Workers need a program that fights for a clean planned socialist economy!
Two conferences on the future of Railroad Safety were convened, first in Richmond CA on March, 14, with a follow up on the 21st in Olympia Washington. In the spectacle of the American left a list of endorsers including various syndicalist, socialist, and environmentalist NGO’s, CBO’s gathered under the banner of safety with little else to unite them. Some advocated for letter writing to politicians for better conditions, some told us “all you need is love”, while the Richmond Progressive Alliance and it leader “Third Camp” Mike Parker from Solidarity and Labor Notes, who in the last Mayoral campaign withdrew and threw his and the RPA’s support behind long term Democratic Politician Tom Butt, brought the popular front to this conference in the guise of a “non” political opening statements by the spokesperson for the Democratic Mayor. Despite advocacy for general strike and social revolution from the floor the main gist of the conference was on the issues of safety, logistics and trade union solidarity with active participation from Tesoro refinery steel workers who were still on strike.
The common sense and good trade unionist instincts of Rail Road workers long trapped in conservative craft unions has birthed the Railroad Workers United (RWU). RWU adopted the following principles of good industrial trade unionism, Unity of All Rail Crafts, An End to Inter-Union Conflict, Rank-and-File Democracy, Membership Participation and Action, Solidarity, No to Concessionary Bargaining. The attack by the transport industry bosses on labor including the unsafe demand for one man crews, long trains and long hours has increased the other hazards inherent in rolling stock with bomb like loads of chemicals and fossil fuel products. The failure of the craft unions to united workers around their interests has resulted in back biting and general weakness by dividing the various categories of RR workers. In the face of the failure of the craft unions the movement toward industrial unionism that the RWU represents is progressive, long overdue, and cannot be won unless the workers embrace class struggle methods to fight anti-labor laws which prevent rail strikes, general strikes and secondary—solidarity–strikes. This requires that the rail workers unions unite and declare their class political independence from the twin parties of the bosses who indoctrinate the union leaders and the membership into submission to the anti-labor laws and into the regular political activity of supporting the “labor friendly” candidate.
Even militant industrial trade unionism cannot win unless it breaks the chains to the Democratic and Republican parties and this requires a political fight which the syndicalist IWW supporters of the RWU are dead set against. The IWW members explicitly tell RWU members that they do not need their own workers party. Prominent IWW/Occupy leader Elliot Hughes was overheard in the lunch line telling workers they do not need a labor party. Despite the attendance from Soc Alt, Speak Out, Socialist Workers Party and the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee only the Communist Workers Group advocated for class political independence, to challenge the labor bureaucracy for leadership with class struggle methods and for a workers party that fights for a workers government, to much applause and waving red flags (IWW leader Steve Ongerth was the time keeper waving the red flag). The following leaflet was distributed:
Workers need a program that fights for a clean planned socialist economy!
We need safe decent jobs, quality education, medical care, pensions, and housing for all! We need massive infrastructure programs with investment of billions to employ the unemployed, to make the transition to clean energy production. Millions are out of work or have sub-living minimum wages and survive in poverty while the owners of the energy and transport industries attack working conditions and violate our safety both at work and in our homes and in the wild. The energy extraction and transportation industry under capitalist ownership driven by the profit motive will not and cannot make this work safe, therefore our program requires the expropriation of the extraction and energy industry as well as the transportation industry and the commanding heights of the economy because they are all intertwined. Only social ownership of the means of production, workers self-management and a rational socially planned economy can provide a road out of the economic and environmental crisis. To advance the conditions of workers we submit that this conference resolves and calls upon rail workers to initiate strike actions that stops the Obama/Buffet fossil fuel dependency and perpetuation plan; to call on steel workers, auto and electrical workers to launch the general strike that initiates the retooling and massive implementation of clean energy solutions (solar, wind and geothermal) now!
We can learn well from what railroad union organizer, socialist and wobblie, Eugene V. Debs taught workers over one hundred years ago. On December 10th 1905 at the Grand Central Palace in NYC Debs admonished the crowd of workers and forward thinking people, socialists, anarchists and trade unionists:
“The Industrial Workers is organized— not to conciliate, but to fight the capitalist class. We have no object in concealing any part of our mission; we would have it perfectly understood. We deny that there is anything in common between workingmen and capitalists. We insist that workingmen must organize to get rid of capitalists and make themselves the masters of the tools with which they work, freely employ themselves, secure to themselves all they produce, and enjoy to the full the fruit of their labor.”
He then asked the rhetorical question: “Why should you be dependent upon a capitalist? Why should this capitalist own a tool he cannot use? And why should not you own the tool without which you cannot live?”
So today we have to ask what has changed? Is there any reason to make common ground between the workers and the capitalists? Consider Deb’s analysis of the economics and see if it sounds familiar:
“Every few years there is a panic, industrial paralysis, and hundreds of thousands of workers are flung into the streets; no work, no wages; and so they throng the highways in search of employment that cannot be found; they become vagrants, tramps, outcasts, criminals. It is in this way that the human being degenerates, and that crime graduates in the capitalist system, all the way from petty larceny to homicide.”
Jailed for organizing the 1894 Pullman rail workers strike Debs read from Marx ultimately guiding these comments:
“At the beginning of industrial society men worked with hand tools; a boy could learn a trade, make himself the master of the simple tools with which he worked, and employ himself and enjoy what he produced; but that simple tool of a century ago has become a mammoth social instrument; in a word, that tool has been socialized. Not only this, but production has been socialized. As small a commodity as a pin or a pen, or a match involves for its production all of the social labor of the land; but this evolution is not yet complete; the tool has been socialized, production has been socialized, and now ownership must also be socialized; in other words, those great social instruments that are used in modern industry for the production of wealth, those great social agencies that are socially made and socially used, must also be socially owned.”
The actual workers organizations here today can either declare the truth that the early IWW and Debs fought for as the clarion call of the working class and likewise declare that this assembly also resolves that: “We deny that there is anything in common between workingmen and capitalists. We insist that workingmen must organize to get rid of capitalists and make themselves the masters of the tools…” and initiate the call for strike action to defeat the capitalist offensive. Or by lack of declaration turn the political leadership of this assembly back to the NGO’s who organized it.
Today in the shadow of the legacy of Eugene V. Debs, workers face the decades old subservience of the trade union leaders to the ruling class. Through which the bosses orchestrate their will by control of the labor aristocracy maintaining and perpetuating a backward consciousness across the working class that traps workers behind the misleaders, the so called progressive layer of Democrats, the NGO’s that pose as environmentalists and fake left outfits like the Richmond Progressive Alliance, Socialist Alternative, libcom.org, the IWW (redux) and the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee who all come together at this conference under the banner of workers safety and environmental concern and conspire to keep the workers separated from their historic transitional socialist program.
Today this Rail Safety conference (http://www.railroadconference.org/) sponsored and supported by a host of seemingly pleasant and progressive NGO’s have tied this assembly by a thousand threads to the big bourgeoisie[i] . This seemingly educational forum can either serve the interests of the working class or it can serve as the embryo of the Popular Front which shackles labor to capital in all forms of cross class alliances up to and including state power. If the assembly does not declare for the program of the working class the program of the board members of the NGO’s dominates by default. If you care to follow the links of the sponsors you will find:
The Lands Council is backed by co-owner of Keystone Software now owned by Tude City IMS running logistics for big rail, ocean and lake vessels. Behind the Communities for a Better Environment you have Liberty Hill Foundation behind which you find the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the California Endowment which includes the likes Russ Gould who served as Senior Vice President for Wachovia Bank. Dan DeLeon joined The California Endowment in 2008 as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and he was the L.A. regional vice president of Finance for Time Warner Cable. Climate Solutions at its web site promotes the CERES Washington/Oregon Business Climate Declaration which is supported by anti-union Whole Foods and Charter School promoter Microsoft and of course CERES backs the Obama Climate Action Plan. The CERES Mobilizing Business Leadership for a Sustainable World has Anne Stausboll sitting on their board. She is the CEO of CalPERS and was the chief investment officer of CalPERS at the peak of the real estate bubble and crashed workers retirements in the bubble after employers withheld contributions during the “fat years”! She sits on the advisory Board of the Toigo Foundation which is a tool for the big bourgeoisie governed by the likes of Carlye group and JP Morgan. Then you have the Washington Environmental Council on whose board Jim Hanna from Starbucks environmental affairs department sits. And behind it all is the main conference sponsor Backbone Campaign whose board member Sandra VanderVen is the senior organizer at Fuse Washington and still volunteers for MoveOn.org and in Fuse you have the likes of Dean Nielsen principle of Cerillion N4 Partners a political consultant who worked for Clinton in 92 and for Solidarity in Poland, Gore/Lieberman, EMILY’s list, the NEA, NARAL and the Democratic party in several states.
To counter the program of the NGO’s we need our workers program. It starts with the fight to turn unions into class struggle organs and leads to a workers/labor party that fights for a workers government. The path is via a Transitional Program based on a method that exposes the current need (e.g. jobs) and resolves it by shortening the work week 30 hrs. work for 40 hours pay. The incompatibility of the workers needs with the inability of the capitalists to resolve the crisis leads step by step to the expropriation of the capitalist class. But unfortunately the working class misleaders from Socialist Alternative, the IWW and the TWSC have something in common with their bourgeois partners at this conference, their unwillingness to raise the historic program of the working class. This is how the fake left acts to pave the path for the triumph of the popular front and the defeat of the working class. Workers need their revolutionary party and world party of socialist revolution to defeat the fakers and break the illusions in the popular front from Richmond California to Cape Town, São Paulo, Athens and Caracas.
Communist Workers Group March 14, 2015
Labor Donated
politikang pilipino
March 15, 2015Reblogged this on politikang pilipino.
Arjun
March 26, 2015I was at the conference too, in Richmond. You seem to have an overly pessimistic, and arguably sectarian view of the proceedings and the nature of these sorts of events. Here are a few of my observations:
1) I have to admit, that I cringed quite a bit when that one fellow called for general strikes and a workers’ party and other vague platitudes–and I say that as somebody who would love to see a general strike and some sort of workers’ party. But it seems good to treat these conferences as a space to learn, to understand other people’s positions, the state of the railroads, current strategies and trajectories, etc. If your basic strategy is to run around like a broken record, then you have neither the information nor the networks necessary to build a workers’ party and wage revolutionary struggle. Its just generally off-putting when somebody comes across like they have the right answer and it is the duty of the workers to come around to their position.
2) It doesn’t seem like there is a good understanding here of why IWW and other folks might roll their eyes at vague calls for a workers’ party–and more importantly, it doesn’t seem like you or your fellow party cadres attempted to understand why people had the positions they did. This ties in to my first observation; there doesn’t seem to be a serious will to actually engage with people’s current positions and why these positions are held. Without engagement, there can be no influence; and I don’t think we should count blog posts as “engagement”.
3) You have a lot of suggestions for how to empower workers and what a socialist society would do. But I’ve honestly seen these same exact words a thousand times before, in similar contexts. What seems to always, always, always be missing is the actual details about how you think “unions are turned into organs of class struggle”, how workers’ parties are actually formed, and how political change generally comes about. Taken at face value it seems like the general strategy is to have more and more people shouting about the transitional program, until magically it is implemented–which I doubt is the actual strategy in mind.
What does day-to-day strategy actually look like? How do these strategies look if they are deployed by rail-road workers, or refinery workers, or longshoremen? The fact that these more detailed discussions never seem to emerge, and the same tired rhetoric about “workers’ parties” and etc. make me skeptical that there is any serious commitment here to working-class revolutionary organizing.