Syria Fact Sheet: Victory to the Revolution!

Rebel fighters hold their weapons as they take their positions near the town of Kafr Nabuda in Hama province, Syria, Oct. 11, 2015. The Syrian army, backed by allied militias, has made advances in western Syria after heavy Russian airstrikes. (photo by REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah)

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/11/syria-opposition-advance-hama-countryside.html#ixzz4MjO8HyuT

 

Syrian Fact Sheet

1)       U.S. sheds crocodile tears over Aleppo while their own coalition is waging attacks on people across the region; the tears are for the deal they had with Russia. The U.S. never had a problem with Assad while they were employing his torture chambers against captured Afghanis and Iraqis during the Iraq war or while he kept Palestine in check.   Indeed the U.S. refusal to arm the opposition with heavy artillery, anti-tank, anti-aircraft MANPADS and SAMS has long indicated the two-faced non-commitment to any revolutionary upsurge of the masses for democracy.  The U.S. has always been hedging its bets in search of the new pawn or in deference to Assad. The Obama “red line” declaration after Assad’s Sarin gas attack on Ghouta proved this. That pro-Assad figures in the west have had so much fun disputing the truth of the attack is due to the Obama administration’s refusal to energize their press control, exactly for doublethink reasons when they found no support in Congress for enforcing any red line.

2)       The Arab national revolution emerged again in 2011 with the democratic and economic demands of the masses across the Middle East and North Africa.  The people's demands could not be met under regimes that sustained imperialist control and perpetual semi-colonial subjugation.  Thus the masses came in collision with imperialism.  Both the dominant western imperialism and the emergent Russia/China bloc contesting for geopolitical advantage and control of semi-colonial resources and markets.

3)       The counterrevolution emerged from multiple quarters against the masses in the region from Egypt to Libya to Syria. The majority of local counterrevolutionary forces are proxies for imperialists, East or West. Thus we see Hezbollah backing Assad, while additional counterrevolutionaries are the proxies for regional players and are external expressions of intra-royalty factions in Saudi-Arabia and/or counters to Iranian intervention, and a virtual invasion by Iran with Russian technical and logistical support. To survive the masses have had to find arms where they can. This disturbs sectarians who equate the stencils on the arms crates with imperialist control over the end users. Some of these sectarians say there is no Syrian working class.

4)       The bourgeois army officers and Syrian capitalist renegades around the FSA/SNC who abandoned Assad and ran off to Geneva to make alliance with imperialism claim leadership of the opposition and make alliance with western imperialism in the hope of gaining control in a post Assad regime subordinate to the U.S./EU and free from the Russian bloc. They do not speak for the revolution, nor for the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC).

5)       Russia is not anti-imperialist; Russia is looking at Syria as a fertile territory for investment of its surplus capital.

6)       The bombing of civilian populations by Assad and Russia with no real opposition from the west is aimed not at ISIS or Al Qaeda but at the civilians who are organizing their own self-defense, including their own self administration.

7)       The Local Coordinating Committees (LCC) established across Syria are the form that self-organization takes, they are the natural organs of self-defense and survival created by a civilian population under siege.  Inside the LCC’s both the democratic aspirations of the masses and the need for civil administration and defense from the neo-liberal barrel bombs of Assad unite a civilian opposition against all anti-democratic forces. Thus they are an embryo of workers councils for self-administration of the society by the working population and the lower middle class and dispossessed farmers driven to the cities by climate change.

8)       U.S., Russia and China suffer overproduction of Capital and are desperate to find places to put it to use where they can assume profit in actual investment and not speculation. Syria has the misfortune of geographic location to be right where profitable pipelines can be built.  For Russia, Syria is a host that offers naval and airbases on the Mediterranean, a geopolitical objective of the first order as a counter to the U.S. bases that ring this body from Morocco to Turkey. This is also a proxy war over the allegiance of important business partners for both imperialist blocs, namely the business of Turkey and Iran.  For Turkish and Iranian business, the Russian bloc, just like the U.S. bloc would sacrifice the national liberation of the Kurdish people just as readily as sending their bombers or facilitating invasions of Syria.

9)       But make no mistake, none of these profit-making objectives can be achieved by either bloc so long as the revolution is contesting political power with the regime; both Russia and the U.S. endeavor to crush the Revolution; Russia seeks to obliterate it and fortify the personal regime of Bashar Assad; the U.S. seeks to combine elimination of the revolutionaries with co-optation of forces it can make amenable to the survival of an Assad regime minus Assad.

10)    The revolution increasingly comes to understand that national liberation from the combination of the Assad dictatorship and the invaders allied to Assad requires breaking with imperialism completely. This places socialism on the order of the day as the only way out and that the national democratic revolution has no hope of realization in a bourgeois parliament but must be carried through to victory by the armed masses and their own workers-democratic organizations. Stalinophiles count as nothing the proliferation of hundreds of Local Coordinating Committees or their five years of experience administering and exercising growing powers in areas liberated from Assad.  

11)    Defense of Rojava against ISIS was at first heroic and led by the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) with armed women’s detachments taking the fight against brutal counterrevolutionary theocracy. But as has happened numerous times in the post-WWII era, Kurdish national liberation has collapsed into an unholy alliance with U.S. imperialism. That this time, the betrayal was managed by the Maoist PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), the same group that lately abandoned the armed struggle within Turkey, shows how the stagist theory of Stalinism, in practice, abandons the masses when a revolutionary victory is within their reach. The U.S. forced the YPG to abandon the fight against Assad, just as it co-opted FSA forces on the southern front

12)    Co-opted forces allied to one or the other bloc can only deliver a carved up Syria corresponding to contemporary spheres of economic interests. Assad howls that this is what Washington wants, but has nothing to say about the forced redistribution of populations-- actual ethnic cleansing -- that is the object of the Russian air campaign against Aleppo and the invasion by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

13)    Since the end of WWII the semi-colonial states have been driven by the need of their peoples to liberate their economies from the parasitism of imperialism.  The Russia/China bloc is not leading an anti-imperialist bloc that can win national independence for semi colonies from imperialism.    Russia and China are not leading an anti-imperialist united front a la the World Social Forum’s dream of a “21st century Socialism,” rather they are trying to wrest countries from U.S./EU imperialist control across the global south and claim the semi-colonial prizes for their own profit.  Did their BRICS bank bail out their preferred popular front in Brazil and head off the U.S.-inspired impeachment? No!

14)    Today internationalist workers must defend the Syrian Revolution as it is the front line in the struggle of the international proletariat and oppressed masses against the designs of imperialism, the system that each of the two blocs employs in a quest for control of all the world’s trade and labor. This is what is at stake in besieged Aleppo. Take the side of the masses against every one of their would-be masters! Victory to the Syrian Revolution!

Communist Workers Group – USA (CWG-US):

Email: cwgclasswar@gmail.com

Website: www.cwgusa.org/

Subscribe to Class War (Paper of the CWG-US)

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http://www.cwgusa.org/?p=1726

Class War Vol 2 No 3 November 2014

Revolutionary journal of the Communist Workers' Group, USA.

For a Socialist Palestine! Climate Change: Socialist Solution No Justice in Capitalist America Editorials US  Imperialists out of MENA! International Labor Defence Egypt, Mexico, Palestine, US. What We Fight For   Read More

USA: For Mass Labor Actions to Defend Iowa City Municipal Jobs and Defeat Privatization!

   For Mass Labor Actions to Defend Iowa CIty Municipal Jobs and Defeat Privatization! by JohnnBrown

Class War Volume 1, Number 6, Winter 2013

   Class War V.1 #6 by JohnnBrown

Greetings To the Second Congress of the Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe!

From the Communist Workers Group (USA) December 6, 2013


Since “independence” in 1980 the ZANU-PF and its predecessors have made Zimbabwe safe for imperialist exploitation. The Program of Permanent Revolution is confirmed in the negative results of the national revolution, which gained for the national bourgeois forces the role of administrator over and champion of a capitalist economy which can neither support its people nor gain its independence from the dictates of the world market. They are playthings of imperialism; they cannot avoid the economic and military ravages intertwined with the inter-imperialist struggle over Africa’s resources. The ZANU-PF regime has not always been a favorite with the former colonizers and they are tolerated in the breach because the cost of overthrowing them was judged to be too steep by the Blair and Mbeki regimes. Sanctions imposed at that time impacted the lives of the working masses and ordinary poor. By design they did not interfere with the profits of the giant extraction companies.[1]

In the epoch of imperialism there is no national program for the liberation of the semi-colonial countries and their people. The pan-Africanist vision also has not liberated Africa. While touted from many corners of the continent by liberation fighters turned capitalist state administrators, it serves as an ideological and organizational roadblock to the African workers revolution in particular and the world revolution by extension.

The tasks of the bourgeois revolution, the completion of the agricultural reform, national independence and democracy have not been completed by the ZANU-PF. How could they be with their political program? A layer of veterans has become a new ruling class. Their privilege derives from and is maintained by the counter-revolution from within the anti-imperialist revolution, and is just a cost of doing business for the imperialists.

Had these tasks been completed Zimbabwe would be able to feed its people and would not be trapped into mono-cropping for the world market. The starving of the masses fills the prisons for want of bread and democracy. Yet in the prisons hundreds have died because the state cannot find the funds to feed the inmates but one meal a day.[2] The capitalist system is the crime and the prisons are the result! We say tear down the prisons! Complete the agricultural reform by uniting agricultural workers under the leadership of the working class to seize Capital’s assets, plan and implement a rational production of food to meet the needs of the people.

Had these tasks been completed the resources of the state would prevent the epidemic (reportedly 100,000 victims) of waterborne disease, and cholera would not be a threat today. Yet by subordinating the national revolution to imperialism, the mineral wealth of the nation keeps the miners and their families living in poverty without clean and safe water supplies.[3]

We hear Anglo American tooting its own horn for having donated a preposterous $100,000 to the Red Cross and showcase plumbing projects to fight cholera. The fake concern of these imperialists is notable on two accounts. Capital proclaims its beneficial role as a big investor, yet the historic impoverishment of the nation is the product. We say complete the revolution! Expropriate the assets of foreign capital! Make the imperialists pay![4]

Rio Tinto, Anglo American, Impala Platinum drain the nation’s wealth by keeping the miners wages at the starvation minimum wage of $227 a month. The Chamber of Mines is fighting the union’s demands for $800 for diamond miners, $700 for platinum miners and $573 for gold miners. The impasse in negotiations last week (Nov 26) will once again put the ZANU-PF to the test as the state arbitrator adjudicates on the dispute in January. We say no faith in the state arbitrators! VICTORY TO THE MINERS IN THEIR FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE! TO WIN AGAINST THE INTERNATIONAL CORPORATIONS UNITED STRIKES ACROSS SOUTHERN AFRICA ARE NEEDED!

In Bloomberg.com we read, ‘‘The union believes that it’s fair and just for each sub-sector to remunerate its employees at rates that are proportional to its performance…” We say union leaders who tie labor costs to the price of the ore workers extract from the ground are not committed to the workers but to the market and its dictates! The LCC demands a living wage for all! For wage and price committees tied to mass assemblies of workers, the unemployed, agricultural labor and students! We must reject wages being determined by the wild fluctuations in the price of the ore workers mine. Imperialism has extracted its profit and super-profits when the ore was selling at high prices, yet they did not raise wages then, and now the labor fakers tier the wage demands referencing the imperialists excuses about the fall in demand! Repatriate the stolen super-profits! Expropriate the Expropriators![5]

We have noticed a big increase of the Chinese influence in Zimbabwe and it is not limited to the economic sphere. The 98 million dollar loan to build the Harare military base signals a long-term partnership with the ZANU-PF regime. It will garrison forces aimed squarely at the working class, as Zimbabwe is not the imperialist proxy of choice for enforcement on the continent. For the present we don’t see Zimbabwe making military moves against its neighbors. This base will constitute the security of the state at the expense of the masses who will have to pay back the loan. And the Atlantic Monthly raises the question about what it represents about future projections of Chinese military power onto the continent. We well remember that imperialists have made Africa their battleground in both inter-imperialist world wars and we see Africom as an early placeholder for US imperialism and its NATO allies.[6]

The Marikana example is an object lesson in the need of the working class to organize self defense of its ranks and its struggles. We know the ANC colluded with the mine owners against the Marikana miners and shot them down in cold blood. The ZANU-PF is no better and we must warn the workers against faith in the state and prepare the masses to defend their strikes, to arm the people and disarm the police. As Trotsky observed in his history of the Russian Revolution, “The way to the soldier’s rifle leads through the revolver taken from the Pharaoh.” [7]

From the belly of the imperialist beast and on behalf of the vanguard workers of the USA we salute this second congress of the Revolutionary Workers Group! We salute the programmatic conquests that have resulted in the formation of the RWG. The RWG is the ripe fruit of the battle against Cliffism and its surrender to the Popular Front and entry into the MDC. We would wish to caution vanguard fighters everywhere of the Cliff/Schachtman tendency’s history of reducing class struggle to economism. Recently, these willing class collaborators (the ISO-Z) tried to hitch their failed economist project to the unsullied standard of the RWG which proudly defended the transitional method against a fake unity of the working class and its vanguard around the minimum program of reformism.

The RWG likewise rejected the schematicism and target fixation of the FLTI which refuses to recognize Chinese imperialism though it stares workers in their face anywhere they care to look and particularity in the southern hemisphere. The RWG has successfully defended the revolutionary position on the August 1991 coup and counter-coup in the former USSR and has done so against the considerable pressure from the backslider RCIT whose break from the method of Cliffism is incomplete as demonstrated by their support for Yeltsin faction and their objectively pro-imperialist position in support of the Bosnian breakaway state and the NATO bombing of Serbia.

We salute the RWG for raising the banner in Africa for solidarity with the Revolutionary fighters in Syria and in solidarity with the deepening Arab revolution against the misguided calls for retreat to bourgeois parliamentarism and the Constituent Assembly while trade unionists on strike in Egypt are daily fighting the military regime and while the order of the day across MENA is to organize workers councils and militia.

We are united in our internationalist vision and resolved upon the tasks of building a revolutionary workers’ international. The very survival of humanity depends on our victory. Capitalism, the impending inter-imperialist conflict over resources and markets and the devastation of climate change will devastate the billions in the semi-colonial world whose infrastructure is least prepared to adapt. The impact of drought driven by climate change on the Syrian economy has driven the people to revolt and we will see case after similar case as the comprador bourgeoisie seek to keep the cork in the bottle. Hurricanes, typhoons, natural disasters combined with capitalist lack of planning and the anarchy of production that gave us Fukushima cries out for the formation of a planned world economy. Our tasks are monumental but our program of class independence and the dialectical method of the transitional program guide us to build our fighting party to lead the workers to victory.

All power to the working class!

Victory to the Zimbabwe miners! Justice for Marikana!

For the united socialist state of Southern Africa!

---

USA | The BART Strikes | Once again on the relevance and method of Trotsky’s Transitional Program

   THE BART STRIKES: Once again on the relevance and the method of Trotsky's Transitional Program by JohnnBrown

Mobilize all of Labor to Defend Longshoremen

Obama/Solis/Government hands off the ILA!

Smash Taft-Hartley strike-breaking through

all-out working class struggle!

ILA/ILWU unite to shut down the ports on all three coasts!

The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) has been in negotiations with the USMX (United States Maritime Alliance) bosses for the last several months. No contract agreement has been reached yet, but the ILA leaders have agreed to a contract extension until February 6th, thus averting a strike for the moment. As negotiations drag on, a February 6th strike is a possibility. On the West Coast, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in Portland is also under attack by the bosses. There has been saber-rattling in both struggles by the bosses and their supporters. More than 100 business owners, along with Florida Gov. Rick Scott have called for Obama to impose Taft-Hartley strike-breaking. On the West Coast, Obama’s Coast Guard has been deployed for the express purpose of escorting any scab ships if it comes down to a strike or lockout, while private security strikebreakers stand in the wings.

Instead of mobilizing support for these struggles, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka had all his energies focused on the fiscal cliff; propping up the Democrats and beating up on the Republicans, and in the process, not even denouncing Obama and Pelosi outright over their proposed chained CPI Social Security cost of living increase calculation (which was eventually withdrawn at least for the time being.) The fiscal cliff doom was a lot of hype to divert and scare workers while lining the pockets of corporations by protected enshrined tax dodges as the ruling class promises to go after past social gains like Social Security and Medicare in the run up to March 1st debt ceiling deadline. One other thing is real though; the working class and the oppressed are being led off a cliff by the Democratic Party sellout union tops that are unwilling to do what is necessary to defend our unions or to defend even the minimal remaining social safety net that is under attack.

The miserable fiscal cliff deal pleases no one except Grover Norquist. Obama January 1st spin was that he carried out his campaign promises to avoid unnecessary cuts to social services. However, the fiscal cliff deal is only temporary, until the automatic spending cuts take effect in March unless a new deal is reached. The State Federation and Central Labor Council layers of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy will all fall into line behind Trumka and the Democrats even as they catch fire from the rank-and-file members who are being left high and dry by this largely one-sided class war against the working class and the oppressed. And now in the direct line of fire are the Longshoremen.

To the misleaders of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor federations must be added the reformists of the Workers World Party and the Southern Workers Assembly who are distributing an online petition to ask Obama to abstain from imposing strikebreaking Taft-Hartley provisions on the ILA. This petition is couched in the language of disappointed Democrats not that of militant trade unionists who understand where the class line lies. This online petition came our way from Occupy Oakland Labor Solidarity and we can only hope that they have better plans for supporting the Longshore struggle and opposing government strikebreaking.

For their part, the ILA bureaucracy already has plans to conduct a potential strike with one hand tied. Their strike preparations include instructions to handle perishable goods, military cargo, automobiles, non-containerized cargo and mail. This is nonsense. Shut down the ports tight, all the cargo and all the ports!

Both the ILA struggle on the East and Gulf Coasts, and the ILWU on the West Coast are key labor battles by unions that wield enormous power and that have traditions of labor militancy. In the wake of the defeat of labor in Michigan, once a bastion of organized labor, we cannot afford many more defeats. It is time to fight! United ILA/ILWU struggle that shuts down the ports with the backing of much of the rest of organized labor and the oppressed could not only stop the string of working class defeats, but could also be mobilized to fight the attacks on social welfare.

It was the ILWU which hot-cargoed goods from South Africa during the apartheid regime, ILWU locals 10 & 19 supported the immigrant worker led May 1st Great American Boycott where Latino labor coast to coast went into the streets and reminded the American worker what May 1st is about. The ILWU local 10 initiated a political strike against racist police repression and the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, CA. It is reasonable to expect and correct to call upon the port communities of the oppressed to support and defend Longshore labor Action. It is correct to see Longshore labor action as a form of your own self defense.

The Communist Workers Group (CWG) encourages workers to keep a close eye on the ILA struggle along with that of the West Coast ILWU. Bring these struggles to your union and community and spread the word! An injury to one is an injury to all! Mobilize all-out support for the Longshoremen on all the coasts!

CWG January 6, 2013

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/01/05/18729502.php

http://www.ilaunion.org/

http://www.ilaunion.org/pdf/StrikePreparations.pdf

reblogged from cwgusa

 

DEFEND PRO-PALESTINE ACTIVIST FROM AUSTRIAN STATE REPRESSION

A young comrade of the RKOB of Austria has been charged with ‘sedition’ for making a speech in support of Palestinian liberation and against the “apartheid” state of Israel at a recent demonstration in Vienna against the Israeli bombing of Gaza. We quote from the RKOB statement.

“20-year old Palestine Solidarity Activist and RKOB spokesperson Johannes Wiener has been accused of „sedition” and must appear soon at the “Federal Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism” in Vienna (this is the long name for the Secret Police in Austria). His crime: He held a speech in solidarity with the Palestine Resistance at a mass rally on 16.11.2012 during the recent Gaza War. As a result comrade Wiener faces the threat of up to two years in prison. His militant speech has caused some public attention and was already viewed 6.500 times since then. It has been published as a video both on the RKOB website as well as of the bourgeois daily paper HEUTE. (1)”

The Liaison Committee of Communists condemns the actions of the Austrian imperialist bourgeois state in suppressing the democratic right of freedom of speech!

We condemn the actions of pro-Israel, pro-Zionist political groups in actively campaigning for the suppression of freedom of speech.

We declare our solidarity with the RKOB in a united front on the demand: “Palestine shall be free, from the River to the Sea!”

LIAISON COMMITTEE OF COMMUNISTS
Communist Workers’ Group (USA)
Revolutionary Workers’ Group (Zimbabwe)
Communist Workers’ Group (Aotearoa/New Zealand)

Which way forward for the Oakland Port Workers Assembly

How can the Oakland Port Workers Assembly support the SEIU 1021 strike - building the class wide solidarity needed to win a non-concessionary contract? 

We have seen many one day strikes (the CNA makes a regular practice of using them as do the European trade unions) and they do not result in winning contracts. In fact, they are used by the union leaderships who tie the workers to the capitalist bosses’ political party, as a pressure release valve when leadership feels heat from the rank and file. However, in this period of capitalist crisis non-concessionary contracts will not won by one-day strikes or even a series of them.

Our support for the strike action at the port by SEIU 1021 this week must be unwavering and show that the Assembly is mobilizing boots on the ground and bringing the information about the Port to our co-workers and communities.  But we would be remiss if we were to say nothing about the failed strategy of one-day and limited duration strikes, about who promotes them, the whys  and how’s and that they disarm the working class.
Our assembly has a choice to make.  Will we limit ourselves to doing the work the labor council should be doing, substituting ourselves for the work the accumulated resources of labor (under control of the leaderships) should be put too?   Of course we must!  But this is not enough.

Read On

Lessons of the Chicago Teachers' Strike

Despite the resolve the working class displayed: massive demonstrations, strong picket lines and unwavering parent/student support, the reformers of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) in the leadership of the CTU showed their true colors Friday announcing that settlement had been reached, and that after a vote of the teachers’ House of Delegates planned for Sunday, the teachers would have gone to their classroom Monday the 17th without ever seeing or voting on the contract. Under pressure from the rank and file in the House of Delegates the planned capitulation was postponed over the objection of fake socialist Jesse Starkey, who has acted to keep the membership in the dark. The reformists are maintaining the fantasy that you can win a major strike by keeping the membership and their mass of working class supporters out of the discussion on the contract’s provisions.

This strike was as much the parents and students strike as it was the teachers. To win, the leadership of the strike needed to include the great mass of the Chicago working class, The first requirement for this mobilization would have been full disclosure. How else would the workers expect to defeat Emanuel’s injunction tactic, except by mass working class independent political action? This is something CORE and the ISO dread and worked overtime to prevent in this bourgeois presidential election year.

The entire nation had their eyes on Chicago as the fight for education is and has been in the forefront of the fight against the capitalist rulers’ imposition of austerity. Unlike the populist Occupy movement which found its base in the youth, the precariously employed, students and activists, while receiving only minimal, half-hearted and transitory support from the unions, the fight to “Save our Schools” has been the focus of hundreds of thousands of working class parents and teachers across the country.

Receiving only local media coverage, tens of thousands of angry parents, teachers and students have been attending thousands of school board meetings held in districts across the country to confront the school boards and the overpaid administrative lackeys of the ruling class. The job of these lackeys has been to impose standardized testing as the teaching model, eliminating critical thinking (Bush’s “No child’s brain left alive,”) standardized testing as quality control of teachers (Obama’s “Race for the slop,”) increased class sizes, closing of “underperforming” schools, privatization in the form of for-profit charters, the replacement of the professional credentialed and unionized teachers with scab “Teach for America” workers whose youthful exuberance and excitement at getting a job quickly fades as the false promise that they could make a difference is exposed by the reality they face in the under-funded and failing school systems across the nation.

But the nation’s parents, separated by ten thousand districts and hundreds of thousands of schools, are not an organized force with social weight that can be easily mobilized for impact. The minimal options allotted to parents: pass a school bond or not, raise money for the PTA classroom enhancement drives, donate time to the youth program of your choice, abandon public schools for the charter schools,–none of these cut to the root of the problem. Indeed, atomized as they are, the parents’ social weight and viewpoint is often misrepresented by the media pundits who pit the parents/students against the “greedy teachers.”

But this time in Chicago the parents were not buying it! Despite the hardship, tens of thousands of working class parents supported the strike with great hope that the organized strength of the teachers union would give their concerns for their children’s education a voice. The parents know well that the school board and administrators are overpaid lackeys (earning six figures) doing the bidding of the ruling class whose stated intention is to destroy public education and turn our children and their schools into commodities and profit centers for investors in the Bill Gates/Arne Duncan vision of schools without unionized teachers.

The capitalists, while ignorant, elitist and as condescending as Romney’s blunder on tape indicates, are driven to impose austerities and privatize education by the decay of capitalism and slow demise of the American Empire. To offset the declining rate of profit they must undercut the social wage through the destruction of social programs which do not directly profit the capitalists. Public education, defined pensions, public health, worker safety and environmental standards are in the crosshairs and any unions or organizations which stand in the way of their “rationalization” of the economy will find themselves attacked by the media, harassed by the State and the political and economic power of the billionaires. In the epoch of the decay of capitalism, the over-production of fictitious capital competing for ever-diminishing returns provides no incentive to employ the growing “surplus population.” 

American workers are coming to understand that the same “free market” pressure that drives Lonmin, Debeers and Anglo-American to super-exploit and murder the miners in South Africa are the same concrete material forces which drive Apple and Dell to super-exploit young workers living in the slave-like conditions at the Foxconn factory in China, and that the crisis of capital has created the necessity for the ruling class to impose austerity and commodify everything–all in order to offset the declining rate of profit. Under these conditions, where the social relations of the mode of production act to limit the productive capacity of the working class, those social relations are no longer sustainable except by means of repression, hence the “education reform” and the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

The strength of the CTU strike was that the fight was not for wages alone but aimed its fire at the ongoing privatization process. Fighting school closures, inadequate class room temperature controls, increased class sizes, lengthened school days, test-based “quality control,” the encroachment of charters, and the continued denial and de-funding of arts, music, physical education and the various electives that round out an education is exactly the battle the working class parents were happy to wage. Parents needed the teachers union to step forward in defense of our children and when they did the parents responded in solidarity, joining the picket lines, bringing lunches to the picketers, organizing youth support and putting enormous pressure on the ruling class, whose intention it was to drive a wedge between the teachers and the parents.

CTU Leadership Snatches Defeat From the Jaws of Victory

What the broader American working class support base for the Chicago teachers does not know is the lengths the reformist CORE leadership went to try to frustrate the CTU membership’s desire to fight the capitalists’ “reform plans.” CORE is a union reform caucus that was organized against the sellout and corrupt regime of United Progressive Caucus (UPC) led by Marilyn Stewart. CORE won the 2010 CTU elections based on a vague program of taking a more militant and grassroots stance against the attacks on education. The membership of CORE includes sympathizers of the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) and the ostensibly revolutionary Solidarity group. Right after the CTU 2010 election, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) threatened to lay off 2000 teachers based on principal performance evaluations and not seniority. Instead of trying to mobilize the ranks at that time for a real fight, the CORE leadership under Karen Lewis filed an injunction in Federal court on procedural grounds, not even opposing layoffs on principle. A judge ruled in favor of the injunction and imposed recall in hiring, but over 1300 teachers were still left without work.

Then in April 2011 we saw Karen Lewis championing SB 7 in the Illinois statehouse. This law perversely narrowed the legal basis of labor action and required a 75% yes vote for any strike authorization by civil servants. SB 7 trashed a number of teachers’ seniority rights and otherwise attacked their long understood and legal collective bargaining provisos. In this dirty business Lewis had a number of accomplices on the so-called left.

Lewis’ right hand man is vice president Jesse Sharkey of the International Socialist Organization (ISO,) which traces its political linage through Tony Cliff back to Max Shachtman. In the weeks after the passage of SB 7, when its contents and consequences were understood and when a Wisconsin-style mobilization could have repudiated the law, Sharkey did and said nothing. The ISO, with hundreds of members in Chicago did nothing and further covered up Lewis’ support for the anti-labor measure. Karen Lewis, you understand, is a Democrat, a card carrying member of the bosses’ party. As we have seen the ISO do previously in the San Francisco Labor Council and the California AFL-CIO State Federation, the ISO supports the anti-labor tactics of the Democratic Party and makes them possible. The ISO believes the CTU has legislator allies who must be supported and must not be left high and dry by any reversal of the CTU leadership’s support for SB 7. Subsequently the rank and file had other plans and 95% voted for the strike authorization and the Obama/Emanuel ploy fell on its face in front of massive union solidarity.

After ten months of negotiations the membership was not worn down and still rejected the capitalist education plan! In this respect this is a political strike and Emanuel’s injunction plot was always possible, even without the special provisions of SB 7, under Taft-Hartley.

Our class enemies are not geniuses and they picked the wrong city and the wrong time and the wrong workers to start this fight with. As the strike progressed the ruling class desperation was exposed. George Schmidt of the Chicago Substance News puts it this way, “Whether the unraveled is Vitale on camera, Emanuel fulminating behind the scenes…or Brizard quietly collecting his enormous pay while being told to sit down and shut up off stage, the sight is not pretty.” (David Vitale is president of Chicago board of education, Rham Emanual is mayor of Chicago and Jean-Claude Brizard is the CEO of the Chicago Public School system.) The fate of the phony education “reform” drive ushered in by Bush/Obama/Gates/Buffet and their hit man Duncan, with all the potential profit for investors in privatization, hung in the balance. 

Beneath the din of the punditries and politicians’ empty platitudes evoking sympathy for the struggling parent and students effected by the strike is their terror that the ruling class plan is being exposed and rejected by the teachers, the working class and the oppressed minorities! In Chicago, where 86% of the students are minorities, the working class parents know damn well that closing schools, overcrowding classrooms, driving out qualified teachers, and “teaching to the test” is part of the school-to-prison pipeline intended for the millions of youth that capitalism neither needs to educate nor intends to employ. The teachers have won the battle for support of working class parents and of Occupy Chicago. What they have not overcome is the reformist leadership of the CTU and the labor movement, which is entrenched in the bosses’ Democratic Party, which demands they demobilize the teachers and prevent this movement from spreading. They have not overcome it and this is what has come to pass.

Way Forward

As Leon Trotsky stated in his work Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay (1940):

“In other words, the trade unions in the present epoch cannot simply be the organs of democracy as they were in the epoch of free capitalism and they cannot any longer remain politically neutral, that is, limit themselves to serving the daily needs of the working class. They cannot any longer be anarchistic, i.e. ignore the decisive influence of the state on the life of peoples and classes. They can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”

The labor movement in the United States has a whole history of reform union movements based on vague programs for “union democracy,” against sellouts, fighting a corrupt leadership and/or based on simple trade union militancy. They have all failed the test of leadership and have become the class-collaborationist union bureaucrats they were fighting against. Under the leadership of the union bureaucracy the working class will continue to face defeats. In order to win victories we need to produce a new generation of worker militants that understand that there is absolutely no reconciliation between Labor and Capital. Rank-and-file union caucuses need to be formed on the basis of a class struggle program of transitional demands so as to put forward a fighting union leadership that will drive the bureaucrats out of union office. These caucuses will educate, unite, organize and mobilize against austerity and against all attacks on workers and the oppressed. These caucuses will stand for the absolute independence of the labor movement from all capitalist parties, be they Democrat, Republican or Green, Liberal, Conservative or “Independent.” Such caucuses could be a springboard for building a fighting workers’ labor party to fight for a workers’ government.

• Smash SB 7 and Taft-Hartley anti-labor laws!

• Defend Teachers and Public workers unions from union busting politicians!

• Mobilize a working class offensive to defend students, parents, teachers, schools and neighborhoods against the capitalist war on the working class!

• Stop School Closures and Privatization!

• For Working Class Education! Defend Public Education!

• For Free Quality Education For All From Pre-School Through Graduate School!

• Establish student stipends, room and board as social guarantee!

• Occupy the Schools! Nationalize all private schools and charters!

• Socialize the big educational scholarship foundations and endowments!

• For teacher/student/worker/parent control of schools and universities!

• Limit class sizes! For a massive public works program to build safe, healthy facilities.

• Free the students and educators from the regency of class miseducation, curricula of mystification and oppression!

• For liberal arts and athletic education with adequate teaching materials and facilities. Teach working class history! Teach the history of the oppressed!

• Drive out the labor fakers! Build Class-Struggle Caucuses in the unions and forge fighting union leaderships!

• Ultimately only a workers government formed by workers councils backed and resting upon the armed might of the self organized working class—workers self-defense militia will be able to provide quality education for all and save our school! 

Reblogged from Communist Workers Group (USA)  blog

September 19, 2012