From the Belly of the Beast

The Global Capitalist Collapse and the Awakening of the World's Workers

Ray O Light

Over the past few months, the world capitalist economic crisis has deepened everywhere. From China and India to Poland and Latvia, tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs and their livelihoods. In most of the countries of Eastern Europe, the numbers and percentages of unemployed have already reached staggering proportions. In the USA, November and December each saw over five hundred thousand new unemployed workers; and over six hundred thousand lost their jobs in each of the first three months of 2009. When the large number of self-employed, and the underemployed are included, an estimated five million workers in the USA alone have been drastically impacted.

The initial response of the imperialist and other reactionary governments to the crisis has been to provide multi-billion dollar (euro, pound, yen) bailout giveaways to the wealthiest, greediest and most guilty ruling class bankers and businessmen, the very people most responsible for the depth of the crisis. This boondoggle has been squeezed out of the sweat and blood of the working class in every country, indeed, the amount of dollars, euro, etc. involved in the bailouts will still be coming out of the children and grandchildren of those of us in today's working class, if we allow the system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism to survive.

* In the first half of the twentieth century, the international communist movement, under Lenin-Stalin Bolshevik leadership, had been the pathfinder, trailblazer, organizer and leader of the most advanced class in the struggle for world progress – the international working class. For most of the past fifty years, the international communist and workers movement has been led by collaborators with imperialism, headed by U.S. imperialism.

In the past few months, the working class of the French colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique have waged powerful workers strike struggles organized through their trade unions, spearheading their islands' masses in their demand for economic relief from this global capitalist crisis. The general strikes on both these Caribbean islands, with overwhelming popular support, have succeeded in winning their immediate wage and price demands and have raised the fundamental question of political power, including the question of national sovereignty vis-a-vis French imperialism. Their struggle has inspired a similar struggle with similar demands in the French island colony of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean on the other side of the world.

No doubt, too, the strong uprisings of the exploited and oppressed masses of Guadeloupe and Martinique have helped provide backbone to the increasingly independent stands of Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador in opposition to U.S. imperialism. More dramatically, the defeat of the Arena Party government in the March 2009 election in El Salvador represents a resurgence of mass anti-imperialist sentiment among the workers in this Central American country, a former center of revolutionary activity. For more than two decades, prior to this victory, the Salvadoran working people had been living under the Arena party-led state of terror.

At the same time, the French working class, inspired at least in part by their class brothers and sisters in Guadeloupe and Martinique, has undertaken massive and militant demonstrations within that important imperialist country itself, resisting the efforts of the French ruling class to put the burden of the crisis on their shoulders. Likewise, the working people of Greece, along with the students, have been staging massive protests against police brutality and in defense of popular education, also fueled by the economic crisis. The street demonstrations of the Greek masses have shaken the roots of the reactionary regime there.

The working class militancy being exhibited in oppressed colonies and neo-colonies and major imperialist countries, as well as countries in between, is a reflection of the mass disaffection with the world system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Even without the existence of a viable alternative socialist camp at this time, the toiling masses' fascination with global capitalism has been broken.

Within the USA itself, for sixty years U.S. imperialism's post World War II hegemony in the capitalist world allowed for a situation to develop in which the organized labor movement has been almost totally subservient to U.S. imperialism, and the U.S. working class has been loyal to the U.S. imperialist ruling class as it became almost completely caught up in the consumer culture. For about twenty-five years after World War II (approximately 1947-1972), the organized section of the U.S. working class was able to win wage increases (and material gains) without the bitter and bloody struggles normally associated with such working class advance. This fact of life was precisely in accordance with Lenin's teachings on the imperialist bribery of "its own" working class by major imperialist powers.

For the past thirty-five years or so, since then, the real wages of U.S. workers have not increased. Yet working people here have continued to experience significant material gains. This has been largely due to the inflation bubble and especially inflation in the housing sector on which most working class family wealth is based. In recent years the consumer spending of U.S. working people, largely on the basis of the proceeds from housing inflation, has been the engine driving much of the world capitalist system's economic production.

It is no wonder, then, that, over these sixty years, the U.S. working class and its labor movement have been almost completely won over to the "virtues" of capitalism, U.S. imperialism style.

Now this is no longer the case! The subprime mortgage crisis in the USA has led to a housing crisis which has led to a U.S. financial crisis, to a world financial crisis, and finally to a world capitalist economic crisis. The subsequent massive job loss and the wiping out of private pensions, along with the U.S. government bailout of the rich ruling class financial criminal organizations like Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs is awakening the U.S. working class to the fact that the system is rotten. Certainly, if we don't yet know it, we feel it in our bones.

In the USA, the growing mass disaffection with the system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism is a fundamentally new condition that dramatically impacts every clash between labor and capital, between the oppressed and the oppressor, between the police and the oppressed nationalities, between the workers and the opportunists leading the U.S. labor movement.

Three outstanding recent developments in the U.S. working class movement reflect this new reality – the growing revolutionary potential of the working class within the belly of the beast itself.

No doubt partly fueled by the Obama election victory as well as an increasingly angry mood of the working class in response to the economic crisis and the bailouts for the Wall Street rich, five thousand meatpackers at the massive Smithfield Foods plant in Tarheel, North Carolina (N.C.) won their union election, in a close vote, and affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW).

This victory culminated a sixteen year struggle against one of the most intense anti-union company offensives in recent U.S. history -including firings and physical assaults on union activists, use of local police agencies and immigration raids aimed at intimidating and splitting the workforce, and anti-trust lawsuits against the union. The unity of the Afro-American and Latino workers and the fact that the factory is located in the "Black Belt South," in the old slave plantation region, in one of the least unionized states (3% of the workers in N.C. are unionized) add to the significance of this victory.

Another indication that the mood of U.S. workers, especially immigrant national minority and Afro-American workers, is changing rapidly and dramatically for the better was revealed by the successful factory occupation by 240 Republic Windows unionized employees in Chicago after they received three days notice of lay-off in violation of the law that required a 60 day notice of plant closing. With their union, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), the workers occupied the factory for six days demanding their severance pay, continuation of health benefits and pay for accrued vacation.

Workers were especially angered by the fact that Bank of America, a recipient of $34 billion as part of the massive Wall Street bailout, withheld credit from the company in part causing the plant shutdown. The demands and actions of the Republic Window workers received the sympathy and captured the imagination of working people all over the country who share their outrage at Bank of America, et al.

After a six day occupation of the factory the workers won all their demands, including a severance package worth $1.75 million. Furthermore, in February 2009 following the victorious sit-down strike, the factory was sold by Republic Windows to Serious Materials, a green-oriented, California-based windows company. The new owners have signed a new union contract with the UE and the workers have begun being called back!

The past few decades have witnessed the almost total disappearance of the strike weapon from the arsenal of U.S. organized labor. In this setting, the Republic Windows workers and the UE's adoption of the far more advanced tactic of factory occupation in defense of their rights and standard of living and the widespread sympathetic response they received, are very good signs indeed.

Currently, the largest union in the USA is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) led by its autocratic President Andy Stern. Stem has overseen the rapid growth of SEIU, in marked contrast with most U.S. unions which are shrinking. But he has accomplished this on the unprincipled, anti-union basis of "sweetheart agreements" with hospital and health care and nursing home corporations over the heads of and at the expense of the members he is signing up.

Stern has attempted to crush a democratically run, San Francisco-based 150,000 member United Health Care local of SEIU led by its progressive President, Sal Roselli. But the membership and leadership of SEIU local #250 mobilized and defended its rank and file-led union and its decent contracts. In late January, after Stern trusteed the local, more than a hundred union staffers led by Roselli, in consultation with 5,000 local union stewards, resigned from the SEIU and launched the formation of a new National Union of Health Care Workers (NUHW). Thus far the workers in bargaining units representing almost one hundred thousand workers have indicated a majority commitment to NUHW. But the U.S. Labor Department, influenced by Stern and his Democratic Party political connections, are frustrating many rank and file attempts to hold votes on union affiliation at this time. But the struggle continues.

The protracted and mass struggle for union democracy being carried out by NUHW, occurring in this period of economic crisis and nascent working class ferment, holds significance far beyond California and the SEIU. It has the potential for helping to pave the way for class struggle-oriented, democratically-run, rank and file-led unions, capable of leading a crusade of working class organization and struggle against capital such as were born and thrived in the last Great Depression with the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO). NUHW needs and deserves our support.

For those of us who have "kept the faith" and continued to uphold the banner of socialism, even as the Socialist Camp dissolved and disappeared, the new world capitalist economic crisis provides a great opportunity and an increased responsibility. We need to spread the truth about the superiority of the socialist system to a new generation of working people who are every day learning new bitter lessons about the degradation and dead end character of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

As Karl Marx wrote, 160 years ago, "We have nothing to lose but our chains! We have a world to win!" On to the Socialist Future!

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