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The following
article appears in the Oct. 2 special edition of Socialist Action
newspaper.
A tremendous outpouring of working
people will assemble at the One Nation Working Together rally in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 2. They are protesting because
they are the victims of an anti-social system, capitalism, which has
destroyed 9 million jobs and foreclosed 2.3 million homes during the
present Great Recession.
They are protesting because that system
has gifted $16 trillion to bail out the banks, insurance companies, and
corporate plunderers while destroying union contracts and eliminating a
half century and more of social gains. And they are protesting because
they increasingly understand that the capitalist system has neither the
ability nor intention of changing gears to provide any relief from the
bipartisan government and corporate attacks that have ruined the lives
of millions of Americans.
Were it not for these attacks on every
aspect of social life, on the broad trade-union movement, on Blacks,
Latinos and other oppressed nationalities, on immigrants, and on civil
liberties, few would be marching on capitalism’s seat and symbol of
power.
Were it not for the trillions given
away yearly to the military-industrial complex to boost already bloated
profits and to conquer poor people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
the world over—to steal their resources and re-colonize their
nations—there would be no antiwar contingents on Oct. 2, like the one
organized as part of the Peace Table by the United National Antiwar
Committee (UNAC). The latter contingent will demand the immediate
withdrawal of all U.S. troops, mercenaries, and war
contractors from Iraq and Afghanistan. It will champion the civil liberties
of the scapegoated Muslim and immigrant communities, and demand an end
to U.S. aid to Israel and an end to U.S. support to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the siege of Gaza.
UNAC is the antiwar committee that
organized the highly successful Albany, N.Y., conference of 800
participants in July and is planning a mobilization against the war and
regressive social policies to take place in San Francisco and New York
City next April 9.
Many workers understand that the
present Middle East wars were a fraud from the beginning.
Every poll shows that a growing majority opposes Washington’s imperial interventions. They know
that there were no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and that the Iraqi government had no
connection to al-Qaida—the now totally refuted twin pretexts for Washington’s murderous wars. They understand that
this has been a war for Iraq’s oil, the second largest oil reserve
in the world, and a war for U.S. domination of the Middle East more generally.
They understand more than ever that the
U.S. government of the rich does not
conduct “wars for democracy” abroad while it is smashing democratic
rights and civil liberties at home.
Last month’s FBI raids and blanket
witch-hunting subpoenas issued across the country to antiwar, union,
and social activists tell another story. The Sept. 24 raids on the
homes of leading activists in Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, California, and elsewhere are a warning that the
“terrorist” pretext may well be a prelude to overt government attacks
on all social movements that seek to challenge the status quo in the
interest of the working class. In Minnesota, those whose homes were broken into,
and whose computers and files were confiscated, included union and
antiwar activists who participate in the leading bodies of UNAC.
Workers and their allies today
understand that the 150,000 U.S. troops and mercenaries (paid contract
killers) in Afghanistan are not there to capture the 81 or so
al-Qaida members that the CIA has identified. More to the point, the
recent New York Times revelation that Afghanistan is the source
of $1 trillion in natural resources—including the world’s second
largest reserve of lithium, a metal vital for the production of
batteries for computers and cell phones—sounds eminently more
reasonable as an explanation for the U.S. war against that nation,
today run by the U.S.-imposed corrupt and universally hated Hamid
Karzai dictatorship.
Two opposed perspectives
But what the working masses and their
allies among the oppressed are rallying for on Oct. 2 and what their
bureaucratic misleaders (“labor fakers” or “labor lieutenants of
capitalism” is what they, accurately, used to be called) are pushing
are two entirely different and opposed realities.
Oct. 2 was initiated by the
300,000-400,000 member SEIU local 1199 and the NAACP, and later
endorsed by the AFL-CIO. One Nation Working Together is the name of the
coalition they formed to organize the march. The name itself is a
fraud. There is no “one nation working together” in the U.S. There is a capitalist elite that runs
the country and exploits workers in every industry without exception,
and there is a working class that produces all the wealth and yet is
denied the benefits of its labor. The two have nothing in common, just
as the slave and slave master have nothing in common.
Unions were originally organized to
defend the interest of the working class against the boss class. But
today’s union misleaders see a partnership with the corporate world and
its parties as the way forward, at least the way forward to protect
their own separate and anti-working-class interests and privileges.
In the name of this “partnership” (the
bosses used to say, “what’s good for General Motors is good for
America”), today’s union bureaucrats have submitted to and helped
orchestrate the most rapid fall in union membership in history. Without
a whimper, they have presided over the decline of union membership
demanded by the ruling rich to the lowest levels in the past 100 years.
And their partnership with the boss class has resulted in the
annihilation of the hard-fought union victories that brought a
semblance of decency to the lives of millions of American workers.
Canvassing for the Democrats
One Nation Working Together’s Oct. 2
theme is to demand, or better plead, for the Democrats to implement the
“Change We Voted For.” Their objective, stated repeatedly by the labor
bureaucracy and by NAACP President Ben Jealous, is to use the Oct. 2
mass mobilization to form yet another coalition for the midterm
elections and then on to 2012. This theme was repeated in the website’s
“Call to Action.” There is no union leadership in the country that has
organized today to go to Washington, D.C., without an electoral, Democratic
Party orientation in mind.
Many of those who stay behind will be
organizing door-to-door canvassing activities for the Democrats. The
Ohio NAACP is not sending any buses to Washington because “Ohio is a swing state and door-to-door
organizing is what is required.” Several New York state labor councils are doing the
same. Labor officials in the San Francisco Bay Area cancelled a planned
Oct. 2 Oakland demonstration in favor of a joint effort of all Bay Area
Central Labor Councils to canvas for the Democrats.
The One Nation Working Together website
contains a “Mission Statement” with a video urging people to sign on
for One Nation. The video features one speaker only, past Democratic
Party National Committee Chair Howard Dean, who is also the chair
“emeritus” of the Democratic Party today.
The One Nation website’s “Policy
Principles” include a lengthy list of social reforms long put forward
by the labor bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. One statement reads,
“Today, more than ever, we need to break the gridlock in Washington and
we need decisive leadership and policy that will move all in Congress,
especially in the Senate, forward.”
Howard Dean aside, in the abstract the
long list of liberal “Policy Principles” could be generally supported
by almost anyone in the radical movement. In the concrete, however, we
are confronted with a mass mobilization by the labor bureaucracy and
pro-capitalist liberal organizations from A to Z, for a new coalition
to elect the Democrats in the midterm November elections and in the
presidential elections of 2012.
There is no mention in the Policy
Principles of any of the U.S. wars in the Middle East or anywhere
else—not even a mention of the word “peace,” although a microscopic
examination might find the concept mentioned in the abstract. A phrase
mentioning the need for “peace abroad” is buried in another
section of the website, likely a concession to the “peace movement.”
In fact, the Oct. 2 rally glosses over
all the critical issues of the day. There is no mention of Obama’s
spending more money and sending more troops to Afghanistan than George
Bush; no mention of Obama’s unbroken string of promises to labor; no
mention of Obama’s destruction of the UAW and its contracts that were extracted
from the boss class over more than a half century of struggle.
And there is no mention of Obama’s
reactionary immigrant “rights” proposals embodied in the notorious bill
authored by Democratic Party Senator Charles Schumer. The Democrats
state that this “tough” measure will have “securing the border” as its
major priority, echoing the repressive SB1070 legislation approved by
the Arizona legislature.
The “lesser-evil” electoral scam
Some 40 speakers are slated to speak on
the One Nation Working Together rally platform. Not one will place the
responsibility for today’s economic and social crises on the capitalist
party in power, the Democrats. All will focus their “fire and
fury” at the “Republican obstructionists” or the right-wing
proto-fascist Tea Party fanatics.
The truth, however, lies elsewhere. The
Democrats are no less the party of the corporate elite than the
Republicans. They have been chosen by the elite and tiny ruling class
of billionaire capitalists to lead the assault on workers.
Barack Obama received more corporate
funds than any other capitalist candidate in history, Republican or
Democrat. He was chosen to once again play to perfection capitalism’s
electoral “lesser evil” shell game, the better to foster the illusion
that the Democrats were the party of “change.”
American capitalism’s electoral farce
is consciously planned to perpetuate the illusion that elections are
the vehicle for social change and that there are important differences
in the “two-party” contest that merit public participation. In reality,
the Democrats represent the interests of corporate America—full stop!
History teaches that the Democrats were
originally the party of the Southern plantation slave owners, whose
descendents were aided in more recent times by the Ku Klux Klan and
related racist-terrorist groups like the White Citizens Councils. The
Democrats lost their racist voting bloc in the South due to President
Nixon’s and the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy.” But decade after
decade, they have sought to regain national power by running Southern
candidates only. Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton were selected
for this task—that is, breaking off a few Southern states to try to win
the presidency for their particular corporate sponsors.
Today, with regard to the working
class, the two major capitalist parties have no differences. The
corporate backers of both parties have no choice but to continue and
deepen the exploitation of wage labor if they are to remain competitive
on U.S. and world markets.
The capitalists now use the electoral
process virtually on a year-round basis. They finance and engineer Tea
Party bigots and Republican bluster to consciously make room for the
Democrats on the right. The louder the Republicans and their media
morons roar, the better prepared is the ground for the Democrats to
take another pound of flesh from working people.
The logic of lesser-evil politics leads
to a never-ending choice between evils. Of course, this is the logic of
these who seek to perpetuate the system of a tiny minority ruling class
prevailing over the vast majority.
Workers need their own party
Socialists want it the other way
around. We fight for an egalitarian society where for the first time in
human history the great majority rules in its own interests, through
its own institutions, and for the purpose of advancing the well being
of all humanity—as opposed to the profits of the few.
If there ever was a time when a break
with the two-party capitalist system was needed, it is now. The
formation of a Labor Party based on a reinvigorated and fighting
trade-union movement, allied with all the oppressed and exploited, is a
far better strategy than that of the labor fakers ceaselessly begging
at the feet of big money capital. Such a party can emerge from the
coming struggles of working people in every arena against the horrors
that the boss class requires for its survival.
The power that working people generate
in Washington on Oct. 2 with their sheer numbers can
serve to remind them they are a social force capable of great deeds.
The history of all social change in the modern era is the history of
the working-class masses, in alliance with all the oppressed, breaking
from the status quo of minority rule and embarking on an independent
course.
American workers are no exception. They
have a remarkable and tested capacity to fight back, which during the
Great Depression of the 1930s broke the grip of industrial capitalism
to exploit at will. They will do it again, this time taking the
struggle forward to the construction of their own working-class party
and to a definitive break with the heinous capitalist system itself.
Today’s unprecedented assaults are
changing the consciousness of millions. When these emerging fighters
take the field of action, and convert their potential strength into
great mass movements demanding fundamental social and economic change,
the present labor bureaucracy will be swept from the scene, the deadly
lesser-evil conception of politics will wither away, and a new world
will be in the making.
The participation of today’s militant
fighters in the Oct. 2 mobilization—with their own class-struggle ideas
and programs and under their own banners—can be an important step in
this direction.
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