Class War news---tune in tonight.

It's handy deciding what is reported on the TV news and how it is reported. Here's a small example.  I actually don't watch too much local news because it's pretty bad, very provincial. On comes a story about county supervisors who were "forced" to vote to close a number of fire stations because "voters" refused to pass a parcel tax to pay to keep them open.  A parcel tax is a homeowners tax, or property tax.   These taxes on workers and the middle class are put on the ballot as the only way we can save education, save public services etc. I never support these taxes because they don't save what they are claimed to and it is simply continuing the assault on workers and the middle class and lastly, it makes it harder to build a united mass movement that can go after the minority who actually are stealing all the money.

So the reason that there are potential life threatening closures of fire stations is the voters won't increase their own taxes and reduce their disposable income.   There is no way one could come away with a different conclusion and that's intentional, it was stated as such.

The reporter could have said: "Due  to the 6 trillion or so of taxpayer money that Washington and the Pentagon are spending on wars to secure profits for US corporations abroad, Americans will have to do without vital services at home."

Or he could have said: "Due to the massive accumulation of wealth by fewer and fewer individuals and their shifting of this wealth , more than $26 trillion of it, in to offshore tax havens, Americans will have to do without more and more public services."

On the other hand, the reporter could have quoted Business Week, a very sober and astute journal of the 1% that warned over thirty years ago, "

It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow--the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more...Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept this reality. "Business Week 10-12-74.  He then could have apologized but added that we can't say we weren't warned.

All the above would be true of course.  But why tell the truth.  As I reported on this blog some time ago, I was sitting in my bosses office in my capacity as a shop steward one day and as he was out copying some document I glanced at the book he was reading.  I didn't get past the first page and the advice from the author who wrote: 

"If you're going to strive to motivate workers through autonomy and empowerment, it's important to remember that the primary burden is to make sure employees believe what you say. Don't tell them you want them to be empowered to increase the company's profits.  Tell them you want them to be empowered because it's the best way to remain competitive and guarantee everyone their jobs."

Carl Robinson, Vice President, Organizational Psychologists.

But that's the advantage of owning the media and the means of information in society. It has a class point of view.  It's not an accident that the dominant ideology in feudal times was the Divine Right of Kings. The king was king by the grace of the creator of all life. I wonder where that idea came from.

And the story immediately following the one about stupid voters that put their community in danger because they didn't want to raise their taxes?   A detailed report on fraud and waste among public sector workers.

And there's no such thing as class war!

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AFL-CIO's answer to Hostess Bosses? Hope.

By Richard Mellor

"While Hostess Brands is trying to scapegoat the workers and members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM), the real cause of the company's collapse can be traced back to its crony capitalism and consistently poor management. " AFL-CIO on Hostess dispute.

Taking an example from Barack Obama's playbook, Frank Hurt, the president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union says that he is in a "position to be hopeful" in the wake of the Hostess Brand's attempts today to have a judge accept the company's bankruptcy plans to close 36 plants and layoff 18,000 workers.

It seems that what Mr. Hurt and the entire trade union leadership are being hopeful about is that some good capitalists will step in and buy the business; rescue workers from the "crony capitalists" that have ruined it .  The Wall Street Journal opened it's piece on the dispute today, "The Union that brought the 85 year old baker of Twinkies and Wonderbread to its knees....", this is the dominant voice of capital in the US, this is their opening salvo in a report about these events.  The capitalists know their "line of march".

Hurt is hopeful, that there is "more than a good chance"  that some of these good capitalists will "swoop in to buy the profitable parts of the company and give his members their jobs back" the WSJ adds.  It seems the hopeful Union official has misunderstood the work arrangement.  If these jobs were the workers' jobs, "his members" jobs, they would still be in them.  His members own the ability to work, their life activity, that the owners of capital simply bought and used over a period of time just like they would buy a chair or a vehicle.  The right to work does not exist in capitalist society. They do this because in the process of producing commodities with this life activity (what we call work) the owners of capital extract more value than they lay out in the process.  This is where profit comes from once they sell the finished product.  When better opportunities arise, the owner of capital, in a capitalist society has every right to employ their capital somewhere else. This is what they mean by freedom.

So the good Union leader can "hope" all he likes, the process will be played out.  We did not "hope" Unions in to existence unfortunately, our lives would have been a little easier but history a lot more boring.  As the good Union leader hopes Donald Trump might come along and out of the goodness of his heart purchase the use of his members life activity again, the bosses make their position clear.
"Nobody wants to have anything to do with these old plants or these union or these contracts", says Hostess CEO Gregory Rayburn, referring to the good and the "crony" capitalists. Rayburn explains that there was some interest from a group of coupon clippers that own Pabst Blue Ribbon but their interest was based on a nice bankruptcy and that a "..liquidated Hostess would be free of its collective bargaining agreements."  Investors buying the company certainly wouldn't do so if it meant hiring back the workers who had struck. It's, "..beyond wishful thinking" says the CEO who earns some $2 million a year. They know the class lines and make sure they are on the right side of them. Their politicians, the courts, the police, the military ( a somewhat more risky element) are all used ion the battle to eliminate the workers' organizations.

Ken Hall of the Teamsters, whose union accepted the company's concessions, has no answer to the bosses either.  He supported the concessions although he will not have to work under the contract he tells his members is inevitable. Hall's three salaries totaled more than $250,000 in 2008 according to the TDU.  He doubts the bakers' Union leadership's view that someone will come in and buy the company, "Our view is that this is going to be a fire sale.", he tells the WSJ. He is right as the comments from the coupon clippers show.  As I stated in an earlier piece on the Unions, the bosses are not afraid of the Ken Hall's of this world.  Every leading labor official in the country has made it clear openly and emphatically that there will be no resistance to the bosses' efforts to drive US workers down to the levels of our brothers and sisters in India or Vietnam.  The coupon clippers are very confident after years of cooperation from the heads of organized Labor, even cooperating with them in the firing of uncooperative local leaders as the UAW leadership did in the dispute between one of their locals and the Freightliner corp in Cleveland NC.

We do not have to look far to see an alternative to the "hope" tactic.  Every dispute at the point of production must be generalized and linked to the struggles in our communities against foreclosures, or home robbery as it should be called.  Against the lack of health care, the cuts in education the crisis of youth unemployment and the growth of the prison industrial complex.  The war against public sector workers and the services we provide is the same struggle. The public sector, the most unionized sector, is being blamed for the economic crisis just like the coupon clippers at Hostess are being blamed  by the Wall Street Journal.  Factories like Hostess should be occupied and appeals be made to all workers and our communties nationally to come to the aid of these workers.

The idea that we can rely on the so called "good capitalists" or their politicians to rescue us is a proven failure.  Every freedom we have, every benefit and progressive social legislation, every right we have, has been won through the struggle of organized workers against organized capital. We can only rely on our own strength and only have to look at our history and our best traditions to see what works.  Workplace occupations, mass direct action and through that, independent political action is the road we must take.  Being prepared to violate their laws, challenge their authority through mass direct action was what broke the back of Jim Crow, General Motors and the Industrial capitalists who murdered workers with impunity in their rapacious quest for profits.

We reject that we have to compete with other workers domestically or overseas.  Workers throughout the world are fighting for their lives and futures against the very same forces that are destroying our lives here in the US; we must unite with global workers' against global capital.  If we look closely we will see that the workers who were shot in South Africa for striking the mines there, were shot by forces under direction of the very same forces that are savaging workers here.  Our first step is to reject austerity and backward motion.  But we have to recognize that we have to go further.  The wealth in society is our collective product.  How it is used in future production should be determined by those who collectively created it. If we decide we stop producing Twinkies and apply capital in a different way then we do so for the collective benefit of society.   But no one loses the right to work.
We have to control how we produce life which means we have to take it from the hands of the clique that presently owns the capital which is an essential part of the production process.  But it is only that portion of it spent on human Labor power that adds value and creates the wealth that the coupon clippers amass which makes it our distinct product.

History changes. How we produce the necessities of life changes. The only thing constant is change said Marx.  Every ruling class teachers that the system of production they govern is the only system of production and will last for all time.  Human history proves this false. Workers don't control the production of ideas in society that are taught in their schools, and especially universities, and we don't own, manage and control the means of producing the needs of society either------but we can and it's time we did.  The future of humanity is dependent on it.

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Obama's honeymoon will be short: crisis, conflict, class polarization is ahead.

by Sean O'Torrain

Obama's honeymoon? I think it will be short. I also think that it will be crisis ridden on many fronts.

He is already into trying to negotiate US capitalism's debt with the Republicans. The liberal wing of the Democrats will be pressing him to tax the rich. In the Republican Party the extreme right will try to hold their leaders to stand against this. Obama is liable to cave. This will increase tensions inside the Democratic Party maybe leading to splits.

This debate over the deficit shows the US economic system is in crisis, but also shows the political crisis of US capitalism. It is possible the Republicans could split in the next four years. This would open up a whole new political situation here where the two parties of US capitalism could begin to lose their political monopoly. This would be of world-wide significance.

This debacle of Petraeus and the top army brass who were conducting the wars in the Middle East will further discredit the US military, one of the few US capitalist institutions that was not looked upon with complete contempt. Read the descriptions of the shenanigans that were going on amongst these top brass and the so called hospitality groupies and the lavish dinners that these people held and the 20,000 to 30,000 emails that one general is reputed to have sent. Where did he get the time? No wonder US capitalism is losing the wars with its generals doing all this while the military rank and file were fighting and dying in the Middle East.

We should think of this serious crisis in the US military this way. Two Months after the Russian Revolution of 1917 formal ranks and the saluting of officers was banned. The salute is a recognition of the superiority and integrity of the officer caste, and the top ranks of all military's are from the ruling class or linked closely to it; the Bolsheviks got rid of it.  The salute is to make the soldier at every rank commit themselves to unquestionable loyalty to the chain of command.  Imagine what a soldier will think about now as he or she salutes Petraeus, or what appear to be an increasing number of others like him.  They will not be able to keep from laughing. This is a big blow to the military. And it was Petraeus remember who pushed Obama to stay longer in Afghanistan and launch a surge there against Obama's instincts.

Another area of great crisis for Obama is liable to be the Middle East. What will happen there in the next four years? It is likely that Syria will explode, it is likely that different peoples divided up  and transferred in to many different states by imperialism in the past will, as war and fragmentation sweeps the area, seek to build their own national states again breaking up the existing states further. There will even be a tendency to going back to the tribal divides again. Something will also happen in the next four years over the nuclear program of Iran and the Zionist regime in Israel and due to the Zionist regime's stupidity and arrogance the Israeli Palestinian conflict will continue. 

Then there is the world economy. I cannot see how Obama will get through his next four years without a new and much worse 2008 type collapse and a much worse recession than the one we are coming  through. I also cannot see how trade and other tensions with China will get anything but worse. In China itself it is hard to see the ruling elite there getting through the next four years without a huge increase in uprisings and instability. At some point, there will be more open conflict between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the rising Chinese capitalist class.  This will inevitably lead to splits in the ruling party and a more confident and open capitalist class making a move for total control. I cannot see the Euro crisis getting anything but worse and the movement of the working class there increasing. In Russia, stability will also be hard to maintain; the country is already extremely volatile and divided. In Africa and Latin America we are also seeing increasing movements of the working class. The Venezuelan elections which have kept Chavez at the helm was a real blow to US imperialism in the latter area.

Within this process we will see the emergence of working class women as never before. Half the factory workers in the world are now women. They will not sit back. Already in advanced capitalist countries and in countries such as Bangladesh we have seen them take action. And in the Arab Spring there is increased struggles against the sexism of the Islamic regimes and ideology.

Not the normal approach to Staten Island

And of course there is the the big one; climate change, pollution and the general environmental devastation that is the result of the capitalist system of production. What cities, what areas, will either be submerged under water or be made inhabitable through drought, pollution and nuclear catastrophe in the next four years? The storm in the NE of the US and the Caribbean that brought 6 foot walls of water down the streets of Staten Island, the tsunami and nuclear catastrophe in Japan, Katrina, the oil spill in the Gulf, and the melting of the ice caps, these are signs of  the developing catastrophe under capitalism.

Yes Obama is going to have a second term of it. The inspiring struggles that are taking place will give great opportunities to the working class. In that sense we are in a very favorable period. Here in the US we would hardly know it but there have been massive strikes in South Africa that have threatened the world production of Platinum. These have been joined by strikes of farmworkers and it comes after the murder of 40 or so workers by the state. The workers will not be cowed; not like their present leaders.  Today, in Europe, there are protests and/or general strikes in 23 countries.  There are calls in some quarters for a mass Europe-wide march on the European Parliament in Brussels. The ongoing struggles in Latin America and China and among the world's indigenous people against the destruction of their lands are ongoing.   But if these opportunities are not taken, they will turn into their opposite. As we say democratic international socialism or catastrophe and the destruction of life on earth as we know it.

Obama and capitalism is going to have their hands full, and so are the working gclass.

Unless the working class takes power and replaces the present clique that control the means of production of human life, then life on earth as we know it will be destroyed.  I believe we need to fight to build mass united front type formations, with programs that take on, confront and are able to throw back the capitalist offensive and open up the door to a worldwide working class offensive. This would put on the agenda of the mass of the working class once again the issues of capitalism and socialism. This can come quickly. After all think that it was only slightly over 20 years ago when socialism was declared dead and that history had ended.

The workers' movement world-wide has already ended this period. Within these united fronts that I speak of, whether they initially take the form of united fronts or united front type parties we have to also build revolutionary socialist currents which will be able to draw the lessons of history and  put a cutting edge on these movements, a cutting edge on these great chisels----one that can allow them to end capitalism and build a democratic socialist society.

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