From Wisconsin to California and Beyond:
It’s Time for the Working Class to Fight Back!
(Flyer circulated by HWRS at May Day marches and rallies in 2011)
Labor is in a fight for its very survival. Workers in California and across the nation are at a crossroads. We can continue down the road of dependence on the Democratic Party, political lobbyists, and court rulings. We can persist in our reliance on business unionist leaders who pedal concessions, and tell us to “share the pain” instead of taking the militant actions needed to win and make the capitalists pay for their crisis. Or, we can open a new road of independent working class action defend our gains and organizations!
In the face of the occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol and a growing wave of militant worker actions (April 4th ILWU 10 strike, May Day unity of labor and immigrants), the Democrats and union tops are trying to put a lid on workers’ militancy, telling us to “put down the placards and pick up the clipboards”; they intend to take the masses off the streets and depend instead on electoral and judicial solutions. This dead-end strategy leaves the resolution of the crisis in the hands of the bosses’ institutions and their politicians. The Democrats could not deliver the Employee Free Choice Act, and have not hesitated to join in the current attacks on public workers’ collective bargaining rights, salaries, and benefit packages nationwide. Reliance on the Democratic Party is not the answer. Instead, to arrive at a solution to the crisis that favors the working class, we must develop and pursue a strategy of self-organized activity and political independence.
The outcome of this struggle will be decisive for the entire working class. Either the workers’ movement will prevail, and based on this victory a sense of revitalization will infuse the ranks of labor with a new spirit to turn the tide, or the capitalists will be victorious, and will expand their campaign from state to state, picking the unions to the bone and crushing the working class. For big capital, this is an international and nationwide attack; for the working class, the response must be internationalist and nationwide as well.
Workers Must Break with the Pro-Capitalist Democratic Party!
The old strategy of class collaboration between labor and the Democrats has long tied the American worker to the imperialist project, pitting workers here against the workers of the world. Labor, allied with the Democrats, has for over a century endorsed imperialist interventions supported and planned on a bipartisan basis by Wall Street politicians who took labor for granted, tossing us crumbs while militarily plundering and exploiting the resources and workers of the world. We need a new strategy that breaks the stranglehold of class collaboration, understands that workers’ interests are not the same as Wall Street’s, and opens the road to international workers’ solidarity. Our allies are the workers of the world, not the bosses’ politicians!
To resolve the economic and political crisis in the interest of the working class, we must organize from the bottom up (factory/office/jobsite committees), and we need to develop new leaders who will prepare for general strikes. We need to reject the Democrats who take our support for granted, and instead run independent labor candidates. This way, we can build working class political independence and lay the foundation for a fighting workers’/labor party that will not hesitate to use working class methods of struggle to defend public education, health care, immigrants, and the rights of all the oppressed against attacks by Wall Street. Only through mass, militant, independent working class based action can we remake our society into one that puts people before profit. The capitalist parties put finance capital first! To put working class interests first, we need a fighting workers’ party based on labor, the oppressed communities, students, and the unemployed!
Our Task: To Exploit the Cracks in Consciousness
The consciousness of the working class in America is changing under the pressure of deteriorating material conditions. Old prejudices, as well as illusions in the “American dream,” are daily being crushed under the weight of unfulfilled expectations. Workers are starting to question the efficacy of the strategy and tactics of the current crop of labor fakers. As workers find that their dependence on the Democrats – even when coupled with daily protests, candlelight vigils, tent cities, and occupations of state capitol buildings – will not and cannot produce the desired results, they will be looking for solutions that actually work.
The general strike and a program of transitional demands are our answer. With these working class weapons, we fight for control of the work and the workplace. The bosses have shown they are no longer capable either of administering the work process, or of guaranteeing the product – which, in the case of public work, is providing services (education, health & safety, transit, home care, etc.) to the people. WE DO THE WORK! WE SHOULD CONTROL IT! SHARE THE WORK: JOBS FOR ALL! 30 hours work for 40 hours pay!
Advocacy for a general strike, today, exposes the existing union leadership’s inability to fight. The call for the general strike puts them on notice that we know they do not have a strategy or tactics that can resolve the crisis in the workers’ interest. Our strategy is to take every step with the masses toward ever greater self-expression of the historic interest of the working class. The tactics we use must rely on workers’ self-organization, united front action, and the international workers’ solidarity needed to win. As the economic crisis grows more acute, making it increasingly apparent that capital cannot resolve it, the emerging call for a general strike poses the question of which class should run society: the capitalists or the workers.
Confronting old limitations and roadblocks
Decades of beseeching “friendly” Democrats for their help have proven beyond doubt that reliance on elected capitalist politicians to protect our rights is a dead-end strategy. Solidarity actions, such as the May 9 protest in Sacramento, are a starting point, but if their goals are limited to pressuring politicians through lobbying and rallies, they will ultimately go nowhere. Even if we could persuade the Legislature to “tax the rich,” it means nothing as long as we must depend on pro-capitalist politicians to set the priorities for how to spend those taxes. Our workplace rights, our families’ health care, our children’s education, the preservation of our environment, and the human needs of our working class communities will still be at the mercy of corporate lobbyists and campaign donors who thrive on non-productive expenditures such as the prison-industrial complex, the military-industrial complex, and corporate welfare.
What we need, instead, is a strategy based on workers’ self-organization and solidarity! Our goal must be to build on actions like the Wisconsin State Capitol occupation and the May 9 action in Sacramento by turning them into popular/worker/labor assemblies that meet everywhere to plan and prepare for a nationwide indefinite general strike. Local assemblies should delegate strike committees of the activists in the ranks to go to all worksites to organize meetings, help establish rank-and-file committees, caucuses, and networks, and enlist support for the strike to build locally and regionally before setting the date for the big one. Such organizational developments can lay the foundations needed for the formation of a workers’ party that fights for a workers’ government capable of administering the economy in the common interests of the majority.
The path to victory for working people nationwide is via general strike, but we must not ignore what it will take to win. All the hurdles in the way need to be consciously considered by mass assemblies of workers and popular forums, run on the principles of workers’ democracy. Organized labor’s ties to the Democrats and the entrenched labor fakers need to be broken. A new militant rank-and-file leadership committed to class struggle methods and class independence must be forged, and must fight for and win leadership. Unless we first oust the business-unionist bureaucracy and reclaim the unions as democratic bodies run by the most militant workers, the general strike will not happen, or if it does, it will flounder and be smashed.