Two, Three, Many Wisconsins
Posted by Tell No Lies on February 18, 2011
This article from Fire on the Mountain is a follow-up to a previous piece that we also reprinted and that sparked a spirited discussion of the place of state and municipal budget battles within the class struggle in the United States and their potential, or lack thereof, to radicalize people.
“We should note another aspect of all of this that is impossible to deny: the Wisconsin resistance has been inspired by the militant spirit of the Arab revolt….
“This kind of thing is enough to make any old proletarian internationalist all dewy-eyed, and in a real rather than a sentimental way. Year after year we could bang our heads against the wall for international solidarity: end US military aid to Colombia; allow Aristide to return to Haiti; end US military aid to Israel and Egypt; and so on.
“Our efforts were worthy, but we could get nowhere until now because of the iron law — true no matter how much we fight to change it — that people only begin to see the need for international solidarity when they see how the liberation of others is bound up with theirs.”
Two, three, many Wisconsins
By Felix Dzerzhinsky
What a week it’s been! And it’s not even over. I’ve had people asking me whether I feel vindicated about my post of two weeks ago, where I said that the fight over public budgets was going to be the key front in the class struggle in the United States this year. I can’t say that I feel especially insightful; it took no genius to see the significance of these fights. But I am pleased — pleased, that is, to see that in this struggle, our side is now fighting back.
The mass action in Wisconsin has dealt a severe blow to Scott Walker’s attempt to out-Christie Chris Christie. As of this writing, State Senate Democrats, responding as all wily bourgeois politicians are wont to do in the face of unexpected levels of mass pressure, are denying the Republicans a quorum by hiding out of state.
All of this could change for the better or worse tomorrow. Everything depends on the ability of workers to maximize the disruption of business as usual in the state: keep the Capitol shut down, keep as many schools as possible closed and teachers and sympathetic students at the Capitol or in the streets, etc. The rest of the country is watching, and the activists among us are wondering if we’ll be able to reproduce this level of constructive anger in response to the attacks that we face.
The fight is never identical from one place to the next, but the possibility of having a good example is encouraging for the rest of us. Why has Wisconsin risen up? I’m happy to report that they were able to start in a place where I suggested we not start: with a militant defense of the rights of public-sector workers. Economic hard times, I wrote, mean that this is a bad place to start, because so much of the public resents public-sector workers who have benefits that they do not have. Better to defend public-sector workers only in the context of a broader fight against service cuts, I said, and then we need to put the demand to make the rich pay at front-and-center, lest we lose too many people to capital’s mystifications about taxes. I still think a lot of this holds true going forward, but I also think I underestimated the catalytic potential of public-sector workers. After all, their unions are still the big battalions of the fight to defend public services. And perhaps more crucially, no matter where you are, everyone knows a teacher. Everyone knows a city trash collector or state worker. Everyone knows a firefighter; they were exempt from Walker’s direct attack, but they know the meaning of solidarity, and are aware that their own bargaining positions will be weakened if other unions are weakened, so they showed up at the Capitol in some strength. And yes, everyone knows a cop: they were also exempt from Walker’s attacks, but reports indicate that plenty of them showed up to support the other unions as well — out of uniform, of course, but thereby marking the first time you were ever grateful to see a plainclothes policeman at a demonstration. (If you’re having a hard time dealing with contradictions, you’re going to have to get used to it.)
So part of the explanation for why Wisconsin has exploded is that Walker miscalculated: he assaulted the unions frontally in an aggressive manner, and as the South Africans said in another context, he struck a rock. When the public-sector workers moved, others began to move as well, including the University of Wisconsin students, and the fight has at least partially taken on the character of a fight to defend services, even if the immediate issue of public-sector workers’ rights is still at the center.
But if a belligerent attack on public-sector workers is the explanation, why isn’t John Kasich getting the Scott Walker treatment? Today’s union-led gathering in Columbus, Ohio, did have an affect at the capitol, but was much smaller than what Wisconsin was able to pull off: 1,800 people by some reports, or maybe 2,000, and they all had to face off against the teabaggers. And Columbus, like Madison, also has a large state university. OSU is no UW-Madison, but still . . .
Some may put the Wisconsin successes down to the relaxed atmosphere of Madison itself. There is something to this. Over the years I’ve talked to people who attended demonstrations in Madison after having been activists in other parts of the country, and they bewilder the Madisonians by expressing shock at protest tactics that would get people arrested just about anywhere else; in Madison, though, you will see police blocking traffic to let unpermitted marches to pass through the streets. But let’s be clear: these are cosmetic differences, and they don’t explain anything. Our job is to reproduce the successes of Wisconsin everywhere else, in our own conditions.
So I would submit that plenty of people are watching to see if this thing actually succeeds. Then, and only then, will it look like a viable option elsewhere in the country. So Wisconsin has ended up in the vanguard, to which the rest of us say: congratulations, and now you still have a big job to do.
We should note another aspect of all of this that is impossible to deny: the Wisconsin resistance has been inspired by the militant spirit of the Arab revolt. It’s not just a few leftist students from UW-Madison carrying signs; you have Democratic state senators making the comparison, saying of Walker’s attacks: “The story around the world is the rush to democracy. The story in Wisconsin is the end of the democratic process.”
This kind of thing is enough to make any old proletarian internationalist all dewy-eyed, and in a real rather than a sentimental way. Year after year we could bang our heads against the wall for international solidarity: end US military aid to Colombia; allow Aristide to return to Haiti; end US military aid to Israel and Egypt; and so on. Our efforts were worthy, but we could get nowhere until now because of the iron law — true no matter how much we fight to change it — that people only begin to see the need for international solidarity when they see how the liberation of others is bound up with theirs. The democratic enthusiasm accompanying the budding revolutions in the Arab countries is so infectious that you didn’t even need to watch Al-Jazeera: the plain truth of it all began to come through even on CNN, or even on the snippets of news that most people watch.
Most dazzling of all, after 10 years of the most vile racial demonization of Arabs and Muslims in the United States — including, lest we forget, an especially ugly episode of national prominence at so-called “Ground Zero” just last summer, as the Republicans prepared for the fall elections — the ordinary people of Egypt were able to touch something among the ordinary people of the United States. It is why Glenn Beck’s racist insanity has lately become even more shrill than usual, as his tribe of Klan-like followers declines in number: democratic revolutions in the Arab world and the broader Middle East do not only mean trouble for US imperialist interests there. They really do present the threat of a good example right here in the United States, as millions of people start to question the myth that “we” are exemplars of freedom for the rest of the world, and start to realize that in fact we are laggards with a lot to learn from freedom fighters elsewhere.
Tough as our own struggles are — and most of them are still very much uphill — it is hard to avoid the feeling, unthinkable as recently as a month ago, that we live in a time of revolutionary inspiration. In fact I am reminded of the words of one of the most overrated poets in the English language: William Wordsworth, whose reputation has unfairly overshadowed a more talented contemporary because his rival was a revolutionary and Wordsworth a sycophant. Ironically enough, Wordsworth is relevant in a discussion of public budgets, because in his snarling dotage (which lasted a long time), he lost some money on some Pennsylvania bonds after the Panic of 1837, and in response he actually wrote a poem — an extremely bad one — denouncing Pennsylvania for not paying off coupon-clippers like himself. But even Wordsworth could look back on his own brief period of revolutionary optimism, inspired by that revolution that is still the greatest of them all: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!”
We shouldn’t get carried away, of course. We are still in a world of trouble. Worthy as the Wisconsin resistance is, it is still a defensive struggle, and the eventual compromise solution will still look pretty bad unless the mass activity takes some truly unusual large-scale turn. And while the demonstrations in Wisconsin are winning sympathy from many residents of the state, getting to the overwhelming majority needed to stop budget cuts will still require a clear answer to the confusion many people have about public-sector workers who have decent benefits while so many tax-paying workers do not. Therefore, I think that my call for aggressive make-the-rich pay initiatives is still a valid one, for Wisconsin and everywhere else.
This is not policy wonkery. I think that it is good to have some concrete tax proposals, but also to raise the issue generally: throw a spotlight on some of the worst bad actors, corporations that get through tax loopholes, wealthy individuals who pay the same sales taxes as poor people — whatever works. We should begin to go on the offensive everywhere with the message that there is no real budget crisis, only an unwillingness of the rich to contribute what they ought to contribute.
We should not shy away from militant support of proposals that are already on the table, either. In Minnesota, Democratic Governor Mark Dayton wants to raise income taxes on the wealthiest taxpayers; his assistant commissioner of revenue uses the same kinds of arguments about the regressiveness of state and local taxes that were in the ITEP report I cited in my post two weeks ago. If the governor’s proposals were to pass, the tax increases would hit only the wealthiest 5.5% of taxpayers, and would mean that all taxpayers would contribute roughly the same proportion of their income — a flat tax structure, not a progressive one, though at least not a regressive one either. Mild as this is, and in spite of the fact that Dayton is also proposing severe spending cuts, his initiative deserves mass support on its merits, and it will need it if it is to have any prayer of passing the Republican legislature.
The preponderance of state budget proposals out there now remains awful and is getting worse as each governor lays out plans. In Michican, Republican Governor Rick Snyder proposes changes to business taxes that would actually raise $1 billion less in revenue, even as he hints at a new $900 million tax on pensions (!) and calls for the end of the state earned-income tax credit.
The struggle continues. And while Scott Walker has led the way in anti-people aggression, Wisconsin’s workers have led the way in militant resistance. And it is in this latter sense that we should fight to make two, three, many Wisconsins.
tellnolies said
I got the following report off of facebook. I think it captures some of what makes this exciting for people.
Miles Ahead said
Felix:
Am writing this on the fly, but the above boggles my mind…but I want to point out, that with all the talk about budget cuts (pay cuts, benefit cuts, etc.)–first of all, if you read or listen to any reliable sources, Wisconsin is a lot more secure financially than many other states and the “budget cuts” and bogus “deficit” is really a cover for out and out smashing the unions and “organized labor” the rank and file–and the public sector unions have been some of the most militant even in this day and age. One example is they have consistently stood with students in their fight against tuition hikes, etc.
And what is wrong with their fight?
There is another “theory” being put forward, that Wisconsin (and subsequently Fla., Iowa, Ohio, etc.) is a ploy by the Republicans to also try and sap any financial support for Dems. in 2012, since three of the public service unions were the biggest institutional contributors to the Dems., while mega corporations (with a nod from the friggin’ Supreme Court)and “institutions” pour kazillions into the Repub. and T Party campaigns. (I don’t have time to go into all this now…but if you want to hear some facts check out Rachel Maddow.)
As far as the budget goes…the pub. sector unions have already said they will pay more from their pay checks for healthcare, pension and taxes…but the governor said a flat out no.
Today the ranks swelled to 45,000 (in Madison alone), and tomorrow there is an expected 250,000. And the Tea Party is supposed to demonstrate tomorrow…in support of the governor. People are being polarized…and exposed….and in some ways so is capitalism.
While I have heard “this is class warfare” several times, there are 14 Wisconsin Dems. who have left Wisconsin to try and stop the governor to get a vote on his union busting bill. These Dems. are being applauded…and what I think is likely to happen is that somehow these 14 (if they “stay strong”) will circuitously be summed up as the “heroes.” As if these 14 would have done this action had there not been thousands demonstrating, marching and sitting in.
tellnolies said
Miles,
I am unsure of what you are arguing here. Is it that because there is this dimension of electoral calculation (that gutting public sector unions will cripple the Democratic Party’s electoral operations) that this ISN’T really class warfare?
Perhaps I’m misreading you, but since there has been so much opposition here to the proposition that the budget fights are a key front in the class struggle, I feel compelled to ask.
The motivations behind these attacks are undoubtedly multiple: to cut social spending, to weaken organized labor in its last stronghold, to weaken the Dems. Different aspects are probably more and less important to different fractions within the alliance of forces supporting these attacks.
And yes that means that the Dems will, via the unions and non-profits, be all over these fights like white on rice, even in states where Dem governors are spearheading the attacks. The question for revs as I see it is whether we concede that ground to them or whether we think this is a fight in which sections of the people are likely to be radicalized and where we therefore intend to fight for our ideas.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
@Miles Ahead: There seems to be a bit of a recurring problem on Kasama with commenters not actually reading what I wrote. The paragraph that you quote is in reference to any earlier article of mine on public budget fights, which I wrote just before the Wisconsin struggle escalated to a new level. In that earlier article, I said that the attack on public services (and the workers who perform public services) makes headway among much of the working class because in their lived experience they actually do pay more in taxes than they ought to be paying, because state and local tax regimes are so regressive.
Of course Walker is lying even about the extent of the state budget gap in Wisconsin. The point is that in Wisconsin or anywhere else, we need to build a majority to defend public services from attack, and we do it by making the demand that the rich pay for the crisis they created, rather than cutting services for the people.
I stand by my argument for this strategy nationally. I also think it’s a pretty detailed and sophisticated argument, and whatever you think of it, I would prefer that you actually read what I originally wrote, since I’d rather not have to repeat myself here. Thanks.
Carl Davidson said
Of course we have to be in the thick of this. And our task are to build organization, at every level, in the thick of fanning the flames. Don’t worry about Dems coming in as allies, however indirect or wavering. Make the most of it, but mainly put out your own views, your own platform, not only to unite a progressive majority–’Kill the Bill!–but also to unite a militant minority, ‘Make the Banksters Pay! ‘Jobs, Not War, Out Now! Put the Working Class in Power!
Today Pelosi called for solidarity with the workers and students in Wisconsin. The point is not ‘being fooled’ by Pelosi, et al., but to both explain them and make use of the fissures as best as we can.
The upper crust of US capitalism is divided among Neoliberals, Proto-fascists and Keynesians. There are more nuances, but that’s roughly it. At the moment, the main danger is the growing neoliberal alliance with the protofascists, including the GOP and much, but not all, of Team Obama.
The Keynesians–like Krugman, Galthbraith, Stiglitz, and in this case, Pelosi–are out in the cold. They are thus potential allies vs neoliberalism and the Tea Party right. Our task is to be Marxists, and more widely, progressives. But we have allies that are in the Keynesian camp, including much of the union leadership.
Our task is not to become Keynesians ourselves or even tail them, but to educate everyone, including ourselves, as to what’s really going on across the board, from a Marxist view–at least that’s the task of those of us who consider ourselves Marxists. I won’t speak for other progressives who consider themselves something else.
It’s called carrying out the task of revolutionary education in the heat of class struggle.It’s indispensable to building both a socialist movement, revolutionary organization and a counter-hegemonic bloc that can contend for power.
Gregory A. Butler said
A couple of things, from a seasoned labor activist (18+ years as a dissident in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, 13 of those as a shop steward).
Civil service workers represent the majority of union members in America today, thanks to 30 years of retreat and surrender by private sector unions that have allowed much of manufacturing, trucking and construction to be deunionized pretty much without a fight.
Now, the unionbusters are coming after the public sector unions and, it seems, the leaders of those labor organizations have decided to make a stand in Wisconsin. That kind of makes sense – Wisconsin is the cradle of civil service unionism (America’s largest public sector union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees [AFSCME] was founded right there in Madison in 1932) and the first state to give public sector workers the right to collective bargaining (1958).
Wisconsin is also a very liberal state with a long history of public sector unionism.
Also, Wisconsin is a very White state. Outside of the large Black and Latino neighborhoods in Milwaukee, and the few pockets of Mexican and Laotian Hmong immigrants in some of the second tier cities, the state is overwhelmingly Caucasian. This is very different than many other states, where the civil service workforce is largely workers of color.
This is relevant because, in a state like New Jersey, when Governor Christie talks about cutting civil service wages and benefits, he’s basically telling White taxpayers that he’s going to put “those people” in “their place” by taking away their relatively high wages and good benefits. Governor Walker can’t use those racial codewords in Wisconsin, because the state workforce looks just like the suburban taxpayers, so racial resentment is not a factor.
In a lot of ways, the Wisconsin protests, as inspiring as they are, are also a revolt of the downwardly mobile labor aristocracy.
The core of the rally have been the teachers, reinforced by police and firefighters. Those three civil service titles are the most privileged aristocratic section of the civil service workforce, with wages and benefits far better than the clerks and laborers who make up the rest of the public sector labor force.
However, like all aristocratic workers, their privileged status is always tenuous and temporary under capitalism. A generation ago, over the road teamsters and workers in construction, the auto industry and the steel mills had a similar status – today, those workers have been pushed far down the economic ladder, in many cases (particularly in construction and trucking) by outright deunionization, in other cases by retreat and surrender by the unions.
The imminent loss of those privileges is what those cops, firefighters and teachers are fighting.
It’s not an accident that their picket signs talk about “saving the middle class” – these privileged workers are fighting to preserve their middle class status and avoid being pushed back down into the general ranks of the working class, where wages have been falling for 40 years and pensions and benefits are unknown.
That doesn’t mean that these protests are reactionary at all – it’s always good to see workers fighting back, and generally privileged workers are more in a position to resist (for one thing they’re more likely to be unionized) and privileged workers have something to lose so they have more cause to fight than the rest of the class.
The problem is, the fact that privileged workers have something to lose is also a double edged sword.
Remember, the last big strike by a relatively privileged group of civil service workers (the New York City Transit strike of 2005) was broken by the threat of very high individual fines – that’s a big threat to workers who have tens of thosuands of dollars in IRAs and 401(k)s and who own $ 500,000 houses (and that’s a typical home price in the working class neighborhoods of NYC and it’s suburbs) -they have just enough money that those fines are collectable, at the cost of confiscating their life savings.
For this to be a winning struggle, I think we have to take this fight to the point of production.
That is, the best way to counter this attack on public sector workers is to re unionize the private sector workers – particularly the non union workforce in the industrial core of the economy (construction, trucking, factories, the building service industry)
Those workers tend to be disproportionately Latino immigrant (and to a lesser extent African American) and they are just poor enough that the threat of fines for an illegal strike are pretty much meaningless (hey, if you live in a rented room in somebody else’s apartment and you don’t have a bank account, what exactly is the court going to seize if you don’t pay the fine?)
Also, those workers are at the strategic core of the economy – if they strike, the whole economy shuts down.
That kind of social power in motion can (and has) toppled governments.
Miles Ahead said
moderators…how come my comments 6 & 7 (which is basically a repeat) been awaiting moderation for hours?
Miles Ahead said
Hopefully 3′s a charm…and if not, i give up. Here’s what I have been trying to say for hours–
If nothing else, my comment reveals the pitfalls of reacting to one or two sentences in an entire post, and more so writing something “on the fly.” And even now, that I’m not on the fly, am still flying at a low radar, and probably haven’t given this post (and what Felix and others said before) its just desserts.
However, I still maintain, even if superficially, that the basic thrust of some of this discussion is reformist.
My initial reaction is to the following, with my emphasis—I suppose, taking things out of context:
Felix–
A couple of things: re budget cuts…these cuts have been happening for approximately two years now, an example– state employees, or staff at various state universities and colleges, in the form of furloughs, forced retirement, freeze on hiring, unpaid forced overtime, $$ hikes in bennies, i.e. healthcare, etc. And students have also been feeling the pinch in terms of tuition hikes, cost of living, slam dunking scholarships, etc. Many of these employees are unionized, but there has been solidarity between union, non-union and students. Unfortunately the reaction has been a demo here and there, and not very long lasting.
(BTW and on the other hand, the House of Representatives—what a misnomer—just passed a bill that would slash $60 billion in “government spending”—and guess who is being targeted…Planned Parenthood for one.)
If you listen to many of the “Wisconsinites” or “ists” (oh no, a new “ite” or “ist”) demonstrating and their demands, it is not over more taxes, or even service cuts, it’s about union busting, their right to organize, and basic rights of the working class, en masse.
Furthermore, those thousands on the streets of Wisconsin (including high school students, families, etc.), the majority are not “resenting”, o contrario, the public sector workers, but are united with them. Some may not be seeing this as “class warfare” but the seeds have been planted to even see this “budget crisis” as class against class. And why, now, are the reactionaries going after U.S. labor and one of their leverages, i.e. unions with such a vengeance? And P.S. do people really think most people are mystified or hoodwinked when it comes to taxes???
In the “most democratic and free societies” (if not “the most” according to U.S. rulers) why the vitriolic attack and trashing of some basic extremely hard fought for rights—for starters the right to organize? Meanwhile, state troopers were sent out to find the 14 Dems. MIA, and governor Walker “hinted” that the National Guard would be called in to “fill the void.” Hmmm…this isn’t Bahrain, but for some, there are beginning to be some growing similarities. Another potential—more demystification of “bourgeois democracy”—U.S. style.
There are inherent limitations to the Wisconsin struggle…especially if we view it as strictly an economic one—and certainly we are limiting the possibilities for something more sweeping if we “put the demand to make the rich pay at front and center.” That pie in the sky “demand” ain’t never gonna happen under capitalism… and that notion ain’t nothin’ new.
And so what if the rich pay some portion of their astounding profits to “fix” the budget crisis? Is that gonna radically rupture the system? I think not. In fact, as revolutionary communists, if we make that demand front and center, that will only help to sustain the system, at least temporarily.
As part of the mix,.—in reaction to Rush L. (part of his conspiracy b.s.) who is saying that these people in Wisconsin, and in particular, public workers, are freeloaders and parasites, outside agitators, — contrary to Rush, there is the spin from liberal Dems that these workers and demonstrators are “true Amerikkkans” and the “real” patriots. Oh swell…
And then a catalyst…Egypt!. (Who woulda thunk?)
So while the bourgeoisie is working overtime to sum things up for the U.S. w.c. and attempt to co-opt the potentially even more volatile Wisonsin (and other state) battle—, there are those within the thousands demonstrating, who see links and ties between the struggle in Egypt to their own, and a new (class and international) kinship is developing. This is super significant!
Whether or not the people in Wisconsin are victorious or defeated in the immediate sense, there is a ripening sense and new awakening (most especially among the advanced) to see things more globally, both as part of a global economy and more so as part of an international class of the oppressed and exploited. With some, certainly not all, will people be looking at immigrants and the undocumented a little differently? Is there not the potential for people to get a better understanding of how the imperialists warp whole economies in places like Mexico, and try and pit worker against worker, for their own interests?
I know that’s a tall order in terms of political consciousness, but these events can provide fertile ground for a larger battle in the ideological and political spheres.
To focus on even budget cuts, or certainly U.S. taxes, IMO (obviously) is not an advanced position, and even through the backdoor, by trying to water things down in terms of some false schism between public and private sector workers, to make things more palpable, is reformist. As to the latter, already that schism if it ever really existed, is being pushed aside. A schism, BTW, fostered and fomented by the bourgeoisie.
TNL:
I agree that there is the potential for sections of the people to be more radicalized…but am not sure that I would put it like “where we therefore intend to fight for our ideas.”
I think this is, in large part, a matter of mass line, but to me mass line DOES NOT mean lowering the bar, or appealing to the lowest common denominator (not that TNL was implying that). It also means relying on (and working with) the advanced, even in the struggle in Wisconsin, as they inevitably do battle within their own ranks.
As far as “us” conceding ground to “them,” i.e. the Dems., hell no…but at the same time, sure we are bound to see most Dems. trying to gain as much ground as they possibly can. Seems to me, a big part of their contradictions and propaganda is to pose as being for “the little guy” the “ordinary U.S. citizen.” (Saying “Ordinary” always infuriates me.) But they’re getting some help from the likes of Sarah P., and other Right-wing fanatics…who’s now saying the workers in Wisconsin have to be prepared to make more sacrifices and stop demonstrating.
Let’s face it—the imperialists/capitalists have a well-oiled machine. What is up to us is to look for, act on, expose and analyze and unite with people in potentially pivotal struggles, unite most especially with the advanced, when those cracks and fissures in their machinery arise. And to help (!) and be part of turning those (“our”) ideas into a material force.
tellnolies said
Miles,
I’m still having problems following your arguments. Maybe its just me. I’ll keep trying. The questions we are discussing here, as I see it, are:
First, whether or not budget battles are a key front in the class struggle in the US and therefore an area where communist revolutionaries should be throwing in. Several people here have argued that they aren’t and therefore we shouldn’t and that rather the logic of these fights is INHERENTLY reformist and therefore a dead end.
and Second, if this is an area where we should be throwing in, on what basis should we be doing so. This of course involves a whole set of other questions about methodology but also around the content of demands and slogans. And here we are discussing the question of waging an ideological fight around the slogan “Tax the Rich.” You seem to be arguing, correct me if I’m wrong, that because the system can afford to raise taxes on the rich that this is a slogan revs should not be promoting.
I disagree. While it is certainly the case that taxes could be raised on the rich without crippling capitalism we really need to understand the whole neo-liberal offensive including the radical shifting of the tax burden over the past 30 years in relationship to a system-wide decline in the rate of profit and the corresponding fiscal crisis of the state. So while the present tax code can be modified the system really can not afford to return to Keynesian days of old. (Which is why Carl’s talk about Obama and Pelosi being Neo-Keynesians is self-deceiving rubbish, but I digress.) In such a context, the demand to “Tax the Rich,” and the prospect of it actually happening in anything more than a token manner is, I think, more threatening not just to individual rich people but to the rule of capital than you might suppose.
In Wisconsin already AFSCME leadership is saying that they are basically willing to eat the cuts in Walker’s bill and that this is only a fight over collective bargaining rights. This sell-out concession before the first round of the fight is finished is an expression of the real fragility of capital’s position and the real fear they feel in the face of rising demands globally.
There is a widespread view among liberals that the consensus view in the ruling class (and one embraced by Obama) that what is needed now is not stimulus but deficit reduction is sitmply irrational. But its not. It is a politically astute recognition that even modest concessions to working class demands could very quickly ignite enlarged struggles that will threaten the whole system.
All that said, I prefer the more ambiguous and ominous slogan “Make the Rich Pay.”
In either event, neither of these slogans is a “lowest common denominator” position, but rather will be rejected by most leading Dems and union heads. They represent rather a distillation of the more advanced thinking among the masses who are chafing under the leadership of the Trumkas, Jacksons and Pelosis. Along with the internationalist sentiments that seek to link these battles up with the revolutions in the Arab world they embody an application of the mass line AT THIS MOMENT. If they gain traction and larger sections of the Dem and labor leadership are compelled to play catch up and embrace them that would, in my view, be a good thing and an opportunity to identify even more advanced ideas among the masses. This is how I understand the mass line, but I’d be interested in your take on what slogans you think a proper application of the mass line would raise.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
I differ with Carl’s analysis that “Kill the bill” is a progressive-majority demand and “Make the rich pay” (in whatever way it gets formulated concretely) unites the militant minority. My contention is that the demand to make the rich pay is what can unite more people with us, because it pushes back against the right’s argument that public-sector workers want more money from taxpayers who can’t afford it.
The people in the streets are the militant minority. They happen to be a pleasantly-surprising, much-larger minority than I would have expected a week ago (that was the point of my references in this article to stuff I said in the earlier article: self-criticism). But they are still a minority — all social movements are, to be sure, but social movements do eventually need to make a broad-based appeal to the uninvolved.
We should not confuse the attitude of the people in the streets with the sentiments of the broader population, including the working-class population outside of the public sector. Miles Ahead correctly observes that for the people in the streets demonstrating, “it is not over more taxes, or even service cuts, it’s about union busting, their right to organize, and basic rights of the working class, en masse.” I agree with this, but I see it as a shortcoming, or at least a potential weakness. I do not intend to give credence to Walker’s and the Republicans’ claim that they have the “silent majority.” I said that in my first article I underestimated the extent to which public-sector workers are as embedded in the working class as any of its other segments, and these demonstrations are going to be pulling or uninvolved elements of the class into sympathy with the demonstrators, which is all to the good. But the situation is still very precarious. Somehow this bill is going to have to be stopped, and that means there is a need to reach more people in the broad hinterland.
Finding ways to demonstrate that these public-sector workers are fighting for everyone’s future — rather than their own relative privileges as the right would claim — is going to be essential for success. (I’m not interested in discussing whether my criteria for success are “reformist,” since the revolution is not on the table right now, and nothing we do at the moment will put it there for the foreseeable future.) The demand that the rich should pay, rather than public sector workers or the people who depend on their services, is a unifying demand and an outward-looking one rather than a demand intended solely to fire up the already-active.
You don’t have to be a publicly-identified revolutionary to raise the demand, either. An e-mail from Mary Kay Henry today said: “While the collective bargaining rights of our members are at stake, it’s important to note that the conversation taking place is about more than that alone. When Scott Walker manufactured this crisis by giving tax cuts to corporations and his special interest friends last month, it escalated a state legislative debate into a struggle for economic justice with large corporations not paying their fair share to get Americans back to work.”
I think you have to talk this way to really reach people who are not going to get up in arms about collective-bargaining rights precisely because they have no experience of collective bargaining because of the disappearance of unions in the private sector. It also happens to be a principled way to talk about the issues, even if it doesn’t satisfy our r-r-r-revolutionary friends.
Nat W. said
@TNL,
This is a question more than a critique. Does exercising the mass line taking up the slogans that reflect distillation of the advanced thinking of people or does it mean understanding those sentiments and developing a language that connects those sentiments to the objectives of our broader revolutionary goals?
It is clear to me that revolutionaries should be involved in this struggle and that this struggle can have the potential to radicalize sections of the population in the upcoming period. I appreciate your intervention into this discussion and your criticism of those who doubted the potential significance of this battle around budgets on the basis seemingly of their perceived purely economic nature. Hopefully events are transforming us all.
Though I wonder, and this is a question about fusing with those who become radicalized and the idea of mutual transformation; how much should we take up this slogan of “tax the rich” as against the notion of taking that sentiment to speak to the antagonistic relations between rulers and ruled and to expose the capitulations of the dems and the union leaders and to possibly provoke more independent forms of organization that begin to up the level of resistance and consciousness.
In other words, many of us have talked about the necessity to wrench away sections of the base of the democratic party. Do we have an opportunity to that here? If we do, do we do this through repeating the more advanced ideas that emerge or by embracing those ideas through communist analysis and provoking independent action in the near future and as the struggle moves forward?
Carl Davidson said
I find some of the comments here rather strange. It’s as if some other, more alien, working class showed up other than the one embedded in the thinking of some.
Politically speaking, the workers and students here represent the progressive majority not because of their numbers, but because of their political range. If you took a survey, I’d bet only a handful voted Green, most by far are Democratic votes, and there’s even a few GOP voters among them, or people with roughly the same range of views that didn’t bother to vote. They are angry because, under stressful economic conditions, this GOP/Tea Party governor displayed arrogance, demanding not only concessions, but that they give up their union rights, that they had no rights he was bound to respect, after millions had just been given away in tax cuts to business.
That’s why ‘Kill the Bill’ could not only unite this crowd, but also a majority of Wisconsin votes. It says, in substance, repudiate the GOP-Tea Party right. Find another way.
As for the militant minority, I was referring to all those who want a basic change in the system–Marxists, Greens, and generally people fed up with both parties. To unite them, and project a slogan with a wider agitational impact, is why I suggested, ‘Put the working class in power’ and the point about ending the wars. There’s a narrow majority in the country for ending the war in Afghanistan, depending on how it’s framed, but we can’t assume it was a demand that would unite everyone there–which is why it could be put forward anyway, but by a militant minority. There’s every reason to bring more advanced demands to mass events like these, even if they are no the basis of unity, but a basis of discussion to move things forward.
The best tax reform demands to fight the crisis lie beyond Wisconsin–a financial transaction tax, removing the $106K cap on FICA, to name just two of the best. Both of these are part of the AFL-CIO program and can unite a majority, if fought for. But these have to be done at the federal level. I don’t know enough about the state’s tax structure to advocate a specific one for the state.
Those of us working in the unions know very well that frustration has been building, especially among the more progressive-mind and politically active, such s those who go door-to-door in election campaigns. they are ready for ‘street heat’ to light a fire under those claiming to be close to them and to deliver a blow to those who don’t.
What’s happening is that these layers of the masses are now moving to a higher and more active level of combat, one that opens the doors to mass radicalization. If we deploy appropriate tactics with a good strategy, we can not only fan the flames to spread it, but we can ‘cast the net and draw it in,’ to build up our strength in our socialist organizations beyond the ‘onesies-twosies’ level we have been operating at for some time. Indeed, if you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy (one of my favorite quips from Alvin Toffler) but if you have one, seize the time! Get involved even if you don’t, and use it as a big classroom to test your ideas learn apart from the struggle itself, and learn something new.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
Carl Davidson writes:
“The best tax reform demands to fight the crisis lie beyond Wisconsin–a financial transaction tax, removing the $106K cap on FICA, to name just two of the best. Both of these are part of the AFL-CIO program and can unite a majority, if fought for. But these have to be done at the federal level. I don’t know enough about the state’s tax structure to advocate a specific one for the state.”
I’m not an expert in Wisconsin taxes, either, but one thing I do know is that they allow an income tax deduction for capital gains of 30 percent. The deduction was 60 percent just two years ago, and they reduced it to 30, so we could say that they should eliminate it altogether. And the state should repeal the corporate tax breaks that Walker enacted as soon as he took office.
Walker also canceled a high-speed rail project that had significant Federal funding and would have created a lot of jobs; he did so on the grounds that the state was too “broke” to do the operating funds, even as he did the corporate tax breaks that cost the state millions. There is a lot to be said here about the very role of the public sector in job creation, and a lot of concrete demands around which you can unite a majority of people.
@Carl: I get what you’re saying about the militant minority; I see you are trying to make the case to the ultralefts here that they should actually do something. Your patience is saintlike.
tellnolies said
Nat asks:
This is an excellent question that does not, I think, have a simple answer, unless you think “both” is a simple answer.
The process of distilling advanced ideas is not, unlike that of distilling say moonshine, a primarily technical problem. The identification of certain ideas as “advanced” involves a political judgement based on an already existing, presumably revolutionary, analysis of the world on the part of the revolutionary minority that is attempting to carry out the mass line. But the mass line can not simply be a process of finding the right language to connect those sentiments with a preexisting analysis. It must, I think, involve a genuine process of mutual transformation in which not only are the masses “won over” to a progressively more radical understanding, but in which the revolutionary minority’s own understanding is transformed through their participation in the struggles of the masses to produce fusion into a new political subject, what Mike has called “a revolutionary people.”
Mao developed his theory of the mass line in the context of a unfolding revolutionary situation in China and consequently there are certain assumptions in it about the at least implicitly revolutionary content of the most advanced thinking among the masses are more difficult to support in the present context of the United States. The slogan “Tax the Rich” distills what I read, and this is art not science, as the more advanced thinking among the masses likely to be drawn into these budget fights (which are different masses than are likely to be drawn into say a fight for immigrant rights or against police brutality). It is not content-wise a “revolutionary demand” in the way that Carl’s proposed “put the workers in power” is. Indeed we should expect some Dems to run for office in 2012 on precisely a call to “Tax the Rich” if it takes off as a slogan in these fights. But it does represent a drawing of class lines that has been almost entirely absent from the political discourse in the US and that is, I think, a minimal precondition for any deeper radicalization. Raising “Put the workers in power” I think, and I’d be happy to be shown wrong, is not IN THIS MOMENT going to move the center of debate at a moment when it can actually be moved. It might attract a new recruit or two to the little group that advances it, which in some circumstances would be reason enough to raise it, but there is, I think, potential to change the terrain.
This may seem contradictory, but I think it makes sense if we take the notion of mutual transformation seriously as a process with many different moments and that some offer opportunities to strengthen revolutionary cores while others offer opportunities to move masses incrementally closer to those cores and that we need to be good at doing both and modulating between them.
Aunt Vic Keller said
With all due respect to Mr. Davidson’s seniority and loyalty to the cause, this line of thinking is severely flawed for multiple reasons.
The categories Mr. Davidson gives are unscientific and do not necessarily reflect real contradictions between political forces in the US ruling class.
It is not true that Keynesians are more desirable exploiters, or that “neo-liberals” are more akin to fascists. If anything fascism is more Keynesian, but Mr. Davidson is trying to make an emotional appeal to fascism. (Since calling conservative elements of the US ruling class as “fascist” is alarmist and distracts from the real fascist enemy mobilizing itself among the white working class, the fact that US ruling class are democratic liberals is bad enough since they are still exploiting the masses, no fundamentally than any fascist regime)
It is also not our need to ally with factions of our exploiters, include the trade middle-management who are complacent in the butchery of our bodies at the hands of the capital economy, or, for that matter, “Keynesians” who have a better plan for the stability of the capitalist regime. (If Keynesianism is such a more desirable model, why is it the model most quickly adopted by reactionaries in times of political crisis?) This is class-collaboration that has failed us time and time again.
The Democrats are very self-interested “allies”, they’re most worried about getting strangled at the hands of the working-class. We shouldn’t worry about them or take their deceitful comments of “solidarity” seriously, we should only laugh at them on the run from their class brethren.
Nat W. said
TNL says:
“This may seem contradictory, but I think it makes sense if we take the notion of mutual transformation seriously as a process with many different moments and that some offer opportunities to strengthen revolutionary cores while others offer opportunities to move masses incrementally closer to those cores and that we need to be good at doing both and modulating between them.”
This raises a couple of more questions for me. One, are the moments so seperated that in one moment there is the opportunity to strengthen rev cores while in another we have the opportunity to move masses closer to that core? Shouldn’t we be attempting to do both in every moment, even while acknowledging the uneveness of particular moments and the opportunities that are presented?
Let me explain the thinking your response provoked in me. I think it is right that we can’t connect advanced sentiments with a prexisting analysis, if that was the case where is our room for transformation. Contrary to that I think we must enter the struggle side by side with the masses and form a communist analysis based on the particularities of the struggle and the larger political and social context. Forming this analysis based on actually developing struggle is a part of our transformation as revolutionaries but is not all that is wrapped up in our transformation.
I also think that there is not just the matter of recognizing the distillations of the most advanced sentiments of the masses, but also seeking out the nodules of the advanced themselves as minority groups within the larger struggle. Another question, how possible is it to move masses closer to a core that hardly exists? And in that case is there not the need to attempt to modulate between both oppurtunities within the same developing moment?
So I think there is the need to enter the struggle, learn from both the advanced sentiments in general but also seek out the most advanced subjects and develop our analysis based on the concrete nature of the way the struggle is developing also taking into account the interventions of the most advanced nodules and soon the revolutionaries. In this way I think we talk about mutual transformation between the advanced and the revolutionaries and also how to modulate between the kinds of opportunities that particular moments open up.
Again just some initial thoughts provoked by your response, and I would be eager to hear yourz and other thoughts on this.
carldavidson said
AVK, if you don’t think my descriptions of the basic policy differences in the ruling class–neoliberal, Keynesian, proto-fascist–are accurate, tell us which ones you think would be more accurate. Or if you think these things simply don’t matter, tell us that and explain why.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ # 13 Felix Dzerzhinsky – On that railroad construction project thing, actually, it wouldn’t create a whole lot of jobs at all, relative to the huge amount of money to be spent on the project ($ 810 million dollars, for 80 miles of railroad track from Milwaukee to Madison).
Technically speaking, the sector that we in the construction business call “heavy and highway construction” is highly automated and has been for many years, so they can build roads with as little labor as possible. It’s not like those old newsreels from the depression era, with a couple hundred laborers with picks and shovels digging out a right of way – think a half dozen big earth moving machines, each driven by only one operating engineer, with only one laborer to direct each machine. Heavy and highway construction was automated way back in the 1950′s when President Eisenhower ordered the construction of the Interstate and Defense Highway System, and the sector remans the most automated branch of the construction business.
On a job like this, the contractor would probably do the job with two crews – one starting out in Milwaukee, the other in Madison.
Laborwise, each crew would look something like this:
Senior Management/Administrative: 4 superintendents, 6 engineers, 2 surveyors, 1 secretary
Carpenters: 1 Carpenter foreman, 1 Carpenters Union working shop steward, 2 journeylevel carpenters, 1 apprentice
Operating Engineers: 12 operating engineers, 1 “master mechanic” (non working Operating Engineers Union shop steward), 1 “oiler” (apprentice operating engineer)
Cement Masons: 1 Cement Mason foreman, 1 apprentice
Ironworkers: 1 Ironworker foreman, 1 Ironworkers Union working shop steward, 8 journeylevel ironworkers, 2 apprentices
Electricians: 1 Electrician superintendent, 1 electrician foreman, 8 journeylevel electricians, 2 apprentices, 1 “expiditer” (Electricians Union-represented electrical equipment truck driver)
Laborers: 1 labor foreman, 1 Laborers Union working shop steward, 25 journeylevel laborers, 5 laborer apprentices, 2 “flag girls” (yes, that sexist term is the actual job title – they are women laborers who direct traffic around construction sites, paid at the lowest Laborers Union pay scale, 1st year laborer apprentice)
Since we’re talking about two crews here, the total number of jobs is 186, for a job that would probably take about 4 years, off and on (jobs like this are always stop-start operations, with frequent pauses for bad weather and materials delivery. If we add in the labor needed to build the passenger terminals at either end (about 100 workers on jobs that would probably last about a year each) we’re talking about only 300 jobs.
All that for a “train to nowhere” a passenger rail service route covering a short route already adequately served by bus service in two metropolitan areas where virtually the entire adult population have drivers licenses and own cars.
That’s not even getting into the racial and gender politics of who gets those jobs.
The great bulk of those 300 workers (like 98%) will be men. Construction contractors in this country have a strong bias against having women on their jobsites.
In part this comes from a medieval “ideology of craftsmanship” worldview which holds that only men are supposed to do skilled trades work and the very idea of having a qualified woman doing skilled construction work goes against the natural patriarchal order of the universe (the more skilled and qualified the woman is, the more it defies that phalocentric natural order of things).
Also, there’s a money issue – if you have an all male crew, especially if they are working outside, a contractor can get away with not bothering to rent portable toilets (a considerable cost savings over the life of a long job). Male construction workers have been socialized – by both contractors and the unions – to think that it’s unmasculine to complain about bad working conditions, so men on an outdoor jobsite without toilets will simply relive themselves in the bushes or behind a truck. Women workers, on the other hand, will complain, they will leave the site to drive to a gas station or a fast food joint with a restroom (if they do that on the contractor’s time that costs money since they are still on the clock), they will complain to the union and they will sue.
So generally contractors avoid hiring women if they can possibly help it.
On a job like this, typically the only women would be the secretaries in the contractor’s jobsite trailer and the “flag girls” directing traffic.
Racewise, the crew starting out in Milwaukee would hire a handful of Blacks, Latinos and Hmongs from the union, maybe a half dozen at most. They might just hire two Black women to be “flag girls” and have the rest of the crew be all White men, if they thought they could get away with that. The crew running out of Madison would only hire White men out of the union hall, with two White women as “flag girls”. On both ends of the right of way, only about 1/3rd of the crew would come out of the hiring hall – the rest would be “company men” – union workers hired solely at the employer’s discression. Typically, all of them would be White men.
Politically, the bottom line is, the reason the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party support these boondoggle “jobs programs” is to create jobs for White male suburban “Tea Party Democrats”
As I’ve shown above at length, the bulk of these jobs would go to White males who are longtime members of construction unions. This is a group of people who are probably frequent voters (unions aggressively mobilize their members to vote in every election), are probably nominally registered Democrats, but who often vote Republican for reasons that, basically, are racial in nature.
These jobs programs are subsidies for what Hillary Clinton once called “hardworking Americans” – married White suburban males who are married with full time homemaker wives.
That’s why they are acceptable, no matter how wasteful they are, as opposed to jobs programs that benefit “the underclass”. That is, urban Black and Latino workers, in particular, urban Black and Latina women (who shouldn’t be working anyway – they should be married and dependent on their husbands, like “decent” women are supposed to).
So yeah, there’s a whole racist and reactionary subtext to these construction jobs programs, which is why I oppose them, even though I myself am a member of a construction union (Carpenters local # 157, Manhattan & Bronx, New York).
If we’re going to use that $ 810 million for construction jobs at all, it should be to build housing for the inner city poor and impoverished rural communities (in Wisconsin’s case, that would mean building public housing in the Black, Latino and Hmong ghettoes of Milwaukee, and on the Indian Reservations in the northern part of the state.
Better yet, don’t use those funds for construction at all – spend that money to hire teachers, school aides, paraprofessionals, school libarians and day care center workers in inner city Milwaukee and on the reservations in the north. That would provide jobs for the most underserved group of unemployed workers (women of color) and provide badly needed services, and the possibility of a future, for poor children of color.
However, those funds should definitely not be wasted on providing a few labor aristocratic jobs building a rail line that nobody needs.
Governor Walker opposed this program for his own reasons (basically because the jobs in question are unionized) – but that doesn’t mean that we should support this project.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
@Gregory: I am familiar with racism in the construction trades, though you put some “meat on the bones” in your description of what goes on. That said, it’s hard to fight for equality in access to jobs if the jobs aren’t there in the first place. Not all the jobs created as a result of mass transit projects are construction jobs, either. Further, some of what you’re saying — that in Madison and Milwaukee, “virtually the entire adult population have drivers licenses and own cars” — assumes that there’s no value in having people take fewer car trips, or in generally taking steps to overcome our irrational (and ultimately unsustainable) automobile-centered way of life.
I agree that the money would be better spent on housing and/or schools, but that is a Federal fight, because transit capital funding is Federal money. The state angle is that the governor turned it down for anti-people reasons; Rick Scott in Florida has just done the same thing. You live in New York; do you also support Chris Christie in killing the commuter train under the Hudson?
I take it you differ with the WISPIRG study that the Milwaukee-to-Madison project would have created 13,000 jobs. I too tend to be skeptical of jobs-creation claims, but it is not as if WISPIRG is a corporate front organization.
carldavidson said
If you want to create jobs where they are most needed first, among inner city youth with few skills, Van Jones presented the solution years ago.
Start with an inner city agency or school or church that works with youth, then partner them with a home improvement firm in need of customers, then bring in union apprentice programs, then community colleges with career track classes, then a local credit union and a source of recovery money–that makes a ‘green jobs collaborative’ that can hire a thousand kids to begin winterizing public buildings at a living wage.
The entry level skill is using a caulking gun, but with the apprentice programs and community college courses, provided free, they can become more skilled in a variety of green energy construction and retrofitting tasks.
To make it really interesting, transform the collaborative over say, three years, into a worker-own green construction cooperative that can survive on its own, like Ohio Cooperative Solar in Cleveland, with the kids who make it through as the new worker-owners.
I wouldn’t spend a penny for new highways, only to repair some dangerous bridges. But I’d spend a lot on high-speed rail beds and modernizing and repairing locka and dams for green river transport.
Likewise, a fed program that would fund every county to set up its own county-owned wind farm, as has been done in Western Iowa, not only creates green jobs, it also lowers power rates to all county residents with money left over to fund the county public schools.
But the squeaky wheel gets the grease. You have to organize local coalitions with wide allies to fight for the money and required structural reforms. Otherwise, the usual suspects line up, the poor get pushed aside, and you have a ineffective jobs program, with a white top and a Black bottom.
rst2536 said
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
Tea Baggers preach the Constitution;
Obama blathers budget woes;
And both sides fancy their solution
Will prop big business status quos.
And so go after union workers,
By blasting us as (worth)less shirkers;
As if we wandered in despair,
While waiting for Obama’s care.
Check out Ohio and Wisconsin:
You didn’t see us act the mouse
As we fought baggers the in House
To force them out, and try ensconcin’
Democracy where it’s policed…
As Arabs did the Middle East.
POSTED BY BOB TANNER AT http://poemsonaffairsofstate.blogspot.com/
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Felix – Yes, I do support New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s cancelation of the railroad tunnel job. Just like the Wisconsin high speed rail job, and all of the rest of those high speed railroad jobs across the country, this was a very expensive jobs program for a couple hundred privileged suburban White male “Tea Party Democrats” and the money could have been spent far better elsewhere.
Passenger rail service died out for a reason – cars, busses and passenger aircraft are far faster and better ways to move people, and trucks are far better to move most freight. We shouldn’t waste public funds reviving the carcass of railroading – let the railroads survive in their natural niche, moving large amounts of bulk cargo along fixed routes.
As for the polution caused by cars, I think we need to aggressively move forward to the replacement of the entire American auto and truck fleet with hybrid vehicles, rather than social engineering schemes to make people take the train instead of driving. Mass transit only works well at transporting workers from high density urban neighborhoods to high density central business districts – other than that, cars are superior for personal transport, because they allow the user to travel when she wants where she wants without being tied to fixed transit routes and timetables. Modern day gasoline powered cars are exessively polluting, that needs to be resolved by the hybridization of the present motor fleet, rather than by the abolition of the private car.
Also, replacing the entire American motor fleet would create a hell of a lot of jobs for autoworkers – since half the US motor fleet is American made, about half of those jobs would be here. As for the rest – well, Japanese, Mexican, South Korean and German autoworkers gotta eat too!
As for those jobs numbers from WisPERG, they are pure fantasy – as I pointed out above, we’re only talking about 300 construction jobs here. As for the railroad, once in operation, we’re only talking about 100 jobs, many of which would be filled by AMTRAK workers transferring in from other areas (in particular Chicago, a major AMTRAK hub that is very close to Milwaukee).
Basically, we’re talking about 300 temporary and 100 permanent jobs – not much for $ 810 million.
@ Carl – I agree with you that it’s a good idea to use public funds to create jobs in residential construction in inner city areas.
However, I don’t agree with the weatherization program (no matter what Van Jones has to say about it).
First, I have to point out that the current Laborers Union sponsored “green jobs programs” for home weatherization jobs do NOT pay a living wage
As is typical for the construction unions, if a craft or subcraft is predominantly minority or women, the unions will make damned sure that the workers in question are paid at a lower than normal wage scale
That’s why they are using minority laborer apprentices for this work rather than hiring the many unemployed journeylevel laborers currently sitting on the Laborers Union out of work list.
If they used journeylevel laborers, the’d have to pay $ 30 an hour plus benefits, rather than the $ 12/hr plus benefits if they use apprentices.
And, like all inner city jobs programs based on hiring untrained youth, when the young women and men in the program get trained they get laid off and replaced with the next group of young kids who can be underpaid
I would support that inner city weatherization program if at least 90% of the participants were adult journeylevel workers getting paid full union scale (that is, the same pay scale the White men get on commerical jobs) – also, since caulking and insulating is actually carpenter work, not laborer work, they should be getting Carpenter scale (at journeylevel rates, that’s $ 46/hr plus benefits) not Laborer scale (even at the top laborer journeylevel rate only $ 25/hr).
I’m very uncomfortable with inner city jobs programs that focus on using youth of color as cheap labor, rather than paying adults of color the prevailing wages for the work they are performing (that is, the same pay scale that White men of similar skill would recieve).
Above all, the inner cities and the Indian Reservations need new low income public housing, built from the ground up or renovated by inner city adult workers of color, recieving the same wages White men get paid to build luxury housing. We do not need underpaid teenagers with caulking guns getting low paid temp jobs to do touch up work on dilapidated housing that needs to be completely renovated or replaced.
Radical-Eyes said
Just now catching up on this discussion, which–by the way–is reminding me of why I value this Kasama discussion site so much.(Not that I’d forgotten!)
After reading TNL’s lucid posts above, I am now planning to make a sign for the Boston solidarity rally (at the Statehouse, Tuesday, 4-6pm for those nearby) with (something like) the following slogan:
“From Egypt to Wisconsin: Make the Rich Pay”
To sharpen it up–as well as to accentuate the kleptocrat angle I may add “Thieving” before “Rich.”
If there is room on the sign, I may then add “for the crisis they made”
All told the long version would be: “From Egypt to Wisconsin: Make the Thieving Rich Pay for the crisis they made.”
A More chantable verson: “From Egypt to the USA: Make the Rich Pay.”
Radical-Eyes said
This is better actually:
“From Egypt to the USA:
Make the Filthy Rich Pay”
rst2536 said
Radical-Eyes,
Your first line is great: it both says something and scans. May I suggest for the second line: Let’s force the dirt bag rich to pay. I say this because “filthy” is a cliche and because the line while not scanning perfectly, scans better. Just a thought. Or a better second line might be: “Let’s stomp the rich and make them pay”
Nat W. said
@Rst2536,
I like that response, RE’s first line does “scan” like you say. I’m interested in what is discovered. I do feel like with different collectives beginning to form in different locations, “scanning” is at the heart of where we are at. With the reading cluster at Kasama under the title “where to start” as one very important guide.
RW Harvey said
It seems that one question is how to unite with the struggles in places like Wisconsin, Ohio, etc. — and similar ones that willbe erupting — in a way that also exposes that what is going on is systemic to capitalism.
“Make the RIch Pay” feels way too vague (i.e., who are the rich anyway?); perhaps explicitly targetting banks and/or corporations would be sharper? Demanding more jobs or more union rights/unionizing may appeal to many n the streets but as communists isn’t this rather tailist: unite at this level and THEN when this (possibly) cannot be met, point to the bad capitalist system?
People in America, in many places and from many walks of life, are beginning to feel the vise-grip of imperialism in crisis. It is not simply the phenomenon of people in the streets en masse that has some making links between Egypt and Wisconsin; I would venture to say that the faint whisper of possible freedom from being ground down is being heard globally and it is this spirit that our slogans must amplify.
Perhaps someting along the lines of: “From Wisconsin to Egypt — Support Resistance Against Injustice.”
Or: “Unite and Resist: We refuse to pay for the corporate crisis.”
rst2536 said
RWH,
What about : MAKE BANKS AND CORPOATION PAY or MAKE THOSE WHO CAUSED THE CRISIS PAY
Radical-Eyes said
I agree that “the rich” isn’t as precise as we would like to be, ideally. I added “filthy” to try and focus it more on those who are actively agents of the exploiting of the people. Still imperfect, obviously.
Maybe “making pay” isn’t the best motif. It implies a Big Other from whom we could theoretically extract satisfaction. When it’s system change that’s called for.
Still, I think that TNL’s point about intervening in the discourse of the moment is important. I think it is possible to do so without handing the mantle of prospective leadership over to bourgeois politicians.
Introducing the scandal of wealth distribution into the present public discourse (amongst the active and mobilized workers and students) can be valuable I think. Likewise with the specter of internationalism.
The “risk” of reformism here is lessened if we accept the notion that the present stagnation crisis of capitalism puts tight limits on the ability of the ruling class to grant concessions or to introduce such reforms as progressive income tax, etc.
The question then is: should we accept such a notion? And what is our basis in political economy for our verdict on this?
Nat W. said
@RE
You say, “The “risk” of reformism here is lessened if we accept the notion that the present stagnation crisis of capitalism puts tight limits on the ability of the ruling class to grant concessions or to introduce such reforms as progressive income tax, etc.”
I think there is truth to this and I also think this is a battle that can be won within the framework of the existing order, though in a way that can be an advance for the people and set the rulers into retreat.
For example through the course of the class struggle in Italy from the end of WWII up until the 1970s, the Italian working class was able to win a number of highly significant concessions including a something I think was called a wage index, where it became law that wages had to rise in tune with the actual rate of inflation. They’re were also rights won such in regards to worker control of the factory and strict limits on the ability of workers to be fired. Alot of this was won from the workers going against the leadership of the unions and the PCI which was one of biggest communist parties in Europe. I’m still studying this and trying to wrap my head around of it, but one of the issues made clear by both revolutionaries including the left of the PCI and those outside of it and also bu the workers themselves that yes austerity was necessary (after an initial economic boom post WWII Italy was faced with a recession starting I believe in the mid 1960s), though it was the capitalist, the rich who would have to sacrifice, austerity wouldn’t come this time on the backs of the workers. And again through wildcat strikes, the formation of independent workers councils and such, the workers actually won the demands and caused a great deal of havoc for the bourgoisie. Many foreign and Italian investors who had poured money into Italy in the 40s and the 50s because migrants from the south of Italy were providing a large pool of cheap labor began to pull their money out.
I don’t think the level of consciousness or struggle in the US right now is near comparable to that of the workers in Italy in that time (or now, as some of those laws about wage indexes and such still exist and are still a point of contention in struggles over austerity),and the intermediate victories won did not lead to revolution for reasons I’m still trying to learn from, though I think the euro-communist turn of the PCI and the lack of development of a viable revolutionary strategy for the left had something to do withb this. (Though I want to understand this more concretely and probably some others here already do.)
What I’m getting at is that I think we can make demands based on the current sentiments of the people and win them and shake things up in the process. We don’t need to make these demands with the thinking that they can’t possibly be won and that this will have the effect of further radicalizing the workers (ie. Trotsky’s idea of transitional demands).
One of the things that stood out to me about the Italian experience is that the workers in many respects won these demands through going agaoinst the institutionalized left. This happened in France in 68 and the US in the 70s, though it never went as far as it did in Italy. That’s another thing I’d like to understand.
But I think to the extent possible depending on some contingent factors regarding how this fight develops, attempt to expose the vacillations of the democratic party leadership and wrench the base, including perhaps their lower level politicians away, provoking a certain consciousness that the people can win these austerity battles independently of the democrats.
I’m less certain of how to do that, though I think there it is a process that can take shape through the methods of mass line, communist investigation, and fusing with the advanced in a way that can become mutually transformative. In other words, we are fighting to win these struggles together with the people, not to prove that we can’t win them. And we are learning from the sentiments of the people, intervening where necessary, and I think, encouraging, though not always (but sometimes) forms of independent organization necessary to take up battles that the democratic party leadership wont take up.
No guarentees for where it will go, but I think all this is also a part of investigate dig in, hasten while await.
Sorry for the rambling nature of these comments, it’s what happens when one can’t fall asleep and its 5:30 in the morning. Hope they made some kind of sense, and that they can be of some use.
Carl Davidson said
@GregButler
First, the reason trucks and planes ‘do better’ than rail is because of hidden government subsidies, not anything objective. In NYC, for example, the city would collapse without passenger rail. It simply couldn’t work. Europe, Japan, China and others are rather wise to have their transportation subsidies favoring rail. And river transport for bulk items is even greener, which is why upgrading and repairing our locks and dams is a worthy green infrastructure battle.
As for you approach to jobs, you’re making the best defeat the good, along with an assumption that standards can’t bend a little.
We have unemployment issues across the board here in Western PA, but the greatest by far in among inner city youth, many now well into their 20s, who have never had a job of any sort, at least for any length of time, left high school early and have few skills for a labor market.
If you don’t like Van Jones’s approach of ‘start with a caulking gun,’ even if it’s at a $12 an hour ‘living wage’ at first, rather than prevailing or union wage, exactly what do you propose to fight for to get these kids a regular income at a regular job? Do you think it’s better to leave them unemployed if you can’t start them at $30 an hour?
During the 1930s in this area, FDR put people to work via the WPA and CCC projects that built our state parks, among many other useful things. The younger workers lived in camps, keep a small allowance, and the rest sent home to their families. I think we can do better today, but without that effort, which my grandfather was in, I don’t know how my mother and her sibs would have made it.
I think John Conyer’s HR 5204, a full employment bill now being re-introduced, which is funded via a financial transaction tax and makes the government the employer of last resort, is a good place to start. We need mass local meetings around what it means, and mass organizations of the unemployed and underemployed to fight for it. It has the most potential to bring the lower strata of the working class into the political fray on this matter.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
Carl writes (in response to Greg):
“First, the reason trucks and planes ‘do better’ than rail is because of hidden government subsidies, not anything objective.”
Yep, and part of the reason that passenger trains died out in much of the country is not because “cars, buses and passenger aircraft are far faster and better ways to move people,” but because starting in the late 40s there was an illegal conspiracy between General Motors, Firestone and Standard Oil of California (now Chevron), among others, to buy up electric train systems in cities across the country and replace them with buses.
In Allegheny County, PA, where I live, there are now only two light-rail lines in the Port Authority transit system, which look more expensive than the buses on the Port Authority’s statement of operations, but are hardly more expensive if you take into account the hidden subsidies for roads, etc., that Carl is referring to. But there used to be many more routes, and a web of them, not just a hub-and-spoke system with Downtown Pittsburgh as the hub. My understanding is that you could get from Donora to Aspinwall in a relatively short period of time; I realize that to fully appreciate this reference you have to have some knowledge of Western PA geography, but I don’t doubt there are parallels all over the country.
Understand that I am also opposed to boondoggle projects that don’t mean much or that favor suburban whites at the expense of communities that need the services more. So in Allegheny County, the “T” service (light rail) does cover a number of impoverished “hilltop” communities in the city, but is also primarily a suburban commuter system. And in the late 90s, when Mayor Tom Murphy was creating the “North Shore” around the two new publicly-funded stadiums, he and the local planners applied to the Federal government for hundreds of millions of dollars to tunnel under the Allegheny River and extend the T to the “North Shore.” This project — which is now under construction — is ludicrous, because (1) it is not geared to real economic development, but to the retail/entertainment “North Shore destination,” and in fact amounts to more subsidies for the owners of the two sports teams and the upscale restaurants that hang on to them; and (2) the distance is so short that many people now either park Downtown or take the T Downtown, and then just walk across the bridges anyway. Resources would be better spent upgrading service in the East End black neighborhoods, where most people take the buses. But I don’t see why there shouldn’t be billions of dollars invested in re-building train routes in those areas, rather than keeping the dependence on buses that was created by corporate interests that wanted it that way sixty years ago.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Carl – (on the jobs programs/minority unemployment stuff): I am against any kind of jobs program for workers of color that involves using minority youth as cheap labor.
I believe that all of the workers on publicly funded construction projects should get prevailing wages, rather than a “separate but equal” pay scale for youth of color. It’s the worst kind of institutional racism to tell workers of color that somehow we’re worth less than a White man and pay us at a seperate but equal pay scale so I cannot support that under any circumstances.
The bottom line is, caulking and insulating is part of carpentry work according to the Department of Labor and in my labor market the wage for that is $ 46/hr, not the $ 12/hr apprentice laborer wages that participants in that program are being paid in this labor market. Every day those kids work, doing a $ 46/hr job for $ 12/hr, they are essentially getting $ 34/hr pickpocked out of their wallets. I’ve been a socialist and a labor activist for way too long to support that under any circumstances
Beyond that, I disagree with you that, when it comes to minority unemployment, the priority is to provide low wage jobs for teenagers.
Priority one should be to provide jobs for minority adults and provide economic support for minority teenagers to stay in high school, graduate and go to college, just like their White suburban peers do.
In that context, priority one should be family wage jobs for women of color in general and single mothers of color in particular
They face two sets of oppression and they have kids to support, so they need the jobs and the money, and should get first dibs on the employment opportunities.
That’s why I was talking about using the money wasted on these railroad boondoggles and using it to create jobs for teachers and other educational workers. Those are largely female professions and we need to focus on employing women first.
That’s another reason I oppose construction jobs programs – the industry is notoriously sexist, has a long and ugly history of almost breathtakingly grotesque gender and sexual harassment targeting the few women who are able to enter the industry and thanks to that history, any construction jobs program will, de facto, be jobs program for men only.
Second priority for jobs programs for the unemployed of color would be jobs for adult men.
That’s why, to the extent that I would support inner city construction jobs programs at all, I support programs that employ journeylevel tradespeople who are already in the industry. We really don’t need cheap labor youth training programs when adults who already work in the industry are sitting home unemployed – they should get first dibs on those jobs.
As for unemployed teenagers of color, instead of using them as cheap labor, how about sending them where their White peers go – COLLEGE???
I’d much rather see them provided with grants and stipends to go to school and learn a profession rather than having them as cheap disposable low wage construction labor.
Yeah, I know, Carl, it might seem quite radical to you to demand equality for people of color – to demand that adults of color get family wage jobs and teens of color get subsidies to go to college instead of being shunted into the low wage labor force. I also know the Democratic Party won’t like those ideas either.
Be that as it may, that’s what’s objectively needed, no matter what the powers that be might have to say on the subject, and that’s what we should be demanding.
If all we ask for is table scraps, that’s all we’ll ever get, Carl.
On Conyers bill, that’s not a serious law. It’s just street theater that he’s been introducing every session of congress since I was in high school (and probably long beforge that) – he knows it’s not going to pass but he gets to demagogically claim he’s doing something about unemployment.
About Roosevelt’s WPA, if you actually study the history of the program, it was a lot like modern day Workfare and in it’s day WPA workers engaged in fierce strikes and protests against the program. The WPA was also Jim Crow segregated and was used as a patronage program to employ lots of workers right before an election (essentially go get their votes) and then they’d be laid off right afterwards. The CCC was essentially a military training program brilliantly disguised as a jobs program – essentially they were training those young men in basic military discipline and combat engineer skills, for the imperialist war that was on the horizon.
A lot of American leftists like to sugarcoat Roosevelt and present him as some kind of great guardian of the working class, when in fact he was the guy that saved American capitalism and led America in a major imperialist war.
That’s just not true and I refuse to join in the hagiography.
@ Carl and Felix (on the railroad stuff): I’ve studied and written quite a bit about the transportation industry and based on my studies I really don’t buy the whole conspiracy theory argument that somehow an evil cabal of Chevron and GM executives came up with some conspiracy to destroy mass transit. The world just doesn’t work like that.
Railroads deteriorated in our country for a couple of reasons.
One major factor was the industry’s monopolistic practices in the late 19th and early 20th century, that caused railroad companies to avoid inovation and have really bad customer service (one railroad executive once said “the public be damned!” and that’s pretty much what they thought of their clients) The industry assumed that their freight business and their passenger business would always be there and they only had to provide the bare minimum of service.
Another factor is the fact that cars, omnibuses and motor trucks are a lot more flexible – they aren’t tied to tracks, don’t have to run on strict timetables the way railroads do and they can go anywhere that has roads (and even lots of places that don’t).
After WW II, when the federal government built a national highway system based on the German Autobahns and Italian Autostrada (like those systems, it was primarily built for military reasons – to aid troop movements and materiel shipments in the event of a third world war), suddenly long distance road transport got a whole lot faster.
This created a market niche for trucking companies to compete with the railroads and take their freight. Unlike the railroads, the trucking companies were very flexible and customer service oriented towards their clients (and the clients they wanted to steal away from the railroads) It also helped that the trucking companies only had one union to deal with (the Teamsters, a corrupt and basically pro management union) whereas the railroads had sixteen different unions which had relatively strict and strongly enforced work rules.
On the passenger side, Greyhound and Trailways could now compete with railroads for passenger service thanks to the interstates and they could serve more destinations simply because their coaches were not tied to railroad tracks and could go anywhere that had roads.
The airlines (an industry that had emerged during WW II) took away the top end of the railroad’s passenger business, because why would a businessperson want to spend 16 hours on a train when he could make the same trip in 4 hours on an airplane (2 hours once jets were introduced in 1958)? The airlines also killed the oceanic passenger line service as well – why spend 5 days on a ship to get to England when you could make the trip in 10 hours on a plane (6 hours once jet service came in)?
Finally, there was the motorcar. After WW II, with the rise of the suburbs and cheap credit, lots of people had cars, even regular working class people and poor folks. Cars give the individual a great deal of freedom in when and where they can travel – a car owner doesn’t have to wait on bus or train timetables, nor does she have to take an out of the way route and transfer if there is no direct service from point A to point B, she can go to any place that has roads any time she wants.
This also killed commuter train and bus service – except for exceptional areas like New York City with lots of high density working class communities where most of the workers traveled to jobs in one of two densely packed geographically small business districts in the Borough of Manhattan. Elsewhere, car commuting was (and quite frankly still is) quicker and more efficient than bus or train travel.
In other words there were objective economic factors that pushed the railroads out of long haul and commuter passenger service and common carrier freight express service.
Basically, Americans don’t take trains for long distance trips and use private cars instead for the same reasons that British people fly to America on jets rather than taking ocean liners and German people travel to America in commercial airliners rather than zeppelins.
We’re all Marxists here and I’d hope we all understand that we live in a world where the economy is governed by objective economic forces, not evil conspiracies by bad men hiding in the shadows.
That’s another reason why I oppose these anachronistic schemes to artificially prop up long haul railroad passenger service, which died a natural death over 50 years ago.
As for the transport needs of the urban and Indian reservation minority poor, instead of mass transit schemes that keep them tied to bus lines and train schedules, I’d support economic subsidies so they could buy moderately priced compact hybrid or electric cars, so they would have the flexibility to get to jobs in the suburbs, which would greatly expand their employment opportunities, and they’d be able to do so in low or no emissions vehicles.
Carl Davidson said
@GregButler
I don’t know what to make of your numbers, Greg. More than 90 percent of industrial workers around here have no union, and ‘prevailing wage’ standards only apply to a handful. My brother works as a webmaster at $12 an hour, a rate that would be ridiculous in Chicago. But he can take it or leave it.
Inner city kids at 18 are supposed to have a high school diploma, and be getting ready for community college? A handful will, but most can barely read and write at 18-to-30. But they’re still in dire need of work, and if they’re to be paid the $40+ wages you’re insisting on, they’ll never be hired.
The wage-benefit package of the largest employer in the country, Wal-Mart, is around $12 an hour. If any communists want a very tough nut to crack, involving secret organization, try your hand at unionizing this outfit.
So I’ll ask, since your proposal is unrealistic under current conditions, why stop there? Simply demand full communism everywhere and be done with it.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will work for some better-designed structural reforms, which can actually assist and empower people, building the levels of organization we need to get to higher levels of struggle in the process.
As for transport, I’ll just disagree. One thing I loved about my visits to Europe was my Eurail Pass, where I could get from central city to central city, in decent trains, even with a place to sleep on an overnight run, and not bother with the hassle of getting from the airports to downtown.
We won’t even get into the question of which forms of transport take the most carbon out of the ground and pump it into the air.
charley2u said
The “public sector” is dead — get over it, Carl. The only question is how the State dies. For decades the AFL-CIO has operated as a company union outfit of scabs at home, and as agents of Washington abroad. In this crisis, as for the last 60 years, Capital has reneged on its agreement with the labor aristocracy. What did the AFL-CIO expect from the gang of predatory parasites at whose feet they have abjectly groveled these years?
The AFL-CIO is dead and we must bury it without tears; Egypt proved working people do not need company unions to make revolution.
tellnolies said
Here is an interesting article about Charles Barron and others shouting down Gov. Cuomo (“Tax the Rich”) at a meeting of the Association of Black and Puerto Rican Legislators:
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/02/21/2011-02-21_andy_speech_drowned.html
This is I think a positive development.
MLW said
Why not just go back to the pre fdr fraternal societies, you actually had emerging organizations that were actually starting to give workers more of a sense of managing their own lives this was happening just at the time of the reforms gee I wonder why?
Carl Davidson said
Gee, Charley, if the AFL-CIO is ‘dead’ and isn’t worth saving, I guess there’s no reason for us to bother with the anti-union-busting battle in Madison–unless you think the Tea-Partiers coming out on the streets there have a more correct approach to the AFl-CIO, and you want to lend them a hand pushing the corpse into a grave.
Of course, the AFL-CIO is a contested zone and a battleground in its own right–but I’m glad it’s there, and work to expand it.
Sometimes I think our differences get to the point of alternate consciousnesses that put us in alternate universes. We don’t share enough of a ‘universe of discourse’ to have much to talk about.
RW Harvey said
Between all the talk about transport and Van Jones’ solution to unemployment, aren’t we forgetting the specficity of the current global crisis of imperialism? Why would we be advocating “start with a caulking gun” anyway? Do we think we are about to have a landslide of $12/hour jobs for inner city youth? Do we think the attempts to crush public sector workers is primarily about union busting? Some prognosticators are predicting another stock market bubble that will rise to 15,000, suck more middle class investors in, and collapse with another enormous transfer of wealth. How many of these this economy can foster, and how much of this the masses of people can stand, is a very fluid and open question. Need I mention the ever-present shadow of imperial war escalating and expanding?
Let’s keep our eyes — and the eyes of the people already in struggle — on the international dimensions and build unity here and quite possibly undermine the patriotic tsunami that will be along soon enough. This tremendous, beautiful genie is pushing its way out of the bottle of oppressiona nd repression and we sit here planning to tell the masses to gather ’round and debate the merits of jobs bills, imagine as real phantasmgoric plans for jobs, and take thier fighting spirit and fight union busting? WTF?
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
RW Harvey: The discussion on jobs and transportation began because I argued for pushing back on Walker around his rejection of a Federal high-speed rail project; Greg argued that we shouldn’t bother to support such projects at all, hence the discussion.
The demand for jobs, at livable wages, with benefits, and doing useful work of benefit to the society at large — this is a demand that ultimately challenges capitalism, since under the current system it can’t be fulfilled.
In the real world, the fighting spirit of a large section of the people is being directed at union-busting. My suggestion that we develop tactics and strategies — not just slogans — to go after the rich with the demand that they pay for the crisis, and do so in a way that mobilizes the people to win some victories, and also affix the real blame for the crisis (hence pushing back against the right’s attempt to blame public-sector workers). Coming up with concrete demands, and waging real fights around them, is the way you organize masses of ordinary people, rather than sloganeering with the already-converted. As far apart as Carl and I on the one hand are from Greg on the other, our discussion was at least edifying; whose discussions look more weirdly out-of-touch, ours, or the simultaneous conversations elsewhere in the thread about the exact wording of picket signs and chants?
Carl Davidson said
The global crisis of imperialism is rather concrete when viewed in the particularly of contradiction.
Around here, it has devastated industry, exported factories, and created pockets of Black youth unemployment and Black unemployment generally, at record levels–above 30 and 20 percent, and those working are usually at nonunion jobs not paying much.
For many of these young people, the choice is between the criminal-prison-industrial complex or, if they’re ‘lucky’. into the military-industrial complex as the foot soldiers of Empire.
Into that mix, people like Van Jones, Rep. Jone Conyers or the USW’s Blue-Green Alliance offers some progressive options on how to oppose the global crisis as it directly impinges of their lives, Our task is to engage those battles and that process, and build on it, taking it farther and wider. In brief, drawing the general from the particular, and so on.
I’m sure it’s not the only fault line–police brutality is another, school reform and school debt still another. But these are all worthy places to begin. You can see the faces of these kids in every video clip from Madison. Is it some fear of getting cooties from getting too close to reforms or union officials that is bothering some folks here? Otherwise, I have a hard time understanding the resistance here to things like this.
RW Harvey said
Well, cooties is an important consideration but not the most important in this case.
While the crisis of imperialism does indeed manifest in a million particularities, my fear is that the fact of exposing imperialism will get utterly submerged and diluted by (1) neglecting the specificity of the current crisis (this is not the 1930s, nor even the mid-70s, and it is not even 2007, for that matter); (2) by yoking people even more tightly to the system by rallying behind Conyers (a bourgeois politician) and Van Jones (a reformist community organizere and Obama buddy). Why do this? Do you really believe that this teaches people anything about fighting imperialism? Our most immediate allies are frankly in Egypt and everywhere else resistance is building. I’d rather have one single fighter who understand this than a dozen fighters fighting for Conyers jobs fantasy.
Carl Davidson said
RWHarvey says:
That’s exactly the difference between you and me. I’ll start with a dozen kids from the projects to start an unemployed committee and a fight for jobs in a heartbeat, over one person wanting to hold up a picket sign in solidarity with Egypt. I can win the kids from the projects over to solidarity with Egypt lickety split, but the other way around is a bit more difficult.
Radical-Eyes said
@Carl. Forming committees of unemployed young people in and around the projects sounds like a promising idea. (I would love to hear summations of past experiences in this vein.)
But you seem to be assuming that the best way to form such committees is around specific policy proposals and job program demands that are currently on the Democrat’s table (albeit pushed off to the far corner of that table).
Frankly, my experience at a working-class community college–not the projects I realize, but still– has reinforced my sense that people in struggling working-class, poor, and people-of-color communities are often *hungry* for radical ideas and analysis. And excited when they see someone cultivating and encouraging such discourse in a non-dogmatic way.
So I guess what I’m asking is: What is really the best way to get 12 young unemployed activists riled up for serious social change activism (locally and beyond)?: focusing on Conyers job program or… talking about what they did in Egypt and why can’t we do that here?
Radical-Eyes said
@Felix:
I take issue with your characterization of the side discussion on this list concerning the specific language of slogans as “out of touch.”
Such discussion was introduced in the context of deciding what line to bring out to solidarity rallies this week.
Is it your belief that the particularity of language used in slogans, on signs, etc. doesn’t matter much?
What if any role do slogans play in political discourse in your view (interested to get others ideas on this one too)?
It’s interesting to refer to TNL’s link above at ths point. In my view the action cited–the interruption of the NY Governor’s speech by collective “slogan-eering” (that is by a single chanted slogan being taken up by hundreds of people… in part perhaps because the “rabble rousers” in the crowd had the *correct* slogan!) is probably of more significance than the particularities of specific tax code ammendments that you (in your article) suggest that “we not shy away from” supporting.
Nat W. said
@RE,
I still like the idea of a slogan being implemented as a scanning device to seek out the sentiments of the crowd.
It is also important imho to remember that Barron and those who chanted with him were putting forward a demand in their slogan and beyond the slogan had a more detailed list of what they wanted.
I like the idea also of the committees of unemployed youth, though I’m not sure this has to be done specifically around the questions of jobs, but can actually develop organically from a key number of questions that unemployed youth face including police brutality, criminalization, gang violence, etc. In other words I think it is important right now to let the main thrust of discontent come directly from the people themselves and that this can be a way of learning what the people are most concerned with, where the advanced among the masses are seeing and establishing their own language and resistance around key faultlines and how revolutionaries need to relate to them.
In that case I agree with RE that we need not necessarily try to win them around our own demands or demands that can be coopted by the left dems. At the same time I think demands will emerge organically that can objectively be coopted by the dems and we have to traverse this carefully in the heat of battle and learn to use a more non-dogmatic discourse in the process of further radicalizing ourselves and the advanced in how we expose the nature of the political game the dems are playing and also developing more radical demands and slogans that more directly run into conflict with the system. All this can be drawn out over a very extended period of time or events, as they seem to be doing now can develop very rapidly.
I think TNLs point of understanding the opportunities that certain moments present us is vital, though I would reapeat that we should always be thinking of the things TNL presents, growing the core and moving large sections of masses toward that core, within the same moment. And TNL is correct imho, this is art more than science.
Nat W. said
Also, when I say things can develop very rapidly, I am not saying that rev will immediately be on the aagenda, however, a moment where large sections of people can become radicalized in a very quick period can occur and there will be the opportunity to both expand our core and find nodules of advanced popping up in different locations, and also win larger sections of people closer toward that core. That is something we don’t want to miss.
These are all just thoughts. I’m sorry that my writing style is very declarative.
Carl Davidson said
It might first be a good idea to study the Conyers Bill, which by no means has the support of the GOP, Blue Dogs and even many Dems.
Briefly, it says Wall Strett is to be taxed for puting people to work and starting jobs. The revenue goes into a fund, dividing into two parts. The first part is for county and city government to use when unemployed people present themselves asking for a job. They then have to be put to work at whatever the county deems necessary–painting schools, building new parks, whatever–at a living wage for a year, and the county uses this fund to pay the workers. The second part goes into a local startup fund. This is where local people–workers, small business, entrepreneurs–present a business plan for a new green construction or manufacturing renovation or startup that would hire locally at prevailing or union wages. The startup funds can come as a loan or a grant, and to a regular business or a cooperative business. Where the jobs from the first part only last a year, and then have to be re-applied for, the jobs created from the second part last as long as the new business succeeds, and hopefully the more success, the more new jobs created.
Here’s the point. Even though it’s a national bill, it offers maximum flexibility to local communities on how to design and apply the projects supplying the jobs. The projects are designed locally, but funded nationally, but by taking back a chunk of surplus value from Wall St speculation, rather than general tax revenues.
It’s still being tweaked, but that’s the main features. It hardly solves everything–nothing does under capitalism. But it’s a good component part of a wider green manufacturing industrial structural reform, and it’s key value, as opposed to other components, is that it puts unskilled people who need employment most to work right away. In that sense, it’s WPA/CCC 2.0
As for Egypt, what are the main lessons so far? That people have the power, in the form of the mass strike or rebellion, to turn out the autocrat from an autocracy, split the army, and then pose the demands of what amounts to a national democratic revolution, and to begin to build organization to win it and go further.
Very good, but even for Egypt, it’s only the beginning of answers for the problems of the masses. It tells workers and youth in the U.S. that they need ‘street heat’ to stop or gain certain things or throw out or put in certain measures or individuals. But you are still stuck with the task of formulating the solutions to the key problems, both short-term and strategic, as an independent platform. Otherwise, you’re stuck in the worship of spontaneity, tailing the wave and tailing someone else’s platform, so to speak, but left high and dry when it recedes.
Nat W. said
@Carl,
How is supporting the Conyers bill not tailing the wave of spontaniety in its own right? Where is the initiative of the revolutionaries? How does this help to wrench sections of the dem base away from them?
To be clear I’m not opposed to the Conyers bill in and of itself, though I think making that the thrust of what you’re aruing for organizationally is essentially a top-down type of proposal even if it comes from the left of the dems.
I would beg this question, how do we work around a current international conjuncture that is beginning to develop, in ways that both seek to feed off of the initiative of people in action, WITH AN EMPHASIS ON SUPPORTING INDEPENDENT ACTION THAT ID DEVELOPING AND HELPING TO GIVE IT MORE CONCRETE REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATIONAL FORM? In doing this, and I think this is part of our communist intervention, we need to be winning people away from the dems on a national level, I won’t speak to other situations globally, and not rallying behind their proposals, even their left proposals. To the extent that we do support a dem bill, to the extent that sections of people are mobilized behind this in large numbers, we need to both be seeking out the more radical forms of discontent within that general mobilization and bringing forward on the basis of the development of the struggle INTERVENTIONS that go beyond what is being proposed by the dems.
I am arguing that a volatile situation seems to be beginning on a global scale and that is beginning to effect political (class) struggle here in significant ways that MAY pose the opportunity for rapid radicalization of sections of the oppressed and other sections of US society, and that we lose the chance to consolidate that organizationally if our strategy is to tail the left of the dems.
I hope we can all ponder over this possibility and give it more concrete forms of analysis than I have the ability to do.
carldavidson said
First of all, this is a Conyers Bill. It would be great if the entire Democratic Party backed it, but so far, not even close. Judge it on its merits. It’s not perfect by far, and has some weaknesses.
But any piece of legislation has weaknesses, and any measure can be fought for in a reformist way or in a way that strengthens revolutionary and grassroots forces. Use your imagination, and experiment, then sum it up. Remember, the easiest way our adversaries find to coopt us, is to get us so worried about being coopted, that we do nothing at all. That leaves the entire field to them, and without a fight.
Second, it’s also a funding bill for local projects. If a group of revolutionaries want to create a worker-owned coop business that can put people to work, here’s your opportunity to sit down with the masses, develop a plan for one, and fight for it. If you win, you gain a strong point to build on, and then go wider. If you lose, you still hopefully consolidate and thus are better organized than before you started, which is the real definition of a partial victory.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
Radical-Eyes writes:
“I take issue with your characterization of the side discussion on this list concerning the specific language of slogans as “out of touch.” Such discussion was introduced in the context of deciding what line to bring out to solidarity rallies this week. Is it your belief that the particularity of language used in slogans, on signs, etc. doesn’t matter much?”
Yes. The exact message in agitation and propaganda can and should be carefully worked out beforehand, but that is a technical question, subordinate to strategy. No false modesty here: I am skilled at firing up the masses at demonstrations, especially at coming up with and leading chants. But that does not an organizer make.
The way you guys were discussing this stuff was just weird. Look at the second of your sentences I quote above: You were “deciding what line to bring out to solidarity rallies this week.” In what universe is this effective organizing? Have you ever actually seen this work in practice? You show up at a rally organized by someone else — other people have made the phone calls, called the press, dealt with the permits of a permit was needed, brought the bullhorns and other stuff like that, and above all turned out their own base — and you, who perhaps many of these people have never seen before, are going to bring your “line” to them? Why should anybody be attracted to your “line” when it is other organizers who have brought them to the demonstration in the first place? It’s telling that there are constant references by multiple posters to the best way to make communist “interventions” in the living struggle, which assumes that communists are coming to the struggle from the outside.
The whole discussion struck me as a little ludicrous, because if you’ve ever organized an action, you know that when you show up at the action, 95% of the work has already been done. Your showing up with the “correct” wording on signs is not going to impress anybody. When you’re discussing which “line” to bring to a struggle, you should discuss it in terms of how you talk to the masses, and around which demands you organize people by engaging them in face-to-face conversations in the course of organizing them and mobilizing them to take action — not showing up and trying to “win the advanced to communism” at a rally that you played no part in organizing in the first place.
jgramsey said
Straw man alert.
Felix, when I mentioned “bringing a line” to a rally, I intended that “line” not as *the* (“one, true”) line, but *a* line aimed at testing the waters, gauging people’s responses, stirring up conversations with individuals, etc. (What Nat W and others referred to as “scanning” above.) This is the principal aspect.
At the same time, the collective that I am working to organize here in Boston would like to make a (very) modest contribution to a broader discourse by saying something (visually) that has some insight or use. That might make the people who see it think. And attract people to engage us, etc. And maybe even get picked up by the more advanced amongt the organizers of the event…Who knows?
I think we are actually in agreement in seeing these events as not just chances to support what is being done, but opportunities for investigation. I happen to think that having some sort of creative, witty, deliberately political statement (whether visual, textual, vocal or both) *can* facilitate that process.
No false optimism either: Often the chants and slogans at these sorts of events are terrible–and very much drag down the spirit of an event that, even with its various limitations, has more potential than is realized.
Unless people are taking the symbolic and “slogan-eering” realm seriously, march-chants often gravitate towards the very worst lowest common denominator rhetoric imaginable. (“Whaduwewant? Peace. Whenduwewanit? Now.” etc.) I anticipate perhaps tomorrow’s solidarity rally, despite the efforts of many stalwart progressive organizers, may feature such gems as: “Union Concessions, yes. Union Busting, no” etc.)
I find that people at these events–both organizers and attendees– actually appreciate it when people bring a clever sign, phrase, chant or whatever to the mix–again in a non-hijacking, collaborative spirit. Don’t you? Not saying the earlier suggestion were anything spectacular. But why be shitting on a wee bit of public brainstorming?
My sense is that maybe you are perhaps projecting some notion of “ultra-left”-ism onto me/elements of this discussion.
Trust me. No one was mistaking my suggestion of a sign slogan, with serious revolutionary strategy or organizing. (God, I hope not.) I’m well aware that the revolution is not simply an act of spontaneous expression. And yet, my sense is that how we express ourselves, and encourage others to express themselves, does in fact matter. That words and phrases can and do matter as well.
Radical-Eyes said
Note to moderator: I was logged into wordpress as “jgramsey” for that last post (#52). @ Felix, that one was for you. :)
carldavidson said
Actually, everyone taking part in these mobilizations are rather creative and inspiring. Here’s just one on many youtube clips:
I appreciate a good chant, slogan or banner as much as anyone, but for our socialist tasks of revolutionary education, I’d pay far more attention to doing the propaganda work in the discussion groups and analytical articles before and after the street actions themselves.
zerohour said
“You show up at a rally organized by someone else — other people have made the phone calls, called the press, dealt with the permits of a permit was needed, brought the bullhorns and other stuff like that, and above all turned out their own base”
I think this reflects a local observation that can’t be so easily generalized. In New York City where I live, those who attend demonstrations and actions are not limited to some proprietary base that is tied to the main organizers. In fact, most attendees don’t necessarily share the same politics of the main organizers and are there in support of the overall issue whether it’s anti-war, support for Park 51, etc., Often the most visible organizer of the largest demos has been ANSWER. Here, it would be bizarre for anyone to assume that most people at those demos were strictly ANSWER’s base.
So what’s “outside” in your situation may not apply elsewhere; but even then, in terms of how we talk to people, what does it matter who did all the legwork? Does this confer special status in setting the terms of discussion? To look at mobilization in terms of your base seems assumes a limited scope. Wouldn’t you want broad sections of people to attend who are not your base?
As far as I’m concerned, a communist intervention (a good one anyway) is not about imposing a correct line, but about talking to people and finding out what their sentiments are – there’s no reason to assume that everyone views things the same way or has the same sense of strategy as the organizers. We should try to find out about the concrete conditions and history surrounding such struggles. However, we do this with the intent of formulating strategies and slogans that can address immediate needs while promoting as radical a politics as possible. Why should we not?
What I find strange about this discussion is that people are formulating general slogans without thinking about how the budget cuts affect and intersect with other contradictions in specific regions with specific histories. For instance, in New York City, it may not take on a such a direct form. It may be expressed through other means, such as struggles around education, and even then it may not be focused solely on the budget. Students in the CUNY system have been fighting budget cuts for decades, but due to the working-class, non-white character of much of the student body, demands for progressive community-oriented curricula and open admissions have been at the forefront just as often as tuition hikes and financial aid cuts. This is not to say that things should end there, or that this has been the best approach, but this is how they have played out in the real world. In California, one group involved in the student movement, Advance the Struggle said “We don’t need a budget cut movement confined to defending education. We need a budget cut movement that defends the people while resisting all forms of state violence.” Some areas may not feel the need to specifically address state violence.
My point is, there’s still much to be learned. I don’t know if I agree with the formulation that the budget cuts are the “key sector” of class struggle, but I do believe they will be critical in shaping the terrain we are working in and I appreciate Felix Dzerzhinsky’s writings about it. What’s happening in Wisconsin is exciting and I support it. If collective bargaining is rolled back, it would be a giant step towards decimating an already fragile social safety net. But as someone brought up previously, Wisconsin is 90% white. Historically, much of the attacks on the public sector have been racialized. Therefore, I hesitate to start generalizing from this one example no matter how inspiring it may be. In some areas of the US, budget cuts may be the triggering factor that exacerbates other tensions and we should be sensitive to that too.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Carl – I think we have a big difference of method here.
I’m starting out from the assumption of what the working class (or, in this case, a section of the working class – Black, Latino, Asian and Native American workers) ojectively need and then proposing demands that fit those needs. In making up those demands, I am fully aware that those demands will be unacceptable to the ruling class, the corrupt pro capitalist business unionist officialdom of the AFL-CIO unions and pro ruling class elements like the Democratic Party and community organizers like Van Jones. I also know that the political forces available to the working class are so incedibly weak at this point that these demands are no more than agitational at this moment.
However, they are still important as a goal to fight for and as a point of unity to mobilize workers to rebuild the labor movement from the ground up and build a socialist oriented revolutionary working clas political movement. It won’t be easy, but we can either do that or get gradually ground into the dust by the ruling class.
I’m very aware that at present the labor movement is in a death spiral, and has been since the early 1970′s. As a first line union representative of a corrupt, gangster ridden, racist, sexist business union (who’s leaders are so debased that many of them have been sent to prison for looting the union and taking bribes from mafia connected employers to let them pay less than union scale) I’ve been an eyewitness to this decay from the inside.
All the more reason for me to be committed to radical means to fight for the demands of the working class and oppressed minorites – cause, to keep it 100% real, reformism is not going to get us anything, not even scraps from the master’s table, at this point.
Also, I’ve had an inside view of those kind of minority youth jobs programs that you advocate – basically, they use Black and Latino teens as disposable cheap labor. As I said above, those kids should be in college, just like their suburban Caucasian peers, not doing low wage construction work – we should fight so that those jobs are living wage jobs for adult men and women, rather than temp jobs for out of school youth.
One of the ways that we can mobilize the immigrant and minority workers in the low wage non union homebuilding sector is to fight for them to get the same wage that their White peers in commercial construction get – that’s why I demanded that they get paid the wage scales called for under the federal Davis Bacon act (that’s where I got that $ 46/hr wage rate for carpenters – that’s the prevailing wage for carpenters here in NYC, under that law).
These workers are as skilled as the White guys on the commercial jobs (hell, in the case of many of the Mexican carpenters and Sikh brickpointers and caulkers I’ve seen on jobsites around here, they are more skilled than many their White counterparts) – they deserve the same money.
The developers aren’t going to like that, neither will the Real Estate Board, or the Democratic Party, or the contractors – hell, the union leaders (and a big section of the more privileged White male union members) won’t like it either, but we have to fight for it.
If we only ask for scraps, that’s all we’ll ever get.
Hell, these days, we might not even get that!
On the question of method, and I hate to put words in your mouth here so I apologize in advance if I did that, but it seems that your method is to figure out what demands are acceptable to the liberal wing of the ruling class and their political lakeys in the Democratic Party and the Not For Profit Industrial Complex, and to tailor your demands to that which they will accept.
Again, I’m not trying to dis you, brother, or put words in your mouth.
However I’ve been reading your posts for several years now, and if I had to summarize your political method in a sentence, that’s how I would describe it.
That method may have worked 40 or 50 years ago, when the rulers of this country were in a position to make concessions – these days, they aren’t even in a position to make concessions even to the most aristocratic and privileged sections of the working class, so the poor workers of color in the inner city and on the Indian Reservations have no hope of making that method work in this day and time.
Militantly fighting in the streets and at the point of production for our burning needs (even if the rulers can’t or won’t meet our demands) is a much better way to go – especially because it will teach that volitile and combative section of the working class that their demands CAN’T be met under capitalism and the only way out is revolution.
@ Felix – we’ve had a very good discussion here and out of concrete detailed conversations like this, anchored in the real world of capitalist exploitation, racism and sexism, from which a movement to fight for our class and for the abolition of capitalism will be born.
Nat W. said
@Zerohour,
In regard to intervention I think there are interventions that are made from the outside and those that are the made through and after the process of fusion.
@Felix,
The point is not to win the advanced to communism in the way you characetrize it. The point is around investigation, learning from the most advanced ssentiments of people in struggle and making analysis and forming communist strategy based on those initial investigations. Communists come into struggle with some of their own thinking but their thinking should also be transformed through the development of struggle and the contingincies that especially relatively spontaneous uprisings like what is happening in Wisconsin or the pan-Arab world right now.
So we want to understand a situation, especially the sentiments of those rising up and to be able to both learn from and speak to those sentiments. We also want to create a “revolutionary people” fusing a communist politics with an advanced section from the people that can serve as a conduit between a revoltutionary politics and broder sections of people be won to that politics.
So back to Zerohour, I think there is the intervention you decscribe of investigation and learning, starting from the outside, and interventions that come from the inside, as we are integrated into the people, and are beginning to develop a revolutionary mass base, culture, and new forms of revolutionary organization. This is still a procees of learning though we have begun much further along the road of fusion between the revolutionaries and the advanced conduits.
This is a strategy for developing a revolutionary base and a revolutionary politics here. It is a strategy that is in nacsent form and different collective around the country are grappling with how to put it into practice. BUT FELIX, tell me where any such base exists in this country. And in that sense, when there are sponataneous outbreaks of struggle, aren’t we all coming from the outside more or less?
Also Zerohour, I unite with your concern about being keen to the diverse ways in which these upcoming struggles will present themsselves and the need to understand the particulalrities of different areas in this regard.
Carl Davidson said
@gregory
I could care less whether the liberals at the top find certain structural reforms ‘acceptable.’ What I am concerned amount is whether they can unite a progressive majority, or even a militant minority, at the base.
For instance, when the rubber met the road, the liberals at the top opposed us on HR 676 Medicare for All and EFCA, Employee Free Choice Act. But these are very much part of our platform here, and remain so. On HR 676, we got every labor council, every major city council and the county boards to sign on to it. Even though we didn’t win it, at least not yet, it served us well in building our organization.
All people ‘should’ be able to go as far as they want in higher education–at no cost to them; in fact, they should be subsidized.
But ‘should’ has nothing to do with our current situation. We have young men in there early 20s with no high school degree and who can hardly read, certainly not even at a high school level. They need work to support themselves and their families. It’s rather useless to say they ‘should’ be in college. As for the liberal bourgeoisie, they don’t give a damn about these young people, which is why Van Jones is out in the cold and green jobs money that could help them is shrinking,
But in fighting for a structural reform like job creation, those concerned can’t win it alone. You have to make it practical regarding its funding and win allies to help push it through.
Otherwise, if the main aspect of your demands is simply their agitational value, you can say anything you like. So yes, in that sense we have a different method.
charley2u said
Yes, Carl there is no reason to save it. The Koch Brothers are only finishing the job began by the AFL-CIO leadership itself in 1947 when they expelled the communists. discarded the de3mand for shorter hours of work, sabotaged workers’ movement in dozens of countries, and applauded US military adventures.
What about this extensive history of betrayal do you not get, Carl? Where in all of the AFL-CIO is there contested territory? What happened to the autoworkers following the betrayal of the leadership in 2009? You are not simply wrong, you have lost touch with reality in any universe.
You are living in some fantasy world where any day now the AFL-CIO is going to rise up and side against Capital. Give me a bre4ak. The AFL-CIO has 12 million members; how many of them are in the streets to defend the public sector, win health care, or end unemployment. How many of them were in the streets over NAFTA, over deregulation of the financial sector, over the wars? How many unions have added more members than they had in 1980?
Wake up, Carl. The company union movement is being deliberately strangled by the AFL-CIO itself, and the Koch Brothers are being framed for the deed.
charley2u said
Carl,
You have been talking that same yang crap since the 1970s — you badly need to upgrade your communist CPU.
charley2u said
While you are at it, add more memory too. Start here: http://www.laboreducator.org/
Carl Davidson said
Charley, I make no apologies for the AFL-CIO. They have a ways to go. But I do know this much, along with every other worker in a union shop around here. We’re better off with an AFL-CIO union than none at all. If you can’t acknowledge that, that’s what I meant about ‘alternate universes.’
So here’s a link from my universe. Note Trumka on the platform backing the workers, and the press release from the Madison AFL-CIO Council to prepare for a general strike.
http://beavercountyblue.org/2011/02/22/general-strike-wisconsin-workers-prepare-to-up-the-ante-vs-the-far-right/
I’m fairly sure this wave will end in a compromise deal that we on the left won’t like. But I’m dead certain this is the arena, including all the AFL-CIO unions, where we need to be, to better prepare for the next wave.
RW Harvey said
Carl, this essay by Van Jones — http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/22-7 — is precisely why I want that one person with internationalist consciousness over a dozen or more folks begging for the American Dream to be restored. This essay is not only reformist, not only is in deep denial aboutthe crisis of imperialism, but reinforces American chauvinism, exceptionalism, and upholds a vision of uniting to get America back on top.
If this is what you mean by your ability to “likety-split” raise consciousness amongst those urban youth discussing how to get jobs, then man are we in serious trouble when it comes to making a communist revolution.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Charley2u – I’ve been a union member my whole working life and I’ve spent about the past 13 years as a shop steward in one of the oldest and most conservative of the AFL-CIO unions, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of America (or ex-AFL-CIO unions – the UBC seceded from the federation because the AFL-CIO wasn’t quite as class collaborationist and pro boss as the UBC’s leadership! In other words they broke away to the right!)
So I can tell you that you are right on the money about the political decay of the federation (the only thing you left out is the endemic racism of the unions – along with the anticommunism and the pro imperialist foreign policy, that’s one of the reasons the federation is dying as a labor organization)
The unions in this country are in a death spiral that they will not recover from. We’re going to have to build new labor organizations among the workers from the ground up, because the current labor movement is only capable of new organizing on a company union basis – the SEIU is a perfect example of this.
Obviously, those of us in AFL-CIO unions can and should wage political struggles where we are, but nobody should have any illusions that the present dying labor unions are capable of any kind of revival. Some of them, like the SEIU, might survive as AARP-like group insurance sales agencies, totally stripped of their labor representation function (its actually the goal of the current SEIU leadership to reorganize their union along those lines) but that’s about it, and we’ll see this final decay by the end of this decade.
I look upon it as an opportunity – we have a chance to rebuild a new labor movement on the ashes of the old one!
charley2u said
Gregory A. Butler, Peace brother. We will win!
Carl,
Yes. I did see that the Madison Council is preparing to strike. As I understand it, their argument is they are willing to forgo compensation in some form to retain their bargaining rights. Now you just imagine a union with real bargaining power offering this concession!!!!! What their actions show is that their formal bargaining rights are meaningless, since they have no power to put teeth in them.
You need to wake up — nap time is over old man! The young communists out there need real advice not nostalgia for the “anti-fascist front”.
Carl Davidson said
@Charley and @Gregory
My advice to to the youth, for what it’s worth, is to form their own fighting organizations, then seek out the more progressive-minded local unions, and form alliances to fight on any number of issues–EFCA, Marcellus Shale, Blue-Green Alliance, against the wars, One Nation coalitions and so on.
The battles started in Wisconsin are a case in point. They’ll learn some things from the unions, and the union militants will learn from them. And we need to be building our socialist organizations among both.
Why you can’t see this is beyond me.
As for Van Jones, I still like him and his book. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of him, either a a reform leader or as a man of the left. I could be wrong, but we’ll see.
But that wasn’t our bargain in any case. I said I would take eight kids from the projects interested in green jobs over one kid into anti-imperialist solidarity with Egypt, even if he or she had some theory to go with it. I still think I could win to project kids to solidarity with Egypt easier than the other way around.
In any case, I’m glad the unions are sending buses to Madison and Ohio, and inviting the radicalizing youth to ride along with them. It’s a positive move, and all of us should welcome it.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Charley4u – I know brother, we’re gonna win all the way one of these days!
@ Carl – Your proposals for reformist activism within the Democratic Party’s orbit seem to be hyperfocused on the youth, as opposed to older workers.
All of your proposals above were exclusively youth focused (jobs for young workers, youth unemployment committees, youth forming coalitions with so called “progressive” local unions ect ect ect)
What about middle aged and older workers?
You have nothing to say about us – hell, your jobs program doesn’t even have any work for us, just temp jobs for out of school youth.
I just don’t get that – why do you oppose organizing among older workers?
Also, your very well crafted and elaborate youth organizing for reform proposals all have one fatal flaw.
They ignore the fact that this is not the 1960′s.
The rulers are in a crisis, domestically and throughout their empire, and they are no longer in a position to buy class peace at home by making concessions to aristocratic layers of the working class (and, occasionally, to the more combative sections of the oppressed workers).
They wish they could do that, because it would be a much easier way for them to rule, but at this point they are telling the truth when they say they can’t afford it.
That’s why they are forced to go after aristocratic privileged workers like teachers who’s privileges would have been untouchable as recently as a decade ago. Sooner rather than later they’ll even have to go after the privileges of cops and firefighters, the backbone of their state’s repressive apparatus. That will be very dangerous for them – and an awesome revolutionary opportunity for us if we’re ready for it.
Despite what you and Mr Jones are saying, reformism isn’t a viable option anymore – basically, are choices are fight back or bow down, there’s no middle ground anymore and the rulers aren’t in a position to buy our submission to their rule with economic concessions the way they were back in the 1950′s and 1960′s.
Basically, your reform proposals are hopelessly utopian, because the rulers aren’t in a position to make those kind of concessions anymore.
At this phase of the game, the only realistic program is the revolutionary one.
Since the unions are dying, we need to build new forms of worker organizations, from the ground up, and lead them mobilize workers into strikes, slowdowns, sickouts, urban uprisings and every other sort of type of resistance to the exploiters, as well as making demands on the rulers, while constantly reminding the workers that the only real solution to our exploitation and debasement under capitalism is for us take over from the capitalists and rule society ourselves.
We need workers of all generations involved with that, not just teenagers (or for that matter not just middle aged people and old folks either).
Above all, with the youth, our demand should be that every one of them should be able to get an education free of charge and we should fiercely fight for that, rather than handing our youth over to be used as cheap labor by the capitalists and/or the Not For Profit Industrial Complex.
These aren’t reform proposals, Carl – these are immediate burning demands that the rulers cannot meet. As the workers fight for them, they’ll see we’re right that the only solution is overthrow of the capitalists and their state (and the Not For Profit Industrial Complex that helps to prop up that state, including your compadre Mr Jones)
Carl Davidson said
@Gregory
Don’t put words in my mouth that I didn’t speak. I’m for full employment–everyone, of all ages. The Conyers Bill is a Full Employment measure.
But we also want to start where the need is greatest, especially if we want to take on the structures that give the job market a white top and a Black bottom.
In this part of the country, the highest unemployment rates by far, with heavy social consequences, are among inner city youth. That’s why we start there, and work our way outward and upward, to include all. I suspect things are much the same elsewhere.
Capitalism, of course, apart from exceptional periods, does not supply full employment. It considers 100 percent employment ‘inflationary’ and takes measure to block it. That’s why it defines it at around 5 percent, and we know even in those ‘better’ times, that five percent is disproportionally younger people of color. But we fight for it anyway, packaging it in a variety of structural reform measures which, if won, can serve as strong points moving us to higher ground, where we can deepen eveyone’s consciousness that the deeper problem is not the lack of jobs, but capitalism.
To build the unity needed to unite workers and the oppressed to win anything, special attention has to be paid to these matters. I’m surprised that you don’t see it.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Carl – I believe, as I’ve stated clearly above, that the way to deal with minority unemployment is to focus on providing jobs for adults of color and educational opportunities for teenagers of color.
I said it clearly above several times, but let me spell it out again here.
Priority one should be jobs for adult women of color (with single mothers of color getting special priority) in the educational, health and public services fields. Since most children of color are raised in single parent families with a female head of household, getting jobs for those women is top priority.
Priority two should be jobs for adult men of color – this is where construction of new public housing and renovation of existing public housing units would come in. In all cases, the work should be done at Davis Bacon prevailing wages (that is, the same pay scale White men doing commercial construction get). With the construction jobs, the focus would be on employing men of color who already work in the trades as a career, not bringing in teenagers through bogus training programs as temporary cheap labor.
As for teenagers of color, as I said before they belong in college, like their White peers in suburbia and that should be the focus, not using those kids as cheap labor for the Not For Profit Industrial Complex. I spent about 2 years as a carpentry instructor in the not for profit sector, I know very well from the inside just how flawed those programs are, and how oriented they are to providing cheap disposable sweatshop labor for the Not For Profit Industrial Complex, which is why I oppose them so strongly.
Since the capitalists can’t afford any of this, and the bourgeois politicians don’t want to take the political heat from racist White labor aristocratic, middle class and upper class voters for spending public funds to help out the minority poor, none of these programs can happen through conventional Democratic Party pressure group patronage politics.
These are agitantional demands that would be advocated and fought for in the context of a campaign to build revolutionary unions among the blue collar and service workers that the dying AFL-CIO unions have left behind – with a focus on occupations with large numbers of workers of color (residential construction workers, truck drivers who haul sea freight in the ports, restaurant cooks, blue collar temp agency workers).
All of this would be done in the teeth of opposition from the capitalist state, the Democratic Party, the Not For Profit Industrial Complex, professional reformists like Van Jones, and the dying mainstream AFL-CIO trade unions. Also, this work would have to have a political side to it, which would involve building a revolutionary socialist political movement among workers, in particular workers of color and immigrants, and youth and students of color.
That’s what I’m talking about here, brother.
I do see your points, Carl I just strongly disagree with them
A final note on the youth jobs thing.
Over in the United Kingdom a few weeks ago, there were some spectacular and splendid protests by British youth that really inspired me.
They were fighting to preserve programs that enable working class English, Black, Asian, Scottish, Welsh and Irish kids to go to college – programs that the Tories and the Liberal Democrats want to destroy, programs that Labour also wants to destroy, just a bit slower than the Tory/Lib Dem coalition does.
They weren’t fighting for youth jobs, nor should they have been – they are kids, they belong in school not in the sweatshops and they fully understand that.
I agree with them and we should demand those types of programs here – knowing full well that the rulers can’t afford them and won’t voluntarily concede them.
The whole point of the exercise is to show workers and youth that this system has no future for them and the only realistic way out is overthrow of capitalism and rule by the working class. That’s the bottom line here, Carl.
charley2u said
At my website, I offer an alternative examination to the events in Wisconsin that is somewhat less deluded than that offered by Felix here. You can find the first part here: http://wp.me/pgA5p-219
charley2u said
BTW: @Felix, didn’t it ever occur to you that the public sector workers are being led into a trap by an otherwise useless “union” leadership. Despite the outcome of this battle, the welfare queen of 21st Century Austerity will be the public worker. Walker deliberately goaded them into a fight they cannot win.
carldavidson said
And I keep trying to explain to you, Greg, that it makes no sense to send youngsters in the 18-24 age bracket to college when they are high-school dropouts who can only read at a 6th grade level.
You can say things ‘ought not’ to be that way, but that’s the way they are.
Now, even with these problems, these young people still need employment and to make a living. Otherwise, they end up dead, in jail, or, at best, in the army.
My proposal offers to start with something they can do; your’s offers to start with something they can’t do, even if it was available and they wanted to do it.
That’s the long and the short of it. Why you keep avoiding it, and repeating that they ‘SHOULD’ be in college like their suburban age group is beyond me.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Carl – We’re going to have to agree to disagree, but before we part let me tell you a story.
In the 1960′s and 1970′s in New York City, activists fought to open up the de facto segregated City University of New York system (which had offered free college educations to an overwhelmingly White student body) to students of color. Since it was a different era they succeeded, and for a brief period the CUNY system had free tuition for all NYC high school graduates, including Blacks and Latinos.
They dealt with the reading level issue with remedial reading, writing and math classes for students who were below college level. These programs were very effective, and I can tell you myself from having worked in youth services that well motivated youth with good instructors can catch up a lot faster than you might think.
Yes, Carl, you can take a kid who’s reading, writing and math levels are at middle school levels and, with work, get them up to speed within their first year at college. CUNY used to do it until damned recently (that’s why CUNY rapidly became Black and Latino after open admissions and it stayed that way even after tuition was imposed)
Low reading levels aren’t permanent, Carl, all it takes is a bit of work.
That’s all the more reason why those kids should be in college, rather than used as cheap labor.
College shouldn’t just be for suburban White kids who had all the advantages, they should be for all students – even Black kids who were failed by the school system and need remedial work.
For a reformist, you seem awfully pessimistic about the possibility of change – you present a vision where the only possible life outcome for Black kids is a life of crime or a life in khaki – or a life as cheap sweatshop labor.
Not very appealing and I can’t agree with you – especially because I come from a background not that different than the origins of the Black kids you’re so quick to write off, and yet and still instead of being dead or in jail here I am debating Marxist theory with you!
Those CUNY remedial programs had a lot to do with that – even though I only spent a year there, they had an impact, and they are part of the reason that I had the kind of good life outcome I did.
So no, I will not join you in writing off inner city kids as only good to be cheap labor – with just a little bit of help, they can go to college just like the White kids from suburbia and that’s what we should fight for.
Bottom line, Black youth deserve diplomas, not caulking guns and that’s why I reject your youth jobs program (unless of course you want the suburban White kids to drop out of college and join my younger brothers and sisters up on the step ladder working for chump change!)
With that, I’m done.
Nice talking to ya, Carl.
charley2u said
@Felix
I take a look at your analysis here: http://wp.me/pgA5p-21p
Carl Davidson said
I do not write off inner city kids, Greg. Quite the opposite. I was on the design team that created Austin Polytechical Academy in and all-Black low-income neighborhood in Chicago. and we work with remedial classes all the time, and have a very realistic idea of what’s involved. My particular contribution, besides giving the school its name, was to include a feature for it to be open in the evening so parents and other residents could enhance their job skills as well. That part of the scholl finally starts this year.
Here’s a link to the school’s site;
http://austinpolytech.org/
And a link to a new story about it:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec10/pledge_12-01.html
The school was inspired, in part, by the Mondragon Coops in Spain, and we sent a group of the kids there for a study tour.
Before this, I spent years working with gang kids, drop-outs and ex-offenders–teaching classes to get them certificates as computer repair technicians. I know the realities first hand–I can tell you stories that will make your heart soar, and make your heart break. And part on that experience helped in the creation of APA.
I also lived in New York City in the time frame you mention. The remedial programs worked for some, but not most, and unfortunately lost a good deal of support, as did the entire system. Now the costs alone are keeping an entire generation out.
So my point remains. These young people need work at what’s defined as a living wage for starters, and they need it now. We’re not living in your Lake Woebegone world were every child is ‘above average.’ We have to deal with reality, and move forward from there.
Austin Polytech needs to be multiplied by 1000, and set up in every major city. Unfortunately, too many on the left find it too reformist to bother.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
Charley2u: Your analysis is just plain wrong. Walker and his billionaire backers were not looking for, or at least not expecting, this level of confrontation. They were genuinely spooked by it, as Walker himself said during the prank phone call when he thought he was talking to David Koch: he had to keep wavering Republicans in line.
This second article of mine contains some self-criticism of the first article, because I underestimated what public-sector workers would be able to achieve. There is real resentment of public-sector workers among private-sector workers and the unemployed who are doing poorly, economically-speaking, in this economy even relative to what they’ve experienced over the past 30 years. What I did not predict before this explosion, and which I was very pleasantly surprised to see, was the widespread sympathy for workers engaged in mass action. I say that I did not foresee this because I forgot that the public-vs.-private dichotomy is a false division within the working class: everyone knows a public-sector worker, so these mass activities have garnered tremendous sympathy. There was a poll a few days ago in which the public supported public-sector collective bargaining rights at something like a 61% rate; I guarantee you that if that poll had been taken a week before, prior to this upsurge, the result would have been very different.
The only victory that the directly-affected workers can get out of this is a defensive one. They have already agreed to concessions, and that was probably inevitable in this environment — if any one of us was a leader of these public sector unions, we would be in the same position, and all the rhetorical militancy in the world would not change that fact.
But it is possible, right now, for the unions to emerge from Wisconsin with an important defensive victory. Preventing the removal of collective bargaining rights may seem like a small matter (though your suggestion that public-sector unions exist only at state sufferance is frivolous: the institutional survival of all unions is based on legal protections — Federal for most of the private sector, state for the public sector — and if fascism arrived tomorrow, all unions would be wiped out, so you are making a false distinction). But scoring a defensive victory through mass mobilization can set a confidence-building precedent for the rest of the country, and sends the clear message that the right has already entered the territory of over-reach. Over-reach and adventurism can in fact damage capitalist interests severely: think of how the “Vietnam Syndrome” restricted US imperialism’s ability to wage direct war for decades.
This defensive victory potentially sets us up for larger struggles around the public budgets themselves: beginning to roll back the draconian cuts proposed by governors in all the states, and going on the offensive (as I proposed) by making the rich pay.
And there is a practical path to this defensive victory in Wisconsin: holding the senate Democrats, and then generating enough pressure in the “swing” Republican districts to come to something that preserves workers’ basic rights. Whatever the settlement is, provided it preserves workers’ right to organize and bargain, we should claim it as a victory and use it as the basis for further organizing and action.
All of this is going to be very difficult. There is no guarantee of victory. But it is ludicrous to think that the right wing wanted this. The resistance has been much stronger than they anticipated, I think largely due to the impetus provided by the Arab revolt. The struggle has been cobbled together. There are many leaders within it, of varying degrees of competence, militancy, and politics. That is the way all struggles happen, and it is incumbent upon revolutionaries to participate in these struggles, to listen to the masses and also to lead based on what we learn from listening. Your “analysis” kicks to the curb a fundamental principle of revolutionary organizing, which is that it is right to rebel against reactionaries.
charley2u said
The third part of my analysis of the Wisconsin public union fight:
“As the slogan, “Make the rich pay”, implies, the working class has no more desire to absorb the cost of the State than does the capitalist class.”
http://wp.me/pgA5p-22f
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Carl – I hate to rejoin this discussion, but I have to point out tht you’ve made some incorrect statements about CUNY and remedial education.
CUNY’s remedial ed programs were actually very successful – they changed CUNY from a system so segregated that, in 1965, White liberal activist attorney Paul O’Dwyer referred to it’s flagship campus, City College, as “The White Rhodesia of Harlem” to a system that offered a world class college education to every New York high school graduate (even the Black ones – even me).
That was the source of the opposition
The problem wasn’t that CUNY remedial ed failed, it was that it succeeded all too well and a university system that had used the taxes of all New Yorkers to educate a few Whites was now open to every young adult in the city.
That’s why remedial ed was attacked – racism.
That’s why the City imposed tuition in 1975, and every attack on CUNY ever since has been fundamentally racially motivated.
It seems that your line on this question is based on the idea that college and hopes for a better life are impossible for inner city youth of color (apparently because we’re undeducatable) and the best we can hope for is to be low wage laborers.
That’s the only conclusion that I can draw from your opposition to the idea that, in this high tech age, all young people (even Blacks and Latinos) should go to college, and your insistance that all we can hope for is job training programs that lead to blue collar jobs. Even then, you seem to oppose as utopian the idea that Black and Latino blue collar workers should make the same pay scale as Whites doing the same jobs.
charley2u said
PS:
Feilx, sorry. But you are not only wrong, your analysis leads us into a blind alley to be mugged by Capital.
charley2u said
Your analysis, for one thing, presumes Walker is running the show here — he is not. This is a classic wedge issue being run out of Washington to divide working people. Even if we assume you are right about Walker (and you are not) we still have to deal with the fact that every day a teacher misses work, the reputation of the teachers’ union declines — which was stated directly by Walker in that phone call. You called it right the first time; don’t compound you mistake.
Carl DAvidson said
No, Greg, I don’t think any such things. I fought for open admissions then and now, and changes in the high schools miseducating the youth as well. I think every kid so go as far as he or she wants, and is willing to work at, and, as I said, at now cost to them, even subsidizing them.
Our starting points differ, however. I think we need a good number of jobs now that put people to work at a decent living, even without college degrees being required.
Felix Dzerzhinsky said
Charley2u‘s position on Wisconsin, distilled: Don’t fight back, it’s hopeless, just lie down and take it. When they pick a fight with you, just give up.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Carl – I think that all jobs should pay a living wage, with Black, Latino, Native American and Asian workers getting the same wages that are paid to White men – but those jobs should be for fully grown adults.
Teenagers and young adults, including inner city Blacks, Latinos and Asians and Native American youth, should be allowed to go to college for free and be given a stipend to live off while in school. We should fight for the goal of universal higher education. Remember, at one time, only the children of the rich went to high school – it took a huge struggle to fight for the right of working class and poor youth to have universal secondary education.
As for youth job training programs – the cold hard fact is, most working class jobs do not require extensive pre hire training. The few skilled trades jobs that do generally have really severe labor surpluses, and really don’t need any more unemployed workers pushed into those industries, especially partially trained desperate young people who can be used as cheap labor.
This is especially true of the building trades. Our industry has a chronic surplus of labor and a severre unemployment and underemployment problem even in boom times. In hard times like now, construction has massive unemployment, far higher than the rest of the economy, and even the workers with jobs typically work lots of short weeks.
All construction jobs programs need to be focused on employing the existing adult construction workforce rather than sending hapless desperate minority teenagers into an industry that can’t support it’s present labor force. Only the contractors and the real estate interests benefit from that, because the more labor they have chasing after the few jobs means that they can batter down wages even further.
That’s one of the main reasons I so adamantly oppose the minority youth jobs programs you promote above – besides, of course, my view that, just like White sububan youth, all inner city and Indian reservation minority youth should be in college.
Carl Davidson said
Greg. we have strayed far from the original thread here. But am I correct in hearing you say that jobs programs aimed at youth, ie, 18 to, say, 24, are either wrong or a waste of time, since these young people should all be in college? And if they don’t have the ability or desire to do college-level studies, we can readily fix it with proper coaching and remedial programs? Does that mean jobs that don’t require a college degree need make no special effort to bring young people into them?
I’m just trying to get clear here, because it seems we have widely different assessments of conditions, or assessing the existing conditions simply doesn’t count for much in your approach.
jp said
all of us, but especially the oppressed and exploited, need to learn (like brecht said) but college study doesn’t confer intelligence or understanding, but a credential – a very useful one – to allow a student the opportunity to be a more valuable cog in the economic machine (by complicity or necessity).
learning can be better accomplished through workers study groups, or poor people’s councils, or tenant groups, etc. you’d find college professors (some) willing to help.
college for all those who want/need it, but learning for all. in better days, industrial union membership gave people at least some alternative view of social roles, and many times introduced them to further out ideas.
it’s not college, but work according to ability, with life’s encompassing needs met, that we need. there are all kinds of socially necessary work needing to be done that require no university training.
the push for more and more college enrollment in recent years has been a bubble created for financiers, much like the housing bubble. all that student debt becomes wealth for the financiers, thorough the magic of capital. students leave college as indentured servants.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Carl – I reject the elitist concept that there are students who “lack the ability” to go to college. That writeoff tends to be applied in a racist way to Black, Latino and Native American students from poor families – you’ll never hear anybody say that a suburban White adolescent “lacks the ability” to go to college (even though, based on the existance of expensive private college prep programs like Kaplan Review, as well as companies that ghostwrite the college applications of affluent students and then carefully shepheard them through the admissions process, it’s obvious that there is a large pool of White middle class teens who’s academic abilities are questionable)
So yeah, I think that all adolescents should go to college, and all public colleges should have free tuition and free textbooks – we should work towards undergraduate college education being mandatory, the way high school attendance is today (remember, not that long ago there were folks who used arguments similar to your to support the idea that working class youth shouldn’t go to high school!)
As for the question of “desire to go to college”, that’s the wrong question. High School education is mandatory in our society, and (correctly) nobody asks if high school students would rather stay home – the ones who don’t go to school are viewed (correctly) as students with problems who need extra help. I have the same view of college education – it should be compulsory.
That’s the persepective I’m coming from here, Carl – I’m an advocate of universal higher education.
As for jobs that don’t require a college degree, no, they absolutely shouldn’t be actively recruiting among college age youth. As I spelled out above, adult workers (in particular adult women workers) should get first dibs on jobs (especially the better paying ones). I also oppose youth job training programs – we already have enough skilled labor, and future skilled labor needs can be met by employer and or union sponsored and funded training of current workers and, of course, immigration.
Of course, these are goals and current conditions aren’t like this at all.
That’s why I put forth a vision of what I believe America’s working class needs, rather than limiting myself to making the present unbearably bad societly slightly less intolerable. That’s the difference between being a refomist and a revolutionary – reformists end up propping up the present system by limiting themselves to only fighting for changes that are compatible with present society. Revolutionaries call for the changes that need to happen and fight for them, and ultimately that’s what brings the system down.
Obviously, you and I have different views on that and that’s perfectly OK, Carl.
I absolutely and totally 100% disagree with your perspective, I suspect you feel the same way about mine.
So let’s agree to disagree and call it a day.
Carl Davidson said
That’s fine with me. The differences are clear enough. If anyone wants to see in practice what I’ve worked on on this topic, they can simply google “Austin Polytechnical Academy”. Otherwise, you can have the last word.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Carl – I googled Austin Polytech’s site. Congratulations on the 59 corporate sponsors! It’s also nice to see that your school, unlike most charter schools, actually has an AFT union contract for it’s teachers.
I’m sure it’s a fine school with hard working faculty and I’m sure the kids are great (they always are – no matter what kind of agenda the adults around them have).
With that said, in a Chicago where manufacturing employment has been on a long term decline for the better part of 45 years (literally since before I was born), and where there are less than 108,000 factory jobs left in the entire city, why are you training Black teenagers to take metal working jobs in factories?
Twenty five years ago, my uncle Bub, a skilled tool and die maker who spent 30 years in the toolrooms of Connecticut factories until he got unceremoniously tossed out on his ear with no pension (he still works at age 74 – in a nursing home kitchen for less than $ 10/hr) told me that metalworking in America had no future (“the wealth has shifted to East Asia” was the way he used to put it) and that it would be foolish for me or any other young person to even bother with the metal trades in this country.
Bub said that in a big defense plant state, where a lot of the factories have to keep some of their work here because the manufacturing processes are classified!
I’m sure his observations would be even more on point in Chicago, a city that used to manufacture mostly civilian products with no such national security limitations on their site of production. They certainly were valid in New York, a city where the manufacturing workforce has declined from 925,000 workers in 1968 to less than 200,000 today (they don’t even print newspapers here anymore!)
Honestly, it doesn’t seem very realistic to teach Chicago teens how to be tool and die makers and machinists when those jobs are rapidly moving to Mexico and China.
Carl Davidson said
First, Gregory, read closer and don’t assume so much. You got several things wrong.
Austin Polytech is not a charter school, but a public school. The teachers union, the CFL, and the IAM were on board from the beginning. CPS wanted us to make it a charter, but we refused. Without the unions on board from the git go, it simply wouldn’t work.
Nor is it a magnet school, but a ‘choice’ school based in a low-income Black neighborhood. ‘Choice’ simply means you have to pick it to attend, you’re not assigned to it if you don’t want it, nor is there a test you have to pass to simply get the cream off the top.
Remedial classes bring students up to speed, but often with great difficulty, given the poor nature of the neighborhood elementary feeder schools. Nor is the problem simply that of the schools. When parents can’t read, and dire poverty, crime and addiction abound, things are complex.
One thing I’ve learned for certain: All simple solutions to our educational problems are wrong.
Nor is it simply ‘metal-working.’ With Labor Dept funds, we did a research project for the CFL revealing the the CPS came up 12,000 graduates short for high-tech manufacturing workers–things like robotics, software design for advanced equipment, and so on–ie, the skills needed on the plant floors of today and tomorrow, not yesterday.
This is not your standard ‘trade school,’ but more of a junior engineering high school. Its graduates can go directly into high-end manufacturing, on to higher ed, or a combination of both. In any case, ‘life-long learning’ is the watchword.
That’s the reason for the alliances with high-tech manufacturing firms. They donate the most modern equipment, train teachers on how to teach about them, and provide internships, field trips, summer jobs and such to the students. They are mostly family held firms with under 300 workers, but with high end products. Getting them on board is a plus, and helps the school, the students and the community.
As for bringing together parents, community, unions, some governments and some business, you can call it a Gramscian counter-hegemonic historic bloc on the micro level, if you like. Mainly, it’s assembling the forces at hand to solve problems at hand.
The school is now open in the evenings, beginning to draw parents and other residents to get certified in some of the skills and equipment as well, to enhance their own employment prospects.
Don’t get me wrong. This is no magic bullet. APA is only a drop in the bucket of what’s needed. We designed it as a proto-type that needed to be multiplied a thousand times in every major city, but that requires a major battle for deep structural reform. It’s one that’s worth it.
Gregory A. Butler said
@ Carl – Thanks for the corrections on the details.
However, the cold hard fact remains: the manufacturing sector in the US is on a permanent decline.
The numbers don’t lie, brother.
Also, as I’ve said before, America has a chronic surplus of skilled trades workers – that’s true in even in construction, a sector that’s actually expanding. It’s certainly true in manufacturing, where runaway shops, automation (the “robotics”" you refer to) and the lengthening work day are reducing the demand for skilled labor.
Also (and I say this as somebody who actually spent 2 years running a Wiedeman CNC press in one of the last metalworking shops in the New York area) the computerized machines actually require less skilled operators than the conventional ones! Most of my coworkers who operated the same type of machines at that shop were Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants just off the plane from Southeast Asia who had never worked in a machine shop prior to that job.
So actually, the few manufacturing workers left in this country in the future will actually need less skill then the present cohort (the machine takes care of the thinking part of the job – and it’s programmed by one of the engineers from the office, not by the metal workers who operate it)
Bosses (like your school’s 57 corporate sponsors) just love job training programs because they are an excellent source of young strong cheap labor
That’s why the Building Trades Employers Association here in New York has as part of it’s 26 point demands for the next contract cycle that all the trades take in more apprentices. They’d rather hire a bunch of low paid teenagers instead of hiring the thousands of out of work journeypeople sitting home waiting for a job.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Austin Polytech’s employer sponsors have a similar outlook towards your school’s students – better to hire them at $ 10/hr than to hire a skilled journeylevel machinist at $ 25.
Of course, the downside of that is, once these young trainees have a few years of experience under their belt and are skilled enough to command a higher wage they are tossed out and replaced by the next generation of young kids
That’s why I’m totally opposed to these youth job training programs – as I said above, those kids need to be on the college prep track, not being prepared for blue collar jobs that alredy have more workers than they do job openings. I’m saying that as somebody who used to coordinate a youth jobs training program in the Bronx, so I’ve seen the results and I know what I’m talking about.
There is an excellent book on the subject, that backs my conclusions up with statistics – it’s called The Job Training Charade by Gordon Lafer [2002 Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York]. Professor Lafer is a member of the faculty at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center, and he’s a very pro labor scholar.
Carl Davidson said
@Greg
APA’s business partners are interested in young SMART workers over young STRONG workers. What wage they can get depends, naturally, on their union contract, or if they don’t have a union, what they’re able to bargain for themselves. But at the moment, the pay scales in question are in the $30-$40 hourly range.
You’re right that the US manufacturing sector will shrink in size, and certainly in the lower skilled or unskilled areas. But with a proper industrial policy, the higher-skilled, high-value-added sector is capable of growing. Whether it will or not is an open question, and part of the battle between the Keynesians and the neoliberals at the top.
Strategically, of course, neither US capitalism nor any other capitalism is going to solve the employment problem. What we can do is fight for partial solutions in the form of radical structural reforms that help enhance the skills and power of the working class, especially where it’s needed most, and use those campaigns as a bridge to a socialist future.
The effort around this school is, as are the battles in Wisconsin and elsewhere today, only one small piece of this bigger puzzle.
jp said
just left a meeting where the usual blather was stated about what the ‘workforce’ really needs are well-rounded, critical-thinking persons – and this is supposed to be the good position.
of course critical thinkers would just tear the system down.
as i said above, we don’t need college graduates necessarily, we need people who learn and can think, and who will therefore insist on ‘from each… to each.’
brecht:
Keep your head!
Your science will be valueless, you’ll find
And learning will be sterile, if inviting
Unless you pledge your intellect to fighting
Against all enemies of all mankind.
Never forget that men like you got hurt
That you might sit here, not the other lot.
And now don’t shut your eyes, and don’t desert
But learn to learn, and try to learn for what.
jp said
i’m sure it’s not the first time on this site, but it’s appropriate here: Praise of Learning by Brecht:
Learn the elementary things!
For those whose time has come
It is never too late!
Learn the ABC. It won’t be enough,
But learn it! Don’t be dismayed by it.
Begin! You must know everything.
You must lake over the leadership.
Learn, man in the asylum!
Learn, man in the prison!
Learn, woman in the kitchen!
Learn sixty year olds!
You must take over the leadership.
Seek out the school, you who are homeless!
Acquire knowledge, you who shiver!
You who are hungry, reach for the book:
it is a weapon.
You must take over the leadership.
Don’t be afraid to ask, comrade!
Don’t be talked into anything.
Check for yourself!
What you do not know yourself
you don’t know.
Scrutinize the bill,
it is you who must pay it.
Put your finger on each item,
ask: how did this get there ?
You must take over the leadership.