Class struggle in the time of COVID-19 and the 2020 election cycle!
May Day 2020
Class struggle in the time of COVID-19 and the 2020 election cycle!
Drinking the “Re-Opening” Clorox vs stating our class’ historic objective.
For reformism we are facing an election. For the proletariat we are facing a Depression. Bloomberg’s Noah Smith knows this. One in five are now unemployed. Prisons and nursing homes are becoming death camps. So much for the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie that the economy will “come roaring back” by July(Trump, Kushner, et. al..)
The reopening is upon us. Trump, who refused to use emergency powers to retool and produce PPE and ventilators, is using that authority to force slaughterhouse workers to return to work, even before the plants have been reorganized to provide sufficient social distancing to protect the workforce. The fascist-inspired suckers we saw hooting for “re-opening” in multiple cities last week are the ‘useful idiots’ mobilized in a concerted push by the ruling class to Make Americans Slaves Again. And Trump took this to heart, he is forcing a largely black and immigrant work force back to the slaughterhouses where COVID clusters are mushrooming. At the Waterloo Plant in Iowa the number of confirmed cases jumped from 90 to 1,300 in one week. Already this virus has killed more Americans in two months than all the anticolonial forces did in S.E. Asia during a 30 year conflict from 1945-75. If the working class does not enter center stage the capitalists will send us back to work with little protection and still less an understanding of how to run an economy that keeps workers safe and healthy.
We ask: Which class will reopen the economy, the capitalist class or the working class? Who will feed the people! Will bread be brought to market, food lines or mass cafeterias? Who will decide, the class conscious capitalists or a class conscious working class? The capitalist have their plan and it has factored in “acceptable risks” to all our lives! The immediate task of Capital is to get quarterly profits rolling for shareholders. The immediate task of the working class is to defend our families and communities’ health. This requires that we advance our own program, forge our own organizations, and build our politically independent workers party that establishes a workers government. We must answer how a workers government would reopen the economy vs how the capitalist state intends to reopen the economy.
Overseas the workers say “Après la Pandémie, Tout le Monde Dans la Rue: Entre les Vagues, Grève!” That is, after the pandemic, everyone into the street! Between the Waves, Strike! (And get a yellow vest!) Of course there may be no waves if “back to work” orders are enforced the way AG Barr wishes. This will multiply a death toll that has at the end of April outstripped the government’s model forecast for early August!!! The great efficiency of the past, the “mass transit” of public transportation, will now threaten our lives going to and from work! Further, all those forced to work when there is neither community testing, contact tracing nor a vaccine must strike or play Russian roulette with their loved ones’ lives!
To open up healthy work sites requires a level of planning that Capital reserves for individual profit centers, micro managed production processes and coordinated supply chains. Capital has no interest in conducting the logistics, the planning and integration of national and international production and distribution required to meet the current needs of humanity. Their intra-market competition is based on an ‘anarchy of production’ that has all Capitals competing-only colluding tactically for individual strategic gain. The intention of each individual Capitalist is to reopen to reclaim their piece of the market after the destruction of much of the fictitious, fixed and variable capital the market has been choking on since the 2009 Quantitative Easings.
To counteract the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPTF), big Capital counts on this unfolding depression to clear the decks so that the surviving Capitals can return to the pre-COVID norm as it existed and how they hope it will continue to exist. That does not include a total revamping of every work station in every factory and every office to protect workers from the uncontrolled and apparently uncontrollable future rounds of this or subsequent pandemics. But it won’t be a return to the norm because this and future pandemics are compounded by economic crash and climate revolt (nature defending itself!). So a century of health and safety wins will be gutted, union agreements ripped up, the working class driven yet further downward, and big oil will use their ‘jobs’ pretext to burn the planet.
It is not that the required planning and coordination is too difficult. It is just not profitable and not possible under the current capitalist mode of production for profit. Profit as the sole intention of the boss class requires the sacrifice of workers health and safety–today as in all previous times! For that model, just look at how capital behaves in the semi-colonial world, where their toady regimes stumble in and out of lockdown, workers chased home, then back to work by police and paramilitary thugs. Health and safety? Disaster capitalism is the new normal in the global south, while Bonapartist regimes continue to replace liberal democracy across the northern hemisphere.
Bankers are getting hungry for your interest payments. Big oil is starving you to fill your gas guzzlers, and the FED is printing devalued fiat currency based on the promise that exploitation of workers will be increased to cover the debt. GET BACK TO WORK YE SLAVES OF RENT, UTILITIES AND FOOD DEBT! Otherwise capitalists will run your skeletons out of your hovels and you will be just so many more homeless. Alongside the workers and poor, the class of small businesses “mom & pop shops” are folding under the joint pressure of the banks and landlords’ insatiable persistence and the pathetic rollout of federal assistance that favors corporate restaurants like Ruth’s Chris Steak House over ‘Sadie’s Diner.’ Sectors considered stable and bullet proof (public employees, teachers, public works projects) are all being impacted as Bloomberg tells us this could be deeper than the Great Depression. This is a mega opportunity for the capitalists and their politicians to go on an offensive to roll back the gains public workers have made over the decades. Barely recovered from the 2008-2009 crash layoffs and wage-stagnant though this work force may be!
Only the political independence of the workers’ movement can compel Capital to let us live! The pandemic is already seen as a great experiment and opportunity for sections of the ruling class to do without militants and many layers of machine operators and service providers. YOU are not in their recovery plans! We need our own plans, decided upon ONLY by our own class!
Strike! Insist on Living! Biden won’t help! It’s up to us! Walk out en masse in support of your local medical workers! Do this in defiance of Taft-Hartley, with official Union support or without, make this happen! LIFE is what is more important than private profit!
Union Busting is coming – Capital will desperately seek to recoup their losses out of the hides of the most supine of the reserve army of labor! Organize the unorganized including locals of the unemployed, like the “Federal” Locals of the 1930s! Keep the scabs out and/or bring them out too!
Mitch McConnell (R) has called to cut off Federal aid for the states; that the states can file bankruptcy. This is the fulfillment of the right-wing dream to completely gut the social safety net and social services, privatize public services, drive down the wages and benefits of public sector workers and to break the last bastion of organized labor in the U.S., which is the public sector unions. This is “Let them eat cake!”, or rather the “FU” American version to workers and society on top of tens of thousands of our dead working class sisters and brothers at home and abroad due to the disdain of the ruling class for our lives. The state governors and legislators, Democrat or Republican, will be imposing austerity even without McConnell’s help. State budgets are already being hard hit with the businesses shut down and loss of revenue, mass unemployment, the costs of managing the pandemic and the strain on state and local public services.
The public sector unions in the states have faced attacks on their legal rights to exist in recent years along with forced concessions with the blessing of the trade union misleaderships who have no intention of mobilizing a fight. The methods of these labor lieutenants of Capital to ‘defend’ our unions are promoting the Democrats, the ballot box, the labor boards and the courts. The state of the labor movement, the broader working class and society today is a testament to their strategy.
State and municipal workers’ contracts will be under attack as the many Democratic Governors and mayors administer the austerity just as if they were Republicans, cutting funding to social programs and limiting wages that perpetually fall behind the real cost of living. Workers need to build class struggle caucuses in the workplaces based on class struggle action,and political independence. Only then can the workers movement win against the current attacks on working people and our allies. The current crop of boot lickers, who pose as labor leaders, are already on their knees, starved by right to work legislation and vying for their last lick of relevance supporting the Democrats; they will stand in the way of workers taking direct action such as strikes for PPE, for safe and healthy work conditions, for living wages and bullet proof contracts with cost-of-living escalators.
Private sector workers have been hit hard, particularly healthcare workers and the industrial working class in meat-packing and processing, and along with public sector workers in transit. As essential workers, they have not been provided proper PPE or safe working conditions and have been forced to work in crowded conditions, just as before and usually without accurate COVID testing!. Healthcare and other workers have engaged in wildcat strikes and protests. Workers committees are needed right now to organize strike actions that shut down these workplaces and demand that the bosses provide appropriate PPE and safe working conditions, along with hazard pay. Shut down non-essential work with full pay and benefits to laid off workers. All “roaring back” schemes are fatal and every worker will need to strike for health and safety! This makes striking now an objectively political movement. We need to transform the self-defense strike into a conscious political movement for a workers’ party, a fighting party of the workers and the oppressed! Now workers are being forced to return to work as the ruling class re-opens the economy and this requires not only the same strike actions to guarantee safe working conditions, but a Transitional Program for a workers government, a species survival socialist program.
United, coordinated worker strike actions that completely shut down production, distribution and services are needed! Seize workplaces through sit-down strikes to enforce workers’ demands for safe working conditions! For mass picket lines that no scab will dare cross! For solidarity strikes! DEFY strike-breaking injunctions and smash Taft-Hartley and all anti-union laws through class struggle! Union and non-union truckers unite to support strikes by refusing to transport struck goods. For mass union organizing campaigns to organize the unorganized “wall to wall”! Build unemployed councils united with the trade unions!
The right wing attacks the temporary $600 Unemployment increase which for low wage workers results in a weekly pay greater than their sub $15 per hour income. We call for across-the-board wage increases! We call for wage and price committees to establish real costs of living, and cost-of-living clauses in all contracts. We call for sliding scales of working hours beginning with a 30 hour week for 40 hours pay, so as to spread the available work, both for the survival of all, where everyone is entitled to eat, and to reduce exposure to unseen infection factors
Workers who lose their jobs also lose their health insurance, if they even had it. Against the for-profit healthcare and the state cuts to Medicare and Medicaid we fight for socialized medicine! Where today American capitalist medicine offers the least care at the highest prices, we call for establishing a higher level of expertise and services available to all as a human right. For free, quality healthcare for all through the nationalization of the insurance, hospital, medical supply and pharmaceutical industries with no compensation to private shareholders and under workers control! For free quality education and job training for all to train the next generation of healthcare and other socially necessary workers!
Despite formal “equality” it is always Black Americans who bear the brunt of capitalist crises. They are treated as second-class citizens even in the best of times. At the beginning of the Shelter In Place, Black people were afraid to wear masks and with good reason-fear of being terrorized by the racist cops. The police draw pistols at the sight of a masked Black person! And with a disproportionate incarceration rate, Black people face rampant infection rates inside as well as outside the walls. The Black and Brown communities have been hit harder as the hospitalizations prove, along with immigrants. Racist public policy has for generations denied Black communities adequate health care access, and to this is added the crimes of environmental racism and the psychological effects of racist hostility. The underlying, pre-existing conditions killing so many of the Black COVID cases have these identifiable causes. These conditions call for socialist revolution!
LatinX populations are taking a beating, whether native born, documented , undocumented or refugees. This follows on years of official bourgeois state victimization, first by the “great Deporter” Obama, and since by the kid cager, fake wall builder and asylum seeker ejector Trump. We discover that Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (P.U.A.) has not been sent to anyone in still-devastated Puerto Rico! Trump has ramped up anti-Chinese propaganda too, causing a spike in anti-Asian violence as he seeks to pin the blame for the pandemic on China, exactly to boost his re-election chances. Say no to Xenophobia! Free Puerto Rico!
The mass unemployment with 30 million idled by April 30th rivals that of the Great Depression. And the youth today who had diminishing prospects under a better economy will have little when so much more labor is disposable in the minds of the bosses. “Open the Road to the Woman Worker, Open the Road to the Youth!” So has our program proclaimed at all times since Trotsky penned the Transitional Program in the second dip of the last great depression.
The CARES Act eviction moratorium will expire and then the parasitic landlords are going to want their rent. Likewise the banks want their mortgage payments. No excuses! The calls for payment “moratoriums” are just formulas for debts renters and homeowners won’t be able to pay. Think of how many families lived paycheck-to-paycheck before the pandemic! This is a national and international emergency. Vaccinate everyone and cancel rents and mortgage payments!! Rent strike now!
Food is a human right the capitalists do not abide! Masses line up at food banks for quickly diminished supplies, and supermarket shelves are barren after the first few hours. As the bosses force workers into unsafe working conditions and without proper PPE in the meat processing plants, letting the pandemic run rampant and devastating the workforce, meat shortages and rising prices are predicted. Trump signed the Defense Production Act at the end of April but this doesn’t resume the shipping, rail or trucking, of foodstuffs that normally supply restaurants. Originally an anti-labor Korean War law, the lightminded application now sentences many meatpacking workers and/or members of their families and communities TO DEATH.
With restaurants closed and workers falling ill, the whole anarchy of the capitalist food supply chain has been disrupted. Truckers not getting enough work to survive and pay for their leases because restaurants are closed. Farmers threaten to cull pigs and chickens, ready crops are tilled back into the ground and milk is dumped by the millions of gallons for want of storage or markets. This condition is artificial! More than the homeless are going hungry!
We demand Municipal markets with city workers’ council price controls established by the wage and price committees in coordination with the neighborhood committees. The bourgeoisie conducts a census every ten years. The neighborhood committees will conduct a continuous census and know the true vittles demand!
To critics who say we engage only in sheer propaganda and do not stand with the masses in their fight against Trump, we say: We do fight for socialist revolution through propaganda. Yes, but we understand many workers are not for socialism today and that even the best leaflet in the world won’t convince them. We know the workers learn by their own experience so we point out the nature of the crisis, its causality and trajectory. Our method is to patiently explain that the world economy can’t go back to the way things were, that opening of the economy is a life and death question for the working class and that therefore it must be opened by the working class using science in the interest of survival and not allow the capitalist class to rush to reopening in their chase for profit. This is the method of the Trotskyist Transitional Program, which is both analytical and a system of demands.
The shut down of the economy, the work limited to essential workers and telecommuting has only been capable of providing scant healthcare, a floundering education system, unsafe and unhealthy food production, unhealthy housing (of both the free and incarcerated), limited food distribution and scanty and unhealthy public transportation; managed by capital this process is still exposing and sickening workers because capitalist management method has always disregarded workers health and safety. Today the transitional program explains that only the working class can organize a healthful return to work when it erases profit expropriators from the economy.
This is why the Transitional Program fights for Jobs For All as a job sharing equation, shortening the work week and organizing workers control of the prices, wages and subsidies. This element of our program for addressing the crisis does not stand alone but initiates thinking through to the logical inquiry of who will stand in the way of this program and how this program can be enacted, paving the entire path up to the door of the worker’s government. This program is laid out from factory committees to workers councils, to workers militia, to expropriation of the commanding heights of the economy.
Our critics are well acquainted with the text of the 1938 program. It is rewritten with new vividness in every struggle but its general method and characteristic elements remain the same, it acts as a bridge between the immediate objective needs of the working class and the social revolution. To the fake Trotskyists and other communists supporting the Biden campaign we say you cannot fight for this method and develop this program by endorsing and campaigning for enemy class candidates. You will secure none of the objectives this way, objectives which can only be won by class struggle against the legacy and practices of the very capitalist candidate(s) you are supporting!
The Democratic National Committee hopes Tara Reade is willing to take one for the team! Three years after #MeToo the #DNC is saying to #TaraReade #NotYouToo. The Democratic party participation in the #MeToo blew up in their faces when Al Franken was outed and ousted while slime ball Trump slithered free! The Democrats are an ineffective opposition party, their pathetic attempt at impeachment was a total capitulation. Now the same leadership has anointed Biden. The liberals and bourgeois-feminists silence is acceptance of Biden’s past and it puts their hypocrisy on display. No, we won’t out ole Lunchbox Joe! ‘We oppose rape and rapists are despicable but we will vote for the rapist instead of overturning the capitalist state because we are obsequious slaves to Capital.’ The Democrats and all the faux socialists that are chanting the “Anyone But Trump” mantra will tell workers and women that this rapist is the best they have to offer as a means of defeating Trump. They tell you to trade an old white billionaire rapist for an old white millionaire rapist. And you wonder why the majority of workers don’t show up to the polls! We have to dump Trump by mass actions and general strikes, refusal to do unsafe work and refusal to pay for their crisis! Join the May Day Actions! Support workers strikes for safe working conditions! Strike to bring down the Trump clusterfluck! No faith in the Democrats. Build a fighting workers labor party to build a workers government.
Down with anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant racism! Close down the detention centers! Free all migrants! ICE out of the communities! ABOLISH ICE! Full citizenship and employment rights for migrant workers and refugees!
Down with all anti-abortion measures during and after the pandemic! For free abortion on demand! Open clinics in every state and every county over 10,000 residents. For free 24 hour child care centers when work resumes.
Provide proper amounts of PPE for all health care workers! Enforce Aerosolized Transmissible Disease, Zoonotic Disease, Respiratory Protection regulations and social distancing in all work environments! For worker actions to seize and retool factories for production of medical equipment and PPE! This is the latest 21st century pandemic, not the last! Produce COVID-19 tests, reagents and swabs and provide access for all without charge!
The criminal justice system is designed to incarcerate a population that has been institutionally cut out of the economy by slavery, debt peonage, Jim Crow segregation, lynching, ineffective Affirmative Action Programs, and ongoing institutional racism! Close the petri dishes called prisons and detention centers! Protect the incarcerated population during the transition to liberation, homes and jobs!
We need a 1937 type sit-down strike wave today that seizes workplaces and enforces workers demands; that enforces safety conditions and PPE, determines what should be produced, where goods should be distributed and which businesses are essential!
Build rank and file action committees to support and build strikes and job actions of Amazon warehouse workers, healthcare workers, and sanitation workers….all workers! Expand worker action committees to factory and job site committees that build workers councils and worker self-defense guards! For solidarity strikes! Truckers! Refuse shipment of struck goods!
We call on the unions to seize the shuttered economy, to open supply chains, to initiate safe work protocols determined by on-the-spot scientific evaluations and put an end to the lack of equipment needed to defeat this pandemic!
We call for Labor-Black-and-Brown Defense Guards organized in Union Halls and community centers of the oppressed neighborhoods to ensure equal distribution of resources, food, water, power and medical care to all in need. For Labor-Black-and-Brown Defense Guards to also defend against state repression, racist cops, fascists and to defend picket lines and protect strikers!
Down with labor/management peace schemes! For class struggle to defeat anti-labor laws such as Taft-Hartley! Defeat class collaboration with the capitalist parties! We fight for the political independence of the working class. No support for the Demcoartic or Republican parties of the bosses!
Pandemic conditions warrant a general strike and a workers’ contest for political power. For this contest we need class struggle unionism and a fighting workers’ labor party!
Make the Gig Apps pay their workers unemployment insurance and provide PPE for those who are still employed! Full wages and full benefits for all workers laid off or fired! Jobs for all by spreading around the available work! For 30 hours workweek or less for 40 hours pay! Living wages, full employer-paid benefits, PPE and safe working conditions for all workers!
Our program calls for JOBS FOR ALL! There is no excuse for transit systems to lack adequately protected cleaner crews! Hire cleaners immediately for 30-hour weeks at 40-hours pay! We demand more trains and buses to make ‘social distancing’ a fact!
Public utilities and communications are privatized under neoliberalism. Make power, water, and the internet a social right. Nationalize all utilities and run them under working class control!
Turn on water and power to occupied residential housing regardless of ability to pay!
End housing insecurity! Protect the homeless and the vulnerable populations! House the unhoused! Seize vacant real estate to house the homeless! Abolish eviction law. Seize all , real property from large landlords and multinational realty firms! For immediate rent forgiveness! For immediate rent/lease suspensions for small businesses! For mortgage abolition! Free quality housing for all!
Feed the food insecure! Support small farmers to provide local produce at subsidized prices! For workers price committees to set prices! For workers committees and committees of bank employees to provide free credit from the financial institutions to re-open and aid family farmers and small businesses! For workers control of transport, credit and mercantile operations!o
International workers’ actions to win aid for the colonies and semi-colonies of needed funds, food, PPE, test kits, medical professionals and medical equipment! Survival of our class is an international existential question. Expropriate the private expropriators of the surplus value we produce and dedicate it to the survival of our social class worldwide! No worker is illegal or your enemy!
Down with repressive state and anti-worker national emergency measures! For democratic worker committees and labor-black-brown self-defense guards in the communities, not the cops or National Guard, to determine and enforce the isolation level required and to shut down non-essential businesses! For protective healthcare measures for the military ranks! For enlisted personnel unions and elected officers!
For fast-track training for 3rd year medical students (doctors and nurses)! For free quality education for all! Build hospital pandemic wings, not student indenture to banks! Forgive student loans!
Provide free home care for those quarantined! Increase staffing at medical facilities until 30 hour weeks at 40 hours pay become the new social norm! Union skilled pay to become the new norm, replacing 60 hour death sentence weeks for substandard pay!
Provide immediate free universal health care regardless of income and citizenship status! Provide PPE & training and create safe and healthy work conditions for all capable of conducting essential work at prevailing wages! Build hospitals, clinics and organize delivery of food, medicine and other essential supplies!
For free vaccinations for all! For free, quality healthcare for all through socialized medicine! Nationalize under workers control the hospitals, clinics and the insurance, pharmaceutical and medical supply industries with zero compensation to the major shareholders!
No bailout for the big capitalists who used the 2009 bailouts to buy back shares and inflate the market, filling your retirement accounts with shares of fictitious value! Open the books to workers committees so an accurate accounting can be made! Nationalize under democratic workers control the commanding heights of the economy with not one penny of compensation to the major private shareholders! For a rational, collectivized, centrally-planned socialist economy based on social needs, not profit, managed under democratic workers control!
Build a fighting Workers/Labor Party to fight for workers’ rule! For a Workers Government based on democratic Workers Councils and a Workers Militia to carry out the socialist tasks!
For a Socialist America as part of a Socialist Federation of the Caribbean and the Americas!
Workers of the World Unite! Build a new revolutionary Workers International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution!
