Cameron's humiliating defeat over Syria attack

British PM David Cameron

from Roger Silverman in London

It was one of those moments that mark a turning point in history: the defeat this week of David Cameron’s parliamentary motion paving the way for Britain’s participation in the planned US military intervention in the Syrian civil war. It came after years of endless futile foreign wars and economic crisis, during which all but the super-rich had suffered crippling drops in living standards and Britain’s once-famous health service and welfare state had been all but destroyed. Food banks, riots and suicides are becoming commonplace features of British life.

Ten years ago, the whole of central London was ringing to the chants of demonstrators marching against the impending war against Iraq. It was the biggest demonstration in British history. A series of catastrophic adventurist foreign wars was launched notwithstanding, with consequences every bit as devastating as the marchers had warned. At a cost of something like £50 billion and the deaths of around 700 British soldiers, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have each in turn been reduced to chaos, anarchy and civil war.  

The financial crash of 2008 and the election in 2010 of the most right-wing government for eighty years further compounded a general feeling of helpless despair. True, there were a couple of huge trade union demonstrations and some national strikes by Britain’s remaining public sector workers; but overall resistance has been dampened by a feeling of fatalistic gloom. If two million people on the streets could be ignored, what was the point of protesting?

But today the public mood is stretched almost to breaking point. Just as in Turkey it took no more than the threat to build a supermarket over one of the few public parks in Istanbul, and in Brazil the mere announcement of a rise in bus fares in one city, to bring millions of people on to the streets for days on end, so too in Britain patience is running out. No one had predicted even the possibility that a government decision to go to war yet again could run aground. There were no mass demonstrations; just a mounting underlying sense of mute outrage, strong enough to impel even some quite unlikely forces to oppose military action this time: forces that included Britain’s new populist far-right party UKIP, and 39 MPs from the governing Tory and Liberal Democrat parties, who defied the party whips to oppose the government. The mood was powerful enough even to stiffen the normally wobbly backbone of the dithering Labour leader Ed Miliband, who had originally intended to support military action (though, naturally, with the usual token reservations). The government motion had been expected to be just a formality; no media commentator had seriously even considered the possibility that it could be defeated.

The outcome is an utter humiliation for Cameron: the prime minister of a former empire who declares war and then has to mumble apologetically: "OK, I get it. The war's off then". This spectacle will give heart to millions of people who up to now have been demoralised by years of unremitting attacks. An uprising like those in Turkey and Brazil may not yet be imminent in Britain; but the spell has been broken. It is proved at last: even this government can be forced to retreat.

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Attack on Syria: The hypocrisy of Obama, Kerry and co.

Two Sec's of State.  Ask her about dead children John?

by Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

The billionaire John Kerry who also functions as the US Secretary of State is ready to teach the Syrian dictator Assad a lesson. He called Assad a "thug and a murderer", and says the US can’t let a dictator get away with such serious crimes; unless it’s one of the US’s dictators of course.  "History will judge us all extraordinarily harshly if we turn a blind eye to a dictator's wanton use of weapons of mass destruction," Kerry added.

I was watching the news tonight and it can make you feel so helpless as it is like a bunch of parrots repeating their master’s words.  Most Americans don’t really pay much attention to the forces that are at play in the world getting most of our news form CNN and other such outlets.  The US is not unfamiliar with chemical warfare as it used it in Vietnam pouring dioxin (Agent Orange) on the Vietnamese people and their food.  The chemical was even poured over their own troops.  Kerry was in Vietnam he must know that.  The US used Napalm ion Vietnam also and white phosphorous and depleted uranium in Iraq.

The phony concern coming out of the mouths of Obama, Kerry and other Wall Street politicians are seen for what they are by the vast majority of people in the world. The US spin doctors have no credibility.  The attack that has taken place, no matter who did it, killed 1,429 Syrians, including at least 426 children reports say.  But lets add a little US political logic to this scenario.  The US enforced sanctions in Iraq cost the lives of some 500,000 people, mostly women and children.  But when Madeline Albright who was also US Secretary of State was asked about this on US TV she said that the deaths were “worth it”.

From her point of view such mass slaughter is worth it of course just like the death of 3 million Vietnamese was worth it I suppose.

Wolf Blitzer had his array of “experts” on a panel, one of them the right wing Zionist Alan Dershowitz. Another one was some sort of former CIA official.  Dershowitz I think it was mentioned something about the US imposing a “no fly” zone.  They all had a nice little chat about this but no one mentioned the possibility of a “no fly” zone over Gaza. The Israeli’s used white phosphorous in Gaza, the US used it in Fallujah, Obama’s drones have been slaughtering innocent women and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan for years.  This whole affair is not about human decency and rights

In the aftermath of the British parliamentary vote to oppose involvement the talk was also about having to put together a US led coalition. Oh, let’s see who will be on that team I wonder.  There’ll be the Saudi’s and the pimps that lead the Gulf States that get US weapons and protection from their own people.  There’ll be some other flunkies who will be blackmailed and cajoled in to giving whatever action is taken some sort of international legitimacy.

But this is less about Syria than Iran.  Kerry says Iran will be “emboldened”if the US doesn’t act.  We’re all supposed to be afraid of Iran.  But why would Iran not want nuclear weapons?  Israel has hundreds of them?  The US invaded the country bordering Iran and also encouraged the former leader of that country, Saddam Hussein to invade Iran and offered money, and chemical weapons to do so. Incidentally, Bremer who was the US imposed governor of Iraq after the US invaded it, repeatedly referred to Assad as Saddam on the news tonight.  What morons.

The capitalist class cannot rule with any level of stability and jumps out of the frying pan into the fire, from one quagmire to the next with working class youth at the front.  The class that rules leads from the rear in these ventures.  If the attack on Syria goes ahead and it looks more likely that it will, a few hundred million dollars of US taxpayer funds will disappear in a few minutes. The war on workers at home will continue in order to pay for it and the ranks of the terrorist groups will find new recruits.  And yet again, the  “experts”at the Pentagon are on the same team as al Qaeda or the Islamic fanatics.  Way to go boys.

The most pressing task facing the workers of the world is the class war over which class governs society and for us in the US which class represents us to the world.  Despite the many changes that have taken place in the working class in the US, the shifting of manufacturing abroad, the growth of finance capital and the service sector accompanied by an increase in unproductive labor, managers overseers, police and the like, global capitalism cannot be overthrown without the US working class settling accounts with the unelected coupon clippers that govern US society, the most heavily armed and ruthless bourgeois on the planet.

I remember when I was in my late teens and early twenties. You could travel from London to Joburg all through Africa overland, no problem.  You could go to Iran and Kashmir and Nepal and from Calais to Calcutta relatively safely. Not today.

This is how far the capitalist system has brought us. And its most powerful representatives are here in the US. We should consider that the US and the Democratic Party in particular is the only nation and the only party to have dropped nuclear bombs on civilian centers.  We should not underestimate their ruthlessness; they will not hesitate dropping nuclear weapons on their own cities if they saw their interests and their system truly threatened---United We Stand be damned.

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Thoughts on the struggles in Northern Ireland

This description of Ireland below is very similar to the events that took place here in the US that led to the increase of the black middle and upper middle class. Meanwhile, the conditions for black workers and youth continue to worsen.

by Sean O'Torrain

I was back home in the North of Ireland a few months ago at a wedding. I was seated beside a middle class Catholic couple who has a relative who joined SF and has a local council position now. They played no role in the military campaign of the Provos. Only when it became a mass movement did they even get involved in the Civil Rights movement. They played no role in the 1969 Derry uprising. They made sure they kept their children well out of the firing line, the majority of whom got good educations and no longer live in the North. Middle class Catholics like these made some gains out of the last years .

These middle class people whispered to me in a soft voice that if it had not been for the Provos campaign they would have got nothing. This is the typical attitude of the middle class Catholic. They did get something out of the last 30 years war. They got access to more jobs and positions. For them the sacrifice made by a generation of Catholic working class youth was worth it. As an old man used to say to me back home they would fight to the last drop of another man's blood.

These middle class Catholics whom the Provisionals now represent ignore a few facts. Look at these. "According to the Multiple Deprivation Measure 2010 – which collates data on categories such as health, income, employment and education across 582 wards in the North – 14 of the 20 most deprived wards overall are predominantly Catholic. Sixteen of the 20 most deprived wards assessed on household income and employment are also mostly Catholic. A similar picture emerges from the Peace Monitoring Report 2012, which found “the proportion of people who are in low-income households is much higher among Catholics (26 per cent) than among Protestants (16 per cent).” The Provisional campaign did not end discrimination against the Catholic working class in the North.

The organizers of this blog have always opposed the Provisionals campaign. We have said it would not drive British imperialism out of the North, that it would increase sectarian division and that the working class as a whole in Northern Ireland would be further divided. This is correct.

The increased gains of the Catholic middle class and the Sinn Fein politicians have enraged the Protestant working class whom are still under the hammer of the attacks of capitalism in this period of crisis. They feel that some of the marginal privileges they had have been reduced and will be further reduced. They feel that the peace process has been at their expense. So we have the worst of both worlds. The Catholic working class are still exploited and more so than the Protestant working class and the Protestant working class while still having some small marginal privileges feel that they are losing these and under threat. Inevitably sectarianism will not go away.

The North is more segregated than ever before. More separate schools, more so called peace gates separating streets and areas in Belfast. The coming economic crises will see Imperialism and capitalism once again turning up the screws on divide and rule. The crisis of the North is not over. There is a real danger in the years ahead of new sectarian military conflict with the possibility of civil war and the repartition of the country.

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CIA wars aren't fought to defend US workers interests.

by Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

The Washington Post has published the secret US Intelligence budget that the paper received as part of a package of information from Edward Snowden.  The $52 billion of taxpayer funds it appears often fails to protect “national security” the Post argues.

Naturally, representatives of the bankers and other coupon clippers that we bailed out after the crash  are already saying the Post has published material that could cause, “Significant damage “ to national security (former CIA officials Paul Pillar, now at the Brookings Institution). The Post has admitted it held back publishing some of the material for fear it would harm national security. The CIA’s $14 billion a year is aimed at knocking out competitor's computers and stealing secrets as well as spying on US citizens.

But the question we have to ask ourselves is: what constitutes national security?   The interests of Halliburton, CitiBank and the cronies that run these institutions are not the same interests as the workers and middle class that allow the US economy and society to function.  In fact, the increased attacks on US workers, our wages, benefits and general living standards, is a direct result of policies designed not to protect us but policies aimed at protecting the interests of US capitalism abroad.

It was not in the interests of US workers, or a good use of our tax money, to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954 or the democratically elected secular government of Iran in 1953.  The US installed the vicious regime of the Shah of Iran after that escapade so if we want to allocate blame for the presence of the Mullahs blame the Pentagon and their British colleagues.

It was not in US workers interests to invade Vietnam, slaughter 3 million people,  and support a government that couldn’t get elected by its own people.  The US also used chemical weapons on them as it did on the Iraqi people. It wasn’t in our interests to support Bin Laden against the Soviets and the religious fanatics against the government of Mohammad Najibullah.  The US supported the Taliban against Najibullah and when the Soviets could no longer offer assistance the Taliban killed him, castrated him then dragged his body through the streets.  The US had its way, the Islamic fanatics won.  That they were misogynistic 7^th century religious nuts didn’t matter as long as an oil and gas pipeline to the Arabian sea was possible and capital not restrained it was OK, violence against women be damned. US workers and the labor movement should have given critical support to Najibullah against the Taliban and their Pentagon partners.  Remember, up until 1999, every Taliban official was on the payroll of the US government.

It wasn’t in our interests when our government involved itself in the murder of Patrice Lumumba and installing Mobutu who killed some two million people. The assassination of Allende and overthrow of that democratically elected government was US orchestrated.  The list of such actions taken to supposedly protect our national interests is a long one. What these activities amount to are not defensive actions but offensive ones aimed at making the world safe for US corporations and the 1% in their rapacious profit making ventures.  Who is going to invade the US?

We are told we are all Americans; that we have to unite.  But all Americans don’t have the same interests. It’s not in the interest of US workers to have fire stations closed, post offices shut down, education savaged, our national parks falling apart through lack of funds etc. It is not in our interest to have two million people in prison and millions of people without decent shelter, food or health care.

The assault on Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden by the representatives of Wall Street in Congress and the Pentagon has nothing to do with the safety and welfare of the American workers and middle class. We can't travel to half of the countries in the world due to US foreign policy mapped out behind closed doors.  What embarrassed them about the Wikileaks and Snowden releases it that they reveal their diplomacy for what it is, the diplomacy of thieves and robbers.   Their counterparts are the same of course, but as workers we have to reach out to our own class internationally.  Millions of workers just like us are suffering horrendous hardships and never ending war in the struggle for control of the world’s diminishing resources. The instability of the so-called free market is everywhere.  More bubbles are developing as the same old activities return. The countries that have been in the limelight as the example of the vibrancy of the market are slipping deeper in to the quagmire, I am talking about the emerging markets particularly the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China). China has whole towns sitting empty or unfinished including a huge replica of the Eiffel Tower, there is an explosion waiting to happen there and the same can be said about the US.  Welcome to the free market folks.

International solidarity and independent activity on the part of working people is made more difficult because organizations we have built over time, trade unions and in most other advanced capitalist economies, political parties are led by bureaucrats whose world view is the same as the bosses, the same as the bankers and Wall Street crowd. Even those claiming to be socialist support their capitalist governments. The workers of France for example, their unions and parties should take direct/industrial action against that government’s threat to bomb Syria, its former colony. Appeals and assistance from the workers of the industrial world to the workers of Syria and the Arab Spring would provide a real alternative to the Assad regime and those in opposition who want rid of it. It would undermine the Islamic fanatics and offer a real alternative to Assad or al Qaeda.

Most people have read the quote below and there is no doubt Butler had weaknesses, a sort of protectionist isolationist ideal, but his description of his role as a Major General in the United States Marine Corp is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it in the 1930’s.

Excerpt from a speech given by Major General Smedley Butler in 1933

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

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Israeli soldiers disciplined for dancing Gangnam Style with Palestinians

The Zionist regime is facing its most serious assault in decades. Israeli soldiers on patrol in the West Bank came upon a dance hall where Palestinians were having a shindig. The usual bullying and brutality directed at Palestinians didn’t occur; something far more dangerous did. It appears the soldiers joined Palestinian men who were dancing to the now famous “Gangnam Style”. Israeli army spokespersons consider the incident very “serious” as "the soldiers exposed themselves to unnecessary danger and were disciplined accordingly," AP reported. It reminded me of the fraternizing between the troops during the first world war. The officers were punished for it. Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) is a good film about that incident and the interview with the director is good on the DVD of it. It’s not the soldiers’ putting themselves in unnecessary danger that is the problem, as the military brass claims. Fraternizing with “the enemy” tends to undermine the argument that they are the “enemy”. Here’s the party from Israeli TV

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Fast food workers actions exceed expections.

Demonstrations and strikes of fast food workers for a $15.00 an hour minimum wage were expected in 35 cities today. One mass media outlet, CNBC, are so far reporting such events in 60 cities. Also that on many occasions when activists turn up outside restaurants workers inside at work take off their hats and come out and join them. There are also reports that while the employers continue to sharply condemn the workers and their demands that in some sectors they are making concessions behind the scenes. The reasons seem to be to undermine the movement for the full $15.00 and hour but also to try and cut across the movement becoming more conscious and solid and actually unionizing.

 

We will see how it goes as the main union involved is no great shakes. But so far we are seeing some good developments.

 

 

Sean.

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The Restaurant lobby, the other NRA

With fast food workers around the nation walking off the job tomorrow I thought it would be of interest to readers to know a bit more about the  National Restaurant Association. This piece below is from AlterNet.

The Other NRA: How the Insidiously Powerful Restaurant Lobby Makes Sure Fast-Food Workers Get Poverty Wages and Have to Work While Sick

Fast-food workers feed their families on a pittance while the big corporations resist fair pay and sick leave.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/L. Kragt Bakker

August 27, 2013  |  

 

Editors note: This is the first in a series of reader-supported—i.e. crowdfunded —articles about the powerful National Restaurant Association and the plight of low-wage workers who are being screwed at every turn by industry lobbying tactics and misleading propaganda. An amazing 387 AlterNet readers contributed more than $5,500 to support this ongoing investigative project. Many of the donors are listed at the end of the article.

 

While thousands of fast-food workers were preparing to walk off their jobs earlier this summer to seek raises to $15 an hour, the industry’s corporate lobbyist, the National Restaurant Association, was celebrating a string of political victories blocking state minimum wage increases and preempting local sick day laws.

 

In June, the NRA boasted that its lobbyists had stopped minimum wage increases in 27 out of 29 states in 2013. In Connecticut, which increased its state minimum wage, a raise in the base pay for tipped workers such as waitresses and bartenders vanished in the final bill. A similar scenario unfolded in New York State: It increased its minimum wage, but the NRA’s last-minute lobbying derailed raising the pre-tip wage at restaurants and bars. The deals came despite polls showing 80 percent support for raising the minimum wage. 
 
The NRA’s lobbying didn’t stop there. It also told members that it blocked a dozen states this year from passing laws that would require earned paid sick leave, which is what New York City and Portland, Oregon adopted. Meanwhile, it boasted that six states, including Florida, passed NRA-backed laws that preemptively ban localities from granting earned and paid employee sick time. “These are horrible things, but there are amazing things that are happening to change it,” said Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), which has been working a dozen years to slowly change the industry’s exploitive business model and labor practices. “And there will be increasingly important stuff coming up.”    

As fast-food workers across the country prepare for a second nationwide walkout over wages on Thursday, most Americans have little idea how profitable and politically aggressive the corporate mainstays of America’s second biggest employer have become. While labor activists have had victories in 2013, such as New York and Portland passing sick leave laws, and New Jersey poised to raise its minimum wage via a ballot measure this fall, the restaurant industry’s lobbying powerhouse is at war with the industry’s workers.

“It’s an old-boy network. It’s very old-school thinking. It’s very, very conservative,” said Paul Saginaw, founder of Zingerman’s food companies in Michigan, which employes 600 people and unlike the NRA, supports better benefits for employees like healthcare. “There has to be some pressure put out to provide better lives for people.”

Most Americans are unaware that millions of people who work in the industry—especially the 2.5 million fast-food preparers and servers who earn an average of $8.74 an hour, according to federal labor statistics—are not just teens in their first job, but adults with families to support. They may not know there’s a separate minimum wage for tipped workers, $2.13 an hour, that hasn’t changed in 22 years—although 32 states have raised it slightly. They may not realize that they, as the restaurant-going public, subsidize owners via cash tips, even as the NRA routinely tells legislators its industry cannot afford to pay better wages or basic benefits.

Most Americans don’t know that restaurant salaries are so low that the industry’s 12.2 million workers use food stamps at twice the rate of the U.S. workforce, and are three times as likely to be below the poverty line. Or that women earn less than men in similar jobs. Or that restaurants are among the biggest low-wage employers of people of color. Or that virtually every chain—except for In and Out, according to ROC—don’t want to pay living wages and benefits or offer real opportunities for advancement.

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The Radical Tradition of Autoworkers

Andy Piascik Interviews retired autoworker Greg Shotwell

The sit-down strike by General Motors workers in the winter of 1936-37 was one of the galvanizing events in U.S. labor history. Similarly, the efforts of the primarily African-American autoworkers of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the other RUM’s sparked the resurgence of rank and file militancy in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. In more recent years, the New Directions caucus and Soldiers of Solidarity carried on the radical tradition in the United Automobile Workers.
           
Gregg Shotwell was active in both New Directions and SOS for much of his 30 years working at General Motors during which time the UAW’s rolls fell from1.5 million members to 382,513. He published Live Bait and Ammo, a boisterous newsletter that regularly skewered management as well as official union passivity. Often hilarious, always biting and sometimes depressing, Live Bait and Ammo documented the devastating impact the collaboration between automakers and the UAW has had on workers in the factories.
           
Haymarket Books published a collection of Shotwell’s Live Bait and Ammo in Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream. In this interview, Shotwell talks about the onslaught of auto management, the decline of the UAW and the efforts of autoworkers to resist both.

Piascik: What was the situation in the auto industry and in the UAW when you began as an autoworker in 1979?

Shotwell: It was at that time American auto companies first started to experience serious competition from foreign automakers and they weren’t prepared for the contest. US consumers demanded fuel efficient vehicles and the American auto companies took advantage of the opportunity to upgrade their products by laying off hundreds of thousands of auto workers. In the best of times the companies took all the credit for success but when times got tough they put all the blame on workers and then proceeded to design some of the most notorious failures in auto history. Ralph Nader pilloried the Corvair but it didn't take Consumer Reports to bury the Vega, the Pinto, and the Gremlin beneath the irredeemable crust of US car history. 

In the Eighties GM, Ford, and Chrysler were obsolete manufacturing enterprises. Rather than retool and revamp to make more competitive products, the companies took advantage of the situation to attack the UAW and blame poor quality and lackluster production on workers. The companies never relinquished what we called "paragraph 8" in the UAW-GM contract, or "management's right to manage." That is, management reserved the right not only to hire and fire but to design both the product and the means of production. Publicly, workers bore the brunt of the blame for GM's failure, but on the inside, pencil pushers made all the decisions.

In 1981, we started producing valve lifters for Toyota and the first batch we shipped was returned for inferior quality. Toyota taught GM how to produce first time quality products at our plant and I suspect at other GM plants as well. It wasn't magic. They simply raised the bar.
For its part, the UAW responded to the crisis of foreign competition by promoting hatred of brothers and sisters in other countries and encouraging UAW members to identify with the bosses.

Piascik: Were you involved in the union right from the start?

Shotwell: No. My initial response to the sensory assault of auto production —the noise, the smell, the relentless pressure to work faster and faster— was to drink alcohol. I wasn't alone but the addiction kept me undercover. It wasn't until I quit drinking that I began to get involved in the union. I needed to feel integrated in the workplace and getting active in the union helped me to feel like I was a part of a larger and more meaningful organization. I never would have believed it was the beginning of the end for the UAW.

Piascik: In Autoworkers Under the Gun, you talk about how workers had far more control of the shop floor 30+ years ago than now. Can you elaborate on that?

Shotwell: Automation and lean production methods, which are an intensification of Taylorism, have successfully sped up and dumbed down the jobs. In the Seventies, auto production required a lot more people power. Our sheer numbers gave us a greater sense of influence on the job and in society at large. Workers had more control over the production and pace of the work because manufacturing depended more on workers' knowledge, skills, and muscle.

Today, everything is automated, computerized, and heavily monitored. As a result human labor is devalued and workers feel less important. Thirty years ago, we also had a union culture that advocated confrontation rather than cooperation with the boss. There was a clear demarcation between union and management. In the Eighties, management attempted to blur that difference and the UAW went along with this ridiculous idea that the boss was your friend rather than someone who wanted you to work harder for less. It's been a painful history lesson and one that UAW President Bob King has failed to acknowledge despite the overwhelming evidence that concessions and cooperation do not save jobs.

In my early years, whenever management would start to crack down, we retaliated by slowing down production. The bosses learned quickly that if they wanted to meet production goals, the best way to do that was to treat the people who did the work with respect. If I was running production and the boss gave me a hard time, I would create a problem with the machine and write it up for a job setter, who in turn would shut it down and write it up for a skilled tradesman. When I told him the boss was on my back he would ask, "How long do you want it down?" This wasn't something that we organized, it was a part of the shop floor culture. We agreed never to do someone else's job, we had clear job definitions or work rules and we adamantly refused to violate our contract. Today, the UAW promotes speed up, multi-tasking, and job definitions or work rules which are so broad they are worthless. Workers today enjoy less autonomy because they have less support from the official union and a shop floor culture of cooperation rather than confrontation with management.

Piascik: Why, after so many years where "cooperation" with management has been so devastating to autoworkers, is the UAW pushing it harder than ever?

Shotwell: Because they are getting paid by the company.  The Big Three (GM, Ford, Chrysler) set up separate tax-exempt nonprofit corporations which are managed by the company and the union but financed solely by the companies. It's a 501-c. As a result, salaries for UAW International appointees are subsidized by the company. The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) requires that unions make all financial records available to the membership, but these corporations are separate legal entities.

More generally, many unions, not the just the UAW, have lost their bearings. Union leaders don't have a world view independent of the corporations they serve. The institution of Labor is infected with opportunists who claim we can cure the afflictions of capitalism with a heavier dose of capitalism. As a result, union leaders advocate that we work harder for less and help the companies eliminate jobs. Competition between workers and cooperation with bosses is an anti-union policy, but it makes perfect sense to union leaders who have more in common with bosses than workers.

Piascik: You belong to an organization of rank and file autoworkers called Soldiers of Solidarity. What is SOS and what kind of work does it do?

Shotwell: SOS was a spontaneous reaction to an urgent crisis. Delphi hired bankruptcy specialist Steve Miller, who threatened to cut our wages 66 percent, eliminate pensions, reduce benefits, and sell or close all but five Delphi plants. The UAW didn't respond so I called for a meeting of rank and file UAW members to discuss what we should do to defend ourselves. Autoworkers and retirees from five states representing all the major automakers and suppliers came. They recognized that Delphi was the lead domino and if they took us down, the other companies would follow suit.

We agreed on the name Soldiers of Solidarity at our third meeting because we felt like we were engaged in a battle; we felt our struggle was not limited to the UAW or Delphi; the solution was solidarity; and the acronym was a distress signal. Initially, we decided not to focus on elections and internal union disputes because of the urgency of the crisis. A number of us had been in New Directions and we didn't want workers to think our idea of a fight back was electoral. We wanted to focus on direct action and work to rule. We understood that we were fighting the company, a cooperative union, and a capitalist government but we kept the focus on the company to attract as many workers as possible. We knew how ruthless the Administrative Caucus that controls the UAW could be but the Administrative Caucus was at the bargaining table and most members were pinning their hopes on them. As it turned out, the Administrative Caucus didn't waste any time attacking us anyway.

 As a result, SOS was forced into behaving like an underground movement. We were in the shadows dismantling the apparatus of profit and threatening to take down the whole edifice of partnership if our demands weren't met. I said in one of my newsletters, "Management likes to throw money at problems. Let's give them a big problem to throw money at." We did. As a result, GM and Delphi, started meeting the primary needs of a majority of the members -- safe pensions, early retirement, subsidized wages and transfers back to GM. Workers made choices based on what was best for their families and resistance deflated. The downside to this guerilla defense was that we lacked a structure that could sustain us after the immediate crisis ended. SOS continued to advocate direct action but our numbers dwindled as so many chose retirement.

Piascik:  How widespread is rank and file resistance to the union's collaboration with the companies?

Shotwell: There is a lot of dissatisfaction but actual resistance is minimal at this point. I think we have to bear in mind how fragile workers feel in the current economy. The government hasn't done anything to help create jobs, organize unions, or improve opportunities for working class people. Whenever there is a crisis for unions or working people in general, Obama is Missing In Action. If unemployment benefits are extended, it is always at the expense of the working class as a whole like with the extension of the Bush tax cuts.

I do believe, however, that momentum is building, primarily because the new generation of autoworkers doesn't have the golden handcuffs: pension and health care in retirement. The previous generation was bound to the company and the union by the promise of retirement after thirty years. Young autoworkers don't have anything to look forward to except a weekly paycheck and they are grossly underpaid for the work they perform. They have no reason to feel loyal to the company or the union that stabbed them in the back. As this new generation takes control -- and they will soon gain a majority in the UAW -- I believe we will see more resistance to the union's collaboration with the bosses.

Piascik: The 2009 auto bailout was much talked about, yet next to nothing was said in the mainstream media about how it furthered the attack on autoworkers. At the same time, autoworkers were said to be grudgingly accepting of the deal because the alternative was unemployment. Can you talk about this?

Shotwell: The 2009 bailout was, from a UAW member's perspective, extortion. We were told to accept it or lose everything we ever worked for. The general public was given the impression that UAW members were treated like prima donnas because they didn't lose their pensions, but none of the CEOs who engineered the calculated catastrophe lost their pensions. For some reason, Americans are led to believe that workers don't deserve contracts but no CEO in the nation will work without a contract replete with a golden parachute. Tell an auto supplier the contract is canceled and see how many parts you get on Monday. Contracts are the way capitalism works for capitalists, but workers aren't included in the legal equation.

Companies take the value generated by labor, transport it overseas, and then act like their pockets are empty. Labor has a legitimate lien on Capital. Companies routinely charge the customer more for the cost of doing business, as in the deferred compensation of a pension, and then spend the extra money on themselves rather than honor the contractual commitment. Bankruptcy is a business plan and a growing industry in the USA.

It seems outrageous that the government would give the companies so much money and not require a job program making worthwhile energy efficient products. Instead, the government gets company stock which binds the public to Wall Street rather than autoworkers, their natural allies, and union members get a contract that makes non-union an attractive option. Not only did new hires get half pay, they lost pension and health care in retirement -- about 66 percent of fair compensation. Then the extortion contract included a no-strike clause during the next set of negotiations which rendered collective bargaining a charade. The only people who had the stomach to watch 2011 auto negotiations were Right to Work for Less advocates and day traders making bets on the side. In 2011 traditional workers didn't get a raise in their pensions for the first time since 1953. Their pensions were effectively frozen and, considering how quickly new hires will be the dominant force in the union, I don't expect they will ever see a raise. But no one seems to notice the effect of a frozen pension on the future prospects of a workforce that can't conceivably work the assembly line until they are 66 or older. The Obama administration revealed its anti-union underbelly. Every reason that a non-union worker had to join the UAW is gone. Now Bob King is pretending that workers want the UAW so they can have a voice in the workplace. Whose voice? A UAW nepotistical appointee who thinks the boss is his bosom buddy?

Piascik: In your book you write, "The institutions - corporate, government, union - that brokered the self-destructive contrivance called neoliberalism are obsolete and need to be replaced." Union obsolescence seems to suggest that horizontal alliances between rank and file workers from different industries, as well as with community activists such as we saw to some extent in the Occupy phenomenon, is more the way to go than, say, the seemingly Sisyphean task of reforming a union or unions as a whole. What are your thoughts about this?

Shotwell: The so-called social contract has been broken and yes, I do believe that rank and file workers will have to decide whether the unions can be reformed, or if it would be better to organize a new union, one that included all workers. But that's a vision and I am not a visionary.

The building blocks of a revitalized labor movement are not in the sky. The building blocks are work units. In my experience struggle, not elections, is the fulcrum of change. Elections reinforce learned helplessness. Direct action reinforces the power that workers have over production and services and thus, profit. Likewise, demonstrations which may be inspiring and may be an organizing, agitating and educating tool are easily tolerated. Look how quickly and efficiently the government developed tactics to corral and disperse the Occupy protests. I agree with Joe Burns, author of Reviving the Strike that the best way to organize is with a strike. But I believe in this era of precarious employment the best strike method is on the inside.
The trouble with traditional strikes today is that union bureaucrats don't play to win. They use strikes to soften resistance and encourage compromise with management. One of the best examples of this was the UAW strike against American Axle in 2008, a time when American Axle was eager to reduce inventory. I felt that workers were set up to lose.

Whether one chooses to reform the union or start a new union, one must first organize workers. People work to support families, not ideologies. If you want to organize a workplace, fight the boss and win. Even a small victory is a building block. I was notorious for my criticism of the UAW. I called the bureaucrats the Rollover Caucus, the Concession Caucus, and eventually just the Con Caucus. But that didn't prevent me from working within the union, not only by attending meetings but by winning elected positions on the Local Executive Board and working on committees like Education and Civil Rights and By-Laws. These positions gave me access to knowledge and opportunities for new allegiances and influence. I think we have to use every tool in the box. Which reminds me of my favorite line by Ani DiFranco: "Every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right."
In the end I believe workers find that solidarity is not an ideal; solidarity is a practical solution to an urgent need.

Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author who has written for Z Magazine, The Indypendent and many other publications. He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.

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Down in the Jackson Hole

By Michael Roberts

Central bankers from all over the world gather each August underneath the Grand Teton mountains in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for their summer symposium to discuss the global economy and what central bankers can do about it.  This year, Ben Bernanke, head of the most important central bank, the US Federal Reserve, is not present.  He is about to end his term of office at year-end, so perhaps he saw no need to attend.  But lots of other key bankers and mainstream economists are there.

The main issue to discuss, as it was last year, was how effective has been the policy of ‘quantitative easing’ (QE) in getting the global capitalist economy into recovery mode.  QE is where central banks buy up government, corporate and mortgage bonds through the expansion of central bank power money (‘printing money’), in order to inject ‘liquidity’ into the economy.  The idea is that this extra credit will filter through from the banks and pension funds that the central bank has bought the bonds from into loans to households and businesses.  Those loans will lead to more spending in the shops and more investment by businesses.

Well, has it worked?  That’s easy to answer.  No.  The global economy remains stuck in a low-growth mode, and most important, at such a low growth in economic activity that unemployment rates remain nearly double the rate before the Great Recession in the major economies and three or four times as high in the depressed economies of southern Europe.

At last summer’s symposium, central banks were worried that QE was not working and a leading mainstream economist, Michael Woodford presented a paper (http://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/sympos/2012/mw.pdf?sm=jh083112-4) in which he argued that if central banks could change the perception of businesses and households that interest rates were going to stay very low for a long time, then that would inspire ‘confidence’ and thus lead to increased spending and investment.  This led to the recent policy of central banks, called ‘forward guidance’ (see my post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/a-blind-guide-dog/).  Forward guidance is an attempt by central bankers to persuade businesses and consumers that they do not have to worry about rising interest rates for years ahead and so they can start spending now.

But forward guidance has done no such thing.  Indeed, after both the ECB and the Bank of England followed the Fed and announced such ‘guidance’, stock markets fell and interest rates rose!  That was partly because businesses still do not believe that central banks won’t hike interest rates at the first sign of economic recovery.  But it was also because the Federal Reserve had already announced that it intends to begin to end its QE policy by gradually reducing its planned asset purchases that it will make from September onwards.  That is seen as a sign that central bank support for ‘easy money’ is coming to an end.  Stock markets, particularly in emerging economies, which have been the main beneficiaries of this largesse, have sold off big time.

And that’s the point.  QE has not boosted the ‘real economy’ but merely fuelled a new credit bubble in stock market and property prices – US home prices are now up over 12% since this time last year and in the UK, prices are up 5%, with over 10% in ‘hot’ London.  Indeed, as I pointed out in that previous post, the latest evidence shows that  QE measures have had little or no effect on boosting the real economy.  A recent paper by Vasco Curdia and Andrea Ferrero at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Efficacy of QE) found that the Fed’s QE measures from 2010 had helped to boost real GDP growth by just 0.13 percentage points and the bulk of this ‘boost’ was thanks to forward guidance, namely convincing investors that interest rates were not going to rise.  If that factor had been left out, the US real GDP would have risen only 0.04 per cent as a result of QE.

This is worrying for central banks.  They would like to think that providing easy credit has done the trick and there is now sustained economic growth so that they can end their QE measures.  Instead, they cannot – indeed in the case of Japan, they have been extending them.  At the Jackson Hole symposuum, Christien Lagarde, head of the IMF, urged caution on ditching QE too early:  “now is not the time to pull back on these policies.. are still needed in all the places” these policies are being employed… I do not suggest a rush to exit,” Lagarde said, adding in Europe, “there is a good deal more mileage to be gained” from unconventional policy. As for Japan, she said an “exit is very likely some way off.”

And Lagarde added an important sting in the tail of her address.  She reckoned that QE should be maintained because it would help allow governments to push through yet more measures of wage cutting, privatisation, reductions in government spending and ‘liberalising’ markets in order to raise the profitability of capital and thus sustain economic revival down the road.   As she put it: “I do worry that all the hard work of central banks will be wasted if not enough is done on other fronts—to adopt the admittedly more difficult policies needed for balanced, durable, and inclusive growth. . . . [unconventional monetary policy] is providing the space for more reforms. We should use that space wisely.”

But despite the policies of austerity to reduce costs and despite the policy of easy money through QE, the global capitalist economy does not respond.   This has been the longest slump since the second world war. A recent CEPR discussion paper by Antonia Fatas and Olian Mihov (http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP9551# and http://www.voxeu.org/article/recoveries-missing-third-phase-business-cycle) found that the US economy has still not returned to ‘normal’, ie trend growth in real GDP after more than 16 quarters since the trough of the Great Recession – and still counting.  That compares with just six quarters to return to normal in previous post-war recessions.  Moreover, the accumulated loss in US GDP from its peak caused by the Great Recession and the subsequent weak recovery so far totals 22% of US peak GDP and still counting.  That compares with a maximum of 16% in the 1980-2 slump and only 4-5% in other post-war recessions.  The depth and duration of the Great Recession has been hugely damaging – ant the gap remains (see graph below).

The driver of economic recovery under capitalism is investment.  That leads to jobs and then to income and then to spending.  But sufficient investment depends on profitability recovering to previous levels or higher and on debt not being too high that it strangles corporate investment.  That has not happened so far.  While  cash flow and profits may be up for larger companies, the rate of profit has not recovered in many capitalist economies, like the UK and Europe.  Also, large multinationals have preferred to invest in emerging economies rather than in the domestic economy.  And cash-rich companies have taken advantage of credit-fuelled (QE) stock markets to buy back their own shares rather than invest and boost dividends.  This helps executive bonuses!

Small businesses cannot invest because they cannot borrow on current terms and many are zombie companies just able to pay the interest on their debt.  They have been hoarding labour rather than invest in new equipment and labour saving systems.  And overall corporate debt levels remain too high to allow new investment – paying down debt or holding cash is safer.

The conundrum of rising profits and stagnant investment in productive assets shows that the ‘recovery’ is artificial.  It depends on central bank liquidity, which finds its way into the financial sector not the real economy.  The really cash-rich companies are banks, financial institutions and large multinationals and not the bulk of non-financial companies that invest and employ labour.   One analyst reckons that as interest rates start to rise over the next year, when central banks try to wean the capitalist sector off its milk of ‘easy money’ that has slowed “down the process of creative destruction… then these zombie companies are going to present symptoms of a disease which will begin to affect other companies. That is when the recession will come.”

Meanwhile, small businesses in the US and elsewhere are struggling – and they are the main sources of new employment. In 1982, new companies made up roughly half of all US businesses, according to census data. By 2011, they accounted for just over a third.  From 1982 through 2011, the share of the labour force working at new companies fell to 11% from more than 20%.  Total venture capital invested in the US fell nearly 10% last year and is still below its pre-recession peak, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.  New startups, as opposed to startup jobs, accelerated during the recession and remain higher than average, according to the Kaufman Foundation (http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/entrepreneurial-activity-declines-as-jobs-rise-in-2012-according-to-kauffman-report.aspx).  But what this shows is that older and blue collar workers, forced out of their jobs, are trying to set up self-employed businesses to to make ends meet.  Most of these businesses soon die a death.

The unemployment rate in the US has dropped a little from its peak during the depth of the Great Recession.  But this hides the continuing depression in the labour market.  The labour participation rate, the ratio of people in the workforce against those adults of working age, has been dropping fast.

In other words, as Marx would put it, the reserve army of labour has been rising sharply since the late 1990s and accelerated during the Great Recession.  This reflects the efforts of the capitalist sector to counteract the fall in the US rate of profit since the late 1990s by raising the rate of surplus value – a major countertendency to the rise in the organic composition of capital – in effect the cost of new technology.  Capital aimed to exploit labour harder to compensate for increased costs of capital investment relative to profitability.

This succeeded for a while in checking a very sharp fall in profitability.   But eventually, a slump could not be resisted when profits began to slip from 2005 onwards.  Now the risk is that any growth in new value will be capped by the inability to employ more unused labour.  So economic growth will remain stunted.  Plenty for central bankers to ponder.

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Art and politics. Separate?

I am on another list where a Comrade said that art and politics were separate. I was/am not sure on this. In fact I would have to say that until I would hear more I am against this. Anyway here is the response I put on to this other post. Sean.

I write:" Comrade  I am not sure what you mean when you say art and politics are different worlds. I think you are also saying that music and politics are different worlds. If this is so I think we should struggle against this. Or are you saying that such a struggle would be impossible to win given the structure of our brains, the hard wiring. I know just about nothing about art and music. And some would say politics either but I will let this go for now.

 

When we were building the old CWI in Dublin and got to be able to have socials of up to 100 people those who could sing and say poems would do their party pieces. Given the tradition of music in Irish life there were always plenty of people to take the mike. The music was usually Irish traditional or Dublin working class songs.

 

But I also had a friend at this time who was a classical musician. She studied the harpsichord at Trinity College. She also conducted a small classical ensemble. I was always on at her to do something at our socials. She resisted and I would get angry as I thought she was saying that the mainly working class audience would not appreciate her music. Some working class Comrades also were not in favor of her performing as they said nobody would want to hear her.

 

One night she just up and went to the front of the hall and sat on the performer's stool. The Comrade organizing the singers handed her the mike. All others used the mike. My friend did not she just held it down by her side. The night was well on and there was a buzz of well lubricated Comrades. Then my friend started to sing with her trained classical voice. Slowly heads began to turn, slowly chatter and the clink of glasses stopped. Eventually the room was totally silent as the working class audience recognized world class music and world class, is it right to say, art. This is where I am confused Julian where you say art and politics are different.

 

I emigrated to Canada when I was 20 and worked in an iron ore mine in Northern Ontario. I was a bit of an odd man out as the rest of the shift were mainly white Canadians. But there was one guy who kept himself apart and said little and I could see was examining me. He was native Canadian.  One night he said: "Hey Irish you want to come back and have a drink and listen to some music?" I said no as that time I did not drink alcohol. But he asked me again and so I went. He lived in a not too well preserved shack at the edge of town. We went in he pointed to a chair poured himself a large brandy and then went and put a record on his record player. He sat down and lay back on a large soft arm chair. His big cat came out from the next room and jumped up and sat on his chest. Then the music started. Great crescendos, then down to the most gentle and tender renderings that you had to curl your toes to allow into you, then great rolling sweeping powerful driving surges. I was in shock.

 

Eventually the record was over. "Well what did you think of that Irish?"  In my terrible backwardness and ignorance I said "I did not like it that is the rich man's music." Marty who was to become my friend gave me a dressing down. "What is wrong with you. Do you not know the rich keep all that is best for themselves and leave us the scraps. Well I am taking the best from them. The best music." That night there with Marty was the first time I heard Beethoven's 5th symphony. I went on with Marty's help and my Dublin friend's help to appreciate classical music so Comrade Julian I am confused when you say that art and I think you also mean music are separate from politics and I take this to mean you are saying separate in a fixed manner.

 

I believe that music and art and dance and politics are all part of us. And I believe that building a fighting movement full of life in all its great wonder has to see that such a movement would draw from all our talents and abilities and potentials.

 

I read recently that Mozart wrote a small piece and one day he was down the street at a coffee shop, not Starbucks, and he heard some little sparrows singing it but with one note changed. Is this true or is something I just want to believe. I am a bit of a sucker for good stories.  I heard he even adopted the changed note version and called it after the wee sparrows. Were they listening at his window and knew a good thing when they heard it?  I wish I could play an instrument. But the backwardness of rural peasant life when I was young did not offer an opportunity for this.

 

Sean.

 

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Fukushima: more radioactive water, more uninhabitable land

The market at work: The Sunday stroll of the future?

by Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

The “vibrant” private sector seems to be failing yet again in Japan where it appears the state will be forced to take over the clean up of the private sector’s huge disaster at the Fukushima nuclear facility.  We need to remind ourselves that when corporations leave a community leaving their polluted properties, land, water and such, it is generally the public sector that is faced with the clean up and the bill not to mention the effect on public health.

Three hundred tons of contaminated water leaked from one of the hundreds of storage tanks used to cool the damaged or broken reactors and Tokyo Electric Power Co. has been repeatedly criticized for incompetence and a failure to produce a long-term plan.  The most incompetent decision was made long ago mind you when it was decided to build nuclear rectors on an earthquake fault in a part of the world referred to as the “ring of fire” due to its seismic activity.  In addition, the plant sits next to the ocean in a land whose language gave us the word “Tsunami”. Good decision making?

Calls for the government to take over are mounting as last week’s leak was the most serious accident at the plant since the meltdown and there are more tanks that are suspect.  It’s impossible to gauge the level of environmental damage as more and more contaminated water leaks in to the ocean amid concerns that there are “growing -- volumes of radioactive water at the site.” according to AFP.

"The leak of contaminated water from the tank was extremely regrettable," Yoshihide Suga Japan’s Cabinet Secretary stated at a news conference adding that, "Failing to manage tanks properly is a big problem."  Japanese government inspectors have stated publicly that the water storage at the plant was “sloppy”.

TEPCO has been accused of hiding the extent of the problems at the disaster site where the clean up is expected to take 4O years.  But like all these disasters, Fukushima, the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico that also killed eleven workers and the West Texas fertilizer plant that blew up the town, the cause is not some mystical or elusive incident. They are not “accidents”as we define an accident, an event beyond our control perhaps, or “acts of god” as some people call them. These disasters are market-induced disasters; the decisions that led to them are made by individuals or groups of individuals with certain economic interests, with class interests. It is most likely that none of the people who made the decision to put the Fukushima reactors on an earthquake fault lived near them.

I am anything but an expert on nuclear power or the effects of radioactive waste on the world’s water bodies but I am convinced that both the BP spill and the Fukushima disaster and all such environmental catastrophes, have short-term but also long-term consequences.  Blue Fin Tuna spawn in the Gulf of Mexico for example; we won’t be fully aware what genetic damage millions of gallons of crude oil has done to these fish or other marine life until it manifests itself in their offspring and even longer than that. There must surely be tons of oil at the bottom of the ocean floor. We are always told that the level of radiation is safe, or the oil has been all but cleaned up but even if the culprits were telling the truth which they rarely are, these chemicals infiltrate everything. Then in the case of oil removal there is the chemical they use to remove it, that is also poisonous.

Scientists have stated that with regard to Fukushima, whole areas will likely be off limits, abandoned for human habitation.  This is just the beginning and the pace of this activity will speed up.  Here in the US recently, there have been numerous incidents of sink-holes opening up and swallowing whole houses, parts of small towns and just this week a cluster of trees disappeared.  This is most often due to mining activity. I remember flying back to Britain once and as we flew over the mountains heading north in to Canada, there were whole bare patches atop the mountains where logging had denuded it.  Imagine if we could see the scars and potholes in the earth, the product of unplanned and profit driven industrial activity.

As the Japanese taxpayer intervenes to bail out the Tokyo Electric Power Co. and pay for its failures, it is important to remind ourselves that capitalism cannot stop the impending environmental catastrophe that looms ahead. If the system is not changed and a democratic socialist plan of production introduced that determines society’s needs based on rational planning, collective ownership and in harmony with nature, there really is a possibility life as we know it will cease to be. It will not be isolated areas that will be uninhabitable but the entire planet. 

To recognize that we must change this situation is not utopian; it is a matter of necessity and the survival of life on this planet as we know it.

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Labor, value and capitalist production

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

If we ask workers, or even capitalists where profit comes from, the answer generally is that it comes from selling the product that the particular industry makes above its cost of production. But this is not so.  Profit is made not by selling a product higher than the cost of making it it but in the labor process itself.  The capitalist sells the commodity the worker makes for more than the capital he or she put out in the labor process, the capital for machinery, plant etc along with wages or the price of labor power. But the added value is present in the commodity itself prior to sale, it is merely realized or set free through the sale which is why we live in a 24 hour marketplace and the imbecile Bush urged us to "go shopping" after 911.

This added value contained within the commodity and realized in the sale has its origin in the labor process because the worker produces a certain amount of money value in the labor process (with the assistance of the means of production that the capitalist owns) but in return receives money (wages) that equals only a portion of the value the worker produces.  If the workers produce the value (let's say shoes) of their wages in 6 hours for example, the capitalist doesn't send them home. What would be in it for them?  So while it appears because we are paid a wage, that we receive 8 hours pay for the value we produce in 8 hours work, we are only paid for part of this working time. The value (again, shoes for example) that we produce beyond this we receive nothing for. It is an unequal exchange, the owner of capital receives value or a finished commodity that contains labor power they paid for and labor power they didn't.  This unpaid labor power is the source of profit and Marx called it surplus value.

I am not an economist but this view of the world makes absolute sense to me and explains concretely how workers are exploited in what we call capitalist society; it corresponds to objective reality as I see it.  But what got me to thinking about this was an ad I just saw on TV.  This ad started off stating something like how can an idea become reality "without the capital to make it happen?". I agree with that statement incidentally and understanding exactly what "capital" is, is another task for workers who want to understand how the world actually works.

Then there was another ad that immediately followed it saying the same thing about a "vision" how a vision can become concrete or a real.  A vision can only become reality with "financing" the ad tells us. The ad is right, capital, money or financing is absolutely necessary to make ideas real. 

But in both these cases there is another vital aspect missing and that is human labor power or labor as most people would say.  It is as if this function doesn't exist.  Someone has an idea, another has money and presto, you have society.  But as I explain above, labor is the source of profit and therefore all value creation or wealth.  The short term payroll loan that the capitalist takes out from the banker is simply a reserve capital, the product of labor power past.  It is a collective product.

Not only was human labor missing in these ads, it reminded me of when I hired a guy to do some work on my old house before I sold it. He gave me the contract to sign and I noticed that at the end he had a percentage under the heading "profit". Nowhere was there a column or a mention of the unpaid labor of the workers he employed although his payment for labor power was there, the hourly rate he paid his painters but naturally, there was no mention that he paid them less in wages than the value they create through their labor power.

So at least, labor was in existence in this example but profit again, or its source is not defined.

Someone, I can't remember who, once said that the system works behind the back of society, even the capitalists if you ask them do not really think it through.  They attribute bubbles and excess simply to "animal spirits" or claim "crony capitalism" the culprit whatever that means. They refuse to recognize that these occurrences are an inherent aspect of this system of production, of capitalism and its many contradictions.

As a wage worker all of my life, even before I became political or was introduced to socialist and/or Marxist ideas I used to get mad when I would read or hear something  like, Donald Trump or Howard Hughes built this or that hotel or resort.  "No they didn't" I would say to myself angrily.  Welders, iron workers, laborers, bricklayers, painters, plasterers, carpenters, they built that resort.  Waiters, servers, cleaners, maids, bartenders accountants and other workers operated it, made it function.

Capitalism is an exploitative system, we know this in our gut, but it's a bit harder to see that in a wage system where we are told we are paid 8 hours pay for 8 hours work which is not possible, than in feudal society for example where the exploitation was much clearer as the surplus was given in kind.  The serf would see the product, food for example,  of two or three days labor be handed over to the feudal lord not to mention tithes and rights the lord had like sleeping with your bride on her wedding night.

For the feudal aristocracy the peasant was there to serve their interests, they were the rightful owners of the land and everything on it bar the commons and their wealth came from the peasant's labor.  The capitalists view wage workers in the same way; it doesn't even exist in the creation of things.  All is needed is an idea and some money.

Without production there is no life and without labor there is no production.

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Mexican Teachers: "Education is Not a Class Privilige, It is a Social Right"

by Jack Gerson

The previous post on this blog, Ken Hanley's article "Mexico Teachers Strike Closes Classes in Several States", gave a partial picture of the massive and bitter struggle that has been going on across most of southern and central Mexico for nearly a year, including months-long and ongoing mass strikes of teachers in several Mexican states. The root cause of the conflict is the attempt by Mexico's new president, Enrique Pena Nieto, to impose austerity in the form of a neoliberal education agenda akin to the assault on public education in the U.S. and the UK, including tieing teachers' jobs to student performance on high stakes standardized tests, weakening union rights, and modifying the curriculum to be "business-friendly" -- as dictated by the World Bank and a cabal of multinational banks and corporations.

The best popular background article on the Mexican struggle is David Bacon's "U.S.-Style School Reform Goes South",  published last April in The Nation magazine:

http://www.thenation.com/article/173308/us-style-school-reform-goes-south#

However, since that article was published, the struggle has really heated up. Teachers in Guerrero, Michoacan and other states have walked out, joining the Oaxacan teachers (discussed in Bacon's article), mainly led by the CNTE (a large radical national grouping in the national teachers' union).

I think that the essence of the struggle is contained in the April 22 declaration of the teachers of Michoacan state stating their grievances and their resolve and their intention to strike until their grievances were resolved. I'm including it in the original Spanish, but I'll translate the heading:  "Education is not a Class Privilige, it is a Social Right."

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“LA EDUCACIÓN NO ES UN PRIVILEGIO DE CLASE, ES UN DERECHO SOCIAL”

A LA  OPINIÓN PÚBLICA

A LAS GOBIERNOS FEDERAL Y ESTATAL

A LOS MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN:

Hoy, 22 de abril del año 2013, el magisterio michoacano, nos dirigimos a ustedes para hacer saber la determinación que hemos tomado de asumir nuestros deberes cívicos, frente a las reformas laboral, energética, fiscal y educativa, y lo hacemos una vez que tocamos todas las puertas de gobierno, que buscamos oídos para nuestras peticiones, que solicitamos  la protección de la justicia ante los tribunales, que públicamente hemos solicitado ser incluidos en las discusiones para la construcción del modelo educativo  que requiere este país, y la respuesta ha sido negativa. Pero, al mismo tiempo, el trato que nos dan es de difamación desde los medios de comunicación, para justificar el uso de la represión policiaca. Por todo lo anterior, a partir de esta fecha NOS DECLARAMOS EN PARO DE LABORES POR TIEMPO INDEFINIDO, hasta lograr respuestas satisfactorias en lo referente a:

1. La  abrogación del decreto, emitido por Enrique Peña Nieto, que reforma los artículos 3° y 73 de la Constitución, por lesionar el carácter gratuito de la educación al imponer cuotas a los padres de familia, y permitir que la educación sea un negocio de los empresarios; por lesionar los derechos sociales y laborales, legítimamente legados por los hombres que nos dieron Patria; por pretender instituir el contratismo y buscar el despido de más de un millón de maestros con un examen tramposo, que no es una evaluación; y por buscar un mayor empobrecimiento de los contenidos educativos, en detrimento de la formación integral de los estudiantes.

2. El castigo correspondiente a Elba Esther Gordillo Morales por el despojo de nuestro dinero y otros delitos cometidos contra el magisterio y el pueblo de México. Que se realice un proceso de elección de los representantes en nuestro sindicato,  donde todos los profesores participemos. Desconocemos la imposición, por parte del gobierno federal, de Juan Díaz de la Torre, miembro de la mafia de Elba Esther.

3. El respeto total a las Normales formadoras de docentes, por ser un pilar fundamental de la educación pública y gratuita, y legado de la Revolución Mexicana.

4. Que se ponga un alto a la represión física, administrativa, mediática y laboral que los gobiernos estatal y federal han emprendido contra los maestros que luchamos por nuestros derechos y por la defensa de la educación pública, científica, nacional y gratuita.

 Sabidos de los riesgos que corremos por las amenazas de un gobierno que se niega a respetar el derecho de niños y jóvenes de acceder a la cultura universal, tomamos esta determinación porque estamos seguros de la justeza de las demandas, y tenemos claro  que, si bien el Paro Indefinido reduce el número de días clase en las escuelas, no salir a luchar contra esta mal intencionada reforma, es renunciar a contar con escuelas públicas y con programas de estudio basados en el progreso de las ciencias y la tecnología, orientados al desarrollo de las facultades humanas. No salir a luchar, sería seguir aceptando programas de estudio y textos empobrecidos, que tienen al día de hoy resultados catastróficos en niños y jóvenes, y dejarle paso libre al creciente cobro de cuotas y a la destrucción del sistema educativo. Por el cariño y compromiso hacia nuestros niños y jóvenes, seguiremos luchando con la mayor organización, inteligencia y solidaridad posibles.

Echar abajo la reforma educativa no será cosa sencilla, se requiere  contar con la participación decidida y consciente de toda la sociedad en las acciones de oposición y presión política. Se unifican los ricos empresarios, el gobierno, los diputados, senadores, partidos políticos y medios masivos de comunicación para imponer la reforma educativa en contra de los intereses y aspiraciones del pueblo. Por ello, nuestro llamado a unificar todas las fuerzas del pueblo es urgente, por el presente y futuro de la Patria.

Vamos a una intensa Jornada Nacional de Lucha, al lado de los trabajadores y pueblos de Guerrero, Oaxaca, Morelos, Chiapas, Baja California Sur, Quintana Roo, Puebla, Distrito Federal, Tlaxcala, San Luis Potosí, Coahuila, Veracruz, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Jalisco, entre otros.

Informamos que en el marco del Paro, además de acciones de presión política, realizaremos actividades culturales, pedagógicas, deportivas, sobre el cuidado del medio ambiente, alimentación sana, etc., en los centros escolares y comunidades, como parte del compromiso que hemos asumido en  el Congreso Estatal Popular de Educación y Cultura, realizado los días 17,18 y 19 de abril, en la ruta de implementar un modelo educativo que responda a los intereses de TODOS los michoacanos.

Y, aunque queda claro, es necesario decirlo: es responsabilidad del gobierno federal y estatal el estallamiento del paro de labores, por su intención de acabar con la educación gratuita de los mexicanos, ¡NO LO VAMOS A PERMITIR!

ATENTAMENTE

“POR LA EDUCACIÓN AL SERVICIO DEL PUEBLO”

SECCIÓN XVIII DEL SNTE-CNTE

MICHOACÁN

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