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The liberals propose to tweak the Wall Street
Bailout on behalf of the amorphous “taxpayers” living on a mythical
“Main Street.” Revolutionary socialists, in contrast, start from the
needs of flesh-and-blood workers, and rely on their class power to
challenge ruling class attacks.
For that reason our Action Program for this
crisis begins with a call to the real, existing organizations of the
working class: the trade unions and allied organizations.
We call on the leaders of the AFL-CIO and
Change to Win federations, and of independent unions, to call an
Emergency Congress of Labor at which representatives of the working
class can draw up a set of demands and vote on a strategy to win them.
Such a Congress should make sure there is representation from the most
embattled segments of the class, such as immigrant workers, oppressed
nationalities and women, retirees, the disabled, etc. We therefore
encourage that the Congress be open to representatives of immigrant
workers’ centers, the NAACP, NOW, and similar organizations.
At this Congress, Socialist Action would ally
with class-struggle militants to push for adoption of the following
demands:
Not a cent to bail out the bankers!
Nationalize the entire banking system under the control of capitalism’s
victims, not its agents! Open the capitalists’ books so we can
determine what has been stolen, hidden or squandered at our expense!
Make the banks, corporations and the ruling class pay the full price of
the crisis!
No to mortgage foreclosures! Reduce present
mortgage payments in proportion to the capitalist-caused decline in
value!
As the crisis affects not only the financial
sector, but spills over into, and is itself in turn caused or
reinforced by, simultaneous crises in manufacturing, soaring inflation,
and a global climate crisis, we demand worker’s control of the monopoly
corporations in manufacturing and mining, energy, and transportation.
We call for the election of committees of workers to run these
industries – workers who represent the millions whose pensions have
been eliminated or are on the line and whose jobs and healthcare have
been disappeared.
Jobs for all at top union wages! Reduce the
workweek to 30 hours with no cut in pay to provide jobs for all!
Restore and guarantee all pensions! For a
real Social Security system that pays pensions at union wage levels!
Eliminate the private health insurers and providers, and merge Medicare
and Medicaid into a free, universal, and public health system that
covers all needed services without charge!
Bring all the troops home now from Iraq,
Afghanistan, and every other country where they’re stationed, and spend
the trillions for war instead on rebuilding the nation’s inner cities,
schools and hospitals. One hundred percent tax on the war industries!
Finally, the bipartisan support for bailing
out the ruling class shows once again that workers need our own
political organ: Break with the twin parties of capital! For a Labor
Party based on a fighting union movement and all the oppressed and
exploited!
* * *
As one of its first tasks in mobilizing
support for the demands adopted at it, the Congress should organize
committees in every workplace in which workers’ jobs, pensions and
health benefits are threatened by the crisis, and in every neighborhood
threatened by foreclosures and evictions – as well as in the Gulf Coast
and urban areas destroyed by “natural” disasters and decades of
discrimination. These committees can draw up more concrete demands to
supplement the above, some examples of which follow.
Workers desperately searching for information
on the fates of their mortgages, pension funds, 401ks, health benefits,
life insurance policies, retirement annuities, education debt – indeed
their very paychecks – will respond eagerly to an opportunity to meet
collectively to share information and to demand the right to see the
books of all companies holding direct stakes in the funds affecting the
above, as well as the institutions holding the financial instruments
based on them.
Parallel committees can be formed in
neighborhoods facing high rates of foreclosure and eviction to demand
access to the banks, real estate companies, and other institutions
causing their misery. These committees could also organize physical
resistance through mass mobilization against evictions.
We demand an immediate halt to all foreclosures,
cancellation of all interest on mortgages to banks and mortgage
lenders, and renegotiation of all mortgage terms, including the
principal and debt built up due to usurious interest rates, such
negotiations to be led by workers’ and homeowners’ neighborhood
committees. We demand that what workers owe be recalculated downward in
proportion to the decline in the value of their homes caused by the
puncturing of the housing bubble built on financial speculation.
Replace the Federal Reserve with a workers’
and consumers’ council to oversee the merged and nationalized banks.
Rehire the tens of thousands of bank workers being laid off, who must
organize their own committees, which can meet with workers’ and
neighborhood committees and expose to them the secret records of their
banks.
Abolish immediately the market for
mortgage-based securities, credit-swaps, and other derivatives. The
workers’ committees will know how to use the funds seized from these
markets to ensure the safety of the deposits of all individual workers
as well as to use their surpluses to fund production and services.
These workplace and neighborhood committees
can unite to pool their information, especially as they are often
victimized by the same banks even though working in different
industries. Meeting together, they can discuss the demands adopted at
the Congress, and concretize them further based on their collective
sense of their needs.
If bankers whose debts don’t get
“deleveraged” refuse loans to businesses which then shut down
production, workers can demand the nationalization of any company
shutting down or cutting jobs or benefits as a result.
We call for the nationalized banks to be
merged into one public institution under the supervision of workers’
committees, which could then decide how that public bank’s funds can be
used to rebuild society, based on the needs expressed in the plan of
the Congress of labor and supplemented by demands of local workplace
and neighborhood committees.
The agribusiness and energy monopolies must
be nationalized as a first step to dealing with inflation.
When threatened with plant closure in 2006,
UAW Local 879 in St. Paul drew up a plan to convert from making cars to
green production of environmentally friendly products such as
wind-generating turbines and hybrid vehicles. The same process must now
be reproduced in every workplace threatened with closure due to the
crisis, and on a nationwide scale.
The transportation industry, including auto,
bus and rail manufacturers, as well as railroad and subway lines, must
be nationalized to begin reorganizing the economy in a way that can
reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to save the planet. Paulson claims
there is a financial emergency justifying his dictatorial takeovers.
Workers must declare instead a Climate
Emergency which justifies our inspection and control over the
financial, food, energy and transportation industries!
To combat inflation, we call for a sliding
scale of wages that fully matches the Consumer Price Index (including food
and energy, left out of the official CPI). Such a scale should be
applied also to retirees. It must be monitored by workers’ and
consumers’ committees, which could inspect and if need be take over
companies claiming they can’t survive under the new wage schedule.
In addition to the 6-hour day and 30-hour
week, reflecting the gains in our productivity, we demand reduction of
the retirement age to 55. We demand unemployment insurance at union
wages and benefits.
In Trotsky’s 1934 Action Program for France,
which contained demands similar to those above, he already called for
special demands for the specially oppressed: “Equal wages for equal
work. Abolition of the superexploitation imposed on women, young
people, aliens and colonials. Maternity protection with supplementary
leaves of absence. Repeal of all special legislation applying to
foreign and colonial workers.” Those demands if anything are more
urgent today, especially as a way of fighting the violent racism that
the ruling class will organize to divert us from our common
exploitation today!
For a confiscatory tax on the rich! Even
manic deregulator John McCain recently proposed that none of the
executives involved in the taken-over firms get salaries more than the
President, which is $400,000. We say instead, institute a 100% tax on
all income over $400,000 throughout the economy! And jail time for
anyone shifting their bank accounts offshore to evade this.
* * *
To liberal whining about greed and corruption
on Wall Street, and calls for bourgeois politicians to have a greater
hand in overseeing and regulating bankers’ bailouts, we counterpose the
expropriation by the organized working class of the banks and
billionaires, and the end of the system which makes greed, swindling,
and corruption inevitable.
Labor historian Steven Fraser, author of a
recent book on how Americans have viewed Wall Street historically,
predicted that the current crisis could lead to a revival of the spirit
of the late 19th Century, when mass labor and radical movements
“expressed a deep yearning to abolish the prevailing industrial order.
They believed that out of all this could come a new way of life, a
cooperative commonwealth.”
Similarly, as Bill Onasch noted in Labor
Advocate Online, “nationalizing the financial system has long had a
proud place in American working class heritage. The 1912 Socialist
Party platform that Gene Debs ran on called for ‘The collective
ownership and democratic management of the banking and currency
system.’”
In the course of agitating and organizing
around the above demands, revolutionaries need to step up our education
about the nature of the system which has brought on this crisis, and
how the steps we take to combat it today can lead to a brand new social
system, to the “cooperative commonwealth” envisioned by Fraser’s 19th
Century radicals.
We encourage our readers to write us with
their own suggestions for demands to meet this crisis, or refinements
of the above demands as they apply to your workplace or neighborhood.
We want to hear from you about discussions going on among your
coworkers and neighbors about the crisis, especially about organizing
efforts against it!
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