It is has been ten years since thousands of workers and youth shut down the WTO here in Seattle.  Now the fight against budget cuts is once again laying the groundwork for a mass movement.  One again young people and workers are in the streets  asserting that another world is possible.  In this piece I will analyze this dynamic, shifting terrain of political struggle.

This reflection comes in the wake of the March 4th National Day of Action to defend public education, which was a major leap forward here.   A student strike at the University of Washington (UW)  brought out around 700 students, workers, teachers, and high school students with an unexpectedly high level of militant energy, shutting down streets and almost blocking the freeway ( as you can see in this video).

As an organizer with the student-worker group Democracy Insurgent  (D.I.) at the University of Washington, I wish to draw out some reflections and conclusions from our involvement in the struggle.  I’ll start by tracing the struggles that lead up to the March 4^th strike and made it possible.  Then I will outline what March 4^th shows us about the prospects and challenges for building a mass movement here in WA state and beyond.

(note: while many of my co-organizers would probably agree with what I lay out here, this is not an official position paper by Democracy Insurgent, it is just my own reflections).

Opening Shots: last year’s struggles for schools, not jails

The first signs of mass activity in the wake of the economic crisis came a year ago, in the late winter of 2009.  The Seattle School Board and the new superintendent decided to close 5 school and 8 programs, mostly in working class communities of color.  Parents, teachers, and students mobilized to disrupt school board meetings and to hold rallies and marches.  While these efforts failed to stop the closures, they exposed the racist effects of the economic crisis and have remained a permanent source of agitation in communities of color. While this was going on, King County (which includes Seattle) was planning on building a $200 million dollar jail.  The movement against school closures converged with the campaign around Initiative 100, which demanded funding for schools and social services, not prisons.   Many progressive non-profits got involved with this campaign.  Because of this groundwork the slogan “money for jobs and education, not for mass incarceration” rang out loudly last week on the picket lines at the March 4^th student strike.

In the early summer, Seattle Public school administrators made more cuts, laying off many teachers, counselors, and other workers, which lead to larger class sizes.  The teachers’ unions, parents, and students mobilized to disrupt a school board meeting but were unable to stop the cuts.  Seattle teachers were discussing striking around these issues and others during their contract negotiations at the end of the summer but decided not to.

Teachers in Kent, which is a working class suburb to the south of Seattle, did go out in a powerful strike for smaller class sizes.  They defied a court injunction to go back to work partly because working class parents actively organized to support their fight for quality education.  This action is key because it highlights what happens when working class people and people of color are being pushed out of Seattle by rising housing costs (gentrification).  They are moving into South King County to places like Kent where the public infrastructure is inadequate for the growing population and racial tensions are boiling.  Some of my students have told me they  mobilized to fight white supremacists in a town south of Kent a few years ago when they put up a noose at the school to intimidate people of color who were moving in. I imagine that the Kent strike will be the first of many actions to rock south King County where the organized Left and the nonprofits have relatively little presence.  Working class struggles like this are necessary if we want to avoid a situation where people are pitted against each other to fight for crumbs from the crumbling public infrastructure.

The Kent strike inspired workers across the state.  Now, as teaching assistants at UW face layoffs and increasing workloads and as undergrads pay more tuition for less instruction, rank and file TAs in UAW Local 4121 are looking to the Kent strike as a model as they mobilize for their own strike in early May against budget cuts.  They are also framing their struggle as a fight for quality public education and low class sizes and are reaching out to undergraduate students and other workers for support.

We are All Workers:  Custodians up the ante at UW

In the spring of 2009, rank and file custodians expanded pre-existing smaller struggles against budget cuts at UW, and began to give these struggles a mass character. UW custodians are mostly East African, Asian, and Latino workers and they are part of local 1488, one of the larger locals of  WFSE, the Washington Federation of State Employees (part of the AFSCME international union.)

For over a decade, management had been trying to institute speed up of the work process, privatization, and various management strategies like Team Cleaning which increase managerial oversight by instituting an assembly-line style of work.  Several rank and file custodians had organized committees on the shop floor to block these developments.  In one building they set up an arrangement similar to what Antonio Gramsci once described as “internal commissions”; custodians would bypass management and the union bureaucracy to directly negotiate with students and faculty about what needed to be cleaned when and they would organize this work themselves.  They got the job done well without mangers breathing down their necks and they enjoyed a higher level of democracy in the workplace which encouraged political education and an intellectual life on the job.

Last spring and summer, management used budget cuts as an excuse to restructure the workplace to break these and other forms of solidarity workers had built up over the years.  These changes didn’t save much money, they were more about control and dominance.   They tried to ram through Team Cleaning and they also tried to cut the swingshift, which was devastating for custodians who need to work at night so they could care for their families or work second jobs during the day.  Management has also tried to turn students and professors against workers by laying off custodians, forcing the remaining custodians to work at an inhuman pace, and then blaming them when classrooms and labs aren’t clean.

Democracy Insurgent and the now-defunct Anti-Budget Cuts Coalition teamed up with rank and file custodians to fight back against this restructuring and the broader budget cuts students and workers were facing. Holding meetings during  workers’ breaks, we organized several high profile demonstrations involving hundreds of workers.  While student attendance at these demonstrations was relatively low, the upsurge of workers’ self-activity showed that budget cuts are not inevitable.  When workers stormed the board of regents meeting they were fighting not only for themselves but also for students’ demands.  The militancy they showed challenged the widespread sense that nobody wants to fight back and got students thinking about the need to organize themselves as well.

These actions also helped Democracy Insurgent expand. They showed that the custodians’ struggle and the anti-budget cuts struggle are key anti-racist struggles on campus and we brought around many students and workers of color, some of them international students, and many from working class backgrounds who wanted to support these efforts.  Over the past 9 months we have trained intensively through study groups, mentoring, and building a sense of community and a common cultural life.  We held a Women and  Transfolk Retreat to train new organizers and have prioritized anti-ableism, queer liberation, and feminist political education.  All of this has helped us develop a whole new layer of leaders among oppressed peoples who all played key roles in leading the March 4^th strike.

The workers’ struggle ebbs but rank and file organizations consolidate

While we managed to stop the university from cutting the custodian swingshift, the informal networks of rank and file self-organization got scrambled by arbitrary transfers to other worksites.  Workers also had to contend with ethnic divide and conquer which management and a handful of union officials encouraged.  The president and vice president of the union local at first supported our work but when they felt rank and file workers were getting out of their control they tried to stop them from organizing and tried to prevent them from meeting with us or from doing actions that too harshly criticized management.  These factors, combined with police harassment and the lack of a vibrant student movement made it difficult for workers to advance their struggle through student-worker unity.

At this point, the struggle could have died if we had not moved beyond a “student- labor alliance” politics. What happens on many campuses is student groups rally support for union struggles and then sometimes union bureaucrats return the favor, for example by supporting student groups’ calls for divestment from sweatshop produced apparel. This is all well and good but it can lead to some problems. Often union bureaucrats expect students to be subordinate shock troops for their own initiatives. They are asked to act either as secretarial functionaries or as cannon fodder for spectacular actions. When students refuse to do that they are then accused of “dominating” workers. Students’ guilt about their own class privilege is then used to demobilize them. They are told that the union bureaucracy represents workers and if they try to directly interact with the rank and file they will be taking up too much space and will somehow lead the workers astray. This stance overlooks some key factors – the fact that many students are working class themselves, and the fact that workers are not passive, foolish people who will be easily lead astray by people half their age! Also, the student- labor alliance model assumes that “student’s issues” and “workers issues” are somehow separate so that if students get involved in workers struggles it is only out of moral commitment, not common interests. But when it comes to fighting budget cuts, there is no easy separation between workers and students issues – we are fighting the same administrations that are trying to privatize our universities and bust our unions! So to fight the cuts, what we need are campus organizations that consist of both students and rank-and-file workers.

With this in mind, we collaborated with several rank-and-file custodian leaders to build International Workers and Students for Justice (IWSJ) in the fall of 2009.  The goal of this group is to rebuild some of the shop floor organization that had been lost in order to fight the budget cuts and impending privatization of the workplace.  IWSJ brings together rank and file workers and students independent of the union bureaucracy.  We called a memorial for In Soo Chun, a custodian who had burned himself alive in front of the UW president’s office, and a protest against a particularly abusive manager and we successfully agitated inside the union local to pass a resolution to support the March 4^th student strike (see below).   Publicizing the AFCME local 444 resolution calling for strikes in California on March 4th helped us to do this; for a great discussion of the role of this resolution and the need for rank and file mobilization, check out Advance the Struggle’s blog.

Graduate student workers inspired by the custodian organizing also decided to organize their own rank and file group of UAW members called For a Democratic University (FADU).  Learning key lessons from the failed New York University Teaching Assistant  strike ,  they started in the fall, long before the contract negotiations which are going on right now; this has given them six months to organize intensively and independently  in their workplaces and departments to prepare for a strike.  They also successfully pressured their union bureaucracy to support the March 4^thstudent strike and they convinced several TAs and professors to cancel their classes or to hold them on the Quad, on the picket lines.  Now they are mobilizing in their departments to prepare for a full-scale strike in early May; this will be absolutely necessary to stop the administration’s demands for massive layoffs, concessions, and overwork.  We are going to agitate to try and turn this into a massive joint student-worker strike to shut down the university, similar to what the group Advance the Struggle was agitating for leading up to March 4th in California.

2010 so far:  signs of an early spring?

This increased worker militancy is more sustainable now because students are finally starting to mobilize, opening up the possibility of a mass movement on campus.   In December, news from the occupations and strikes in California began to inspire more students to get involved in organizing against the new round of cuts which the state legislature and Governor Gregoire proposed this session.  Many groups and individuals, including IWSJ, FADU, and DI, came together to form the UW Student-Worker Coalition to fight these new cuts.  This coalition is focused on direct action tactics and aims to involve large numbers of students and workers who are rapidly becoming politicized by the economic crisis. A similar political tendency seems to be emerging at Evergreen College though it is overshadowed there by the “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing” insurrectionist tendency which occupied a Housing Community Center on February 20^th.  This insurrectionist tendency is not present at a large scale in Seattle so far, which means that proposals for militant direct action here are coming from more diverse sources, as I will explain below.

The Washington State Student Association and the various student government groups at WA state college and university campuses also began mobilizing, leading to a series of walkouts and rallies on February 5^th across the state.  The student government at UW and the UW administration have been constantly encouraging UW students to go to Olympia to lobby instead of organizing against the cuts on campus so they did not organize a walkout.  In fact, they have not called a single protest on campus this year.  The workers’ struggle on campus illuminated for us the importance of fighting both the statewide cuts and the implementation of these cuts at UW because it showed that the UW administration was targeting cuts towards the most oppressed layers of students and workers on campus, in this case immigrant workers.

Contradictions in Olympia: a revolution needs to be about more than “revenue”

While Democracy Insurgent has maintained our independence from the union bureaucracy and the student government lobbyists, actions these groups have taken recently have helped mobilize social forces which are contributing to building a movement.   For example, on February 15^th, WA state unions and student government groups from across the state called for a lobby day and rally on the capitol steps in Olympia.

A new layer of progressive union organizers, stewards, and officials has recently started to emerge in local 1488 and some of the leaders of this layer passed resolutions to support this rally.  They organized buses to bring both workers and students to the capitol, overriding the wishes of the president and vice president who continued to oppose student-worker solidarity efforts.  Some of this new crew of leaders see themselves as reformers and advocates of social democratic unionism: they want the union local to be a progressive force in WA state politics, fighting for all working class and middle class people.

We welcomed the chance to meet up with large numbers of rank and file workers on the buses and in the crowd at the rally.  Instead of lobbying we passed out almost a thousand flyers to students and workers advertising the March 4th student strike at UW and a rank and file workers meeting in Seattle calling for solidarity from below across locals to fight the cuts and highlighting the need to do job actions not just rallies.   People were very excited and receptive.

From what we saw that day, I would argue that the scene is very different from the situation in California in some key ways.  Here the centrist Democrats are in power whereas in California the Republicans (Arnold and Co) are in power.  The WA Democrats are held back from raising taxes on the rich by Tim Eyman and his Republican block in the legislature and by the limitations of the WA state constitution in similar ways to how the CA democrats are held back by Proposition 13 and the Republican block in the legislature.  But the crucial difference is that the Democrats are ultimately the ones who have to take the fall for this deadlock here, not the Republicans – because they have the majority in the legislature AND the executive branch in their party, it’s harder for them to blame the cuts on the Republicans.  That means the Democrats can’t agitate for popular mobilization against the cuts TOO MUCH because it could easily get out of their control and everyday people could start attacking them.

So they called the rally on the 15th in order to try to keep the unions and student government leaders in their camp.  They were trying to co-opt the protests of rank and file workers and students into a call for “ increased revenue” to stop the budget shortfall.  Some of them even called it a “revolution” against the “tyranny of King Eyman”.  What this means in practice though is they are calling for raising regressive sales taxes on the working class, NOT instituting a statewide progressive income tax on the wealthy, which would require changing the constitution and actually doing battle against the Republicans.  I also think that the Democrats are clearly in bed with the big liberal capitalists like Bill Gates who resides relatively tax-free in the Seattle suburbs.  Gates and his friends are for funding social programs but through public-private partnerships like charter schools and turning UW into an elite research university (Bill Gates Sr. is on the UW Board of Regents).    In other words, the WA state Democrats program is relatively hostile to social democratic proposals for things like free education and free healthcare for all.  They will not respond easily to social democratic lobbying and union negotiations and it will take a mass movement from below that pushes the limits of capitalist legality if we want  to win these demands.

In California some union bureaucrats were willing to use short symbolic strikes as a battering ram against the Republican administration but here they will not likely do the same against a Democratic administration without significant rank and file pressure.   In Olympia on Feb 15^th, the unions and the student government types did not present a program that was independent of the Democrats.  Their slogans were focused on fighting the “all cuts budget” and “funding the future” by supporting liberal democrats’ calls for increased revenue.  This is really unfortunate because they’re basically calling for increased taxes on working people.  This gives a lot of social and ideological ammunition to the right wing teabagger/ anti-tax crowd who rallied earlier in the day against increased taxes.  The way the media ended up spinning the day of action was “anti-tax protests vs. pro-tax protests”.  This is a disaster for the unions and student government groups.  Basically in the short term it opens up possibilities for the Right to co-opt working class anger against the elites and discredits the unions’ claims to be working class fighting organizations in the eyes of many.  It gives ammunition to the classic right-wing attack on public sector unions – the claim that they are “entitled” state workers demanding too much from low-paid taxpayers.  That’s why we need to put forward an independent perspective that we are fighting for democratically organized public education, health care, and social services for everyone not just for students and state workers.

The leadership of the anti-budget cuts rally timed it carefully so that there wouldn’t be clashes with the teabaggers.  I’m not sure why but my guess would be because the Democratic Party leaders don’t want to initiate open political confrontation with the Republicans and are still trying to be bipartisan, sort of like the national party is doing under Obama.   So far the unions in general have gone along with this;  some locals have directly confronted the teabaggers, but all of them should be out there getting in their faces and attacking their anti-immigrant, anti-worker message.  It seemed there was a sentiment among at least some layers of the rank and file yesterday that this needs to happen.  I saw some teachers march by a group of teabaggers and shout at them and when I talked to them they said “look at those assholes with their  fancy private school dresses and suits.”  I imagine that the liberal leadership is afraid that a direct confrontation with the right would unleash too much rank and file energy from their own crowd which could get out of their control.

The Social Democrats have nowhere to go except to the rank and file

It did seem that there was a significant  social democratic tendency to the left of the Democrats on the 15th and it seemed that some of the liberal trade union leaders were worried about this tendency getting out of  their control.    Basically, this social democratic milieu looks something like what emerged in California this fall when progressive trade union leaders organized strikes coordinated jointly with student government and progressive coalitions.  Yesterday there were signs calling for taxing the rich and a lot of the crowd was responsive to our chants calling for money for education not war and occupation.  We were one of the few groups independent of the democrats/ union bureaucracy/ student government who came with a megaphone, banners, flyers, etc. so we were able to lead a large segment of the rally, maybe 700-1000 people or so in chants.  I don’t think all these folks are as militant as DI or IWSJ are, I just think that they are social democratic leaning and there is a vacuum of social democratic leadership which we were basically filling by calling for things that the social democrats would otherwise be calling for, like student strikes and cross-local workers solidarity meetings (of course our vision of cross-local solidarity is rank and file based, not based on coalitions of progressive union officials like the social democrats’ vision would be).

A week after this rally,  the old business-unionism oriented president and vice president were suspended from office pending investigation.  This has opened up more space for the newer progressive / social democratic leaders in the union to start organizing and building coalitions because they are no longer held back by conservative leaders.   Some workers see this development as linked to IWSJ’s long term rank and file organizing.   As one custodian put it, we forced the union to “get off it’s ass and do something.”  Many workers wanted to be involved in the anti-budget cuts struggle with us and the old leadership’s hostility to this helped discredit that leadership.  The newer leaders’ coalition building with us has helped them solidify their position in the union and in turn it has helped us reach out to more rank and file workers.   On the same day the old union officials were suspended, the union voted to support an IWSJ member’s resolution to endorse the March 4^th Student Strike and to mobilize workers to join the picket lines after work or through using their vacation time.

The rise of more social-democratic leadership in Local 1488 means that we finally have more coalition partners and can begin doing wider-scale and deeper mass organizing on a united front basis.   Rank and file workers who had been intimidated into silence by the previous president are starting to mobilize again, feeling that they can once again use the union structure as a shield from management retaliation.  Many custodians and tradespeople came out to the picket lines on March 4^th.  They were very excited to see so many students out there striking and it raised very clearly the question of when workers would be able to strike too.

This could happen sooner then we initially thought.  We didn’t call for workers to wildcat strike on March 4^th because months of intimidation and retaliation had really broken down morale and direct action on the job did not seem like a possibility.  However, in the weeks leading up to March 4^th the legislature decided workers’ health care premiums could be tripled and their share of health care insurance costs could rise from 12% to 30% because the legislature had moved money out of their health care fund to pay for other expenses.  This, combined with proposed furloughs and local grievances triggered short wildcat strikes in several locals elsewhere in the state the past few weeks, when workers walked out for an hour or two and set up pickets.  The WFSE statewide (Council 28) website posted reports of these wildcats right alongside coverage of the March 4^th strike at UW and portrayed all of these actions as part of an uncontrollable wave of rank and file anger .  Could there be a possible wildcat against budget cuts at UW, perhaps in coordination with the impending Teaching Assistant strike in early May?

I could see the emerging social democratic layers inside WFSE eventually call for strikes to fight for healthcare and public education for all and if they do that we should support it.   However, any militant social democratic force inside the union will eventually run on a collision course right into the higher up bureaucracy of the statewide Council and the AFSCME international which we need to prepare for.  It is unlikely that strike resolutions will get passed without tremendous rank and file pressure and independent organizing by groups like IWSJ.  In what follows I will explain why.

Social Democracy involves building coalitions of progressive trade unionists, student leaders, and progressive left-electoral blocks.  It involves essentially trying to install a more progressive leadership, rather than building wider and deeper layers of militant  rank and file leadership.  It is basically what former Black Panther Aaron Dixon called for in his keynote address at a recent UW-Evergreen anti-budget cuts organizing conference. It is what Dixon tried to build when he ran on when he campaigned for senator on the Green Party ticket.  Socialist (Trotskyist) groups like the ISO and Freedom Socialist Party are friendly to Dixon perhaps because they think that they can work with him to help build  some sort of new labor party or something similar to the old, early 20th century Socialist Party of Eugene Debs.  I do think that conditions are ripe for the formation of such a front because the Democrats’ grassroots base is weakening and the Democrats are ideologically in shambles.

However, I think there are three reasons why this is not likely to happen: 1) the AFL-CIO bureaucracy is wedded to the Democratic Party to the point where I don’t think they can move independently of the Democrats unless there is mass rank and file insurgency that threatens to fracture the AFL-CIO itself.  It would take something at the scale of the  CIO general strikes in the 30s to rupture the bureaucrats’ alliance with the Democrats. And if a workers’ mobilization at that level breaks out nowadays in this time of deep ecological  and social crisis I hope we would be fighting for more than simply defending the remnants of the New Deal.  2) The US electoral system is so rigid that it makes it nearly impossible for social democrats to win elections, even locally.  3) Because of the recession the elites’ profit rates are down so they are less willing to simply dish out funds to social democrats in order to co-opt movement energy or stave off deeper revolts.  In the 1930s they could borrow money to finance the New Deal but now the US deficit is already gigantic after billions of dollars of war spending and bank bailouts and at a certain point too much deficit spending will threaten the government’s credit and credibility.   Therefore, we could see more direct repression in the future and fewer attempts to buy people off through reforms. Behind every fee increase there is a line of riot cops waiting as folks in California have learned.

So given these realities, I think the social democratic forces will run up against serious obstacles that will prevent them from solidifying into a coherent progressive leadership.  I imagine that any local social democratic leaders will become renegades in the eyes of the statewide union leadership who will probably try to reel them in so that they don’t upset WFSE’s relationship with the Democrats.

That’s why I think it is still crucial that rank and file workers and students organize together independently even of our progressive coalition partners among the union leadership.  We need to be able to maintain  independent fighting organizations like IWSJ and FADU so that we can continue to organize when social democratic leaders are either co-opted or silenced by the union higher ups.  If progressives end up getting kicked out of union offices I hope they will come around and join rank and file organizing efforts, realizing that it is the only way to achieve their goals. I think this is a perspective that more and more of the social democratic workers are starting to realize by the sheer force of events.

While I can’t develop it here, I imagine that the same type of dynamic might emerge among student government leaders.  Maybe some of them will come over to our side but the bureaucracy as a whole will be unable to join coalitions like the Student Worker Coalition the way they have in California because to do so would totally ruin their future political careers (in contrast, in California their highly compromised “movement leadership” can help their careers).

Many union and student government leaders have turned on the tap of mass mobilization to fight Olympia’s cuts but they will try to turn it off again once the legislative session ends and it no longer serves to support their lobbying efforts.  However, in a time of crisis like this, workers’ and students’ self-activity is not something that can simply be turned on and off just like that; the mobilizations which the bureaucrats have encouraged could possibly get out of their control.  More and more student and worker militants need  to continue building grassroots organizations so that once the bureaucrats pull back we’ll be the ones who will be left carrying the torch and then we can run with it.  I could see rank and file students and workers who were politicized and energized by the past few months of agitation (including the 4^th) starting to work with us.  Then, as the cuts are implemented and people get pissed off about it, we could see new rank and file upsurges.

So what approach should we have to social democratic union and student government leaders in the meantime?  I don’t think we should needlessly antagonize them or call them out just for the sake of calling them out even though we have obvious disagreements about whether change comes from above or from below.  I think what we can do is push them as far as possible  to implement their social democratic tendencies because doing this further exposes all of the contradictions I’ve laid out here.  We can encourage them to keep mobilizing the rank and file to fight the cuts and can hold them to their word, trying to explain to them the limitations of trying to make the bureaucracy more progressive.  Every action they call we can use as an opportunity to flyer, talk to workers and students, and to build up independent rank and file fighting organizations.  At some point some of them will have to go back on their word and they’ll start opposing these actions and then we should call them out and continue to organize independently.  If this happens, other social democrats will probably want to continue fighting and they will realize the need to rely on rank and file power as they start to clash with the bureaucratic higher ups… this could open up cracks in the bureaucracy and makes it easier for rank and file workers and students to seize the initiative.  In any case, we need to maintain our organizational independence from progressive union officials while working in a friendly united front coalition with them against the cuts.

If the crisis continues to escalate over the long haul we could see the kind of polarization emerge that has emerged in Europe.  There liberal and social democratic parties and union bureaucracies have been unable to chart a course independent from center-right neoliberal ruling parties so the famous European social-democratic welfare state is in total crisis.  Former social democrats are becoming revolutionaries seemingly overnight.  This has opened up space for mass insurgent rank and file worker and student movements like what we are seeing now in Greece.   Could this be on the horizon in Washington State?  We’ll see…

March 4^th:  students of color take the lead

I can’t go into depth here about what specifically went down on March 4^th at UW but the experiences we went through here certainly gesture in that direction.    Democracy Insurgent will publish a piece shortly which summarizes the key events and analyzes them, drawing conclusions for future organizing.  I will add a link to it here when it becomes available.  In the meantime I would like to highlight some key developments on March 4^th that illuminate the shifting terrain of struggle.

First of all, the strike was lead largely by students of color.  Activists of color in For a Democratic University, International Workers and Students for Justice, Democracy Insurgent, and MEChA were prominent leaders in terms of giving speeches, leading pickets, and doing media interviews.  Many of these leaders were also women.  What was even more striking was that hundreds of students of color who haven’t yet been involved in organizing against the budget cuts came out and many of them spontaneously assumed leadership roles, leading chants and proposing forms of escalating militancy that went beyond what we expected to accomplish as organizers.  Many of these students are the rank and file members of officially recognized student of color organizations.  These groups have ties to the administration and student government.  However, these students came out fighting on the 4th even though the administration and student government have been telling everyone to go to Olympia to lobby instead of striking.  This is a huge step forward for the entire campus.

The key question now is what organizations and coalitions can be built to keep the mobilization going so that folks don’t just go back to accepting business as usual.  We need to keep laying out an anti-racist strategy so that students of color active in the official groups recognize that they have stronger allies among campus workers, grad students, and high school students fighting to get into UW than they do among the UW administration’s official diversity managers.  We need to show that these managers’ role is to give legitimacy to an administration whose privatization policies basically amount to racist attacks on students of color.

On March 4th here was a dynamic interplay between high school students of color who were attending the strike to fight for access to UW,  undergraduates of color, and workers of color.  Folks were all sharing each others’ signs and were chanting and dancing together and responding to each other’s speeches, forming a very energetic contingent on the picket lines.  At one point, an East African custodian delivered a speech to a group of African American students from the Black Student Union who responded enthusiastically; it was a powerful moment of pan-African, internationalist solidarity which has boosted the confidence of many of the people involved.

I think that in many ways the situation at UC San Diego (where students of color are facing a tremendously hostile racist environment) really highlighted the need to fight for access to UW.  Many students realized we need to prevent the decline in student of color enrollment that could come with the tuition hikes.  As fewer and fewer students of color attend UW the climate will become more and more hostile; if we don’t stop the cuts UW could end up looking like UC San Diego.  The Black Student Union’s sit-in at UCSD also showed the power that students of color have when they expose the administration’s phony attempts to manage diversity at their expense.  They lead students to walk out of an official administration teach-in saying that what we need now is ACTION, not more talking.

March 4^th:  a new society invades the old

The Student-Worker Coalition had planned to picket for a while and then if there was enough energy we planned to march through academic buildings.  After that we were considering setting up pickets at the entrance to campus.  What happened ended up going far beyond these plans.  We did end up marching through academic buildings and we even marched through a large lecture hall still in session encouraging folks to walk out.  When we announced that folks in California had stopped traffic on main streets and highways, students in the crowd started chanting “take the Ave!” referring to University Avenue, a main street near campus.  Making our way off campus and onto the Ave, we effectively shut down the main streets entering campus, bringing traffic to a halt and occupying key intersections.

The crowd seemed to be at its largest as we moved up the Ave towards 45th, another main street in the University District.  With the mass of people and upbeat energy, a lot of people  started agitating to occupy Interstate 5 (I-5) and some Student Worker Coalition members including DI members backed this proposal.  We turned onto 45th and stopped at the intersection of 45th and Brooklyn (on the way to the freeway).  We blocked the intersection for about half an hour at this point to hold a general assembly and to take a vote about whether to continue to the freeway.  There was a debate amongst the crowd over whether or not we should continue to I-5 or whether we should march to UW Tower, a UW administrative building nearby. There was some confusion because some of the advocates of taking the freeway just meant that they wanted to occupy the off-ramp to block access to the University District, NOT block four lanes of oncoming traffic but this wasn’t made clear to the majority of the crowd.  We also ran into logistical problems because our megaphones were not loud enough for everyone to hear.  Perhaps more people would have decided to do this if it had been clearly proposed as an exit ramp occupation/ picket line instead of as a march into oncoming traffic, especially since at that point our numbers had decreased to about 200 people.  We tried to clarify this in a second general assembly outside of UW Tower, where three different proposals were laid out.  One, to block the offram.  Two, to storm UW Tower.  Three,  to return to campus by way of the north entrance, block that intersection for a while, then march back to the Quad and march through the buildings as we had originally planned.  The third proposal won out and we followed it.

Throughout these moments of agitation, a cross section of the crowd including many women and people of color, were involved in agitating to take over the streets and the freeway.  Many of these students were entering this struggle for the first time or had only been involved in lobbying or calling their senators to stop the state cuts to UW.  Many workers who for the past several months had been unwilling to come out to actions were also there with us blocking intersections.   In this sense, March 4^th represents a dialectical break and leap forward beyond where the campus was at a month or two ago.  The first action the Student Worker Coalition called back in January had only about 80 people but this time around 600-700 people began to push against the limits of capitalist legality.

This shows that we can no longer proceed according to a neatly mapped out, pre-planned model for escalation.  We don’t need to go through every step that the movement in California went through back in September and October when they were just getting started.   What has happened in California the past 6 months has had a tremendous impact here and we are skipping many of the steps folks down there took and jumping right into the middle of the fight at full force.

Many activists used to smaller numbers campaigns based on predictable escalation were overwhelmed by the sheer weight and the sheer militancy of the crowd.  March 4^th really showed that from now on we cannot take anything for granted and we need to prepare for the most unexpected outbreaks of mass self-activity.  Some of us in Democracy Insurgent, building off of similar experiences with spontaneous actions during protests against Israel’s siege on Gaza, had attempted to prepare our coalition partners and co-organizers for this possibility.  That helped the Student Worker Coalition balance its well-thought out plans with the need to embrace new layers of leadership that emerged spontaneously.  However, debates continue over our embrace of spontaneous leadership.  What constitutes a democratic movement?  How assertive should organizers be about directing the crowd?  How can we continue to support the leadership of oppressed people?  Is this done better through embracing spontaneity or through deciding which roles people will play ahead of time and then sticking to this?

What will it take to actually Occupy Everything? Mass strikes are a place to start…

I do not mean to celebrate spontaneity just for spontaneity’s sake.  There are forms of spontaneity that  fail to advance the struggle and forms we would oppose; in the case of March 4th Seattle though, the spontaneity we experienced helped bring new layers of students into the struggle.   It is crucial to emphasize that  spontaneous militancy and direct action here is coming from everyday students and workers, many of them women and people of color; it is NOT coming from the insurrectionist “occupy everything, demand nothing” tendency because that tendency is not very widespread in Seattle, at least not yet.  I hope that as militancy increases we can start to cohere a different tendency, independent of the liberals and bureaucrats on the one hand  and independent from the insurrectionists on the other hand.   What happened on March 4th points in this direction.

The debate going on in California about whether or not the insurrectionists should have occupied the highway in Oakland is very different than the debate here about whether we should have blocked I-5.  Here, the drive toward the highway was not the result of organized insurrectionists breaking off from a larger march.  It was something that emerged from what was (at least at one point) a majority of the crowd.   If anything, those who backed the idea of the freeway occupation are the student counterpart to the furstrated social democratic workers  I mentioned earlier, folks who are tired of following labor laws that are stacked against them and are starting to consider wildcat (unauthorized) strikes as a viable option.  So too are students open to taking risks to advance the struggle.  Folks who would previously have been trying to push the Democrats to the left are getting fed up with how unresponsive the system has been do their efforts and now have only one place left to go: into the streets, where they are joining radicals and revolutionaries in mass, democratic  direct action.

In these actions you can see the outlines of a potential new society breaking out in fits and starts.   There was an almost magical sense of exhilaration on March 4^th as hundreds of strangers started to see themselves as part of a community for the first time.  We  realized that when that many people unite and move together the normal rules don’t necessarily apply.

For a brief moment we had a sense that we can be self-governing.  We tried to hold general assemblies in the streets, right in the middle of intersections blocking traffic and shutting down business as usual while we practiced a form of  insurgent direct democracy, voting with our feet and our voices, not with surveys and Roberts Rules of Order (as a friend of ours who spoke at the rally once put it, “who the hell is Robert and why the hell do I need another man telling me how to talk?”)  For a moment we had the confidence we could really take back this campus and these streets and make them our own.

However, as quickly as it came, it passed.  As much as the insurgent democracy in the streets shows glimmers of a new society, it is also deeply flawed, caught in the contradictions of the old society.  Folks in the back of the crowd were frustrated because the bullhorns were weak and they couldn’t hear what was happening and many of them started leaving.  The front of the crowd which was so confident about taking the highway looked around and noticed our numbers had decreased.   During the vote, it seemed that a narrow majority of the crowd wanted to pull back from blocking the freeway so organizers on the megaphone called for this with  the resolution to come back next time bigger, stronger, and more prepared.  When folks went back to class and to work the next day I’m sure some kept that resolution in mind and others repressed it and went about their business forgetting all of this ever happened.  Some walked away energized about the possibility of direct democracy, others walked away excited but also confused and disoriented, and others felt that all this democracy was just getting in the way.  This shows we still have a long way to go and we need to keep discussing how we can move forward together.

The insurrectionist Occupy Everything folks live for moments of spontaneity like what we experienced in the streets here in Seattle.  But for them that’s it, THAT moment itself is the revolution.  They don’t have a sense that we could live like that for hours, for days, for years, for our lifetimes, but only if we actually organize campaigns and movements that build off of these moments.  Only if we learn from their successes and failures, weaving them together in the art of insurrection, to the point where we gain permanent community control of our workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods.   To the point where everyday people govern, and governing itself is the art of  democratic direct action.   That is something that working class people of color understood when they fought for control over education in the 1960s, and it is a lesson we are learning again today.  The insurrectionists don’t understand that after that moment of spontaneity you need to regroup withthe new folks who were activated and who activated each other in the crowd during an action, and you need to organize with them, train together, and build new institutions of struggle like rank and file strike committees, general assemblies, internal commissions, workers’ newsletters, and united front coalitions. In the wake of March 4^th that’s where we turn: to a month of April full of outreach, education, debate, organizing, and agitation aimed at further rupturing the hegemony/ dominance of all the forces which are trying to cut up and enclose our future.

Months of patient, painstaking, seemingly boring work went into shaping the conditions under which March 4^th could explode.  And we will need to do a lot more of that to get to the point where we CAN actually Occupy Everything.   What does it mean to occupy an entire campus?  It means to shut that campus down through a massive general strike, and then to re-start a process of democratic education on the picket lines which goes far deeper than anything we will ever learn in our classes.  It means to show through mass student-worker solidarity that this campus cannot run without the cooperation of everyone who cleans its toilets and grades its papers.

Teaching Assistants at UW are aiming to strike around May Day for low class sizes and quality democratic education for all.  If undergraduates, custodians, other workers, high school students, and community members join them then we will take a decisive step toward making UW into a truly public university.  We might be able to turn this into a community center for the entire city, a place where knowledge is produced by everyday people, infusing wider and wider struggles to resolve this deepening economic and political crisis on OUR terms, not those of the elites.  If we can pull off  a worker-student strike at UW in early May then we’ll be living out the vision of the WTO protests 10 years ago, showing each other that  this is what democracy looks like.

In the News

Hundreds of Thousands Take Part in National Day of Action to Defend Public Education, Democracy Now

Education funding demanded in ‘Day of Action’, The Oakland Tribune

Thousands rally on campuses, streets for schools, San Francisco Chronicle

UW student rally targets higher-ed funding, The Seattle Times

California Students Protest Education Cuts, The New York Times

Analysis

Open Letter to the White Student Movement by J.

Response to a Critic of the “White” Student Movement by occupy california

Raider Nation Collective Statement on the M4 Highway Takeover by Raider Nation Collective

Following String of Racist Incidents, UC San Diego Students Occupy Chancellor’s Office, Democracy Now

How Not to Capitulate to Union Bureaucracies: March 4th and the AFSCME 444 Resolution by Advance the Struggle

Don’t be Bamboozled by the Budget by Democracy Insurgent

New York Officers Won’t Face Federal Charges in Sean Bell Killing

A Sight All too Familiar in Poor Neighborhoods

Israel’s New Strategy: “sabatoge” and “attack” the global justice movement

How a New Jobless Era will Transform America

The U.S. Economy and China: Capitalism, Class and Crisis

A Post-Capitalist Future

The Two Dominant of Models of Understanding Disability

The 2 dominant models for thinking about disability in the US and Western European contexts are the “medical model” promoted by a capitalist medical system that sees disability as physical limitations that need to be cured, either through eugenics (the idea of eradication of people with disabilities, also used to argue for the elimination of people of color), treatment, assistive devices (such as wheelchairs, brail, or sign language) without a broader analysis of the physical and social barriers that make these devices necessary.  The medical model has also had clear racist components, by pathologizing people of color as “crazy”, and therefore mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or aggressive and often violent medical treatment.  The medical model fundamentally treats people with disability as if they are a second-class, homogenous group of people, while individualizing disability and preventing collective struggle against both ablism and unequal health and safety.  The “social model” was developed primarily by disabled peoples movements and serves as a counter to the medical model, and makes a distinction between impairments, or physical or emotional situations, and disability, which are the social conditions created by an ablest society that manifest as barriers for people with impairments.  In what follows, I argue that what’s missing from both these models is a way of simultaneously valuing the capabilities of folks who are disabled by a capitalist, patriarchal, and ablest system and value the caring work necessary for people whose state of health, mobility, or emotional difference and distress mean that they are not going to participate in work in any sense; this necessitates the recognition and encouragement by revolutionary movements of the simultaneous autonomy and interdependence of folks engaged in caring work and folks being cared for.

“The Politics of the Disability Rights Movement”

Using Ravi Malhotra’s 2001 article (link above) in New Politics I hope to make an intervention calling for a critical rethinking of disability, and struggles of disabled folks. This article makes a couple of key interventions

+A critique of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other “disability rights” legislation for being individualized legislation that was based on the idea of disabled people as consumers.  The ADA serves a similar role to that of labor contracts typically negotiated by trade unions: making the world a safe place for disabled people to consume and work.  The ADA relies on individual disabled folks or class action groups to sue companies or businesses that break the ADA, but does not call for a restructuring of society to make it lest ablest.

+A highlight of militant, from-below struggles engaged in by disabled people, through the example of the occupation of the Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) building in San Francisco in the early 1970’s, and ADAPT [American Disabled Association for Public Transit], an organization built on militant and direct action tactics by disabled folks.  During the HEW occupations, members of the Black Panther Party and other revolutionary organizations joined in solidarity with

As Malhotra’s title points to, there is still a lot of work to be done in realm of disabled rights, and disabled rights movements face the same challenges as other oppressed groups struggling for liberation, including liberal co-optation and identity politics. Evoking Hal Draper’s essay, “The Two Soles of Socialism”, Malhotra states that the left disability liberation movement is doubly constrained:

“…on the one hand, the well-funded bureaucratic impairment-specific organizations accomplish little and often undermine the possibility of broader solidarity, rank and file disability organizations seek to empower disabled people through militant struggle from below…[But]even ADAPT would seem to lack a coherent anti-capitalist agenda that would  enable it to form concrete alliances wit h other marginalized people.”

Disability and Revolutionary Movements

But what can this critique of the disability rights movement tell us about the necessary role of revolutionaries, and revolutionary organizations today?  While Malhotra makes important suggestions for how disabled people can further engage the struggles of other oppressed folks, he does not yet quite come out and make an intervention that I think is necessary, ie, that oppressed folks are (also) disabled folks. One important point Malhotra raises that I extend, is the development of a concept of disablement, that is, that disability is not just a product of societal restraints that limit the capabilities of disabled folks (as laid out by the social model of disability), but that a capitalist society also produces disability. Others have provided strong evidence that the working class struggle is the struggle of queer folks, people of color, and women.  The further development of this concept points to a need, not just for alliances between disabled folks against an ablest society, but also that the disabled persons struggle is the struggle of people of color, queer folks, and immigrants who come under disproportionate emotional and physical assault by the state and capitalism.  Too often on the left, the conversation about disability is either 1) obfuscated or 2) taken up as a secondary struggle, or one that can only take place within the realm of social service provision.  In this time of deepening economic crisis that goes hand-in-hand with worker exploitation, military and militarized violence abroad and in the US, the gutting of healthcare, the struggles of disabled folks are increasingly visible.

Calling for Care Beyond the State and NPIC

The disability struggle also frames these struggles differently because explicitly disabled liberation necessarily calls for a layer of society to be engaged with care.  Capitalist societies have enfranchised these people through welfare programs, social security disability, and the “businesses” of care (like home health care, nursing homes, institutions, etc).  However, because these settings are based primarily on generating revenue, care is often poor, and workers tend to be low-paid, work long hours, and immigrants who face oppression and abuse by management.  This relationship also reinforces a hierarchical relationship between “consumer” and “provider”, but with the “consumer” often at a physical and economic disadvantage as well. Why is it that revolutionaries have not been able to care for the elderly, ill, or emotionally distressed?  So far, some revolutionary organizations, both in the past and the present (such as the BPP) have tried to replicate social reproduction that the NPIC accomplishes but in a non-capitalist system.  These programs, such as the BPP’s survival programs, worked outside of the capitalist and state system to lead school lunch programs, elder care, and health care in the communities they were organizing.  What they were not able to do was fundamentally challenge systems that cause disablement, or to engage with those people working in health care.  I would argue these organizations failed to be sustainable in the long term because they did not or do not actively engage with anti-capitalist struggles, and did not engage with the point of production of production where oppression through education, medicine, etc takes place.

What if in the HEW occupation, disabled people of color revolutionary organizations were at the lead?  What if these folks were calling for control over their own healthcare as well?  This would make obvious the racial dimensions of care, health, and disability. What if working folks, including disabled veterans, were also a key part of the struggle?

And what if a radical group of nurses also took part in the struggle, calling for a people’s healthcare where they could have open access to training and not have to care for people under the restrictions of pharmaceutical companies, health insurance, and underfunded hospitals and community medical facilities?

On a more theoretical level, how can we simultaneously fight against ablism, but also value the health and well-being of all people?  Can a disabled people’s movement call for from below treatment methods and health care programs, that support working people, queer folks, and people of color instead of making them more ill?

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/tavis-smiley-ends-state-black-american-union-show-continues-media-lockdown-obamas-black-left

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/12/10/sorry_obama_afghanistans_your_vietnam?page=full

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNak-6O8lFQ&feature=PlayList&p=1CFF4C19CCDEF1B9&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=18

http://www.thegrio.com/opinion/ending-dont-ask-dont-tell-will-be-a-teachable-moment-for-black-america.php

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/econ-f05.shtml

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704722304575037241392821742.html

http://www.khukuritheory.net/authors/john_steele/our-relation-to-revolutionary-tradition/

Ok so that was more than what was intended, but the last two weeks have been huge…

Will

Attached is an excerpt from Harlem Vs Columbia University: Black Student Power in the late 1960s by Stefan Bradley called, “Gym Crow Must Go!”.

Black Students at Hamilton.

For a little more information and some pictures check out this link: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/1968/#links

Here are some questions/comments I have to start the discussion off:

1. How might Black only groups be viable on campus but run into more problems in the workplace? I am thinking of the League of Revolutionary Black Worker’s in this light.

2. Is race only articulated through Black only organizations? Can white-supremacy still be fought in a multi-racial organization? Can a positive vision of Black affirmation and pride have a key place in a multi-racial organization?

3. How do folks feel about this sentence, “As members of the black intelligentsia and the working class, they were able to manifest power by using the threat of violence to invoke fear and reconsideration by a powerful white institution.”

4. What does this sentence mean? “If Black Power were to ever be fully achieved in this country, at least politically, it would take an alliance of what sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called the “blackbourgeoisie”and the “blackproletariat.”" What historical evidence is there of such an alliance?

5. I do not understand H Rap Brown’s claim that the Black community is taking over on p. 172. If the Black community is taking over, how come it is only half-dozen folks removing the white jocks.  Perhaps someone else who knows more about this event can fill in the details. Did the author forget to mention that there was an actual physical community behind Brown’s statement?

6. The occupation of Hamilton put the University President in a precise problem, “”The fact that a group of black students were in sole occupancy of one of our buildings did complicate the matter.”99The possibility of a “race riot,” like the one that had occurred in Harlem just weeks before, was probably frightening to him and the rest of the school officials. The president as well as the SAS protesters understood that when both the white and black protesters were occupying the building, it was an issue of “student protest.” However, when SAS asked the white students to leave to occupy Low Library, the issue was no longer simply a student building takeover, but a black student and community protest.”

7. What does occupying a building accomplish? How does it cause a crisis for the university politically and economically? In the Columbia link I provided above, the writer mentions that most students boycotted classes. Is that a possible strategy today?

8. What were the immediate victories and yet at the same time how was Columbia able to recover?

Will

Class conflicts in the transformation of China

Introduction

As we previously argued in issue 14,1 the immense economic transformation that is occurring in China has not been driven by China’s move to a market economy, as neo-liberal ideologues insist, but by the success of the Chinese state in attracting and tying down international capital on its own terms. When Deng Xiaoping opened up the Chinese economy in the early 1990s, after four decades of autarchic development, foreign capital was permitted entry only to the extent that it assumed the form of real productive capital. In joint ventures with the Chinese state, foreign capital was required to provide both the plant, machinery and technology necessary to raise the productivity of Chinese labour and access to Western markets. In return the Chinese state provided investment in infrastructure (i.e. transport, communications, electric power and other utilities) necessary for the accumulation of capital, social peace and, most importantly, an almost inexhaustible supply of cheap and compliant labour-power.

China’s integration into the world economy over the past decade or so has not only led to rapid and sustained economic growth in China, but to a rejuvenation of both world capitalism and American economic hegemony. Firstly, as we have previously pointed out, China’s integration into the world economy has been based on specialising in the mass production of cheap manufactured commodities, which the West, and the US in particular, either gave up producing during the restructuring of the 1970s and ’80s, such as clothes and toys, or which was were not produced before, such as DVDs and mobile phones. As a consequence, China has been able to establish a complementary dynamic of accumulation with the USA. As such, the vast and increasing flood of cheap Chinese commodities into the US economy has, for the most part, not had the effect of displacing American-based capital, and thereby creating unemployment, but has served to reduce inflationary pressures. At the same time, the Chinese state has recycled the growing inflow of US Dollars earnt by its exports by buying up American financial securities, thereby helping to financing America’s trade and government deficits. This has given the US authorities much greater freedom to use monetary and fiscal policy to ensure a more rapid and continuous capital accumulation and growth in the American economy.

Read the rest here

Here are two views on the meaning of the Ford workers vote and on the role of the UAW in the offensive against autoworkers and whether it should be by-passed altogether or it can be reformed.

Auto Workers Untamed: A “No” Heard ‘Round the World
By Ron Lare

By November 1, United Auto Workers (UAW) members at Ford had overwhelmingly rejected contract modifications, in voting that concluded—not coincidentally—the day before Ford announced new profits. This was the second set of modifications to the UAW-Ford contract proposed this year. The first were voted up in March, but the members saw these as a “giveback too far.”

The concessions just voted down were to last until 2015, i.e. through the new contract still to be negotiated for 2011. They included severe limitations on the right to strike, a six-year freeze on new-hire pay that had already been cut in half, and the reduction of skilled trades classifications. The argument of the company and the union leadership was that these measures were needed to “match” the labor cost savings at the bankrupt Chrysler and General Motors corporations.

At half pay, young auto workers will not be able to buy the cars they build. With the average nonunion industrial pay in the United States substantially higher than the $14.50 that Ford new-hires currently get, what does Ford—let alone the UAW—think it’s doing? Anyone who has been subject to the discipline needed in a modern auto assembly plant knows that—short of fascism—you can’t effectively run one here for this kind of pay. The top goal of this savage pay cut is not so much immediate savings as the extermination of the UAW as a respected force on the shop floor as well as politically. Ford will raise pay later, but hopes to dictate its own terms.

Solidarity House argued for the attempt to put Ford workers in line with those at bankrupt GM and Chrysler by appealing to the downward “pattern” that now includes non-union transplant companies. As many workers said during the campaign, “Bring them up to us, not us down to them.”

The most prominent sentiment on the shop floor and around local halls was that we must vote “no” in order to hold on to the right to strike over wage raises in next year’s contract negotiations. Ford and the UAW bureaucracy countered that the union has not struck Ford since 1976. Members replied, “If it’s not that important, then why do they want to take it away from us?” There was no good answer to that.

Anger was very palpable during voting at union halls around the country. At UAW 600, local staff backed off as a line of Truck Plant voters hissed at them that they would take only Vote No leaflets.

The coming result of the vote was clear from the early count, ending in a 70% No vote among production workers and 75% No among skilled trades, for an overall 72% No vote, according to a letter to the membership from Vice President for UAW-Ford, Bob King. (UAW Solidarity House has released only percentages, not a national count. Only an internal union appeal extracted a count in 2005.)

During the Vote No campaign, the national union leadership lost political control of the most important Ford plant in the US if not the world, the Dearborn Truck Plant, one of the plants in UAW Local 600.

Full-time Truck Plant bargaining committeeperson Gary Walkowicz, who has long been a national leader against concessions at Ford, plant president Nick Kottalis, and five other Dearborn Truck Plant union officers came out with a signed statement against these concessions during the campaign. The Truck Plant makes the F-150 pickup truck and a huge proportion of Ford profits. Members there voted No by 93%. Skilled trades worker Judy Wraight was one of the authors of the Local 600-wide “vote no” leaflet quoted below. Across all Local 600 Ford plants, the vote was No 3087, Yes 823.

The new faultline in the Ford empire should be an inspiration to workers everywhere. A Ford executive responding to the vote in Kansas City — earlier and virtually equal to that in the Truck Plant — said he was “shocked.” And perhaps Ford workers have somewhat alarmed the U.S. ruling class as a whole.

The national contract rejection sprang from factors ranging from a sense that Ford had come back for concessions a time too many, to rebellion by lower-level union officers in touch with the rank and file, to a presence of radicals, including socialists, in some key plants. It is the first time a national auto contract was ever voted down by a majority of the membership!

In the wake of the rejection vote, UAW president Ron Gettelfinger said there would be no more negotiations until 2011. But two days after the vote results were announced, Reuters reported: “Ford Motor Co. will continue meeting informally with United Auto Workers leaders to discuss labor issues following the rejection of concessions by U.S. rank-and-file workers, a top executive said…”

Such talks are always said to be underway, but Ford was making a point by making this statement at this time: We’re back at concessions bargaining the day after.

An excerpt from a leaflet signed by 18 opponents of the concessions at UAW Local 600 UAW stated the following:

“The strike threat defends our money, benefits, rights—and UAW political clout…Power in Washington starts with our power right here (for true national health insurance, converting closed plants to greener jobs and alternative transportation for auto and other workers, and defending the gains of civil rights movements, etc.).

“International solidarity: CAW-Ford members like Lindsay Hinshelwood at Oakville (Ontario) assembly also organize against concessions. We need an independent Council of union reps and workers across borders, not Ford lobbying the International Metalworkers Federation Ford Network. Ford wants to lead the race to the bottom internationally.“

It remains to be seen whether unity against company attacks and rejection of timid union leadership can be converted into a sustained rank-and-file organization for action including strike mobilization, union democracy, and international solidarity. This could feed social movement unionism, helping to unite the working class and reverse the decades-long decline of the union movement in the United States.

For activists at Ford, the way forward is upward but not yet entirely clear in its details. The vote was notably dependent on a “No” or neutral position taken by shop-floor officers who had supported all the concessions up to now. Some of these officers concluded during the campaign that they could not be re-elected if they supported the latest concessions at a company returning to profitability.

What will those who followed the rank and file yesterday do tomorrow? Such questions will be prominent until union officers have to side more consistently with a rebellious rank and file. The 2010 UAW Convention delegate and other local elections, as well as the 2011 contract, are good opportunities. The UAW Convention next year is in Detroit.

Despite efforts at international solidarity against union concessions at Ford, the Canadian version of these concessions has been adopted by vote of the Canadian Auto Workers union by 83%. Today international union solidarity is required for any comprehensive fight for jobs, pay and working conditions.

(There is more coverage of this struggle at Labor Notes and Soldiers of Solidarity.)

—Ron Lare is a retired member of UAW Local 600 and former executive board member.

**************

The Ford vote and the UAW’s defenders
By Jerry White

Last week’s defeat of Ford concessions contract—by a margin of 22,136 to 7,816—was a massive repudiation of the United Auto Workers by the rank-and-file, and a sign of the growing hostility and opposition of workers to this pro-company organization.

The “No” vote was a historic event—the first rejection of a national auto contract recommended by the UAW since 1982 and at Ford since 1976. It is, however, only an initial step.

Within hours of announcing the defeat, top UAW executives pledged to work with Ford on a daily basis to “insure that they maintain the highest levels of quality and productivity” and “remain competitive.” This can only mean the UAW intends to force through the concessions on a plant-by-plant basis using the threat of factory closings and mass layoffs.

Ford workers must draw the implications of their own actions. A struggle in defense of jobs and living standards will not be carried out by the UAW—which is no less an enemy of workers than are the corporations and the Obama administration—but against it, through the creation of new organizations of working class struggle.

In the aftermath of the “No” vote, various middle class organizations, which like to posture as “left” and even socialist, have insisted that any resistance of workers must be channeled through the UAW. Contrary to all evidence, these groups claim that the UAW can be reformed and its leadership forced to respond to the needs of the organization’s members.

A “resounding NO vote would be the first step to re-building the UAW as a union that fights for its members and all working people,” claimed one leaflet signed by two supporters of Solidarity, a self-described “socialist, feminist and anti-racist organization.” The two are also former executive board members of UAW Local 600 at the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan.

“Rank and file UAW activists should use the momentum and sense of victory that this has given us to begin building the kind of movement that can turn the UAW into a fighting trade union,” declares another statement, written by a supporter of Socialist Alternative and a UAW official at the St. Paul, Minnesota Ford plant. The program for “rebuilding the UAW,” should include the fight for a “publicly funded green jobs program” and the nationalization of the auto industry, they wrote.

“Perhaps this is the beginning of a new workers revolution, one that will gain the respect of those that negotiate on their behalf and redefine the direction of the UAW,” wrote a another local official at the Ford-Mazda plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, in a column featured on the Labor Notes web site.

The natural question that arises upon reading these statements is: What “UAW” are these people talking about?

What evidence can they present that shows the UAW is anything other than a right-wing appendage of the corporations and the state?

In 1937, the exiled socialist leader Leon Trotsky argued that the American Federation of Labor, despite its treacherous and pro-capitalist leadership, could still be defined as a “workers organization” because “within certain limits it leads a struggle of the workers for an increase—or at least against a diminution—of their share of the national income.” Should the AFL leaders, Trotsky wrote, “defend the income of the bourgeoisie from attacks on the part of the workers; should they conduct a struggle against strikes, against the raising of wages, against help to the unemployed; then we would have an organization of scabs, and not a trade union.”

This is exactly what the UAW has done over the last three decades. On the basis of the program of “labor-management partnership” and “Buy American” nationalism, it has functioned as a labor police force for the employers, isolating and betraying every struggle against plant closings, mass layoffs and concessions.

As a result of the suppression of working class resistance by the UAW and the AFL-CIO, the richest one percent of the population saw its share of national income more than double—from 9 to 20 percent—since 1979.

With the multi-billion VEBA retiree health care trust fund, it has been transformed into a business, complete with Wall Street advisers and a substantial ownership stake at all three Detroit automakers.

Its top administrators—far from being responsive to pressure from below—have a direct financial incentive to extract ever greater levels of profit from UAW members in order to boost the value of their shareholdings. These executives have seen their salaries and perks increase, even as the membership of the organizations and the wages of auto workers have sharply declined.

The UAW is widely hated and despised by the workers. Yet the supposed “lefts” and “progressives” instinctively defend the UAW and declare illegitimate any action by workers independent of the union apparatus. This says more about the class character of these organizations than any of their left-sounding phrases.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when the unions were still looked upon by workers, despite their hostility to the union bureaucracy, as organizations that they could use to defend their interests, when major class battles were waged via these organizations, the middle class groups were utterly indifferent and even openly hostile to the trade unions.

At the time they generally labeled the “white working class” as racist and identified the majority of union workers with the reactionary politics of leaders like AFL-CIO President George Meany. Meanwhile, they attacked the Workers League, the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party, for intervening in union struggles and seeking to build a socialist leadership and mobilize the rank-and-file against the bureaucracy and its alliance with the Democratic Party.

Only during and after the decisive decade of the 1980s—when the UAW and AFL-CIO turned to corporatism, helped impose concessions and mass layoffs and betrayed one strike after another—did they orient their activities to the unions, become their most enthusiastic boosters and increasingly integrate themselves into the union hierarchy. That is to say, when the social character of the unions became more openly anti-working class, and any democratic impulse from the workers was extinguished, at precisely that point these groups became the champions of the unions.

Far from “reforming” the unions, the influx of the “dissidents” and “lefts” into various positions in the labor apparatus has not had the slightest impact. The right-wing politics of the AFL-CIO—the promotion of nationalism and chauvinism, defense of US imperialism and its wars, and support for the Democratic Party—has not lessened.

Time and time again the ex-radicals sought to boost illusions in one faction of the UAW or another in order to provide supposed proof of the possibility of reforming the organization. One of their past favorites was UAW Vice President Bob King himself, the architect of the Ford concessions who was booed off the stage by rank-and-file workers during the vote.

Their promotion of the UAW today is part of a general lurch to the right by middle class groups, who have lined up behind the Obama administration and the interests of US imperialism. The subordination of the working class to the so-called “unions” is a very critical issue for America’s ruling elite, under conditions of an historic crisis of the capitalist system and an emerging revival of working class militancy and political radicalization.

The “No” vote by the Ford workers is a harbinger of the return of great class battles. The way forward for auto workers and every section of the working class is a decisive break with these reactionary organizations and the building of new organs of industrial and political struggle based on the political independence of the working class, internationalism and socialism.

This is what the middle class groups fear and oppose.

Thanks to Batay Ouvriye are accepting donations to help the people not only survive the devastation, but lay the ground work to fight back. Visit Miami Autonomy and Solidarity for more information. We hope folks we send them whatever they can.

You can also send funds to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund.

Avatar Reenvisioned - From the Kasama blog

There has been a lot of debate about James Cameron’s movie Avatar. This film describes a private mercenary force like Blackwater colonizing a forest planet named Pandora sometime during the 22nd century. The indigenous people of this planet, the Navi’i, rise up and drive them out; in the process some of the colonizers switch sides and join the rebellion. Some see this story as a “noble savage” myth that perpetuates racist stereotypes of indigenous people. Others see it as a criticism of ecological destruction and a warning of what will happen if we don’t learn how to live in harmony with the natural world. Some see it as a white guilt fantasy and an example of liberal racism because it involves a white man leading a revolt of oppressed people.  Others see it as an inspiring story of anti-colonial armed struggle; (an Anti-War activist friend of mine said that Cameron was able to do what the anti-war movement has not been able to do: to encourage millions of Americans to root for the defeat of the US military.) In any case, this movie has been seen by millions of people and has broken records as a holiday blockbuster, so it is clearly striking a chord with everyday people  in this time of economic crisis, ecological fear, and colonization efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and elsewhere. For that reason, it is important for activists to carry on these debates because if we misunderstand the appeal of this movie we could be misunderstanding where our coworkers, friends, and neighbors are at right now.

Noble Savage Myth?

Those who argue that Avatar perpetuates the “noble savage” myth have a point. The Navi’i fight with bows and arrows, speak with “Hollywood African” accents, and at times speak in over-the top mystical dialogue that is both stereotypical and cheesy. I would argue that these are bad choices on Cameron’s part that detract from the deeper themes of his movie.

A few folks in the comments section over at the Kasama blog have taken this critique even farther, saying that Cameron makes the Navi’i look stupid and superstitious because they believe in Eywa, a deity who is suffused throughout the natural world, and concentrated in the Tree of Souls. The movie contrasts this Navi’i spirituality with the profit-driven “insanity” of the colonists who see the planet Pandora as simply a natural resource to be accumulated at all costs. Is this falling into the “ecological Indian” myth that claims that indigenous people live in harmony with nature and all ecological problems are simply the result of colonization?   The problem with this myth is it treats indigenous people as if they are part of the landscape, like lions of buffalo, not human beings who transform their environment through labor and technology. In reality, indigenous people have transformed their environments and have long histories of changing technologies and social relations, some of which are very ecologically sustainable and some which are ecologically destructive. Deep Ecologists, some “primitivist” Anarchists, and some liberal environmentalists appropriate indigenous culture to articulate their politics without taking seriously the histories of indigenous peoples and without siding with existing indigenous communities today in their ongoing struggles against colonization. This is a major problem which needs to be critiqued ruthlessly.

I agree with those who criticize the ecological Indian myth, but I think it is dogmatic to apply this critique to Avatar. Avatar is science fiction, it is not a documentary about the colonization of North America and it is not a primitivist movie. If it were either then I would say yes, it is both inaccurate and racist. But the Navi’i are not supposed to be Native Americans, they are another culture in their own right that Cameron dreamed up in the context of a fictional story (it would have been better if he had avoided the stereotypical bows and arrows to make this clearer). And, as I argue below, they are not “primitive”.  We can critique how Cameron dreamed up the Navi’i, and we can critique the allusions and references to indigenous history that he makes, but we need to start by looking at the specific story that Avatar tells in all of its details and begin our critique there; we can’t simply import our (entirely justified) ideological beef with the noble savage myth into the movie. Art is not simply something that narrowly projects and expresses the class, race, and gender politics of today – while it is clearly informed and limited by these and needs to be critiqued in terms of them,  it also has an imaginative aspect to it that needs to be taken into account if we want to avoid dogmatic interpretations of popular culture.

….Or a Revolutionary Future Utopia?

Beyond the bows and arrows, I don’t think that Cameron presents the Navi’i as “primitive” at all. (I hate this term in the first place – no real life indigenous groups were ever “primitive” outside the minds of white supremacists”).   In fact, the Navi’i are highly sophisticated, and in some respects have more developed technology than the humans in the movie. For example, they have the ability to transfer and merge their consciousness with other beings, including the horse like animals or bird-like animals they ride. This allows them to do fighter-jet style maneuvers in the air which are faster and more precise then the colonizers’ helicopters. Cameron has them merge their consciousness with other beings not through some appropriation of what colonial anthropologists call shamanism, but rather through a unique, biologically based technology: they, and other creatures on the planet have “link” interfaces where the tendrils of their bodies merge with each other. Instead of a synthetic technology based on chemicals and energy sources that require mining, the Navi technology seems to be based on the biological and ecological networks around them. But this doesn’t make it any less advanced; in fact, Cameron suggests it is more advanced because it enhances the complexity and beauty of the planet rather than destroying it. When Jake Sully communicates with the Tree of Souls near the end of the movie he warns the planetary network of consciousness centered there that the colonizers are going to destroy it because they will  do the same thing they did to earth: turn it into a barren, lifeless, synthetic environment.

In fact, the Navi’i consciousness-linking technology is exactly what the humans are trying to develop in their colonial science labs with the Avatar program, which meshes the consciousness of individual humans with the bodies of individual Navi’is. The movie suggests that the Avatar program is possible because the Navi’i had developed their bodies to be able to do this kind of linking. Grace Augustine, the main human scientist who developed it, may have gotten the idea by observing the Navi’i technology herself: we see her taking samples of the neural networks in the forest roots near the beginning of the movie and we know she runs a school for Navi’is which probably has as much to do with exploiting them for their knowledge as it does teaching them.

However, Cameron ultimately argues that the humans are not able to fully develop this technology because their science is constrained by the politics of imperialism. For the humans, there is a contradiction between their technology and their social relations. The Navi’i’s link technology implies the possibility of deep forms of communication between beings. But instead the colonists’ Avatar program involves a “mind-body” split where consciousness “comes down” from above like an Avatar to dominate and control the Navi body. The largely white colonial scientists then take over Navi bodies and use them to support a liberal imperialist project of gunboat diplomacy, and “white man’s burden” efforts like building the school to teach English.  If there is a conflict between the colonial scientists and the colonial mining corporation in the movie, it simply represents two competing forms of capitalist accumulation: resource extraction vs. biotechnology, a conflict playing out right now in Chiapas, Mexico between oil companies that want to destroy the jungle and biotech companies that want to plunder its genome.

The Avatar program is still trapped in the logical of modern Western individualism: ONE individual consciousness enters one body. The Navi’i, in contrast, seem to be able to transfer their consciousness into the entire world around them, not just an individual body, and their use of this technology is not based on the domination of mind over matter, it is based on a mutual, dialectical relationship where the birds they merge with have to “choose” them as much as they “choose” the animals. This ultimately makes the Navi technology more powerful than the human technology, which ends up helping them win the war in the end because they are able to  convince Eywa to come to their aid in the form of an onslaught of animals who attack the human predator drones. Some commentators over on the Kasama blog asked if nature is going to save them anyway what’s the point of fighting back? This misses the point: the Navi’i shape and change nature as much as nature shapes and changes them; they have an unalienated relationship with the natural world but they are far from being controlled by mysterious forces and they don’t simply bow before some unchanging essence. On the contrary, their society is like what Murray Bookchin hoped a future social ecology on earth could be: nature rendered self-conscious.

Grace Augustine realizes all of this too late because she is too trapped in her liberal white man’s burden logic and the fact that she is a client of imperialism whose science is funded by the colonial mining effort. In an argument with the corporate CEO of the colony who wants to destroy the Navi’i Home Tree, Augustine says correctly that the Navi’i belief in Eywa is not “paganism”. She says that Eywa is a material presence, which (she thinks) can be quantified, because it involves a kind of planet-wide computer system, a neural network in the roots of trees that processes information rapidly. What she doesn’t understand is that Eywa cannot be understood or studied by breaking her into discrete pieces and putting her under the microscope. When Eywa is trying to save her life all Augustine can think of is “I should take samples of this” and the movie suggests this attitude, this “wound” is ultimately the wound Eywa is unable to heal.

At the same time, Augustine is right, the Navi’i do not practice a “primitive” mysticism. Eywa is not a disembodied Spirit. The Navi are not idealists, in fact they fully integrate spirit and matter, idealism and materialism, in a way that only the most utopian libertarian Marxists and anarchists have dreamed up. They do not worship a God who stands outside of and dominates the natural world, nor do they merge into a pantheistic Oneness, a “night in which all cows are Black” as Hegel put it. Their worship involves merging their consciousness with the world around them through creative praxis: though a mix of contemplation and action. It is almost like all of them become Jesus figures: fully God and fully human(oid), they are in touch with universal truth in and through the concrete, particular, embodied reality they live in. This allows them to co-develop/ co-evolve with the natural world and that’s why they are able to develop such a sophisticated system of biologically-based technology.  To extend the theological echoes here, I wonder if the choice of Grace Augustine’s name was intentional.  For her, like for St. Augustine, grace and spirit come down from above to control disobedient bodies; for the Navi’i who defy her liberal racist science, there is no separation between spirit and matter.

In summary, I don’t think Cameron presents the Navi as primitive. In fact, I think they represent what humanity could look like if we didn’t invent capitalism, patriarchy, and the state. Imagine if indigenous peoples on earth were never conquered by patriarchal and capitalist empires but still continued to develop and grow through history (if we reject the noble savage myth, this means indigenous cultures have history and do change and grow without the intervention of imperialism). Could one possible future have been something like the Nav’i?  I would like to think so.  Maybe for many of us the appeal of Avatar is that it expresses repressed dreams for a less alienated way of life.

For example, Navi’i society has less of a gender binary; both men and women fight and hunt, and they even look relatively similar (notably, Cameron manages to make these relatively genderqueer creatures have sex appeal which pushes the limits of Holywood’s heterosexism, even though unfortunately the Navi’i appear to have only heterosexual mating patterns because Jake Sully is asked to choose a woman for a mate). Most importantly, it is a woman leader who is most adept at interpreting Eywa to make political decisions. While they seem to have some form of leadership hierarchy, it doesn’t appear to be based on coercion or permanent class divisions. And it seems most of their technology is used towards the goal of making life easier and relatively affluent – they have plenty of food and shelter and seem to have a lot of fun because their work and their play overlap. This means that their military technology is relatively underdeveloped (hence the bows and arrows), leaving them at first unable to match the human colonists who pour most of their resources and science into developing tools to exploit and conquer others instead of developing their social relationships.

So ultimately this is a story not about an indigenous past vs. a colonial present; it is a story of a utopian revolutionary indigenous future vs. a dystopian capitalist future. It is the kind of society many of us dream about building on earth vs. the society we have nightmares about: Blackwater mercenaries conquering and destroying everything in their path, justifying it all as a preemptive war on terror, dispensing even with basic concepts of citizenship and rights, leaving life bare and broken.

While I don’t think it’s fair to accuse Cameron of primitivism I do think that there are problems with how exaggerated he makes this contrast. The Navi’i are too utopian to the point where they seem fantastic or unbelievable. The human colonists are complex – there are class and ideological divisions among their ranks which lead to mutiny and treason. Why does the same process not happen among the Navi’i? None of them, except for the main character Jake Sully, betray their people and he only does it because he literally has a white man in his head telling him what to do. Why are there no opportunistic layers in Navi society willing to give up their way of life for “blue jeans and light beer”?   The fact that they are completely immune to the temptations of capitalism seems too flat.  For example, why are none of them willing to become a comprador ruling class, middle men power brokers between the people and the colonists like so many misleaders and house slaves have been willing to do on Earth?   If Cameron had explored these kinds of dynamics the film would have been much more compelling and much harder to dismiss.

Ultimately, Cameron does explore these questions, but not in terms of social or class relations: he explores them primarily through a developing conflict within the inner consciousness of the individual Avatar, Jake Sully, as I will argue at the end of this essay. The Avatar is a composite of two characters: Jake Sully the disabled marine, who is a white man, and Jake Sully the Navi’i whose blue body is bred by the colony and controlled by the white man.

Race Treason and Anti-Imperialism?

Most commentators focus on Jake Sully the white man and present him as the main character. In this reading, the movie Avatar is a story about race treason. Sully becomes a reference to white people like the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown who switched sides, who broke with white supremacy, who refused to act white, and who joined people of color in revolt against white supremacy. Sully fully identifies with the Navi’i struggle to the point where he becomes Navi’i and fights his former people. The white commander of the mercenary forces directly calls Sully a race traitor and tries to kill him for it.

Because most people interpret Sully the white man as the main character, debate about the movie ends up falling along pre-established ideological fault lines. The movie has reignited an important debate about the problems and possibilities of advocating that white people become race traitors. This debate sometimes references Race Traitor magazine, a publication that advocated that white people no longer identify as white. In my mind, both sides of this debate make good points and both have their flaws. Advocates of a race traitor strategy say it is necessary to help break up the white club, to create civil war among white people so that people of color can more successfully bring down white supremacy. Also, they argue that white supremacy also oppresses white workers, women, queer folks, and people with disabilities. Each of these groups has good reason to fight against the ruling class but instead they are told to ignore their own oppression, to say “at least I’m not Black”, and to side with the white rulers against people of color. Advocates of race treason claim that it should be the role of white individual to switch sides, not only for the sake of people of color but also for their own liberation.

Many of them would claim that Jake Sully in the movie does just this: his is a person with disabilities and is working class so he can’t afford the health care necessary to get his legs back. He is the profile of a poor working class white veteran who is fighting to colonize people of color but is getting screwed by the military in the process. Sully realizes this and switches sides, turning the guns around and fragging his officers.  What does it mean that millions of military age white Americans are watching this movie? If they identify with Jake Sully’s transformation, does that mean the movie is nurturing seeds of rebellion, mutiny, or treason against U.S. Empire? White identity in the US is going through a process of transformation right now because many of the systems that supported white supremacy (for example the United Auto Workers which gave white workers access to higher paying skilled jobs in auto plants) are breaking down as the system can no longer afford to pay out the benefits to co-opt white workers and keep them in the white club. Maybe movies like Avatar are so popular because lots of white people are starting to look for something else to become. If so, isn’t this a good thing?

…Or Blue-Face Racist Fantasy?

I think it is to some extent, but it poses some serious problems.  The problem with a race traitor strategy is even though it advocates smashing whiteness it ends up putting white people at the center of the story. It makes it seem like the agency to fight white supremacy and colonialism will come from heroic white individuals who switch sides rather than from millions of people of color – the world’s majority, who need to work out their own contradictions and build up their own organizations to revolt. Critics of Avatar rightfully claim that the film plays into this dynamic. Some of them claim that Jake Sully never fully gives up his white privilege. He can go back to being a colonizer at any time; he never fully experiences what it’s like to be an oppressed Navi’i. And, in the end, he ends up leading the Navi’i in their revolt; this makes it seem like the Navi’i are helpless and need to be saved by a white man.  As my friend C.J. argued, yes it’s true the Navi’i have sophisticated technologies but in the end it is only the white man who knows how to use these technologies to defeat the colonists; he alone can ride the giant bird, and he alone can speak to Eywa at the end to convince her to fight with the Navi’i.  More damningly, he is the ONLY ONE to suggest uniting the Navi’i clans to fight back which makes the rest of the Navi’i appear to be stupid and un-strategic.  In fact, as Will from Gathering Forces pointed out, they were still busy trying to save a white woman’s life (Grace Augustine) when their entire people was about to face genocide! Isn’t this all just a liberal racist fantasy?

Unfortunately, I think this is the message many white folks will take away from the film, and Cameron doesn’t do anything in terms of his narrative to significantly jolt them out of it. At the same time, there are aspects of the story that challenge this reading and thus give us space to raise criticisms of the race traitor concept when we discuss the film with folks around us. For example, even when Sully calls the clans together to revolt he ultimately recognizes the leadership of the more militant Navi’is who trained him: the lead male warrior and Neytiri, the woman who trained him in Navi’i ways who becomes his partner. Sully uses his ability to ride the giant bird and his knowledge of the enemy’s technology to help unite the clans to fight but it doesn’t appear that he is the only one calling the shots. In fact, he even asks the more militant Navi’i whether he can speak at one of the rallies and they give him permission. Also, at the end, he seems to relinquish his prestige as the one who can ride the giant bird and goes back to being a rank and file Navi’i. Finally, and most importantly, the source of strength and the agency for winning the revolt does not come from his heroism alone, it comes from the fact that the Navi’i are able to come together and to draw from their strengths and knowledge of the land to wage guerrilla warfare.

Sully realizes this is the only way after he exhausts all the options available within the framework of liberal imperialism. He starts out by trying to “preserve” Navi’i culture thorough Grace Augustine’s colonial anthropology only to find out the corporate leaders are interested only in mining not in culture. They even use his field notes to justify their destruction of the Navi’i Home Tree. Then Sully tries to use his privilege to stop the bulldozer from cutting down the trees by desperately shouting at them to stop as if he actually mattered to them. When this fails, he sees that an individualistic revolt based on his own moral standing in the eyes of the colonizers is going nowhere and he returns to the Navi’i people, recognizing that the only agency for change lies with them. Notably, when he does this, his privilege does start to erode: the white colonel sets out on a vendetta to hunt him down and kill him.

Finally, it is not only a white man who commits treason against colonialism in this film. I agree with some critics that it would have been much more powerful if Jake Sully were cast as a person of color. Imagine if he were a disabled Native American or Arab war vet and if Cameron had explored him going through a process of realizing that the same system that stole his people’s land is now stealing the Navi’is land? However, Cameron suggests this when he casts Jake Sully’s co-conspirators as South Asian and Latina. They are central to orchestrating the mutiny inside the colonial military and one of the movie’s climaxes is the Latina character Trudy Chacon trying to frag the white colonel shouting “you’re not the only one with a gun bitch.”   Despite its serious problems, I find it hard to dismiss as racist a movie that successfully gets an American audience to root for people of color soldiers when they choose to frag their officers rather than kill other oppressed people.

Blue Skins White Masks?

But, more importantly, I think both sides of this race traitor debate are missing a key part of the story. They are focusing on Jake Sully the white man, even though it is Jake Sully the Navi’i, in his blue body, who actually gets the most screentime, and who is really central to the story. I don’t think this is only a story about a white man who commits race treason. I think it is also a story of an alienated Navi’i who begins as a traitor to his people and ends as an anti-colonial militant.  The Navi’i don’t know that Sully the Navi’is mind is being controlled by a white man in the colonial base; Neytiri only figures it out at the end. They perceive Sully as a Navi’i brought to them from the Sky People (humans), as someone who has caught their “insanity.”   They probably assume that Sully is part of the English language school that Grace Augustine runs through her own Avatar character. The film suggests that the Navi’i forced this school to shut down as an act of revolt against this kind of white man’s burden paternalism.

But, like has happened all too often in colonial history, it is not just white men running this liberal paternalism, it is people whose bodies are oppressed because they come from the colonized “race” but whose minds are whitewashed.  In this sense, perhaps Jake Sully  has what W.E.B. DuBois described as “double consciousness”: his mind and body are split and there is a war going on between the oppressor and the oppressed for the fate of his body. In this sense, Jake Sully starts out as the Navi’i equivalent of an Uncle Tom who is trained in the colonizer’s schools and goes back to use the master’s tools to dominate his people. He is a “blueberry”: blue on the outside, white on the inside. Over time, he needs to exorcise and transform the white part of his mind, which means switching sides and joining the revolt of his people against colonialism. In this sense, the movie could actually be read as a parable for the psychological transformation of colonized peoples. As Frantz Fanon described, colonialism demanded that people of color could be nothing else besides white and yet it never allowed them to be white. This contradiction and loss of identity can lead to an explosive anger and violence that can only result in self-destruction or revolution against the colonizers. In the film, Jake Sully’s tension is worked out through armed struggle. Through this struggle Sully is finally able to reject the white consciousness that is dominating his mind and he is finally able to find his place among the insurgent Navi’i people. Read this way, the movie does speak powerfully to the agency, complexity, and humanity of oppressed peoples. Ultimately Sully doesn’t save the Navi’i, the Navi’i save Sully. It is their collective power, manifested through the battle and culminating in the final ritual at the Tree of Souls, which allows him to make the final transition to become fully Navi’i.

Conclusion: Seeing Deeply

Ultimately the main point of Avatar is “I see you.” Navi’i culture is based on this deep recognition of interconnection and interbeing. This is a spirituality of liberation which stands in militant resistance against the logic of wars on terror, wars for resources, and scientific research sponsored by private military contractors. Despite all of the film’s serious flaws, I do think that the film gives us enough to work with to argue that “I See You” also stands in resistance to liberal imperialism and “friendly” racism. To fully SEE each other, we can’t be paternalistic, we need to recognize the self-activity of oppressed people and the central role oppressed folks must play in choosing the ecological, free, and less patriarchal future represented by the Navi’i over the nightmare future represented by the colonial mercenaries. Hopefully the film inspires people to fight today to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to stop the ongoing theft of indigenous land from British Columbia to Palestine, and to stop the capitalist destruction of Earth’s ecology before it is too late.

my friend, Sarah Hopkins, made this flag after we watched "Flag Wars," a film about middle class, white gay men gentrifying a black neighborhood. The rainbow flag became a symbol of gentrification, so we realized we need to make our own flag which symbolizes working class, queer liberation.

In the past two years, the issue of gay marriage has dominated the scene of queer struggles. Some of us are actively supportive, others, grudgingly supportive, and more others who rail that yet again, queer struggles are being monopolized by assimilationist, middle class versions of normality and family: “We are the same as you, except for in bed.”

Some supporters of gay marriage point to the economic benefits of marriage. Working class and poor queers need marriage to help alleviate their poverty; immigrant queers need marriage to get US citizenship. I agree. Yet, let’s not forget that many queers will never get married because of their suspicions of state institutions. Granting gay marriage doesn’t guarantee that immigrant spouses get visas or are free from ICE harassment. Also, around us we see families for whom marriage has not helped alleviate the race and class oppressions that they face everyday. While it may be true that gay marriage does benefit some immigrant couples, oftentimes this comes as an afterthought rather than a decisive theme of gay marriage struggles. It is undeniable that the struggle for gay marriage has been dominated by white, middle class queers who support the Democrats and are ashamed of those of us who don’t fit in their status quo.

One may see gay marriage as a reform to be won to open up space for more gains for queer liberation. Indeed, if gay marriage was simply a tactic within a broader strategy that integrated class, race and queer struggles, perhaps it wouldn’t cause so much anxiety among radical queer circles. In the absence of a broader strategy and vision however, all our hopes get pinned on this one struggle and the questions become stressful, burdensome and intense: Are we betraying our roots? Are we fighting for the society we envision through this struggle? Exactly what is this broader vision of queer liberation that gay marriage is a reform toward?

That the issue of gay marriage has dominated and overshadowed other important discussions that should be had among queer radicals shows that there has been a lack of strategy and vision of queer liberation that integrates anti-racist, anti-patriarchy, class struggle and anti-ableist perspectives. While academics have churned out thousands of books on queer theory, spinning our heads dizzy with abstract lingo, those of us on the ground have not similarly churned out our own theory and practice of queer struggles. This is not to say people have not led successful and important campaigns around queer liberation. However, the strategy and vision has not been clearly articulated and insufficiently theorized for it to be replicated and generalized in different places and conditions. The result is the domination of liberals, with their pro-capitalist, liberal racist, ableist, “tolerate us” ideologies.

The limits of middle class ideology

One glaring question is: Where is the working class in our strategizing and vision of queer liberation?

What kind of politics has defined queer liberation in such a way that has led to the erasure of the working class, which composes the majority of US society and the world?

Most queers are workers. That means the queer struggle is also a class struggle. Why hasn’t it been seen as such?

How do we organize as workers to demand queer liberation? Who are our friends, and who are our enemies? Will the union bureaucracy or the rank and file lead the movement?

These questions lead us to examine how middle class politics have dominated queer organizing. This domination has led to the erasure of working class and poor queers. This is not simply a coincidence.

Middle class academics have produced middle class theories to understand our oppression. In the post 1960s era, with the demise of class struggle politics, identity politics have taken reign. Similarly, the failure of revolutionary groups to take up gender and sexuality as decisive parts of the class struggle has meant that academics had the free reign to monopolize queer theory.  As a result, middle class academics could get away with claiming that class struggle politics has nothing to do with queer politics because they confused the class-reductionist and often heterosexist politics of degenerate Leftist sects with the struggle of the working class itself, including its many queer members.

The result of all of this is that our movement is left with a shallow analysis of “intersectionality” rather than a full strategy by which the oppressed –  people of color, women, queer folks, people with disabiliteies — can unite to fight our common enemies.  Among progressive circles, the idea of “intersectionality” has been taken up by the non profit industrial complex (NPIC). In the absence of working class organizations like revolutionary organizations and thriving unions, academia and the NPIC have become the dominant progressive institutions today. The theories they espouse understandably have lasting impacts.

It is commonly explained, that “our oppressions intersect.” That race, class, disability oppression (the –isms) all come together to support one another. When activists reference these intersections, it is usually a call for different identity based groups to work together, to counter a divide and conquer. It is also an attempt to recognize the specific struggles of each identity-based oppression. The intentions are good, and serve initially as a useful lens for understanding various experiences, yet fall flat as an organizing theory.

The erasure of class in the intersectionality theory is most clearly expressed through the replacement of class oppression with the defanged term, “classism.” Rather than advocating for class struggle of the working class and the poor taking over the means of production and the running of society, the “classism” analysis is an attempt to raise the consciousness of the rich, to be NICE, FRIENDLY, SENSITIVE to their poorer brethren. Under “classism” ideology, working and poor folks become the rich man’s burden, not an agent for change in our own right. In fact, the organizing that arises from such an ideology is as condescending and patronizing toward working class and poor folk as the snobbishness it aims to criticize.

At its worst, intersectionality theory compartmentalizes our identities — we are a “class” compartment, lying next to a “woman” compartment, lying next to a “people of color” compartment, and then a “person with disabilities” compartment, and the list goes on. In reality, we aren’t neatly arranged compartments segregated and then intersected. That each of those individual compartments is further divided into those with more and less institutional power is also erased. In reality, we are a mesh of working class, queer, gendered, differently abled and colored people. We don’t naturally have more allegiance to the queer segment of ourselves than the colored segment – we are all of it at once. We hate the white supremacist queers, as much as we disdain the ruling class people of color or labor bureaucracy who will readily sacrifice us for their own self interest. We also don’t naturally have more allegiance to the queer middle class than we do to the rank and file straight workers.  Our self-conception is more complicated, and our liberations, more explosive.

I have heard vague calls for queers to work with labor. Yet, broadly speaking, what is labor? By labor do we mean the labor bureaucracy or the rank and file? Also, what is queer? Is queer the assimilationist white, rich, patriarchal gay men or the transfolk denied jobs for their gender expression? When queer works with labor, who exactly are we talking about?

The majority of the world is the rank and file of the working class, not the union bureaucrats. The majority of queers are not middle class and white. In fact, union bureaucracies and queer middle classes have betrayed us in their grab for their own power, making shameless alliances with the very forces that exploit our labor and erase our identities. We are mostly working class, rank and file, queer people of color and that’s who most of us see when we look into the mirror everyday. Any attempt to build an “alliance” between labor and queers needs to begin from this starting point.  An “alliance” or “intersection” should not even be necessary, it is only made necessary by the fact that the union bureaucracy dominates “labor” and the gay elites dominate “queerness.”  If we can break down these twin dominations then it will be much easier to build an “alliance” because most queers already are labor and many laborers are queer. This involves struggle and organizing.

Queer Struggle is Class Struggle

Selma James is a Marxist feminist who wrote the seminal piece, “Sex, Race and Class,” among other feminists texts that reclaim women’s liberation from middle-class, racist ideology. She and others in the Global Women’s Strike were pioneers in organizing Wages for Housework, demanding that women who engage in the often invisible and devalued reproductive labor, be compensated for their work as laborers in capitalist society. I draw heavily from their perspectives toward women’s liberation to understand queer struggles as also manifestations of class struggle, hoping to expand beyond the heteronormative theories that nonetheless, were so groundbreaking at the time.

To adapt James: the queer struggle need not wander off into the class struggle. The queer struggle is the class struggle.

Rather than dissecting who we are and dividing ourselves into neat compartments that await token representatives to “intersect” our oppressions for us, is it possible for us to see that these oppressions are manifestations of class oppression? Our experiences and oppressions as women, as queers, as folks with disabilities, cannot be separated from the capitalist structure of society.

The old, white, male revolutionary left would have us think that class struggle was only in the factories. In “Sex, Race and Class” Selma James decisively shows that the class struggle extends beyond the factory. Unwaged labor done by housewives in heterosexual families, provide the reproductive labor that is essential for the system to maintain itself. Whether it is bringing up the next generation of workers through nurturing children, or replenishing the labor of their partners through the maintenance of the home and the bare necessities, housewives conduct the work that is often invisible, but necessary for the continued and intensive looting of labor by the capitalist.

The emphasis and dogged maintenance of the heterosexual nuclear family is a product of capitalism. All who violate it are criminalized. To the extent that women and queers challenge the eternity of this heteronormative institution, we are not wanted.

Queer Families

The heterosexual nuclear family ensures that the responsibility for reproductive labor can be contained within the household, stripping the state, or the capitalist bosses of any responsibility for maintaining their workers’ health, sanity, desires. Besides being an institution that replaces society in meeting the material needs of workers, the heterosexual nuclear family also serves other emotive purposes.

As John d’Emilio describes, the nuclear family under capitalism is supposed to function as an affective site, a “personal space” that is an escape from the stresses of public work life, that helps workers to deal with the alienation they experience on a day to day basis. We are taught to believe that even though works sucks during the day, at least you have your cozy family to return to. The fact that many blood families are actually dysfunctional, patriarchal, homophobic, or damaging to our self esteems, in large part also a product of the stresses of daily living under capitalism, is besides the point. We are often told that it is something to be tolerated since it is the only imagined site of reliability and comfort that we can count on in a dog eat dog world. We are taught from young that aside from blood, other relations are tested and many don’t survive. The reality is, every relationship is tested and stressed under capitalism and we cannot escape the alienation in a definitive manner, nuclear family or not, without struggle.

Queer liberation is deeply tied to the existence of non-heteronormative families as legitimate families with access to social services, jobs, education, shelter and support. These families go beyond gay marriage even though the latter could arguably serve as a useful reform.  Our need to encompass struggles for different families has to do with the fact that the possibility of total rejection and abandonment by our blood families and communities, a loss of financial and emotional support from them, has been a real fear for many of us. Some of us are pleasantly surprised by families that have accepted and loved us nonetheless, and yet more others have been brutally disappointed. Regardless, in light of theories that will continue to see our trangressions of heterosexual norms as a sign of individual mental instability, a community that affirms our desires and needs is all the more necessary. Chosen families, non-heteronormative families, are not merely luxuries, they are needed for our very real, daily survival.

Yet under capitalism, these families are illegitimate. Single mother households, or households with people with disabilities, or extended families with elderly and young dependents, or communities that take in non-blood relatives as their own, struggle to survive off of welfare checks or minimal paychecks. These families do not readily and predictably churn out the future, obedient disciplined workers that will deliver their bodies to capitalism, in exchange for a pittance of a wage. Our rejection of capitalist discipline is written off, as our cultural inadequacies. Perceiving our labor as unwanted and untrustworthy, capitalists reject us from the economy and ship us off to prisons, nursing homes, mental institutions or into the informal economy of the streets, still managing in the process, to extract some profit for themselves through our oppression.

Middle class ideology cannot liberate us because it reiterates capitalist attacks on our chosen, non-heteronormative families. It will teach us to reject the families we have, and to settle for the more nuclear, more hetero, the more “responsible” family. Yet another non profit will offer us job training programs for the worst, cheapest, most demeaning service sector jobs and expect us to be thankful. Clinton’s welfare act did just that and masqueraded itself as a well-meaning “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” program. This is couched in terms of us learning “life skills,” learning to be responsible citizens under a capitalist system, to unlearn our rebellion. Yet there is no understanding that many of us disdain these programs and these jobs, not because we are lazy, but because class oppression at the workplace, in the service sector is not a desirable alternative. That we would find a minimum wage job ruled by an increasingly heavy- handed managements, demeaning and undesirable, is then blamed on us: We are undeserving, lazy and untrustworthy.

It is not a surprise that Stonewall took place on the streets, in the dingiest bar that made its business serving queers  ostracized from other parts of the city. Fierce queers, many whom were people of color and sex workers, worked the streets and came out in defense of it. Where jobs in the formal economy shut out queers, particularly transfolk, the streets and its informal economy was and still is, seen as the only place to find money, and family. Where hormones are too expensive and inaccessible because our needs are seen only as elective options by the insurance industries, then street versions make for sufficient transitions. However, the rise of AIDS among queer communities in the 1980s is a reflection of the challenges of street lives, of poverty, and of a lack of accessible comprehensive healthcare, lest we should over-romanticize its dangers. The complete neglect of the state, the rhetoric of blame that rained on queer communities as a result of the AIDS epidemic, shows how our survival cannot happen without a fight.

Recognizing that any struggle needs strategic allies, where do we turn to? Middle class ideology, through the state and the non profit industrial complex, advocates to save us from ourselves, and help us overcome our queerness, abandoning our chosen families in the process. Even the progressive non profits advocate for us through back room deals with the state or the Democrats, who have proven only to be the worst, two-faced betrayers of queer liberation. If we can agree that such resolutions are unsatisfying, who then can queers who engage in the informal economy, for whom the streets is home, turn to for our collective liberation? How can we make the struggle against discrimination of transfolk at workplaces, the struggle for better wages and more desirable jobs, a real struggle on the streets, and not mere legal reform negotiated in back room deals that too many of us are shut out from?

Homophobia and Transphobia is also Class phobia

For all its talk of fostering creativity through competiton, the capitalist system is the most repressive in stifling the creativity and motivation of its workers. It insists on seeing us merely as cogs in a system, devoid of thought, emotions, and desires. When queers are discriminated in the hiring process for being too gender deviant, too campy, too out, it is because we jarringly disrupt the capitalist fantasy of a brainless, emotionless, machine-like worker. We are punished for showing that there really isn’t a division between the public life in the workplace, and our private lives as sexual, emotional, gendered beings. We bring our private lives into our public lives, the workplace, either because we have no intention or no way to hide who we are.

The attack on queer expressions of gender and sexuality in the workplace under capitalism is an attempt to strip us of our agency, creativity, sexuality, intelligence. Yet these same traits are the ones that queer and straight workers alike utilize to get through the grueling workday. We improvise our jobs with lessons learned from years of experience or stories exchanged by reliable co-workers; We hold ourselves to an integrity at the workplace that bosses keep pushing us to betray: we refuse to snitch on our co-workers, we help the slowest and newest workers get through so they get paid like all of us; We also know better than the next new manager where all the safety hazards in the workplace are, or how best to organize the work. All these aspects of labor cannot be found in the employers manuals, but are lessons transmitted through conversations in the break rooms or on the job, or during rants in the clock-in stations. Just as queer workers are seen as too outrageous for our transgressions of what is normal at the workplace, so are these invaluable conversations seen as too bold, too unruly by an inhumane capitalist system.

These demands for our freedom, from gender expression to workplace control, go beyond the contract, or our wages. At their best, these are demands that arise from our desire as workers to see the workplace not merely as sites of alienation, but also as extensions of who we are and our relationships. Currently, it is only the top echelon, the CEOs who get to put their own unique, personalized stamp at their workplace. These desires challenge the fundamental basis of capitalist control over our labor. For that reason, they are beyond the confines of trade union politics and cannot be successfully negotiated through the contract. It is the daily struggles of the rank and file workers where such tension is experienced and so it will be through our daily, independent, and militant action that this tension can be overcome.

Patriarchy

Under capitalism, patriarchy serves the dual functions of devaluing female labor, particularly that of women of color, as well as appeasing oppressed male labor. The gender binary, the patriarchal family and heterosexual marriage are key manifestations of patriarchy that affect the everyday lives of working people.

The gender binary limits and enforces the division between male and female genders, subjugating the latter under the former. Historically, male workers, particularly white men, have been attributed of rationality, scientific knowledge, and power relative to women workers. Women, the supposedly lesser sex, are cast with hysteria, emotions, instability, needing male supervision and control. Women of color have been devalued in society, the targets of racism and sexism, and their labor, the most devalued. Our cheap and accessible labor has provided capitalism an unending pool of female workers who will accept low wages.

The fraternity of male supremacy also institutionalizes this division to prevent male workers from questioning their own oppressions — there is always someone worse off.  Through the process of slavery and white supremacy, the U.S. ruling class realized that it could keep white workers under its thumb by giving them better wages and other benefits denied to Black workers. It encouraged them to reflect on the fact that, as miserable as they may be, at least they’re not Black.  Similarly, too many male workers congratulate themselves for not being sexualized, objectified and devalued as women workers under the capitalist system. There is always someone worse off. Under this binary, gender benders, trans workers cannot find a stable liberated place. To the male supremacists, the transwomen have betrayed their gender, and transmen desecrate the male gender. By their crossing, both render the division undesirable, indefensible and transgressible.

Our mere existence as queers do not imply naturally that we are anti-patriarchal or anti-capitalist, yet our existence threatens this binary under capitalism and it is up to us to bring forward a politics that utilizes this power. Through a queer politics that also draws from anti-patriarchal struggles, we challenge the notion that women workers need to be subservient, or that male workers need to cling on to the chains of their imprisonment. We can smash the gender binary everywhere we go, and through that, dismantle the systems that are premised on its existence.

As the capitalist system abandons previously thriving and unionized American cities to exploit cheaper labor elsewhere, deindustrialized cities are full of unemployed and poor people of all genders. Lisa Duggan’s luminal essay[1] suggests that where white privilege and male privilege had once guaranteed white folks and men a sense of entitlement on the basis of their race, gender and citizenship, today’s capitalist race to the bottom strip these benefits and present instead unemployment and welfare as the few viable options. In lieu of these losses, white male workers either acknowledge the need to stand side by side with other oppressed workers, or they resent their loss and seek to reinforce that sense of superiority and entitlement. One may argue that Vincent Chin and Brandon Teena were victims of a last grasp at masculinity and its privileges in deindustrilaizing cities.

Brandon Teena was a transman who was raped and murdered in cold blood in 1993, in Lincoln Nebraska after his transgender identity was revealed. His story was depicted in Boys Don’t Cry, as well as the Brandon Teena Story. Lisa Duggan situates what happens to Teena in the context of the deindustrializing Lincoln, Nebraska. In the absence of jobs and presence of abject poverty, those who transgressed boundaries were subjected to violence. They threatened an existing order that could not deal with any trepidation. She insightfully says,

A politics that cannot grasp the constraints, coercions, pressures and deprivations imposed through class hierarchies and economic exploitation, or that fails to imagine the realities of rural, agricultural and other non-metropolitan lives, cannot possibly speak to the Brandons in our midst. Brandon needed a labor movement, a working class politics, a critique of economic cruelties.[2] (emphasis mine)

Duggan’s quote and its analysis are important because it discusses homophobia and transphobia not simply as an incomprehensible form of hate by straight folks, but rather situates it in the context of deindustrialization, poverty, and pressures that such economic deprivation creates for all folks who live in that environment. This is important for us to understand, not to excuse the violence of the perpetuator’s crimes, but rather to understand its origins so we can fight back and change the conditions that created it. An incomprehensible hate cannot be destroyed and neither can it be transformed, but through mass struggle, an economic condition and its pressures that lead to transphobia and homophobia can potentially be changed.

Yet, contrary to what middle class chauvinism would have us believe, homophobia and transphobia are not just the realms of deindustrailized cities and the working class. The recognition of the existence of homophobia and transphobia within working class communities is simply a sober assessment and recognition of the challenges we have to overcome in concreting organizing toward a vision of a working class queer liberation. As Joanna Kadi says, the caricature of the homophobic worker is also a fantasy of elitist queers who have either have had no meaningful contact, or simply outright disdain and class hatred for the working class. Middle class folks and their urban chauvinism would have us believe that queers outside of metropolitan areas are subject to even greater hate crime, or violence from their communities. These folks have no ways of understanding the myriad ways in which our families and communities have also expressed their love and support for our chosen lifestyles and partners. Bound by less rigid social etiquette norms that rich folks are socialized into, our working class families are less inclined to hide what they believe. This doesn’t mean we are more or less homophobic, simply more vocal about whatever it is.  When the spotlights shine on the question of working class homophobia, what is instead left invisible, is the institutionalized heteronormativity, racism, ableism and class oppressions that have destroyed more queer lives than hate crimes ever have. The military, the abject healthcare system that increase our risk of HIV/AIDS, unemployment, and police brutality are only some examples. Let us not forget that the blood is on the hands of the capitalist ruling class and the middle class that create, support and enforce those policies.

Will we be degenerating into a class reductionism by situating queer struggles within class oppression?

Are we in danger of saying “Queers and Straight, Unite and Fight?” along the same lines that the Communist Party once envisioned for Black workers? The vision of “Black and White Unite and Fight” put black workers demands as secondary to white worker demands, claiming that black workers had to silence their struggles against racism for a façade of unity. Instead of demanding white workers overcome white supremacy,, black workers were accused of dividing the class through their resistance against their racist co-workers. For our purposes, how do we avoid the same class reductionist strategies that call for an undemocratic popular front between queer workers and a by-far heteronormative labor movement?

There are some precious lessons to take from the Black Power movement. In her piece, James discusses how Malcolm X, a figure whom many would associate only with Black nationalist politics, was able to hit at the crux of working class struggle. To quote her:

Intellectuals in Harlem and Malcolm X, that great revolutionary, were both nationalists, both appeared to place colour above class when the white Left were still chanting variations of “Black and white unite and fight,” or “Negroes and Labour must join together.” The Black working class were able through this nationalism to redefine class: overwhelmingly Black and Labour were synonymous (with no other group was Labour as synonymous-except perhaps with women), the demands of Blacks and the forms of struggle created by Blacks were the most comprehensive working class struggle.[3] (emphasis mine)

Where class is racialized and oppression exacerbated along racial lines, then race was also another redefinition of class. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers was one such example. Based in Detroit in the late 1960s, the LRBW was a Black autoworkers organization that was independent from the union bureaucracy. They saw that the union bureaucracy, in its collaboration with management, was unable and unwilling to fight against the racism that Black workers were facing. They were always the last ones hired and first ones fired, and subject to extremely dangerous working conditions because their lives didn’t matter to the capitalists and the union bureaucracy. The LRBW took independent action on the shopfloor, such as wildcat strikes, to fight for their safety, through a message of Black workers struggle against racism. When the demands were achieved, it was a victory for all of the working class. The Black struggle is the class struggle.

How can we form organizations today that take up the struggles that queer workers, both employed and unemployed, face at the workplace and in doing so, further the struggle for all of the working class? So that our victories are also class victories?

The need for a working class queer liberation theory and practice is not just an academic foray. It is a necessity for us to reach out beyond the abstract lingo of queer theory, beyond the annals of academia, urban centers and progressive non profit scenes. If we are to appeal to queers who are working class, are people of color, are differently abled, and who may not even identify as queer but, whose love lives, sex lives, gender expressions and family formations are all queerly out of heteronormativity, then we need to articulate a politics that reflects this diversity.

Drawing from the words of the Combahee River Collective, working class queers across race, ability and gender have to be responsible for our own liberation. We have to build power in such a way that those who accuse us of dividing their heterosexist labor movement, or their white, middle-class queer movements will have to realize  that “they might not only lose valuable and hardworking allies in their struggles,” but that they might also be forced to change their habitually heterosexist ways of interacting with and oppressing working class queers.
In 1978, the Black lesbian feminists of the Combahee River Collective said,

We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.[4]

We do well to learn from that history to build on our theory and practice on a queer liberation that weaves in anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-ableist class struggle politics.

Power to queers, and therefore to the class.

[2] ibid

[3] Selma James, “Sex, Race and Class,” <http://libcom.org/library/sex-race-class-james-selma>

[4] Combahee River Collective Statement, <http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html>

Two weekends ago in Iran hundreds of thousands people (perhaps more) took to the streets once again and defied the clerical regime. The holiday of Ashura was turned into another referendum in the streets with people marching, as well as attacking police stations and banks. Not only were about a dozen people killed by the police, but there were reports that some units refused to fire on the crowds and that some went over to the marchers. What seemed to be at first a continuation of the small, sporadic but violent demonstrations that have occurred in recent months, turned into another massive street confrontation with the regime. Therefore, they have turned out to be a further development of the June 2009 protests that, what seemed like protests about the questionable election result of Ahmadinejad’s victory, became a direct and mass challenge to the character of the regime itself.

Well before the June events, and periodically since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the character of the regime and the struggles against it have become among the Western Left and Iranian socialist exiles deeply and bitterly debated. The reason for this urgency is obvious: Imperialism has spent 30 years in an unrelenting attempt to win back its access to Iranian oil and destroy the historical example of the Iranian Revolution. While more recently the U.S. has hoped to sponsor a version of its “color revolutions” in Iran (as they have in Ukraine, Lebanon and Georgia), there is another side of the struggle in Iran that is fundamentally opposed to the interests of Western imperialism. The fundamental issues, of course, go back further and are not new, and go back to the time of the Russian Revolution when this became a dividing line between anarchists, Left communist currents, Trotskyists and Stalinists.

Here are some basic readings that cover some key positions on the Iran events. Some basic questions worth asking (among others): What is the class basis of the movement? What are its politics and demands? What are the forms of struggle that are developing? What is the relationship of U.S. imperialism and Israeli apartheid to developments inside Iran and the historical legacies of the Iranian Revolution? What are the issues involved in the “split” between the Iranian and Arab Left concerning the character of the regime and the movement against it?

Background to the June events:

Kaveh Ehsani, Arang Keshavarzian and Norma Claire Moruzzi,
Tehran, June 2009

Iran and the Western Left:

Wildcat,
Iran: A new warm-up?

World Socialist Web Site, The crisis of the Islamic Republic and the tasks of the Iranian working class

MRZine Editor,
How many Leftists are “United for Iran”?

Saeed Rahnema,
The Tragedy of the Left’s Discourse on Iran

I have felt this takes on a particularly important dimension in the United States where race/class tensions have existed between Asians and Africans.  This has been most notably recognized in popular media through the Asian shop owner pitted against the Black community.  Hopefully these dynamics will be explored in the upcoming months on the blog, but to frame that discussion properly we need to start from a seemingly distant point.

Here are some notes on Aijaz Ahmad’s chapter on “Three Worlds Theory” from his book, In Theory. While Aijaz explores the relationship of literature, socialism, nationalism, and anti-colonialism, I will primarily focus on the latter three.  I am specifically trying to explore the relationship of “Afro-Asian solidarity” to Three Worlds Theory (When people say “third world” the underpinnings go back to TWT.), the Bandung Conference, and the Non-Aligned Movement. I am not saying they are the same thing, or that they originate from the same historical moment or people.  I am trying to connect and separate concepts in the hopes of achieving some clarity. Fundamentally, I believe the question of Afro-Asian solidarity is about the class nature of such solidarity.

I believe this is important as in the last decade a host of works by Bill Mullen, Vijay Prashad, Robin Kelley and Fred Ho revive a legacy of African and Asian solidarity.  I believe this attempt is vital, but has been underdeveloped theoretically and politically.  Most notably it has taken on Stalinist and Maoist politics.  I have taken Aijaz’s chapter as a key place to start thinking about the problems of any discussion on Afro-Asian solidarity.  My interest is in thinking about Afro-Asian solidarity ‘from below’ from a class perspective.  In this light Mullen’s connection of CLR James and Grace Lee Bogg’s collaborative efforts is vital.  There is much more that can be explored from ‘from below’ recoveries in the context of national liberation and communist movements.

If my notes on Aijaz do not make 100% sense right now, my upcoming notes on the Darker Nations should clarify why Aijaz is so vital in the discussion of Afro-Asian solidarity. I believe that Vijay Prashad’s work is a long lament or tragic drama on why the national bourgeoisies did not have time or resources to develop the nation; or that they were not pushed to the left far enough; among other excuses justifying a history of national liberation and neo-colonialism rooted in the national bourgeoisies as the determining agents of social change.

a) Aijaz asks a fundamental question: “whose nationalism is it”  (292)?  What class interests are at play in any national configuration?  Was Bandung or the Non-Aligned Movement reflective the interests of the oppressed layers of the newly independent countries or the national bourgeoisies?

Looking at Bandung or the Non-Aligned Movement as moments of Afro-Asian solidarity, we can ask what does the basis of such solidarity have to be?  Is there a difference between a solidarity from above based on states and ruling classes, and one from below based on workers, peasants, and the unemployed?

b) Aijaz says the following about Three Worlds Theory, “The striking feature of the Three Worlds Theory as it passed through its many versions was this theory, unlike all the great modern theories of social emancipation—for democratic rights, for socialist revolution, for the liberation of women; indeed, anti-colonial nationalism itself—arose not as a people’s movement, in an oppositional space differentiated from and opposed to the constituted state structures, but, in all its major successive variants, as an ideology of already-constituted states, promulgated either collectively by several of them, or individually by one distinguishing itself from another” (292).

Here we can connect Three Worlds Theory to Bandung or the Non-Aligned Movement which posed as movements of liberation, but were movements of the national bourgeoisies.  This is in contrast to all other movements of liberation which arose out of oppressed layers of society.

c) “…the agency of fundamental transformations was said to reside  in the nation-state itself” (293).

d) “An ideological formation which redefined anti-imperialism not as a socialist project to be realized by the mass movements of the popular classes but as a developmentalist project to be realized by the weaker states of the national bourgeoisies in the course of their collaborative competition with the more powerful states of advanced capital.” (293) and “It was this sectoral competition between backward and advanced capitals, realized differentially in the world, owing partly to colonial history itself, which was now advocated as the kernel of anti-imperialist struggles, while the national-bourgeois state was itself recognized as representing the masses (293).

e) What was the Bandung Conference in a more historical sense: “Held in April 1955 in the Indonesian city of Bandung, it was a Conference strictly of the independent countries of Asia and Africa.  South Africa and Israel were excluded for obvious reasons, the two Koreas were also excluded for reasons of controversy, but the Indochinese countries and three African  colonies which had not yet become entirely sovereign were included because they were soon expected to gain their independence.  No country was invited from Latin America.  China was invited, and Zhou En Lai in fact played a considerable  role, despite the fact that China was the world’s largest communist country; Paksitan (one of the hosts) and several such countries were also there, despite their military alliance with the United States” (294).

For some more basic information on the Bandung Conference check out the Wiki page.

f) Aijaz points out that the term “Third World” comes Europe for what its worth (294).

g) For Aijaz the larger global geopolitics is also pivotal in understanding the brinkmanship shown by China an India.  The Korean War had just ended. China needed to normalize its relationships with its Asian neighbors not on the terms of the Communist menace.  Nehru wanted to isolate Pakistan since it was being entangled in an American military alliance.  Sukarno of Indonesia had to deal with the second largest Communist Party on the continent and was being pressured to reconsider his own position of neutrality towards the American military alliances in the region.  Thailand and Philippines who were invited to the Bandung Conference were under the umbrella of American protection.

What emerges from Aijaz’s sketch is that geopolitics was a vital dimension to how some of the leading countries at the Bandung Conference saw things.  Aijaz jabs at the idea that a unified Third World ever existed—one against US Imperialism and Communist domination.

i) “Since the Western media were less interested in regional realities and saw those realities through the prism of Soviet-American contentions, it was particularly keen to pick up this singular aspect and conjured up a tripartite division of the world, with the ‘Third Word’ being the world of military non-alignment.  In this characterization, the American world was First not because capitalism was superior but because its interlocking military alliances, from NATO to SEATO, were more powerful, with fully global reach; the USSR was Second because it had only the Warsaw Pact, with a comparatively very inferior technological base; the Third World was composed of those countries which were militarily not aligned with either the United States or the USSR and could there be a force for peace. The fact that this key element of non-alignment did not fit half the governments represented at Bandung did not much bother the media, and it has not bothered the scholars who have inherited that tradition of representing Bandung” (296).

Aijaz points out that “Third World was simply another name for military non-alignment” (296).

Later in the chapter Aijaz argues that “Not socialism but nationalism has always been designated by the propagators of this term…as the determinate, epochal, imperative ideology of the Third World” (307).  While I agree with Aijaz in this precise instance, but is national liberation and socialism counter posed to one another?

j) “We do not agree with the communist teachings, we do not agree with the anti-communist teachings, because they are both based on wrong principles,” Nehru is reported to have said at the Bandung Conference (297).

Aijaz asks “who is the ‘we’ in Nehru’s sentence” (297)?

Aijaz’s response is very important, “Nehru had been the first to underline the fact that it was a conference of governments. Nehru’s sentence, in other words, is a governmental sentence.  The ‘we’ is, in the first sentence, the government of India. In this first instance, it presumes that it speaks on behalf of all of India; government, in other words, claim to be the nation” (297).

k) Aijaz also points out that Nehru was speaking to the masses of India who were between the Communists and Congress (the latter being Nehru’s party).  Aijaz argues that he is fundamentally saying that it is anti-national to vote for the Communist Party.

l) Aijaz challenges the fundamental truth of whether Nehru was committed to non-alignment.  He raises a dirty secret about Nehru, “had spent the first few years after Independence seeking an alliance with the Anglo-American bloc, and there was some anxiety in the country that he might revert to this position at any time, as indeed he did during the Galbraith ambassadorship, in the Kennedy years…” (299).

After independence, Nehru “Got India to join the restructured British Commonwealth instead, in April 1949, and even accepted the King as ‘Head’ of the Commonwealth, mainly with a view to cultivating the Anglo-American bloc” (301).

m) Aijaz says that each of the Presidents/ Prime Ministers came with their own internal/ national compulsions.  He is not particularly clear on the internal dynamics which brought Sukarno to the conference (perhaps others can comment), but in the case of Nasser it is fairly obvious: he had just come to power in Egypt, he had a massive Communist party to deal with, the showdown with the British over the Suez canal was only a year away leading to the need to cement his own credentials as a world leader in the struggle against imperialism.

Hopefully several things emerge out of these notes. The first is that the Bandung moment is not reflective of Afro-Asian solidarity in the sense of one which involves hundreds of millions of people in their own self-emancipation.  It was the politics and conference of a newly emerging elite of formerly colonized countries.  The latter aspect which lends to so much nostalgia, romanticization, and sympathy for that era and those figures.  This only obscures the self-activity of countless people whose blood and sweat freed their nations from colonialism, and instead throws up representative figures who at the same time had to crush the most militant dimensions of revolutionary socialist-nationalism to achieve power.

Second, is the publication of texts which discuss that era are politically important because they implicitly offer new ways of forging such an Afro-Asian solidarity.  The question for future activists and militants is will that solidarity be forged through nation states or with the self-activity of millions of oppressed people.  There is a clear line between the two which cannot be blurred.

Sustar, who relies to a certain extent on Kim Moody’s very solid 2007 book, US Labor in Trouble and Transition, paints a broad picture of contemporary labor as one that has faced a thirty-year employer assault that has destroyed its organizations, left workers with stagnant wages, and looted its social services, meanwhile the profits and power of capital soar. The result of this attack has not only left workers in the objectively worst position it has been in since the 1930s and before but has also created a general crisis of historical memory where a newer generation of workers lack the traditions of struggle of an older one.

This ruling class offensive which has been exacerbated by the economic crisis, has hurt people of color, women, and queer folks most acutely. Talks of the “he-cession” which depict the loss of those jobs that employ men disingenuously leave out how it affects the unpaid labor of women who both produce future workers and reproduce current workers’ ability to work. They forget how the recession affects queer folks who already are not entitled to domestic partner benefits. And they forget the already disproportionately unemployed and underemployed black working class who have suffered another round of job losses and concessions that have affected the industries where they are most concentrated, including public employment.

The union bureaucracy has undergone a change. Decades ago, they were reined in through the capital-labor social contract to help deflect working class self-activity into bureaucratic channels. The union structure became removed from the struggles of the shop floor and colluded with management to ensure labor’s productivity. Nowadays, these institutions are dead and dying as capital no longer needs them. The appearance of labor’s organized reup via Andy Stern’s SEIU is in fact appearance only, for in the name of organizing it has undercut labor conditions, bargained behind workers backs, attacked independent unions, and has partnered with management to ensure not only productivity, but capital growth. The UAW is another manifestation of this transition where it has gone from management partner to shareholder under American auto’s restructuring. Where previously it oversaw the destruction of union jobs and wage and benefit concessions, under its new position it is leading this process with the creation of a two-tier workforce.

The hopes for any labor renewal from above that came with either the election of John Sweeney to the AFL-CIO helm in 1995, the Change to Win split in 2005, or the election of President Obama have come crashing down every time. Instead, Sustar points to the 2006 immigrant general strike, the Republic Windows occupation, the Smithfield Strike, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers boycott, and the growth of workers centers as new forms of organization and activity as new possibilities for renewal. People of color have been central to each of these experiences and, at least with the CIW, the Smithfield Strike, and workers centers, have taken place within the US South.

Moody situates the centrality of the South in both the current economic and political dynamics of our period. As part of the neoliberal assault on the working class in the rust belt, production has not simply been offshored but relocated to the US South. Looking at the current economic picture, Moody postulates that the United States is still fundamentally an industrial society and that deindustrialization is not a national but merely a regional phenomenon.

Sustar contends correctly that the prospects for any movement to grow in the South or prevent its insularity from movements elsewhere will depend seriously on the two-fold challenge of organization of the South’s industries that places the fight against white supremacy as central. While Sustar sees the purges of the radical elements of the CIO union as determinant of the failure to organize the South in the 1940s, it is not just a top-down dynamic. White supremacy pervaded not just companies and right-wing labor bosses, but the white working class itself. While there were historical exceptions to this trend, the possibilities for white supremacy’s defeat simply weren’t strong enough.

The potential problems of the article are in seeing the inverse of what C.L.R. James called the period after World War II, as “not a crisis of leadership, but a crisis of the self-mobilization of the working class.” Sustar, and Moody alike, connect the upsurge of a new labor movement with the reinvigoration of radical or “social movement” labor leadership still if they reject the new corporate unionism of Stern and Gettelfinger or even the old Gompers business union model. To be sure, Sustar doesn’t disregard the need for such from-below activity, but it isn’t given the central historical role it deserves and is essentially made dependent on the union structure.

It was folks like James, Martin Glaberman, Stan Weir, and Staughton Lynd that saw the self-activity of the working class as the basis for a new militant leadership or unionism, but that the former must preserve its own formal and informal independent organization lest it forgo its power and wind up in the same position it is in now.

–

U.S. labor in the crisis
Resistance or retreat?

By LEE SUSTAR

THE ELECTION of Barack Obama last November seemed to promise a new era for organized labor. With Obama in the White House and a solid Democratic majority in Congress, it appeared that unions would finally be able to get action on their main legislative agenda—passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a measure that would make it easier for workers to join a union. And with the world’s press gathered outside Obama’s Chicago home during the transition period, a victorious factory occupation at the Republic Windows and Doors plant in that city captured the imagination of the country, and even got some encouraging words from Obama himself. Soon afterwards, workers at the huge Smithfield pork processing plant in North Carolina voted to unionize after more than a decade of vicious anti-union actions by the company. Hopes were high that unions were set to go on the offensive.

A few months later, the picture is quite different. The chances for the passage of EFCA appear bleak. The biggest union in the country, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was embroiled in the undemocratic takeover of its 150,000-member West Coast health care local.1 At the same time, the SEIU intervened in the internal conflict of another union, UNITE HERE, once its closest ally, to annex 150,000 members of a breakaway faction. The old UNITE leader, Bruce Raynor sought refuge in the SEIU because, he claimed, the HERE side was spending organizing money wastefully; the top HERE official, John Wilhelm, accused Raynor of bargaining for low wages and poor working standards, Stern style, in order to convince employers to allow unfettered organizing. At stake is not only union jurisdiction over hotels and casinos, but control of the only union-owned bank, the Amalgamated Bank, which had $4.47 billion in assets in 2008.2

As a result of this internecine battle, the SEIU-dominated Change to Win group of unions was in tatters. A 2005 split from the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win unions had failed to deliver a promised breakthrough for labor. Instead, it was edging toward some sort of reunification with the labor federation—but only under pressure from the Obama administration, which insists on the convenience of one-stop shopping when it deals with the unions.3

Certainly the Republic Windows and Doors occupation to win workers’ severance pay—and the solidarity and excitement that this action garnered—remains an inspiration. But what followed wasn’t similar victories, but one of the most catastrophic setbacks in the history of the U.S. labor movement. Private employers were demanding, and obtaining, concessions from unions in industries ranging from newspapers to trucking companies. Even as expectations of Obama mounted in advance of Inauguration Day, Chrysler and General Motors were slashing jobs and gutting union contracts as they drifted toward bankruptcy amid the worst economic slump since the Great Depression.

It was during that 1930s crisis that the United Auto Workers (UAW) stormed onto the scene with dramatic factory occupations led by communists, socialists, and other radicals. Today’s UAW, though, is a vastly different organization. It has followed its long-established strategy of partnership with employers to an extreme conclusion by becoming, through health-care trust funds, a major shareholder in GM alongside the U.S. government and the majority (55 percent) shareholder in Chrysler. To achieve this bizarre form of employee ownership—the union trust fund will get just one seat on the company board—the union agreed to ban strikes for six years, eliminate work rules negotiated over decades, cut overtime pay, and further concessions.4 The result of all this is the virtual elimination of the difference between UAW-organized plants and nonunion ones. The UAW, which once steadily raised the bar for wages and benefits for the entire U.S. working class, is now leading the way down.

The driving force in obtaining these concessions is the Obama administration, which publicly claimed that it had been tougher on the UAW than the Bush White House.5 Rather than use the $50 billion nationalization of GM to launch a green industrialization program, the Obama administration wants to create a slimmed-down “new GM” while selling off unwanted assets at fire-sale prices. This will intensify the crisis in the auto parts industry.

Even mainstream liberal commentators were aghast at the terms of Obama’s GM bailout. “Wouldn’t it be better to use the money to convert GM and other declining manufacturing companies into producing what America needs, such as light rail systems and new energy efficient materials, and training laid-off autoworkers for the technician jobs of the future?” said former labor secretary Robert Reich.6 Rather than use GM to create good paying jobs, the Obama plan will further downsize GM’s UAW. “At the end of the 1970s, when the first round of concession bargaining began in the U.S., the UAW had 450,000 members at GM,” wrote Sam Gindin, a former economist for the Canadian Auto Workers:

Today, after repeated contracts that allegedly “won” job security in exchange for workplace, wage, or benefit concessions—sold by the union as well as the companies—the UAW’s GM membership is down to 64,000. If GM is “successful” in its current restructuring, that will be further reduced to 40,000. Thirty years of concessions and a 90 percent loss in jobs. If ever there was a failing strategy for workers, this was it.7

The capitulation by UAW leaders has boosted the confidence of employers everywhere in their effort to make workers pay for the economic crisis. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger met no union resistance when he imposed unpaid leave on state workers, which amounted to a 9.2 percent cut in pay. He planned to seek another 5 percent cut as this article was being written.8 Fifteen other state governors have made similar moves.9 And when United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) dared to show resistance by organizing for a one-day strike to protest layoffs, they were hit with a judge’s temporary restraining order that banned the action by threatening to levy fines that would bankrupt the union and strip the credentials of any teacher who walked out. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the most active of the big-city labor councils, failed to mobilize in response.10

If union leaders can see a bit of a silver lining in one of these many ominous clouds, it’s the appointment of a pro-union member of Congress, Hilda Solis as labor secretary.11 But that’s little compensation for Obama’s leave-no-banker-behind economic policy. So far, Obama’s funneled trillions in U.S. taxpayer money into enormous bailouts for Wall Street, compared with only modest tax cuts for workers and an economic stimulus plan that will create far fewer jobs than the six million jobs that the recession has already destroyed.12

Besides this immediate onslaught, the U.S. working class faces an epochal shift as the result of three intertwined crises: a protracted economic crisis that will lead to plant closures and layoffs (“restructuring” in the employers’ parlance); a generational transition in which younger workers find that decently paid union jobs held by their parents are no longer available; and a great demographic shift in which immigrants account for an increasing share of the working class. Before we can assess the prospects for labor’s revival, we need to take account of these developments and understand their economic, social, and political implications.

Kim Moody, the veteran socialist, labor activist, and author, has made an invaluable contribution to this task in his recent book, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition. Moody argues that organized labor, already weakened by decades of decline, has become further disoriented and thrown onto the defensive by several trends, including an aggressive attack on unions by Corporate America, demographic change, and a restructuring of manufacturing around “lean production” that involved steady job loss—not simply as a result of globalization, but through new labor-saving technology and a shift to nonunion operations in the U.S. South. The analysis that follows will take Moody’s work as a point of departure.

Impact of the economic crisis

The recession—or perhaps, depression—is greatly exacerbating the problems of the U.S. labor movement. Even as the economic downturn began in December 2007, one labor economist pointed out that, “17.5 percent of all unemployed workers were long-term unemployed, compared with just 11.1 percent in March 2001,” the start of the last recession.13 And if job growth had simply kept pace with the population increase, there would have been an additional 3.2 million more jobs in the U.S. economy by 2008.14 Today, workers are facing what the Economic Policy Institute calls a “jobs desert,” with joblessness at 9.4 percent in May 2009, the highest level since 1983. One in four of the unemployed—some 3.9 million people—had been jobless for at least six months.15

The leadership of organized labor has been unable—and in many case unwilling—to resist job losses among unionized workers. Rather, they have concentrated on organizing the unorganized. This led to an increase in the numbers of workers in unions by 311,000 in 2007 and by another 428,000 in 2008, bringing the so-called union density rate to 12.4 percent, up from 12.0 percent in 2006.16 These gains—especially in the context of a recession—highlight the fact that tens of millions of workers are prepared to organize, a conclusion supported by recent opinion polls.17

While these increases in unionization are important, the pace is far too slow to change the balance of power between labor and capital—and the recession and the anticipated “jobless recovery” will likely wipe out these advances. Further, unionization is down from about 35 percent in the mid 1950s. In the private sector, union density is just 7.5 percent, a figure comparable to that of a century ago. Yet even these stark numbers fail to convey the extent of labor’s crisis. Half the country’s union members (about eight million people) live in just six states—New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and California. The South remains a bastion of anti-unionism, where six states had unionization rates below 5 percent.18

The union bureaucracy has sought to overcome its crisis through political solutions via the Democratic Party. And unions did play a major role in Barack Obama’s presidential victory, spending $300 million on the elections and mobilizing enormous numbers of union staff and members.19 This led labor to look forward to the political spoils—chiefly, the passage of EFCA. But, as usual, organized labor badly overestimated the support of its supposed Democratic friends in Congress and the White House. Instead of using its election field operation to launch a campaign for EFCA, the unions pulled back just as big business geared up.20 Nevertheless, union leaders continue to look with hope toward the Obama administration for a political solution to their problems—if only because they have no other strategy to deal with the employers’ escalating demands for givebacks.

Indeed, the auto crisis is only the most egregious example of concessions bargaining that has taken place since the onset of the recession in December 2007. For example, Teamster officials reopened a contract at YRC, the parent company of the Yellow and Roadway freight haulers. Union officials agreed to, and workers ratified, a 10 percent cut in pay and mileage compensation. In return, the workers will get part ownership in the company.21 YRC’s main unionized competitor, ABF, is expected to demand similar givebacks.

Many other companies are pressing similar demands, reported the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA), a private research company. Other large contracts set to expire this year include regional grocery store agreements covering 110,000 workers. Overall, contracts covering 2.2 million private-sector workers will come up for negotiation throughout 2009.22 It should be added that most unions that took major concessions in the last recession of 2001—such as the airlines—have still not overcome the job losses and pay cuts that they took then.

One big showdown could come at AT&T, which demanded concessions this spring in contracts that cover 100,000 workers. Despite $2.6 billion in profits last year, the company recently laid off 12,000 workers. Now management wants health-care concessions that amount to a 7 to 10 percent pay cut.23 After mobilizing for a possible strike, the CWA allowed an April 4 contract deadline to pass without an agreement, apparently to allow its other contracts with the company to expire to better coordinate bargaining.

A notable exception to this concessions bargaining trend is Boeing Co., where a long strike by machinists last fall forced management to back down on demands for virtually unlimited outsourcing and minor gains on pensions.24 Boeing’s backlog of orders gave the union leverage despite the slump. Nevertheless, the strike victory did not roll back previous concessions on outsourcing and lower-tier pay for new workers. Moreover, despite a huge backlog of orders for new airplanes, the economic slump has led Boeing to announce 10,000 layoffs.25

Meanwhile, in the public-sector, recession-driven budget cuts are leading to layoffs and aggressive management demands at the bargaining table. In New York City, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has extracted $400 million in health-care concessions from public-sector unions as he pushes to eliminate 2,000 jobs.26 New York governor David Paterson, a Democrat, backed off a plan to lay off 9,000 state workers, will eliminate 7,000 union jobs through buyouts and attrition, and reduce workers’ retirement benefits.27 Across the Hudson River, yet another Democrat, New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, also used the threat of layoffs to get state workers’ unions to agree to an eighteen-month wage freeze and ten unpaid furlough days, a giveback worth $304 million.28 Across the country, in Washington State, Governor Christine Gregoire, another Democrat, submitted a budget that eliminates funds for pay raises that the state had previously negotiated with unions.29 There are similar examples from other states.

Organized labor’s failure to resist concessions has lowered the living standard of all workers. According to the BNA’s Wage Trend Index, annual wage growth in 2009 will be about 2 percent, as the economy will “eliminate any ability for the vast majority of workers to negotiate higher wages,” said Kathryn Kobe, the economist who worked on the report.30

The recession will accelerate the transformation of the U.S. into a low-wage economy—a trend that is already far advanced. As the New York Times’ Louis Uchitelle wrote last year:

The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction…. The decline is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly workers still earn that much. That’s down nearly 60 percent since 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.31

What’s more, household income was propped up only because of the increasing role of women in the workforce—that is, it took two (or more) incomes to achieve the living standards that one wage earner could have supported previously.

As the Economic Policy Institute noted with the release of the State of Working America 2008/2009,

although the economy has expanded by 18 percent since 2000, most Americans’ household income does not reflect that growth. Quite the opposite: real income for the median family fell by 1.1 percent from 2000–2006. A small increase in the median family’s hourly wages (1 percent) was more than wiped out by the 2.2 percent drop in annual work hours. Moreover, whatever wage growth occurred since 2000 was based on the momentum from the 1990s recovery—wages did not improve at all over the 2002–07 recovery.32

As measured in today’s dollars, the State of Working America authors note, “from 1979 to 2007, wages are up only slightly, from $16.88 in 1979 to $17.42 in 2007, a growth of just 0.1 percent per year over nearly 30 years—virtually stagnant, despite some rapid growth in the late 1990s.”33

In the recovery of the 2000s, the share of national income going to profits reached a forty-year high. This change in the distribution of national income, the authors’ estimate, is “the equivalent of transferring $206 billion annually from labor compensation to capital income.”34

For African Americans, as always in U.S. capitalism, the system is qualitatively worse, owing to the legacy of slavery and the persistence of racial discrimination. The Black jobless rate in May 2009 hit 14.9 percent.35 If there is still a controversy among economists whether to call this downturn a recession or depression, in Black America there’s no debate.

In short, U.S. workers are experiencing a rapid and sharp drop in income, employment, and living standards, with slim opportunities for improvement in the foreseeable future. This will have far-reaching social and political consequences. The aim here is to try and frame some of the questions facing the labor movement that will arise from this crisis.

The one-sided class war

The 1960s and 1970s are remembered as the heyday of the civil rights and antiwar movements. But it was also a time of worker rebellions in the “basic industries” of auto, steel, and coal mining as well trucking. Much of a revived revolutionary left threw itself into union organizing. Then came the PATCO strike of 1981. President Ronald Reagan used the full power of the state not only to replace 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, but also to obliterate their union. The signal to employers was clear: It was open season on unions, and “concessions bargaining”—negotiations in which unions surrendered pay and benefits—became the norm.36

The obliteration of PATCO also encouraged further government intervention in strikes, from routine injunctions limiting picket lines to violence by police deployed to protect strikebreakers. The National Guard was used to violently break strikes by Arizona copper miners in 1983 and Minnesota meatpackers in UFCW Local P-9 in their heroic 1985–86 strike against wage cuts.37 A decade later, striking newspaper unions in Detroit abided by court injunctions and violent police tactics that shut down effective, militant mass pickets during the opening weeks of the long Detroit newspaper strikes.38 In January 2000, South Carolina state troopers attacked a picket line in Charleston, S.C., which led to five longshore workers being placed under house arrest for more than a year until a solidarity campaign forced charges to be dropped.39

The heavy hand of the state ensured that most picket lines would remain symbolic rather than active attempts to stop production, as they had been in the militant struggles of the 1930s. Striking unions adopted the slogan, “one day longer” to show their willingness to outlast employers. Workers sacrificed enormously in what were often valiant, but losing, battles, such as the Illinois “War Zone” struggles at food processor A.E. Staley, heavy equipment maker Caterpillar, and tire maker Bridgestone/Firestone.40

The big exception to this pattern is the victorious 1997 Teamsters strike at UPS—a big employer was caught flat-footed by workers’ solidarity and widespread pro-union sentiment. UPS could make no serious attempt at strikebreaking. But UPS was able to use its political connections to mount a campaign against then-Teamster president Ron Carey, who was elected on a reform slate. In the months after the strike government overseers of the union removed Carey from office for campaign violations by his staff, even though Carey, who passed away recently, was later cleared of all wrongdoing in federal court.41

In the post–PATCO labor movement, the heaviest judicial hammer has come down on Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, which represents 38,000 bus and subway workers in New York City. In 1999, a judge put in place an injunction in which fines of $25,000 for strikers and $1 million against the union would double each day of the strike. After the union did walk out for sixty hours in 2005, a judge imposed a fine of $2.5 million on the local, banned the automatic deduction of union dues from workers’ paychecks, and ordered the brief jailing of union president Roger Toussaint.42 Local 100—already weakened by ex-reformer Toussaint’s high-handed administration—has yet to recover.43 The New York injunctions were apparently the template for the judge who banned the planned one-day strike by L.A. teachers. This hard line recalls the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when unions routinely faced “injunction judges,” violent attacks on picket lines by police and armed forces, and naked class justice.

In this environment, unions have all but abandoned the strike as a weapon. In 2008, there were just fifteen work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers, compared to 424 in 1974. In the last two decades, there have never been more than fifty-one such work stoppages in a given year.44 Less union militancy led directly to organizational decline, Moody writes:

[Unions] grew when they fought for something and in particular, as in the 1960s and early 1970s, when they fought to sustain or increase power in the workplace. These days, the notion that growth and militancy have any connection, except possibly a negative one, is angrily dismissed by precisely those who lay the greatest claim to strategies for growth…above all…the SEIU.45

A bureaucratic solution to union decline?

Labor’s long crisis led to the victory of John Sweeney’s New Voices team, which took over the AFL-CIO in 1995. Sweeney’s team gave a liberal makeover to the stodgy Cold War federation apparatus, and promised a labor renewal. (Under Sweeney there was also a repackaging of, but not a fundamental change in, the AFL-CIO’s largely government-funded foreign policy operation, notorious for its collaboration with the CIA.46 That, however, is beyond the scope of this article.)

To survive, Sweeney’s AFL-CIO developed a strategy with four basic elements: (1) encourage mergers with other unions to compensate for shrinking membership; (2) organize in industries that cannot be shipped overseas, such as in health care, hotels, and construction; (3) collaborate with management to try and gain employers’ neutrality in union elections; and (4) pour big money and member activism into electing a Democratic president and Congress in the hope of prolabor legislation.
This approach is pursued by both the AFL-CIO, the historic national labor federation, and the Change to Win (CTW) coalition, which broke away in 2005. It’s a perspective that fits the needs of the top levels of the union bureaucracy. The top union officialdom functions as a buffer between capital and labor, and, in the U.S., most embrace that role enthusiastically. Far removed from the shop floor (if they ever worked there at all—many are lifetime staffers), leading U.S. union officials have a lifestyle and social connections that tie them more closely to management and politicians than to the rank and file. While crises and splits in the union hierarchy can open the door to reform candidates and pressure from the membership, the union bureaucracy will at best vacillate unless pressed forward by rank-and-file action.

And that’s exactly what today’s union leaders are keen to prevent. While their methods differ, both the UAW’s Ron Gettelfinger in the AFL-CIO and SEIU president Andrew Stern in Change to Win have essentially the same goal: create a union machine that is unaccountable to, and impregnable against, the rank and file. Stern’s method is to create gigantic “locals,” often more than 100,000 workers that span one or more states, run by people who were appointed or installed through electoral maneuvers orchestrated by union headquarters.47 In this way, Stern, argues, SEIU can have the clout to force employers into neutrality agreements. Yet this has most often involved top-down organizing in which the workers are passive, even unknowing, recipients of union membership.48

Stern’s scorched-earth effort to destroy the opposition-controlled United Health Care Workers-West with dismemberment and trusteeship is only the biggest and crudest expression of the authoritarian rule that has become the norm in SEIU. Stern’s authoritarianism was on display in April when hundreds of SEIU members were sent to physically attack the Labor Notes union activist conference outside Detroit as part of a dispute with the California Nurses Association (CNA).49 Stern called off the dogs a year later and made peace with the CNA and its affiliate, the National Nurses Organizing Committee, which led to trades of members in Nevada hospitals, a move that, as union democracy organizer Herman Benson put it, left “nurses on both sides feeling like bartered chips.” This, in turn, was part of a complex regroupment of the CNA and registered nurses into a new 185,000-member union affiliated with the AFL-CIO.50

The SEIU’s deal with the CNA wasn’t a case of Stern turning softhearted, however. The deal preempted an emerging alliance between the nurses’ union and the new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), which was founded by leaders and members of the SEIU’s United Health Care Workers-West after the local was put into trusteeship by the SEIU International.51 In any case, the seamy side of Stern’s regime came to light, as corruption scandals took down two important union leaders in Southern California and another in Michigan.52

In defense of these organizing methods, Stern and his supporters claim that workers are more interested in power than democracy.53 It’s true that SEIU has had major success in organizing mostly immigrant janitors after achieving a breakthrough in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. But as Moody points out, the L.A. janitors’ real wages fell by around 10 percent over the course of two consecutive five-year contracts.54 More recently, the SEIU policy of “bargaining to organize” has led to strict limits on traditional union workers’ rights, including the right to speak out on bad conditions in nursing homes. The agreements also included a low wage increase and bans on strikes.55 In Stern’s eyes, the crime of Sal Roselli, who was then president of the SEIU’s United Heathcare Workers-West, was to resist such deals and challenge the SEIU’s approach to partnership.56 Now head of the new National Union of Healthcare Workers, Roselli has the support of tens of thousands of SEIU members, most of whom, for the moment, are legally prevented from joining the new union, which calls for a fighting, democratic labor movement.57

For his part, the UAW’s Gettelfinger is also seeking ways to preserve the bureaucracy by making it as independent from the rank and file as possible. The means to do so was to be the retiree health-care trust fund handed over to the union by GM, Chrysler, and Ford under the terms of the last contract. Now that those funds give the union ownership stakes in GM and Chrysler, the union itself will be the enforcer of harsh working conditions, lower-tier pay, and a ban on strikes.

Of course, unaccountability and hostility to rank-and-file militancy have long been the norm in the U.S. labor bureaucracy. But Stern and Gettelfinger have pushed bureaucratic control to new extremes. Their argument to the rest of the labor movement is that the union machinery must do whatever it takes to survive. In this view, unions must help make employers profitable and minimize, if not eliminate, union democracy in order to permit leaders to make difficult, unpopular decisions. This will allow the unions to survive and rebuild a new base among different sections of workers in nonunion industries. Moody calls Stern’s program “corporate bureaucratic unionism,” a leap beyond even the class collaboration of traditional American business unionism.58

The rest of the union bureaucracy hasn’t gone as far in this direction as Stern and Gettelfinger. But many union leaders would do so if they could. Indeed, the issue in the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO had more to do with control over money and resources than any clear-cut differences over labor or political issues. Essentially, Stern and the leaders of the other CTW unions—including unions of workers in health care, food, farms, trucking-driving, and construction sectors—no longer wanted to be dragged down by the declining manufacturing unions that remained in the AFL-CIO. Splitting the federation didn’t resolve those issues; neither will the proposed reunification ahead of the AFL-CIO convention set for later this year.

Another failure for labor law reform?

Whether or not they reunite, the AFL-CIO and CTW are both focused on trying to pass EFCA. The employers have made it clear that they will do whatever it takes to prevent this “armageddon,” as the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called it.59 But the shift of momentum to the employers recalls labor’s last two failed attempts to pass labor law reform under Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter in 1978 and Bill Clinton in 1994, which went nowhere despite Democratic control of Congress.60

Some in the labor movement have criticized EFCA as an effort to substitute a legal mechanism for the hard work of organizing the unorganized.61 Certainly, EFCA in itself wouldn’t overcome all the problems that have hindered union organizing for decades: bureaucratic, top-down methods that use arbitrary checklists and timelines rather than cultivating and encouraging rank-and-file militants over the long term; jurisdictional disputes that pit rival unions against one another as they compete for “hot” shops; and a reluctance to use job actions and other militant tactics to pressure employers.

Jerry Tucker, a former UAW regional director from the New Directions reform caucus and a leading labor activist, argues that EFCA won’t automatically make it easier to organize unions. “I would take it back to labor’s culture,” he says, “its actual activity and what it represents to workers. Organized labor doesn’t represent a movement at this point that workers can attach themselves to—where they feel a certain sense of upsurge or upward momentum.”62 Moreover, EFCA wouldn’t necessarily lead to the kind of strategic focus needed to rebuild the U.S. labor movement. Crucially, no union has been willing to commit the resources necessary to organize (or reorganize) the critical supply chains of trucks, trains, and warehouses that are integral to today’s just-in-time production methods. (The failure of the Teamsters’ poorly planned and ineptly run 1999-2002 strike for unionization at the Overnite trucking company—now UPS Freight—highlighted this failure.)63

The most import thing about EFCA or similar legislation is that it could reinforce the idea that there’s a federally protected right for workers to organize. As in the 1930s, when organizers used New Deal legislation to claim “your president wants you to join a union,” today’s union officials and rank-and-file activists could use EFCA to encourage workers to be confident to organize. They can use Barack Obama’s own words as justification.64 The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) took an important step in this direction when it used the EFCA debate to relaunch its effort to organize Wal-Mart.

But even the best labor law reforms won’t overcome the crisis of organized labor. As U.S. labor history demonstrates, unionization has increased not in small increments, but in great upsurges of struggle, as in the 1930s.

Immigration and the unions

Amid the latest escalation of the employers’ relentless war on labor there are also signs of the possibility of renewal. On May 1, 2006, millions of immigrants and their supporters marched in cities across the U.S. against proposed federal legislation that would have criminalized the estimated 12 to 14 million undocumented people in the United States. In response, immigrant labor took to the streets. As Moody points out, companies in industries heavily dependent on immigrant labor—from the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach truck drivers to meatpackers to textiles and landscaping services—were shut down for the day, demonstrating the power of immigrant labor in those sectors.65 These actions revived May Day, International Labor Day, in the country where it began during the struggle for the eight-hour day in 1886. The marches were won of the biggest displays of workers’ power seen in the U.S. in many years.

The impact of the immigrant rights demonstrations underscored big demographic changes in the U.S. population—especially in the working class. Moody sees the new prominence of immigrant labor as evidence of a third great demographic transformation in the U.S. working class, following the earlier wave of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century and the changes wrought in the mid-twentieth century by the mass African American migration into the cities, the North, and industry, and the large-scale entry of women into the workforce. Each of these changes posed challenges to organized labor, which sometimes rose to the occasion (uniting white and African American workers in the old CIO mass production industries, for example) but often did not. Today, he notes, “immigrants are already attempting to organize in a variety of ways. The question is, are the strategies and structures of today’s unions fit for the job?”66

To be sure, many unions, especially the SEIU and UNITE HERE, have for many years sought to organize immigrant workers. Those efforts resulted in a historic policy shift in the AFL-CIO in 2000, when the union’s executive council voted to call for amnesty for undocumented workers. This is a big break with the past, when most unions saw immigrant labor as a threat and supported restrictions on immigration. In 2003, the HERE union of hotel workers helped organize “Immigrant Freedom Rides” across the U.S., linking the historic struggle of African Americans for civil rights to immigrants’ willingness to struggle.67

But even as the immigrant rights movement erupted in 2006, labor became consumed in a debate over whether to support employer programs for a guest-worker program. The SEIU and UNITE HERE favored this approach, collaborating with employer organizations to advance the agenda; the AFL-CIO opposed it.68 It wasn’t until President Obama began pushing for immigration reform legislation that the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win federations agreed on an approach that opposes guest-worker programs and proposes a national commission to decide on future levels of immigration of permanent and temporary workers.69

This is a step forward from supporting guest workers, even if it fails to live up the AFL-CIO amnesty position of 2000. But the unions are still far from coming to grips with the changes that immigration has brought to the U.S. working class—and the potential to organize in a radically different way. In the big May Day marches of 2006 and 2007 in Chicago, for example, unions easily could have passed out flyers announcing informational meetings in immigrant neighborhoods in and around the city to explain how the marchers could unionize their workplaces. The self-organization that enabled uncounted numbers of workers to negotiate with bosses for time off—or together plan not to show up—could have been the starting point for workplace organization.

However, most union officials, locked into the narrowest cost-benefit analysis of organizing, simply couldn’t grasp the fact that immigrant workers were willing and able to organize themselves. Other union officials may have understood that potential—but were unwilling or unable to give their full backing to a movement that was beyond their control.

Organize the South—or die

A key focus of Moody’s U.S. Labor in Trouble is the shift in production to the South. While there certainly has been a shift in jobs overseas, the numbers are questionable, Moody points out, because much of the job loss is the result of technological change that makes a smaller number of workers vastly more productive. As a result, even though the number of manufacturing workers in the U.S. now stands at 12.3 million—a drop of 5 million over the past decade70—the U.S. remains a fundamentally industrial economy: “the ratio of service output to goods and structures, as the government measures these, has not changed much in almost half a century…. The industrial core remains the sector on which the majority of economic activity is dependent. Hence it is the power center of the system.”71

The continued centrality of production could allow U.S. manufacturing unions to retain their clout, despite job losses. But the unions have not only failed to maintain wages and conditions in their historic bastions, they’ve been unable to follow work into nonunion facilities, particularly the South. Here labor is paying a steep price for its historic failure to confront racism directly during the era of Jim Crow segregation. In the late 1940s, the old CIO’s Operation Dixie organizing drive was stillborn as Southern employers used both racism and anticommunism to attack any and all efforts to organize Black and white workers. “Only a confrontation,” writes labor historian Sharon Smith, “with Southern white supremacy could have paved the way for organizing success.” But the CIO at that time was busy purging and raiding the left-led unions that were willing to take on that challenge, and its support for the Democratic Party made it incapable of challenging the party’s segregationist Southern wing.72

As a result, in the postwar era the South became an attractive locale for both U.S. and foreign capital. The region has become home to most of the auto “transplants” owned by German and Japanese companies, all of which are nonunion despite repeated efforts by the UAW to organize workers. The picture is similar in other industries: by 2000, 30 percent of manufacturing jobs were in the South.73

Even where labor has made inroads in the South, the unions’ pursuit of corporate partnership and aversion to rank-and-file activism has been ill-suited to the fierce resistance they’ve encountered. A particularly telling example of this is the struggle of the Freightliner Five, leaders of a UAW local at truck plant in North Carolina. When the workers led a brief strike in April 2007, they were fired. Four of the workers had been leaders of the organizing committee that helped compel the company to recognize the UAW a few years earlier. Yet rather than defend these militant, diverse leaders—three of the workers are Black, one is a woman—the UAW excluded them from membership by the union local president. Two got their jobs and union memberships restored in arbitration.74

An important exception to labor’s losing streak in the South was the UFCW’s organizing campaign at the huge Smithfield pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C. Despite years of setbacks through company violations of union election laws, firings of union militants, and general repression—including an in-plant jail—the union prevailed. Key to this was outreach through workers’ centers to both immigrant and African-American employees, and on-the-job organizing that made the union’s presence felt. Long before the union officially won the right to represent employees, the union became a resource for immigrant workers coping with the threat—or reality—of job loss and deportation by supporting a walkout against a raid. For Black workers, the union was key to the successful fight to win Martin Luther King Day as a paid holiday.75

Reviving social movement and class-struggle unionism

The Smithfield victory provides a glimpse of how labor can win even against a hostile employer. But labor’s unwillingness to embrace social movement unionism—among immigrant workers and in general—highlights the larger reasons behind the unions’ repeated failure to organize the unorganized. As Kim Moody explained:

While the blame for so many not getting a chance to choose a union lies heavily with the employers and a broken [National Labor Relations Board], the labor leadership must take a good deal of collective responsibility. This isn’t just the lack of organizing effort by many unions, but the long-standing, top-down business union practices (or worse) of most of those who are organizing in the private sector. You can’t be a union member unless you are, or are about to be, part of a recognized bargaining unit. You can’t even be part of an organizing drive these days unless your employer was targeted by the strategists at union HQ. If you are part of an organizing effort that fails (by card check or election) you’re out. If the union wins recognition but fails to get a first contract and gets decertified, you’re out even if you voted to keep the union. All of these practices are self-imposed, none are required by law. There are a handful of unions that are now practicing non-majority unionism, such as the UE and CWA. And the AFL-CIO and some unions have given a measure of recognition to worker centers and immigrant workers. But most top union leaders don’t want members or allies who aren’t under their control. This needs to change.76

The example of UE should be emphasized. Once the largest union in the old Congress of Industrial Organizations founded in the 1930, it was decimated in the late 1940s and 1950s by a series of splits and raids orchestrated by rival unions because of its left-wing leadership that included members of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, UE has survived as a small but vigorous independent national union of about 35,000 members, one that has in recent decades focused heavily on immigrant workers.77

UE’s militant and democratic approach to trade unionism was vindicated in December 2008 during the successful six-day occupation at the Republic Windows and Doors occupation in Chicago. The occupation was organized by workers to demand severance pay after the company announced that the business was closing its doors. Overnight, a factory occupation—something usually reserved for labor history books on the 1930s and nostalgic speeches at union conventions—became a focal point for working-class resistance amid a profound economic crisis. The widespread attention to the fight even inspired a California “green” window manufacturer to buy the plant, with plans to hire most, if not all, Republic workers.78

That militancy didn’t develop overnight. Republic workers had decertified two conservative and corrupt unions before joining UE in order to build a fighting, democratic union. Those years of struggle laid the basis for the battle of December 2008. By day three of the occupation, the importance of this fight was clear to millions of working people across the United States. “This is the end of an era in which corporate greed is the rule,” said James Thindwa, executive director of Chicago Jobs with Justice. “This is the start of something new.”79

Crucially, the Republic workers—most of them Latino immigrants, a minority African Americans—became the faces and voices of the U.S. working class as it faced the worst economic slump in seventy years. At a spirited December 9 rally of several hundred outside the occupied plant, UE Local 110 President Armando Robles got an especially loud cheer when he declared, “We are America,” a popular slogan from the immigrant marches of 2006. This time, it was a reference to the entire working-class majority in the United States.80

Rebuilding the labor movement in a changing working class

Does the Republic Windows workers’ victory represent, to borrow the overused cliché from the business press, the first “green shoots” of a recovery for labor? Or will the UAW’s epic collapse foreshadow yet another series of retreats and defeats for the unions? Can the independent National Union of Healthcare Workers establish a model of democratic, member-driven, militant unionism? Or will the SEIU’s corporate-style gigantism predominate, as shrinking unions seek mergers for survival in a perverse realization of the old Industrial Workers of the World dream of creating “one big union?”

These questions can only be answered in the struggles of the months and years ahead. But what is already clear is that the depth and length of the economic crisis means that organized labor will have to fight like hell to just to keep its ground, let alone advance. But reviving class-struggle unionism—to use another term from labor’s past—will be a painstaking task. Complicating the process is the fact that the generation that led the last wave of labor resistance in the 1970s is nearing retirement or is out of the workforce already due to job loss. And given the low level of union struggle since PATCO, a younger generation has little or no experience of unions as fighting organizations. As some academic labor relations experts noted, “the reduction of strike activity has created an environment in which the general public, and perhaps some union members have little conception of what a strike is or does.”81

Resistance, nevertheless, continues. Crisis-driven government budget cuts in the months and years ahead makes public-sector strikes in particular more likely. Teachers are in the crosshairs, as the crisis combines with the “school reform” agenda to give school boards additional leverage to attack seniority, impose merit pay, and create nonunion charter schools. Private employers too are using the crisis to push for givebacks that finally forces a showdown, as several long, recent strikes, such as the one at the Stella D’oro bakery in New York City.82

The potential for a labor victory that could change the dynamics is there. Certainly the Los Angeles political establishment was relieved at the judge’s order that banned a teachers’ strike, lest it become a popular rallying point for working people fed up with attacks on the education of working-class kids.

Other elements of labor revival may well come outside the established unions altogether. Moody calls attention to the network of workers’ centers that meet the needs of nonunion workers, often immigrants, to help pursue wage-and-hours claims and assert their legal rights. He also points to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the organization of nonunion immigrant tomato-pickers who waged a successful campaign to force Taco Bell, the corporate customer for their tomatoes, to pay a higher price to finance higher workers’ wages. McDonald’s surrendered next.83 To this list could be added the Starbucks Workers Union (SWU), a project of the IWW. Although it lacks formal collective bargaining rights and represents workers in a relative handful of stores, the SWU has, through tenacious organizing, made gains on the job, reversed firings of union activists, and won precedent-setting cases before the National Labor Relations Board.84

These creative efforts highlight the possibility for new organizing. Yet there also needs to be a strategic focus to rebuilding the unions in the heart of production and distribution. For it is there that workers have the greatest leverage to reverse the decline of their class and begin to make gains.

This point is rightly emphasized by Moody. He points out that the lean production system—minimizing inventories, for example—has created several choke points for U.S. industry. To rebuild their muscle, unions must reconquer, or conquer anew, lost ground in the ports, on trucks, in the warehouses and on the railways. At the same time, unions have to finally make the commitment to organize Southern industry, a task that will require an explicit commitment to fighting racism, long-term preparation, and, ultimately, courageous actions that draw upon the traditions of the civil rights movement. Opposition to racism will be essential in efforts to both organize immigrant workers and serve as their advocates amid xenophobic attacks from the right as it seeks scapegoats for the current crisis.

Entering such battles will require a kind of politics very different from that put forward by union officials, who typically follow the dominant trends inside the Democratic Party. What’s needed is independent working-class politics. This doesn’t mean prematurely declaring the existence of a workers’ party, but rather building on the basis of political independence of the working class. This will necessarily be a long-term project, one that applies the lessons of labor’s largely buried radical history to new conditions.

For that reason, the new debate on socialism in U.S. politics should be taken up inside the labor movement. While socialism re-entered political discussion as a right-wing epithet for Barack Obama’s policies, there is a genuine interest in socialism as an alternative to today’s crisis-ridden system. Left-wing labor activists should seize the moment to bring socialist politics into the workplace—not only as a vision of a more egalitarian and democratic society in the future, but as a way to inform how workers organize and fight today.

To be effective militants today, union activists need to assimilate the lessons of previous generations of socialists who rejected labor-management partnership and promoted class-struggle, social-movement unionism. It was those socialists, communists, and other militants, not the established union leaders, who led the battles that transformed the U.S. labor movement. The 1934 general strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco and the sit-down strikes in auto and other industries a few years later couldn’t have happened without that rank-and-file upsurge. The expansion of public-sector unionism in the 1960s couldn’t have been achieved without the civil rights and Black Power struggles that involved and inspired millions of African-American workers.

In today’s crisis, as Sam Gindin argues, the survival of organized labor—let alone its revival—will require bold new approaches:

This is an historic moment that challenges us to think big or suffer even worse defeats. Faced with immediate needs, workers and their union have too often shied away from taking on larger issues of social change that seemed too abstract, too distant, too intimidating. The lesson however is that if we only focus on the immediate, the options we have are always limited. We are all now paying the price of that failure to think bigger…. In this context, what is truly unrealistic is not new options, but the notion that stumbling through the present crisis will preserve past gains or bring new security.85

Where and when the next upsurge will come is impossible to predict. But with capitalism in a protracted crisis—and the system more discredited than in any time in decades—the conditions for a fightback are developing. And despite the catastrophe in the auto industry and the seemingly endless stream of bad news for workers, the Republic Windows and Doors victory points the way towards a renewed, fighting labor movement. Melvin “Ricky” Maclin, vice president of UE Local 1110, spoke for millions of workers the night that the Republic workers won:

I feel wonderful. I feel validated as a human being. Everybody is so overjoyed. This is significant because it shows workers everywhere that we do have a voice in this economy. Because we’re the backbone of this country. It’s not the CEOs. It’s the working people.86

Lee Sustar is the labor editor of Socialist Worker and a frequent contributor to the ISR.
1 Dan Clawson, “A battle for labor’s future,” Z Magazine, June 2009.

2 Ruby Wolf, “Civil war in UNITE HERE,” SocialistWorker.org, March 31, 2009, socialistworker.org/2009/03/31/civil-war-in-unite-here.

3 Harold Meyerson, “Unifying unions,” Washington Post, April 7, 2009.

4 John D. Stoll and Sharon Terlep, “UAW discloses terms of GM deal,” WSJ.com, May 26, 2009.

5 “Obama administration auto restructuring initiative—General Motors restructuring,” the White House, June 2009, www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Fact-Sheet-on-Obama-Administration-Auto-Restructuring-Initiative-for-General-Motors/.

6 Robert Reich, “No reason for public involvement in GM,” Marketplace, June 1, 2009. marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/06/01/pm_gm_bailout_comm/.

7 Sam Gindin, “The auto crisis: putting our own alternative on the table,” The Bullet/Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 200, April 9, 2009.

8 Jon Ortiz, “State pay cut likely; how it’s done is the question,” Sacramento Bee, May 31, 2009.

9 Herbert Sample, “California provides example for Hawaii plan,” Associated Press, June 3, 2009.

10 Gillian Russom and David Rapkin, “Battle intensifies in LA schools,” SocialistWorker.org, May 19, 2009, socialistworker.org/2009/05/19/battle-intensifies-in-la-schools.

11 “The labor agenda,” New York Times, December 28, 2009.

12 Shobhana Chandra, “Slower U.S. job losses signal recession is starting to ease,” Bloomberg News, June 6, 2009.

13 “Statement by Chad Stone, chief economist, on the December unemployment report,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 4, 2009.

14 Josh Bivens and John Irons, “A feeble recovery: The fundamental economic weaknesses of the 2001–07 expansion,” Economic Policy Institute, December 9, 2008.

15 Heidi Shierholz, “Jobs picture,” Economic Policy Institute, June 5, 2009.

16 “Union members in 2008,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 28, 2009, 1.

17 Costas Panagopoulos and Peter L. Francia, “Labor unions in the United States,” Public Opinion Quarterly (New York), Volume 72, Number 1, Spring 2008.

18 “Union members in 2008,” 3.

19 David Moberg, “Wooing unions for Obama,” Nation, October 13, 2008.

20 Tom Hamburger, “Labor unions find themselves card-checkmated,” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2009.

21 “YRC Teamsters to vote on 10 percent cuts,” Teamsters for a Democratic Union, December 3, 2008, www.tdu.org/node/2571. See also John Schulz, “A YRCW-Teamsters deal reached,” Gerson Lehrman Group, December 3, 2008, www.glgroup.com/News/

A-YRCW-Teamsters-Deal-Reached.-Remember—Its-a-Journey-Not-a-Sprint.-29554.html.

22 “Bargaining calendar is fairly light, but some early reopeners expected,” Labor Outlook 2009, Bureau of National Affairs, January 29, 2009.

23 Randy Christensen, “CWA gets ready for a fight,” SocialistWorker.org, March 25, 2009, socialistworker.org/2009/03/25/cwa-ready-for-a-fight.

24 Darrin Hoop, “Boeing strike ends in union win,” SocialistWorker.org, November 4, 2008, socialistworker.org/2008/11/04/boeing-strike-ends-in-win.

25 Christopher Hinton, “Boeing plans to slash 10,000 jobs as the economy weakens,” MarketWatch, January 28, 2009, www.marketwatch.com/story/boeing-plans-to-slash-10000-jobs-as-the-economy-weakens.

26 Paul von Zielbauer, “City labor unions agree to reductions in health benefits,” New York Times, June 3, 2009.

27 “Unions, Paterson reach agreement to avoid mass layoffs,” Albany Business Review, June 5, 2009.

28 “Corzine, union deal avoids layoffs,” Associated Press, June 4, 2009.

29 Adam Wilson, “State wins union lawsuit: Gregoire can shelve contracts, judge says,” Seattle Times, February 12, 2009.

30 “Slowdown in rate of wage growth to continue, BNA index shows,” Bureau of National Affairs, January 15, 2009, www.bna.com/press/2009/specialreports/wtijan09.htm.

31 Louis Uchitelle, “The wage that meant middle class,” New York Times, April 20, 2008.

32 “For most, economy yields more of less,” Economic Policy Institute press release, August 28, 2008, www.stateofworkingamerica.org/news/swa08_pr_final.pdf.

33 Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008/2009 (Washington: Economic Policy Institute 2008, advance PDF edition), Chapter 3, 12.

34 Mishel, et al, State of Working America, Chapter 3, 42.

35 Shierholz, “Jobs picture.”

36 Kim Moody, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 108–10.

37 For excellent accounts of these struggles, see Jonathan D. Rosenblum, How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Peter Rachleff, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1993).

38 James Bennet, “After 7 weeks, Detroit newspaper strike takes a violent turn,” New York Times, September 6, 1995.

39 The story is told by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger, On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).

40 See Steven K. Ashby and C.J. Hawking, Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

41 Joe Allen, “Remembering Ron Carey,” SocialistWorker.org, December 16, 2008, socialistworker.org/2008/12/16/remembering-ron-carey.

42 Steve Downs, Hell on Wheels: The Success and Failure of Reform in Transport Workers Union Local 100 (Detroit: Solidarity, 2008), 20, 45.

43 Amy Muldoon, “Taking back the TWU,” (Interview with Marvin Holland), SocialistWorker.org, May 15, 2009, socialistworker.org/2009/05/15/taking-back-the-twu.

44 “Major work stoppages in 2008,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 11, 2009.

45 Moody, 101.

46 Kim Scipes, “An unholy alliance,” Znet, July 10, 2005, www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/5864.

47 Steve Early, Embedded with Organized Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 218–24.

48 Brian Cruz and Larry Bradshaw, “Roots of the crisis in the SEIU,” SocialistWorker.org, April 25, 2008, socialistworker.org/2008/04/25/roots-crisis-seiu.

49 Ibid.

50 Herman Benson, “Nurses now for sale, barter and trade,” Union Democracy Review, March–April 2009.

51 Randy Shaw, “The shocking SEIU-CNA alliance,” BeyondChron, March 21, 2009.

52 Paul Pringle, “SEIU spending scandal spreads to Michigan,” Los Angeles Times, August 26, 2008.

53 Sustar, “Behind the UNITE HERE merger,” Socialist Worker, July 23, 2004.

54 Moody, 195.

55 Brian Cruz, “Will SEIU obliterate a California local?” SocialistWorker.org, January 9, 2009, socialistworker.org/2009/01/09/will-seiu-obliterate-a-local.

56 Mark Brenner, “Trusteeship looms for dissident SEIU local,” Labor Notes, February 2009.

57 Clawson, “A battle for labor’s future.”

58 Moody, 196–97.

59 Steven Greenhouse, “After push for Obama, unions seek new rules,” New York Times, November 9, 2008.

60 Sustar, “A new labor movement?” International Socialist Review, Issue 1, Summer 1997.

61 Mishel, et al, The State of Working America.

62 Sustar, “What can turn labor in a new direction?”, (Interview with Jerry Tucker), SocialistWorker.org, April 11, 2008, socialistworker.org/2008/04/11/turn-labor-new-direction.

63 Tom Leedham, “The road ahead runs through UPS Freight,” TDU.org, March 16, 2006, www.tdu.org/node/153.

64 Sustar, “A new battle over the right to organize,” SocialistWorker.org, November 21, 2008, socialistworker.org/2008/11/21/battle-over-right-to-organize.

65 Moody, 211–12.

66 Ibid., 78.

67 Alan Maass, “Freedom ride for immigrant rights,” Socialist Worker, October 3, 2003.

68 Sustar, “Labor and immigration,” Socialist Worker, May 5, 2006.

69 Julia Preston and Steven Greenhouse, “Immigration accord by labor boosts Obama effort,” New York Times, April 14, 2009.

70 “Unemployed exceed manufacturing jobs,” Manufacturing & Technology News, April 17 2009.

71 Moody, 39.

72 Sharon Smith, Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006) 189–92; 197–98.

73 Moody, 45.

74 Sustar, “Split ruling for Freightliner Five,” Socialist Worker, November 7, 2008.

75 David Bacon, “Unions come to Smithfield,” American Prospect, December 17, 2008.

76 Kim Moody, “A few additional thoughts on the new situation,” contribution to the Center for Labor Renewal listserve, November 23, 2008.

77 Jim Wrenn, “UE ‘non-majority’ union organizes the old-fashioned way,” Labor Notes, August 2002; Steve Bader, “Pre-majority” public workers union makes gains in North Carolina,” Labor Notes, September 2002.

78 “Chicago window factory reopens with occupying workers back on the job,” Democracy Now! May 15, 2009, www.democracynow.org/2009/5/15/chicago_window_factory_re_opens_with.

79 Sustar, “A rallying point for labor,” SocialistWorker.org, December 8, 200, socialistworker.org/2008/12/08/rallying-point-for-labor.

80 Sustar, “Republic workers target Bank of America,” SocialistWorker.org, December 10, 2008, socialistworker.org/2008/12/10/workers-target-bank-of-america.

81 Paul F. Clark, John T. Delany and Ann C. Frost, “Private sector collective bargaining: Is this the end or the beginning” in Clark et al (eds.), Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 2003), 4.

82 Jessica Carmona-Baez, “Stakes get higher at Stella D’oro,” SocialistWorker.org, June 4, 2009, socialistworker.org/2009/06/04/stakes-get-higher-stella-doro.

83 Moody, 219–20; Helen Redmond, “McDonald’s caves to farmworkers,” Socialist Worker, April 20, 2007.

84 Adam Turl, “Standing up to Starbucks,” SocialistWorker.org, April 17, 2009, socialistworker.org/2009/04/17/standing-up-to-starbucks.

85 Gindin, “Auto crisis.”

86 Sustar, “Victory at Republic.”