Vol. 79/No. 37      October 19, 2015

The worldwide crisis of capital has no end in sight, and the propertied rulers are stepping up their assault on the working classes. The percentage of the working class with a job has fallen to a decades-long low; temporary, part-time and agency work is everywhere; and wages are stagnant, Jack Barnes, SWP national secretary, said in his political report.

Decades of refusal by the trade union officialdom to organize workers, and to use union power against attacks by the bosses and government and in support of other social struggles, have led to defeats and sinking membership. The labor bureaucracy’s dependence on the political parties of the employing class has shut workers off from developing an independent working-class political road forward.

Actions against bosses, cop brutality

Two-thirds of autoworkers at Fiat Chrysler rejected a proposed deal Oct. 1 that would have left standing two-tier wage divisions that are a blow to the unity of the 36,000 workers there. An overwhelming majority of workers at Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway voted down a proposal last year promoted by officials in the SMART union’s Transportation Division that would have allowed the bosses to reduce train operating crews to one person.

Derailments and deaths — from Lac-Mégantic in Quebec to Amtrak in Philadelphia — are the result of the rail bosses’ offensive. Management tries to shift the blame onto the backs of the very workers they are attacking. The party, including through use of the Militant, can help lead in winning support for the defense of Tom Harding and Richard Labrie, Steelworkers union members who face frame-up charges for the 47 deaths in the Canada derailment.

Many of these developments were outlined in a report on party members’ work in the unions and labor battles given to the meeting by SWP trade union director Norton Sandler.

Because of the refusal of labor misleaders to organize, many working-class fights are finding new forms, like the growing number of battles for $15 and a union. In New Mexico, immigrant workers at car washes and other low-paying jobs, who have been ignored or brushed aside by union officials there, have formed worker associations to fight superexploitation, wage robbery and abuse. They have won a number of victories, including rulings by the National Labor Relations Board that their organizing activity is protected by the law.

Young people, led by youth who are African-American, are leading fights against cop murders and brutality. These battles and mini-rebellions have pushed the rulers back. They are taking steps to rein in their police. Cops like those who killed Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, have been fired, jailed and indicted across the country.

Outrage over the refusal of grand juries in several areas to file charges against the cops, including in the killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, forced Gov. Andrew Cuomo to grant special powers to the state attorney general to step in and take charge of cases where cops kill unarmed people.

Some in the Black Lives Matter movement and many middle-class radicals close their eyes to these developments or argue they aren’t happening. Telling the truth, they believe, will undercut the fight against police abuse. But recognizing the real impact the movement is having is necessary to get a hearing and fight effectively.

That was shown this summer by the revulsion and dignified response among working people of all skin colors to the political assassination of nine African-Americans in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a Nazi-minded individual named Dylann Storm Roof. That overwhelming response forced the rulers to take down the flag of terror against the Black-led movement that overthrew Jim Crow from the state Capitol, and to remove that hated emblem from items on store shelves across the country.

These social struggles and the developing labor battles reinforce and strengthen one another, the National Committee concluded. They provide growing opportunities for workers — Black and Caucasian, immigrant and native-born, employed and jobless — to come together.

The Washington Post tried to paint an opposite picture of Caucasian workers in the South in a Sept. 12 article headlined “An American Void,” focusing on youth in South Carolina who knew Dylann Storm Roof. The feature-length smear job painted the youth and their families as white trash, whose lives center on playing violent video games, smoking tobacco and marijuana nonstop (complete with a close-up photo of an ashtray), constantly buried in electronic devices, who don’t read and take no interest in anything outside their trailer park.

Their biggest crime, the Post seems to suggest, is that they offer a place to crash for friends or acquaintances who need one, Black or white, including Roof for a few days. For doing so, Joey Meek, one of those highlighted in the article, has been arrested by the FBI on frame-up charges that he lied and didn’t give them information about Roof.

Capitalist ‘world order’ unravels

In response, the U.S. rulers have sought a new line-up of alliances and trade pacts, seeking to shore up their declining power. These efforts include “resets” with Moscow and Tehran, agreement with these regimes on efforts to achieve some stability in Syria and Iraq (as well as in Ukraine and Russia’s “near abroad” in eastern Europe), and the recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership and plans for a similar trade deal with European rulers.

Each of these steps contain unpredictable but inevitable threats of friction and conflict. The first fruit of the “resets” has been decisions by Moscow and Tehran to send bombers, tanks and troops into Syria. The rapidity with which the Vladimir Putin government in Russia has moved to shore up the murderous government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria — bombing opponents of the regime and violating Turkish airspace — shows the deals engineered by the Obama administration have unforeseen and dangerous consequences for working people there and the world over. And they spur countermoves by Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other regimes that can cause new conflicts to emerge.

One consequence of the carnage unfolding in Syria is the displacement of more than half its population, with millions forced into camps and towns in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Thousands with greater means are seeking refuge in Europe. Wherever they end up, they are confronted by riot police, razor wire fences and abuse from the capitalist rulers.

For decades, labor’s misleaders have refused to fight for working-class unity; to combat discrimination, deportations, and attempts to criminalize immigrants; and to organize working people into unions, whatever their origins. This fight is key for the working class, to draw immigrant workers together with native-born in the growing class struggle in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The grinding capitalist economic, political and moral crisis, the weakening of Washington’s imperialist dominance, spreading conflicts and growing workers’ resistance tear at the fabric of the Democratic and Republican parties, spawning campaigns like those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

At the same time, the Socialist Workers Party finds greater interest in its working-class program, from demands to meet the immediate needs of working people to support for revolutionary Cuba to the need to break with the bosses’ parties and construct a labor party based on the trade unions. These and other pressing questions for working people will be at the center of the 2016 SWP presidential election campaign.

Cuban Revolution stronger

The Cuban Revolution is a living example of what workers and farmers can accomplish when they fight to take political power, transforming themselves in the process, and act to advance the interests of working people both at home and worldwide, as Cuban revolutionists have done.

This political attraction of the Cuban Revolution today has been shown, among other ways, in the response of workers and farmers in France, South Africa, Venezuela and elsewhere to visits by the Cuban Five, five revolutionaries imprisoned for a decade and a half in the U.S. for their actions in defense of the Cuban Revolution.

Waters had just returned from participating in a conference in Vietnam on building support in Asia and the Pacific for the Cuban Revolution and the fight against Washington’s embargo. She laid out plans to step up party work to press for an end to the embargo and for return to Cuba of the Guantánamo naval base, which has been transformed by the U.S. rulers into a torture camp and blot on humanity. Waters discussed the importance of increasing circulation of Pathfinder Press books that explain the gains won in revolutionary struggle by workers and farmers in Cuba.

She also pointed to new opportunities to step up the fight to win freedom for Oscar López, who has spent over 34 years in U.S. prisons for his unbending support of independence for Puerto Rico.

Implementing meeting’s decisions

Youth are attracted to two things, Barnes said, to action and to high level political discussion — “stretching their brains.”

Party members who work at Walmart and elsewhere will step up efforts to advance the broader fight for $15 an hour, regular schedules and a union. This explosive movement is already having an impact and can begin to reshape and advance the labor movement.

Unlike every other group that claims to speak for working people, most of which have either stopped publishing newspapers or reduced how often they print, the SWP is campaigning to expand the circulation of the Militant, and of Pathfinder Press books that contain the history and continuity of the party and the revolutionary working class movement. Party members and supporters take these weapons to share with workers on strike picket lines, social protests and political activities, in big cities and small towns and rural areas.

Books like Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power; The Changing Face of U.S. Politics; Teamster Politics; The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning; and issues of New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory edited by party leaders, are crucial for party members and others looking to understand how the class struggle is unfolding. Reading and studying these books make it possible for workers to bring to life the party’s program — hammered out in struggle over decades — in order to fight for demands in the interests of working people grounded in the lessons of past battles.

Increased party participation in workers’ struggles today tied to widening circulation of the party press and literature will help expand a Marxist current in the labor movement, strengthening it. Carrying out this course will help the party grow.  
 
 
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