1-02-06, 10:00 am
The class struggle is in some respects like a baseball game. There really isn't a time clock, as there is in most other team sports, but a series of innings that can go on indefinitely, where one team has its chance to score and then has to take the field to keep the other team from scoring. Although there is a set number of innings, with extra innings if the game is tied, teams keep on playing until someone wins, even if curfews force the game to be restarted at a later date or rainouts compel it to be replayed entirely.
To the surprise of many, including, I am sure, the mass media, which reported the New York transit strike in the biased way a particularly partisan sports announcer, known as a 'homer,' reports a game, the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU) won a significant, albeit incomplete victory. On the key question of pensions, the TWU beat back management's attempt to radically reduce workers' benefits. In the new contract the TWU also gained paid maternity leave, which is the rule in most other developed countries, but virtually unheard of for workers in the United States. Workers also received salary increases that were above the present rate of inflation and better than many had expected, along with an improved health care plan for retirees.
The only really negative part of the contract, from a pro-labor perspective, was management's forcing workers to partially pay for their health care benefits, a policy which private and public employers have been implementing for many years as a 'giveback' in the crazy quilt system of insurance-company-controlled, HMO health care in the United States. While this is a loss, it is, in my opinion, clearly outweighed by the gains. Also it should be borne in mind that, the establishment of a National Health Service, making health care a matter of right not a question of employment, would socialize the costs of such care and eliminate the present extremely iniquitous and highly bureaucratic system.
Labor is still very much behind in the class struggle game, given the losses of the whole post World War II area, particularly since the 1980s, when capital owned a federal government, as it does today, that called every play against workers. But now labor has scored some big runs in New York by going on strike and forcing the Bloomberg administration to accept a settlement far less favorable to themselves than they and their media announcers expected.
Media pundits, who have long proclaimed the end of traditional labor militancy thanks to the benefits of 'globalization' now have a lot of egg on their faces, although I doubt they will miss a single beat in uttering their pro-business pontifications. For example, The New York Times’ star utility player, Thomas Friedman, who usually holds forth from centerfield in home games (domestic issues) and right field in away games (foreign affairs issues, like NATO's dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the war on Iraq, and even has a coaching job as assistant manager for the capitalist class), has a new best-selling book, The Earth is Flat, which argues the case that traditional labor and management adversarial relations are as relevant as the flat earth theory today.
This is not only because subways and buses cannot be 'outsourced,' but also because the TWU is a strong union and has enough general labor and social solidarity to stop any attempt by the Bloomberg administration to do to the transit workers today what Calvin Coolidge did to the Boston police strike of 1920 and Ronald Reagan to the air traffic controllers strike in 1981, that is, break the strike, fire all the workers, and replace them.
Rather than being 'outmoded' by 'globalization,' the theoretical and practical value of Marxism-Leninism as a guide to action, or, to continue the sports metaphor, a 'game plan' is enhanced in situations such as the transport workers strike. You don't go on strike at the end of every contract, just as you don't hit and run every time someone is on base, but strikes are still, given the nature of the game, essential tactics to both defend workers’ rights and make gains for all of labor – just as the hit-and-run play is an essential tactic in a baseball game to either score runners or advance them into scoring position at crucial points in the game.
As technology has become more and more complex and large sectors of the economy need workers with technical and professional skills and education, the real value of labor has actually increased. However, capital seeks to reduce labor costs by limiting wage and salary gains and making workers pay more and capital less for health care, pensions, and other social benefits. Workers, regardless of the capitalist propaganda which encourages them to see themselves as weak and powerless are, as Marxists understand, in reality potentially stronger than the capitalists and public officials who think and act on behalf of the capitalists – both of whom are dependent on workers.
Workers can still, as the TWU showed last week, hit and score runs, instead of just passively watching the unfair strikes called against them by biased umpires. They can hit back by going out on strike – telling New York's arrogant managers what the railroad and mining unions told the robber-baron capitalists and governments armed with anti-strike injunctions in past periods of labor militancy: 'You can’t mine the coal and run the trains with Pinkertons and bayonets.'
Workers can also work to change or do away with anti-labor laws, Taft-Hartley nationally and local anti-strike legislation like New York's Taylor law, in order to enable workers to organize union shops and go on strike without worry that 'replacement workers' (scabs) will replace them temporarily or permanently. As Marx and Lenin both understood and made part of their strategy, economic and political power mutually enhance each other, and are ultimately an indivisible tool for the capitalist class to advance their class interests. Thus, the working class must make also make use these tools – through unions, workers’ parties, socialist ideology and policy – an indivisible means of advancing their OWN class interests.
Although I have no belief in an afterlife, the transmigration of souls, re-incarnation, or any religious idealist worldview, I do think that 'Red Mike' Quill and Austin Hogan, along with the Communist and broad left leadership cadre who built the TWU in the 1920s and 1930s, would be very happy today to see their union win this important victory against openly hostile national and local governments and the media.
Mike Quill also served for a time as an American Labor party councilman from the Bronx in a period (1930s and 1940s) when the American Labor Party, supported by the CPUSA and other broad left groups, was able to elect city councilmen on its own and other tickets, including two CPUSA candidates, Benjamin Davis in Harlem and Peter Cacchione in Brooklyn.
Since Labor needs political power if it is to advance and the Democratic Party is never a trustworthy representative of labor, Roger Toussaint and other New York labor leaders, and labor leaders throughout the country, should contemplate running for public office and reviving in some form New York's American Labor Party, as well as independent broad left parties such as the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, before it was merged with into the Democrats and the Progressive Party in Wisconsin. Such labor and progressive anti-monopoly political parties could act effectively to support unions, punish capitalists and capitalist politicians who pursue anti-labor activities, and use state power to restrict if not reverse the export or 'outsourcing' of capital, including by calling for public ownership of factories and workplaces threatened with outsourcing, instead of seeking to bribe capitalists with tax breaks and labor 'givebacks.'
Although the media will try to make us quickly forget the TWU's victory, it is important that we both remember it and learn from it as well, in order to teach its primary lesson: Workers through strikes and other militant actions can still win important victories, and that without militancy and class solidarity, victory is never possible.
--Contact Norman Markowitz at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
