for the frog is to knock over the pot and run away, instead of trying to land on the bottom with another part of its body or keep jumping in place.

The correct view of the trade union struggle and the victories of the trade unions is that the victories in this struggle give us more opportunities to study communism and do communist work. Until we are aware of our next challenge beyond the banal trade union movement, no matter how important it may seem, we will never make any headway in actually changing the situation.

In this light, we urge and invite honest and conscientious proletarians to read and learn about the scientific-centralist position of Proryv magazine, because we are a group that remains true to the historical spirit of Marxism-Leninism. Right now in the United States, we are focusing on self-education and creating the conditions to prepare established communists to fight for communism in the 21st century. As we form competent personnel, we will have more support and expand the scope of work. Moreover, since we adhere to the scientific Marxist-Leninist line, we are the greatest enemies of the Trotskyists, the Social Democrats (democratic socialists, or whatever the Mensheviks call themselves these days), the revolutionary committee hysterics, the Maoists, the Hoxhaists and the naive anarchists. All these groups suffer from a failure to recognize reality, scientific illiteracy, outright opportunism, or even fascist terrorism in Trotsky's case. We urge people from these groups to recognize fatal problems and embark on a scientific path. Finally, if you are dishonest, power-hungry, lazy or democratic, please join one of these other groups and leave us alone.

In the future, if we want to create unions, ideally we need to create unions, which are centralized organizations, which in turn are led by the Communist Party, made up of the most militant, focused, battle-tested, carefully trained, self-disciplined, self-educated and most self-sacrificing leaders of the working class. The ultimate goal is to produce enough quality leaders and centralized organizations to eventually destroy the bourgeois dictatorial state by starting a revolution at the moment of a revolutionary situation. Yes, it will be difficult in the United States, but if Marxist science and the dialectical nature of the world are any indication, history is on our side; and we can also be creative. The decline of capitalism is guaranteed because, as the recent Western-backed Ukrainian adventure has shown, the United States can no longer pillage the world like it used to. Indeed, even the current strikes that have just taken place in many places were unthinkable just a few years ago. We need to work on the task of actively training proletarian leaders if we are to behave like true communists.

Dear reader, you may not be completely convinced, but you know that you are an honest and conscientious person. Well, then start studying Marxism-Leninism! Read some of our articles. Daily study distinguishes a conscientious person from a talker. Until we form a leadership of scientists, communism and the true potential and true freedom of mankind will remain a pipe dream. Without a party of the working class, which is guided by dialectical materialism, all the horrors of capitalism fall upon the proletariat without the proletariat drawing essential lessons from these horrors. Only a true Marxist party can comprehend historical events with the help of a dialectical-materialist scientific worldview, can provide an appropriate direction for the forward movement of the proletariat, can carry out mass agitation,

Today the United States is the center of world reaction and imperialism. Yes, it is most difficult to make a revolution here, but at the same time, all of humanity will achieve true happiness quite quickly if the center of world capitalism and world reaction falls under the blows of the communists.

Huošan
14/01/2023

https://prorivists.org/77_trade-unionism/

Google Translator

[blindpig]

If You Won’t Sacrifice Workers to Fight Inflation, You’re Off the Op-Ed Page
CONOR SMYTH


Larry Summers calls for mass layoffs from the beach (Bloomberg via Vice)


Inflation surged in the spring of 2021, hit a 40-year-high rate of 9.1% in June 2022, and was still running at a historically high 6.5% at year’s end. Coverage of inflation has surged along with this rise in prices, with the volume of inflation coverage reaching levels not seen since the 1980s. One analysis (CAP Action, 12/22/21) found that in November 2021, CNN and MSNBC gave inflation roughly double the combined coverage of “jobs, wages and healthcare.”

Despite the New York Times‘ warning (11/8/22), Democrats lost a respectable nine seats in the House and actually gained a Senate seat.

Inflation has, unsurprisingly, taken center stage in the public consciousness. Voters in a pre-midterms poll (Data for Progress, 10/27/22) ranked it as their top issue by a solid 15 percentage points. The New York Times (11/8/22) noted that polling before the vote revealed “the highest level of economic concern headed into a midterm election since 2010, when the economy was coming out of the worst downturn since the Great Depression.” And exit polling put inflation at the top of the list of issues for voters.

Meanwhile, a debate has been raging over all things inflation: How high will it go, how long will it last, what should be done? Call it the Great Inflation Debate. Central to this debate has been the role of the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and what it should do, if anything, to quell the phenomenon.

Many on the left, so-called “inflation doves” (e.g., Nation, 2/18/22; In These Times, 9/22/22; Chartbook, 10/26/22), have been highly critical of the Fed’s reliance on interest rate hikes—which notoriously work by “weakening workers’ bargaining power and forcing them to accept lower wages” (Slack Wire, 3/2/22)—as a response to price increases. More conservative “inflation hawks,” by contrast, have called for aggressive monetary tightening (i.e., substantial rate hikes) to silence the inflationary threat.

The opinion sections of media outlets would seem a natural place to host this debate. Doves on one side, hawks on the other. Now rumble! After all, what is an opinion section for, if not a wide-ranging debate that exposes readers to varied perspectives on a pressing issue?

Unfortunately, opinion sections at corporate news outlets are notorious for their failure to include progressive voices. As the Columbia Journalism Review (5/8/18) pointed out in 2018, despite the growing prominence of the left in politics, left-wing thinkers have remained poorly represented on major op-ed pages. The “virtually nonexistent” presence of socialists at these outlets contrasts sharply with readers’ calls for more left-wing voices and the popularity of socialism with the American public—recent polling shows over a third of Americans have a positive view of socialism (FAIR.org, 10/9/20).

The Great Inflation Debate offers yet another example of this marginalization of left-wing voices. At the Washington Post and New York Times, two of the most widely read establishment newspapers, the opinion sections have fallen short in providing readers with exposure to progressive voices on inflation. In one case, the failure has been abysmal. In the other, it’s been merely painful.

Hawks and hawks and hawks, oh my!

Vice: ore People Must Lose Jobs to Fight Inflation, Larry Summers Bravely States From Tropical Beach
Larry Summers went full Bond villain as he declared from a tropical beach (Vice, 1/10/23), “There’s going to need to be increases in unemployment to contain inflation.”

The award for abysmal failure in the field of political balance goes to the Washington Post, where hawks reign supreme. Top hawk is Larry Summers, treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and devout neoliberal, whose inflation takes have been prominently featured on the Post’s opinion pages (2/4/21, 3/17/22, 12/19/22), including in pieces by the editorial board (3/20/21, 9/21/22) and other columnists (6/13/22, 12/14/22). Summers has morphed into an almost cartoonish villain over the course of the Great Inflation Debate, in one recent instance requesting a dash of unemployment while comfortably reclined, hands clasped, by a tropical beach.

Up until recently, when Summers (12/19/22) endorsed the Federal Reserve’s “approach of stepping more gingerly,” his op-eds for the Post have been appallingly hawkish. He was already declaring “tightening” as “likely to be necessary” back in May 2021 (5/24/21) and has consistently called for interest rate hikes over the last year (e.g., 3/15/22, 4/5/22, 10/31/22). Even after the Fed raised the cost of borrowing in March 2022 and signaled its determination to do so again six more times before the end of the year, Summers (3/17/22) reprimanded it for being insufficiently hawkish, stating, “I fear the economic projections of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) represent a continuation of its wishful and delusional thinking of the recent past.”

A core complaint of Summers’ is that the labor market is too tight, a polite way of saying that workers have become too empowered. Ironically, in the summer of 2020, not long before his descent into inflation hysteria, Summers had penned a piece for the Post titled “US Workers Need More Power” (6/28/20). Less than a year later, Summers (5/24/21) fretted, “Higher minimum wages, strengthened unions, increased employee benefits and strengthened regulation are all desirable, but they, too, all push up business costs and prices.” You see, he wants to help workers. But you know what really helps workers? Higher unemployment.

‘The power to quit’

Other Post columnists have not been much better. Jennifer Rubin (6/1/22) has invoked the specter of inflation to lambast Biden’s plan for student debt cancellation. Catherine Rampell (7/12/22) has complained about pesky state lawmakers’ plans for boosting residents’ incomes to shield them from inflation, dubbing these plans “actively harmful in the fight against inflation.” In the same article, she criticized student debt cancellation for its (negligible) inflationary impact and endorsed hiking interest rates instead. Rampell (7/5/22) has further lamented the Biden administration’s tendency to side with labor instead of pursuing policies that would hurt labor but would “modestly reduce pricing pressures.”

The Washington Post‘s Sebastian Mallaby (6/15/22): “To get inflation under control, the Fed will almost certainly have to cause a recession.”

Sebastian Mallaby (6/15/22, 7/15/22) has called for aggressive rate hikes in response to inflation, lauded Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell as “courageous” following his conversion to tight monetary policy, and argued that due to the high pace of wage growth, “the Fed will almost certainly have to cause a recession” in its fight against inflation. Henry Olsen (5/12/22) has taken abnormally high inflation as an opportunity to advocate cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and, like Summers, has worried (2/10/22) that the Fed’s rate increases won’t be large enough to reverse the low unemployment that “giv[es] workers the power to quit and seek better pay and working conditions elsewhere.”

Megan McArdle has provided some dissent in her columns. In one article from May (5/29/22), she stated the obvious:

It is, of course, bad to lose 8% of your purchasing power to inflation. But it’s even worse to lose a hundred percent of it to unemployment—and the collective suffering of those who lose their jobs is arguably much greater than the pains of households strained by inflation.

She concluded the piece by “wonder[ing] whether [it]’s possible” to “stabilize inflation and then lower it gradually” rather than causing a recession.

In other columns (5/16/22, 9/21/22), however, McArdle has dismissed the idea that corporate profiteering has contributed to inflation as a “conspiracy theory,” and has stopped short of sharp criticism of the Fed, opining that “it’s hard to blame them” for “tightening the screws.”

EJ Dionne, a self-proclaimed “inflation dove,” has likewise dissented from the cacophony of hawks at the Post, expressing in a recent column (12/14/22) his disappointment that the Fed has not signaled a pause in rate hikes. He nevertheless made sure to salute Larry Summers for correctly predicting a rise in inflation.

‘Imposing economic pain’

If columnists are mere mortal combatants, the editorial board might be seen more as a deity, descending from time to time to proclaim the victory of Reason and Justice. For the Post, Reason and Justice assume the earthly form of a hawk. Though the editorial board (8/27/20) approved of the more dovish turn at the Federal Reserve back in 2020, the rise of inflation has led the board to widen its wings and unleash its talons.

The Washington Post‘s first example of a “bad proposal” (4/15/22): “Democratic accusations that companies are driving inflation by price-gouging don’t pass the logic test.” This from a paper whose owner raised the price of Amazon Prime 17% after posting a $14 billion quarterly profit.

The board was already preparing for a more hawkish turn in the spring of 2021, just as inflation was about to take off. In a March editorial (3/20/21), the board commented:

Everything depends on the Fed’s timely willingness to use its anti-inflation tools, even if it means imposing economic pain. We must hope both that the central bank never faces such a test of independence, and that it passes if it does.

The board went full hawk in early 2022, with a February editorial (2/16/22) declaring, “It is time for the Fed to get aggressive.” By April, the board’s impatience was palpable (4/15/22):

We have been urging a long-overdue half-point increase in interest rates for months. The Fed finally seems ready to take this decisive step at its May meeting…. But more bold moves will likely be needed later this year.

The board has maintained this aggressive posture as the Fed has come in its direction on interest rate policy. In a September editorial (9/21/22), the board noted that future rate hikes “will hurt, slowing growth and weakening the labor market. Unfortunately, there is no other good option.” In November, the board (11/1/22) made clear its perfect willingness to accept a recession in exchange for lower inflation. Along the way, it has repeatedly argued (6/1/22, 7/30/22, 10/22/22) against student debt cancellation due to its presumed inflationary impact.

Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire founder of Amazon who has owned the Post since 2013, is undoubtedly more than pleased with the near-universal hawkishness found on the Post’s op-ed pages. Amazon has been facing a worker insurgency since early in the pandemic, which has led to the first successful unionization of an Amazon warehouse, despite intense pressure from management to back down (In These Times, 5/23/22). The aggressive interest rate increases that the Fed has implemented, and that the Washington Post editorial board and many Post columnists have cheered, will have the predictable and intentional effect of weakening workers’ bargaining power. No doubt the Post’s columnists and editorial board are not consciously trying to serve Bezos’ interests, but if they were, they couldn’t do a much better job.

Bezos, in fact, has publicly expressed approval of one of his op-ed writer’s being on-message, retweeting a column by Catherine Rampell (5/16/22) that denounced the “demagogic rhetoric” of blaming “Corporate Greed” (in scare caps) for inflation—what she mocked as the “greedflation theory of the world.” (Defending herself against charges that she was carrying water for her boss, Rampell tweeted—5/18/22—”If Post writers are secretly channeling Bezos’s beliefs, we’re doing a terrible job at it, since our policy views are all over the map.”)

This came after Bezos involved himself in a public spat with the Biden administration over its call for heightened corporate taxation as a response to inflation. As Jacobin (5/23/22) put it:

If you were looking for a digital era version of Citizen Kane behavior, this is it—and it not so coincidentally comes right after President Joe Biden hosted Amazon Labor Union organizers at the White House.

The Washington Post is not exactly expected to be a friend of labor. But, as inflation has surged, it is nevertheless jarring just how anti-labor the Post has revealed itself to be. Democracy may die in darkness, but workers die in Amazon warehouses (Jacobin, 1/9/22; Popular Science, 9/2/22).

Doves…with claws

Yes, says Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/23/22): “There don’t seem to be any realistic alternatives.”

The New York Times has taken a decidedly more moderate stance towards the inflation question. The editorial board has shied away from the bellicosity of the Post, primarily outlining its take on the proper response to inflation in one piece (4/29/22) from April 2022. This editorial, gravely titled “The Courage Required to Confront Inflation,” conceded, “It is time to raise rates.” However, the piece called for “a more measured approach,” and warned against “moving too quickly to confront inflation, or raising rates too high.”

The Times’ relative moderation on the inflation question is reflected in the writings of its op-ed contributors. The most prominent voice in the opinion section has been Paul Krugman, a Times staple who has supplied worthy dissent on important issues such as austerity in the past. Yet Krugman’s unwillingness to step too far left is obvious from his past criticisms of progressives, and it shows up once again in his editorials on inflation.

After his over-optimism in 2021 that inflation would resolve fairly quickly of its own accord, Krugman tacked right in his prescriptions in 2022. In a piece from January 2022, Krugman (1/21/22) pronounced, “it’s time for policymakers to pivot away from stimulus…. The Federal Reserve is right to be planning to raise interest rates in the months ahead.” But he cautioned, “As I read the data, they don’t call for drastic action: The Fed should be taking its foot off the gas pedal, not slamming on the brakes.”

Much like Summers, a central concern of Krugman’s has been the tight labor market. In one of his most recent columns on inflation (12/26/22), he wrote, “My concern (and, I believe, the Fed’s) comes down to the fact that the job market still looks very hot, with wages rising too fast to be consistent with acceptably low inflation.”

The tightness of the labor market has led Krugman to reject more progressive alternatives in the fight against inflation. For instance, in a column from August (8/23/22), he invoked the high level of job openings in his rejection of price controls. He concluded: “There are many good things to be said about a hot economy and tight labor markets, and we’ll miss them when they’re gone. But there don’t seem to be any realistic alternatives.”

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Krugman is that his knack for remarkable clarity in dissent from the mainstream is matched by a firm commitment to resisting the most radical conclusions. Krugman, in stark contrast to commentators like Larry Summers, has vociferously defended the Biden administration’s economic recovery policies, despite their contribution to inflation. Hailing the swiftness of the Covid recovery, Krugman (1/6/22) wrote in early 2022, “accepting inflation for a while was probably the right call.” In another column (2/3/22) from around the same time, he observed, “The costs of unemployment are huge and real, while the costs of inflation are subtle and surprisingly elusive.”

Yet as inflation reached higher, Krugman’s claws came out. In March of 2022, he wrote (3/21/22):

Now, excess inflation suggests that recent US economic growth has been too much of a good thing. Our economy looks clearly overheated, which is why the Federal Reserve is right to have started raising interest rates and should keep doing it until inflation subsides.

So, while Krugman is willing to ask whether a war on inflation is really worth the pain, his answer affirms the orthodoxy, workers be damned.

‘Too low for too long’

The New York Times‘ Peter Coy (8/26/22) recanted his dovish views on inflation: “It’s clear now that the Fed erred by keeping interest rates too low for too long, allowing inflation to get excessively high.”

After Krugman, the most frequent contributor to the Great Inflation Debate at the Times has been Peter Coy, who has provided somewhat more dissent than Krugman on inflation policy. For instance, in a column from March 2022, when Krugman (3/21/22) was advocating a series of rate hikes, Coy (3/16/22) featured an economist, David Rosenberg, opposing further rate hikes after the March one, the first since before the pandemic. Rosenberg provided a rare critique of Paul Volcker, the legendary Federal Reserve chair who slayed inflation in the 1980s (partially by sending the labor movement to the morgue): “‘People tend to forget that in the early 1980s Volcker was reviled,’ Rosenberg said. ‘And no one really knows if inflation was going to fall anyway.’”

In June, Coy (6/17/22) evinced “concern about the Fed’s newfound aggressiveness” and noted, “There are other reasons to think the US economy and inflation are beginning to cool off, even without extreme measures by the Fed.”

His concern has been complemented by an openness to alternative ideas. In October, for example, he recommended cost-of-living adjustments to help protect people against inflation (10/14/22). More recently, in a column (1/4/23) on class conflict and inflation, he displayed interest in incomes policy, which would involve wage and price controls.

Yet even Coy has revealed claws. Though he has been skeptical of rate hikes, he has nevertheless yielded to their necessity. In August, he wrote (8/26/22), “It’s clear now that the Fed erred by keeping interest rates too low for too long, allowing inflation to get excessively high.” That such a blunt instrument, one that has the predictable and intentional effect of weakening workers’ power, obviously must be used in the context of the current inflation is not in question among the Times’ foremost participants in the Great Inflation Debate.

Besides Krugman and Coy, both regular Times columnists, a spattering of other commentators have been awarded spots in the Times’ op-ed pages. Mike Konczal and JW Mason, progressive economists affiliated with the Roosevelt Institute, published a piece (6/15/21) in the summer of 2021 that criticized reliance on interest rate hikes as a response to a surge in demand, and warned:

There is a real political danger that policymakers will be pressured into seeing an economy with more worker power as something to be reined in, under the rationale of avoiding dangerous overheating.

A Times opinion newsletter (12/16/21) from late 2021 featured skeptics of rate hikes, with Eric Levitz noting, “Raising rates could actually make things worse,” and Adam Tooze commenting, “A broad monetary policy squeeze may be a high cost, low return proposition.” The Times has also run a more recent piece (10/4/22) by Tooze pointing out the substantial dangers that Fed policy poses for the global economy. Another notable progressive invite has been Ro Khanna, a California congressmember, who took to the Times (6/2/22) last summer to argue for a more holistic approach to lowering inflation.

There have been a number of other Times editorials written by progressives over the course of the Great Inflation Debate, but while left-wing voices are certainly more common at the Times than the Post, they do not receive serious amplification. There is no major columnist at the Times who has, over the past year and a half, not only written regularly on inflation but outlined a genuinely leftist response, one that does not involve deliberately throwing people out of work in order to reduce labor costs. While the Post may be a caricature of a hawk, the Times more resembles a dove…with claws.

Remember the left wing

James Galbraith (Nation, 2/18/22) points out that “since most American jobs are in services, those wages are also prices”—and that “suppressing wage increases for low-wage American workers is reactionary.”

Corporate outlets may have clipped their left wing, but that does not mean leftists have been silent. In reality, they have been significant participants in the debate over inflation—outside the Post and Times. The economist James Galbraith, for instance, outlined a compelling case against interest rate hikes in the Nation (2/18/22) back in February 2022:

Suppressing wage increases for low-wage American workers is reactionary. And it’s a result that can be achieved only by gouging those workers and their families on their debts and then cutting off their bargaining power over their jobs.

Galbraith urged his audience to recognize that progressive transformation of the economy

will put pressure on the price level. The “inflation” to come is just a condensed reflection of this reality. And the idea that “inflation is the Fed’s job” is just a way of denying that reality while dumping the unavoidable costs of adjustment onto American workers, their families, the indebted and the poor.

Rejecting the idea that the Fed should hurt workers to lower inflation, Galbraith advocated progressive remedies to high prices, including the redirection of resources toward more socially beneficial uses, the de-financialization of the economy, control of healthcare costs through Medicare for All, rent control and selective price controls.

A casual reader of the Times or the Post would almost certainly find this line of reasoning shockingly alien. But they would likely be quite familiar with the argument for interest rate hikes. Repetition has made the thought of weakening worker power seem commonsensical, while exclusion makes the idea of strengthening worker power sound radical.

Opinion sections at these outlets just so happen to prioritize views that line up with the interests of their owners’ class and against those of the poor. What readers get is not a real debate; instead, it’s indoctrination.

https://fair.org/home/if-you-wont-sacri ... p-ed-page/

Remember when Krugman was the darling of liberals? Still is......

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(Image by Davide Schmid)

Workers in the UK take to the streets in largest day of industrial action in a decade
Originally published: Pressenza on February 1, 2023 by Davide Schmid (more by Pressenza) (Posted Feb 03, 2023)

On the 1st of February 2023, the UK came the closest it has come in a generation to a general strike as workers from across a wide range of sectors including education and transport walked out in protest regarding poor pay, unfair working conditions, pensions and precarity. The day of strike represents the culmination of many months of industrial action across the UK, including unprecedented strikes by nurses and ambulance workers. They are a response both to the current cost of living crisis, which is pushing many workers to the brink of poverty, and to the long-term reality of declining pay and worsening public services. Many sectors, such as teaching and health, have seen declines in real pay in the order of 10-15% since 2010. This combined with the effects of more than a decade of austerity to create a situation in which key public services, from ambulances to A&E, from rail transport to schools, are in a state of constant disfunction and crisis.

On the streets, the sense of solidarity up and down the country was palpable as rallies took place in major cities and workers came together to say no to the continued erosion of working conditions which affects a growing proportion of UK workers, including many of the key workers who only two years ago were being celebrated as heroes during the pandemic.

As cars beeped their horns in solidarity and streets came to a standstill, it became clear that this is no longer just a case of individual fights, but a movement across the country. It is no longer simply a case of rail workers, university lecturers or health professionals fighting for their own rights. People across the country have had enough and are coming together to say so. The chants of ‘workers united will never be defeated’ rang out above the sound of traffic, with people stopping in the street to clap those passing by on marches and rallies.


MR Online

MR Online

This is a stark reminder to the British Government that there is power in the people; that real time pay offers far below inflation and the expectations that people will continue to work ridiculous hours with very little recognition, along with the erosion of safety measures and public services, will not be tolerated. Government representatives continue to push back against the demands for recognition and fairness, but if today is anything to go by, the fight may be long but workers will not be divided.

https://mronline.org/2023/02/03/workers ... -a-decade/

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UK Train Unions' New Strike Suspends Service Of 15 Lines


An empty platform at Paddington Train Station, London, U.K., Feb. 3, 2023. | Photo: EFE

Published 3 February 2023 (20 hours 43 minutes ago)

“Train drivers have not had a pay rise in four years. What option do we have but striking?,” Workers' leader Whelan said.


On Friday, England’s Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) and the National Union of Rail, Maritime & Transport Workers (RMT) held another massive strike that shut down the services of over 15 train lines.

"Drivers have not had a pay rise in four years. What option do we have but striking?," ASLEF Secretary Mick Whelan said, demanding wage increases and better working conditions.

Whelan apologized to passengers for the limited service caused by this initiative. He explained that the disruption would last all day and that some services will gradually resume on Saturday.

“Dialogue with the Rail Delivery Group has gone backward. Its offer of a 4 percent backdated raise for 2022 and a further 4 percent this year would add a significant number of contracted hours to drivers,” he insisted.


Talks between the ASLEF and train company representatives are likely to resume on Tuesday. “We want a resolution. However, if we do not reach it before the end of the month, the strikes will continue,” Whelan said.

On Wednesday, up to half a million British teachers, university staff, train drivers, and civil servants took to the streets to reject below-inflation pay deals. Their mobilization was the largest held in the U.K. since 2011.

Whelan warned that his union is ready to continue holding strikes for years if necessary. “If our demands are not met, it is pointless to lose the impetus gained," he stressed.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/UK- ... -0007.html

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Demonstrators against French government pension reforms take part to a protest march, in Bayonne, southwestern France, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023.

France brought to a standstill over attack on pensions
Originally published: Morning Star Online on January 31, 2023 by Roger Mckenzie (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Feb 02, 2023)

MILLIONS of French workers took to the streets in protest as the country was brought to a standstill in a “citizens’ insurrection” over the government’s attack on pension schemes.

Workers walked out on the second day of industrial action against President Emmanuel Macron’s scheme to raise the French retirement age by two years to 64.

The eight main trade union centres said that more than two million people took part in 250 protests against the changes, including a massive rally of hundreds of thousands in Paris.

France’s oil industry was paralysed, with the CGT union centre saying that nearly all workers at TotalEnergies went on strike.

High school and university students also joined the protests, with a few dozen students occupying the main building at the Sciences-Po university overnight.

“Obviously this is young people’s business,” said Colin Champion, a student leader at the Lycee Voltaire in Paris, one of several schools blockaded by pupils in the capital.

Even a prison in the south-western city of Nimes was blocked by staff protesting, a union source said.

Polling shows that most French people oppose the reform, but President Macron’s government says that it is determined to ram it through.

The reform is “vital” to ensure that the pension system keeps working, Mr Macron said on Monday.

Speaking in Marseille, where unions say 205,000 people took to the streets, veteran left-wing politician Jean-Luc Melenchon called the uprising against the government proposals “a form of citizens’ insurrection.”

CGT general secretary Philippe Martinez told reporters that there were “10,000 demonstrators in Reunion, 16,000 in Tarbes, 25,000 in Nice and 20,000 in Avignon.”

Saying he believed the support on Tuesday was greater than on the previous day of action on January 19, Mr Martinez told MPs “to listen to those who elected them. Despite attempts at division, union unity is strong.”

Transport, schools and the energy sectors were all heavily hit by the strike. There were virtually no regional or high-speed trains operating in the country.

Air France said that one in 10 short and medium-haul services had been cancelled. About half of all nursery and primary school teachers took industrial action.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, who French communist leader Fabien Roussel yesterday compared to Margaret Thatcher, is under increasing pressure to modify the proposals.

Unions say that women in particular will be discriminated against by the plans as they take time out from work to have children.

The proposals are set to be considered by the National Assembly where Mr Macron’s party no longer has a majority.

https://mronline.org/2023/02/02/france- ... -pensions/

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General Executive Board Demands Public Ownership of Railroads, Discusses Young Worker Upsurge



JANUARY 31, 2023

Pittsburgh

Meeting on January 28 and 29, UE’s General Executive Board unanimously endorsed a statement demanding that Congress “immediately begin a process of bringing our nation’s railroads under public ownership.” The statement notes that “the private owners of our nation’s Class 1 railroads have shown themselves utterly incapable of facing the challenge of the climate crisis, dealing fairly with their own workers, or even meeting the most basic needs of their customers.”

Local 1177 President Larry Hopkins, a rail crew driver for Hallcon in Chicago, pointed out that the refusal of the railroads to upgrade their locomotives impacts the health of workers like him who work in the rail yards. “They need to replace a lot of the old yard locomotives that are in there,” he said, because the pollutants they emit are “very toxic to the air. As rail crew drivers, we’re being exposed to the toxins.”

Local 1477 President Jessica Van Eman, also a Hallcon rail crew driver, decried the effects of longer trains on small communities like hers, where the longer and longer trains demanded by the railroads’ “endless thirst for profit” can block access to crucial emergency services. “Just in our little town of Belen, New Mexico, we’ve had three people die because they could not get to the other side of the tracks,” she said. “These rail yards are not made for 20,000-foot trains.”

In 2021, UE launched the Green Locomotive Project, which aims to encourage the railroads to upgrade their locomotive stock to cleaner and more efficient “Tier 4” locomotives, and to adopt zero-emissions technology for use in rail yards. This would significantly reduce both the pollution around rail yards and their carbon footprint, while creating good, union jobs — a concrete example of what a “Green New Deal” could accomplish.

Local 506 President Scott Slawson pointed out that “the emissions from old, polluting diesel locomotives are harmful to the people who work in rail yards and they’re harmful to the communities around rail yards.” He pledged that “We are committed to getting all locomotives out there to Tier 4 or better.” Local 506 members manufacture locomotives for Wabtec in Erie, PA.

“An influx of a lot of young people who want to build UE”
In his Organizing Report, Director of Organization Mark Meinster noted that “there’s an upsurge in this country among young workers,” and that the union is seeing “an influx of a lot of young people who want to build UE.”

This was confirmed by other GEB members. Local 1186 President Mike Tomaloff, whose local represents workers at Willy Street Co-op in Madison, WI, reported that “we get high school kids that are fired up about the union”; Local 222 Vice President Margaret Dabrowski noted that young workers are tired of the “bunch of lies fed to them,” and “now they want to fight back.” General President Carl Rosen said that young workers “want autonomy, militancy, politics that challenge the status quo” — which is exactly what they find in UE.

This upsurge of young workers has been especially evident in UE’s organizational work among graduate workers in the recent period. Meinster reported that UE won an NLRB election on January 10 and 11 for 3,000 graduate workers at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago, with over 93 percent of the vote. The union also has elections scheduled for the week of January 30 for two additional graduate worker bargaining units of over 3,000 workers, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the University of Chicago.

Meinster also reviewed the first contracts that were won in December at two universities in New Mexico and at Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania, ongoing negotiations for first contracts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Refresco bottling plant in Wharton, NJ, and organizational work among public-sector workers in Virginia and West Virginia.

Turning to contract bargaining, he said that UE is in the middle of “the most intense contract cycle of all of our contract cycles.” In September, UE’s six Hallcon locals settled a new national agreement covering approximately 2,000 workers. Most of UE’s Service Contract Act locals, which together have several thousand members, have recently settled contracts, negotiated bridge agreements with a new contractor, or will be going into negotiations in the coming months. Seven hundred and fifty UE members at Henry Mayo hospital in California are in “a real fight,” with their contract expiring on January 31. And on June 9, Locals 506 and 618 will see their first contract with Wabtec expire, and are expecting a big fight.

https://www.ueunion.org/ue-news/2023/ue ... in-january

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UE: RAILROADS MUST BE BROUGHT UNDER PUBLIC OWNERSHIP
Posted by MLToday | Feb 20, 2023 | Other Featured Posts | 0



Statement of the UE General Executive Board
Pittsburgh, PA
January 30, 2023

Railroads are a crucial part of our nation’s infrastructure. Nearly every sector of our economy depends on goods shipped by the railroads, which haul forty percent of all long-distance freight in the U.S., measured by ton-miles. A third of all exports travel by rail. Furthermore, the greater fuel efficiency of using rail to move both people and freight means that moving more of our transportation onto the railroads will be necessary to address the existential threat of climate change.

Yet the private owners of our nation’s Class 1 railroads have shown themselves utterly incapable of facing the challenge of the climate crisis, dealing fairly with their own workers, or even meeting the most basic needs of their customers. The railroad companies cannot even be said to be in the business of moving freight; they are merely in the business of using their monopoly control over the nation’s rail infrastructure to squeeze as much profit as possible from customers and workers at the behest of their Wall Street shareholders.

Therefore, we demand that Congress immediately begin a process of bringing our nation’s railroads under public ownership. Public ownership of part or all of their rail systems has allowed many other countries to create rail systems that can move people and goods quickly, affordably, and in an environmentally sound way. With public ownership, governments can take the long view and make crucial infrastructure investments — and prevent price-gouging.

Railroads are, like utilities, “natural monopolies.” The consolidation of the Class 1 railroads in the U.S. into five massive companies over the past several decades has made it clear that there is no “free market” in rail transportation. With most customers having no other choice, and no central authority mandating long-term planning, each individual railroad company has little incentive to make investments in infrastructure and every temptation to take as much of their income as possible as profits. Even Martin Oberman, chair of the Surface Transportation Board, the federal agency that regulates rail, has called the railroads “monopolists” who are cutting services and raising prices because “that’s the easiest way for them to get rich.”

In their endless thirst for profit, the railroads have implemented a system called “precision scheduled railroading,” which simply means operating with as few staff as possible — speed-up by another name. Shippers have been complaining about the resulting poor service for years, and during the pandemic our entire economy paid the price with snarled supply lines leading to shortages and price hikes. The railroads do not even seem interested in expanding their share of the freight market, instead seeking to extract more and more short-term profit out of customers for whom rail is the only feasible way to ship their products.

The effect on railroad workers has been even more severe. In order to implement precision scheduled railroading, the companies have imposed draconian attendance policies which make it virtually impossible for railroad workers to take any time off, even for medical reasons. This intolerable state of affairs almost led to a railroad strike at the end of last year, until President Biden and Congress — clearly willing to intervene in the “market” when workers threaten to withdraw their labor — imposed a contract on the workers that did not even contain the workers’ bottom-line demand of adequate sick leave.

It is not only shippers and railroad workers who suffer from railroad company greed, but communities which have the misfortune of being located near tracks and rail yards. Every year, motorists are killed at railroad intersections in need of safety upgrades — which the railroads could easily afford but refuse to pay for. Idling and slow-moving trains can block access to neighborhoods near tracks for the better part of an hour, an inconvenience that can turn deadly if emergency responders are blocked from being able to get to those in need. Thanks to railroads’ special legal status, granted by Congress, states and municipalities are forbidden from regulating this problem, but Congress has so far refused to do so, and the problem is getting worse as precision scheduled railroading has led to longer and longer trains.

Communities near rail yards, which are primarily working-class communities and communities of color, suffer from heightened rates of cancer, asthma and other health problems due to the exhaust pumped into their air by diesel locomotives. While the Environmental Protection Agency has regulated locomotive emissions since the 1990s through a “tier” system which has ratcheted down the pollution from newly-constructed and rebuilt locomotives, far too many old and dirty locomotives are still in use. In 2019 almost two-thirds of the over 24,000 locomotives owned by Class 1 railroads were built prior to 2001, and if not remanufactured are only required to meet the inadequate emissions standards of Tiers 0 or 1.

In 2021, UE launched our Green Locomotive Project, which aims to encourage the railroads to upgrade their locomotive stock to cleaner and more efficient Tier 4 locomotives, and to adopt zero-emissions technology for use in rail yards. Although the legislation our allies introduced in Congress would have provided generous financial incentives for the railroads to adopt this green technology, they opposed us every step of the way.

Addressing the threat of climate change will require not only that the railroads upgrade their locomotive stock, but that more of our nation’s freight be moved onto the railroads — which, even with their current locomotive stock, have a much lower carbon footprint than other modes of transportation. The Biden administration has recognized this in The U.S. National Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization, released earlier this month. But what shipper currently using other methods of transportation would choose to switch their business to an industry which holds its own customers in such contempt? Put simply, the railroads’ “business model” is a direct threat to our ability to leave a livable planet for our children.

Our nation can no longer afford private ownership of the railroads; the general welfare demands that they be brought under public ownership.

https://mltoday.com/ue-railroads-must-b ... ownership/

For a start....

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Workers walked out of the Flint Assembly Plant in the 2019 General Motors strike. In a runoff election, UAW members have elected a full slate of reformers to lead the union into this year’s Big 3 auto bargaining and beyond. Photo: Jake May/The Flint Journal via AP.

It’s a new day in the United Auto Workers
Originally published: Labor Notes on March 17, 2023 by Luis Feliz Leon and Jane Slaughter (more by Labor Notes) | (Posted Mar 20, 2023)

The machine will churn no more. Nearly 80 years of top-down one-party rule in the United Auto Workers are coming to an end. Reformer Shawn Fain is set to be the winner in the runoff for the UAW presidency.

As of Thursday night, Fain had a 505-vote edge, 69,386 to 68,881, over incumbent Ray Curry of the Administration Caucus. Curry was appointed by the union’s executive board in 2021. There are around 600 unresolved challenged ballots. (This story will be updated with the final vote tally when we have it.)

“By now, the writing is on the wall: change is coming to the UAW,” said Fain.

You, the members, have already made history in this election, and we’re just getting started. It’s a new day in the UAW.

It’s a stunning upset in one of the nation’s most storied unions. Once Fain’s victory is conclusive— after remaining challenged ballots are counted—he will join Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock, who ran on the Members United slate and won outright in the first round, and a majority of the International Executive Board, giving reformers control of the direction of the union. The UAW Members United slate won every race it challenged—a clear rebuke to the old guard.

“Thousands of UAW members put countless hours into this historic campaign to take back our union,” said Fain.

I thank those members—no matter who they voted for—for taking an active role in our union.

“But thousands of members have lost faith, after years of corruption at the top and concessions at the bottom,” he continued.

Our job now is to put the members back in the driver’s seat, regain the trust of the rank and file, and put the companies on notice. We are ending give-back unionism and company control in the UAW.

PHOTO FINISH
Fain is an electrician from Kokomo, Indiana, and on the staff of the international union.

“Shawn Fain ran a campaign on the promise of true reform in the UAW,” said Justin Mayhugh, a General Motors worker at the Fairfax Assembly plant in Kansas City and a member of Unite All Workers for Democracy, the caucus formed in 2019 to fight for members’ right to vote on top officers. UAWD backed Fain’s UAW Members United slate.

“That message has resonated with the members of our union who are ready for change,” Mayhugh said.

He ran a campaign based on the needs of the rank and file, and because of that, he was able to overcome the many entrenched advantages Curry enjoyed during this election process. It’s a truly historic moment for our union.

And not a moment too soon. The Big 3 auto contracts with Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) expire in six months, and the industry is undergoing major changes with the rise of electric vehicles. The Big 3 now have less than half of the domestic auto market and more than half of all U.S. auto workers are non-union.

Agreements with the Canadian union Unifor covering some 20,000 auto workers at the Big 3 also expire in September.

“We are putting the Big 3 on notice: they should get ready to negotiate with a UAW where the membership is back in charge of this union,” Fain told Labor Notes in December after the first round of the election, where reformers won five seats outright.

LONG TIME COMING
The last time a reformer had won a seat on the UAW board was in 1986, when Jerry Tucker of the New Directions Movement became a regional director. New Directions coalesced a group of reformers into a rank-and-file resistance movement in the 1980s and early 1990s.

And going back even further, the last contested election for the presidency, except for Tucker’s run for president in 1991 and other symbolic runs, was in 1946 between RJ Thomas and Walter Reuther, heading opposing caucuses.

Reuther won and purged the Communists from the UAW staff and defeated or co-opted other opponents. He consolidated his power in a 1947 sweep that accomplished what historian Nelson Lichtenstein describes as “nothing less than the elimination of his rivals from all posts in the UAW hierarchy.”

“The UAW in the ’40s was known for this intense internal democracy,” said Lichtenstein, author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit.

And hopefully, with the victory of Shawn Fain, he’s not going to create a new machine. There are going to be contested elections from now on, and that’s a good, healthy thing. It brings in the rank and file and energizes people.

BUMPS AHEAD
The UAW has 400,000 members and a strike fund of a billion dollars. The new leaders campaigned on a militant approach to organizing, internal democracy, and solidarity against tiers, similar to the leadership shakeup in the Teamsters in 2021. The Members United slogan was “No Corruption, No Concessions, No Tiers.”

They face steep challenges. The union has seen a membership decline in its core manufacturing sector. The GM division, for example, is today about 11 percent of its 450,000-member heyday in the 1970s. Attempts to organize auto factories in the South have failed, including at a Nissan plant in Mississippi in 2017 and a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee in 2019. Other organizing opportunities are on the horizon. Ford will build four new factories to produce electric vehicle batteries and electric F-Series pickup trucks in Kentucky and Tennessee by 2025, employing 11,000 workers.

To shore up numbers, the union has brought in university workers in recent years, now accounting for 20 percent of members. University of California graduate employees, coming off a recent strike, went overwhelmingly for Fain, defying local leaders who supported Curry. Graduate worker turnout was very low, however, and they were a modest part of Fain’s vote total, 2.5 percent.

GOOD CONTRACTS ORGANIZE
The new leaders will need to fight for stronger contracts at existing shops while launching new organizing campaigns. Scott Houldieson, an electrician at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant and a founding member of UAWD, says these goals are mutually dependent.

“When you’re negotiating concessionary contracts, it doesn’t help your organizing strategy at all,” said Houldieson. “In fact, it gives talking points to the anti-union forces.

“And while we have to do both at the same time—bargain strong contracts and do new organizing—we will do better at organizing the unorganized if we can first organize to fight back,” he continued.

The rank and file is fed up with our union officers taking the company line, each and every time we have an issue, whether it be contract negotiations or grievance settlements.

The Big 3 are hauling in record profits, but they continue to lose market share to non-union automakers. Electric vehicle battery plants and federal investments that are part of a green industrial policy provide an opportunity to organize workers in new manufacturing jobs.

CONCESSIONS KEY BEEF
UAWD’s campaign for one-member-one-vote was seen as a long shot when it began in 2019. Even the union’s Internal Review Board once described the union as functioning like a “one-party state.” But then an investigation by the Justice Department laid bare longstanding corruption in the union, including embezzlement, kickbacks, and collusion with employers. Thirteen union officials went to jail, including two former presidents.

The consent decree that resulted from the corruption scandals made it possible for members to decide whether they wanted to directly elect their officers, as opposed to a convention delegate system. In December 2021, UAW members voted 63.6 percent in support of electing top officers through one-member-one-vote.

But the financial chicanery at the top was not enough to galvanize the rank and file, says retired Local 1700 President Bill Parker.

“Corruption was a minor issue,” said Parker. “The real problem was that the union no longer fought the company, going back to the early ’80s when it began granting concessions, and then it all went downhill from there.” The union began giving away concessions at Chrysler beginning in 1979. Ford and GM followed suit with demands for ever-deeper givebacks.

“People want the union to challenge management,” said Parker,

not lay down in front of them. So they want the collective power of the union, not just to reform the union, but to aggressively change the union into a fighting institution.

RETIREES VOTE FOR CHANGE
But the discontent has had a slow build-up. Take retirees from locals whose factories closed. Parker says they felt abandoned by the union and were favorable to reformers in both rounds of the election. (We can’t tell how most retirees voted because their votes are mixed with those of active members. But we can see how retirees from closed locals voted.)

“Forty or 50 years ago, when I started out, retirees were solidly in the camp of the Administration Caucus,” he said,

because at the time, the Administration was doing things like negotiating improvements in the pension and bonuses.

“Then in 2007, during contract negotiations, the union agreed to two tiers.” Now “the majority of Chrysler workers are second-tier employees with no pension, no retiree health care, and they’re treated poorly in the plant.”

At Chrysler Local 1268, where the company has indefinitely “idled” the Belvidere Assembly Plant where 1,350 UAW members work, workers voted over 70 percent for Fain.

“The sad reality of this is, over the last year and a half, since President Curry’s been in power… the company has awarded more than three different products, and Belvidere could have had every one of those,” Fain said on a Facebook livestream last December.

They’ve had ample opportunity to take on the company and to get product there, and prevent thousands of layoffs.

BUILDING HOPE
Anger has propelled rank and filers into leadership. But the flip side of anger is lack of hope.

“The new administration is going to have to start giving the members some confidence,” said Houldieson.

Right now, they lack confidence, and for good reason—they’ve been beaten down by corporate unionism for decades now. So we’re going to have to work on building a contract campaign that gives the membership more confidence than they’ve had in a long time.

This attitude of resignation partly explains the low turnout in the election (14 percent of the 400,000 active members and 600,000 retirees) and the slim margin of victory. In addition, reformers said that members struggled to get information about the candidates in order to make an informed decision.

At first, the AC had relied on the sleepy internal life of the union to protect it from the insurgents and tried to pretend the election wasn’t happening, giving it little publicity. “The Administration Caucus didn’t campaign much in the first round because they thought they had it in the bag,” said Houldieson. “They are used to just having their way.” But they hadn’t faced a one-member-one-vote election before.

After the reformers’ victories in December, the AC roused from its lethargy and Curry pulled out all the stops.

His strategy was to get Administration Caucus loyalists—appointed and elected officials—to campaign in Ford locals, the home base of his running mate Chuck Browning, who has been the UAW vice president in charge of Ford. Their message was that Fain, from Stellantis, would somehow discriminate against Ford workers.

Curry, who was an assembler at Freightliner Trucks in North Carolina before he became a union official, won in Region 1A to the west of Detroit and also won in large Ford plants in Region 8 in the South, where turnout increased by 41 percent in the runoff. Fain took a majority in the union’s other seven regions.

REBELLION FROM BELOW
Plucked from the shop floor, UAW Members United challenger Daniel Vicente won the runoff vote for director of Region 9, which covers western and central New York, New Jersey, and most of Pennsylvania.

What motivated him to seek union office? Vicente, a machine operator and a convention delegate representing Local 644 in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, credited a hazardous incident at his current job at Dometic, which makes steering control cables for boats, and the short shrift a local union official paid him once he brought the incident to his attention.

His nerve was steeled at the July UAW convention in Detroit when he saw delegates, in the convention’s closing hours, reverse their previous vote to boost strike pay—at the AC’s request.

In a heartfelt Facebook post on March 3, Vicente wrote about growing up in a blue-collar family and the bonds of solidarity he has forged with fellow workers on the shop floor, writing about a co-worker, Mohamed Aitqol:

You and I have pulled 12 hours shifts together, we sweated it out in the summers and froze half to death in the winters on these machines.

He promised to carry with him that spirit of solidarity as he travels Region 9 to meet with local members and leaders to together transform the union.

“The race is done, so now the hard part begins,” he said.

https://mronline.org/2023/03/20/its-a-n ... o-workers/