Defying the Neoliberal Order:
World Labor Strikes Back
A global overview written on behalf of the Freedom
Socialist Party National Committee, discussed and adopted by the January
1997 FSP Convention
by Andrea Bauer
Overview
No more business as usual!
During the past four years, that message has been sent by workers all
over the world: public servants walking off the job in France and Ontario;
unionists, together with Aborigines and students, marching on Parliament
in Australia; high-paid aerospace workers striking Boeing and low-paid garment
workers suing their bosses in the United States; maquiladora workers organizing
unions in Latin America; anti-privatization bus drivers provoking huge sympathy
walkouts in Denmark; factory hands, teachers, and others protesting some
$9 billion of unpaid wages in Russia; members of illegal unions wildcatting
in China; Hyundai employees battling police in South Korea; strikers demanding
a pro-labor constitution in South Africa; and many, many more.
In the Political Resolution prepared for the 1993 Freedom Socialist Party
convention, we predicted these mounting confrontations between capital and
labor, foreseeing that the fall of the bureaucratized workers states of
the former Soviet bloc would demolish the fragile equilibrium between owners
and wage slaves worldwide.
When we discussed the former USSR and Eastern bloc in 1993, we concluded
that the economic underpinnings that made these countries workers states
-- nationalization of the bulk of the means of production, central planning,
and state monopoly of foreign trade -- were gone, or going fast.
To lose these states to counterrevolution was an immense and tragic defeat.
At the same time, however, the disaster opened up tremendous new opportunities
for the workingclass movement in every corner of the globe. Why? Because
it broke apart (although it did not eliminate) the entrenched Stalinist
bureaucracy that exerted such a backward but potent influence over this
movement for many decades. This development would take the brakes off the
class struggle, we wrote, and so it has.
And the upswing in strikes and anti-austerity activities has been not
only quantitative, but qualitative as well; many of the workers involved
have grown enormously in class consciousness. Employees at the Staley corn-processing
plant in Illinois, for example, were profoundly changed by discovering during
their three-year strike that the injustices they confronted were not unique
or accidental, but part of a systemwide pattern of exploitation.
The momentous potential of these militant campaigns, however, is not
being realized, thanks to the spineless temporizing of status-defending
labor officials. These inveterate compromisers belong to a worldwide club
of misleaders who are linked by treachery and privileges and are personified
first and foremost by the Stalinist bureaucrats referred to above. Trotsky
dubbed them the "middle caste" -- the well-compensated negotiators
between the ruling class and the toiling class.
So crisis continues to define our era: in the first place, the crisis
of the capitalist order, desperately seeking growth at any cost but still
enmeshed in the long wave of recession that began in the early 1970s; and
in the second, the "historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat,"
(1) as Trotsky called it.
The
good news is that the bourgeoisie, trying vainly to remedy
its problems through a frontal assault on mass standards of living, is propelling
the working class onto a course of solving its problems. The bosses' frenzy
is doing nothing less than
sparking the conditions for revolution everywhere.
And foremost among these prerequisites is the emergence of new leaders,
such as the young First Nations radicals shaking up the status quo across
Canada and the fiery immigrant students challenging the hard-right offensive
in California.
Furthermore, the coordinated global attack is provoking an increasingly
coordinated international response, as can be seen in the defense of Cuba
and in the mobilization against corporate mega-exploitation in the maquiladoras,
the export-oriented sweatshops of Latin America.
Extending this internationalism
is crucial to successful resistance.
Capitalism is caught in an organic, irreversible undertow. Its demise
is certain, even though the bosses' media does everything it can to convince
us that we live in the best of all possible worlds at the pinnacle and climax
of history.
It falls to us, as Marxists, to explain that transforming the social
system in order to raise the material and cultural conditions of humanity
is not only a good idea, it's a practical one; that capitalism has a natural
and logical replacement, socialism; and that this new mode of living is
achievable by promoting the leadership of the most oppressed workers, who
are already out in front in the fight for a better existence for all.
Bosses try to manage an unmanageable
crisis on the backs of workers
Many of capitalism's economic engineers openly admit that their train
has jumped the tracks. They acknowledge the reality of a 25-year-old global
recession -- although they may prefer the euphemism "slowdown."
The International Monetary Fund, a kind of Board of Directors for the
biggest world capitalists, is obsessed with ending the long contraction
of the economy through growth -- because only unrelenting expansion can
keep its clientele afloat and capturing fabulous profits. But, contradictorily,
bourgeois economists are also obsessed with holding down the pace of growth,
in order to prevent runaway inflation.
What the financial overseers
cannot admit is that wrack and ruin
is
built into their system. Recession and inflation are the manifestations
of insoluble contradictions; chiefly, the crisis of overproduction.
Why the drive for constant growth and rising
profits can end only in crash
In Ernest Mandel's
Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, he
explains the startling phenomenon of "too many goods":
"Capitalist economic crises ... are not crises of
scarcity,
like all pre-capitalist crises; they are crises of
overproduction.
The unemployed die of hunger not because there is too little to eat but
because there is relatively too great a supply of foodstuffs.
"At first sight the thing seems incomprehensible... But the mechanism
of the capitalist system makes this seeming paradox understandable. Goods
which do not find buyers not only do not realize their surplus-value but
they do not even return their invested capital [i.e., not only fail to produce
a profit, but do not even cover costs]. The slump in sales therefore forces
businessmen to suspend their operations [and] lay off their workers. And
since laid-off workers have no reserves ... unemployment obviously condemns
them to the starkest poverty and precisely because the relative abundance
of goods has resulted in a slump in sales."
Overproduction and its consequence, recession, are inevitable features
of anarchic and competitive capitalism, in which each owner is compelled
to expand and to amass ever greater profits, or die. The capacity for infinite
expansion is
required, but
impossible -- the market is finite.
In the ceaseless search to evade this dilemma,
military spending
became an indispensable prop to keep the U.S. and world economies percolating.
The government is the only buyer for most armaments. So permanent arms spending
is grossly inflationary -- because to sustain it, the government is forced
to borrow heavily from the banks, or simply print more money, or both.
This results in the amount of money in circulation increasing out of
proportion to the amount of goods that are salable and consumable on the
regular market -- or, as it's often put, too much money chasing too few
goods.
(2) This "funny money" becomes
worth less, and its depreciation is reflected in high prices and a lowering
of real wages.
Worry over inflation is what causes the stock market to react so negatively
when unemployment figures dip. Capitalists say they fear that if "too
many" people are employed, workers will set off an inflationary spiral
by demanding better wages. But this argument is bogus. Rising prices continue
to outstrip any increases in wages; low levels of inflation persist even
when real wages fall.
(3) It is government deficit
spending, especially for military production, that is to blame for inflation.
No matter how futile their mission, the capitalists cannot stop seeking
a way to create the miracle of inflation-free expansion. Their current strategy
is the nasty bag of tricks called neoliberalism -- defined by Subcomandante
Marcos of Mexico's Zapatistas as "a crisis elevated to a global economic
system."
(4)
Neoliberalism: The rich get richer through "free
trade" and privatization
Neoliberalism gets its nice-sounding name because it is designed to spur
growth by "liberalizing" trade -- opening every pocket of the
world to imperialist penetration, particularly protectionist or formerly
protectionist markets like those of Japan and Mexico.
Countries such as these are coerced into "reforms" or "Structural
Adjustment Programs" that ban or lower tariffs, deregulate the economy,
and ease restrictions on foreign investment. The devastating impact on developing
and Third World countries can be seen in the near-meltdown of Mexico's economy
in 1994.
Eliminating all barriers to trade also entails the wholesale privatization
of nationalized industry and services, which cancels one of the few means
by which less advanced countries can strengthen their economies. Further,
free trade requires "labor market flexibility" -- meaning the
willingness of workers to take any job, at any wage, if they want to avoid
membership in the swelling ranks of the "structurally" unemployed.
To help cultivate this flexibility, the IMF advises lowering the minimum
wage in those European countries where it is relatively high. And as a method
of reducing unemployment, it suggests reducing benefits!
(5)
Neoliberalism, then, means the imperialists gang up in trade blocs --
such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, European Union, Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation, and new World Trade Organization -- to fuel expansion
by intensifying both the super-exploitation of the less-industrialized countries
and the domestic exploitation of each working class. It promises a return
to Dickensian social conditions that make neoliberalism truly the fast track
to neo-barbarism.
As the bosses press forward with neoliberalism, the U.S. media boasts
that the Holy Grail of steady, noninflationary growth has been attained.
Nearly every article on this subject, however, ends with an edgy caveat
that prospects may not be as bright as they appear.
And with good reason. Attempting to resolve the contradictions of capitalism
by driving down wages and benefits can only exacerbate the bedrock problems,
since workers' purchasing power then takes a nose dive as well. Unfortunately
for everybody concerned, however, the bosses have no other option -- except
a cataclysm such as another world war, which would present capital with
reconstruction opportunities on a grand scale.
Although that horrible eventuality is not an immediate prospect, the
tensions that could lead to it are certainly present.
Trade rifts: no harmony among thieves
In Japan, for example, U.S. capitalists are unhappy with the pace of
deprotectionist reform. The New York Times has advocated that the U.S. go
beyond economic intimidation to a warning of military retaliation, in the
form of revoking long-standing U.S. guarantees to protect Japan from armed
threat.
(6) Canada, the European Union, and U.S.
allies in Latin America, meanwhile, are disgruntled with high-handed U.S.
dictates to them regarding trade with Cuba, China, Iran, and Libya. And
divergent national interests, particularly between France and Germany, are
making the road to a truly united European community a rocky one indeed.
Economic tensions always hold the threat of developing into shooting
wars, and localized wars always carry the danger of becoming global conflagrations.
In 1991, the U.S. managed to forge nearly unanimous imperialist support
for its inhuman blitzkrieg against Iraq, which kept the carnage from spreading
outward. But this will not always be the case, because such conflicts offer
capitalist nations desperate for new markets and spheres of influence the
opportunity to try to redivide the world more favorably.
The talk today is all about mutually beneficial partnerships and cooperative
multilateralism, but let there be no mistake: the USA is adamantly first
among equals, with the most sabers to rattle and capital to invest. And
neoliberalism is designed above all to advance the interests of U.S.-based
corporations.
Ruling class creates climate for
spread of rightwing toxins
While neoliberalism has not succeeded in stabilizing the capitalist system,
it has succeeded in increasing global poverty, hardship, and degradation
of the environment.
In the name of European unity, governments there are waging a wholesale
offensive against labor meant to boost productivity, reduce wages, cut social
benefits, and privatize public services -- in effect, to dismantle the welfare
state.
In Australia, the "social accord" existing among labor bureaucrats,
the bosses, and the government had already been used to launch a similar
program of privatization, layoffs, wage decreases, speedups, slashes in
social services, and higher fees for students. Now, the new conservative
regime has openly targeted the trade-union leadership for extinction.
In Canada, unemployment is rising while social-service gains won in the
1970s and 1980s are being rolled back. Massive budget cuts spell anxiety
and misery for women, people of color, people with AIDS, workers needing
training or retraining, elders, and young people.
In Mexico, the standard of living for the majority is now as low as it
was before World War II.
(7) In Africa, average
incomes have fallen every year since 1989.
(8)
In the U.S., the scandalous gap between rich and poor is the widest of
any major industrialized nation.
(9) Job security
is nonexistent, while corporate profits and the salaries of CEOs inebriated
with downsizing are at an all-time high. Here as elsewhere, economic growth
no longer spurs job creation; it occurs at the
expense of employment.
U.S. cities and states with large concentrations of underpaid immigrant
workers are coming more and more to resemble the Third World countries many
of these newcomers left in desperation. In El Monte, California, from 1989
until 1995, sweatshop owners imprisoned more than 80 seamstresses from Thailand
in a guarded work complex surrounded by barbed wire and a spiked fence.
Similar circumstances for undocumented Chinese workers in New York came
to light when the ship called Golden Venture ran aground with its smuggled
human cargo in 1993.
To divert the blame for capitalism's abuses against workers and the middle
class, its politicians and hired guns are inveighing against immigrants,
"welfare deadbeats," greedy unions, retired elders bleeding Social
Security dry, dope-smoking teenagers, spreaders of immorality, and all the
usual suspects. They hope their message of racism, sexism, homophobia, and
foreigner-bashing will be embraced by angry white male workers dislocated
by the collapse of blue-collar industries -- 1.4 million jobs in U.S. manufacturing
vanished between 1978 and 1990
(10) -- and middle-management
purges. Pitched battles over laws dealing with immigration, affirmative
action, abortion, and gay rights are the fruits of this campaign of polarization.
But the bourgeoisie is not relying only on its ideological campaign to
guarantee the success of its regime of austerity and lowered expectations.
The owning class is enforcing it by taking away broad and fundamental civil
liberties (as through supposed anti-terrorism measures) and by jacking up
police numbers, police powers, and rates of imprisonment. This climate is
a breeding ground for Nazism; white-supremacist, anti-Semitic far-right
groups are trying to take advantage of it to boost recruitment.
The new fascists are aided and abetted in this quest by the pathetic
caliber of what passes for bourgeois democratic leadership these days. Figures
like Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin seem more suited to life as clowns in
a traveling circus than as preeminent statesmen. Neither politicos nor corporate
whiz kids have solutions for the predicaments we are in; their positions
and policy prescriptions flip-flop as regularly as the romantic alliances
of characters on a TV soap opera.
The leadership vacuum creates the danger of another McCarthy era, or
a Bonapartist climb to power by a strong-man promising to stand above the
conflicts tearing society. To protect the rights of all will require unhesitating
defense of the rights of the first, most vulnerable victims of the anti-democratic
siege.
Renaissance of revolt in the capitalist
countries
Amid all this chaos and peril, the exciting and distinctive feature of
the past four years is how strongly working women and men of all colors,
indigenous people, and youth are combating the bosses' reactionary push.
When your back is against the wall, it seems, the fight-or-flight reflex
gives you only one option.
In the USA: Main Street vs. Wall Street
During the regressive 1980s, women and workers of color in low-paid jobs
in the U.S. continued to staff organizing drives and walk picket lines.
And they still do -- but in the 1990s, they are not alone. Their example
has been followed by hard hats in the auto industry; "middle Americans"
working for Staley and Firestone and Caterpillar; Boeing veterans; newspaper
workers in San Francisco, New York, and Detroit; and a plethora of other
fed-up and pissed-off workers of all kinds.
The growing radicalization engendered by these determined strikes comes
through like a laser beam in the final newsletter of the locked-out Staley
workers in Illinois: "We can only hope that the painful lessons of
the 'war on the workers' here ... become part of the rebirth of a militant
labor movement in this country... We need a 'fist' clenched in solidarity
and, like our French union sisters and brothers, strategically ready to
come down on those out to destroy us!"
Sentiment like this has led to a dramatic and long-overdue development
on the U.S. scene. A Labor Party, the independent political vehicle that
workers need so acutely and that FSP has championed for decades, has been
formed.
The utter disgust with the Republican and Democratic parties that is
manifest today, plus longtime pressure from militants in the labor movement,
drove a section of union officialdom to create Labor Party Advocates. This
group eventually culminated in June 1996 in a Labor Party (LP) founding
convention, which was run relatively democratically and free from redbaiting.
Nonetheless, the convention was dominated by the biggest unions present,
the ones with leadership most afraid of antagonizing the heads of the AFL-CIO
by making a clean break with the Democrats. Money was a factor: the LP is
currently being maintained from the general funds of supporting unions,
funds which can't be used to back candidates. Trying to gain access to union
political-action money, which can be put toward campaigns, would force the
AFL-CIO to choose between Democrats and Labor Party candidates.
Consequently, the Labor Party put off running candidates for at least
two years.
Despite the LP's self-imposed (and possibly fatal) handicaps, its formation
marks a huge leap ahead for U.S. workers and oppressed people -- and shows
the loosening of the conservatizing grip of Stalinism over the labor movement.
Non-Stalinist socialists, especially Trotskyists, are participating significantly
in the LP.
The establishment of the LP reflects a growing sophistication and progressiveness
on the part of the U.S. workers' movement. Major unions and federations,
recognizing that bread-and-butter questions are not the only survival issues
for the workforce majority, now adopt positions supporting such things as
affirmative action and immigrant rights.
The union movement has been pushed in this direction by women, people
of color, immigrants, lesbians and gays, Native people, and youth, both
inside and outside its ranks, who are in the streets challenging the right
wing and its anti-labor, multireactionary program. If the Labor Party is
to live up to its potential, these are the movers and shakers who must be
recruited to it. The FSP sees this as the top priority in our LP work, which
nearly every U.S. branch is involved in.
It is becoming clearer every day that immigrant workers, most of them
women of color, are putting the backbone in the labor movement -- especially
in California, where the racist, xenophobic backlash is most concentrated.
In April 1996, Asian immigrant women scored a moralizing victory against
the Jessica McClintock company, a manufacturer of upscale clothing, winning
back wages for employees who went unpaid when a subcontractor for McClintock
declared bankruptcy. They also won an education fund and scholarships for
garment workers, a campaign informing workers of their rights, and a free
hot-line in English and Cantonese for reporting illegal job conditions.
Students of color at high schools and colleges, meanwhile, have been
in the forefront of battles opposing California's anti-immigrant Proposition
187 and its "Civil Rights Initiative" against affirmative action.
The FSP can take pride in its leadership role in both these campaigns.
The party has also been central to the success of two militant united
fronts that deserve to be models for counter-mobilizing against any of the
right wing's schemes: anti-Nazi efforts that have taken the wind out of
the sails of would-be stormtroopers in three countries; and Bigot Buster
campaigns against anti-gay initiatives in Washington and Oregon.
In a climate in which the dominant class stigmatizes anyone not embracing
its so-called "family values," lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and
transgenders, particularly queers of color, have come in for increased bashing,
both physical and political. At the same time, contradictorily, the tenacious
movement for gay civil rights is having a strong impact on public consciousness
and the cultural scene. Whatever the arena, the FSP has been there, offering
a class analysis to a group of oppressed people who have always posed an
automatic threat to the patriarchal nuclear family and the system it serves.
Another instance of our effective broad-based organizing is our support
of gay, radical, and employee rights in Sandy Nelson's lawsuit against The
News Tribune. This widely watched case is part of a national trend toward
more criticism by journalists of publisher restrictions on their free speech
and, ultimately, a free press.
The new combativeness of U.S. workers, demonstrated by everyone from
reporters to seamstresses, is a boon for workers all over -- because without
revolution in the nerve center of imperialism, revolutions elsewhere face
a struggle of Himalayan proportions.
Flash points from British Columbia to Bonn
Around the globe, people are demonstrating their unwillingness to go
along with NAFTA-ization and the rest of the reactionary rulingclass program.
In Canada, greater numbers of people are getting involved in radical
organizations, unions, and the social-democratic New Democratic Party. Union
demands here, too, are encompassing all sorts of social problems; multi-issue
politics have become the norm in both the union and other mass movements.
Striking militancy is manifested in the First Nations movement, where young
warriors have taken the lead in adopting confrontational tactics to fight
land grabs.
In Australia, also, indigenous people are militantly defending their
territorial rights and culture. They are among the many groups under fire
from the new Howard government, whose heavy-handedness is already calling
forth a surge of opposition on many fronts.
In Mexico, the signing of NAFTA set off an armed revolt for Indian land
rights that galvanized a national movement in support of democracy and the
peasants of Chiapas, plus a furor over the legitimacy of the long-ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
In Mexico and regions to the south, organizing by women is a high point,
one that is changing the face of the labor movement, left groups, and national
liberation struggles. Courageous drives to establish unions in the maquiladoras,
despite ugly employer violence, are bringing together women workers and
labor activists from Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Guatemala, and other Latin
American countries. And the link between defense of labor and defense of
the environment is yet another strength of Latin American politics.
European resistance to the bosses' offensive is red-hot. This was most
vividly demonstrated in the November-December 1995 strike by public-sector
workers in France, whose motto was "tous ensemble": all together.
Only 10 percent of French workers are unionized, but both the organized
and unorganized walked out, bringing the country to a standstill for three
weeks. The strike has inspired workers worldwide because of its radicalism
and because it was run by the rank and file, who met every day in general
assemblies.
(11)
Across the channel in England, National Union of Mineworkers President
Arthur Scargill and other labor leaders have quit the moribund Labour Party
to form the
Socialist Labour Party.
And in Germany, hundreds of thousands of workers, students, and activists
flowed into Bonn by bus and train on June 15, 1996, to demonstrate against
government plans to eviscerate public spending and social benefits. It was
Germany's largest union rally since World War II.
Decades of hard-won gains threatened in
Canada
In Canada, vast social gains won after World War II -- including universal,
low-cost medical care, public assistance and pension programs, and nationalization
of many industries -- are being dismantled. Canadians are working harder
and longer, and rising unemployment is creating a permanent underclass.
The new austerity measures are due to economic culprits like the North
American Free Trade Agreement and APEC. They are being imposed in many
cases by Canada's backsliding labor party, the New Democratic Party.
But the bright side is that workers increasingly see social issues as
labor movement issues, and immigrants, youth, women, queers, Québécois,
and Natives are up in arms -- sometimes literally. A general strike shut
down Toronto in October 1996; First Nations warriors have faced off against
the police and military over land claims; and students have closed universities
to protest unrelenting tuition increases. In each of these struggles, dynamic
new leaders are emerging. Needed now: the forging of an anti-capitalist
program for the rising movement.
Sharp social divisions swamp Australian
"Accord"
As international economic competition intensifies, a gentlemanly "Social
Accord" forged among the heads of government, business, and unions
in Australia has given way to a rapid, full-scale attack on living standards
and social conditions. With Prime Minister John Howard of the misnamed
Liberal Party at the helm, drastic budget cuts, unionbusting, and assaults
on Aboriginal rights are the order of the day.
Australians are organizing militant campaigns against a growing list
of outrages, including school closures, police harassment against sexual
minorities, and privatization. In August 1996, enraged workers and Aborigines
seized international attention by storming Parliament House in Canberra,
in a mobilization notable for its unprecedented size, multiracial nature,
multi-issue demands, and repudiation of the conservatism of union officialdom.
In Australia, as elsewhere, capitalism in its terminal stages is ugly
and brutal -- but resistance to it is proving to be beautiful indeed.
The battle is joined
The outcome of all these recent labor confrontations has been mixed.
In a minority of cases, workers have emerged from battle in worse shape,
objectively, than they went in -- the locked-out workers and strikers in
Illinois are one instance. But in most instances -- Ontario, Boeing, France
-- strikers wrested significant concessions from government or employers,
even though they failed to change their basic course.
Most important, the strikers themselves -- win, lose, or draw -- testify
to a new level of class consciousness and confidence in their own power.
Said a train conductor returning to work in France, "Now the bosses
know they'll get a fight every step of the way."
The middle caste:
headless horseman still in the saddle
The fact that upsurges in the industrialized and neocolonial world haven't
resulted in decisive victories can be blamed on the middle caste.
The role of the middle caste is to dilute class conflict while pretending
to represent the victims of class carnage. The Stalinist bureaucracy of
the former Soviet Union gave the middle caste enormous influence. Around
the world, Communist Party members and sympathizers loyal to the degenerated
USSR spread regressive and chauvinist ideas through the working class like
a virus. They affected even proudly anti-communist milieus like that of
U.S. labor bureaucrats, whose vested interest in maintaining the status
quo makes the class-collaborationist policies of Stalinism a natural fit.
For many decades, the Stalinized Soviet Union operated more or less as
the middle caste's command post. Eurocommunism -- an attempt to create "communism
with a human face" -- seriously challenged this function before the
fall of the Soviet Union removed it entirely. (Eurocommunism was the bridge
that a number of revolutionaries traveled to make the short trip from Stalinism
to the reformist social democracy.) Although the middle caste has lost its
long-standing operational headquarters, however, it is still very much on
the scene.
In the U.S., the common feature of all movement bureaucrats is their
deathless allegiance to the Democratic Party. Rallies for such issues as
affirmative action and gay pride are routinely turned into Democratic Party
recruiting drives, where radical speakers are pointedly uninvited, or are
actively censored, because they are likely to be critical of the worse-than-useless
Democrats.
A prime example of this was the April 14, 1996 March to Fight the Right
put together by the National Organization for Women in San Francisco. Asian
American poet and FSP and Radical Women leader Nellie Wong was prevented
from speaking, as was a Chicana ACT-UP member. Responding to this insult
to feminist radicals of color, FSP and RW engaged NOW in a series of written
and oral discussions about not only their racist, anti-Red, undemocratic
behavior, but also the fundamental policy underlying it: Women must not
be allowed to escape from the Democratic Party.
Black middle-casters like Louis Farrakhan, meanwhile, are trying to channel
the anger of millions of African Americans against the system into a commitment
by Black men to "take personal responsibility" for the social
morass dragging down them and their sisters. Some misleaders explicitly
argue that Black people's interests would be served by a new segregation.
These cultural nationalists -- people who exalt cultural/racial solidarity
over class solidarity -- add fuel to the establishment line that what's
igniting in the U.S. is not a class war but a race war. The alternative
to their poisonous politics is revolutionary integration, which points out
the liberating and essential role that increasing integration has played
in bringing the working class together and strengthening it in its fight
against the bosses.
The section of the middle caste that we are
not hearing much from
these days, as an organized force, is the Stalinist Left that tried to retrench
in the Committees of Correspondence, a group whose numbers, morale, and
activities are on the wane. The same is true for other organizations with
roots in the Communist Party and its environs. And the CP USA itself has
degenerated so severely that it did not even pretend to run its own candidate
in the 1996 presidential election, instead urging votes for Clinton.
Class struggle in the realm of ideas
Stalinist
concepts, however -- like the possibility of revolutionary
or socialist states coexisting peacefully with dominant capitalism -- still
maintain a firm grip on the middle caste globally.
In South Africa, the ANC is now the ruling regime, attempting to find
compromises between the goals of the revolution and the dictates of imperialism
-- an impossible task. In Ireland, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams almost seems
to relish his tightrope act, balanced between posing as Bill Clinton's respectable
best buddy on the one hand and a dangerous firebrand on the other. In the
Middle East, after six years of the heroic Intifada, Yasir Arafat and the
Israeli ruling class concluded peace accords recognizing the Zionist state's
legitimacy -- but not the Palestinian right to self-determination.
Whether in or out of power, the middle caste continues to be the arbitrator
between capital and labor around the globe. It justifies its class-collaborationist
maneuvering to its beleaguered constituencies by invoking pragmatism: "This
is the best deal we can get."
Shoring up the middle caste is an academic fad called
post-modernism.
As its name implies, post-modernism is a reaction to modernism -- the perspective
arising out of the 17th century European Enlightenment that just as people
can come to understand and affect the natural world, they can come to understand
and control the operations of society. Post-modernism rejects the idea that
there are any universal social laws regulating our relationships. It rejects
cause and effect on any large scale and sees the basic functioning of society
as random.
(12)
Subjective and idealist, post-modernism scoffs at what it calls "meta-narratives"
-- coherent and comprehensive analyses of what makes the world go 'round.
Marxism, of course, falls into this category, and is derided as mechanistic
and deterministic.
What post-modernism boils down to in politics -- in the feminist movement,
for instance -- is the belief that there is no common oppression that all
women face; no common thread binding them together; and thus no organic
commonality between a woman toiling as an "illegal" garment worker
in a basement in New York City and a lesbian environmental activist protesting
French nuclear testing in a Greenpeace boat in the Pacific. Post-modernism
is a
liberal, do-your-own-thing ideology perfectly tailored for bureaucrats
who want to pursue the agenda of middle-class women, or Blacks, or whomever,
and let everybody else go hang.
Providing ideological aid and comfort to the overseers of unstable capitalism,
post-modernism offers the politics of cynicism, pragmatism, and frag- mentation.
The continuing fight for the workers states
The global overlords, however, need material help, not just moral support.
At the start of the 1990s, many of them were looking East for salvation.
Communism was supposed to be dead, and from its ashes would arise a beautiful
capitalist phoenix, bringing prosperity to the commodity-deprived Soviet
masses and fast and furious profits to visionary investors.
But, instead, it is the delusionary ambitions of the capitalists that
have turned to ashes. Even though the workers states had been wrenched far
off the course of socialism by usurper bureaucracies, fundamental achievements
of the revolution were still in place -- including the people's expectation
of basic material security and general social equality. Because of this
culture, political resistance prevented or delayed many large-scale privatizations
and the adoption of various legal measures needed to reassure nervous investors.
This is especially true in Russia, which exists in an unmanageable twilight
sphere between two wholly opposite systems.
The former workers states are now seen largely not as a tremendous opportunity
for the capitalists, but a vexing problem and burden.
And the hopes that citizens of these states had for increased democracy
and prosperity have turned to ashes as well. Many of them, like people in
the rest of the world, had bought the lie (promoted by both Stalin and the
capitalists) that Stalinism is the same thing as Leninism. They equated
"socialism" with giving up individual liberties and consumer goods,
and hoped that a change in the system would bring better times and better
things.
Disenchantment set in early and is being expressed forcefully. Strikes
are commonplace. But at present, the most dramatic development is that former
Communist Party members are making great electoral strides -- a process
kicked off in Poland in 1993. Communists have returned to power in Bulgaria,
Hungary, and most of the 15 former Soviet republics. Albania's ex-Communists
were kept from achieving the same feat only by vote fraud. And Russia's
Communists, although they did not unseat Boris Yeltsin, are also making
a comeback.
Most of these candidates are not promoting a socialist program. Many
are unapologetic defenders of Stalin and his regime, and many have formed
blocs with ultranationalists. They are clearly far from the answer to the
region's agonizing crisis; the fact that they are getting votes, however,
is positive in that it is a sign of massive, active discontent over capitalism's
return.
The status of the Soviet bloc is no less volatile and transitional than
when we analyzed it three years ago; its story is still unfolding. The counterrevolution,
which advanced by taking advantage of the lack of a clear-cut battle between
classes, is anything but consolidated.
In China, too, world capitalism's rush to re-exploit a lost market --
in this case, of a billion people -- is being slowed by workers' opposition
to surrendering revolutionary gains.
Cuba, meanwhile, is holding out against incredible pressure and even
gathering new support. Its fight to keep the socialist banner aloft, however,
is hampered because its leadership, too, is under the influence of Stalinism.
However, Cuba's leaders appear to be breaking with Stalinist philosophy
in some important areas; the abrupt termination of Cuba's close economic
and political relationship with the USSR has provoked crisis, certainly,
but seems also to have opened up new possibilities. For example, the government
is beginning to allow more participation by workers in decision-making and
is reversing its poor past practice in the area of lesbian/gay rights.
On the front of internationalism, Cuba has a wildly mixed record that
includes some of the most principled solidarity ever extended to struggling
revolutions and some awful copouts and betrayals. Undoubtedly, Cuba's economic
turmoil now makes it hard to extend concrete support to revolts abroad.
However, Cuba's refusal to solidarize with these uprisings, such as in Mexico,
is based on the false hope that containment of revolution elsewhere will
ease the trade embargo and relieve imperialist pressure to overthrow Castro.
Havana still adheres to the impossible premise, derived from Stalin, that
socialism can be built on one island.
In the end, however, Cuba remains the closest thing to socialism on the
planet -- a beacon for workers worldwide and a rallying point for the world
Left. And were Castro to issue a call for the international regroupment
of scattered revolutionary forces, it would strengthen both the defense
of Cuba and the prospects for global socialism.
In Russia, privatization breeds chaos
and revolt
The attempt to reimpose capitalism in Russia has brought total chaos,
and sometimes paralysis, to the economy, where 60 percent of the output
is now engendered by the private sector.
The government owes workers $9 billion in unpaid wages, for example,
a debt that grows by nearly 20 percent every month. Inflation has dropped
from the 2,000 percent annually it reached four years ago, but still runs
at a wicked 22 percent. Result: a general catastrophe, in which the process
of privatization has ground to a halt.
The effect on the people is not just economic, but social, with women
hit the hardest in all spheres. Not only are women the majority of the
vast unemployed population, but they are suffering huge reverses to their
rights.
Russians are not taking this lying down. A partial snapshot of just
the month of December 1996 shows a nationwide strike by the Coal Workers
Union involving 400,000 miners, a hunger strike and occupation of the control
room of a St. Petersburg nuclear power plant by employees, and strikes
or protests by more than 90,000 teachers in 27 regions.
Russian workers, like their sisters and brothers worldwide, are in open
revolt to a degree not seen for many decades.
Nationalism and war: the fruits of triumphant
capitalism
One of the consequences of the dismemberment of the Soviet and Yugoslav
workers states was the bloody renewal of nationalist strife. Capitalism
is built on division -- nationalism, competition, war, sexism, racism --
and it is anarchic. It was inevitable, therefore, that its reimposition
would bring with it an antagonistic, chaotic system of relationships to
replace the collectivist mores and planning that existed before. The only
possible solution to the fratricidal combat occurring in places such as
Chechnya and the Balkans, therefore, is resocialization.
Elsewhere, nationalism and nationalist war are usually legacies of colonialism
or neocolonialism, as in countries in Africa; or a distorted response to
the imperialist rampage, as with Arab fundamentalism in the Middle East;
or both.
The opposite of war is supposed to be peace, but the proliferating "peace
talks" and "peace accords" like those in the Middle East
and Ireland have little to do with actual resolution of conflict. No longer
do peace settlements happen
after wars are concluded. Instead, they
occur beforehand -- a sign of the uneasy stalemate between labor and capital,
and of the eagerness of the middle caste to cut a deal rather than take
a stand.
But there is another side to the coin; these pacts are also acknowledgments
of the power of anti-imperialist struggles and expressions of how desperately
the much-abused citizens of the world need peace.
The shell-shocked residents of what used to be Yugoslavia are as appalled
and amazed by the sudden turning of neighbor against neighbor as by anything
else that has happened to them. Today's civil wars and imperialist wars
alike lend a fresh urgency to the fundamental choice facing humankind: forward
to socialism or backward to barbarism. As playwright George Bernard Shaw
put it, "Socialism or smash."
Crisis and opportunity for the Trotskyist
movement
As we said in our last Political Resolution, the breakup of the Stalinist
workers states and subsequent capitalist rapaciousness have proved more
than ever the validity of the ideas of Trotskyism -- among them permanent
revolution, the impossibility of socialism in one country, the necessity
for leadership by the most oppressed, and the centrality of revolution in
the U.S. to world revolution. The Stalinist fictions of the possibility
of socialism in one country and the necessity for revolution in rigid stages
have been discredited more thoroughly than ever before.
Now is a time of great opportunity for Trotskyists and the building of
Trotskyist parties. Many Trotskyists recognize this and are at the center
of much of the vitality in the labor and social movements.
Yet, in documents leading up to the 14th World Congress of the Fourth
International (FI) in June 1995, the majority of this body's leaders showed
that they had become pessimistic about the prospects for revolution and
about their own front-line role. The essence of their message was that Trotskyism
had lost its relevance. Where did all this liquidationism come from?
First off, it came from a difficulty in seeing phenomena dialectically,
getting under the surface of things. These longtime leaders were demoralized
by current events -- but the weighty French strikes were just a few months
ahead. In the past, this sort of disorientation has led the International
into opportunism, a search for short cuts and quick fixes at the expense
of principles.
For example, the FI refused to confront the radical-laborite Socialist
Workers Party, for many decades the biggest (and richest) of its sections,
when the SWP dropped central Trotskyist ideas from its program and undemocratically
expelled dissenting members. The International has also given uncritical
support to radical or nationalist movements at the expense of revolutionary
principles and revolutionary lives. It handed over information about Latin
American Trotskyists to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which proceeded
to arrest, torture, and expel these socialists. And it cheered Khomeini
in Iran, even while he was mercilessly persecuting leftists and drastically
proscribing the rights of women.
The FI's insensibility to the importance of feminism has caused it critical
damage. Its posture is changing, however, due to the efforts of women within
its ranks. The International now embraces feminism in its program and it
has a women's caucus, which was previously
verboten. These welcome,
long overdue developments give feminists a much augmented opportunity to
bring to the FI characteristics that will be crucial to its rejuvenation:
the understanding of the role of the most oppressed to class struggle; and
sheer, unstoppable perseverance.
Labor and all the downtrodden are on the move, but they are crying out
for uncorrupted, visionary leadership. The bottom line is that world revolution
needs Trotskyism -- and, specifically, Trotskyist
parties -- to succeed.
The FSP, therefore, should redouble our efforts to become part of the Fourth
International in order to help the FI live up to its unique destiny.
Feminism: global antidote
Just as the women of the world are the hope of the Fourth International,
they are the hope of the working class; it is feminism that will ultimately
unite and revolutionize the class. Women -- and especially women of color
-- have in abundance the requisite willingness to take on both the middle
caste and the bosses, because their need for radical change is so burning
that nothing else will do. Black lesbians and feminists, for example, are
continually challenging the anti-gay, anti-female, anti-Semitic, etc. politics
of the cultural nationalists.
Women are masters of the art of identifying allies and building bridges.
In fact, scientists are beginning to recognize that this is a gift they
bring to the species. They are finding that cooperation, not competition,
is the driving force behind much of human evolution, and that it is women,
in their social roles as mothers and caregivers, who are responsible for
hard-wiring this trait into our fabric.
(13)
Women have long been the glue that holds almost every progressive movement
and left organization together. In the past, they were usually pushed into
the background. Now, however, that is much less true. Women stepped into
the foreground in a big way with the 1995 Beijing women's conferences, governmental
and non-governmental, which shone a bright light on women's issues, capabilities,
and interrelationships.
The thrilling internationalism that was on display in Beijing is a growing
fact of life in heavily industrialized countries like the U.S., where female
immigrants are not only reinvigorating the labor movement, but redefining
and broadening what feminism is all about as well.
Meanwhile, women's objective position in society is what impels them
to become radical leaders. Of the globe's 1.3 billion people living in poverty
-- a horrific statistic in and of itself -- 70 per-cent are women. In Japan,
women earn less than
half of what men are paid, and make up merely
six percent of the parliament and two percent of the Cabinet. Around the
world, women make up only 10 percent of legislative representatives and
six percent of Cabinet members.
(14)
These are the conditions that create radical leaders.
Role of the FSP:
the iron is hot, and it's time to strike
World labor is in ferment, and the FSP, unlike most left groups, can
say we saw it coming. For this, we credit our Marxist feminism and integrationism.
But do we want to be the sole proprietor of this marvelous socialist
program forever? Of course not! We want these concepts to become household
words.
Revolutionary ideas that work are the crucial tools that humanity
needs to pull itself out of the capitalist quagmire -- hence, we must share
our ideological wealth. This is not elitism, of which vanguard parties are
so often, and so stridently, accused. It is a privilege for us to undertake
this, it's true; but it is also a deep and inescapable responsibility.
The FSP's top priority, therefore, is to get out our distinctive and
essential positions on everything from the leadership of the most oppressed
to the continuing nature of the revolution in China. How do we do this?
Publish, publish, publish! We need to bring out more books and documents
through Red Letter Press, step up the circulation of all our publications,
and take advantage of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Publications are not the only means for us to broadcast our program,
of course. We should also pursue the following:
- Push for revolutionary regroupment; find a road into the Fourth International
by reaching out all across the globe to Marxists, especially women, who
share our belief in the potential of the Fourth International to be a serious,
democratic, coordinating body for world revolution, and who want to redirect
it to that purpose.
- Run candidates independently, or by working in the Labor Party, or
in coalition with other radicals. Every FSP branch should take advantage
of the singular agitational and educational opportunities that the electoral
arena presents.
Another set of tasks is dictated for the party by rightwing reaction
and counterrevolution. These include:
- Build united fronts to defend the workers who are first to bear the
brunt of austerity and scapegoating.
- Defend the current and former workers states against capitalist assault
and encroachment. Help Radical Women mount a super-successful feminist
brigade to Cuba.
- Win the Sandy Nelson case and defend the rights of all workers to free
speech. Expose the corporate media, with its deceitful ideology of "objectivity,"
as a dangerous threat to all democratic rights.
To tackle all of these activities means that we must grow; we must build
on recent successes in attracting new members and stepping up our fundraising.
It takes people and it takes
money to make our politics come alive
in the world. Fortunately, these ambitious projects are themselves open
doors through which we can recruit from a working class becoming more savvy
and combative every day.
What the FSP has to offer this forward-moving class is Trotskyist feminism.
This is what gives us our vibrancy, our ability to stick it out through
thick and thin, our high morale, and our confidence in the capacity of the
world proletariat to make revolution.
Our optimism is the result of 30 years of putting our program into practice
in hard-fought struggles in every movement. Based on theory, history, and
direct experience, we know with certainty that workers can surmount the
divisions of gender, race, sexuality, age, and nationality to unite as a
class -- and that when they do, they are unstoppable. ¡Venceremos!
Notes to the text
1. Leon Trotsky, "The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks
of the Fourth International," The Transitional Program for Socialist
Revolution, Pathfinder Press.
2. Guerry Hoddersen and Clara Fraser, "Towards the '90s:
Approaching the Final Conflict,"
Freedom Socialist, Vol. 11
No. 3 (June-Aug. 1989); Murry Weiss, Sam Deaderick, and Clara Fraser, "The
Precarious '80s: Crisis and Opportunity,"
Freedom Socialist,
Vol. 8 No. 1 (Fall 1982).
3. David Kameras, "Jobless Rate Steady at 6.1 Percent,"
"Inflation Rate Rises Slightly in August,"
AFL-CIO News,
Sept. 19, 1994.
4. From an address by Marcos in
Canadian Dimension, July-August
1996.
5. MF, "Industrial Countries: Using the Recovery Wisely,"
World Economic Outlook, Oct. 1994.
6. David E. Sanger, "The Corrosion at the Core of Pax Pacifica,"
New York Times, May 14, 1995.
7. From an interview with Ernest Mandel in
International Viewpoint,
May 15, 1995.
8. MF, "Why Are Some Developing Countries Failing to Catch
Up?,"
World Economic Outlook, May 1994.
9. Keith Bradsher, "Widest Gap in Incomes? Research Points
to U.S.,"
New York Times, Oct. 27, 1995.
10. Ethan B. Kapstein, "Workers and the World Economy,"
Foreign Affairs, May/June 1996.
11. Mia Butzbaugh, "How Daily 'General Assemblies' Kept Rank
and File in Control of French Strikes,"
Labor Notes, Feb. 1996.
12. Lisa Macdonald, "The Politics of Post-modernism,"
Green Left (Australia), April 20, 1994.
13. Natalie Angier, "Illuminating How Bodies Are Built for
Sociability,"
New York Times, April 30, 1996.
14. Doug Mellgren, "Most Women Overworked, Underpaid,"
Seattle Times, Aug. 17, 1995.
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