Radical Ideas, Real Politics: Some Thoughts on the Coming Period

By Joel Wendland and Peter Zerner
PoliticalAffairs.net

Due to the economic crisis, rapid technological developments, globalization, and the new political terrain that has emerged as a result of the election of Barack Obama, the present moment is quite unlike any other. Because it is so different, we require a new understanding of the moment, as well as a theoretical agenda that matches this new reality.

This brief essay does not pretend to be a comprehensive discussion of the changed political and economic terrain or a detailed policy road map. Rather, it is intended to launch a discussion in the web pages of Political Affairs of why Marxism remains an essential, objective, and working-class-based theoretical process for meeting the challenges that lie ahead.

Our aim is to develop a focus on the key questions related to social progress and working-class empowerment, a focus centered on building and strengthening a broad people's coalition, like the movement that brought Barack Obama into office, and a sober assessment of reality in its present form, and the potential for creating a new world: an economy, society and system of values that reflect the basic interests of the American people and its working families.

To do so, the theoretical basis of our work, the presentation of our view of the world and society, must accurately reflect the new objective reality, the economic and political crisis faced by working men and women, and the hundreds of millions of marginalized human beings who currently are excluded from the Wall-Street-ravaged global economy.

No one can deny the intensity of the economic oppression that the working class today confronts. We offer a theory of society and a political method that provides the working class, broadly conceived, with essential tools for understanding, joining together with its allies, and confronting the forces that now control most of the wealth and power, America's plutocracy. Our task is to develop the critical weaponry they need to resist and open a pathway to a new kind of society focused on meeting the needs of the people: good paying jobs, affordable housing and health care, universal access to education, racial, ethnic, gender and LGBT equality, and the establishment of a truly democratic political system.

We begin with thoughts on some central features of the present moment and the struggles arising from them.

Read the full article here:

Podcast #116 - Labor History vs. the Cold War

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Political Affairs #116 - Labor History vs. the Cold War

It's June 3rd, 2010. On this episode we talk with Political Affairs contributing editor Ben Sears about his new book, Generation of Resistance: The Electrical Unions and the Cold War, out now in paperback at Amazon.com. So stay with us.


Download the mp3 version of episode #116 here

AFL-CIO and CtW getting to the table?

By Joel Wendland

New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse reported yesterday that the elections have the leaderships of the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win federation talking.

Here's what he says:

In a series of dinners and meetings in Washington, the presidents of several breakaway unions and the presidents of several federation unions have been mapping strategies to help elect Senator Barack Obama and forge joint policies on trade and other issues.

Several union officials involved in the meetings said the leaders had also discussed overhauling the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to address the concerns of some breakaway unions, with the aim of persuading some to rejoin.

It is the need to defeat the Republicans in the November elections that has brought both sides together:

...eager for the Democrats to win the White House and increase their majorities in Congress, the union presidents are trying to maximize their political cooperation, especially in swing states where unions are strong: Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Greenhouse also reports that local union organizations from both federations have continued to work together despite the split on a variety of things from political action and elections to organizing campaigns.

The article goes on to cite labor leaders who believe that after the election struggle, talks may turn to reunification.

For once the big media hasn't tried to exploit differences among workers and their organized leadership. Good article, and important developments.

Trumka: Don’t Let Opponents Divide Us by Race in 2008

Barack Obama is the only candidate in the presidential race who is on the side of working people, and we must defeat attempts to divide workers by race and put him in the White House.

read the whole thing here...

How important is this struggle for our class! No matter where you stand on Obama's politics, this struggle to defeat the influence of racism on the working class alone is worth the effort to work for McCain's defeat and bring Obama into the White House in a landslide.

Labor endorses Barack Obama

The labor movement has united to endorse Barack Obama for president. The 10 million-member AFL-CIO announced its endorsement today. The 7 million-member Change to Win federation endorsed him in early May.

The AFL-CIO statement read in part:

Endorsement Triggers Largest Ever Mobilization of Working Families AFL-CIO Program to Reach Union Voters Nationwide, 13 Million in 24 Priority States www.MeetObama08.org

Calling Sen. Barack Obama a champion for working families, the top leaders of AFL-CIO unions today voted without opposition to endorse him for president of the United States, thrusting the labor federation’s largest ever grassroots mobilization effort into high gear.

“In so many ways―on jobs, health care, gas prices and the war in Iraq―our country is headed in the wrong direction,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said. “Barack Obama has proven from his days as an organizer, to his time in the Senate and his historic run for the presidency, that he’s leading the fight to turn around America. He’s a champion for working families who knows what it’s going to take to create an economy that works for everyone, not just Big Oil, Big Pharma, the insurance companies, the giant mortgage lenders, speculators and the very wealthy. We’re proud to stand with Sen. Obama to help our nation chart a course that will improve life for generations of working people and our children.”

In its endorsement statement, the AFL-CIO General Board cited Obama’s strong support of working families on issues such as health care reform, fair trade that will lift up workers here and around the world, retirement security and the freedom to form unions and bargain for middle-class living standards. Obama has a 98 percent voting record on working families’ issues, compared to just 16 percent for Sen. John McCain.

Laborers' Union Backs Obama

The Laborers' union (LIUNA) announced today that it is endorsing Barack Obama for president. The union, which did not endorse a candidate during the primary season, is a member of the Change to Win federation which did endorse Obama last March.

This from a LIUNA press release:

“The men and women of LIUNA, who go to work every day building and servicing America, will support a candidate that will stand up for working families. Senator Obama is that candidate,” said LIUNA General President Terence M. O’Sullivan. “He will fight for good jobs and a stronger economy, he will fight for the necessary resources to build our basic infrastructure, such as highways, bridges, dams and schoolhouses, and he will lead our country forward with health care reform and true retirement security.”

O’Sullivan said, “Senator Obama offers the promise of a new day in American politics, a day in which millions more working voters participate in the process and a day in which the voices of working people rise above corporate money in Washington, D.C.”

O’Sullivan said Obama’s honesty, integrity and leadership will bring about the change America needs to move the country in the right direction. “As a charismatic leader, Senator Obama will unite America around the politics of change and America certainly needs a change from the Bush Administration,” said O’Sullivan. “We look forward to joining together in communities around the country between now and November, to reach out to working families and put their issues in the forefront of a plan for change. Citizens of this country will feel the power of Obama’s commitment to improving the lives of working men and women.”

Young workers discuss future in labor movement

“Why don’t young workers have an affiliate within the AFL-CIO?” This was one of the questions raised on May 3rd in a strategy session held at the National Conference of Jobs with Justice.

read the whole story here...

Happy May Day! Long Live the Working Class, its Past Victories, Present Struggles, and Socialist Future

by Norman Markowitz

I got a text message from a former student who is a labor organizer today wishing me happy May Day. I have never gotten a text message that wasn't a commercial and I have never sent a text message so I screwed up my answer, but I called her up and wished her a Happy May Day.

The AFL-CIO website is calling May Day International Labor Day, which would make George Meany and others turn over in their grave. This is a major step forward, but May Day can't be separated from the socialist and communist movements which have been at the center of May Day demonstrations from their beginning in 1890, from the revolutionary heritage of May Day, since it was decided to make May 1st, 1890, a day of mass protests for the eight hour day and solidarity with workers through the world at a conference in Paris in 1889 of labor and socialist representatives (with Marxists a major force in both groups) in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution.

May 1st was chosen in solidarity with the workers of the United States. The AFL-CIO website has a valuable link to the history of May Day in which it mentions the campaign launched in the U.S. on May 1, 1886 for the eight hour day. But it doesn't mention the role of anti-capitalist workers and groups in leading the May 1 demonstrations, which also were not about a holiday but about strikes to achieve the 8 hour day. In Chicago, Albert Parson's a former confederate soldier who had became a anti-racist editor fighting the KKK in Texas, then an socialist and later anarcho-socialist printer and writer well known and respected in working class circles, headed a parade of thousands of workers in Chicago on May 1, 1886. When pickets at a strike at the McCormick Harvester factory, were fired on by police a few days later, a mass protest demonstration in which Parsons was one of the leaders was organized in Haymarket Square in Chicago. After Parson's and the other organizers had left the demonstration very late in the events and a battalion of police march on the remaining demonstrators and ordered them to disperse, someone (who was never found) through a bomb and a riot ensued claiming a number of lives. Parson's and a number of his comrades in the leadership of the demonstration were tried for murder and four (even though nothing connected them to the unknown bomb thrower), including Parsons, were executed in spite of an international protest campaign from labor, socialist, and many liberal organizations and groups through Europe and the U.S. Those executed became "martyrs" for the U.S. labor movement and the resolution to make May 1st the day of protest was put forward by the U.S. delegate representing the AFL (which at the time had a large socialist contingent).

The AFL-CIO website also suggests that the holiday Americans still celebrate, Labor Day, has its origins in the the activities of Peter MaGuire, a leader of the Carpenters Union in the early 1880s (the website makes the point that there is debate over this). But our readers should remember that Peter MaGuire was a leading socialist in the U.S. labor movement whose defeat years later by a conservative business unionist was seen by some (myself included) as an important symbolic event in the shift of skilled workers away from an inclusionary class conscious trade unionism toward to an exclusionary "job" conscious" unionism.

The article then goes on to make the the important point that Labor Day was declared a National Holiday by Congress in 1894 fearful of a worker backlash in response to the Cleveland administration's brutal suppression of the Pullman Strike, led by American Railway Union president Eugene Debs. The backlash did occur as the Republican party won a major victory against the conservative Democratic Cleveland administration. Debs, as the article doesn't mention, went on to become the leader of the Socialist Party of America after it was established at the beginning of the twentieth century and was its presidential candidate in four elections.

I am trying to provide this article, which contains valuable information and an overall progressive orientation in its treatment of May Day and Labor Day, with constructive criticisim. The article also quotes really prominent labor historians David Montgomery and Nelson Lichtenstein whose statements capture the essence of class struggle that May Day was and is about.Montgomery's comment that "First state governments and then the federal government adopted the day (labor day) in response to workers demands The government did not create the holiday," is especially important in understanding what May Day was about, just as the "government" responded to workers demands in 1938 in the U.S. when it created the eight hour day standard, which the original U.S. May 1 demonstrations and the later international demonstrations were initiated to establish. But its omissions undermine it signnificantly as a tool to educate working people.

You cannot omit the Marxist and socialist history of both May Day globally and Labor Day in the U.S. (in terms of MaGuire's role), not to mention the role of May Day in the global Communist and Socialist movements right up to today and understand its significance for the past, and its meaning for the present and the future. Those who separate labor from socialism, which laws like Taft-Hartley in the U.S. along with purges and blacklists sought to do after WWII, in effect strike blows against both.

I did learn something really important from the AFL-CIO article that I did not know and I can teach the AFL-CIO article's writers something about this also. In 2003, the Bush administration declared May 1st Loyalty Day, using September 11 and the "war against terrorism" as their pretext. I either didn't know this or had forgotten it since, like millions of Americans, you can only take so much of what what the Bush administration is doing without beginning to blot it out from your consciousness.

But the article omits the that this wasn't the first federal "loyalty day." In 1947, the year of Taft-Hartley and the Truman Doctrine in effect declaring the Cold War, the Veterans of Foreign Wars established and Congress later made official May 1st as "Loyalty Day." In the 1950s especially when May Day demonstrations were suppressed, "Loyalty Day" demonstrations were held as parades in which various right-wing groups, both secular and religious, proclaimed their "loyalty" to the America represented by Joe McCarthy. I assume Bush's advisors knew all of that when they pushed through "Loyalty Day in 2003. It fits the old classic definition of a reactionary---those who learn nothing from history and forget nothing from history and thus try to do the same thing over and over again.

I would also tell both our readers and the authors of the AFL-CIO website article that when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, his government officially declared May 1st "national day" to take it away from the Social Democratic and Communist trade unionists whom he was throwing into the new concentration camps. The Nazi government even banned the use of the word "proletarian" But they couldn't kill May Day, just as the McCarthyites in the U.S. couldn't kill it with their "loyalty day. The Bush administration won't kill it either with the "loyalty day" they recycled from p;d McCarthyites in 2003.

The AFL-CIO website mad the central point that workers on this May Day are standing up for workers rights and against the Iraq War and that the AFL-CIO is with them front and center. And that is the best news for this May Day, as the trade union movement prepares to play a leading role in the defeat of the Bush administration and its would be successor, John McCain. Happy May Day.