Ours is a political struggle to raise consciousness that workers need to organize as a class to take political power

....Ron Poulsen, from Sydney, Australia, explained that communism is not an ideology or a set of ideas dreamed up in an ivory tower, but a line of march for the working class. “It’s based on the generalized lessons of more than a century and a half of the workers’ movement. We need to study these lessons, but Marxism can only be learned as part of the struggles of the working class,” said Poulsen, a member of the Communist League in Australia.

He pointed to the example of Cuba’s socialist revolution, which shows the capacity of workers and farmers to organize a successful fight for state power and begin transforming society, transforming themselves in the process.

A broad range of questions and opinions were talked through in the nearly three hours of discussion, from how to oppose the bosses’ contracting out of jobs to questions about trade pacts and “globalization.” One question was on the challenge of organizing workers in call centers — a rapidly expanding business in the Philippines — where U.S., Australian and other companies take advantage of superexploited labor and an English-speaking workforce.

Baskaran Appu, from Auckland, New Zealand, spoke about the work of building the Communist League there. “As we go door to door in working-class neighborhoods, we are finding an unprecedented openness among workers to discuss a class perspective,” he said.

Several of us explained how in every country the employers push down wages and working conditions in their drive for profits. They try to divide and weaken the working class, introducing contract jobs and using racist demagogy or scapegoating immigrants, women and others. But the unfolding capitalist crisis pushes workers to fight back. And in the process working people grow in confidence and understanding.

Martín Koppel, from New York, described how SWP members have been part of protests against deportations of immigrants. “These actions have won widespread solidarity among native- and foreign-born workers alike,” he said.

In reply to a question about how to respond to capitalist “tax reform” plans that increase the burden on the working class — like one being proposed by the Philippine government today — Linda Harris from the Communist League in Australia pointed to the example of socialist Cuba. At the initiative of the revolutionary leadership there, hundreds of thousands had participated in “workers’ parliaments” in the mid-1990s, discussing and rejecting proposed taxation of workers’ wages.

One youth said many of his fellow students were worried about their future careers if they got involved in broader politics.

Waters replied that education, like all social relations under capitalism, is designed to train students to see themselves as individuals. “You’re taught you should strive to rise out of your class, not fight to rise with your class,” she said. “Ours is a political struggle to raise consciousness that workers need to organize as a class to take political power. Until we do that, no gains are permanent.”

The heart of this political battle, Waters said, was captured well by Malcolm X, “a revolutionary leader of the working class in the United States. When he was asked, ‘Are you trying to wake people to their own exploitation?’ Malcolm said, ‘No, to their humanity, to their own worth.’”

The fight for political space

A couple of students pointed to dangers they face when taking part in protest rallies with the possibility of arrests and becoming targets of police and vigilante squads.

“How to protect yourselves from government repression and murderous attacks by political opponents is not something those of us from outside the Philippines can answer for you,” Waters said. “But we do know from our own experiences and the lessons of history that the answer must flow from a broader strategy to mobilize working people along the road to political power.”

That strategy, she said, means fighting to unify and organize the working class and transform the unions into instruments of revolutionary struggle. It means rejecting the subordination of the interests of working people to electoral and governmental alliances with “progressive” bourgeois forces, the course that is followed by the Communist Party of the Philippines, a Mao-Stalinist organization, and its various split-offs. For the CPP, “protracted rural warfare” is part of this class-collaborationist course, aimed not at taking power but winning concessions from one bourgeois government or another.

Waters pointed to the lessons learned by the Communist Party in the United States, founded in 1919 by workers determined to emulate the example of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution. V.I. Lenin and other leaders of the Communist International helped convince the young party to come out from underground and fight for the political space to operate openly.

Following this back-and-forth exchange, and a tour of the campus, the members of SPEAK put on a “boodle fight” — a traditional Philippine meal — for us. Then the students swarmed the literature table to browse the issues of the Militant and books on revolutionary politics we were leaving them, thirsty to learn more about workers’ struggles and a way forward worth fighting for.  

Source:
https://www.themilitant.com/2017/8121/812150.html

Hiroshima: the shape of the American Century

Lessons of US bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki

Call for unilateral US nuclear disarmament remains key for working class today

BY MARK THOMPSON

Each year events worldwide mark August 6 and 9, 1945, when U.S. warplanes exploded atomic bombs over the densely populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in an act of “deliberate and cold-blooded extermination,” as it was described just days later in a statement by the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.

It is important for working people to recall this horrific destruction of human life. But it is not just a matter of history. From that time on, the working class has had to face the reality that the imperialist rulers possess the military capacity to annihilate all human life. And, as they showed in Japan, they will unleash these weapons if they judge it necessary to uphold their class rule and advance their insatiable drive for profits.

The U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki capped the end of World War II. The German rulers had surrendered in Europe on May 7, and the Japanese forces were militarily defeated in the Pacific. Washington had invaded the islands of Okinawa in southern Japan, and the Soviet Union was about to attack from the north.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. warplane Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb dubbed “Little Boy” over Hiroshima, exploding it almost 2,000 feet above ground for maximum effect. Everything within four square miles was obliterated. Some 70,000 people were killed instantly, many of them incinerated. Within five years the death toll rose to 200,000 as a result of injuries and radiation sickness caused by the bomb. Two-thirds of the city’s buildings were destroyed.

Three days later the U.S. bomber Bockscar dropped a plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” over the industrial seaport of Nagasaki. Some 40,000 people were killed instantly. Within five years the toll had risen to 140,000.

In an Aug. 9 radio address, President Harry Truman threatened to continue the atomic bombing of Japanese cities unless Tokyo surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese government did so the next day.

The deliberate targeting of civilians, mainly working people, was not unique to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a feature of World War II on all sides, from the German bombing of London to the British bombing of Hamburg and Dresden in Germany. Nearly 600 U.S. bombers dropped 1,665 tons of munitions on Tokyo March 9-10, 1945, creating a firestorm that destroyed 16 square miles and killed 100,000 people, mainly women, children and old men.

‘Capitalism is enemy of the people’

As Socialist Workers Party National Secretary James P. Cannon put it in a speech Aug. 22, 1945, “Capitalism is demonstrating itself every day more and more, in so-called peace as in war, as the enemy of the people. Bomb the people to death! Burn them to death with incendiary bombs! Break up their industries and starve them to death! And if that is not horrible enough, then blast them off the face of the earth with atomic bombs! That is the program of liberating capitalism.”

While the SWP immediately condemned the atomic annihilation in Japan, other currents in the workers movement, like the Stalinist Communist Party, which supported Washington in the war, hailed it as “super-duper.”

To this day, the U.S. government defends its decision to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When President Barack Obama spoke in Hiroshima May 27, the first sitting U.S. president to visit there, he made no apology for what Washington had done.

The decision to use nuclear weapons was a political judgment, not a military one. The first detonation of a small nuclear bomb had been conducted just three weeks earlier in New Mexico. Washington was keen to test its new weapon on a real target and to impress upon the world its supreme power through the obliteration of a whole city by a single bomb.

Imperialist goals in the Pacific

Far from ending World War II, this was intended as an opening salvo in a new war. Washington’s battle with Tokyo had been for control of the Pacific. It considered China, in particular, as its prize and intended to crush the anti-imperialist revolution unfolding there. The U.S. wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was coming to an end, and the U.S. rulers wanted to warn Moscow not to interfere with their ambitions in Asia and the Middle East and were preparing to drive the Soviet army back out of Eastern Europe.

There “can be no compromise,” Truman declared in October 1945. The “atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be a signal” to Moscow.

But the rulers’ plans ran up against the working class. A revolution by the workers and peasants ended foreign domination of China and made it clear that any intervention by Washington would be fiercely resisted. At the same time, mass protests by U.S. troops across Asia demanded, “Bring us home now.”

Instead of a “hot” war to herald a new “American Century,” what followed was four decades of the Cold War. Over that time, Washington considered using nuclear weapons during military conflicts many times: in China, Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s; against Cuba in the 1960s; in Vietnam again in the 1960s and ’70s, and on numerous occasions in the Middle East since 1946. Each time it weighed the political price it would pay and decided against it.

Arms race

A feature of the Cold War was an arms race between Washington and Moscow to develop and test new bombs and missiles, including the hydrogen bomb, and to amass massive nuclear weapons stockpiles. The governments of the U.K., France and China also developed and tested nuclear arms. By 1986, the number of nuclear warheads had grown to 70,300.

Today, there are over 15,000 nuclear warheads worldwide, most of them hundreds of times more powerful than those dropped on Japan. Washington and Moscow each have more than 7,000. This is enough to destroy human life on earth many times over. Moreover, almost 4,000 are actively deployed, of which nearly 1,800 U.S., Russian, British and French warheads are on high alert for use at short notice. The other nuclear-armed states today are India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.

The Obama administration has begun a $1 trillion “atomic revitalization” program to develop new warheads and delivery systems over the next three decades. At the same time it is installing anti-ballistic missile systems in eastern Europe and South Korea, enhancing its strategic position against China and Russia and opening the prospect of a renewed nuclear arms race.

The danger that nuclear weapons will again be used is increasing in the world today, not lessening, as the old world order that was in place over the decades following World War II comes apart. The need to prevent this is a powerful argument for why the working class needs to overturn capitalist rule and replace it with the rule of working people. And, it’s why the Socialist Workers Party continues to demand that Washington unilaterally dismantle its deadly nuclear arsenal immediately.

Source:

https://www.themilitant.com/2016/8030/803050.html

Jew-hate foreshadows a diseased condition in European civilization

Excerpts from: Remnants of a Race

The Economist, 12 January 1946.

....European Jewry’s desire for a new exodus is undeniable. Zionist organizations, especially of the extremer kind, are stimulating it; and they are trying to force its pace before the survivors of European Jewry again strike root in their old countries.

....Anti-semitism invariably reflects or foreshadows a diseased condition in European civilization. Its rise and fall is perhaps the most sensitive index of Europe’s moral and political sanity.

....What bourgeois liberalism achieved for Jews in western Europe, only Bolshevism was able to achieve for them in eastern Europe.

....The grave of the Jewish middle class became the cradle of a new gentile middle class in eastern Europe. At the height of the slaughter a Polish paper wrote: ‘The Nazis are solving the Jewish problem in our favour in a way in which we could never have solved it.’

....These new ‘middle classes’ are undoubtedly suffering from a guilt complex which makes their temper extremely nervous and brutal. They look tensely and anxiously into the faces of the few Jews who now seek to return home. Has the rightful owner of the shop come back? Or his child or relative?

....Possession is in any event nine-tenths of the law—zoological anti-semitism provides the last tenth.

....what has the civilized world to offer the survivors of Belsen, Auschwitz, Dachau, and Majdanek? After the first World War it offered the Jews two hopes: the Balfour Declaration on the Jewish Home in Palestine and the Protection of Minorities by the League of Nations. The Protection of Minorities has proved to be a scrap of paper. The scheme for a Jewish Home has met—as could easily have been foreseen—with the overwhelming opposition of the Arab world. Is it possible that the great, democratic nations of the world should have become so helpless that they cannot offer the Jews a strip of land somewhere on the globe or a few hundred thousand entry visas to their countries?

*    *    *

Joseph Hansen on moon landing

Read issue here:

http://themilitant.com/1969/3331/MIL3331.pdf

Joseph Hansen:

The age-old fantasy of reaching the moon 

finally became a reality. The feat consti-

tutes a major milestone in the history of 

mankind, particularly the development of 

science. 

Watching the coverage of the event on 

television, who could fail to be impressed 

by the technological level that has now 

been reached? 

First of all, that man's first steps on 

another planet could be viewed by millions 

of persons all around our own globe 

at the very moment these steps were taken 

would hardly have been credible only a 

few years ago. This advance itself is one 

of the fantastic consequences of the space 

age with its Telestar relay system. 

Equally remarkable was the display of 

reliability, not to mention clarity in voice 

and image, of the communications system 

linking the astronauts with their Houston 

base. How much depended on this can be 

judged by what would have happened to 

Armstrong and Aldrin after they landed 

if a single link in this system had failed. 

Even more impressive was the revela-

tion of the sophistication reached in the 

computers that carried out the continual 

calculations as to the orbits and rendez-

vous of the two space ships. Hardly born, 

the computer is already automated, mini-

aturized, coupled with radar and brought 

to a level of dependability that spoke for 

itself in the Apollo 11 mission. 

As to the power of the jet engines, this 

met all the requirements long laid down 

by the better science-fiction writers. 

Perhaps the most outstanding feature 

of the entire mission was its superb orga-

nizational level- at least this was what 

struck many Americans, who incline to 

be connoisseurs of the organizational side 

of human endeavors, ranging from the 

performance of teams in the field of sports 

to work forces numbering in the tens and 

hundreds of thousands. 

Most of the labor in the Apollo 11 mission 

went into planning and preparation, the 

actual mission representing only a live 

performance of drills already performed 

thousands of times. The contrast to ex-

ploration in previous centuries was strik-

ing, a convenient gauge happening to be 

available in the news about the failure of 

Thor Heyerdahl's attempt to cross the 

Atlantic in a papyrus-reed boat. 

The truth is, of course, that an enter-

prise of the scope of this one -like the 

successful production of the atomic bomb-

is beyond the capacity of private enter-

prise. Only a government could assemble 

500,000 persons, allot $24 billion, make 

available the resources of the Army, Navy, 

and Air Force in a concentrated effort 

of such breadth for almost a decade. Which 

does not mean, of course, that it was not 

a highly profitable business for the compa-

nies that got the contracts. An accounting 

on this would be highly revealing....

Hansen concludes:

....What can be achieved through central-

ized organization and the application of 

scientific knowledge has been shown in a 

way that will sink deep into the conscious-

ness of the masses. 

Why can't similar organization and 

scientific knowledge be applied to make 

our everyday lives more secure and liv-

able? If we can go to the moon, why can't 

we assure food for everyone? Provide de-

cent housing? Adequate medical services? 

Guaranteed yearly incomes? An end to war? 

It is now all the harder for the powers 

that be to dismiss such questions as uto-

pian. They proved that itwas even possible 

to go to the moon! 

Before too long science may thus have 

its revenge on those who have diverted 

it to inhuman ends-to profit-making at 

the expense of human needs, to mass 

murder, to the construction of fiendish 

weapons capable of exterminating man-

kind. 

New layers of humanity will now see 

in a more vivid way how insane capi-

talism has become and what a world 

could be built if the technological base 

humanity has constructed could be placed 

at the disposal of the people and utilized 

in accordance with rational planning. 

The most important feature of the Apollo 

11 triumph may yet be the impact it has 

on bringing man, the tool-making animal, 

to realize that he has become sufficiently 

skilled with tools, and that now he must 

master his social and economic relations 

if he is not to perish from what the tool 

has become.

Seals in the rafters: Jack Barnes on Ross Perot

A portion of a talk by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes, titled, "The Vote for Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan's `Culture War': What the 1992 Elections Revealed." This talk was presented at a Militant Labor Forum in New York on Nov. 7, 1992, just four days after the U.S. presidential elections. It will be included in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working Class Politics in the 21st Century by Jack Barnes.

....The vote for Perot is the thing bourgeois pollsters were most wrong about this year. I do not usually pay much attention to opinion polls, since they rarely reveal much about what is really going on in politics and the class struggle. But the polls caught many of the trends in bourgeois politics pretty accurately this year. They were right about the shift after the Republican convention, when bourgeois public opinion swung decisively against Bush. They were right about how the Clinton- Bush race was turning out.

Why were the polls so wrong on the vote for Perot, then? I think they were wrong because a substantial number of people who intended to vote for Perot did not tell the truth when they were selected at random to be surveyed. Why? Because these people considered the pollsters - like reporters, news photographers, and most "professional politicians" - to be part of the conspiracy.

I watched the televised reports on Perot's huge rally in Long Beach, California, on Sunday night before the election. He stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence and began shouting, "Look, look up there! There are seals! There are seals up in the rafters!" I figured, this is it - he's gone around the bend on nationwide TV. But then the camera panned the audience, and they were all cheering. Many of them knew exactly what he was talking about. He was pointing to members of the navy SEALs - the U.S. Navy's special forces, like the army's Green Berets. And then he explained to the whole audience, and to everyone watching on television, why he does not accept Secret Service protection. For his protection, Perot said, he counts on "our boys" who are trained to protect this country, to protect all of us. (Earlier this year, the New York daily Newsday reported that Perot has a "devoted following in the military, notably within the special-operations community.")

Perot told the crowd in Long Beach that he had watched videotapes of the televised presidential debates; he called attention to how many times his eyes blinked versus how many times Bush's and Clinton's eyes blinked. It sounds bizarre, doesn't it? But if you are prone to believe in conspiracy theories, then isn't eye-blinking a wonderful test of who is telling the truth? Watch their eyes blink! Then watch mine!

These things sound irrational to us. But they get a hearing because millions are trying to find answers that can explain the irrationalities of capitalism. Millions want to know what can be done about the destabilizing consequences they fear for themselves and their families. In the absence of real explanations, the "theories" of a Perot can seem to solve the mystery of what is happening to the country, to the government, to the world, to jobs - to any semblance of security in their lives.

Why capitalism appears more corrupt

Perot taps into a conviction growing among millions of people that the established bourgeois politicians are incapable of addressing the social crisis. More and more people are open to the suggestion that these figures are at worst plotting conspiracies; at best they are immoral, not fit to be in office. Millions are convinced that the government is rotten; Washington and all it represents is morally degenerate; the parliamentary and democratic institutions under capitalism are cesspools where thieves and bureaucrats and maneuverers hide. And more and more believe that something radical must be done to break through this spreading corruption.

The ruling class and its political spokespeople today appear to be so much more corrupt, so scandal-ridden, because of capitalism's deepening and irresolvable problems. Actually, the propertied classes and their politicians are corrupt in all periods. They have always cheated each other and used the government to enrich themselves and their friends. Why else do "public servants" stay in government? The difference today is only that the scope of the social crisis makes it more difficult for the exploiters to hide what they have always become and what they have always ended up doing.

Even when the capitalist class was on the rise historically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the executive branch of the government was always careful about what it said publicly, including in front of parliaments and congresses. 

Presidents, prime ministers, and their deputies lied continually. What changes in capitalism's decline, however, is the growing power of the executive branch. What changes is the executive power's need to hide more and more of what it must do to defend imperialist interests against working people at home and abroad, growing numbers of whom have won the right to be at least a part of the "political class."

The Watergate crisis surely had little to do with the episodes from which it got its name-the break-in at the Democrats' national committee office in the Watergate hotel, organized by the Nixon campaign committee's "offensive security" volunteers. No. Watergate registered the implications for the U.S. ruling class of Washington's defeat in Vietnam. It marked the end of the historic high point of U.S. imperialism's strength and stability. Similar problems for the U.S. rulers - revolutionary developments in Central America and the Middle East in the late 1970s and 1980s - are behind the so- called Irangate and Iraqgate scandals too.

This tendency, in the context of sharpening political polarization, increases suspicions of the rulers and their government representatives. Perot plays on this growing distrust of politicians, even as he offers a Bonapartist solution that would in fact greatly tighten the grip of the presidency. Congress is an obstacle, says Perot. Gridlock! Gridlock everywhere! Gotta cut through the gridlock! Gotta get rid of corruption to end the gridlock! Gotta watch out for conspiracies that lead to gridlock!

Perot uses insinuation effectively. How do people like Bush and Clinton end up so wealthy? Ross Perot is a self-made man -an effective businessman, not a Washington insider, he boasts. There's no mystery how he made his money. "I'm spending my money, not PAC [political action committee] money, not foreign money, my money- - take this message to the people," Perot aggressively asserted during the second televised presidential debate last month.

But what about Bush and Clinton? How did they get their wealth? How do they explain how they got where they are? Ability? Moral stature? Hardly. So what is the explanation? "Who would you give your pension fund and your savings account to, to manage?" Perot said in his closing remarks during the final presidential debate. "Who would you ask to be the trustee of your estate and take care of your children if something happened to you?" And he returned to that theme in Long Beach the other night. "If you had a small business, would you hire either one of these guys to run it?" he asked to thundering shouts of "No!" from the crowd. But wouldn't you trust your money with Ross Perot? The guy's a billionaire, after all. He claims to be beholden to no one - no lobbyists, no bankers, no "foreign interests," nobody. He says he spent millions of dollars of his own money on the campaign. Ross puts his money where his mouth is - his own money. That's Perot's pitch....
Perot, the self-made man, isn't afraid to explain why everybody has to accept pain, why "we all" have to sacrifice, he explains. 

Social Security can't be sacred, Perot says, at least not for well-off people like himself who don't need it. (That is his "populist" foot in the door, to open the assault on Social Security as a universal social right, guaranteed for all.) A higher tax on gasoline may be necessary, too. The federal budget deficit has to be slashed at all costs. But "we" in America can do this, Perot says. Can do!

Perot did not win the election, but we should all watch what happens to domestic policy in this country over the next twenty- four months. Perot's economic program will come closer to what the Clinton administration and bipartisan Congress actually implement than anything either the Democratic or Republican candidates talked about during the campaign.

A warning to workers movement
Perot's radical, demagogic appeal gained a hearing from millions this year, as the election results show. I repeat: the vote for Perot is the important outcome of the 1992 elections, and it is a warning the workers movement ignores at its own peril....

A vote anywhere close to the size of Perot's is rare for a third-party candidate in the United States in this century. Remember the John Anderson campaign in 1980? Anderson got less than 7 percent of the vote, running against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. In 1948 two third-party movements broke off from the Democrats - Strom Thurmond's segregationist States' Rights Democrats, and the Progressive Party ticket of Henry Wallace, backed by forces in and around the Stalinists and some liberal milieus. Those two parties combined, however, got less than 5 percent of the vote, and Democrat Harry Truman won the election and started consolidating the national security state for U.S. imperialism.

But Ross Perot got nearly 20 percent of the vote - 4 to 5 percent more than predicted on the basis of those who said beforehand they would vote for him. The Perot vote registers the growing view that no established Democratic or Republican party candidate will ever be any different. It registers the glorification of the armed forces and their special elite units that gains momentum at times of social crisis - no corruption there! It converges with the glorification of the cops. It reflects the elevation of the so-called self-made businessman (like Perot) who knows how to cut through red tape. "I'm Ross. You're the boss!" - that became Perot's demagogic, populist watchword as the campaign progressed. Together, we will cut through the pretense of democracy in Washington, the gridlock of elected institutions, and get things done!

To get a feel for the way similar forces evolved earlier in the century in the United States, it is useful to read a novel called All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. It is based on the life of Huey Long, the demagogue who became governor of Louisiana during the crisis-ridden years of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Warren brings to life some of the social reality behind the rise of Bonapartist-minded demagogues such as Ross Perot. This is not a new phenomena in the United States. What is new is the acceleration of the social crisis that begins to provide a social base for such rightist developments again today. These movements all combine populist demagogy with deeply undemocratic attitudes and proposals, always built around conspiracies.

The social and political pressures reflected in the vote for Ross Perot have nothing to do with him as an individual. The vote he received has nothing to do with what may or may not happen to Perot or to his "United We Stand" movement tomorrow. 

What is new is that a candidate running outside the two major bourgeois parties, with the kind of radical demagogy he spouted, got close to 20 percent of the vote in the United States of America in the closing decade of the twentieth century. To drive home how new it is, we should just ask ourselves the question: "What would I have thought if I had turned on the television ten years ago, or even five, and heard a major candidate for president saying these things?"
This kind of movement, this kind of demagogy is going to be a permanent and growing aspect of the intersection of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois politics in the period we have entered. It is an inevitable product of a world capitalist order heading toward intensified trade wars, economic breakdowns, banking and currency crises, accelerated war drives, and their inevitable accompaniment-class battles.

Perot's radicalism is a manifestation of the increasingly brutal politics of capitalism in decline. It is a radicalism that pits human beings against each other and reinforces all the most savage competitiveness and dog-eat-dog values of capitalist society. It singles out scapegoats among the most oppressed and exploited layers of our class. When Perot explains what "we" can and must do, the "we" is a lie. But when he says that "we" must act quickly and decisively, because "time is not on our side," Perot is pointing to a fundamental class truth-he is just deliberately using the wrong pronoun. Time is not on their side-the side of the capitalists and rightist demagogues who seek to salvage their system. But time is on our side-the side of the working class, in the United States and around the world.

That is why it is so important for workers and revolutionary- minded youth to absorb that radicalization per se is not in the interests of the working class. In and of itself it has no class content. Radicalism has staked out a permanent place in bourgeois politics, one that will expand as the crisis deepens. Perot may or may not be among its standard-bearers next time around. But the bourgeois right will win adherents to their own radical-radically reactionary-views and proposals until the working class begins to forge a leadership with class-struggle answers out of the fighting vanguard of the toilers.

Democrat Green New Deal: Same old FDR snake-oil

Liberals’ Green New Deal is trap for working class

Modeled on Roosevelt’s WWII attacks on unions

BY TERRY EVANS

Vol. 83/No. 25

July 15, 2019

One feature of capitalist politics in the U.S. is the entry of a layer of self-proclaimed socialists — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who see their mission to rebrand the Democratic Party to better ensnarl workers and to reform and defend capitalist rule while “helping” the working class.

Millions of workers today are looking for something different, as they face an economic and social crisis resulting from the punishing impact of the pro-imperialist, pro-war and pro-business policies of both parties that have boosted profits.

Ocasio-Cortez promotes a “Green New Deal,” backed by many of the Democrats running for president, as the central vehicle to accomplish this. She says, “We are facing a national crisis,” a catastrophe from fossil fuels and “climate change,” that requires a massive strengthening of the capitalist state to address it. And, she adds, the massive mobilization it would mount would create jobs.

But for working people the main question about the plan is not the “green” description in its title, but its model — former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which subordinated workers’ interests to “national unity” in order to turn all the country’s resources to the victory of U.S. capital in the second imperialist world war.

Ocasio-Cortez churns out stories of Roosevelt, the New Deal and World War II as the high watermark of U.S. capitalist rule. It’s a lie. The truth can be found in the pages of the Militant for those years, from the Northwest Organizer, the paper of the militant SWP-led Teamsters union in Minnesota, and in books like Labor’s Giant Step by Art Preis.

Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal demands an “economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal,” which was preparation for the imperialist war. While Roosevelt and his backers said their aim was to “fight fascism,” in fact the rulers’ goal was for Washington to replace both its allies and enemies as top imperialist dog worldwide, the better to allow U.S. bankers and bosses to reap superprofits. And to accomplish this, Roosevelt planned to strangle the labor movement.

“When FDR called on America to build 185,000 planes to fight World War 2, every business leader, CEO, and general laughed at him,” the “talking points” for the Green New Deal Ocasio-Cortez released says. “At the time, the U.S. had produced 3,000 planes in the last year. By the end of the war, we produced 300,000 planes. That’s what we are capable of if we have real leadership.”

But “we” did no such thing. There is no “we” — like all capitalist countries, the U.S. is class divided, and government policies aim to advance the interests of the ruling families and make the working people pay.

Roosevelt’s labor conscription bill

Without explaining it, Ocasio-Cortez points to what the Democrats’ New Deal had in store for the working class and their unions. She says her proposals “build on FDR’s second bill of rights.”

SOCIALIST APPEAL/CARLO (JESSE COHEN)Cartoon in Socialist Appeal, precursor of Militant,graphically shows how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal developed into the war deal as U.S. rulers headed into second imperialist world war, fought for imperialist dominance.

That was in Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address, which came on the heels of the 1943 United Mine Workers strike — called in defiance of the federal no-strike “pledge” — and the Democratic administration’s unsuccessful effort to defeat the miners. In that speech, Roosevelt demanded Congress enact a compulsory labor conscription bill (a “national service plan,” he genteelly called it).

“A national service law — which for the duration of the war, will prevent strikes,” Roosevelt said, “and, with appropriate exceptions, will make available for war production or any other essential service every able-bodied adult in this nation.”

The “exceptions” were intended for his class and their enablers.

Ocasio-Cortez sugarcoats the U.S. rulers’ anti-labor imperialist war polices. The Green New Deal states that Roosevelt’s war moves “created the greatest middle class that the United States has ever seen.”

The plan’s authors cite Washington’s massive war expenditures today, and bailouts extended to banks “too big to fail” in 2008, as examples of how the funds for the Green New Deal can be raised, “[T]he same way we paid for World War II and all our current wars.”

Their praise for the U.S. rulers’ victory in the second imperialist war to divide up the world for exploitation ignores the crimes inflicted on millions of people by the U.S. war machine, including the systematic firebombing of civilians in German and Japanese cities and the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Do we need a bigger government?

The Green New Deal scheme is aimed at strengthening and expanding the capitalist state, building in more weapons to defend capitalist rule. It contains a series of reforms and concessions to make life more palatable for workers and family farmers who face the carnage from the crisis of capital today. The meritocrats proposing it see working people as needing their help to “do the right thing.”

Like Roosevelt’s New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats today view workers and farmers as the objects of government policies to be administered, rather than people who are not only capable of fighting to change the conditions the bosses and their governments impose on us, but to transform themselves through that fight to take political power.

The capitalist rulers are incapable of finding a way to reverse the crisis of their system today. Democrats present a false account of the New Deal to convince working people that something can be done to lessen the abuses we face by better “managing” the capitalist economy.

But it is only by relying on workers own capacities to struggle together against those who exploit us — the same bosses who degrade both labor and the environment — that working people can chart a course forward.

Replacing capitalist rule with workers power can make possible “social relations that are based on human solidarity and serve our interaction with and protection of the natural sources of all well-being and culture,” explains the SWP resolution “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor,” published in New International no. 14. “What more powerful reason for workers, farmers and youth to commit their lives and futures to advancing the historic line of march of the international working class.”

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Roosevelt's War Labor Curbs

Excerpt:

....As Roosevelt summoned the nation after Pearl Harbor for his military crusade to attain the "Four Freedoms"-especially "freedom from want" all over the globe, the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in a mid-April 1942 report, revealed truly shocking facts about "freedom from want" here at home.

Over 25 per cent of all employed workers in December 1941 earned less than $20 a week. Over 50 per cent earned less than $30 a week. Only 13 per cent of income earners in industry, including supervisory and executive employees, earned as much as $50 a week, a sum below the minimum decency and comfort standard of living fixed by the government itself.

Pearl Harbor accelerated the speed of rising living costs. By the end of January 1942, the CIO leaders felt impelled by rank-and file discontent to initiate a drive for industry-wide wage increases. Meeting in New York City on January 26, the CIO National Executive Board issued a call to all affiliated unions to demand "substantial wage increases." President Murray said that by March 1942 living costs including taxes would be 20 per cent above the January 1941 level. This would wipe out all 1941 wage gains and impose an actual ten per cent general wage cut.

To quiet the growing demands for wage increases, Congress passed and Roosevelt signed the War-Time Price Control Bill. This bill, giving the Office of Price Administration power to fix prices of consumer goods, was designed actually to give a legal cover to price gouging. Roosevelt himself had to admit, as he signed the bill, that he had "doubts as to the wisdom and adequacy of certain sections of the Act." On January 30, OPA, headed by Leon Henderson, issued a statement saying it expected "nothing sweeping or radical" from the measure but hoped it might have at least a "psychological" effect on manufacturers and merchants. The January 28 New York Times quite candidly denounced the bill as "a thoroughly bungled and discreditable job, a mere mockery of its own declared purposes."

The "declared purposes" of this price control law were to prevent a general rise in prices; fix maximum prices that might legally be charged for certain goods; and to set up agencies for policing prices. The real purpose was to provide a basis for the claim that prices were being controlled and, therefore, wages must be controlled. The prices of war goods sold to the government were fixed by the corporations themselves, acting through their "representatives" in the war procurement divisions. As for retail prices of civilian goods, it would have taken a vast army even to begin to police the millions of daily transactions. Price control was a fraud.

This was pretty much the belief of the industrial workers. For instance, United Automobile Workers delegates from 90 General Motors plants met in Detroit on February 7, 1942, and adopted demands for a dollar-a-day pay increase and the union shop.

Motivating the wage demand, Walter Reuther, then GM director for the UAW, pointed out that the auto workers were "worse off than they were a year ago" despite the 10-cent hourly boost in the previous spring.

The GM workers' major demands followed those the United Steelworkers had made on four of the Little Steel corporations: Bethlehem, Republic, Inland, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Murray had immediately shunted the Little Steel demands into the hands of the War Labor Board. The UAW leaders followed suit with the GM proposals. Murray's move indicated what he really had in mind when he had promised at the CIO National Executive Board meeting to "fight" for "substantial wage increases" and union security.

On February 23, in a radio address, Roosevelt explained his program. He stressed "the one thought for us here at home to keep uppermost ….uninterrupted production. I stress that word uninterrupted." He urged "three high purposes for every American": (1) "We shall not stop work for a single day. If any dispute arises we shall keep on working while the dispute is solved by mediation, conciliation or arbitration until the war is won"; (2) "We shall not demand special gains or special privileges or special advantages for any group or occupation"; (3) "We shall give up conveniences and modify the routine of our lives if our country asks us to." One "high purpose" Roosevelt did not mention, as virtually every newspaper noted at the time, was the limitation or elimination of war profits. The CIO leaders seemed not to notice the clear antilabor implications of Roosevelt's "three high purposes." Murray had complained that" certain government and industry officials" were conducting a "premeditated publicity campaign" seeking to "prejudice the public mind, and, if possible, the War Labor Board" against the steel union's demands. The chief culprit whom Murray carefully refrained from naming was Roosevelt. The pro-Big Business press was not so shy. The old New York Sun, a traditional Republican fixture on the tables of the Wall Streeters, had to admit on February 24:

"In his speech last night, the President placed the emphasis definitely upon labor ....this did more probably to brighten the atmosphere in Washington today than anything else he said in his speech last night."

Roosevelt followed his February 23 radio speech with a series of more specific demands and commands, designed not only to freeze wages but to force the unions to surrender contractual conditions already won and enjoyed.

His first move was against premium pay for work on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. Union contracts customarily provided for time and a half on Saturdays and double time wage rates for working Sundays or holidays. General Motors initiated the attack on contractual standards when it refused to continue paying double time for Sunday work. This was the first issue submitted to the War Labor Board by the UAW.

Donald Nelson, newly-named head of the War Production Board which had supplanted the Office of Production Management, appearing on March 24 before the House Naval Affairs Committee, stated the Roosevelt administration's position on premium pay. Nelson said that if the unions did not agree within 30 days to give up premium pay for week ends and holidays which did not fall on the sixth and seventh consecutive days of work, the administration would press for a law to compel such surrender. As one New York daily put it, this was a "velvet-gloved ultimatum" to labor.

The top union officials of the CIO and AFL yielded immediately, and without consultation with the ranks. They agreed to abrogate premium-pay clauses in hundreds of newly signed contracts.

This giveaway of their hard-won rights did not go down easily with the workers. Resentment was so rife among the auto workers that the UAW leaders had to call a special national delegated convention in Detroit to cram the decision down the workers' throats.

The most significant aspect of this convention was the united front of the top leaders Thomas, Addes, Frankensteen, Reuther, and the Stalinists against the ranks. The fight lasted for two days. Every trick was employed to break down or confuse the opposition. The resolution to give up premium pay contained a section on "Equality of Sacrifice" so worded as to give the false impression that sacrifice of premium pay would be conditional on measures by the government to eliminate war profits.

One of these measures was described in a letter to the convention from Roosevelt. He promised: "It is the intention of the government to renegotiate contracts with the employers wherever necessary to insure that the savings from relinquishment of double or premium time go not to the employer but the nation."

In this same letter, he said that premium pay "in wartime ... puts a brake upon production. It causes factories to close on Sundays and holidays." This implied that the employers could not afford to pay overtime and premium rates. But when he spoke of the need to "renegotiate contracts," he made it plain that the corporations were being reimbursed by the government for every cent of overtime and premium wages.

In the end, with 150 courageous delegates standing on their feet to vote opposition openly, the UAW resolution to give up premium pay was adopted. Just before the vote was taken, Roosevelt's letter was reread to the convention and Frankensteen bellowed into the microphone: "Are you going to tell the President of the United States to go to hell ?"

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Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936–55.

By Art Preis

http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/it.A/id.326/.f

Correct from the start

Well! 

Hard to beleive I have not posted on this blog for half a year! My apologies to any of you still out there.

What have I been doing?

Working, living, family. Reading a lot of fiction and lit. crit. And recovering from my April 2 stroke. Just the usual.

Politically a few events have happened. The middle class left in the U.S. has moved more fully in a semi-organized way into the Democrat Party.  When all that counts in U.S. politics is putting a minus wherever Trump puts a plus, you wake up to some strange bedfellows, indeed.

The collapse of the International Socialist Organization was something I viewed with unallowed pleasure: another whateverist roadblock removed from the path of future workers and youth looking for a communist party.

My good friend and comrade David has an excellent blog post on the correctness of the U.S. Socialist Workets Party line. I always thought so, though never more than in the last few years. David has used some great photos to underscore his argument, which show very clearly the roots of his (and my) confidence in the future of the Socialist Workers Party.

Jay
7 July 2019