uruknet.info is
one of the best sites on the Internet. Google's censoring them because
they tell the truth about Israel's atrocities against the Palestinians
and Washington's role in those atrocities, as well as Washington's war
crimes against the people of Iraq.--May 8, 2008
When it comes to cajones, US workers could learn a thing or two from our brothers and sisters to the south. The massive demonstration in Mexico City's Zacalo Square last week was held to swear in Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Party of the Democratic Revolution candidate whose supporters claim was the legitimate winner of the July presidential election, not Felipe Calderon, the officially recognized victor from the right wing Conservative Action Party. Obrador's working class backers contend Calderon's razor thin triumph resulted from massive electoral fraud--a phenomenon not uncommon throughout Mexican history.
Mexican companeros don't sit back like passive wimps and allow the bosses to steal an election and install their puppet, laughing contemptously all the way to the bank. Mexico's workers get up off their asses and build a m ass movement in the streets, challenging the authority of the entire capitalist political establishment. There have been a series ofmilitant demonstrations since July. They've played an important purpose. But now the time may be ripe for a general strike, given the revolutionary developments further south in Oaxaca...
Oaxaca the same day
Teachers of the World Unite!
Teachers from Oaxaca to Detroit fight for wages, benefits, better schools, and our kids' future
Teachers in Mexico and US show way forward for all workers
Obviously, the teachers in Oaxaca are a little ahead of their Detroit counterparts--the former are organizing popular assemblies and action committees throughout thousands of neighborhoods; the latter are still politically straitjacketed to the capitalist Democratic Party. But in the context of the respective class struggles of both nations, these teachers have emerged as the vanguard of the Mexican and US working class. And because both struggles are challenging capitalist supremacy in both countries, they are objectively anti-imperialist in character, which is why we're on this page of COSMOS LEFT.
Just as Mexican workers are organizing popular assemblies throughout Oaxaca's communities, so Detroit's teachers should form neighborhood committees, rallies and mass pickets in defense of public education, as the Socialist Equality Party called for in its Labor Day Statement. Just as workers and students in Oaxaca are reaching out to their brothers and sisters across Mexico, so should Detroit's teachers organize joint pickets with Northwest Airlines flight attendants. It is through the broadening of these struggles that workers in the Americas will forge the solidarity that will lay the foundation upon which workers everywhere will build socialism and internationalism.
So much for Washington's War on Terror. These five Cubans are in prison for trying to stop terrorist attacks hatched on US soil against Cuba.
Something to keep in mind as the capitalist government and media ratchet up the hysteria in the wake of the alleged foiled terrorist plot to blow up several jet airliners over the Atlantic, the details of which are eeringly similar to Operation Bojinka, the Manila-based scheme to hijack 12 commercial jets and crash them into the Chicago's Sears Tower, San Francisco's TransAmerica Pyramid, the White House, Pentagon and CIA headquarters. You know, the plot that got past "national security adviser" Condoleeza Rice, who had "no idea" anyone was thinking of hijacking planes and using them as weapons.
The alleged plot allegedly foiled by British and Pakistani authorities, but which apparently escaped the notice of Washington, looks like a dress rehearsal for the coming false flag terrorist attack on US soil that will probably destroy an American city.--August 10, 2006
Socialists Help Workers Win 2 Key Fights for Democratic Rights
In a time of creeping totalitarianism and wholesale attacks on our civil liberties by the capitalists and their government, two recent victories for workers and democratic rights merit attention.
First, a federal judge in Salt Lake City dismissed the retaliatory lawsuit by coal mining company C.W. Mining against the United Mine Workers of America, 16 miners who led the three year fight to organize the company's Co-Op mine in Utah, and the Militant newspaper, which strongly supported the miners in its consistent coverage of their struggle to win UMWA representation.
The company didn't like the fact that miners were speaking freely to the Militant about the oppressive conditions they face in the Co-Op mine. It didn't like the fact that the Militant editorially backed the miners' fight to join the UMWA. It borrowed a page from fascist cable talk show personality Bill O'Reilly in falsely labeling constitutionally protected free speech as defamation.
But Federal Judge Dee Benson dismissed the company's case "with prejudice," meaning it can never file the suit against the parties again. If O'Reilly gets wind of this decision, Judge Benson will no doubt be next on O'Reilly's hit list of judges to incite his legions of demented goons against.
Forcing workers to sign loyalty oaths to the capitalist state is forcing us to sell out our class and swear allegiance to our class enemies. We should be loyal to the working class--here, there, everywhere.
In supporting these victories and recognizing their importance to workers in the class struggle, COSMOS LEFT in no way endorses the political leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, which junked Trotsky's Permanent Revolution and abandoned key elements of Lenin's politics, including unconditional defense of a bourgeois semicolonial nation when it's under military attack by imperialism. We attribute these recent victories to the strength of the programmatic legacy and traditions of the SWP before its roots and continuity to the Bolsheviks were severed in the 1980s by the Jack Barnes leadership.--Aug. 9, 2006
Global Protests Condemn Israeli Aggression
10,000 in Madrid
There were 100,000 in Yemen; 2,000 in Jordan, 10,000 in Dearborn; Michigan, a predominantly Arab-American suburb of Detroit; 700 in San Francisco, 1,500 in New York, and tens of thousands more in Canada, Britain, Australia, Spain, Sweden, Stockholm, Geneva, Paris, Amsterdam, Moscow, Vienna, and Kashmir. (World Socialist Web Site, 7/24/06)
30,000 in London
3,000 in Chicago
5,000 in Tel Aviv
3,000 in Paris
Los Angeles, March 25, 2006: We are not criminals!
Workers of the World Unite!
Our Struggles Know No Borders!
Workers of the United States Unite and Reclaim May 1 as Our Labor Day!
Full and Unconditional Legalization! No Deportations!
No Border Walls
No Detentions! Free All Immigrant Detainees!
No Guest Worker Program!
Full Worker Rights and Protections for All Immigrant Workers!
Family Reunification Measures for Immigrant Workers!
May 5-6, 2006--Before US workers follow the Pied Piper of national chauvinism and bigotry, Bill O'Reilly, down the road of xenophobic immigrant bashing, we should remember that we owe the 8-hour day we enjoy today to the titanic struggles by immigrant labor in the late 1880s and 1890s. Indeed, the origins of the international workers holiday known as May Day stem from these struggles of earlier generations of predominately European immigrant workers in the United States to shorten 12, 14 and 16 hour workdays to the more humane 8-hour day--which is under increasing attack by today's capitalists who ruthlessly extend the workday to maximize the surplus value extracted from wage labor.
Thus the international proletariat, much of it communist and socialist, was inspired by the vanguard role played by the US working class in the heroic fight for the 8-hour day. It was the fight for this shorter work day in Chicago that led to the May 1, 1886 general strike in which nationwide 340,000 workers left 12,000 factories, including 80,000 in Chicago alone. Two days later striking workers clashed with scabs on a picket line at the McCormack reaper works, which gave the cops the excuse to attack and kill two workers.
The outraged workers responded to a call by anarchist leaders for a rally in Haymarket Square to protest the murder of their fellow workers by killer cops. One of the anarchist leaders, August Spies, published a pamphlet, "Revenge! Workingmen to Arms!"
At the rally, however, Spies did not incite anyone to violence. But the cops ordered an end to the rally as they marched menacingly to the speakers podium. Suddenly a bomb was thrown near the police, killing 8. The cops then opened fire on the workers, injuring dozens and killing 11.
Eight anarchist leaders, seven of them immigrants, were charged with murder. The trial was a sham and a frame-up. The defendants were railroaded to the gallows with no evidence linking any of them to the bombing. Only two of them were even in Haymarket that day. The prosecution could only argue that the defendants who had incited the bombthrower were just as guilty. Seven defendants got the death penalty; one received 15 years. Two defendants had their death sentence commuted to life, and one committed suicide.
Seven years later the Illinois governor pardoned the three surviving Haymarket defendants after conceding that all 8 defendants were not guilty after all. Instead, the police official who ordered the crowd to disperse was convicted for corruption. The bomb thrower's identity was never learned, which was no surprise, given the fact he was probably a agent provocateur for the cops or a hired stooge of the steel bosses.
The Haymarket Riot spurred workers on to fight for the 8-hour day. The American Federation of Labor call for massive demonstrations was supported by the Socialist International Congress held in Paris in 1889. A year later, May Day was born when a half million workers marched in London. Communist leader Frederick Engels was there to greet them.
Many workers today don't realize that May Day is as American as apple pie, or at least as American as it is international. The US bosses were able to eliminate May Day during the fierce repression and witch hunts that accompanied the aftermath of the 1919 Red Square and the McCarthy era of the 1950s.
But today, in 2006, US workers, with the help of our brothers and sisters from Mexico and elsewhere, are helping us rediscover our history of struggles and reclaim the legacy of our holiday--May Day. [Thanks to Workers World, April 27, 2006, "Immigrants and the origins of May Day" and to Wikipedia's "Haymarket Riot.]
350,000 NYC Marchers Demand: US Out of Iraq Now!
Make Levees, Not War!--NYC, April 29, 2006
April 30-May 5, 2006--They came from as far away as St. Louis and Detroit and as near as Harlem. They were young, old, and inbetween. They marched in organized labor contingents and as individual workers. And they came with two distinct messages: Impeach Bush and immediately withdraw all US forces from Iraq.
About 350,000 responded to the call to protest the Iraq war from United for Peace and Justice. The demonstrations marched from Union Square to a Peace and Justice Festival in Foley Square, located near the complex of federal and state courthouses and office buildings. Toussant joined list of celebrities that included actress Susan Sarandon, Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and Cindy Sheehan.
The massive and diverse turnout was a reflection of the broad base of organizations that endorsed the action, including Rainbow/PUSH, Veterans for Peace, Friends ofthe Earth, US Labor Against the War, the National Organization for Women, the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, among others.
What was encouraging about the demonstration's composition was the visible participation of trade unions that included 1199 Service Employees International Union, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, District Council #37 (American Federation of State County Municipal Employees), UNITE HERE (formerly the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, respectively), and, of course, New York City's heroic TWU, whose president, Roger Toussant, whose release from the nearby Tombs detention center from his 10-day sentence for leading December's strike just in time to attend this demonstration.
Labor's participation in this antiwar action received a big boost from the large number of predenominantly Latino immigrant workers who were obviously gearing up for Monday's May Day mobilization demanding legalization for all workers by carrying signs reading "Workers Struggles Know No Borders."
Many in the crowd harbored illusions in the Democratic Party and reformism, evidenced by one of the most politically bankrupt signs in history that read, "Today we march. Tomorrow we vote." Vote for whom? Hillary Clinton? She supports the war in Iraq, and she'll support the coming war in Iran. The Democrats are as pro-war and pro-imperialist as the Republicans, because they're just as tied to Wall Street profits and just as sworn to defend them around the world. Half the time Democrats attack the GOP from the right on war, "national security" and "fighting terrorism."
Most of the crowd seemed to sense this. As usual, the majority were to the left of the march's organizers, who had little to say to the demonstrators beyond vote for the Democrats. Although the massive demonstration was a resounding success, marchers were wondering aloud where do we go from here? We've marched and marched before in huge numbers; the whole world marched in February 2003, and still we weren't able to stop Washington from invading Iraq.
That's because demonstrations, however massive, go so far in the specific relationship of class forces unfolding before us. We need a political perspective and program that challenges capitalist wars by presenting the socialist alternative. We need to build a mass socialist party based in the working class that defends workers interests everywhere by fighting for proletarian internationalism that will unite the workers of the world by opposing imperialist wars.
There is a burning objective need for a labor or socialist party in the United States. An action like the April 29 demonstration in New York City, with its weighty proletarian presence, could serve as a launching pad for the formation of such a labor party. Think of the response to a call for a founding convention of a labor or socialist party that would place at the center of its program the demand for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq!
The Growing Combativity of the US Working Class
April 23, 2006--A working class that is now a cross-section of the international proletariat, one byproduct of globalization that helps labor everywhere because it bring us together and undermines the national divisions that have long separated us. What we are seeing unfolding in the immigrant rights mobilizations from Los Angeles to Dallas to Phoenix to Milwaukee to New York is a glimpse of the working class that will make the coming American socialist revolution.
The infusion of immigrants into the American working class is fueling the growing combativity reflected in the current wave of immigrant rights demonstrations that will continue in the upcoming May 1 national boycott. It is seen in the struggles by immigrant workers to win their jobs back after employers fired them for attending the March 10, March 28 and April 10 demonstrations. It was seen in the just concluded hunger strike by University of Miami janitors in their fight for union recognition from the UNICCO Services cleaning company. And it was also seen in the militant, courageous strike by New York City's Transport Workers Union, whose largely Haitian and immigrant leadership and ranks are facing steep fines and jail sentences for daring to defy reactionary, antilabor laws and stand up for the right to strike.
Sometimes the conscience of working people rises above the small minds of their oppressors. Just as Bobby Sands and Irish republicans went on a hunger strike for the basic human right of fighting for their national freedom, so janitors, housekeepers and groundkeepers at the University of Miami refused food for the fundamental human right of joining a union. The fact that their antagonist in this struggle, university president Donna Shalala, was former President Bill Clinton's Health and Human Services Secretary, should put to rest the lie that Democrats are friends of labor.
April 15, 2006--The US ruling class and the demented Caesar leading them, not content with the death and destruction their criminal invasion has unleashed in Iraq and not quite through turning that tortured nation into a mass graveyard, are apparently hell bent on committing additional war crimes in Iran. Seymour Hersh, the credible bourgeois investigative journalist who helped uncover Abu Ghraib, reports in the current issue of the New Yorker that Washington is preparing to bomb Iran's nuclear power plants with air strikes that will possibly include tactical nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile the capitalist media are dismissing their phony mea culpas regarding Bush's Iraq lies and already helping him tell the same package of recycled lies about WMD and terrorism to justify Washington's aggression, w hich is aimed at seizing control of Iran's rich oil and natural gas deposits.
Unlike Washington, Tehran is not threatening anyone with nuclear weapons. Iran is enriching uranium for use in nuclear power plants, totally legal under international law and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Tehran has signed, unlike US allies Israel, India, and Pakistan. And unlike the US, Iran is not threatening tactical nuclear strikes against nonnuclear countries. Unlike the US, Iran has not illegally invaded other nations and killed hundreds of thousands civilians. Iran has not set up torture chambers and illegal prisons in other countries and fi lled them with innocent people whose doors were broken down in the middle of the night by armed thugs in uniform representing an imperial power.
Iran did not overthrow a legally elected American government in 1954 because that government nationalized the oil on American soil. Iran did not impose a brutal dictator on the American people. Iran did not facilitate the building of his murderous secret police that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Iran has not imposed sanctions on the people of the United States.
Thus, when Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice says the United Nations Security Council must take "serious steps" against Iran to "maintain the credibility of the international community," the international working class, when we're through laughing in her face, should demand the world take "serious steps" against the only regime that has incinerated two cities' civilian populations with nuclear bombs--Washington. When Rice claims "we can't let this continue," we should reply, you're right, we can't let this continue, we can't allow US imperialism to continue to run amok in the world, illegally invading nations to seize their resources, killing hundreds of thousands in the process, torturing thousands more.
The world cannot let continue the fact that the only government to actually use nuclear weapons threatens to use them against an unarmed nuclear nation because it might develop several warheads in five years. When Washington unilaterally disarms its n uclear arsenal and stops terrorizing the world with its nuclear supremacy, then we can talk about other the disarming of other nuclear powers as a step toward the international prohibition of nuclear bombs forever. When Israel disarms its nuclear arsenal and no longer terrorizes the Middle East with its nuclear supremacy, then we can talk about preventing the spread of nuclear weapons in the region and the world.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, under siege from the rising tide of criticism from retired generals and others, recently characterized Iran as "a country...that supports terrorists." Rumsfeld, like Bush and FOX News' Bill O'Reilly, is a modern-day Orwellian nightmare, in that everything he says is an Alice in Wonderland inversion or applies to the actions of US imperialism itself, as in "a country that supports terrorists," considering the support Washington has given the likes of Orlando Bosch and Juan Posada Carrilles, who blew up a Cuban airliner in 1976; and the support it gave to the Islamic fundamentalists who became "Al Qaeda," first in Afghanistan, later in Bosnia and Kosova and later apparently, on September 11, 2001.
The US is threatening military aggression against Iran in order to seize control of its huge oil and natural gas supplies. As in every US military intervention since the 1898 Spanish-American War, Washington has either used lied and deception or staged attacks against its forces to win public support for its military aggression and expansionism.
The largely muted reaction to Bush's nuclear threat against Iran within the US political establishment, media, and the general populace is deafening. It is another manifestation of the magnitude of the diseased state of the American body politic. This is an outrage. There are no more excuses. The US warmakers, having gotten away with their first war crime in Iraq, are preparing another bloodbath in Iran, this time with the help of bunker blasting tactical nukes. They are repeat multiple offenders who show absolutely no remorse and, with no shame, are repeating the same set of lies again to cover up their own naked aggression and barbarism.
The international proletariat should take this lack of remorse into account when it comes time to sentence these war criminals for their atrocities against humanity.
In the meantime, we should take heart in the signs of revolutionary health, vitality, and combativity increasing appearing in the working class from Los Angeles to Dallas to Paris. Slowly, we are coming together. The crisis of international capitalism is forcing us to. The ideas of revolutionary Marxism will take root and spread from one end of the globe to the other. And we will disarm the imperialist warmakers, the torturers, the war criminals like Bush, Cheney, Rice, Blair, Chirac, Berlosconi, and all of their ilk.
Their Struggle forWages, Pensions, Health Insurance, Safety, Dignity, and the Right to Strike Deserves Support from All Workers
Dec-Jan. 22, 2005--This essay is on the "Fighting U.S. Imperialism" page because that's exactly what New York City's transit workers are doing. Their heroic strike is not just against the union-busting New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). They're fighting Wall Street and the entire US capitalist class. The Local 100 Transport Workers Union (TWU) strikers are not just clashing with Mayor Michael Bloomberg or Governor George Pataki. They're defying George W. Bush, the US government and the entire bourgeois political establishment. Finally, the one-sided class war that has driven back and beaten down US workers for decades is becoming a two-sided affair.
That's why the World Socialist Web Site is absolutely correct in calling this strike "the biggest class confrontation in the US in a generation," and one that is "an event of international significance." Indeed, it is at the center of the international class struggle.
One that has propelled the US working class back on the center stage of US and world politics.
Dec. 23--Ever since Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union in 1981--a defeat that was preceded by the TWU bureacracy's sellout of the transit workers following the 11-day 1980 strike--we've watched corporations and their government slash our wages and benefits, loot our pensions, endanger our safety, tear up contracts, bust our unions, attack our democratic rights, throw us out of work; raise our taxes while cutting taxes for the rich, reduce our real wages while accumulating obscene levels of wealth. All of w hich has increased productivity--which really means increased exploitation of labor by capital. Although there have been valiant and important defensive fightbacks by the labor movement--Hormel meatpackers in 1986, Eastern's machinists in 1990, among others--it's largely been a one-sided class war.
But the US capitalists have their eyes on broader gains. Their profit drive is rapacious and relentless, but despite their increased short-term profits, their still face a long-term decline in the rate of profit intensifying competition from their capitalist rivals on the world market. Thus American capitalists are driven to further reduce labor costs and make workers pay for the escalating crisis of the profit system. They must take more out of the hides of US workers.
The corporate elite in New York decided to take on one of the most militant unions in the US--Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union--and make an example of it. The MTA, Wall Street, and their political stooges Bloomberg and Pataki--thought they could browbeat the transit workers into submission with threats of draconian fines and prison sentences contained in the antilabor Taylor Law and the city's injunctions. These weapons had been employed with great effectiveness after the 1980 strike, intimidating the union from walking out again for over two decades.
But once again, the capitalists, for all their supposed intelligence, underestimated the capacity of working people to fight back. And they misjudged the depth of the militancy and anger that had built up among the TWU's rank and file, who are fed up with the rich getting richer from the sale of interest-bearing bonds while the workers toil underground amidst rats and toxic air to keep New York's capitalist machine running. The TWU workers remember that in 2002, the MTA, led by billionaire and real estate mogul Peter Kalikow, were caught red-handed keeping two sets of books in order to deceive the workers and public by crying poverty. The workers knew that the the MTA had a $1 billion surplus--at least, given the agency's past deceit. So when the MTA presented the union with a miserly wage increase that didn't keep up with inflation, coupled with demands for sweeping concessions on pensions and health care and the in stitution of "broadbanding," which would combine and eliminate jobs, a dangerous policy that threatened workers and riders alike because it would eliminate the conductor and force train operators to run the trains themselves.
There was something else about the multinational, multilingual TWU ranks that New York's corporate elite underestimated--their instincts and capacity for solidarity--a concept totally alien to the capitalists and their political and media stooges. The workers viewed the MTA's proposal to extend the retirement age from 55 to 62 for new hires as a blatant divide and conquer ploy, creating a two tier system that would seriously weaken the unity of the TWU. The union vowed not to let that happen.
Faced with these draconian demands and bad faith negotiating, the rank and file--not Roger Toussaint, the TWU's leader--drew a line in the sand and said enough's enough, if they want a fight, we'll give them one. Although it must be remembered that a deal was imminent on the eve of the deadline after the MTA dropped its demand to raise the retirement age for new hires to 62. But at the last minute MTA boss Kalikow sabotaged the deal with a provocative last-minute demand that new hires pay 6% of their salaries for pensions.
Faced with this level of belligerence, provocation and disrespect, the transit workers courageously defied the heavily punitive Taylor Law which fines workers two days pay for every day on strike. In so doing, they educated the capitalists, media and even many workers on the viciously antilabor Taylor Law while reminding us all about that most democratic right in a democratic society--the right to strike.
Because if workers do not have the right to strike--what do we have in capitalist society? Nothing. It's the only weapon available to workers to defend our rights. If we don't have the right to withhold our labor power--we have nothing to protect ourselves against the rapacious drive for private profit. The Taylor Law is a capitalist law written by capitalist politicians in the interest of the capitalists class in their fight to keep as much worker-created surplus value in their pockets as possible. It must be challenged and defeated in the streets, in the class struggle, because the non existent "friends of labor" in the Democratic Party will never repeal the Taylor Law. Indeed, where was Hillary Clinton during this class conflict? Maintaining a "nuetral" stance while strongly supporting the Taylor Law?
Faced with this intransigence and provocation, the TWU courageously defied the Taylor Law's prohibition against public employees' striking and walked off the j ob on Tuesday, December 21. And for three days we got a taste of the potential power workers have to bring the capitalist machine to a halt, but the power to implement a general strike on the road to replacing the capitalist state with a workers state. There's an old labor saying: "Working people keep the country running. Workers should run the country." We saw a glimpse of that truth during the three days of the TWU strike.
But once again, because the striking workers were betrayed by the TWU's international union and the entire labor bureaucracy, were shackled by a flawed union leadership that refused to turn this into a broad political fight, break from the Democrats, challenge the entire US capitalist class and government, and failed to reach out to mobilize broad layers of workers and middle class layers in the city, the strike ended prematurely with the workers resuming work without a contract.
Dec. 31, 2005--But before this sellout by the TWU and the rest of the labor officialdom prematurely ended the strike, the rank and file members of Local 100 threw a scare into the capitalist class and t heir political stooges. They served notice that the anger and militancy that's been growing in the working class as we've watched the ruling rich gorge themselves with an increasing arrogance will find expression again in another struggle. In c hallenging the fascistic Taylor Law, New York's transit workers struck a blow for the most important, effective democratic right in the proletariat's arsenal--the right to strike. Local 100 reminded the ruling class--as well as many workers--about this basic lesson in the class struggle: if workers don't have the right to withhold our labor power, we've got nothing. Without the right to strike, we're powerless in the face of an all out mobilization by the capitalist class and its state to defeat our unions, slash our living standards, undermine job safety. The Taylor Law is a capitalist law passed by capitalist politicians to facilitate capital's exploitation of labor. It will never be repealed by so-called friends of labor in the Democratic Party, let alone the Republicans. This vicious antilabor law must be challenged in the streets and in the class struggle. And that's what Local 100's rank and file were prepared to do. That's all workers have--the capacity to withhold our labor power and forge solidarity with other workers to put enough pressure on the capitalists to force THEM to back down and grant the just demands of the workers. We learned in this strike that the capitalists are quite ready to use every weapon in their arsenal: the press, cops, courts, legislature, not to mention Wall Street. All the transit workers had to counter this formidable concentration of state power was the capacity to strike and build soldiarity. But they were stabbed in the back by labor bureaucrats before they ever got the chance to fully develop this winning strategy.
For three days we saw a glimpse of the power workers have in this seemingly all powerful capitalist society; the power not just to shut down New York City but the power to abolish capitalism and transform society in a revolutionary way. As the three days unfolded it was easy to remember the old socialist slogan, "working people keep the country running; working people should run the country." Marxists often talk about the social, political and economic weight possessed by the industrial proletariat, often referred to as the urban proletariat since basic industry is usually located in cities. Transportation and co mmunications are also vital to basic industry, and in a major urban center like New York that serves as the world headquarters for culture and finance capital, transport workers occupy a uniquely powerful social, political and economic weight much greater than their 34,000 members.
Because without the backbreaking labor by those denizens of the deep known as the transit workers, the New York and national capitalist engines were coming to a screeching halt, particularly during the height of the Christmas shopping season. But given the power of the TWU and the relationship of class forces in NYC, the MTA couldn't replace TWU strikers with scab labor as has been done in so many other instances when workers have dared defied capital by exercising their democratic right to strike.
But if you're going to take on the MTA, City Hall, Albany, Wall Street, the White House and US imperialism, even with the most powerful and militant municipal union in the country, you'd better bring a broader political strategy and perspective than the class collaborationist and narrow trade union outlook that TWU leader Roger Toussaint brought to the table.
While the MTA and its capitalist allies in courts, legislature and press brought the full force of the state's repressive apparatus and propaganda machine to bear on the transit workers, Toussaint seemed content to wait for his nonexistent friends of labor in the Democratic Party and the union bureaucracy to come to his aid as jail sentences loomed and the Taylor Law fines mounted. The game of chicken between the MTA and TWU ended when the latter blinked, not because his rank and file weren't prepared to fight, but because the strikers were sold out by both the New York and national trade union bureaucratic misleadership, the "labor aristocracy," as Lenin accurately called them; or as Amerian socialist leader Daniel De Leon described them, "labor lieutenants of capital."
As well they should have. The seven-vote margin (11,227 to 11,234) reflects the polarization reigning within Local 100's ranks. But it also demonstrates the militancy and anger among the workers resulting from the sellout contract agreed to by capital's labor lieutenants.
Jan. 22, 2006--The workers' strike had New York City's labor lieutenants of capital shaking in their boots. On the second day of the strike, a conference call between Touissant and 40 New York City union officials resulted in the former being told Local 100 was on its own. Touissant could expect no help from the union bureaucracy. And none came from any level of labor's misleaders. Not a single leaflet of solidarity from the AFL-CIO or the Service Employees International union. And the Transport Workers Union international publicly sided with the MTA, ordered Local 100's members to scab and return to work, and sent its lawyers into court to argue that the strike was illegal!
Consequently, Toussaint caved in and the 3-day strike was over. But it was clear from the outset that many workers were not happy with the contract Toussaint presented them. And with good reason. The contract represented a setback for the transit workers that would most definitely be used as a springboard to accelerate the attack on the living standards of all workers--public and private sectors. First, the contract did not win amnesty for Local 100's striking workers, which means the draconian fines mandated by the state's Taylor Law and the city's injunction would wipe out the 3%, 3.5%, and 4% raises for the 3-year contract. Second, the contract forces workers for the first time to pay a health care premium of 1.5% of their pay and paves the way for higher future premiums--a huge giveback. Third, the 37-month duration of the agreement pushes its expiration from the Christmas holiday season to the spring, a move that significantly weakens the union's bargaining power and leverage the next time around.
But the contract was not a total victory for the MTA. The strike pushed back the MTA's attempt to raise the minimum retirement age for new hires from 55 to 62 that would have required 30 years of service instead of 25. Thus the pension plan remained unchanged; in fact, some workers will receive thousands of dollars in pension reimbursements to make up for excess contributions paid before 2001. In pushing back the MTA's attempt to attack their pensions, New York's transit workers struck a blow for every worker in this country who has helplessly watch an employer replace the guaranteed defined pension benefit plan with a 401k ruse that puts our hard earned retirement money in a gambling casino.
Faced with this treachery of the union officialdom; a vicious, all-out assault by the capitalist press, which called his workers "greedy," "thugs," and "terrorist"; and his own political limitations, Touissant folded. He had no answers to the bosses' offensive, apart from throwing names back at Bloomberg and Pataki. Touissant's narrow, "bread and butter," trade unionism approach was no match for the task at hand. There's a class war going on, Roger, you're right in the middle of it, and what do you do? Look for help from the Democrats? The state's most powerful Democrat and possible next President, Sen. Hillary Clinton, remained "neutral" by proclaiming her support for the Taylor Law, the vicious antilabor statute being used to bludgeon workers into submission by fining them millions of dollars every day of the strike.
Instead of looking to bourgeois forces like the Democrats and union bureaucrats, Touissant should have turned to the millions of allies who were staring him in the face: New York's working class! For despite all the anti-labor hysteria emanating from the capitalist media, Local 100's striking workers enjoyed broad support from the region's working people, support that needed to be tapped.
What is required is a political approach that reaches out to New York's working class by explaining the need for a political strategy based on fighting for independence from the two capitalist parties, and how this struggle fits into the broader struggle to defend jobs, our wages, living standards, working conditions and democratic rights from the intensifying class offensive being waged by the ruling rich. A political strategy that explains the connection between Washington's brutal war against working people in Iraq and the MTA's assault on New York's transit workers.
Just imagine what would have happened if Touissant had called a demonstration in support of the transit workers and against the war in Iraq! There would have been a mobilization so huge it would have posed the question of a general strike by all New York's workers in solidarity with the TWU.
March 18 & 19 -- International Days of Action Against the War
Unite to Demand Immediate, Complete, Unconditional Withdrawal of All Occupying Forces from Iraq!
No More Excuses! Out Now!
End All Occupations From Iraq and Afghanistan to Palestine and Haiti!
No War Against Iran!
100,000 Protest Bush in New Delhi: "Bully Bush, Go Home!"
From Bombay to New Delhi...
"Whether Hindu or Muslim, the people of India have gathered here to show our anger. We have only one message-killer Bush, go home!" spoke Hindu politician Raj Babbar at the New Delhi demonstration.
That's the spirit. Hindus and Muslims, Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, Palestinian and Israeli workers must reject Washington's divide and conquer strategy and all forms of sectarianism and communalism that divide us. Instead, we should unite and mobilize as an independent force against world imperialism and Zionist Israel based on an internationalist socialist program.
More protests are scheduled in India, including one sponsored by the Communist Party, whose secretary, Pushpender Grewal, said. "We will protest against the US policies, especially the inhuman atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq, a likely invasion of Iran and its continuing support to Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine."
"Workers of the world, unite!"--Karl Marx
As US workers continue to absorb the lessons of Katrina, looted pensions, destroyed and neglected cities, attacks on Social Security, lost jobs, dead miners, no health insurance, no protection from terrorist attacks, hurricanes, or killer viruses, fraudulent Medicare plans, illegal spying, torture and brutal colonial wars for corporate profits based on lies, we will join our brothers and sisters in Palestine, Israel, Iraq, India, Pakistan, France, Germany, England, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, South Africa, Korea, Russia around the globe and build an international movement of socialist workers that will abolish capitalism from the face of the earth.--March 3, 2006
As if US colonialism hasn't committed enough injustice against Native Americans. Leonard Peltier was erroneously convicted for the deaths of two FBI agents during a 1975 shoot-out on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Despite the government's admission that fabricated evidence, withheld evidence, and coerced witnesses fraudulently convicted him, Peltier remains incarcerated after 30 years. Washington still fears Peltier because it knows he would join the worldwide movement against the Iraq occupation and all US militarism.
Free Leonard Peltier, Abu Mumia Jamal, and all political prisoners now! --Feb. 4, 2006
"We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.'
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law....A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people....
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and war criminal?..."
Now this is the kind of artist that causes Bill O'Reilly to see red and kindles his fascist flame. We hope it burns him out and drives him to an early grave.
