People Before Profit blog

HOODIES, HIJABS, AND THE HUMAN TIES THAT BIND US

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:13:00 +0000

via War Times

Rebecca Tumposky foregrounds the racist dynamics shaping events this last month from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, & the Israel-Palestine conflict to the streets of Sanford, Florida & El Cajon, California.

Sixteen Afghan civilians are massacred in their beds by a U.S. soldier. Trayvon Martin is murdered by self-appointed 'neighborhood watchman.' Shaima Al Awadi, an Iraqi immigrant and mother of five, is found brutally killed in her home in El Cajon, California. The KONY video, with its ‘Western-white-military-force-will-save-the-day' message, goes viral.

Racism, violence and war - deeply embedded in U.S. society - are thrust this month into the national spotlight once again.

And they are not going unchallenged. Powerful calls were heard across the country and the globe to end the pattern of racist dehumanization once and for all. From the Miami Heat's solidarity with Trayvon, to the spike in public opposition to the war in Afghanistan, injustice and killing is facing new opposition. The arguments of the war-makers, scapegoaters and fear-mongerers are losing some of their grip. Spring is opening with new bursts of bottom-up energy, as the 99% mobilize to turn the tide and open new possibilities for a different way of living.

WASHINGTON'S AFGHANISTAN WAR UNRAVELS

A focal point of protest is Washington's unraveling war in Afghanistan.

This month saw one of that war's most blatant incidents of brutality yet - a shooting rampage killing 16 civilians (more than half of them children) by Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a multiply-deployed soldier suffering from PTSD. While Western media responded with copious investigations into Bales’ life - his mental health status, childhood, wife, etc. - the stories and even the names of the Afghan victims were barely mentioned.

The sheer nakedness of Bales' rampage made it front-page news, but this 11-year occupation has seen been laced with murder of Afghan civilians from its earliest days. Massacres such as this are simply the inevitable result of foreign occupation in which all Afghans are potential "enemies" and the tools of battle arenight raids, shooting people at checkpoints, drone attacks, and prisons that routinely use torture methods. The mentality of racist dehumanization that is fostered to justify this kind of war makes it inevitable that some soldiers will engage in horrific and naked killing. It is Afghans who pay the heaviest price, but the incident also confirms that the re-deployment of traumatized troops is dangerous for everyone, and ought to spur greater support for Iraq Veterans Against the War and its Operation Recovery campaign in particular. IVAW has also issued a call to March with Veterans for Justice and Reconciliation, planning to "converge in Chicago on May 20 to march to the NATO summit and ceremoniously return our medals to NATO generals."

While U.S. officials made public apologies, and eventually offered compensation to the victims’ families, the military investigation and prosecution has been horrendously slow. This has led Afghan President Hamid Karzai to sharply criticize the U.S. and exclaim that he is “at the end of the rope” over what he termed America’s lack of cooperation in investigating the rampage. Adding to an already increasingly significant rift between the US/NATO and Karzai, the massacre and the response has been another blow to the U.S.’s failing war, just a month after Afghan outrage over U.S. soldiers’ burning of the Koran. Karzai went further to demand that the U.S. confine troops to major bases by next year, while the Taliban announced they were suspending peace talks.

Next door in Pakistan, the U.S. suffered yet another setback in its regional influence, as Pakistani parliament called for an end to drone strikes, and for an unconditional apology for the U.S. attack that killed Pakistani soldiers last November. The legislators demanded that the U.S. “review its footprints in Pakistan,” and declared that “No overt or covert operations inside Pakistan shall be tolerated.”

As the U.S. faces a dismal climate in the region, with Iran having more influence than its own forces, public opinion at home is shifting substantially. In a recent poll,69% of Americans thought that the U.S. should not be at war in Afghanistan, up from 53% just four months ago. Add this to the lack of trust between Washington and its own Afghan client, a weary and overstretched military force, and overwhelming opposition to foreign occupation by the Afghan people themselves, and the handwriting is on the wall: This is a lost cuase of the U.S.

IRAQ: NO HONOR IN WAR

President Obama proclaimed a Day of Honor on March 19, the 9^th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But the day's events in Iraq reflected the human and political disaster that Washington's invasion and occupation of Iraq produced: sectarian violence left at least 45 people dead and 216 wounded; terrible shortages of electricity and water leading to large-scale protests in Basra led by Shiite clerical leader Muqtada al-Sadr.

Now that there is no longer a concern over U.S. casualties, the suffering of Iraqis caused by the U.S. war is off the radar screen of officials in Washington and much of the public. To the extent that it is acknowledged, it is described as "their fault" and "their problem." Not a single mainstream media outlet or public figure drew any kind of connection between the hate crime murder of Shaima Al Awadi in El Cajon and the U.S. attitude toward Iraqis – or Arabs and Muslims in general – that permeated the entire Iraq war. A noble exception to this kind of amnesiac dehumanization was Iraq Veterans Against the War, who marked the "Day of Honor" by taking to the streets to honor ALL the lives lost in this war.

SYRIA: HUMANITARIAN CRISIS EXPANDS; ASSAD REMAINS

In Syria, both the humanitarian and political crises continue to get worse. The Assad government is continuing military operations against Homs and in other parts of the country; anti-regime forces have responded with arms in many cases and the U.N. reports the death toll may be as many as 8,000, with hundreds of thousands more people displaced. As the violence continues, U.N. Envoy Kofi Annan worked to secure Russian and eventually Chinese support for his diplomatic efforts to bring about a ceasefire. While Western and many Arab states are calling for President Bashar al-Assad to stand down first, Russia has put the onus on the armed rebels, saying its long-term ally Syria was ready for talks. No cease-fire or serious negotiations seem on the immediate horizon however.

The demand for democratization in Syria - as in other countries where Arab Spring movements have challenged authoritarian regimes – cannot be disappeared via repression and force. At the same time, outside intervention would only make things worse, not just in Syria but in the entire region. As in the KONY video about Uganda, the argument for military intervention in Syria relies on the notion that the U.S. and the West are potential saviors – an ideological relic from "white man’s burden" days re-labeled as humanitarian intervention. Brutal dictatorships in Syria or elsewhere will only be replaced by better regimes if they are overthrown through the independent movements of their own peoples. Such popular movements inspire and deserve solidarity from people of conscience throughout the world. But those who command the armies of U.S.NATO intervention are as hostile to those kinds of movements as they are to the dictators that are currently out of favor in Washington and Brussels.

ISRAELI GOVERNMENT STILL WANTS WAR, BUT…

The threat of an imminent U.S. or Israeli air strike on Iran appears to be receding for now. Important elements of the U.S. military brass have warned against it, and Obama has worked to prove his allegiance to Israel through sanctions rather than military action. Earlier this month, retired generals came out with an ad calling on the administration to refrain from attacks on Iran. Additionally, a classified war simulation assessed repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran and determinedthat a strike would lead to wider regional war, and could draw in the U.S. and leave hundreds of Americans dead. The injustice as well as the stupidity of an attack on Iran are no-brainers for those of us in the peace movement, but it registers more forcefully in today's U.S. politics when major sections of the military establishment come to at least the "stupid" component of this assessment and go public with their viewpoint.

U.S. popular opinion too, is significantly opposed to military intervention. According to Juan Cole's analysis, “the US public, showing a broad consensus across parties, wants the Iran nuclear enrichment issue dealt with through negotiations. They even want to entrust the issue to the UN Security council. They think that the U.S. should discourage Israel from attacking Iran. They are convinced that an attack would be a disaster and lead to a long-term conflict. And they hold that if Israel goes it alone and does strike Iran, the U.S. should remain neutral.”

Many in the Israeli military establishment and general public also oppose an attack. But Netanyahu and the Israeli right wing keep up their drumbeat for war, not least to distract attention from the continued settlement building which is losing Israel support even in sectors that are ideologically "pro-Israel." In the U.S.liberal Zionist Peter Beinart's call for a boycott of the settlements under "Zionist BDS" has led to a vicious smear campaign against him from the Zionist right, even though Beinart's professed goal is to save Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state." His Zionist BDS pushes the sidelines the demands and movement of the people most afflicted by the settlements – the Palestinian people. But intentions aside, his identification of settlements as the main obstacle to peace is a huge threat to the pro-Israel narrative about this conflict and could potentially create new political space for Palestine solidarity efforts. It is more possible than before not only to prevent a potentially catastrophic attack on Iran, but to expose the ways the "We-Must-Support-Israel" chorus stereotypes and dehumanizes Palestinians and Iranians, and to win larger sections of the U.S. people to support equal rights and dignity for all peoples in the Middle East.

DEMILITARIZING AND REHUMANIZING

Obama said that "if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin"’ (and then got attacked for it by Gingrich, Santorum and Romney for injecting race into the "controversy!!). But what might it take for him and other political leaders to extend that connection and accountability to all children killed by racism and war? More people in the U.S. today think endless war is a dangerous and unproductive policy than at any time since 9/11. Yet while the Pentagon has suffered modest reductions from the current deficit package, the reality is that the military budgets has maintained its highest levels since World War II and enjoyed 13 years of steady growth.

With public support for war dropping, and racism and militarism thrust into the center of public discourse, it is a moment ripe with opportunity. It is a moment to engage masses of people in connecting daily struggles under austerity budgets with demands to shift away from a war economy and reject the racism and dehumanization that constantly generates enemies and leads to violence destructive to all. As the 99% Spring launches, (a bold effort to train 100,000 people for grassroots direct action), as the call for Justice for Trayvon Martin gains ever-larger support, as fights against right-wing racism and attacks on women intensify, the peace movement has new openings before us. There is a larger audience we can reach with the question: what could be possible in a society that divested from militarism, one that was grounded in a vision and commitment to social welfare, healthy people, and a nurtured planet? Can we envision a world where people wearing hoodies or hijabs walk free and humanization is the enduring value that binds us?

Statement by Richard Trumka President, AFL-CIO On the Endorsement of Barack Obama for a Second Term as President

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:55:00 +0000

March 13, 2012

via AFL-CIO

As president, Barack Obama has placed his faith in America’s working men and women to lead our country to economic recovery and to our full potential as a nation. With our endorsement today, we affirm our faith in him—and pledge to work with him through the election and his second term to restore fairness, security and shared prosperity.

The coming election is about values. President Obama honors the values of hard work, of mutual respect, and of solving problems together—not every person for himself or herself. He believes that together we will get through the most challenging economic crisis in memory and restore opportunity for all. Each of the Republican presidential candidates, on the other hand, has pledged to uphold the special privileges of Wall Street and the 1%--privileges that have produced historic economic inequality and drowned out the voices of working people in America.

President Obama took America from the brink of a second Great Depression by pressing Congress to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which saved or created 3.6 million jobs. He championed comprehensive health insurance reform, which -- while far from perfect -- set the nation on a path toward health security that had eluded our country for nearly 100 years. He insisted upon Wall Street reform—passed over the objection of almost every Republican—that is now beginning to reverse decades of financial deregulation that put our entire economy at risk.

Although the labor movement has sometimes differed with the president and often pushed his administration to do more and do it faster, we have never doubted his commitment to working families. He has worked hard to create good jobs; he has made the revival of the manufacturing sector a hallmark of his jobs agenda; he has moved aggressively to protect workers’ rights, pay and health and safety on the job; he has worked for a fair resolution of the housing crisis and he put his confidence and administration unequivocally behind the workers and companies in the American auto industry—a move that saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and is helping to revive the economy now and for the future.

President Obama has earned the support of working people for a second term and today the AFL-CIO voted proudly and enthusiastically to endorse him for a second term.

The labor movement is the original social network—a working class social network—and this year the unions of the AFL-CIO will be mobilizing working people to come together to organize our neighborhoods door to door, powered by cutting-edge technology and old-fashioned energy. We will be running an independent program rooted not in parties or candidates but in helping working people build power, making informed decisions about which candidates at every level to work for based on records and issues.

Raise the Minimum Wage!

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:07:00 +0000

The federal minimum wage is now $7.25 per hour. If you work all year without layoff or penalty, and get a full tax refund, you will have earned $14,500. The federal poverty level for a single individual is $11,170; for 2 people, or a pregnant woman, the federal poverty level is $15,130. So, even a couple, never-mind a family, is either sick-and-dying, or outlaw territory at the federal minimum wage. But its worse than that. Consider a recent study of housing costs measured against the minimum wage.

The Out of Reach project is a side-by-side comparison of wages and rents in every county, Metropolitan Area, combined non-metropolitan area and state in the United States. The report calculates the amount of money a household must earn to afford a rent at the area’s Fair Market Rent (FMR), based on an affordability standard of paying no more than 30% of income for housing costs. From these calculations the hourly wage -- also called the "Housing Wage" -- a worker must earn to afford a two-bedroom unit is derived.

In the wake of the recent depression, with the death of Bush's "ownership society", more households choose renting over home ownership. Consequently the demand for rental housing is surging, pushing "fair market rents" upward and vacancies down. For low income households and those on fixed incomes finding an affordable, decent apartment is incredibly challenging.

Here is the National Low Income Housing Coalition's startling graph showing the hours at minimum wage needed to afford rent:

Of course the hours -- even when calculated based on 30% of income for housing do not capture equally dire measurements of minimum wage workers' ability to meet the "fair market prices" of the clothing, food, education, or health care, or other services their families need.

Lets use another graph from Jared Bernstein's blog to put the plight of minimum wage workers in a slightly broader context.

Source: BLS

Yearly real weekly earnings changes measure if the median wage worker has more, or less, disposable income than a year ago. Disposable income does not include non-liquid kinds of benefit compensation (insurance, etc). For most workers, "weekly" wages tells the whole story, since life is often a parable of "$5 in my pocket, and $500 I owe." Despite claims of economic recovery heard recently, median weekly worker income for most months of the past two years, just like most years of the past 35 years, is either flat, or less, than the year before. In other words, those of us looking at the minimum wage and housing wage graph who feel a sigh of relief that "that's not us" may need a stronger cup of coffee: Most every month median wages and the minimum wage are getting closer!

The lesson of these graphs is a clear to me as John Donne's famous meditation. When you hear the stories of suffering and peril that accompany ALL minimum wage families, and some pompous Faux News economist opines that raising the minimum wage will only "cost jobs", do not ask for whom the bell tolls: It Tolls for Thee.

Can labor recover from its critics? A reply to Francis Fox-Piven

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:25:00 +0000

The labor movement has more than its share of critics. It seems like nearly everyone is ready to give it advice, whether solicited or not.

A case in point: Francis Fox Piven, the renowned sociologist known for her seminal work on social movements, gave a talk to a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago recently. Her subject: "Can Labor Recover?"

According to a (seemingly sympathetic) blog by David Moberg in In These Times, Piven argued that the transformation of the labor movement lies in building a "mass strike movement" in which trade unionists think beyond the narrow calculations of monetary gains and losses.

"Maybe the mass strike movement will well up outside the labor movement and incorporate it" she said, "I hope so, because I think that the future of the labor movement depends on it."

The Occupy movement, Piven went on to say, should work with labor but "on its own terms, not labor's terms."

The labor movement "is not a movement, but a constellation of competing interests groups."

Then she added, "Labor is one of my favorites; it can rebuild, but not with the same leaders and structures. Without pressure from below and outside, I don't think unions can save themselves."

Wow! Listening to Piven, one gets the impression that labor and its leadership, other than telling the Occupy movement what to do, are sitting on their hands - self satisfied, clueless, and in need of a takeover from the outside.

At its core this estimate of labor not only amounts to a misrepresentation of what labor is doing, but also expresses a patronizing attitude toward the organization that represents working women and men.

Piven, at least from the Moberg blog, presents no evidence for her sweeping claims. Nor does she indicate who is going to change labor from the outside. One can only guess.

From my observations and experience, many labor leaders and members are responding to new challenges, reaching out to allies, creating new forms of organization, solidarity, and unity, and not least, diversifying their leadership.

Consider the following:

Without diminishing the importance of the Occupy movement last fall - a movement that changed the political discourse in the country - what labor did in Wisconsin and Ohio was nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, it was of tremendous significance.

Hundreds of thousands were mobilized in a sustained, creative, and tactically varied way to fight the initiatives of the Republican right at the state level. And in both states, the struggle goes on.

The AFL-CIO, moreover, has embraced and incorporated workers centers and other non-traditional forms of organization that are linked to mostly very low paid super exploited workers - immigrant workers, day laborers, taxi cab drivers in New York, and carwash workers in Los Angeles, to name a few.

Unions have extended their ties with other unions and workers around the world to take on the global corporations, and labor has continued to grow its own structures for political independence, including workers running for office.

Trade unions have embraced the Occupy movement. It didn't tell Occupy what to do; in fact, the AFL-CIO sent out a letter to all its affiliates counseling the opposite.

Labor has plans to activate 400,000 trade unionists and friends to do door-to-door work to educate and get out the vote in the fall elections. Of course, some on the left may think that this form of struggle pales in importance to a mass strike.

First of all, it is wrong to counterpose a mass strike against a full-scale mobilization of labor and its allies in the electoral arena.

In fact, I would go a step further and say from a strategic point of view that nothing is more important than winning a decisive victory against the right at the polls this November.

And the left and progressive movements should wholeheartedly support whatever helps to achieve this objective. After all, such a victory carries the potential to fundamentally alter the terrain of struggle on which the labor and people's movements fight.

Second, a mass strike can neither be hot housed, nor it is a cure all. Sure it would shift the ground on which labor fights, but its full impact grows to the degree that it spotlights the main class enemy and combines with other forms of struggle to effect a realignment of politics in a consistently anti-corporate direction.

Piven's take on the labor movement is not peculiar to her alone, but rather is emblematic of a section of the left, academic and otherwise. Which I guess is not surprising, given the distance between the world of the university and the world of working people.

In any case, the left, including the academic left, should be knowledgeable about the labor movement. It shouldhail and join its initiatives.

This doesn't preclude criticism, but it should be done in a constructive, unifying, and partisan way. It should be always mindful not only of the very difficult circumstances in which labor fights, but also the necessary role that it will play in any progressive and socialist thrust in U.S. politics.

Labor Fightback in the Great Recession

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:04:00 +0000

“Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. But notwithstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.” - Eugene V. Debs

Reading this quotation today, over 100 years later, you are struck by two things. How appropriate, how up to date, and how well it fits labor’s situation today. At the same time, 108 years later, you are bound to wonder, how is it that labor can be so bruised and battered yet again?

Still as you digest the whole quote, you have to realize, as Debs did so many years ago, that the last sentence of this quote is the most important. “But not withstanding all of this and all of these…”

Any genuine assessment of the labor movement today has to begin with “... not withstanding all of this and all of these...” For over 30 years the labor movement has faced relentless corporate, political, and right wing attack. Since the beginning of “the great recession” this attack on labor and labor rights has risen in intensity and viciousness.

Of course the Great Recession, caused in large part by Wall Street greed and speculation, increased big business extremism. Capital has always been willing to use economic crisis as a club against labor. The crisis atmosphere is fertile ground for right-wing extremism, virulent racist movements, and attacks on labor.

The disastrous 2010 elections opened the floodgates for all-out corporate war on labor. Ultra right Republicans, organized and funded by shadowy think tanks, now nationally coordinate political and legislative efforts to destroy labor rights. “Right to work” for less laws and assault on collective bargaining rights for public workers, are front and center in a vicious Republican rightwing soup of racist attacks on immigrant workers, attacks on women's rights and women's health, and voter suppression laws aimed particularly at communities of color and the elderly. These billionaire and corporate funded anti-labor campaigns are at the heart of an overall rightwing attack on democracy.

As can be expected in this situation, the house of labor is responding in many different ways. There are so many tugs and pulls on labor. How to respond to political attacks and anti-labor legislation? How to respond to outsourcing and labor-cutting new technology? How to respond to outrageous wage cutting and take away demands in the current political climate? How to respond to lockouts? And central to all of this, when union density is at such a low point, how to organize the unorganized and mobilize declining numbers and resources for the political and economic fight back?

Much has changed in labor in the last 30 years. And that change has greatly accelerated in the last three years. It is beyond the scope of this article to chart all the changes, but suffice it to say that many of us have never seen a labor movement so ready to fight back, so ready to take on the system.

Most visible in recent months has been the explosions of activity and fight back in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and several other states. In Wisconsin hundreds of thousands have hit the streets to recall Gov. Scott Walker and some of the Republican leadership in the Wisconsin Legislature. This is Wisconsin workers direct challenge to the attack on public workers in their state. Well over a million people signed the recall petitions largely organized by labor. In Ohio hundreds of thousands of trade unionists took to the streets all over the state to collect over a million signatures to overturn a Republican inspired law to take away collective bargaining rights for public workers. And in Indiana the labor movement mobilized throughout the state to try and defeat a right to work law. This included tens of thousands protesting in Indianapolis.

In all of these situations not only was the labor leadership and membership mobilized, but significant support came from unorganized workers and local communities. Increasingly across the country the labor movement, small as it may be, is seen by unorganized as well as union workers as a bulwark against these attacks on democracy. In both Wisconsin and Ohio hundreds of thousands of unorganized workers joined the labor movement in these efforts and signed petitions.

The emergence of the occupy movement in the midst of these struggles has had an important impact. Not only did it change the national discussion on deficits and austerity, but it also introduced a new popular way of discussing the class struggle. The 99% versus the 1% in popular discourse deepens ideas about the need for the broadest possible coalitions led by the working class.

It's true that at times occupy and the labor movement don't see eye to eye. Nevertheless they work together in important ways that have benefited each movement. Much of labor clearly sees the value of militants outside support for workers. Many in the occupy movement have very little experience with organized labor. Indeed some are very suspicious and harbor ultra left antiunion ideas.

Nevertheless the occupy movement has brought hundreds of thousands of young people to support labor against right-wing attacks. Across the country many occupy groups have set up labor outreach committees to work with the unions and to support them. Young occupy activists can be found on picket lines, and labor rallies, and many other kinds of labor actions. Whole new generations of activists are learning about labor and its potential to lead struggles for change.

Some of labor's critics on the left seem only able to see the old problems and weaknesses. Labor is too small. Some unions are hidebound and bureaucratic. Union democracy is a problem with some unions. Unions seem only concerned with their own narrow self-interest.

Of course these old problems still exist to one degree or another. But what is new and developing is far more important.

Those of us who truly want to solve the old problems need to focus on what's new. The solutions to old problems will only be found in new approaches to struggle. It is the tens of thousands of union activists and union leaders who are fighting back that hold the key to the future of labor. It is these bright green sprouts of renewed struggle that need to be watered, weeded and sung about.

Important New and Developing Trends in Labor

Everyone in the labor movement understands that union membership is too low. Everyone understands the need to organize the unorganized and to grow. And increasingly many in labor understand that it will take more than the traditional methods to grow. Much of labor is looking hard at questions of globalization, of the changing nature of production, and the changing composition of the working class.

Of course there are no simple solutions to these problems. It will take a lot of experimentation, a lot of new thinking, and a lot of trial and error. No one can deny that these questions have been roiling labor for the last several years. And a lot of new answers and a lot of new approaches have emerged.

The growth of nontraditional union organizing

The AFL-CIO and many unions have worked and supported worker centers as a new way of organizing very low paid workers. Where possible, these worker centers are brought into central labor councils and other structures of the labor movement. This approach has helped place labor in the thick of the movements for immigrant rights.

Other non-traditional tracks have led to organizing home health care workers in California, Taxi drivers in New York and carwash workers in Los Angeles. All of these efforts have centered not only on the low paid workers themselves, but also in building support in the communities they live and work around.

Growth of International Solidarity

Several US unions, including private and public unions, are actively building new kinds of international labor Solidarity. The AFL-CIO and the Change to Win unions are paying greater attention to concrete efforts to coordinate international solidarity with unions dealing with transnational corporations. International trade federations are taking on new life that goes beyond just the sharing of information.

The United Steelworkers are on track to build the 1st North American wide industrial union. This effort goes far beyond talk and consultation. It has resulted in direct concrete solidarity activity in Canada, Mexico, and the US. The Mexican miners union, Los Mineros, have seen concrete solidarity from steelworkers in Mexico and Canada. And US steelworkers have been supported in contract efforts by the miners union in Mexico.

Another important example is attempts here at home to organize the T-Mobile wireless workers. Important solidarity from sister communication workers in Germany have been very helpful in this effort. And the UNI global public workers labor federation has helped build labor support from around the world for the T-Mobile organizing efforts.

Striving to Build Class Unity

The AFL-CIO took the lead in fighting racism in the 2008 election. It was electrifying for labor activists. Labor support played a very important role in the election of Pres. Barack Obama.
This was not just an election-year effort. It was a critical and vital part of labor's efforts to fight for working class unity.

Over the last several years’ great attention has been paid by labor to the racial, national, gender and LGBT composition of labor's leadership bodies. The AFL-CIO's constituency groups like the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and Pride at Work have all received special attention and help. A regular feature now of AFL-CIO conventions is a one-day preconference of the constituencies on questions of unity and the fight for equality and inclusion.

Special attention is also being paid to the role of young workers in the labor movement. The AFL-CIO's Next Up organization of young workers is growing all across the country and bringing many new young workers into the leadership of the labor movement. Several unions have followed that lead by creating or reinvigorating youth councils of their own.

Much of labor has also become involved in fighting for immigrant’s rights. In many big cities around the country the immigrant rights movement and the labor movement have joined forces for impressive May Day demonstrations and marches in defense of labor and immigrant rights.

It is also important to note that the labor movement increasingly sees itself speaking for all of the working class. This is clear to see in fights to defend Social Security and Medicare. It is clear in the fight for healthcare reform. It is clear in the fight for minimum wage and livable wage laws and ordinances. And it is clear in labors fighting stance for what it calls the middle-class standard of living. In these broader economic, social, and legislative fights the labor movement clearly champions all workers and their families. This broader vision of labor's role in society is also shown in labor's embrace of the 99% concept.

Labor's Independent Political Action

The 2012 elections are shaping up to be a monumental battle in the class struggle. All of the labor movement is gearing up for the challenge. Labor's political independence in this election cycle will be the highest it's ever been in our lifetimes.

Almost all of labor will come out in full support to re-elect President Obama. Labor unity on this election, like in 2008, will be truly historic. Despite the disappointment many in labor feel, labor will build genuine enthusiasm for this election. It will be because, despite setbacks, most in labor understand the playing field on which the Obama administration has had to fight. And most have learned that the second term of the President depends not only on what the administration does, but on what labor does to organize and mobilize around its issues. And most critically it is only with a resounding defeat of the Republican far right, including in Congress, that labor can win on working class issues.

Contrary to some of labor's sharpest critics, labor is not pouring money into the Democratic Party. Continuing an important trend that began over 10 years ago, labor is putting its money mostly into developing its own independent political apparatus. The labor movement has pledged to put 400,000 union members in the streets for this election season.

Labor knows well that it can never outspend Wall Street and the corporate right wing in the elections. Rather labor's strength lies in mobilizing its membership and working families with labor organized boots on the ground. In the 2012 elections the labor movement will continue to build a core of activists and experts in all phases electoral work – from managing campaigns, to getting out the vote, to voter education.

And yes this will be mostly working for Democratic Party candidates. Political independence is not always, nor only, the matter of the political party of the candidates. At this time in our history, neither labor nor the left have the power to determine the playing field for the coming electoral struggle. Standing on the sidelines is not an option. The day will surely come when labor can challenge capital and finance in the electoral arena. When that day comes today's efforts at building labors independent political machine will produce the activists and the experts who can really make a third-party work.

Labor will emerge even stronger and more independent from the 2012 elections. Many new and developing trends will continue to develop and strengthen labor. Gene Debs had tremendous faith in the power of organized labor. Like Debs ours is not a blind faith. It takes the full support of the left and progressive movements gathered round the new and developing trends in labor. This is how we get to another famous Debs quote:

“The united vote of those who toil and have not will vanquish those who have and toil not, and solve forever the problems of democracy.” – Eugene V. Debs

Service Workers Unite -- you have nothing to lose but chains!

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 17:38:00 +0000

“...just as the Great Depression was part of the transition of the economy from agriculture to manufacturing, the Great Recession is part of the transition from manufacturing to a service-sector economy. Growth in productivity, plus changing comparative advantage, made a decline in manufacturing employment inevitable. Markets on their own do not manage such dramatic economic transformations well.”

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel-prize winning economist, in Shambles of the US Labor Market

One may quibble with Stiglitz about the details of de-industrialization in the US economy. For example, economists at the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics have been laboring at the very difficult task of disentangling the relative US manufacturing declines due to productivity improvements (automation) vs those caused simply by runaways and outsourcing to low-wage, high-labor-intensity, and lower than US productivity environments in China, India and other areas of the developing world. However there can be no denying the fundamental trend at work for over 60 years as combined automation and globalization forces have steadily restructured the division of labor -- in other words the occupations, in the US economy from manufacturing to service-oriented jobs.

Below is a helpful USA table (using BLS data) detailing the changes since 1950:

Percentage of non-farm workers employed in manufacturing and service jobs (All 2002 figures are to date):

Manufacturing jobs

1950 * 34%

2002 * 13%

Service jobs

1950 * 59%

2002 * 82%

Examples of manufacturing job losses. Number employed in thousands:

Textiles

1960 * 924

2002 * 433

Apparel

1960 * 1,233

2002 * 522

Metal1

1960 * 1,185

2002 * 593

Examples of service job gains. Number employed in thousands:

Educational2

1960 * 616

2002 * 2,510

Business services3

1960 * 656

2002 * 9,301

Health

1960 * 1,548

2002 * 10,661

1- primary metal industries such as steel; 2 - private education institutions; 3 - services to businesses such as advertising, data processing, credit reporting, etc.
Source: USA TODAY analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data

The trade union movement has placed halting and reversing the de-industrialization trend at near the top of its economic and political agenda. While long range trends point to disappointment on this program, there are deep reasons that motivate the AFL-CIO to focus on manufacturing.

First, mass manufacturing is the foundation of modern industrial unionism. It provided both the economic and political strength that compelled enactment of the laws that legalize ALL collective bargaining rights. The economic strength consisted in the right to strike and the immense costs that right could impose on employers, especially where there were large concentrations of workers. That large concentration was a key feature of the economic transition of the previous era that gave rise to the industrial revolution from a primarily agricultural economy. Without that strength, the rights of any and all workers -- both public and private, manufacturing and service, to effectively bargain for a fair return on their labor, and increasingly, their human capital is seriously undermined. It is no accident that attacks on all labor rights have escalated and become ever more vicious every year that de-industrialization has worsened.

Second, as manufacturing -- and with it, unionism -- has weakened, so have the entire “middle class” aspirations of working Americans gone up in smoke. The only alternative path to a reasonable standard of living -- a college education -- becomes increasingly out of reach for working families. Students are now a trillion dollars in debts they will never be able to pay if current inequality trends continue. Universities are charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for training for occupations that simply do not pay enough to pay back the educational investment. Many students begin, but cannot afford to complete, their education.

Some pin hopes on political battles for labor law reform, or raises in the minimum wage. Both are important battles. The major difference between US and European standards of social benefits and protections are the stronger union rights in the latter. National health care, superior public education, retirement and infrastructure systems were all consequences of European labor’s stronger bargaining power and political strength coming out of WWII. However, even though Europe is better, the de-industrialization forces are at work there too and labor strength is weakening -- just not as fast or as dramatically as in the US. The vast erosion of workers’ rights to receive the same proportion of increase in national wealth as capital has also had the side effect of corrupting democratic institutions, like Congress. The corruption is so severe that it has become the anthem of the Occupy movement, and it becomes increasingly doubtful anything short of a huge social upheaval in class relations at the grassroots can correct the dark course our country is on.

News coming out of China of strike waves against the labor-intensity and extreme low wage manufacturing may end up being the most effective brake on the export of jobs NOT motivated by automation. There are signs China’s immense reserve army of subsistence agricultural labor can no longer sustain the growth of this mode of manufacturing. If so, wages and incomes of Chinese workers will rise, and higher productivity, higher skilled labor will be required for the next stage in China’s development.

As Stiglitz notes, increasing inequality is itself becoming a cause of even more draconian inequality as the majority of the people are not able to provide the demand needed to resume the level of growth needed for escaping the depression. For thirty years, workers have been given higher and higher limits on their credit cards, but little or no real wage increases.

A new working class paradigm?

If the manufacturing era is irreversibly passing from the US labor market, can non-manufacturing workers find a path to bargaining power sufficient to reverse inequality trends?

Who are the service workers?

All sales, most professional and technical, half of transportation, and all health services, education, financial services, personal care and service, office and administrative, food service, protective and security workers -- are all in the non-manufacturing sectors. A substantial majority earn under the median personal income (all sources including benefits and capital income) of 39,600 per year. Service work statistics now also include those manufacturing workers who are employed as contract labor through temporary agencies as well. A perusal of the BLS tables on 800 occupations, their number and compensation, will give the reader a good picture of the current division of labor in the United States.

The table below from the BLS illustrates the distribution of service worker incomes relative to other kinds of work by race, nationality, and sex. Note that the "management" measure includes all professional and technical as well as just true manaagment. Thus most of those jobs are also service in essence, as are many of the sales and adminstrative occupations. The graph immediately demonstates the sharp bifurcation between college educated and non-college educated occupations. It also reveals the narrowing gap between industrial and service incomes, a reflection of declining union strength in manufacturing. The gap between women and men in all occupations is still large, as is the gap between Latino and African American workers, and white and Asian Americans in the more skilled occupations.

The next BLS table illustrates the distribution of workers by occupational type, race, nationality and gender.

Some characteristics key to answering the questions of empowerment in the service work world:

Service work is performed overwhelmingly in small units of under 50 workers, even if the employer is a large corporation.

Work processes tend to be more fragmented than manufacturing sites.Worksites are also widely distributed.

Online service work can be outsourced, but other categories less so.

There is a large gulf in income between college educated and non-college educated requirements. Low income service occupations have by far the largest portion of minimum wage positions, and all are below median income. Few have health benefits they can afford to use.

Some service occupations -- like fast food delivery, for example -- have easily measured productivity. But most do not. Most services rely more than manufacturing on personal, human interactions between workers, customers and clients. Their effectiveness often varies considerably based on personality, skills and other “human capital” of the worker. The relationship of the service worker to the customer or client served is the one objective characteristic of their work that gives them potential leverage that manufacturing workers do NOT have. If the service worker forms an alliance with the customer served, the employer MUST listen.

Where productivity cannot be precisely measured, where work is not homogeneous, the Marxist surplus value calculation cannot be easily or exactly made, and intensification of the labor process thus yields uncertain additional profit. While such service is not a public good, neither is it a “good commodity” since it is difficult to scale delivery of a non-homogeneous service, even of a less educated worker.

Most service firms require less investment in fixed capital and equipment per worker than manufacturing operations. In a growing number, the biggest capital input IS human capital, but the actual returns on that capital are not proportionally distributed to its owners. Because the capital barrier to entry into service markets is less, worker owned or shared - ownership firms should be able to start-up and prosper with greater ease.

Contract labor involves almost no fixed capital per worker -- thus it too should be a strong candidate for worker-owned, or shared-ownership firms.

Anti-union campaigns by well-funded extreme reactionaries targeting service providers in the public sector fields of security, education, social work, and health care are indeed direct attacks on the professionalism of those services. An alliance of these service workers and those they serve has become a vital interest of both constituencies.

Retirement, retraining and health benefits that became the union standard in large manufacturing corporations like General Motors or General Electric are simply impossible for the tens of thousands of small and medium sized firms. National, public programs are the only reliable path for most service workers to obtain them.

Over the past two or three decades there have emerged a number of factional conflicts within and between unions in the service sector primarily arising out of contradictions between ideals of democratic industrial unionism and the bargaining realities of representing service workers. In the first place class lines in traditional manufacturing have historically been very sharply drawn. Management and labor have little in common beyond getting the product out the door. Distinctions between hourly and salary, between day rate and piece rate also used to be relatively simple to manage and define. There are those that hire and fire, and those that are hired and fired -- the union represents the latter, period. A union rep that gets cozy with the boss in manufacturing is (or was) almost always suspected of being up to no good. And those suspicions were often well founded given the endless schemes of manufacturing management to compromise union opposition to its latest speedup, or more work for no more pay, plans.

All these matters are considerably muddier in much of service work. The layers of supervision are byzantine; definitions of appropriate bargaining units under labor law are arcane. Salaried pay classifications invade even very low wage jobs leading to big abuses of overtime and denial of rights to union representation. I recall asking one employer “who has the power to effectively recommend hiring and firing?” (“effectively recommend” is a key term in labor law determining eligibility for union membership). He replied “everyone”. That was not far from the truth in that firm. The largest teachers union, the NEA, encourages principals and supervisor membership. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) prohibits it. “Business unionism” is the phrase given in manufacturing to joining with the boss in various productivity enhancing schemes -- schemes that often resulted in layoffs. While there has always been tension between company loyalty and “watching your wallet carefully to avoid being robbed” -- the excesses of business unionism were more easily scorned in manufacturing. Not so in many services, precisely because of the closer direct relationship between workers and the customers they serve.

Increase empowerment for service workers will not likely be achieved in the traditional industrial union framework. Strength must arise from the real economic relationships that the character of the work determines. The key character that is the ultimate strength of service work is the relationship with the people served. Some new frameworks and approaches are needed to make that happen. Public workers under terrible attacks in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, California and other states are finding the ways to make this happen. It is an historic mission, one that will in fact be key to escape from this depression, and the return of good times to the USA!

Frederick Engels on Dühringian vs. Marxian Socialism: Distribution

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 16:41:00 +0000

In this penultimate chapter of Anti-Dühring Engels takes on Dühring's notions of how the social product will be distributed under his "socialitarian" system: Anti-Dühring, Part Three, Chapter IV. The first thing to recall from the previous discussion on "production" is that Dühring finds nothing wrong with the mode of production under capitalism and the system of communes under which he organizes society will keep this mode of operation. The real evil to be overcome is in the mode of distribution. Little did Engels foresee that future "socialists" from the Marxist tradition would be playing around with such concepts for years to come (which he called "social alchemizing") under the rubric of "market socialism."

Dühring treats distribution independently of production. Once the social product has been produced, and this is accomplished by the necessary operative laws of capitalist production, the product can be distributed by an act of will so that "universal justice" is done. This can be done because in the commune everyone must labor and consume based on all forms of labor being considered as of equal value. This system will obtain both within the commune and between the communes. Furthermore, exchange value will linked to the value of the precious metals. This system will be an improvement over the "foggy notions" of thinkers such as Marx.

Let's see just how this "universal justice" actually is brought about. Following Engels, lets take a model commune of 100 workers working an eight hour day and making $100 worth of commodities each or a total of $10,000 worth of goodies. Say they work 250 days a year for a yearly product of $2,500,000. According to Dühring's system "universal justice" requires that each worker get paid the exact value of his labor which would be 250 times $100 or $25,000 a year. The commune pays out the entire value that it creates so, as Engels says, at the end of a year, or a hundred years, "the commune is no richer than at the beginning." There is no accumulation possible in this system. Individuals can accumulate wealth for a worker can always deprive himself and not spend all of his money in a given time period, but society cannot accumulate wealth for any economic expansion or to carry out any kind of social programs.

This is not the only problem with Dühring's commune. The fact that workers are all paid the same means a single worker will actually have more income for savings than a worker with a large family to take care of. Rich and poor will gradually reappear and eventually all the problems of a capitalist society. This tendency cannot be stopped by rules and regulations as Dühring's "universal justice" demands that the workers can dispose of their wages as they wish. And as money is the "social incarnation" of human labor and operates by the laws of capitalist economics in the commune as well as the surrounding world, all of Dühring's regulations to control it "are just as powerless against it as they are against the multiplication table or the chemical composition of water."

Dühring's system breaks down because he, not Marx and other socialists, is under the control of "foggy notions." Dühring just doesn't understand the basic operating conditions of the capitalist system. He wasn't the only one in Engel's day who claimed to be able to explain economics without really understanding what was going on-- the phenomenon is just as rampant today in the 21st century as it was in the 19th. Therefore at this point in his polemic against Dühring, Engels takes a timeout to give his readers a brief summary of Economics 101.

The capitalist economy is based on commodity production and the only value recognized by capitalism is the value of commodities, according to Engels. To say that any given commodity has a value is to say four things about it. 1. That it has a use value-- it serves some socially useful function. 2. That it has been privately produced [this is a simple model of capitalism, not a mixed economy or state capitalism]. 3. It is a product of individual labor but "unconsciously and involuntarily" it also is a social product containing human labor in general which is measured through exchange. 4. The value of the social labor contained in it is measured by some other commodity. Engels gives the example a clock having the same value as a certain quantity of cloth-- say "fifty shillings."

This only means that it took the same amount of socially necessary labor time to make the clock as to make the cloth. Since we don't live in a barter society a special commodity has developed which is used to measure the relative values of all the other commodities to each other-- this is money.

The term "relative" value is important. We cannot determine the "absolute value" of every commodity-- i.e., calculate the exact value of the labor power used to create it. This is because of the complexity of the capitalist system and the variations of the cost of labor and labor time from factory to factory and location to location. All these different factors average out over time and commodities begin to reflect their relative values, the relative rate of socially necessary labor time needed to create them, by having their worth expressed in terms of money. Prices are reflections of relative value not absolute value and can fluctuate wildly around the actual value of commodities-- but over time they come to reflect the actual values that underlie them but in a relative manner.

Engels gives an analogy from the chemistry of his day. He says that the absolute atomic weights of the elements were unknown so scientists used hydrogen as 1 and expressed the relative atomic weights of the other elements as multiples of hydrogen. This is analogous to elevating "gold [or whatever is used as money] to the level of the absolute commodity, the general equivalent of all other commodities" and using it to measure the relative value of human (social) labor contained in them.

The term "social labor" is important to understand. It is not raw individual labor that determines the value of a commodity. It is rather the amount of labor that in a given society is necessary to produce different commodities that gives them their values-- the socially necessary labor time. At least this is "value" as expressed in a capitalist society. In a communist society "value" will not be so expressed. A communist society will have a planned economy and workers will know the value of the labor power they will devote to the production of the products needed by society. "Money" will not be necessary to measure this value. Engels notes that "all that would be left, in a communist society, of the politico-economic concept of value" is the knowledge by the workers/planners "of the useful effects and expenditure of labour on making decisions concerning production."

The notion of "value" is the hallmark of a commodity based economy and, Engels says, it "contains the germ, not only of money, but also of all the more developed forms of the production and exchange of commodities." The fact that this exchange takes place by means of money, and considering the complexity of production (i.e., that in some fields more or less of the socially necessary labor may be involved) "admits of the possibility that the exchange may never take place altogether, or at least may not realize the correct value." This is especially true of the commodity labor-power which, as with all commodities, has its value determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes to produce it and can also be forced into service for longer periods of time than is socially necessary for its reproduction.

Once money has been invented within a primarily commodity producing society we will see its "first and most essential effect" which is the commodification of all aspects of society in which soon all social relations begin to be converted into money relations based on individual private interests. Engels mentions the dissolution of the common tillage system among Indian peasants and the same amongst the Russian peasants and their village communes. Inspired by Marx we might say "Privatize, Privatize, that is the Gospel and the Church!"

Now back to Dühring and his ilk. We cannot meaningfully talk about the "value of labor" and how to see that the worker gets his "full value" as Dühring does in discussing his system of communes. When you measure the value of commodities by the labor they contain you cannot then talk about the value of labor in the same way. Engels says it is the same with weight. We can measure the heaviness of commodities by their weight but we cannot talk about the heaviness of weight. What Dühring and others do is try to measure the "value" of labor by the products it makes (it should actually be measured by time) and then they think the function of socialism is to see to it that "the full proceeds of labour" are given to the workman. But this means the whole value of what the working class creates is returned to the workers in terms of each individual getting back all the value he has created.

This will of course leave nothing for the capitalists. What it overlooks is that "the most progressive function of society" is accumulation. This is why Marxists, by the way, tout the General Consumption Fund (GCF). The individual workers do not get back 100% of the value they have created. The "state" or whatever social arrangement that replaces it, takes a portion of the created value and puts into the GCF which then disperses it to society as a whole (rent and food subsidies, medical care, education, maintenance and replacement of machinery, etc.) The working class does get back the value it creates but collectively as well as individually. The Dühringean system would stagnate and fall apart-- it is economic nonsense.

Finally, Engels points out that the law of value is "the fundamental law" of commodity production and so of capitalism "the highest form" of commodity production. The law of value dictates that commodities created by equal social labor are equal to each other-- i.e., mutually exchangeable. In our day, as in Engels', the only way this law can operate under capitalism is "as a blindly operating law of nature inherent in things and relations and independent of the will or actions of the producers."

It is just this law that Dühring is appealing to when he dreams of creating communes where equal labor is exchanged for equal labor based on his "universal principle of justice." He thinks it possible to keep capitalist economic relations but to abolish the abuses that such relations lead to. In this he completely resembles Proudhon who also wanted to "abolish the real consequences of the law of value by means of fantastic ones."

Engels ends his chapter by comparing Dühring's search for a new society based on his notions of just distributions to Don Quixote's search for Mambrino's helmet which turns up only the old barber's basin.

We are Trayvon Martin

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 14:30:00 +0000

Several thousand New Yorkers gathered at Union Square for the "Million Hoodie March and Rally" to protest the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch volunteer who racially profiled Trayvon and then shot him dead.

The rally gave a warm welcome to the parents, who were in New York making several appearances on national media. The march and the rally was a massive protest against racism and a powerful call for justice.

At the rally Benjamin Crump, the Martin family's lawyer, made a moving speech on the legal facts of the case. He pointed out that the police completely accepted everything that George Zimmerman said 'as if it was the 'Gospel truth.'"

He also pointed out that Zimmerman had committed an act of murder, and the police didn't even take him in for questioning. "They didn't even bother to check Zimmerman through the system or give him a alcohol or drug test."

On the other hand, "They did check on Trayvon. They did test him for drugs and alcohol."

He added, "They patted Zimmerman on the back as if it had been Trayvon who pulled the trigger."

The family had to file a lawsuit to get the 911 tapes from the police. It is the 911 tapes and messages on Trayvon's girlfriend's cell phone that show that Zimmerman was driven by a racist outlook. As Crump said, " He used every racist stereotype in the book to describe Trayvon."

"Zimmerman" Attorney Crump charged, "committed an act of 'cold-blooded murder.'"

On the same day as the march, the Sanford, Fla., City Commission voted that they had "no confidence in Police Commissioner Bill Lee Lewis for not arresting Zimmerman."

Trayvon's parents, Crump pointed out, "are not asking for an eye for an eye. They want justice".

Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father, thanked the New York crowd for supporting his son. The crowd responded with the chant, "We are Trayvon."

Saybrina Fulton, Trayvon's mother, thanked the large crowd for coming out. She went on to say that her heart was in pain but, she added, "to have the support of all of you gives me hope".

She continued, "This is not about black versus white. It's about right versus wrong."

After the rally there was a spirited march demanding justice for Trayvon which took over the streets around Union Square and ended up in lower Manhattan.

Over the last weeks Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly have been under heavy criticism because of the city's racist stop-and-frisk program.

There have also been a number of police killings in New York involving young blacks and Latinos.

The police have also been caught spying on the Muslim community and NYPD has been carrying out mass arrest and vicious attacks on the Occupy Wall St. movement.

In response to the huge national outcry over the murder, the Justice Department has launched an inquiry.

The next step is a massive effort to get 1 million signatures on a petition to demand that the authorities in Sanford Florida arrest George Zimmerman for murder.

One marcher put it well, "I feel sad inside. I have black kids of my own. This could happen to any of us. It's time to put an end to this insanity."

The Million Hoodie March for Justice was majority black, Latino and white youth. It took place without incident.

Right-Wing Hate Groups Exploding in Size and Reach

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 14:16:00 +0000

via Alternet

24 March 12

he radical right grew explosively in 2011, the third such dramatic expansion in as many years. The growth was fueled by superheated fears generated by economic dislocation, a proliferation of demonizing conspiracy theories, the changing racial makeup of America, and the prospect of four more years under a black president who many on the far right view as an enemy to their country.

The number of hate groups counted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last year reached a total of 1,018, up slightly from the year before but continuing a trend of significant growth that is now more than a decade old. The truly stunning growth came in the antigovernment "Patriot" movement - conspiracy-minded groups that see the federal government as their primary enemy.

The Patriot movement first emerged in 1994, a response to what was seen as violent government repression of dissident groups at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and near Waco, Texas, in 1993, along with anger at gun control and the Democratic Clinton Administration in general. It peaked in 1996, a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, with 858 groups, then began to fade. By the turn of the millennium, the Patriot movement was reduced to fewer than 150 relatively inactive groups.

But the movement came roaring back beginning in late 2008, just as the economy went south with the subprime collapse and, more importantly, as Barack Obama appeared on the political scene as the Democratic nominee and, ultimately, the president-elect. Even as most of the nation cheered the election of the first black president that November, an angry backlash developed that included several plots to murder Obama. Many Americans, infused with populist fury over bank and auto bailouts and a feeling that they had lost their country, joined Patriot groups.

The swelling of the Patriot movement since that time has been astounding. From 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274. That works out to a staggering 755% growth in the three years ending last Dec. 31. Last year's total was more than 400 groups higher than the prior all-time high, in 1996.

Meanwhile, the SPLC counted 1,018 hate groups operating in the United States last year, up from 1,002 in 2010. That was the latest in a string of annual increases going all the way back to 2000, when there were 602 hate groups. The long-running rise seemed for most of that time to be a product of hate groups' very successful exploitation of the issue of non-white immigration. Obama's election and the crashing economy have played a key role in the last three years.

At the same time, a third strand of the radical right - what the SPLC designates as "nativist extremist" groups, meaning organizations that go beyond normal political activism to harass individuals they suspect of being undocumented immigrants - shrank radically. After five years of sustained growth, these vigilante groups plummeted last year to 184 from 319 in 2010, a one-year drop of 42%. The decrease appears to be a product of bad press, internecine quarrels, and the co-optation of the immigration issue by state legislatures around the country passing draconian nativist laws like Alabama's H.B. 56.

Patriot and Militia Groups 1995-2011

In some ways, it was surprising that the same deflating effect did not hit the Patriot and hate groups, as 2011 also saw many politicians and other public figures attacking Muslims, LGBT people and other minorities, effectively taking on some of the issues dear to the radical right. But there was enough of a far-right wind to fill the sails of politicians, hate and Patriot groups, and Tea Parties alike, very likely the result, in large part, of a view of Obama as a dire threat to the country. (An IBOPE Zogby survey last year found that 30% of all voters did not believe that Obama was born in the U.S. even after the release of his long-form birth certificate.)

It's hard to know how all this will play out, given the unsettled nature of the presidential campaign and, in particular, the GOP primaries. The animus toward Obama and the government may be as much rooted in economic as racial anger.

In May 2011, a scholarly study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that white Americans believe that progress in race relations since the 1950s has come at their expense, with bias against whites more of a social problem in the last decade than bias against blacks. (This comes against the backdrop of the Census Bureau's prediction that non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority, falling to under 50% of the population, by 2050.) But a Pew Research Center study this January suggested that income inequality may be even more important. The survey found that some two-thirds of Americans believe that there are "strong conflicts" between rich and poor, about a 50% increase since a 2009 survey. That sensibility also was apparent in both the Tea Parties and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

And so it is with many extremist groups.

August Kreis, a longtime neo-Nazi who in January stepped down as leader of an Aryan Nations faction after being convicted of fraud related to his veteran's benefits, told the Intelligence Report that it was all about income inequality.

"The worse the economy gets, the more the groups are going to grow," he said. "White people are arming themselves - and black people, too. I believe eventually it's going to come down to civil war. It's going to be an economic war, the rich versus the poor. We're being divided along economic lines."

At the most macro level, the growth of right-wing radicalization - a phenomenon that is plainly evident in Europe as well as the United States - is related directly to political and, especially, economic globalization. As the nation-state has diminished in importance since the end of the Cold War, Western economies have opened up, not only to capital from abroad but also to labor. In concrete terms, that has meant major immigration flows, many of which have drastically altered the demographics of formerly fairly homogenous populations. In Europe and the U.S. both, white-dominated countries have become less so. At the same time, globalization has caused major economic dislocations in the West as certain industries and kinds of production move to less developed countries.

The sorry U.S. economy also may offer the best single explanation for the huge expansion in the so-called "sovereign citizens" movement, a subset of the larger Patriot movement. Although the size of the sovereign movement is hard to gauge - sovereigns tend to operate as individuals rather than in organized groups - law enforcement officials around the country have reported encounters. The SPLC, for its part, has estimated that some 300,000 Americans are involved.

Sovereign citizens, whose ideology first developed in white supremacist groups, generally do not believe they are obliged to pay federal taxes, follow most laws, or comply with requirements for driver's licenses and vehicle registrations. They also typically believe that filing certain documents can relieve them of debt or bankruptcy proceedings, or even bring them millions of dollars from secret government accounts. The claims are bogus, of course, but they have attracted thousands into the movement at a time of real financial hardship.

Hate Groups 200-2011

Sovereigns' focus on their supposed right to drive "upon the land" without any regulation has brought them into regular conflict with law enforcement officials. That was seen most dramatically on May 20, 2010, when a father-son team of sovereigns murdered two West Memphis, Ark., officers during a traffic stop, but officials have had other encounters. Just this January, a sovereign accused of trying to shoot a police officer during a traffic stop in Hurst, Texas, went on trial.

"There is a contingent of malcontents out there who are exceedingly hostile," Rich Roberts, a spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations, told the Christian Science Monitor for an article last year on the rising number of shooting deaths of police officers. "It's a really complex phenomenon in that it's a whole combination of factors where on one end you've got people like sovereign citizens, who are actually deliberately targeting police, as opposed to your garden-variety bad guy who's carrying a gun and will not hesitate to use it."

The FBI agrees. Last September, it issued a bulletin to law enforcement officials entitled "Sovereign Citizens: A Growing Domestic Threat to Law Enforcement" that describes the movement as "domestic terrorist." The bulletin notes that sovereigns have killed six law enforcement officers since 2000 and that Terry Nichols, convicted in the Oklahoma City bombing, was a sovereign.

The largest group of organized sovereigns, the Alabama-based Republic for the united States of America (RuSA), last year took a new step toward organizing a kind of government-in-waiting by adding a "Congress" with voting representatives in 49 states. The group says it is in the process of "reinhabiting" the government.

Although it can sound threatening, RuSA has not engaged in any known violence. But that's not true of all other Patriot groups, two of which are alleged to have engendered major terrorist plots aimed at police and others last year.

In March 2011, Alaska Peacemakers Militia leader Schaeffer Cox and four followers were arrested on weapons and conspiracy charges related to an alleged plan to kill Alaska state troopers and a judge. A state court later ruled that hundreds of hours of secret recordings made by informants would not be admissible, leading to the freeing of one of Cox's followers. But Cox and the other three still faced federal weapons charges and, this January, a superseding federal indictment again charged them with conspiracy to murder. In a related development, a woman who was the militia's secretary was arrested trying to enter Canada when officials found a pistol and information about pipe bombs and the ricin toxin in her truck.

Then, last November, federal officials arrested four members of a Georgia militia. The four elderly men were accused of plotting to assassinate public officials, bomb federal buildings, and carry out mass murders in four U.S. cities by dispersing deadly ricin dust from the windows of speeding cars. Like Cox and his comrades, the Georgia men are to be tried this year.

One of the factors apparently driving the expansion of the radical right has been the spread of conspiracy theories and demonizing falsehoods. Tall tales about secret government concentration camps, for instance, have spread beyond Patriot groups into nativist organizations and others. Equally preposterous stories of plots to impose Islamic Shariah law and to "recruit" schoolchildren into homosexuality have been plugged around the country, often by well-known public figures. It seems clear that this kind of propaganda boosts membership in conspiracy-minded groups.

But what may end up affecting the American radical right more than any other single factor in the coming year is President Obama and the presidential election campaign. If the primaries generate more attacks on the nation's first black president based on complete falsehoods - that he is a secret Muslim, a Kenyan, a radical leftist bent on destroying America - it's likely that the poison will spread. And if he wins reelection next fall, the reaction of the extreme right, already angry and on the defensive as the white population diminishes, could be truly frightening.

Anit-Gay Groups

The LGBT community made significant advances in 2011, with the repeal of the "Don't Act, Don't Tell" policy on gay men and lesbians in the military, the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage by Americans and the legalization of such bonds in New York state. But it was precisely these advances that seemed to set off a furious rage on the religious right, with renewed efforts to ban or repeal marriage equality and what seemed to be an intensification of anti-gay propaganda in certain quarters. American Family Association official Bryan Fischer, for instance, said that "gays are Nazis," claimed that HIV does not cause AIDS but gay men do, and, for good measure, criticized black welfare recipients who "rut like animals." In another development, most of the religious right groups that started out opposing abortion but moved on to attacking LGBT people have recently begun to adopt anti-Muslim propaganda en masse. The gay-bashing Traditional Values Coalition, for instance, last year redesigned its website to emphasize a new section entitled "Islam vs. the Constitution," published a report on Shariah law, and joined anti-Shariah conferences. Overall, the number of anti-gay hate groups in the United States rose markedly, going from 17 in 2010 to 27 last year.

Anti-Muslims Groups

The number of anti-Muslim groups tripled in 2011, jumping from 10 groups in 2010 to 30 last year. That rapid growth in Islamophobia, marked by the vilification of Muslims by opportunistic politicians and anti-Muslim activists, began in August 2010, when controversy over a planned Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan reached a fever pitch. Things got worse later in the year, when Oklahoma residents voted to amend the state constitution to forbid the use of Islamic Shariah law in state courts - a completely unnecessary change, given that the U.S. Constitution rules that out. The overheated atmosphere generated by these events also helped spur a 50% jump in the FBI's count of anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2010. Then, in March 2011, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) held hearings on the radicalization of U.S. Muslims that seemed meant to demonize them. At the same time, there was a swelling of truly vicious propaganda like this remarkable Jan. 14, 2011, comment from columnist Debbie Schlussel: "They are animals, yes, but a lower form than the dog, as they won't learn to change their behavior for a carrot or a reward."

Black Seperaist Groups

The most remarkable development among radical black groups and individuals last year was the continuing spread of so-called "sovereign citizen" ideology, a set of ideas that originated in white supremacist groups of the 1970s and 1980s but has nevertheless taken off among African Americans. Sovereigns' conspiratorial beliefs generally include the claim that Americans are not subject to most tax and criminal laws, including statutes requiring driver's licenses and vehicle registrations. In the case of the black adherents, who make up only a sliver of the larger sovereign citizens movement, these ideas have been melded with selective interpretations of early black nationalists like Noble Drew Ali. Black sovereigns, like white ones, have engaged in a series of criminal acts, drawing up bogus financial instruments, harassing enemies with unjustified court filings, and even illegally seizing houses they do not own. Another noteworthy development among radical black groups was the Nation of Islam's furious defense of Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, a sometimes Nation benefactor who was killed in an uprising later in the year. Nation leader Louis Farrakhan said that U.S. involvement in Libya would hasten the apocalypse. Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party, went further, calling President Obama a "nigger police chief" leading the attack on a "black man … on the run, named Qaddafi."

Christian Divinity Groups

Christian Identity, a radical theology that describes Jews as biologically descended from Satan and people of color as soulless "mud people," has been declining in recent years, largely because its arcane, Bible-based doctrines seem to hold little interest for young racists. But last year that trend reversed itself, as a new Identity group, Crusaders for Yahweh, appeared with 30 chapters. The group is based in Chillicothe, Ohio, and led by Paul Mullet, a former member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations (whose members generally practice Christian Identity) who left that group in 2010. That year, Mullet briefly formed an organization he called the American National Socialist Party, but he has now moved on to Crusaders for Yahweh, which appears to be tied institutionally to Aryan Nations. Also last year, Identity lost one of its best-known proponents with the death at 64 of Peter John "Pete" Peters, pastor of the LaPorte (Colo.) Church of Christ. Peters, who ran an Internet and radio ministry called Scriptures for America, had inspired extremists for some four decades.

Ku Klux Klan Groups

Overall, the number of Klan chapters last year fell to 152 from 221 in 2010, and the various Klan groupings were relatively quiet. But the year brought major changes in the Klan formations, with some large groups disappearing while others popped up or added large numbers of new chapters. Most notably, the second largest Klan group in America - the Marion, Ohio-based Brotherhood of Klans, with 38 chapters in almost as many states - folded when its leader, Jeremy Parker, joined the leading Aryan Nations faction. At the same time, however, the Rebel Brigade Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Martinsville, Va., and inactive for several years, came back to life under leader Stan Martin with 19 chapters. The United Knights of Tennessee Ku Klux Klan, meanwhile, shot up from a single chapter in Morristown, Tenn., to 19. Two others, the True Invisible Empire Knights based in Pulaski, Tenn., and the Traditional American Knights of Potosi, Mo., merged to form the Potosi-based True Invisible Empire Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nativist Extremist Groups

The contemporary movement of "nativist extremist" groups - organizations that go beyond lobbying and other political activities meant to restrict immigration, and instead harass and confront individuals they suspect are undocumented immigrants -began in 2005, with the appearance of the first Minuteman groups. (The SPLC does not list nativist extremist groups as hate groups; only a handful of the most extreme anti-immigrant groups are listed that way.) For its first five years, the movement expanded rapidly, reaching a high point of 319 groups in 2010. Last year, that number plummeted by more than 40%, falling to just 184, for reasons that are both internal and external. Internally, the movement was disrupted by internecine quarrels and the negative publicity that was generated by a Minuteman leader's murder of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter in Arizona, a case that resulted in the leader's being sentenced to death last year. But what may have been even more important is the way that the movement was co-opted as state legislatures began passing draconian legislation meant to punish undocumented immigrants, effectively stealing the issue away from the nativist groups.

Neo-Confederate Groups

The neo-Confederate movement, whose heart is the Alabama-based League of the South (LOS), grew both smaller and more radical last year as its political efforts to organize a second Southern secession seemed to fall on bare ground. Founded in 1994 by former university professor Michael Hill, the LOS, which opposes racial intermarriage and seeks a society marked by "general European cultural hegemony," had 42 chapters in 2010, but saw that number fall to 32 last year. The drop-off came as Hill's rhetoric grew more belligerent than ever before. Last July, at his Abbeville, S.C., annual conference, Hill told LOS members that "we are already at war" and, earlier, he urged them to buy AK-47s, hollow-point bullets and tools to derail trains. Some 60 people at the conference learned how to draw down on an enemy, and Hill asked in a speech, "What would it take to get you to fight?" Meanwhile, the group's relatively strong Alabama chapter, based in Wetumpka, almost finished work on a 4,000-square-foot building that it intends to use for international conferences.

Racist Skinhead Groups

Last March, David Lynch, leader of the Sacramento, Calif.-based American Front and one of the best-known racist skinheads on the international scene, was shot to death in his Citrus Heights home; his girlfriend was shot in the leg. Within days, police were questioning Charles Gilbert Demar III, a Lynch associate also known as "Charlie Boots" who was the lead singer of the Stormtroop 16 band, as a "person of interest." Demar was arrested when officials found crystal methamphetamine and a meth manufacturing setup in his apartment, but as of press time he had not been charged in connection with Lynch's death. Another significant event on the skinhead scene took place last June, when the decade-old Vinlanders Social Club, one of the most violent racist skinhead groups, held its first white power concert. More than 50 people came to the event in Columbus, Ohio, including Richie Meyer, president of the Confederate Hammerskins, and Forrest Fogarty, a musician and one of Meyer's more prominent followers. Their presence and friendly association with Vinlanders at the event reflected the success of a truce between the two groups that was reached in 2007, ending what had been described as a "blood feud" between them.

White Nationalist Groups

Three large groups form the core of the white nationalist movement in the United States: the Council of Conservative Citizens, an outgrowth of the old White Citizens Councils, that fights against school integration and racial intermarriage; American Renaissance, a journal that justifies white nationalism by attacking the intelligence and mental health of black people; and the American Third Position (A3P), a racist party with electoral ambitions in many states and the nation at large. Of these, it has been A3P, which only started up in 2009, that has been growing the most rapidly. It also has attracted most of the best-known white nationalists in America to its cause. Last year, Virginia Abernethy, an emeritus professor of psychiatry and anthropology at Vanderbilt Medical School, joined the A3P board of directors, as did Tomas Sunic, an American-educated Croatian who has spoken at neo-Nazi events. Others who became A3P officials earlier include Kevin MacDonald, a deeply anti-Semitic professor at California State University, Long Beach; James Edwards, host of a racist radio show based in Memphis; Don Wassall, publisher of the anti-immigrant Nationalist Times; and Jamie Kelso, once an aide to former Klan boss David Duke. A3P is headed up by Los Angeles lawyer William Daniel Johnson, a man who once sought to deport every American with any "ascertainable trace of Negro blood."

Mark Potok is the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report.

Working Class Values in 2012

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:05:00 +0000

As a half million union members across the country prepare to put on their walking shoes and spend the summer and fall knocking on the doors of their neighbors and co-workers to get out the vote, they will be making history. Labor's unprecedented campaign this year is aimed at organizing workers' political power community by community.

"What's at stake are basic values," says Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. "Will we bow to the top 1%? Or will we honor the simple idea that made America great and will make America great again -- respect for hard work and the contributions of every person?"

Organizing working class communities to vote on the basis of working class values is a powerful antidote to the poisonous right-wing mantra that each one is on their own.

The basic working class values of fairness, dignity, solidarity and respect brought together hundreds of thousands of people to resist attacks on public workers in Wisconsin and Ohio, and attacks on immigrant workers in Arizona.

Announcing that President Obama has "earned the support of working people for a second term," Trumka noted his accomplishments including pushing job creation measures through a hostile Congress. "Each of the Republican presidential candidates, on the other hand, has pledged to uphold the special privileges of Wall Street and the 1%--privileges that have produced historic economic inequality and drowned out the voices of working people in America," said Trumka.

The goals of the AFL CIO also include winning a shift in Congress to end Republican rule of the House and obstruction of the Senate.

The Citizens United decision has unleashed wild pro-corporate mega-funding of the Republican extreme right-wing. Labor's strength lies in its numbers. Instead of contributing through the Democratic Party, the unions will put their resources into building up their own member structures for political action.

Labor '96 was the launch of the first independent union get out the vote program. Today, Labor 2012 is fulfilling the original slogan, "building to win - building to last." Methods and structures are now in place in most unions to mobilize large numbers of their members. This year they will be able to speak to the community at large, opening new avenues for political independence.

A dramatic example of labor's independent politics in New Haven, Connecticut is gaining national attention.

Last spring, a group of workers in New Haven were brought together by their unions for a leadership training in values based organizing. They were custodians and clerks (Unite Here Locals 34 and 35), group home workers (1199 SEIU) and social workers (AFSCME). Many had their first big political experiences traveling the country to campaign for Barack Obama in 2008. They brought to the table their life experiences and their readiness to stand up and fight for their co-workers, families and neighbors to have a decent life.

No one imagined that nearly every one of those workers would get elected to the New Haven Board of Aldermen just a few months later, filling two-thirds of the 30 seats and changing the political climate. The bold action to run union activists in so many wards was based on the idea that it is the workers who should be the decision makers. Their story offers great inspiration for 2012.

New Haven's population is majority African American and Latino. Deep poverty exists side by side with the lavish wealth of Yale University, the dominant employer. Last year 32 youth died from gun and street violence. Something had to be done.

New Haven's new governing body is the product of a reawakened activism throughout the city. Relationships between the unions at Yale and the community had grown close over several years of organizing around struggles for community benefits and a community voter project.

Service and maintenance members of Local 35 at Yale, and clerical and technical members of Local 34, along with members of the graduate student union GESO led the Aldermanic campaign effort neighborhood by neighborhood, ward by ward. Door knocking began in the spring to talk with people about what was on their minds.

Anger and dissatisfaction were widespread at the lack of investment in neighborhoods compared to downtown, the lack of jobs for community residents created by big new development, and the shocking number of youth killed in street violence.

At first people shrugged off the home visits saying that nothing will ever change. But as the summer wore on and attitudes shifted, more and more residents began joining the team of door knockers in their wards. The idea became contagious that participation and unity can win positive change. Across the city over 400 people, many for the first time, and many youth, made the commitment to knock on the doors of their neighbors four days a week and make the case for why they should come out and vote.

There was electricity in the air at an overflow rally before election day for the 15 primary challenges to incumbent Aldermen. No one could remember a campaign rally with such a diverse turnout truly reflecting every section and population of the city including the youth. When 14 won it was a stunning victory. It showed that people were looking for leadership and they responded. In the general election a total of 21 Aldermen elected are a part of the labor community movement.

It was the relationships built during door knocking that negated an all-out effort aided by the media to discredit the movement by claiming that union members holding public office would only represent their union's agenda and not the agenda of the neighborhood. Residents could see for themselves that the agenda is one and the same. The working class values of these candidates were clear.

The fact that these candidates had learned their leadership skills within the union became a positive factor. The anti-union split and divide tactic fell flat. At the doors campaign workers would explain how proud they were to be working for their candidate "who knows how to organize and win a grievance because of all the experience in the union. Together we can do the same thing in the neighborhood."

However, the anti-union tactic continues post-election. The new leadership is also being tested with attempts to create racial divisions by the old political structure. Defeating these attempts requires an ongoing structure in each ward, turning the contacts made during the campaign into permanent volunteers who will keep their block informed and mobilize when need be.

After the election and before the January 1 inauguration there was a remarkable overflow meeting at Conte School. People from all parts of the city, organizations, clergy, block watches and other groups took part. Many who had been looking narrowly at their own concerns were now talking about common issues of economic justice.

At this meeting proposals were presented and the priorities for the new Board of Aldermen were developed - a jobs pipeline, meeting the needs of youth, and ending the violence. Research and solutions were then laid out in a booklet published by the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, "A Renaissance for All of Us - Building an Inclusive prosperity for New Haven."

The report acknowledges that "closing the gap between rich and poor, averting the extinction of the middle class, and revitalizing the economy will require large-scale structural reform on a national level and a reinvention of America's place in the global economy. However, there are concrete steps we can take on the local level to make sure New Haven has good jobs, opportunities for young people, and strong communities for all."

The report draws on the Grass Roots Community Agenda developed over the past eight years and projects four concrete steps:

- Make sure more people have access to good jobs with living wages, affordable health care and organizing rights by improving the standards for service sector jobs in the growing fields of health care, education and hospitality.

- Connect local people to good jobs through local recruitment and training programs that guarantee full time employment for all qualified participants upon completion

- Make sure more people have a voice in decisions about development projects in order to prioritize job access, affordable housing and other community issues.

- Increase civil participation and engagement year-round (not just on Election Day) by making sure our communities are organized, educated and informed of their rights, opportunities for involvement, and the plans and proposals that will shape the future of their city.

As the big challenge of shaping and enacting these proposals unfolds, the ability to mobilize neighborhood input and support is key. Leadership building at the ward and neighborhood level is required to establish permanent organizations that can respond to problems and mobilize on a year round basis.

Youth played a significant part in this election. In one ward, the Young Communist League was the core of the campaign. Voters were very impressed at the interest and dedication of high school youth knocking on their doors. In turn, the youth got the experience of a successful collective effort that won.

Without waiting to catch their breath after the primary, the youth organized a Jobs for Youth conference in late September. They formed themselves into the New Elm City Dream and began meeting weekly to organize a march for youth jobs prior to the general election.

Over 200 people came out for the candle light vigil remembering all the youth who had been killed to violence. They marched to City Hall, joined by union members and Occupy New Haven, where they were greeted by elected officials and union leaders.

Six weeks later the New Haven Labor Council joined with Occupy for another march from City Hall to Wall St near Yale University. New Elm City Dream was asked to lead that march of 1,000.

The work of these youth has helped the labor community coalition shape its agenda. Likewise, participation in the political process by these youth with the unions has given them experience and confidence in discussing issues and getting commitments from their peers.

When Jarvis Tyner, Executive Vice Chair of the Communist Party came to meet with the youth in February, there was also an opportunity to exchange ideas with some of the newly elected Aldermen. When he placed their election experience into the national context of defeating the right-wing in 2012, he received an enthusiastic response..

In New Haven there are now no Republicans elected to city government. The same is true in Hartford, Connecticut's capitol city, where voters elected three Working Families party candidates and six Democrats to their city council. However the state's open Senate seat is expected to be a sharp contest between a Tea Party Republican and a progressive member of the House.

The right of workers to a voice at work with union representation, the role of government for the common good, the equal rights of racially oppressed people and women, the chance for youth to earn, learn and live are all at stake in the elections of 2012.

By placing the struggle for working class values at the center of the Labor 2012 campaign, Richard Trumka is preparing the way for battles beyond the election, objectively laying the basis for a larger, more powerful, independent voice for labor and allies that can put working class concerns at the front of the national agenda.

It will take the leadership of the labor movement, the mobilization of the community, and tireless one-on-one conversations about whose interests each candidate represents in every election district across this country to win this epic election battle for the White House, the Congress and State Houses on the side of working people. It can be done.

Labor: An Analysis of Past Strikes, Political Strikes ,Present and Future Struggles

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:38:00 +0000

The trade union movement today remains in deep crisis. The bad news is abundant. The number of workers in private sector unions is single digit, back to what it was before the New Deal. Only the higher percentage of public employees, who were not unionized in the pre New Deal era, keeps the total above single digits.

And public employees and their unions are under massive attack at the state and local level. Although the Obama administration especially has appointed better people to the NLRB, there has been no labor law reform in the interests of workers in this country since Kennedy administration action legalizing federal public employee unions a half a century ago.

When the long-term economic expansion of the post WWII era ended in the mid 1970s and what the late John Kenneth Galbriath called the "truce on equality" (the main trade union leadership's return to a more narrow "business unionist "in exchange for protection from the Democratic party in holding on to their New Deal era gains) was broken by the corporations, AFL-CIO attempts to gain labor law reform were rebuffed by the Carter administration.

The Reagan administration then launched the greatest assault on trade unions since the 1920s while encouraging through its deregulation policies a huge increase in the export of capital from the U.S. These policies were moderated substantially by the Clinton administration, but neither the policies nor the losses were reversed. The Bush II administration took up where Reagan and Bush I left off. The Obama administration's positive policies have been undermined by right Republican gains in major industrial states in the 2010 elections, which have resulted in the most extensive and concerted attempt to destroy public employee unions at the state and local level since their rise in the 1960s.

This is the bad news. Some in the labor movement see this weakness as a reason for more caution, inaction, and a traditional policy to hold on to what little is left even if those policies have contributed to the losses labor has suffered.

What can history do to provide us with a guide that will help us create good news in the future?

First, some have suggested the possibility of political strikes, which played a major part in the rise of the labor and socialist movements in European countries and continue to be part of European/British resistance to reactionary "austerity policies" today. Some see in the Occupy movement a hopeful expression of such actions. Let me look at U.S. history to examine this idea.

Political strikes have played a role in U.S. history-but that history is different in major aspects from European or British labor history

"Universal suffrage" aka male and in the U.S. white male suffrage was established generations later in European countries than in the U.S.

Marxists in the last decades of the 19^th century fought to gain suffrage and other democratic political rights for the working class and to build both trade unions and socialist political parties which would strengthen each other and empower the working class to transform its growing political power into economic power---to use state action in the interests of the working class.

In Italy, Germany, France, and other European countries, political strikes of workers in the last decades of the 19^th century were important in rescinding anti-trade union, anti- strike, and anti-socialist laws and permitting large socialist parties and influential trade union movements to develop.

In the U.S. though, there were no national laws against unions or for that matter strikes. However, employers could with impunity hire strike breakers, use labor spies, and when needed gain anti-strike "injunctions" from pliable judges to break strikes. They could also fire and blacklist workers for any trade union activity.

And if all that failed, they could use their political power to have governors send in state militia and even presidents to send in the U.S. army to break strikes. Although workers had the right to vote in the U.S., the parties that they voted for did little to provide them with any protection of their trade union rights.

Also, the decentralized nature of U.S. politics-broad police powers for local and state governments, gave corporations, increasingly national corporations, a series of both private and public weapons to use against workers that unions did not have. In the U.S., it was never a question of "rescinding" anti-labor legislation, but enacting legislation that would protect workers right to form trade unions from a multi-faceted predatory political system that was fixed in the interests of employers.

In European countries Marxists engaged in political struggles with labor or "Communist" anarchists (those whom Lenin would later call anarcho syndicalists) who rejected the organization of socialist parties and unions and the use of the state to intervene in the interests of workers.

These anarchists, some of whom formed their own political parties while others worked within existing socialist parties, advocated "political strikes" that would snowball into a revolutionary "general strike" which would lead to a workers revolution and the collapse of the capitalist state, with workers then reorganizing the economy and society on a collectivist basis from the bottom up

Some Twists, Turns, and Detours in U.S. Labor History

In the U.S. beginning on May 1, 1886, the Knights of Labor, then the leading trade union federation, called for strikes and demonstrations through the nation demanding an eight hour work day. While they did not call for government legislation to achieve this end, this was in effect a national strike with a clear political dimension.

The Knights of Labor advocated workers cooperatives and were not generally sympathetic to strikes. They were however supportive of workers democracy and the organization of workers (and self employed artisans small capitalists, and women and African-Americans) on a non discriminatory basis. The anarchist wing of the labor movement, whose aims were different than the Knights, supported the May demonstrations and in Chicago played the leading role in mobilizing them. The resulting Haymarket "riot" and trials and executions in Chicago led to a wave of red scare repression nationally against the Knights and other labor activists.

But the events were followed closely by workers organizations through the world. In 1889, at a congress of workers organizations and socialist parties on the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of the French revolution, delegates decided in memory of and honor of the American workers at Haymarket to make May 1, 1890 a day of demonstrations and strikes for the eight hour day through the world, but that this demand be made not only of workers but of capitalist governments.

These demonstrations came to be repeated annually through the world (May Day) and also helped to spark a new international organization of socialist parties and affiliated trade unions(known to history as the Second International). Ironically, Marxists, in their political struggles with anarchists, were able by the mid 1890s to make political action and demands by labor upon governments criteria for membership in the International, thus effectively excluding anarchist labor organizations.

In the U.S. though, the riseat this tim of great corporations in the context of the two party decentralized U.S. political system saw major defensive strikes in Steel (Homestead, 1892) and the railroad industry (Pullman, 1894) which were crushed, along with their unions.

The American Federation of Labor, founded in the mid 1880s. and gaining strength after Haymarket and the collapse of the Knights of Labor, adopted under the leadership of Samuel Gompers by the end of the century a narrow "business" or "bread and butter" unionist approach, modeled after the one that the British Trade Unions adopted after the destruction of the Paris Paris Commune and their withdrawal of support for the First International-British labor rejected the formation of a Labor or Socialist party and supported the Liberal Party to protect Labor's interests against the Conservatives.

While the British Trade Unions would move away from this policy by the early 20^th century after decades of agitation and organization by Marxist and non Marxist (Fabian) socialists, and formed the British Labor Party, the American Federation of Labor pursued this policy, which continues in a sense to this very day, initially in an even more conservative manner -supporting both Democrats and Republicans on an ad hoc basis based on their promise to support specific policies. "Reward you friends and punish your enemies" was Gompers slogan when it came to trade union political action "More" was Gompers angry answer to his socialist opponents when they demanded he speak on labor's long-range goals.

In reality this meant more in wages and benefits for the members of individual AFL craft unions without government assistance and without much interest in the fate of the great majority of workers, since AFL policy did little to organize non craft, industrial workers, service workers, women and even accepted Jim Crow clauses in craft union constitutions barring Blacks from union membership.

Socialists like party presidential candidate Eugene Debs and industrial unionists were active in 1905 in the creation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) which they hoped would be a labor federation which would emulate the policies o f European labor federations and work in concert with a mass socialist and/or labor party. But labor anarchists after a number of years became the most important force in the IWW.

In a sense all of the IWW strikes, those won and lost, were political strikes. Political agitation and political strikes that would eventually lead to the general strike was the goal of IWW activity. To some extent what the IWW lacked in theory it made up in courageous and innovative practice. Its Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike, uniting diverse groups of immigrant workers, was a victory. Its "free speech" campaigns against local laws aimed at its street speakers helped to make the first amendment right real. Its activities in the failed Patterson, New Jersey textile strike (1913) saw artists and intellectuals rallying publically to the side of strike workers in the Madison Square Garden pageant, which John Reed helped to organize.

But it built no lasting labor organization, and did not try to elect candidates to political office. Even with its militancy and courage, and its recruitment of women and African-American activists at a much higher level than the socialist party and in opposition to the AFL's racist and sexist exclusionary policies, it did not survive the massive repression it faced during WWI and the postwar red scare.

Some of the leading IWW activists joined the postwar Communist Party USA(Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and others ) and the Communist Party USA in the 1920s and 1930s, combined the IWW commitment to inclusionary industrial unionism with a variety of more advanced trade union policies-the socialists "boring from within" policies in existing AFL unions, attempts to form new industrial unions in areas where the AFL did nothing to organize like Auto and Steel, and connecting labor struggles with larger political struggles.

The trade union movement won its greatest victories both in numbers and in pro labor legislation during the 1930s and 1940s. Multi-faceted worker militancy and a great upsurge in strikes in the period 1934-1938, focused by dedicated and experienced CPUSA activists, men and women who fitted Lenin's characterization of Communists as "professional revolutionaries" more than any others at any time in U.S. history, even though they did not make a revolution, played a central role in making and consolidating these gains.

These victories remain the greatest in U.S. labor history. While history does not repeat it narrowly and one can't expect them to be repeated in their old form, they remain the best learning experience for trade union activists today.

First, while the strikes were not political strikes per se, there was a major political dimension to them. Beginning in 1930, Communists organized unemployed councils to fight against home evictions and fight for public jobs ("work relief" it was then called) unemployment insurance for the unemployed and direct aid to those who could not work, especially women with dependent children ("home relief" it was then called)

Uniting the employed with the unemployed to prevent capital from using the latter against the former was a policy that Communists successfully advanced. Communists also used the labor provisions of the New Deal government's National Recovery Act, whose purpose was to "bailout" capital by fixing prices and production, but which did establish on paper collective bargaining rights, as a mandate to intensify trade union organizing campaigns independent of the AFL and also to launch campaigns through all of its mass organizations and the professional associations its activists belonged to pressure the AFL to organize the unorganized and establish industrial unions.

In 1934, victories in the Toledo Auto late Strike, the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike, and the West Coast organizing strike of the International Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union(ILWU), which was transformed into the San Francisco General Strike, the only truly successful General Strike in U.S. history, provided a background for the New Deal government's enactment of the National Labor Relations Act(NLRA) in 1935, in which the Federal government intervened to provide a democratic electoral process for trade union certification and collective bargaining agreements.

In other legislation that year, the New Deal government established old age pensions (social security) unemployment insurance (which Communists had largely developed as an issue), a substantial public jobs program, the WPA ("the work relief" Communists had called for years) and aid to families with dependent children (the "home relief" Communists had called for years)

The focused grassroots struggles made the legislation, most of which had been considered "impossible" before the depression, a reality.

The strikes and the legislation then led a pro industrial union fact of the AFL, led by John L. Lewis, to fight at the AFL's 1935 convention for a policy of chartering industrial unions. When the old guard leadership voted this down, it would have been relatively easy for Lewis to put his head down and go along with them. He was after all, a registered Republican with a record of red-baiting in the union in the 1920s, but he saw both the necessity and the opportunity for industrial unionism. He and others broke with the AFL, formed a Committee which later became the Congress of Industrial Unions(CIO) formed a de facto alliance with CPUSA activists, and opened a new page in U.S. labor history.

In the U.S. context, a version of the long established Marxist strategy of uniting trade union and political action bore fruit. Roosevelt's and New Deal Democrats sweeping 1936 victory provided the context for the greatest strike victory won by U.S. workers in history, the General Motors sit-down strike of 1937, which led GM to accept the UAW as an industrial union and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with it.

This victory, before the Supreme Court disappointed the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and virtually the whole U.S. capitalist class by declaring the NLRA constitutional was followed by U.S. Steel's acceptance of the Steel Workers Union to prevent a sit down strike. The wave of sit down strikes continued, state governors, including Democrats elected with labor support, suppressed strikes in the old fashioned way, a sharp recession enabled anti-New Deal Republicans, who had forged an alliance with conservative primarily Southern Democrats to make major gains in the 1938 elections and establish a "conservative coalition" that would stalemate most subsequent New Deal legislation.

But the new unions held their gains, minimum wage and forty hour week(meaning 8 hour day) legislation was enacted, along with the outlawing of child labor. Before the cold war induced postwar repression, the number of workers in trade unions had grown from under 3 million to nearly at the low point of the depression to nearly 15 million, from less than 10 percent of the non agricultural work force to around a 35 percent of the non agricultural work force.

The Lessons for Today

The bad news is that the labor movement even at its height, when it involved itself massively and successfully in national and local politics, built industrial unions which in a number of cases were led by Communist Party USA activists and close allies, never overcame in the long run negative decentralized aspects of the U.S. political system and did not develop an independent labor and/ or mass socialist party .

Had that developed out of the New Deal era, labor might have been able to assist postwar drives to organize the unorganized, particularly in the South, repeal the pernicious Taft-Hartley law, which allowed states to pass anti-union shop "right to work law" to undermine the NLRA, and of course enact national health care under social security, full employment legislation and other advanced progressive policies which were on the New Deal's postwar agenda when WWII ended.

The good news is that we have a mass upsurge against reaction that has taken and spread through the Occupy Movement, bringing to tens of millions the concept that the present capitalist system exploits and oppresses the 99% for the benefit of the 1%. The good news also is that the AFL-CI0 leadership is more fully committed to anti-racist and anti-chauvinist policies and more open to militancy than at any time since the early post WWII era. Now we must bring these two together.

The strength of the Occupy Movement, like the IWW, is their innovation, their courage, their engagement in mass action that gains the attention and also inspires working people. Their weakness,like the IWW, is their lack of a developmental strategy

There is also the significant anarchist tendency within the movement which encourages the view among some that there will be expanding Occupations and perhaps one Big Occupation that will provide victory for the 99% over the 1%.

The strength of the labor movement is its new progressive orientations and the fact that even with its losses, it remains the foundation for the protection of workers'' rights and progressive political action in the U.S.

Its weakness remains its continued function as a political interest group, great caution in working politically in the Democratic party (here I am not talking about a third party, a labor party, but labor's timidity in challenging Democratic party leaders who undermine labor and peoples movements through their deals with the Republican right and in some cases actually play the leading role in attacking public unions)

What labor and the left can learn from the achievements of the past is to start to think again in terms of labor and the left. Under the leadership of John Sweeney and today even more so Richard Trumka, the national leadership of the AFL-CI0 has come to identify with and support peoples movements for civil rights, the rights of undocumented workers, environmental protection, and the unity of public and private sector workers.

We can and must build on this improved relationship to unite organized workers with the tens of millions of non union people who support these movements, not to build paper coalitions which will raise funds and make endorsements, but organizations which will engage in mass actions that advance policies and legislation to strengthen the movements-legislation like public control over the banking system, public works and real foreclosure and debt relief to "bail out the people."

What we can also learn from the achievements of the past is to develop a much more effective relationship with the Obama administration.

Remember that Communist activists in effect began to forge such a relationship when the New Deal government through its major policies was trying to "bail out" the banks and corporations and commercial agriculture from the top, and then led the struggles which tipped the balance in favor of labor and peoples movements in the second half of Roosevelt's first term. There was improvement in the economy then (of course the crisis was much greater and the social protections were just beginning to be established) as the economy is improving now.

Capital and much of the political establishment, including the Democratic Party congressional leadership, looked to continuing these capital "bailout" policies. But the strikes, the unity forged between the employed and the unemployed, the fact that in victory and in defeat those committed to building a new labor movement kept on coming---provided the context in which the New Deal government would support major policy victories in legislation that would stimulate great labor victories which would in turn sustain the legislation.

The lesson today is not only to work for Obama's re-election out of fear of what the right Republicans would do if they gained control of the federal government, although such fears are totally justified, but to begin through this campaign to lay the groundwork for major advances in a second Obama administration of the kind that many hoped would transpire in the first Obama administration. Here labor can and must play a larger role in the campaign, working with the new forces, youth especially, who rallied to Obama's candidacy in 2008.

These forces represented a broad left, anti-racist, anti-corporate, against police state repression movement. But they largely dissipated after the victory. They really were not their politically in 2010. Just as the CIO came into existence in 1935, helped to bring about the landslide of 1936, and then used that landslide to win huge victories and set the stage for the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937-1938, we should work to bring the trade union movement together with both the broad forces which supported Obama in 2008 and the Occupy movement today in a broad based national organization that can help defeat the Republican right in the elections and then move forward with that victory to achieve trade union and peoples victories in national policy and legislation.

These are enormously difficult tasks. Some may see them as very unlikely. However, this is, as I see it, the only realistic model that we have given U.S. conditions today and U.S. history.

Just as industrial unions, national labor legislation, social security and unemployment insurance, minimum wages and the forty hour week, were seen by conventional wisdom as virtually impossible in the U.S. (including the leadership of the AFL) shortly before they were won through both mass struggle and the intervention of a progressive government, a real national public health program, progressive taxation, progressive labor law, full employment policy, and public sector and infrastructure reconstruction and revitalization, all of which conventional wisdom sees as unlikely if not impossible , can be won today

Path to victory in 2012

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:29:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Peoples World

It's easy to underestimate the election chances of the Republican Party this fall. Its antics in recent months make people wonder if the GOP has a secret death wish.

A recent article in the New Yorker is subtitled, "Can the GOP save itself?" A fair question for a party that seems to be shooting itself in the foot at every opportunity.

Just consider the track record of the Grand Old Party over the last few months:

Its opposition to a working-class payroll tax cut played poorly in Main Street America, so poorly in fact that Republican Party leaders in the Senate and House did an about face.

Its war on the labor movement alienated the GOP from millions of working families.

Its hostility to the use of contraceptives turned off large sections of women irrespective of party affiliation.

Its muted reactions to the misogynistic comments of radio host Rush Limbaugh directed at college student Sandra Fluke left people of various political persuasions upset and anger.

Its unconcealed appeals to racist sentiments among white voters met a chorus of criticism.

Its closing of space between the religious and secular spheres didn't sit well with many Americans - nor does its eagerness to go to war against Iran.

And, and by no means least, its presidential hopefuls have turned the Republican primary into a political circus, leaving tens of millions - Republican, Independent and Democrat alike - shaking their heads in disbelief.

No candidate, including Mitt Romney, has been able to win anything close to a majority, and with each state primary - and we still have many to go - each candidate seems to grow smaller in stature.

I could go on, but I think that I have made my point: The GOP, through its own doing, has hurts its chances in the November elections.

And yet it would be a mistake to think that a rout of the Republican right is all but guaranteed.

Why do I say this?

First, money can't necessarily buy an election, but it can make a difference in the outcome. And the Republicans are well endowed. The New York Times reported that Republican super political action committees are out raising Democratic super PACs by a wide margin.

According to the article, American Crossroads, the leading Republican super PAC took in $51 million in 2011 and plans to raise $240 million this year. Charles and David Koch, the billionaire conservative oilmen, the article goes on to say, expect to raise an additional $200 million for other groups opposing President Obama.

Meanwhile the Democratic super PACS, Priorities USA and a related group, raised only $6.1 million through the end of 2011.

Second, it is unclear how voters will react to the fusillade of negative campaigning that will come from the mouths of the Republican candidates and their PACS.

Lacking a positive political message, the GOP will employ large doses of racism, male supremacy and other backward ideas in the hope of winning white workers - the so called Reagan Democrats - to their column in November.

Third, the Republican Party hopes to disenfranchise enough voters, especially youth, people of color and seniors to turn the election in its favor. Its campaign, which must be resisted, is hitting full stride.

Finally, the trajectory of the economy as well the unfolding of events in the Middle East introduces a large element of uncertainty into the elections. If the positive trends in economic growth and employment continue, then President Obama and the Democrats' election prospects improve considerably; a sweep becomes possible.

If on the other hand, the upward advance peters out then it's anybody's election.

As for Iran, the situation remains volatile with considerable pressure on the president from various quarters, including Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, to take military action. So far he has wisely resisted as well as counseled Israel's Netanyahu government to do the same.

If war breaks out, however, all bets on the outcome of the fall election are off.

So no one who hopes to move the country in a progressive direction should relax until the polls are close on Election Day. The Republican right will not bow out of politics without a struggle.

The American people can win in November, but only if we take nothing for granted.

Joseph Stiglitz on the continuing shambles of the US labour market

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:06:00 +0000

via Carl Bloice, and the Financial Times:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/22e87a10-6c34-11e1-8c9d-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1p89JXDkn

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz almost always pleases students of economics who like deeper thinkers. I think he makes several very important points:

1. Looking at the large variables in the macro economy -- workforce size and growth, productivity, GDP -- he comes up with a GDP growth rate that must exceed 4% for sustained progress toward "full employment",

2. High Inequality --- the foundation of the problem of "low consumer demand" --- is the key force driving low growth, and the likelihood that it will NOT exceed 4% anytime soon.

3. The historical "long wave" transition from manufacturing to services (similar to the industrialization wave a century or more ago) is not one that markets can manage. Only government, and a scientific government at that, can manage such transformations.

Stiglitz is arguing, in effect, that there is a world historic shift underway. In Marxist terms one might say that the tech-driven transformation of most work from manufacturing to services is fundamentally restructuring relations of production -- i.e. occupations and ways of living associated with the division of labor, including the division of labor and capital, or classes. Since the kind of wave, or cycle, involved is a long one it exerts a sustained force on all public institutions since many of those institutions are tasked and structured exactly to deal with conflicts and mediations arising out of a mode of production. Environmental, health, corporate, labor, discrimination law all arise out of and are framed by these relations.

On the Left, we are challenged, I think, to consider more deeply the essential characteristics of the class character and content of these relations of production. The working class is changing in important ways. Its not the same class of 100 years ago on many dimensions of measurement: relative income sources from wages vs salary vs capital, assets, skills, human capital, tools, the overall cost of producing workers of the kinds needed in resturctured relations of production, etc. Many of the challenges confronting grass roots organizers reflect the impact of changed structural relations on basic working class organizations: unions, non-profit services, and others.

March 12, 2012 7:21 pm

The US labour market is still a shambles

By Joseph Stiglitz

It is understandable, given the number of times green shoots have been seen since the downturn began in December 2007, that there might be some scepticism about claims the recovery is finally under way. To me the question is what does it imply for policy? Does it mean we can be more relaxed about the demands for budget cuts emanating from fiscal conservatives? Or that the US Federal Reserve should start paying more attention to inflation, and begin contemplating raising interest rates? Even if this is not one of the many green shoots that soon turn brown, the economy will almost certainly need more stimulus if it is to return to full employment any time soon.

This is the inevitable conclusion from looking at the state of the labour market today. It is a shambles. In Friday’s US employment report, the proportion of working-age American adults in a job moved up only 0.1 percentage points, to a miserable 58.6 per cent – numbers not seen since the downturn of the early 1980s. There are still 23m Americans who would like a full-time job but who cannot get one. The jobs deficit, the number of extra jobs that would have been required to keep up with new entrants to the labour market, is 15m. Employment has yet to return to its level of December 2008. Male employment is still below what it was in February 2007 – meanwhile, the working-age population has grown considerably.

Let’s assume that job creation continues at the rate of 225,000 jobs a month. That is only about 100,000 beyond the number required to provide jobs for the average monthly number of new entrants into the labour force. At that pace, it would take 150 months to reach full employment – 13 years, some time around 2025. The independent Congressional Budget Office is more optimistic, forecasting the return of full employment by 2018.

With labour-force growth normally about 1 per cent per year and productivity growth about 2-3 per cent, it takes sustained output growth in excess of 4 per cent to bring unemployment down. No one expects growth at that pace for long enough to return the US economy to full employment any time soon.

We might, once deleveraging is finished, return to “normal” growth rates; but what is required to get unemployment down is an extended period of above normal growth. However, three elements of “missing demand” (missing, that is, compared with 2007) make that unlikely: then, the household savings rate was zero, a result of the top 20 per cent of Americans saving 15 per cent of their income and the bottom 80 per cent spending an abnormal 110 per cent of their income.

Even after deleveraging and after our financial system is fully repaired, saving should not return to anything like the level it was before. Neither should we expect the “return” of American consumers – indeed, we should worry at their reappearance, for what it says about both their rationality and a financial system that facilitates such profligacy.

Before the crisis, 40 per cent of all investment was in property. We had a housing bubble that left a legacy of excess capacity. Continuing weakness in the property sector is reflected in high foreclosure rates and low home prices.

Finally, US states and local governments are constrained, to a large extent, by having to balance their budgets. They depend heavily on property taxes, so both revenues and expenditures have plummeted. This is why there are a million fewer public employees than before the crisis. Government as a whole is being procyclical, not countercyclical.

The pre-crisis bubble masked fundamental problems with the US economy. Low-income households spend a higher fraction of their budgets on consumption than richer households. Therefore, the redistribution towards the top – with the top 1 per cent getting more than a fifth of the nation’s income – would have led to weak aggregate demand in the absence of the bubble.

Moreover, just as the Great Depression was part of the transition of the economy from agriculture to manufacturing, the Great Recession is part of the transition from manufacturing to a service-sector economy. Growth in productivity, plus changing comparative advantage, made a decline in manufacturing employment inevitable. Markets on their own do not manage such dramatic economic transformations well.

Unfortunately, little has been done about the underlying structural problems. Indeed, the downturn, during which wages have not kept pace with inflation, has in many ways made US inequality worse.

Today the American economy faces three big risks. First, a steeper European downturn, as a result of the excessive austerity and the euro crisis. Second, complacency that the economy will recover quickly without government support. Though every downturn comes to an end, that should not be of much comfort. Third, that we accept that an unemployment rate above 7 per cent is inevitable.

If my Cassandra forecast turns out to be wrong, stimulus can be cut. But if it turns out to be right, and we do too little, we will live to regret it.

The writer is a recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics and professor at Columbia University

Debt Default, Withdrawal from the Euro Zone: Greece's Response to Finance Capital's Crushing Austerity?

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:58:00 +0000

It is sometimes difficult to see the actual human suffering behind the rioting and burning buildings in Greece's cities. Even with private bondholders agreeing to accept a "haircut" of 68.5% on the value of Greek bonds they hold (receiving new bonds in the value of €315 for every €1,000 in old bonds[1]), the austerity imposed thus far, and projected to continue for a minimum of five years, gives Greece no real hope of digging itself out of spiraling debt.

A few pertinent facts reveal the scope of the disaster which European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies have imposed on Greece:

• Greece has been in a steep recession for five years already, losing 17% of its GDP.

• Greek GDP contracted by 7% in 2011 and is forecast to lose 4.5% this year, stagnate in 2013, and make a modest 2% gain in 2014 - but these projections are based on wildly optimistic assumptions by ECB consultants and it is equally possible that Greece will have lost 27% or more of GDP by 2014 according to some Greek economists.

• Current Greek unemployment hovers around 20%, and underemployment raises that figure to near 40%; unemployment for 2012 is projected to remain above 18%, to decline to 17% in 2013 and remain above 15% in 2015. Again, these projections are based on wildly optimistic models of Greek economic performance.

• For those Greeks who are employed, austerity measures have imposed wage cuts of 30% since 2009. The EU bailout plan demands a further 15% reduction in wages in 2012-2015, and imposes even more drastic cuts in ensuing years.

Is it any wonder that the Greek working class is expressing its white-hot anger in the streets?

The projected cut of 150,000 Greek public sector jobs which the current bailout plans include would represent in the context of the larger U.S. economy a layoff of 4.6 million workers. This would boost unemployment immediately to 11.3% and secondary effects would probably double the loss. Does anyone imagine that an American administration could be reelected after inflicting that kind of austerity while demanding that still employed workers accept additional wage reductions above and beyond the 15% already imposed?

The shocking extraction of wealth from a less developed EU country to primarily German and French finance capital in more developed EU countries forms a modern example of what amounts to the most savage sort of primitive accumulation.

Even more shocking is the way that the EU leaders, finance ministers, and the ECB have demanded dismantling of even the pretense of bourgeois democracy in Greece. From the humiliating forcing of former Prime Minister George Papandreou to withdraw his proposal for a democratic referendum on austerity measures, to the imposition of Lucas Papademos, a former Vice President of the ECB, as Papandreou's replacement, to the formal pledges extracted from party leaders that new elections would not be permitted to alter in any way the austerity arrangements demanded by the ECB and IMF, to demands that Greece rewrite its constitution to place debt repayment above all other priorities, the fact that the people of Greece no longer have any say in their country's economic affairs has been rammed down the Greek people's throat. Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy control Greek political life more completely than any time since German tanks actually enforced Germany's will in the streets of Athens in 1941.

Grzegorz Kolodko, the former deputy prime minister and minister of finance of Poland and a professor of economics at Kozminski University in Warsaw, points out that the civil-societal fabric of Greece is being rent asunder by ECB/IMF austerity policies:

In three years of austerity Greece's debt has risen from 113 per cent of gross domestic product to 163 per cent. Homelessness has jumped by 25 per cent. Unemployment has risen to 21 per cent, among the highest in the industrialised world, with 48 per cent of young people out of work. It is naïve to think they will watch TV, not demonstrate or fight in the streets. This policy is senseless.[2]

Already market analysts and rating firms are touting the likelihood of a Greek default in late March, 2012, clearly not believing that the current ECB bailout will be sufficient to stabilize the Greek economy,[3] irregardless of sufficient bondholders appearing to have accepted the debt swap. And, yet, despite all this vicious extraction of wealth from the Greek working class and its transfer to European financiers and the open speculation that default and Greece's departure from the euro zone is inevitable, there are still economists and analysts who treat a Greek debt default and withdrawal from the euro zone as the most cataclysmic economic event possible with far more dire consequences for the Greek people and the rest of Europe than the draconian austerity policies the ECB is forcing down Greece's throat.

Whether this is so is an entirely legitimate question. The fact that the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) has called for default and withdrawal from the euro zone, given its vanguard role in popular protest against EU policies and the collaboration of the Greek government with EU finance capital, makes this a vital issue for European and world capitalism. While there are a number of technical issues involved, a Marxist analysis must proceed first from evaluation of the interests of the working class not merely the interests of finance capital.

The starting point for any serious assessment of Greece's options is the realization that the Greek government, even before the additional austerity measures required by the EC for the latest bailout installment, is already verging on a primary surplus. With the issuance of domestic tax-bonds and with a more effectively-enforced progressive tax system the Greek public sector could finance itself in equilibrium for the foreseeable future.[4] The new wave of austerity measures - and the promise of a minimum of five more years of even more intense austerity - are designed to pay off the foreign holders of €270 billion in Greek sovereign debt, a mix of European bankers and private creditors like hedge funds. And continuing to pay off that debt is the condition on which the ECB is insisting to meet its obligation as a central bank to provide liquidity for Greek banks.

Moreover, while a significant part of the outstanding debt did go to finance social welfare spending for the last two decades, it is a gross distortion of the facts to present Greeks as profligate social spenders who must now be bailed out by thrifty Germans. The table below traces the social welfare spending of several EU countries from 1980 to 2010:

Aggregated Social Spending (omitting education) as Percent of Gross Domestic Product

EU Country	1980	1985	1990	1995	2000	2005	2010
Greece	10.2	16	16.5	17.3	19.2	21	24.3
Germany	22.1	22.5	21.7	26.8	26.6	27.2	28.5
France	20.8	26	24.9	28.5	27.7	29	27.4
United Kingdom	20.8	26	24.9	28.5	27.7	29	21.8
Belgium	23.5	26	24.9	26.3	25.4	26	27.2
Netherlands	24.8	25.3	25.6	23.8	19.8	20.7	24.3
Austria	22.4	23.7	23.8	26.6	26.7	27.4	26
Finland	18.1	22.4	24.1	30.7	24.2	26	24.8
Ireland	16.7	21.3	14.9	15.7	13.3	15.8	13.8
Italy	18	20.8	20	19.9	23.3	25	24.4
Portugal	9.9	10.1	12.5	16.5	18.9	22.9	21.1
Spain	15.5	17.8	19.9	21.4	20.4	21.4	19.6
Greece (Standard Deviations from the EU Mean)	-1.72	-1.14	-1.05	-1.20	-0.80	-0.82	0.19
Germany (Standard Deviations from the EU Mean)	0.73	0.21	0.13	0.64	0.86	0.73	1.27
Source: OECD

From 1980 to 2010 Greek social welfare spending (omitting education) ranges from -1.72 standard deviations below the EU mean to 0.19 standard deviations above the mean. Greek social welfare spending is substantially below the EU mean until 2010 and then just barely exceeds it. German social welfare spending, on the other hand, exceeds the EU mean in every period. Furthermore in absolute terms only Portugal has engaged in lower social welfare spending than Greece among the EU countries.

European workers have experienced an unprecedented assault on their living standards in the last decade, and the austerity measures imposed on Greece, as elsewhere, are part of this assault. To the extent that German taxpayers are being made to pay for the bailout, it is to bailout the Greek ruling class and German and French bondholders, not the Greek people.

Europe is not the only place wherein this assault on working-class living standards is going on. In the U.S. austerity measures are being pursued which threaten recovery from the recession and impose considerable hardship on American workers to pay holders of the state and national sovereign debt of the U.S. Those debtholders are not ordinary working people - they are banks and investment houses and foreign governments. There are lessons in the Greek experience for the American working class, and the international working class, too, has a stake in what happens in Greece.

Moreover, much of Greece's sovereign debt consisted of bonds to pay for expenditures which were of great benefit to the European and Greek ruling classes and little to the Greek people. For example, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Greek military spending rose from €5.9 billion in 2000 to €7.3 billion in 2009, then dropped to €6.7 billion in 2010. In 2011 military expenditure was 3.2% of GDP - the highest percentage of GDP spent on the military in the EU and 2.43 standard deviations higher than the EU mean. Even as austerity cuts to the bone in Athens, France is continuing to press Greece to take delivery of two to four stealth frigates with a payment of €300 million per vessel due in 2016.

What would be the costs and benefits for the Greek working class of a debt default and withdrawal from the euro zone?

First, the withdrawal from the euro zone. French economist Eric Dor of the IESEG School of Management at Lille Catholic University has concisely outlined the technical, legal, and economic problems associated with withdrawal from the euro zone.[5] A key issue is conversion of old contracts and debts into the new currency. Greece would want this to be automatic, but since a policy of monetization of public debt would be the most significant reason to withdraw from the euro zone, litigation will ensue as creditors resist conversion. Dor spends five extremely dense pages outlining technical issues which would have to be resolved to avoid disruption of financial markets, which leads him to conclude that "it is difficult to expect a sudden overnight withdrawal of a country."[6] However, it clear that making things easy for financial markets does not outweigh the crushing burden which austerity has imposed on the Greek people.

Let us assume that the withdrawal from the euro zone begins with an opening exchange rate for the New Drachma 25% lower than the previous euro exchange rate.[7] As of December 2012, 59% of Greece's imports and 48% of her exports were to the EU. Hence a large portion of Greece's trade would benefit literally overnight from a 25% discount over Greece's Southern Mediterranean euro zone peers. The 52% of Greece's exports which go outside the euro zone would also become immediately more competitive even in the face of the world recession. Improving Greece's balance of trade is the principal strategy available to the government to avoid recurrence of unsupportable debt. Furthermore, a 25% devaluation of the New Drachma will make Greece's vital tourism sector immensely more competitive and attractive almost overnight, bringing harder currency into the financial system.

There will certainly be hardship arising from the currency devaluation, particularly given the immediate 33% increase in prices which results from a 25% devaluation, but it will certainly be less costly in the long term to the Greek people than the austerity measures. The consequences can also be eased to an extent by price controls, but the impact will be felt in those areas where Greece must import, particularly oil and raw materials. There are will be liquidity problems for Greek banks. Protection of retail depositors is essential and some capital controls will still have to be imposed after the initial freezing of accounts for twenty-four or so hours after announcement of withdrawal from the euro zone, but there is an up side to refusing to bail out the banks - it will impose costs on a financial sector which has immensely profited by Greece's indebtedness and materially contributed to the crisis.

As indicated above, some capital export controls will be necessary, but those who fear a massive euro exodus from Greece on withdrawal likely fear an already accomplished fact: the Greek Finance Minister, Evangelos Venizelos, revealed to parliament that the immense figure of €65 billion has been withdrawn from Greek banks by depositors since 2009, while only €16 billion were transferred to banks abroad. The other €49 billion has been withdrawn from the banks but remains within Greece and it will behoove the Greek government to offer domestic holders of euros a privileged rate of exchange in the short term to encourage return of the €49 billion to the banking system.

The current austerity measures rule out any remediation of the recession's toll on the Greek working class. A policy of monetizing the public debt by inflating the new currency opens the possibility of some increased spending for job creation, although the Greek government will have to be extremely careful to bolster public confidence in the New Drachma, since a worst-case scenario involving a 25% devaluation spiraling through successive devaluations into hyperinflation will have to be avoided.

Withdrawal from the euro zone represents return of popular sovereignty to Greece even more than debt default. It is only by restoring control of monetary policy to the Greek government and that government to the control of the people that real solutions to the contradictions of capitalism can begin to be addressed. Even shorter term, Keynesian and Neo-Keynesian solutions of the immediate crisis involving fiscal policy and the balance of trade can only be implemented by a Greek government which has regained national control of its monetary policy. The Greek Communist Party acknowledges that Greece's entry into the euro zone was a mistake, a mistake which arose from the intersection of the interests of finance capital and the Greek ruling class, and a mistake which has heightened the contradictions of European capitalism by increasing the sacrifice of the Greek working class and its interests to European financiers. With or without the assent of the EU Greece must leave the euro zone.

Now, for debt default. The possibility of a debt default is built into the current swap of Greek sovereign debt bonds for devalued instruments. If participation of at least 75% of creditors is not forthcoming, then Greece will not accept the tenders of the bondholders. Debt default would be much like that, only all the creditors would be given a take-or-leave-it offer by Greece.

The example of Argentina, which defaulted on its sovereign debt in 2005, is probably most pertinent. Faced by a political crisis brought on by IMF austerity policies, in March 2005 Argentina presented a complex offer with varying terms for 152 affected bonds and the three new bonds which would replace them, devaluing the bonds by between 64% to 82%; on average the original debt was reduced by 75%.[8] A 75% to 85% devaluation of Greece's sovereign debt would be the expected offer in any default. Those creditors who refused to accept the offer would have their bonds permanently repudiated, i.e., they would get nothing. 76.15% of Argentina's accepted the default offer. It remains an open question how many of Greece's creditors would accept.

The composition of the holders of Greek sovereign debt is interesting, as shown in the following table:

Percent of Greek Sovereign Debt by Holder

ECB and EU National Central Banks 21.89

Greek financial institutions 10.53

Major Asian financial institutions 9.10

German financial institutions 2.21

French financial institutions 1.23

Italian financial institutions 1.05

Belgian financial institutions 0.63

Netherlands financial institutions 0.49

UK financial institutions 0.39

Austrian financial institutions 0.25

Other bond and bill holders 52.23

Slightly more than 28 percent of Greek sovereign debt is held by the ECB, EU member central banks, and other EU member financial institutions outside Greece. Something on the order of half of the 52.23% of Greek sovereign debt attributed above to "other bond and bill holders" represent private creditors in EU countries. Thus, slightly more than 54% of Greek sovereign debt is in the hands of the EU, EU member governments, and EU member investors.

Resolving the 10.53% of outstanding sovereign debt held by Greek institutions and investors is straightforward. However, resolving the claims of other creditors in light of a Greek default is more complex, particularly if the EU insists on denominating the debt in euros and rejecting revaluation in the new Greek currency.

One issue which can likely be safely dismissed is Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz's concern that ECB and EU policy is driven by fear that a Greek default will trigger a largely unknown number of credit-default swaps (CDS) which will bring the European, and by implication the international, financial system down catastrophically.[9] However, the Deposit Trust and Clearing Corporation does track outstanding CDS (there are 4,263 CDS on Greek sovereign debt), and while the gross notional amount of outstanding Greek CDS is $69.9 billion, the net notional amount is only $3.2 billion, which is 1.19% of the Greek sovereign debt.[10] This is a hugely technical issue and one which rests on some significant accounting sleight-of-hand - the offsetting of obligations which results in the net notional value makes it the worst-case payout.

The hard line taken by the German and French leadership in negotiations with Greece suggests that the EU and ECB would react harshly to a Greek default and demand Greek withdrawal from the EU, possibly impose economic sanctions. However, there is reason to believe that this may be in part bluff. Britain, after all, is an EU member which has never joined the euro zone. Still, Greece is not Great Britain. Ultimately it is difficult to see European integrationists exiling a European country from the EU because it can no longer economically sustain participation in the euro zone. And there is a much greater danger to the EU than to Greece here. If the EU were to react punitively to a Greek default, even imposing trade or other sanctions, it would signal to every other Southern Mediterranean euro zone country with a serious debt problem - Spain, Portugal, and Italy, for example - that default and withdrawal from the euro zone is something to be done sooner rather than later because the EU cannot sustain punitive action against multiple simultaneous defaults and withdrawals from the euro zone without the European financial system imploding. It is unlikely that the European ruling class will play Russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver.

However, in the event the other troubled euro zone countries fail to act in solidarity with Greece, EU retribution may be sharp. The imposition of tariffs would cripple the Greek agricultural sector, which accounts for 3.6% of Greece's GDP. Prohibition on travel to Greece would be unprecedented and is highly unlikely; in fact, Greek tourism, which accounts for 18.2% of GDP, is likely to benefit considerably from an exchange rate which privileges the euro over the New Drachma. Litigation in EU courts will be a decades-long burden on the Greek government. However, there are also other EU vulnerabilities in too sharp a response to Greece: more than 50% of the Greek domestic manufacturing sector was acquired by non-Greek EU nationals; if the European ruling class threatens the economic survival of Greece, these are strong candidates for nationalization. Wilder speculation about European finance capital enforcing its claims with military action is likely no more than just that - wild speculation - since both Germany and France lack the necessary land force projection capabilities. U.S. participation would be necessary, which is unlikely for both political and technical reasons.

Supposing, then, that 75% or more of Greece's creditors accept the default terms, what are the consequences for Greece?

The case of Argentina may, again, give us some indications. Admittedly, Argentina faced rather different circumstances in its default and devaluation, and a considerably different economic climate, but it still represents a best-case scenario. Direct foreign investment in Argentina declined by two-thirds during the five years after the default. A similar decline for Greece is likely, although not necessarily a bad thing: beginning in 2001 with Greece's entry into the euro zone, entire sectors of Greece's national economy were oligopolized by German and other EU firms who drove their local Greek competition out of business. Reduction in direct foreign investment will offer opportunities for local businesses to return. Argentina's default was aided by Venezuela's decision to continue buying Argentine bond offerings, specifically cited by President Hugo Chavez as an expression of solidarity with Argentina against the international financial system.[11] Certainly, such shows of solidarity from progressive and socialist governments, the Peoples Republic of China and Venezuela to name two, could ease Greece's post-default financial distress.

Ultimately, international finance capital showed that making profits counted more than making examples: by 2006 Argentina had reentered international financial markets and successfully sold $500 million in Bonar V five-year, dollar-denominated bonds with Moody's Investors Service increasing Argentina's debt rating from B- to B. Furthermore, Argentina's default strategy has contributed to an extraordinary turn-around of the Argentine economy. Two years after the default, GDP increased by 8.7%. Five years after default, GDP was growing at 9.2%, while the primary account surplus was 1.9%. GDP growth in 2011 was at 6%. The strategy of default and devaluation appears to have worked remarkably well for Argentina, despite the howls from finance capital in 2005. Still, Greece is not precisely in Argentina's situation and the world economy is in recession. The disincentive to renewed foreign investment and withdrawal of access to international credit will probably be longer and harsher than in the Argentine case. Yet, the costs are still less than those of EU-imposed austerity.

Default and withdrawal from the euro zone are not the ultimate solution for Greece's economy, nor is a more favorable balance of trade - the ultimate solution for Greece as well as the rest of the EC is socialism and the final resolution of capitalism's contradictions. However, as a strategy for ending the cruel austerity which impoverishes the Greek people for the profits of European finance capital one could do far worse. The KKE is right - debt default and withdrawal from the euro zone are necessary first steps.

[1] Bondholders will also receive European Financial Stability Facility notes with a face value of 15% of the face value of the bonds, e.g., €150 for every €1,000 of bonds tendered, although details have not been finalized.

[2] Gregorz Kolodko, "ECB must rescue Greece - or pay more later," Financial Times, Feb 21, 2012 (http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/86d3d470-5bb8-11e1-a447-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F86d3d470-5bb8-11e1-a447-00144feabdc0.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fbusiness%2F2012%2Ffeb%2F22%2Feurozone-crisis-greece-bailout-protests#axzz1n6TiVRnz)

[3] E.g., the remarks of Fitch Ratings' Managing Director Edward Parker to Bloomberg/Business Week (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-25/greece-is-insolvent-will-default-on-its-debt-fitch-says.html): "The euro area's most indebted country is unlikely to be able to honor a March 20 bond payment of €14.5 billion."

[4] For this reason Yanis Varoufakis, the chair of the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens and an advisor to former prime minister George Papandreou from 2004 to 2007, has suggested that a Greek default on its sovereign debt could occur while Greece still remains in the euro zone (http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2012/02/18/greek-default-does-not-equal-greek-exit/). His description of the fiscal situation of the Greek government is accurate, but it will take some political legerdemain to extract Greece from the Economic and Monetary Union without severing the link to the EU.

[5] Eric Dor, "Leaving the eurozone: a user's guide," IESEG School of Management, Lille Catholic Univ., Working Paper 2011-ECO-06, Oct. 2011. (http://my.ieseg.fr/bienvenue/DownloadDoc.asp?Fich=1046781054_2011-ECO-06_Dor.pdf).

[6] Ibid., 10.

[7] The figure is not arbitrary. The European Central Bank published harmonized competitiveness indicators based on unit labor costs indices for the total economy (http://www.ecb.int/stats/exchange/hci/html/hci_ulct_2011-07.en.html). For the third quarter of 2011 the indicator for the EU's strongest economy, Germany, was 106.5; that for Greece was 82.3. The difference is 24.2.

Also, the technical details of circulating a new currency are considerable, e.g., new bills will have to be printed, new coins minted, ATMs will have to be recalibrated, etc. However, if need be the Greek government can simply declare Greek-printed euro notes to be New Drachmae[7] or stamp euro notes with a "New Drachma" stamp like the Austrian-Hungarian krone was overstamped to identify interim currencies of its newly independent states until new notes can be printed and circulated.

[8] R.J. Shapiro and N.D. Pham, "Discredited - The Impact of Argentina's Sovereign Debt Default and Debt Restructuring on U.S. Taxpayers and Investors," American Task Force Argentina, Oct. 2006 (http://atfa.org/resources/atfa_1006.pdf), 14.

[9] http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz148/English. The pertinent example is the role CDS played in the collapse of AIG in the United States.

[10] http://www.dtcc.com/products/derivserv/data_table_i.php?tbid=6. The relevant entries are under "Hellenic Republic" in Table 5.

[11] Venezuela also financed a significant part of Argentina's payout of $9.8 billion in IMF debt in 2005.

Foxconn -- A Conundrum of Chinese Socialism

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:17:00 +0000

Recent stories coming out of China have exposed a dark underside to its export driven industrialization program. Apple and many other electronic device companies rely upon ultra labor-intensive production provided at a number of manufacturing clusters, the largest of which is Foxconn, a Taiwan based multinational corporation.

Foxconn has 13 factories in nine Chinese cities, more than in any other country. Its largest factory worldwide is in Longhua, Shenzhen, where up to 450,000 workers are employed at the Longhua Science & Technology Park, a walled campus sometimes referred to as "iPod City". It Covers about 1.16 square miles, includes 15 factories, worker dormitories, a swimming pool, a fire brigade, its own television network (Foxconn TV), and a downtown complete with a grocery store, bank, restaurants, bookstore, and hospital. While some workers live in surrounding towns and villages, most live and work inside the complex. A quarter of the employees live in the dormitories, and many of them work 12-hour days for 6 days each week.

The Foxconn manufacturing complex became the focus of worldwide attention when it was reported that between January and November 2010, eighteen Foxconn employees attempted suicide with eighteen deaths. The suicides prompted 20 Chinese universities to compile a report on Foxconn, which they decried as a labor camp. Long working hours, discrimination of mainland Chinese workers by their Taiwanese coworkers, and a lack of working relationships have all been cited as potential causes.

The studies also suggested that the Foxconn deaths may have been a product of economic conditions external to the Foxconn complex itself. In China in 2010 there were several strikes at other high-profile manufacturers in China. The Chinese university studies note that a fundamental decline in the surplus Chinese labor supply that has powered its labor-intensive "factory of the world" development strategy, especially in export products, is the underlying cause of labor market distortions and abuses.

The Lewisian Turning Point

Arthur Lewis was the first African American winner of the Nobel prize in economics for his work in economic development theory. Lewis published a development model in 1954 that came to be called the Dual Sector Model. In this work Lewis combined an analysis of the historical experience of developed countries with the central ideas of the classical economists to produce a broad picture of the development process. In his story a "capitalist" sector develops by taking labor from a non-capitalist backward "subsistence" sector. At an early stage of development, there would be available an "unlimited" supply of labor from the subsistence economy as long as gains in agricultural productivity (or the ability to import food) could feed this supply. As long as this supply remains relatively unlimited, the capitalist sector can expand without the need to raise wages. This results in higher returns to capital which are then reinvested in further capital accumulation. In turn, the increase in the capital stock leads the capitalists to expand employment by drawing further labor from the subsistence sector. Given the assumptions of the model (i.e., that the profits are reinvested and that capital accumulation does not substitute for skilled labor in production), the process becomes self-sustaining and leads to modernization and economic development -- though not immediate improvements in wages or condition for the factory workers.

However, there comes a point at which the excess labor in the subsistence sector is fully absorbed into the modern sector, and where further capital accumulation can not find labor unless it begins to increase wages. This point is called the "Lewisian turning point" and has recently gained wide circulation in the context of economic development in China, including the Foxconn tragedies. Of course the history of capitalism does not witness corporations reacting wisely to labor market changes. Rather, the first corporate impulse is to further intensify the work process with longer hours and speedup management pressures. What results, inevitably, is that the class struggle intensifies with waves of strike actions and political mobilization as workers reject the increasingly inhumane and unendurable conditions.

Class struggle

The class struggle hit Foxconn management like a hammer in the head, and will keep on hitting Chinese manufacturing, which now must confront the need to restructure away from labor intensive strategies to extensive, automation and higher income and skilled occupations to match the emerging demographics. In response to the suicides, Foxconn increased wages for its Shenzhen factory workforce by 25%! However, in typical corporate narcissistic culture, Foxconn also absurdly demanded that employees sign no-suicide pledges. Workers were also forced to sign a legally binding document guaranteeing that they and their descendants would not sue the company as a result of unexpected death, self-injury, or suicide.

At the same time, according to the Lewisian model, one may expect a simultaneous drive to improve, mechanize and induce larger scale farming to free up more workers. This will relatively reduce the agricultural workforce, but raise its productivity and incomes too, and exert more upward pressure on wages of workers who join the manufacturing workforce. As wages, skills, education and culture of the workforce rise so will demand for domestic services and commodities.

Class Struggle Under Socialism?

Many may ask, "How can there be such abuses, and class conflicts, under socialism?" Doesn't socialism promise and end to class conflict, and create a classless society? Among the many misconceptions regarding both Marxist and non-Marxist concepts of socialism is the notion that social and economic classes can be willed into existence or non-existence by just wishing, or voting, or legislating, that it be just so, without regard to objective conditions of technology, natural and labor resources, and many other factors. The Chinese and Russian revolutions both overthrew putrid and corrupt regimes headed by a class coalition of feudal lords and early capitalists. These revolutions were led by parties of the working and peasant classes. They took over the leadership of their societies when the ancient regimes collapsed, and did indeed set forth to bring into being their conceptions (unique to each country) of a classless society. Capitalist and feudal rights were denied any franchise and most industrial and agricultural property was confiscated by the State for redistribution in both revolutions. In both countries these early efforts had some initial successes, but quickly ran headlong into the reality of the great economic, technological and cultural chasms between the backwardness of their countries and the conditions of material and cultural abundance Karl Marx outlined as the requirements of sustaining classless social relations. The Russian socialist experiment ultimately collapsed under the weight of these contradictions, and is now struggling to find its way. The Chinese experiment did not collapse. Instead it retreated, economically, to a position advocated by Vladimir Lenin as early as 1920, where the working class and peasant coalition would retain political power and the "commanding heights" of the economy while re-introducing market, capitalist relations and advanced firm management techniques in the underdeveloped parts of the economy. The consequence for China has been the fastest and most sustained development rate of any large country in the history of the world -- a staggering effort that has single handedly reversed world poverty rates.

But you can't have capitalism, and social progress for working people, without class struggle. That struggle will propel the Chinese working class by the multitudes of millions to the full realization of the promise of their revolution -- as it will for all those who do the work of the world.

The 89%: Where Anarchism Shuns Unionists, the Ultraleft Allies with the Ultraright

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 18:04:00 +0000

Recently anarchist collectives in the Occupy movement in Oakland and the Pacific Northwest have put forward a new slogan, "We are the 89%."

This is a subtle way of divorcing organized labor from the popular movement, since it is based on an explicit claim that the struggles of organized labor are not merely no longer central, but that the interests of organized labor should no longer be a focus of activist support.

I have personally seen use of this slogan to divide people in Occupy Portland and Occupy Eugene. I have read detailed accounts of similar divisions in Occupy Oakland and Occupy Seattle. And I am convinced that we must challenge both the theory and practice from which this arises as vigorously as possible

One of the most striking explanations of the theory which underlies this anarchist attack on organized labor can be seen in a blog posted by the Oakland Commune.

Other elaborations of this basic idea have appeared elsewhere, but it is significant that the Oakland Commune has been prominent in promoting and rationalizing Black Bloc direct action tactics which have alienated organized labor and working people in general.

The origins of this new turn can be found in conflicts between the leadership and activists of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Occupy activists surrounding demonstrations aimed at closing Pacific coast ports. Lenin's observation that "Anarchism was not infrequently a kind of penalty for the opportunist sins of the working class movement"# seems particularly apt here since the new anarchist attack on organized labor arises from their conflict with the more limited, economist objectives of the ILWU leadership.

The anarchists appear to have seen organized labor as tinder ready to blaze into revolutionary struggle with the slightest spark, and their expectations were seriously disappointed. Again, Lenin is pertinent. One of Lenin's most fundamental insights into revolutionary organizing was the realization that

The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.#

It is a sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Proudhonist-Bakuninist# tradition in the United States that these anarchists do not simply agree with Lenin that a vanguard party is needed for the vital task of educating organized workers to a more general class consciousness, but see the failure of organized labor to immediately form up behind the Black Bloc as an indication that organized labor should be demonized and dismissed in favor of a mix of the unemployed, the underemployed, lumpenproletarians, and the homeless who form the new revolutionary hope.

The Oakland Commune dresses this reactionary assessment of organized labor in a supposedly new discovery about the nature of capital production and circulation. The discovery is little more than taking notice of a fundamental characteristic of commodity production under imperialism: transportation centers take on crucial importance for the export of commodities from the neocolonial periphery to the core. Globalisation has exported many production jobs from the American core to the Third World periphery as part of the export of capital which Lenin predicted in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

However, the Oakland Commune seizes on this characteristic of imperialism to claim that in America the working class has been supplanted by a new "proletarian class" - the unemployed, the underemployed, petty bourgeois students, lumpenproletarians, and the homeless. Let us examine their arguments:

This is why the general strike on Nov. 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces -the ports, for instance- did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat....

We find it helpful here to distinguish between the working class and the proletariat. Though many of us are both members of the working class and proletarians, these terms do not necessarily mean the same thing. The working class is defined by work, by the fact that it works. It is defined by the wage, on the one hand, and its capacity to produce value on the other. But the proletariat is defined by propertylessness....

Worker's struggles these days tend to have few objects besides the preservation of jobs or the preservation of union contracts... The power of the Occupy movement so far - despite the weakness of its discourse - is that it points in the direction of a proletarian struggle in which, instead of vainly petitioning the assorted rulers of the world, people begin to directly take the things they need to survive. Rather than an attempt to readjust the balance between the 99% and the 1%, such a struggle might be about people directly providing for themselves at a time when capital and the state can no longer provide for them.

What the Oakland Commune has done is taken the way an artifact of cyclical crises in capitalism has been exacerbated by the shift from manufacturing to service sector jobs occasioned by globalization and used it to turn class analysis on it head.

Marx identified the role of the reserve army of labor in the first volume of Capital:

The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists, and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the advance of social accumulation.... The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour- army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital.#

This reserve army of labor - those members of the working class held in reserve by unemployment and underemployment - grows and diminishes with the course of a capitalist crisis. In the current recession it is considerably increased, but it has also been increased by dislocations brought on by the effects of imperialism on the core American economy. None of this changes the class character of the unemployed and underemployed: they remain wage-laborers, but wage-laborers uncalled to labor by the particular circumstances of capital. They are no new proletarian class to be combined with lumpenproletarians and petty bourgeois students. They have interests which are coherently part of the interests of the working class as a whole and one of the major responsibilities of a vanguard party is to create unity between the employed, the unemployed, and the under employed on the basis of those underlying class interests. Trade unionists may not instinctively see the unemployed and the underemployed as immediate allies in struggle, but it is the responsibility of party organizing precisely to educate employed workers and workers in the reserve army of labor into what Marx terms the class-in-and-for-itself.

Rather than face up to that responsibility to build genuine class consciousness, the Oaklsand Commune rolls out anarchist platitudes:

"...initiative here has come from a motley band of people who work in non-unionized workplaces, or (for good reason) hate their unions, or work part-time or have no jobs at all."

"...that the insertion of state-sanctioned forms of mediation and arbitration into the class struggle, the domestication of the class struggle by a vast legal apparatus, is the chief mechanism by which unions have been made into the helpmeet of capital, their monopoly over labor power an ideal partner for capital's monopoly over the means of production."

"The coming intensification of struggles both inside and outside the workplace will find no success in attempting to revitalize the moribund unions. Workers will need to participate in the same kinds of direct actions - occupations, blockades, sabotage - that have proven the highlights of the Occupy movement in the Bay Area."

The initiative comes from people who hate their unions. Unions are the helpmeet of capital. Unions are moribund. Workers need to abandon their unions and do direct action like the Occupy movement. These attitudes threaten to destroy any possibility of alliance between the Occupy movement and organized labor.

But there is something more dangerous still afoot here. One of the principal campaigns of the American ultraright has been to bust unions where they exist and prevent them from organizing. It is the single most important objective of the ultraright.

By trivializing the struggles of organized labor, by demonizing organized labor as the enemy of progressive elements in Occupy, by telling activists that union struggles are lost already and that they need to do something else the ultraleft anarchist presence in the Occupy movement has become an open collaborator with the ultraright.

This has to be rejected in the strongest possible terms.

A decisive defeat of the ultra right is not going to be led by anarchists, lumpenproletarians and the homeless, much less will socialism come to America in a revolution of anarchists, lumpenproletarians, and the homeless.

Socialism can only be won and built by the working class - all of the working class: organized labor, unorganized labor, the unemployed and underemployed reserve army of labor. If the Occupy movement is to have a significant role in this struggle, it has to build tight alliances with all the working class.

It is important to emphasize that the anarchists about which we are talking here aren't the idealistic young people in the Occupy movement who call themselves "anarchists" because they think it means to be opposed to capitalism.

Many of these young opponents of capitalism have come to appreciate and encourage unity of action with organized labor and other contingents of the working class.

From among these strata, valuable new members have joined the Communist Party.

The problematic anarchists are the dedicated ultraleftist adherents of Proudhonist and Bakuninist tendencies in American anarchism who embrace a theory of revolution which wants to make the lumpenproletariat and the homeless the new revolutionary class.

They are the same people who embrace Black Bloc tactics and put other Occupy activists in danger with irresponsible direct action tactics. It is these elements that the Occupy movement must call out and repudiate.

Working class unity in the 99% -- that should be our rallying cry. With that kind of focus victory becomes attainable.

Percentage of non-farm workers employed in manufacturing and service jobs (All 2002 figures are to date):
Manufacturing jobs
1950	* 34%
2002	* 13%
Service jobs
1950	* 59%
2002	* 82%

Examples of manufacturing job losses. Number employed in thousands:
Textiles
1960	* 924
2002	* 433
Apparel
1960	* 1,233
2002	* 522
Metal1
1960	* 1,185
2002	* 593

Examples of service job gains. Number employed in thousands:
Educational2
1960	* 616
2002	* 2,510
Business services3
1960	* 656
2002	* 9,301
Health
1960	* 1,548
2002	* 10,661
1- primary metal industries such as steel; 2 - private education institutions; 3 - services to businesses such as advertising, data processing, credit reporting, etc. Source: USA TODAY analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data