Is It Protest Music Or Is It Our Lives?

This post has a lot to do with bluegrass and country music---not completely, but if bluegrass and country music aren't your things then this post may not be for you.

Let's start by dispensing with the idea that "culture" is music, art, writing, and a matter of tastes that may or may not be cultivated and refined. I like an enlarged definition of culture that says that culture is how we operate within social contradictions, how we work with and transmit our understandings of the reality of which we are a part. There is the base of society---all the relationships tied to the means of production and distribution. And there is the superstructure that builds from that base and which ensures that one class holds hegemony and others don't. This is the state, cultural institutions, the way work is organized, school, religion, etc. But there is always---always---conflict running from the base through the superstructure, and hegemony never becomes complete domination, even with fascism. Change and conflict are inevitable. Both the base and the superstructure have irreparable cracks in them. The class conflicts and the contradictions and struggles that occur between races and between genders take place between real people in real time. Classes, races, and genders are verbs in the first place, not nouns; they draw their identities and reason and force---their most active dimensions---from action, not from being statistical categories. Culture is how we operate and what we do within that verb of active dimensions. It's one very important means of understanding and acting on what differentiates the "thems" and the "uses," part of the inevitable social conflict over either the ruling class maintaining or us gaining hegemony.

Have I lost you yet? You thought you were digging into a post about bluegrass and country and here I am going abstract on you. Hang on! 

I think that the great photographer Yevgeny Khaldei best illustrated the role of the cultural worker. His photographs of the Great Patriotic War ("World War Two") are stunning, to be cliché but truthful. And there is one of his photos showing the USSR's soldiers marching over a giant nazi flag as they liberate a concentration camp and there is a building burning in the background. "People ask if I staged the photograph of the soldiers marching on the flag," Khaldei said. "I didn't. But I did set fire to the nazi office in the background." That takes a certain understanding of struggle, the push and pull of struggle and culture, to fully appreciate.

No movement for social change is going to stand alone, apart from society or as a subculture or as "in crowd," and win. Our movements for social change have used music for 150+ years, and things work best when that music reflects popular experiences and knowledge and is accessible. I don't see much discussion of music in my circles, or much appreciation of it. Maybe the pandemic has done some damage here, but I don't see a movement that sings the songs that reflect the lives of working people and that is fully accessible to them/us. It's been a long time since I've been to a picketline with live music that turned people on and had songs they knew the words to. Maybe I'm not going to the right picketlines. That said, there is some great music for us out there right now.

I'm liking Leyla McCalla's music these days:

 and

That music speaks pretty clearly for itself, doesn't it?

I also like Sabine McCalla's music. Here's one of my favorites:

Is Sabine McCalla's song a protest song? In a sense it is---in the very cultural sense as described above---because it captures a sound and an attitude and a rhythm and comes from a creative lineage that are all very much at odds with the capitalist social (dis)order and the music industry itself right now. This is an expression of a southern Black woman's poetic sensibilities, something reaching for a new humanism and coming from a woman whose parents were political activists.

Cedric Watson and Leyla McCalla raise the intellectual bar by challenging us to think and feel together, which is to say that they challenge the capitalist order that separates thought and action. And they do this with real subversive tact.

Let's kick it up a little.

Kelsey Waldon nails so much of the timber of our lives in "High in Heels"--

If she stopped there she might make it in Nashville. But she goes much further:

and:

and

It isn't just that Kelsey Waldon is singing about our lives with solidarity and beauty or that she wears camo (the color of the United Mine Workers of America union) or that you can donate to good causes when you purchase records on her site (https://www.kelseywaldon.com/). It isn't just that she borrows from Hazel Dickens and Ola Belle Reed. It's also the ways that she smiles and frowns and takes control of the music and the ways that she speaks and the way she partners with some serious women musicians. If you know Appalachia and parts of the midwest and south you know what I'm talking about. You will recognize someone just like her on a picketline or at the Piggly Wiggly.

We're going to get some criticism for stereotyping working-class people as mine workers and industrial workers, and as men. I take the point that the working-class is multiracial and multinational and diverse and that we do all kinds of work---more on that below---but I want to draw out that coal production is increasing right now and that this increase in production comes with fewer permanent hires and more contracted workers and increases in black lung. In other words, it comes with suffering for workers and our communities. 

Now, I'm not necessarily anti-Nashville when it comes to music, but for a long time Nashville has promoted music that feeds the far-right or that leaves politics and struggle out of the picture. I can't believe that Lady Antebellum got away with themselves for as long as they did. But Del McCoury gets in under the radar and gets his points across:

and

Now, someone is going to say that Del McCoury's gospel music has a reactionary side to it. I hear that line in "Free Salvation" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCRO88Hj-34) about school prayer, but I want to draw attention to the antiwar message and the underscored statement in the song that salvation is for people "with no exceptions." From the standpoint of a working-class Protestant in the so-called "non-conforming churches" these are not always intuitive positions. I also want to emphasize that the Del McCoury band is essentially a family band, a form of musical organization that Nashville did much to destroy. And who else is doing Woody Guthrie songs and a song protesting rural gentrification?

Del McCoury's "Amnesia" is full of working-class complaints about a relationship falling apart, and his "Streets of Baltimore" is a story I heard many, many times before I left Appalachia in the late '90s. Even then Baltimore had large Appalachian communities, and when I went over there I got away with quite a few traffic violations because the cops figured that I was just another one of the many moving in. I once got hired at a textile mill there without even filling out an application because the manager pinned me as a desperate West Virginian looking for work who couldn't read. "You look like a solid citizen," he said with a wink.   

Billy Strings is moving into Nashville, I guess, but you can see that he has some of the same energy that Kelsey Waldon has and that he knows our working-class despair. Listen in to "Dust In A Baggie":

Logan Halstead gets it right most of the time:

And there are lots more.

This music has to take up some contradictions and hits some walls. All that despair will burn people out, even though it's a money maker. It's easy to get stuck there, and as you go through this music you will find one musician who has a number of songs about staying high and warding off people who carry "bad news" (like the Left) and Logan Halstead's offensive song that insults women in Pineville, Kentucky. This takes us to hipster irony, that just makes fun of working-class people, and to nihilism. And you know that describing our lives is not the same as singing or talking about changing life, but you also know that if we can't define what's happening then we don't have any power at all.

The bigger problem is that most music that puts forward justifiable white or Black grievances and that doesn't attempt to draw the two together somehow falls short and maybe turns back the clock as well. It's an old saying that there is nothing that Black people want that white people don't need. We need to hear that and work with it. Have you ever wondered why The Persuasions changed the ending of their "Willie and Laura Mae Jones" over the years?   

Now, there is an old and very stupid joke about playing country music records backward and getting back your house, your wife, and your dog. I didn't get the import of the history of bluegrass nd country music until I read Keri Leigh Merritt's book "Masterless Men." It's not that she writes about music---she doesn't--but that she explores in this book the lives and cultures of the majority of  dispossessed whites in the pre-Civil War south who did not own slaves and who had an ambiguous or oppositional relationship to the slaveholders and to slavery. Their misery has remained with us. It's a hard book to read, but I want you read it and Dr. Du Bois' "Black Reconstruction in America."

 

I think that its also essential that you go over to the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum and poke around, buy some books there and watch some videos. The Battle of Blair Mountain can be read in many ways, but I think that now wee can see that it formed part of a working-class response to the Tulsa Massacre and the reactionary trends taking hold in the United States during and after the First World War. 

F__k Joe Manchin (and Krysten Sinima too)!!

 West Virginia Senator, Joe Manchin, said he doesn't want to vote for an "entitlement" society. Manchin is of course, referring to the 3.5 T reconciliation bill stuck in the current Congress. The truth of the matter is that both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are standing for a different kind of "E" society. Manchin and Sinema are standing with their Republican cohorts in defense of the Exploitation society.

For Manchin, Senator for West Virginia, the second poorest State in the Union, it really is OK for people to spend their life working crap jobs in poverty; they should be entitled to nothing, per Joe Manchin. The kids of these exploited people shouldn't be offered anything better then the shit lives their parents had, and its plenty OK if West Virginia's seniors die around age 60, rather then the upper 70s to 80s like big chunks of the rest of the country (or at least the wealthier parts of the country).

And then there's Kyrsten Sinema; a ball of lies and bad faith if there ever was one. As we speak, our Senator from Arizona is busy putting wrenches in the gears of her Party's legislative corner stone.  

Nobody knows what Sinema's objections are to the 3.5 T reconciliation bill. She's not saying what she objects to. Sinema says she doesn't negotiate in public. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders say she hasn't negotiated with anyone; not her fellow Senators, not the White House, maybe just the Pharma and other lobbyists she seems to meet with frequently.

Sinema has broken most of her campaign promises. She said she supported lowering drug prices during her 2018 Senate run, but is now hinting she she's ready to object to legislation which would allow Medicare the necessary leverage to bargain for lower drug prices. Coming out of the Green Party, Sinema campaigned for Climate Change legislation. As of today, she's hinting that she objects to the climate change legislation contained in the reconciliation bill.

All week long, we've heard the protest of right-wing politicians, Bill Maher, and the mainline media about Sinema being chased and accosted by activists in a bathroom. Given Sinema's astounding bad faith and wholesale lies throughout her Senatorial campaign, she's lucky she didn't get tarred and feathered, as often happened to politicians in the early Republic when they broke faith to the degree Sinema has. 

The irony of the 3.5 T reconciliation bill is is that there's nothing new or radical about the bill. There are no new social or economic rights contained in the bill. New social programs will be stringently means-tested, as is always the case with social legislation in the USA. Climate change provisions are anemic and the bill in no way challenges the capitalist economic structure. 

Yet the reconciliation bill contains this feature; it's the first piece of legislation  in over 50 years which actually aims to improve the lives of poor working people and their children. As such, the reconciliation bill attempts to define the limits of American poverty to which none can sink lower.

Evidently, even this attempt to define the limits of poverty is too much for Republicans and too much for Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, and too much for American capitalism. For Manchin, Sinema and the Republican Party, the right to exploit needs to be absolute and without limit. This is the Exploitation Society!

 

What Do Cuba and George Floyd Have in Common?

 The answer to this title question is this:

Neither George Floyd or Cuba can breathe. Derek Chauvin, a model of what policing really is in America, had his knee on the neck of George Floyd for over nine minutes and killed him. The United States, for 62 years, has had its knee on the neck of Cuba and Cuba is struggling for breath.

This is not an article about the long and tumultuous between the United States and revolutionary Cuba. It's about the cant, jingoism, and the raw hypocrisy of U.S. politics. Joe Biden, yesterday, referred to Cuba as a "failed state". Yet most of the world see's the United States as a "failed democracy". Cuba might or not be a failed state; its existence might be up in the air. The United States however is more than happy to prove itself over and over again as a "failed democracy".

If I had to throw additional abuse, let me line up Congressional Representative, Val Demings and ex-Congressional Representative, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, both Democrats, both of Florida and both calling for some kind of invasion of Cuba. 

Demings and Mucarsel-Powell are willfully ignoring the fact that their home state is systematically suppressing voter rights, that climate change and pollution are destroying the State of Florida, that Florida's developer boom of the 70s, 80s and 90s has produced death-trap housing up and down its east and west coasts, and health care increasingly doesn't work for Florida's elderly and working class populace. 

Instead, Demings and Mucarsel-Powell have embraced the politics of the U.S's most reactionary, revanchist segment of the population, Florida's Cuban emigres. 

Personally and politically, I despise the politics of the Cuban emigre population. Talk about easy immigration! These emigres arrived in the USA and had silver spoons placed in their mouths. Why? Because they were defecting from a socialist state which went perfectly with Washington's Cold War politics.  That alone led to lots of privileges never accorded to other immigrants. Current immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and other Central American states would have thought they died and went to heaven if they got the same immigration treatment that Cuban Americans got, and Venezuelan wealthy people get now. 

Frankly, I'm also sick and tired of Florida's fascist emigres and their expectations that the U.S.'s foreign policy should center around returning this class of emigres to a nation they left 63 years ago because their personal property was more important than the rest of Cuba. Yet, these are the people Demings and Mucarsel-Powell have chosen to embrace.

It would be interesting to take a look at what Cuba would be if the emigres, Demings, and old right winger Cold Warriors had their way. Minus the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cuba would look a lot like Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti or the Dominican Republic; maybe at best, Jamaica. With the possible exception of Jamaica, all these states are indeed "failed states" well within the orbit of a failing economic system called capitalism. That capitalism is failing the people of these states is proven by looking at the millions of people lining up along the U.S. border trying to get out of these failed states.

Finally, what this immediate cry to invade Cuba is really all about is the failure of the Republican Party, the generic right wing, and moderate Democrats to deal with the United States' own substantial and pressing problems. Rather than dealing with its own democratic failures and the closing net of an American oligarchy; rather than dealing with its own crumbling economy and the impoverishment of half or more of the U.S. population; rather than dealing with the existential threat of climate change; the right wing and their moderate Democrat friends have united around anti-communism and a retreaded McCarthyist anti-socialist politics. 

Anti-socialism and anti-communism are always the politics of those who are otherwise politically bankrupt. Anti-Cuban threats are an attempt to cover-up the political bankruptcy of people like Demings, Mucarsel-Powell, Marco Rubio and others by creating a dire threat that doesn't exist.

So, I'm not buying Demings, Mucarsel-Powell and others' re-hashed Cold War shit. And neither should you!  

 

Talking About the Party (1)---Rafael Hernández

The following piece by Rafael Hernández is part of a much longer and very complex piece that can be found here. The "whole strategic conception of making revolution" is always up for debate, here and internationally. This contribution seems particularly significant given the recent Congress of the Cuban Communist Party and the special difficulties that Cuba is now struggling with.

Hernandez sees an antagonistic struggle between the Cuban revolutionary experience and what were already-existing socialisms, socialist ideologies, and the world alliance of communist parties (Comintern). I don't see that, and I think that we can talk about "socialisms" in part because of the Cuban contributions that might have moved already-existing socialisms and socialist ideologies forward. But are the questions of antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions from the past the most important set of questions right now? No.  

The Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese experiences should teach us that revolution is a prolonged struggle and process that does not move along a straight line, and knowing this should give us some humility when assessing a revolution that is not of our own making.  

Debates become sterile when there is not socialist mass work and practice to back them up---the problem that we have here in Salem.   

March 17, 2021 — I believe that I am not making any revelation when I say that ours does not resemble, neither in its origins, nor in its primary rules for becoming a member, nor in the historical circumstances that surrounded it, any of the living or dead communist parties.

The lack of a history to explain it is one of those gaps, among the many with which today’s society demands information and knowledge, for the Revolutionary process. In case of doubt, conduct your own survey and ask: Which organizations considered socialism as a political project before 1959? What political strategies did they adopt to achieve it? When and how was the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), which governs today, founded? Where did those who were part of its leadership come from? What ideas did they have about communism and socialism? With these five questions, there is enough to explore a plain where many are slightly lost [Cuban slang for “not having any idea about anything].

I can think of other issues, perhaps even more enigmatic: How many of its members called themselves communists five years before the PCC was founded? What did they think and say about some other Communist parties in sister countries [‘other socialist countries”]? Why wasn’t the meeting where it was constituted its first congress? How can it be explained that it was held only 17 years after the beginning of the Revolution and 10 years after it was founded? Did it maintain its original seal when the “Soviet influence” predominated in Cuba? How did it go from identifying itself as the vanguard of the working class to the vanguard of the Cuban nation? At what point did it stop advocating the “dictatorship of the proletariat”? What is its role, as the “superior leading political force of society and the State,” which “facilitates the simultaneous action of the generations that are the protagonists of the Revolution,” in a democratic socialism?

The political culture that originated this Party -on its way to its VIII Congress in a few days- does not come mainly from the Bolshevik tradition, or from the Long March of the Chinese peasants against the Japanese and the Kuomingtang, but above all from the two main Cuban revolutions, one organized in New York and Tampa, to fight for independence, and the second arising from the insurrection against Machado and fought in the streets of Havana in the 1930s. In dealing with the strategic problem of alliances and their difficult framework, this revolutionary political culture contested the type of domination established by the U.S. and its allies on the island, different from that of a decadent empire, submerged in deep and semi-feudal backwardness, as in Russia and China.

As it is known, the culture of the Cuban left was influenced by legacies as diverse as the Mexican and Russian revolutions, varieties of socialisms, communisms, anarchisms, European and American social movements, Latin American and Caribbean radical nationalisms, whose complete inventory does not fit among the iconic images that preside over the commemorative events. However, the political practices of José Martí and Antonio Guiteras, more than any other, were the main artery of that culture. It was not built from the proletariat or the worker-peasant alliance, but on a subject identified as “the people,” that is, a specific set of groups, social strata and very mixed traditions of struggle. Also, from a practice of national liberation, through armed struggle to overthrow a dictatorship, and to advance, from power, a program of reforms aimed at changing an unjust and dependent social order.

The extent to which these reforms would unleash a conflict, which, in a few months, escalated to the level of a bloody civil war, with the active belligerence of the United States, was not foreseen in the platforms of any of the revolutionary organizations, and perhaps not even in the most intimate dreams of their leaders, who would end up coming together as one, 30 months after the triumph.

On the way, and so early that it was almost natural, there was the illegalization of those parties that collaborated with the dictatorship’s elections in 1958. Above all, there was the deactivation of a Congress where the established political parties competed for positions through elections that were suspended indefinitely, without anyone seeming to care much at the time, and which deprived them of their basic functions in the previous political system.

Surprising as it may seem today, those parties, including the Autenticos and the Ortodoxos, opposed to the dictatorship, were left on the sidelines, while people went out to do politics in the streets. Most of those people could not remember when exactly they ceased to exist.

The de facto suppression of the established armed forces, and their replacement by the Rebel Army that had defeated them on the battlefield, gave way, from the first months of 1959, to the merger of the commands and troops of all the political organizations that fought the dictatorship. In addition to bringing those organizations together in the same military structure, two and a half years before they were merged into a single political body, this replacement of the army produced a transcendental change in the actual functioning of the old state.

Nothing less than the armed forces, that backbone of the old regime, would be uninstalled, to put it in the jargon in fashion today. No wonder Fidel Castro, who was neither the president nor yet the Prime Minister, was from the beginning the Commander-in-Chief of those newly installed forces, made up of “the uniformed people,” as his head of state liked to say, a smiling Camilo Cienfuegos, who at 27 was not, however, the youngest guerrilla commander.

I have always been intrigued by the line that separates, according to some textbooks, the “agrarian and anti-imperialist” period of the Revolution and the “socialist.” I say this precisely because all that radical transformation in the functioning of political power noted above, including that of the parties, occurred even before the Agrarian Reform Law of May 1959 triggered conflict with the Cuban and American upper class, even when the Revolution had almost unanimous support, except for the Batista supporters who had fled to Miami and the Dominican Republic.

How the structure of power and the prevailing social order in Cuba in the 1950s could have admitted an “agrarian and anti-imperialist revolution” without it entering from the beginning into the radicality of a real social revolution only makes sense for the codes of that Marxism-Leninism, and in the hypothetical revolutionary scenarios that the Comintern manuals enunciated.

Numerous authors have investigated the Cuban left before 1959, and some of its main problems, differences and conflicts. To narrate it as a well-tuned band, or to simplify it in a straight line connecting the first Cuban Marxists with the Communist Party of 1965 does not help to understand anything of our history. When it comes to political movements, their main interaction was not expressed in the ideological contents of their speeches, but in their concrete political strategies.

For example, when Fidel Castro, before the Granma [landing], characterized the 26th of July Movement as “the revolutionary apparatus of Chibasism,” he was not distinguishing it so much from the Communists, but above all from the Ortodoxo party, politically “impotent and divided into a thousand pieces,” incapable of fighting against the dictatorship.

To illustrate with another example, what separated Joven Cuba (JC), the organization founded by Guiteras in 1935, and the Communist Party of the time, was not adherence to a socialist goal. “In order for the organic organization of Cuba as a nation to achieve stability, it is necessary that the Cuban State be structured in accordance with the postulates of Socialism,” begins the JC Program.

The difference at the outset, when adopting an insurrectional strategy, was concrete political action, which predetermined the type of power at the head of the revolution from the beginning. When it clarified that socialism is reached “by successive preparatory stages,” of which that Program only outlined the first, it was assigning to the “stages” a completely different meaning from those established by the Comintern.

So, to characterize Guiterismo as “revolutionary-democratic” or just “anti-imperialist,” and not as the strategy that opened the road to the socialist revolution in Cuba, through the revolutionary movement that overthrew the Batista dictatorship and initiated the revolution in a continuous manner, illustrates that difference and its meaning. It is not something as simple as different “means” for the same “ends,” but a whole strategic conception of making revolution.

Considering these differences, among the revolutionary organizations and within each one, is not aimed at retrospectively blaming any of them for their mistakes, lack of vision or schematism at the time, but to understand our history as different from a fairy tale or a horror movie, as Tyrians and Trojans are accustomed to characterize it. Among other things, because it also allows us to appreciate the merit of a policy of dialogue that contributed to bringing together very divergent currents, which were deeply suspicious of each other.

Reducing the socialist revolution to the leading role of a party or an ideology does not help to explain its complexities and problems. To imagine that the restoration of the unfulfilled promises of the 1940 Constitution, or any other program of laws or legal constructs created by the organizations that opposed the dictatorship, as if they were the script of the process would be to believe that the circumstances in which the radical social and political changes proper to a social revolution occur are enclosed in a plan of reforms, however important they may be. In any case, the revolution had already manifested itself as a political power even before the first major economic reform had been adopted, by being able to impose itself on the vested interests in the established political order.

The differences within the Cuban left were not limited, of course, to the ways to reach government or take power. If, before 1959, the Ortodoxo Youth even inscribed the word socialism on its banners, and if the program of the old Communist Party, renamed the Popular Socialist Party, could have been confused today with social democracy, these affinities did not necessarily prepare them for coexistence. Quite the opposite turned out to be the case.

Of course, there were Stalinists in this story almost from the beginning. In fact, they were there before the revolutionary parties decided to unite, and not just collaborate. Although sectarianisms were not limited to a single organization, the one that provoked the crisis within the first unitary political organization, the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI in Spanish), was the one brought about by a group of Stalinists who were suspicious of all revolutionaries who were not old communists. In spite of the fact that the PSP warned, in its self-critical VIII Assembly of August 1960, that “the joint action of the organizations is the guarantee of unity and the advance of the Revolution,” the ORI, constituted only two months after Playa Girón, were run aground by sectarianism almost from their foundation.

Finally, as is known, what contributed decisively to uniting the various organizations and their respective internal political currents was not precisely the deliberate, voluntary and conscious adoption of a Leninist model. Beyond the intelligence within the revolutionary leadership, and the coupling of a policy of negotiated unity, the main impact was the siege of a formidable counterrevolution, backed and tutored by the US. The siege of its enemies pushed more for unification in a single party than for a shared ideology among the revolutionary ranks.

If you reread the above, you can understand that when parties like the PSP agreed to dissolve, in the summer of 1961, and declared that “we merge today in the integrated revolutionary forces, on the march towards the construction of the United Party of the Socialist Revolution of Cuba, “they were not entering the Walhalla of perfect harmony or the frozen realm of totalitarianism, as characterized by Tyrians and Trojans, but in a process of change towards a new political system, different from Stalinism and Maoism, and which was not then and later free of contradictions, divergences and even conflicts.

Not having a critical history of that political system and its complexities leaves a vacuum, which is often filled with doctrinal packages, of one sign and another. Both of them are closer, by the way, to the schemes of the Comintern than to political sociology. This convergence is crystal clear when, for example, when some regular contributors to the Spanish daily, El País state that “it was not in January 1959, but in April 1961, when the construction of Cuban totalitarianism had at hand all its necessary elements.”

From this perspective, the social conflict was not brought about by interests and factors of power, but by ideology, and cultural representations, such as those of an enemy “that had to be national and foreign at the same time, a monster in which the evil of the empire and the vileness of the traitors could merge.” This parallelism between apparently exclusive visions, brought together in an approach that replaces historical analysis with literary phrases, and the logic of a social revolution by what philosophers call a teleology (of good or evil) confers a curious code of kinship, not at all by accident.

To deal with plurality within the ranks of that Party; to lead the transformation of the political system, not only as a subject, but also as an object of change; to be a mirror of society and its problems; to look inside and be inspired by that original political culture, seem to be requirements of the historical moment, and of the reconstruction of its meaning. How to do it, at the height of today’s Cuba, requires both realism and imagination.

Source : Hablando del Partido (I)

Bullshit and Lies; Another Response to Liz Wheeler and the YAF

 https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/margaret/FMfcgxwLttDLTpPZdKWzFChcxTnCfklg?projector=1

The above is a link to the Liz Wheeler's rather poorly thought out diatribe on socialism. Liz says she has five questions about Socialism and Democratic Socialists of America, and I'm writing this response because Liz said right wingers should ask these five questions to their "liberal" friends.

So, here it goes:

Question One: "What is the difference between Democratic Socialism and "regular old" socialism?

First, all socialism is democratic socialism. Democratic Socialists of America has included the word, "democratic" because DSA talks about socialism in terms of extending democracy into sectors of society that are currently anything but democratic. 

Right now, that extension of democracy would include the economy, where people and workers democratically decide what is to be produced and how it would be produced. 

Consider the current reality: 

When any of us walk into work, we are not entering a democratic institution. One acts according to policies and production arrangements that are designed by owners. You have no say in how you work and what you make belongs to bosses, not you or your co-workers. 

Every "socialism" I know of finds the current arrangements of work to be entirely unsatisfactory. In truth, the current arrangement involves employees being stressed to the maximum, monitored, and pushed, all in the interests of maximizing profits for bosses and investors. As socialists, we want these relationships of economic exploitation to end; we can. as a society, do a lot better. 

There are other institutions we'd want to change. For instance, education, where the two most important groups of people involved, the students and teachers, have absolutely no say over what is taught  and what real education looks like in the classroom. The current situation in schools is highly "un-democratic" and results in kid-to-worker factories, or, even worse, school-to-prison pipelines. 

Question 2: "Where has socialism worked? Venezuela - no antibiotics, Cuba - rusty surgical instruments, elites fly to other countries for medical care." 

Lets talk about Venezuela and Cuba. Both countries have been thoroughly hounded by the USA and its allies for decades. USA sanctions have have blocked all normal economic relationships with the rest of the world. What Cuba and Venezuela have been reduced to is cash economics (in US dollars) where everything imported needs to be paid for, cash up front. Exports for both countries are subject political interference as the US and allies seek to block Cuba and Venezuela's access to export markets. Any nation, capitalist or socialist, would eventually collapse if they had to live within the restrictions Cuba and Venezuela have to live under.

Here's some facts to consider. Cuban doctors and nurses are all over South and Central America. Mexico has Cuban doctors and nurses, and these doctors and nurses are where they are to help, not make a pile of money.

My daughter is a nurse. While training, she spent a six weeks on a practicum in Nicaragua on the Mesquito Coast. The doctors were Cuban, they were highly competent, although medical supplies were lacking (keep in mind, Nicaragua is now and has been a capitalist country for the last 30 years. So why, in a capitalist country, are antibiotics, anesthetics, surgical equipment so lacking? I know the answer to this, bet Liz doesn't).

Consider too that a number of 9/11 responders who went to Cuba for burn treatments that don't exist in the USA. Stalin lived to be a ripe old man, he never went outside the USSR for medical treatment because he didn't have to. Soviet health care worked for every one, and Chinese health care works for every one. too I'd rather be sick in Vietnam than the USA because in the USA, the care you get is only what your insurance carrier will pay for, and personally, I'm not covered under a "cadillac" health care plan; I think I'd be treated better if I was Vietnamese.

Question Three: "Who pays for socialist programs?"

The funny thing about Liz's rant is that she's got a fetish about money, as does the capitalist class. 

Somehow or another, Liz, and capitalist friends have this idea that money builds everything. As if thousands and billions of dollar bills march into the factory gates and push endless buttons, lug the weights, and operate the machinery that makes everything go: a happy collection of George Washingtons, folded into little origami people,  smiling as they walk through the office, factory, hospital, or whatnot.

Of course, such an economics as Liz suggests are just silly. Everything that has ever been built is built by people. Simply put, the Pyramids weren't built by Pharaoh, they were built by thousands of slaves. Rome wasn't built by the Emperors, it was built by slaves. The aristocrats, secular and spiritual, didn't build the Medieval period. It was peasants and a three field crop rotation system that built the Medieval period. And capitalists didn't build the modern mass production economy; that duty fell to workers of every occupation. 

In truth, capitalists produce nothing. Instead, capitalists are adept at expropriating (i.e. stealing) all that is produced and turning it into private profit.

Basically, us socialists aren't talking about taxing or purchasing "socialism" from capitalists. Socialism, if it ever exists again, will be built by society as a whole. It's the collective power of laboring people that would build such a world and manage it too. 

Socialism really has no use for capitalists at all. Capitalists take what workers make and turn it into their own personal profits; who needs them? We don't tax capitalists because we want their money; we tax capitalists, and want to tax them drastically in order to get rid of the whole class.

Question Four: "What will stop Democratic Socialism from turning into socialism?"

Jeez, this question sounds a lot like the question, "when did you stop beating your wife?" The question is not an honest question; its nothing but a cheap, rhetorical word trick and I'm not biting.

If you've noticed from the above, democracy and socialism are complementary concepts; they go hand-in-hand for us socialists. This idea that democracy and socialism are contradictory is your idea, and comes from your idea of "big" government as it exists now in the USA, which of course is a government that is avowedly capitalist at every level and to its core. The proof of this is the number of corporate lobbyists who fill the halls of every legislative office building in America.

Question Five: "Why would we want socialism here? 100 million people have been killed by socialist regimes."

"100 million people have been killed by socialist regimes."

I'm quite dubious about Liz Wheeler's numbers and how she counts her "100 million". But yes, socialist regimes have made some pretty brutal mistakes in the not so long history of real, existing socialism. In my mind, the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary were brutal, wrong, and impeded the free development of socialism, for instance.

Honestly too, elections in the USSR and the Socialist Bloc were a joke aimed at giving the ruling Party the chance to engage in a few days of self congratulation.

However, the Socialist Bloc demonstrated a different kind of democracy.

In the late 1940s, early 1950s, both East Germany and Yugoslavia attempted to collectivize agriculture. Farmers didn't react well to collectivization, and thus, East Germany and Yugoslavia abandoned collectivization efforts after an year or two. Instead, East Germany and Yugoslavia moved towards a co-op system where farmers retained their personal land ownership but worked with other farmers to increase farm productivity while the state supplied farm equipment and machinery.

East German farmers seemed to like their system. After the re-unification of Germany in 1990-91, East German farmers petitioned the West German power brokers to be allowed to keep their agricultural co-ops. The West German power brokers said, "no". I know why the West German/re-unified German government rejected the co-ops. Bet Liz and the Right Wing don't.

But let's also talk about capitalism's body count.

Slavery, from 1500 AD, up through the 19th century was a 100% capitalist institution. In all that 400 years, slavery was the labor source for the production of cash crops to be sold in Europe's commodity markets.

From 1900 to 1930, roughly half a million workers were killed at work in the US.

I bet Liz is counting the Russian Civil War of 1918 through 1922 in her "100 million" total? Let's talk about the Russian Civil War.

The Russian Civil War caused the death of 1.5 million combatants, and 8 million civilian deaths. This civil war turned into a blood bath because Britain supported, including with troops and airplanes, Monarchist General Yudenich's White army and in Northern Russian. The Czechs and French did the same in regard to General Wrangel's White Army in Ukraine and western Russia. and the US had troops out in support of Admiral Kolchak's White Army in Siberia. 

The strategy of Britain, France and the US was best summed up by Winston Churchill when he said, we want.."to strangle the baby in its crib". Churchill wasn't interested in saving Russia, he was interested in saving his own sorry class in Great Britain.  

I'd be glad to take ownership of our socialist mistakes. But I expect the Right to take responsibility for it's capitalist history as well.

"Why would we want socialism here?"

Here's why DSA, a mess of other socialists, and millions of non-political, non-activists people are interested in socialism in the United States.

Right now, the median income for a family of four, is around $68,000 per year. This means that 50% of US households live on 68K or less, and 50% of households earn 68K or more.

At 68K a year, a family has a roof over their head, most likely. But it's not an easy life. A family of four, at 68K, is probably up to its neck in debt. The loss of one income would be a disaster for such a family. If the kids are going to college, it's going to have to be paid for in loans; thus more debt.

Imagine what life is like on a household income of 40K, or 30K a year? Here, a $400 maintenance bill to fix the car will cause months of economic dislocation in the household. That is if the maintenance job can be paid for in the first place.

By the way, a significant part of the population pays over 50% of their income towards housing alone. 

Meanwhile, ILO and World Health Organization announced last week that 745,000 die per year due to over-work. The focus of US COVID policy, and state policies has been to get people and economies working again (the profit chain), at the cost of around 400,000 additional US lives. Also, the WHO, a couple of years ago listed "burnout" as an official occupational disease. People bust their butts in America every day, just for the right to survive until next month.

Its also worth mentioning US "essential" workers have learned over the last year that "essential" means "disposable".

Given the above, I have a question for Liz and the Right Wing. The question is this: "If capitalism is so great, how come it has resulted in the immiseration of hundreds of millions of people over the last 40 years?"

Finally, Liz and the Right Wing have a view of socialist life that's just plain wrong.

First, the bread lines Liz mentioned? Yeah, lines existed. The type of lines that Liz mentioned though, could have happened after the collapse of the USSR. I read a story a couple of years ago about two sisters who had to share one pair of shoes for years. But this was after the USSR collapsed and was under the care of the IMF, World Bank, the US, UK and Germany's shock doctrine.

I don't know piles about life in socialist Europe. The country I'm most familiar with is East Germany.

In East Germany, it was routine for workers to take time away from work tasks to head over to the enterprise's food store. Usually, co-workers would ask this worker to pick up an item for them as well. If anybody had to wait in line at the food shop, or plant pharmacy, it was 100% on the clock. Try walking off the job and going to the store on the clock in the US; you'd probably be fired.

East German workers, and I suspect Eastern Bloc, and workers in the USSR didn't work like workers in the US or capitalist Europe.  In East Germany, it was almost impossible to be fired. Victor Grossman, author of, From Harvard to Karl Marx Allee, said you'd have to "hit your boss over the head with a crow bar, or report to work  drunk for four weeks in a row" to be fired, and even then the plant's union would have to sign off on the discharge.

In East Germany, economic planning agencies would decide what the factory is going to produce. After that, how the commodity was produced was up to the workers and the union. Unions were 100% accountable to its workers.

Workers in the East didn't have the kind of job stresses that we take for granted in the capitalist West. Nobody was afraid to be fired. Workers decided the speed of production; nobody in the East would have put up with the kind of production speeds ups, monitoring of worker productivity, and brutal supervisors always pushing, like US and European workers put up with every day. After all, it's a workers' state!

The East Germans introduced a course in elementary schools titled, "How to take care of your pet". East German teachers thought that a sense of empathy was a valuable social skill. When my daughter was a little kid, we had an East German story book. It was a sweet story, and the theme was that everything living deserves to be loved.

Or, how about  Social Democratic Denmark? I read a story from a  young American woman who took an internship with a Danish company. This woman worked like an American. She said at work late into the evening. She worked weekends, and she thought all this was good; that's how you get ahead she thought!

After a while, her boss told her she was missing a life. The work week was 37 hours and her boss told her to go home when her 37 hours were done. He told her that her grinding away at work was not healthy, and that she was leading a highly unbalanced life. In sort of socialist Scandinavia, the philosophy of doing your work well, and then forgetting about work after you've done your weekly hours is dominant and written into the culture.

So, yeah, I'd love to be living in a socialist USA! My back wouldn't hurt as much as it does if I had worked in a socialist USA. My stress levels from work and trying to survive wouldn't have anywhere near the stress levels and anxiety that is so much a part of working in a capitalist USA.

There's something else the Right Wing and Liz should know. There's no "secret socialist blueprint". "In regard to socialism and revolution, "one size does not fit all". Every socialist revolution (peaceful or not) has found its own way, consistent with its own history, culture and politics.

As for the USA, American socialists don't exist outside of American history and culture. We actually live quite happily within the our own culture, politics and history. The idea that American socialists would "impose" a borrowed system from the USSR, Vietnam, East Germany or China is pathetically laughable. The Right should actually read our socialist press in the USA if they want to know what socialists are thinking and what a socialist agenda might look like.

In a normal political world, I'd challenge Liz and the Right to a debate. I'd win, hands down, because I understand the importance of facts, and because I know a lot more than Liz Wheeler and the Right will ever know from their narrow, authoritarian, and vengeful rage version of politics.

But the debate isn't going to happen. The problem is that for Liz Wheeler and the Right Wing, a debate is Marjorie Taylor-Greene yelling taunts and threats through AOC's mail slot. With its blanket denial of fact, its reliance on guns and the noose, Liz Wheeler and the Right Wing are the greatest threat to the American Republic in its 245 year history. 

    

Full Support For The Striking Warrior Met Coal Mine Workers!

About 1000 mine workers in Alabama have been on strike since April. They are women and men, Black and white, young and older. The mines they work in are about 45 minutes from Bessemer and have been the focus of union organizing and struggle for more than 100 years, I think. These are gaseous metal coal mines.

You can read and hear more about the strike here:https://umwa.org/take-action/united-we-stand/ 

If you have a few dollars to spare, please join me in contributing to the strike fund. The details are here: https://umwa.org/support-umwa-miners-on-strike-at-warrior-met/.

Please feel good about forwarding this to others who can assist. And please feel good about putting in a note with your contribution expressing solidarity from wherever you are.

Salem, Oregon DSA Statement On The May, 2021 Salem-Keizer School Board Election

Salem Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) rejoices in the victory of the four progressive Salem-Keizer School Board candidates. We believe that the slate won because of their honesty and integrity and their grasp of the issues that most concern people of color and working-class people in Keizer and Salem. They were able to inspire people to vote for change and begin breaking the hold of the most reactionary forces on our schools. This is a victory for people of color, youth, and working-class people. Salem DSA was a part of the coalition that supported these candidates. We were at the doors in working-class neighborhoods, on the phones, and with the unions through the campaign.

This is the beginning, not the finish line. The four newly-elected School Board Directors will need our help. They will need our advice and our support, and they should be able to count on our ability to mobilize for positive change.

The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) will provide large sums of money for our schools, and every working-class person, every union, the youth, and all people of color in our communities have a direct interest in how that money will be appropriated. There should be no contradictions between what people of color, youth, our unions, and all working-class people want as this funding becomes available. We can win an equitable and productive distribution of this money and then demand more and better from the state, the federal government, and the corporations. Our on-going struggle for racial justice in the schools must continue and must win over forces that have not yet fully committed to the fight. The unions representing classified school staff and teachers now have a new opening to help lead the fight for change. Solidarity is always a two-way street, and it is in everyone’s interest to see that we all advance together.

This win opens the door to future wins. We can build from the School Board races to wins for socialists and progressives in 2022, we can win health care for all, we can win a Green New Deal, we can put Trumpism away, we can oppose imperialism and win, and we absolutely must win passage of the PRO Act and all of the fights for equitable distribution of ARPA funds and an end to deportations and violence against people of color and LGBTQIA+ people. Every victory creates another.

The struggle continues!

Responding to Liz Wheeler

Liz Wheeler has challenged the Left and liberals to respond to her five attack points on democratic socialism. 

Wheeler uses lots of quick-shot soundbites while we write lots of books and do long and defensive blog posts and podcasts. For all of our good work we don't get very far. People are busy, the bosses and capitalists have the advantages, we function in a system that divides people and forces us to compete with one another, and capitalism brings out the worst in people for a time as the system falls apart. I'm going to try to respond to Wheeler's attack as she presents it. This will not take longer to read than it will to listen to Wheeler's tired attack. 

One: For us at Oregon Socialist Renewal the "Democratic" in "Democratic Socialism" is there as a point of emphasis. Socialism is democratic in the sense that it extends democracy and working-class power into every area of life. "Democratic Socialism" also refers to a specific tradition in the socialist movement, and one that we have mixed reactions to.

Socialism is NOT "government giving away lots of free stuff" and "government taking over the means of production and distribution." Socialism IS people collectively mobilizing through their workers' and peoples' government and through other democratic means to take power over their lives and their working and living conditions.

Two: Socialism has been the only answer to exploitative and ruinous capitalism, and it has been attempted most often in colonized, people-of-color-majority, and capitalist-plundered and war-ravaged countries. These countries and peoples take up their struggles for socialism with distinct disadvantages: the U.S., other imperialist powers, and multinational corporations squeeze them and make them bleed. And socialism can take generations to develop, with forward and backward movements, just as any other system develops. Revolution is not a straight line and socialists are not magicians who can pull utopia from a hat---and we do not say that we are.

Where has capitalism worked? In what capitalist countries are workers not exploited? Which capitalist powers cede power nonviolently and democratically? Which capitalist countries do not lurch from crisis to crisis or from war to war? Which capitalist countries have not had their breadlines and unemployment lines? 

Three: The wealthy should indeed pay a fair share in taxes, or more, and if we can use taxes to lower their numbers and rid ourselves of them then we should. They don't create wealth or value, and they suck an incredible amount of resources from society. But taxation is not our whole policy. We're about creating a democratic economy that provides for the people and restores the environment, an economy that works for us and is under direct social control. Wheeler & Company are moving in the opposite direction and are okay with drowning us all if their profit-driven boat floats.

Four: Socialism is not about "big government" and "the government" giving orders. If society goes through the work of building new democratic social institutions, committing to restoring the environment, planning where our resources will and won't go, committing to racial and gender justice, and ensuring that everyone has rights and a voice and all that is needed to live then the nature and purpose of government changes. Each one of us may have less stuff, and less junk will be produced, but all of us will have what we need within reason. No society, including capitalism, is static. Our question for Wheeler & Company: what stops capitalism from moving from a system of free enterprise and inequalities to fascism?

Five: Not everyone in Wheeler's room wants fairness---probably no one in that room does, in fact. The idea that taking care of one another means stealing from someone is only logical under capitalism, but it skips over a key point: the capitalists make their wealth through the thefts of time, labor, land, and the national sovereignty of colonized and oppressed peoples, and through gendered and racialized oppression and the destruction of our environment. Still, there is something in Wheeler's argument that's correct in a sense. If we do have to "steal" from someone to help one another then let's do that by expropriating the wealth of those who have taken our labor, land, resources, and rights. Socialism is about building society based on the democratic understandings that an injury to one is an injury to all and that power should flow from each of us as we are able to those who do productive labor in order that all of us should be free and provided for without exploitation. 

How We Struck the Flint Red Cross for Six Week, Cleaned Their Clock, and Had Lots of Fun! Part 2

 In union slang, the Flint Red Cross, was a "hot shop". Hot shops tend to be smaller workplaces, as little as 10 or 12 folks, maybe around 100 or so workers at maximum. To union organizers, a hot shop seems to happen out of thin air, and are seen as workers' reactions to things deeply internal within the employer and its workers. The "hot shop" breakout might happen because the bosses are brutal, or have lost all credibility with with the workers through a longstanding series of lies and broken promises. Sometimes instead, it's the poor wages and maybe a history of wage theft. Often it's a matter of all of the above and then some more too. 

A "hot shop" happens when one or two of the workers decide that they've have enough of the boss' s behavior, and they pick up the phone and call a union.

Personally, I didn't like "hot shop" organizing. "Hot shops" meant that the workers had had enough of the bosses; but what the workers were really asking for was to be rescued by the union, which is not the same thing as forming a union.

For instance, when I was leaving Ithaca, NY in 2019, I did a little picketing with the Painters and Allied Trades Union, Local 11 who had organized a rather large non-profit providing housing services to poor people. The Painters organized the workers and got the workers a first contract, and then a second contract. 

However, as the second contract expired, a de-certification petition had been filed by a few anti-union members of the bargaining unit (with the bosses' help of course). Management had enough "showing of interest" to get a de-certification election on the board.

Meanwhile, few workers took part in supporting the union; either through internal activity, or walking the picket line (informational picket; not a strike). Local 11's organizers were having a hard time communicating with bargaining unit union members. The union leadership inside the non-profit had lost credibility (through years of being ineffective); and things were pretty bleak.

The problem was this. After organizing and obtaining a couple of  contracts, the Painters Union Local 11 figured the workers could take it from there. From Painters Local 11's point of view, workers now had all the necessary tools provided through the contract and labor law, and that would be enough for the workers to run their own show.

The Painters Union was wrong. The tools were not enough. In spite of being a union shop, with recognized stewards and a good grievance procedure, in spite of the union including a large majority of workers within the company itself, the workers within the bargaining unit continued to let the employer govern as if there was no union at all.

By the time the de-certification petition had been filed, the non-profit's management had re-written their job classifications and moved a substantial number of important positions to non-union, outside-the-bargaining unit positions. Stewards and workers never protested, never confronted their bosses, and let the damages mount.

Painters. Local 11 organizers felt terrible. I spent a number of hours walking the picket line with Local 11's organizing director, a real good and dedicated unionist named Travis. Travis felt terrible about what had happened. He need not have felt so guilty. It was an honest mistake. The problem was that Local 11 never figured on the amount of hand holding, and the amount of support, that would be necessary to teach modern non-profit workers from within a union bargaining unit, how to  actually becoming a functional and organic union.

I do believe the Painters Union and pro-union workers prevailed in the end. It took a pile of Unfair Labor Practice charges filed by Local 11, and a community campaign aimed at pressuring so called "progressive" members of the non-profit's board (this campaign was run by the Tompkins County Workers' Center and local 11). But there was never any real fight back by the non-profit's union workers.

I remember another "hot shop" I worked on when with I was with OPEIU. It was a small credit union with maybe 12 to 15 workers. On the last night of bargaining, the woman who had made the original call to the union told me, "If I was out of work, I'd cross a picket line to keep my kids fed, and I wouldn't feel bad about it"; I felt like stepping outside and slitting my wrists. 

The difference between the Flint Red Cross workers, and "hot shop" workers (and indeed many longer term union workplaces) in my mind comes down to this: The Flint Red Cross workers knew they needed to have a union, and that they needed to act like a union, in order to get what they needed.

I'm stealing a quote here from Ralph Chaplin's, "Solidarity Forever". But Flint Red Cross workers understood Chaplin's opening lines from the start:

"When the union's inspiration through the workers blood shall run 
  there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun". 

Many union bargaining teams will focus on constructing neat, logical arguments as to why they should have better wages, or better safety conditions, or whatever. Thus, the effort becomes one of convincing the employer, through logical appeals and and moral arguments, to be a better employer. 

The problem in modern bargaining comes down to the fact that employers generally don'r care if they're logical, nice or morally responsible. Thus, collective bargaining becomes collective begging, and what's missing is that the union neither tries, or wants to even think about using its inherent power towards achieving what workers need and want.

To my mind, the difference between Flint Red Cross workers and most 1970s through 2020 collective bargaining episodes is simply this: the Flint Red Cross strike happened in Flint!

Flint, simply was a union town and a UAW town. Even in 1993-1994, Flint remained a union town. In truth, by 1993, the UAW had been having its butt kicked for the last decade and a half. By 1993, thousands and thousands of autoworkers had been laid off with no hope of return, the parts subsidiary operations (like "Delco", and "Delphi") were gone to the South or Mexico. Auto workers themselves were working five to six 12 hour shifts per week under break-neck conditions; it was not a happy time for auto workers.

Yet Flint still remembered the 1937 GM sit down strike, when the power of the workers broke GM's power and forced GM to recognize the UAW. 

In 1993, there were a few participants of the 1937 strike still around. There were a lot more children of the strikers still around, and even more grandchildren. Everybody in Flint remembered the 37 sit down strike, and people in Flint were still proud of what they did in 1937.

The Flint Red Cross strikers very much remembered the 1937 sit down strike. While many union organizers would describe the Flint Red Cross as a "hot shop"; a spontaneous revolt of the Red Cross workers, it was in truth anything but. 

In reality, the Flint Red Cross strike had a history that was 57 years old by 1994. Everything the Flint Red Cross workers did in 1994 was seen through the prism of 1937 Flint. This was where Gary, the management attorney, went all wrong. Gary read Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal, didn't know his local history, the power of culture, and didn't listen to the workers. As a result, Gary deeply believed that the Red Cross workers would never strike, because that's what Forbes said.

On the other hand, the Flint Red Cross workers had the attitude that if it could be done in  1937, it could be done in 1994 as well. This is the power of a history and culture. If you can imagine winning, you probably can win!

Some thoughts on the Amazon organizing drive in Alabama, and the PRO Act

When the Amazon Bessemer election results were released, the fact that struck me the most was that around 2,600 workers never cast a ballot. It may very well be that Amazon was able to "disappear" a lot of workers' ballots, but I can't imagine Amazon made 2,600 ballots disappear. 

I don't know what went on in the Bessemer, Amazon warehouse. The union; the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), filed something like 24 Unfair Labor Practice charges against Amazon, and an NLRB hearing will be held soon to adjudicate the ULPs. Once the hearings are complete and decisions rendered, we'll all know a lot more about what happened in the warehouse, and maybe have a better idea as to what happened to 2,600 ballots. 

My theory? The vast majority of the 2,600 missing ballots were simply never cast. 

Consider this: Amazon workers are people, just like everybody else. They have things that matter in their lives, and things that don't matter too. My guess is that there were thousands of Amazon workers who just didn't see the union vote as really pertaining to their lives, or didn't see the union vote as important enough to take a stand.  

Obviously, the Bessemer warehouse was a very tense place throughout the union organizing drive. Pro-union workers wanted to talk, Amazon made it clear that it didn't want workers to talk at all, on or off the job. Meanwhile, Amazon had the anti-union propaganda machine blaring on a constant 24/7 basis throughout the organizing drive, and bosses was probably watching all their employees.

Unless an Amazon worker is really committed to the union and know's what they want, the atmosphere at work is going to put a real premium on workers' taking a kind of "duck and cover" approach, aimed at surviving the organizing drive. The "duck and cover" approach is amplified to an even greater extent when supervisors query workers on how they will vote in the union election (even though such queries are patently illegal). This "duck and cover" approach was probably the survival philosophy behind a lot of "no union" votes too.  

The above is not a judgement or criticism of the workers; it's just the way things are and the way things can go in an organizing drive.

There's no doubt that the Amazon-RWDSU vote was a defeat. The RWSDU made a number of crucial mistakes in their strategic approach to the organizing drive. If you want to know more about the RWDSU, and a pretty long list of strategic and tactical mistakes, you can read union organizer, Jane McAlevey's interview here:

 (https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/amazon-bessemer-union-campaign-rwdsu-jane-mcalevey). 

But this article is not about critiquing the RWDSU; it is about something different.

The Bessemer Amazon organizing drive was indeed a defeat; but it was not a loss.

If you take a long range look at the Bessemer organizing drive, it's worth noting that there are now about 1,700 workers who voted "yes" in the union drive. These are the 1,700 odd workers who stood firm, in spite of the pressure from Amazon, it's endless mandatory anti-union meetings, the constant surveillance by supervisors, and always, the threat of being fired.

These 1,700 workers are now tempered and hardened. They've been through the worst and held firm. There's probably another couple of thousand workers who voted "no", or didn't vote at all who will be thinking about the drive for a long time to come. 

Additionally, there are workers looking at organizing across Amazon America. They now know what Amazon is likely to throw at them, and will have a much better chance of countering Amazon from what they've learned through the Bessemer organizing drive. All of these factors need to be placed in the "gains" column if one wants an honest assessment of the Bessemer drive and is also looking towards the future.

And then, there's the PRO Act.

Honestly, I don't think workers and unions will get the PRO Act (Protecting the Right to Organize Act), at least not in the foreseeable future. The margins in the Congress are just too thin to get something like the PRO Act voted through. There aren't the numbers in the Senate to overcome an inevitable filibuster., Just to dampen expectations even more, though Joe Manchin has signed onto the PRO Act, I have doubts that he'll set aside the inevitable filibuster in order to pass the PRO Act. He's that kind of guy.

A lot of Leftists, especially Leftists who are for Labor, but not part of Labor, have placed a great deal of hope in the Bessemer Union drive and passage of the PRO Act. 

With both these events, the non-Labor Left is looking for a magic bullet; the "Great Pumpkin" event that will  change Labor's fortunes on a dime, leading to the organization of millions and millions of workers and entry into a new age of broad sunny uplands.

The problem is that the RWDSU would have needed a divine miracle to win the Bessemer vote, and the PRO Act, in order to pass, will require a miracle as well. 

The truth is that workers and unions won't get the PRO Act until bosses and their corporations are willing to accept the PRO Act as an acceptable alternative to the endless chaos of strikes and other worker actions aimed at disrupting industrial production and the global economy. This is how and why The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, and I'm afraid, this is the only recipe that will get us the PRO Act.

I'm seriously suggesting that unions, workers and the Left take the long view when it comes to workers in unions. Consider these facts and comparisons over the long haul of American labor history: 

The first mass strike in the United States was the Great Railroad Strike of 1873. It took 60 years from this seminal event to the passage of the NLR Act of 1935. 

In that 60 years, there were innumerable coal strikes conducted by workers from the United Mine Workers, Western Federation of Miners, and the IWW. These strikes were brutal. At Blair Mountain, coal miners were bombed by the Army Air Corp. In the eastern Colorado coal fields strike of 1927, striking IWW coal miners were gunned down by National Guard troops and a host of the owners' private security armies. 

There were textile workers strikes such as the "Bread and Roses" strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. The "Bread and Roses" strike is famous throughout the world.  

And how about the Homestead Steel strike of the 1892? 

Or the Pullman Car strike of 1894. How about the McKees Rock strike of 1909? 

Let's not forget the Seattle General Strike of 1919. Or the TUUL (Trade Union Unity League) organizing drives that happened throughout the South in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 

Or the IWW strikes throughout the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest and the South. 

The 1937 Sit-Down strike didn't just happen out of thin air either. The Communist Party: the Socialist Party; the IWW; AJ Muste and  a Christian socialist oriented set of labor unions; all were actively organizing auto workers in Detroit and Ohio since at least the mid 1920s, (Note: AJ Muste was a Congregationalist Minister and the leader of the 1931 Toledo, Ohio, Autolite strike).

Preceding events to the 1937 Sit Down strike were the 1931 Autolite strike and the 1932 Hunger March where unemployed auto workers were met with armed resistance from law enforcement resulting in four deaths and a host of injuries. 

And of course, Auto workers in Detroit were very aware of what was happening in other industries. For instance, the 1934 ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) strike and Portland, Oregon general strike where the ILWU was able to effectively strike every port on the west coast.

In that long list of strikes above, there are very few victories. The 1934 west coast longshore strike was a victory. To this day, the ILWU controls the labor process at every port on the west coast. The 1937 sit-down strike was a victory too. The roof is in the fact that the UAW exists to this day.

In the above list of strikes, Lawrence, Massachusetts was a half-win. Wages rose but the IWW was not able to build a lasting organization of textile workers. Same goes for the Mckees Rock strike of 1909.

Most everything else listed falls in the category of defeats, if you measure a defeat based on what the workers demanded versus what was achieved. 

But none of the listed strikes were losses. In defeat after defeat, every time, workers came back stronger, ranks deeper, resolve greater. Every defeat had the effect of deepening class consciousness across the working class.

So, why would it be different now? As I look at it, we'll be defeated, and defeated again, over and over again, until we win. 

A lot of Leftists out there are thinking we're a lot stronger than we really are; thus the crushed and despairing emotions when the struggle of the moment fails.

The key here is to not fixate on the struggle at hand, betting everything we have in the hope that this time, the "Great Pumpkin" will rise. It's really all about momentum, and building momentum is really what labor organizing is all about. 

Let's start with where we're at right now. The fact of the matter is that most American unions are weak, and most American workers are weak too. Both would gain a lot if unions and workers' organizations got off the internet and stopped waiting for the next "hot shop" call. 

Instead, maybe unions should start setting up permanent store fronts and become a part of the community they're trying to organize? Maybe all of us in the working class movement should start thinking in terms of talking to workers of all stripes every day; more community hot lines; more workers' drop-in centers; more education and accessible discussion of why it matters to be a class-conscious worker and what it will really take to start winning the fight against the bosses? This might be the kind of stuff that builds the kind of momentum necessary in order to win.

   

 

 

 

 

 

How We Struck the Flint Red Cross for Six Weeks, Cleaned Their Clock, and Had Lots of Fun (Part 1)

 (Note: This is a two part article. Part One below is the narrative of the strike including some neccesary background information. Part 2 is an analysis and commentary as to why the strike was successful, and will include what lessons I learned  through the strike, and how what I learned is relevant to the recent Amazon organizing drive and the current PRO Act legislation,) 

The first union staff job I had was with OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees International Union), Local 459, headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. For a number of years, I had been serving as the shop steward at the Lansing Red Cross in “Distribution Department;, that is the Lansing Red Cross’s blood shipping operation. In 1987, I received a call from Local 459’s one staff representative, asking if I wanted to come on board as a second staff representative? I agreed to join Local 459’s staff.

Fast forward to 1992 through 1994. Local 459 had just won an NLRB election certifying that Local 459 was the bargaining union for about 60 phlebotomists, nurses and drivers at the Flint, Michigan Red Cross’s blood operation. The key issue was wages. Yeah, it was 1992 through 1994, wages were a lot lower overall and everywhere (politically, us on the Left were pushing for $10 minimum wage). But the Flint Red Cross’s wages were particularly bad. We had workers in the bargaining unit working for wages in the area of $5.80 to $6.30 an hour, and these were drivers and phlebotomists who ran the Red Cross’s mobile blood drives on a daily basis.

Once the organizing drive was completed, I took over as the bargaining representative from the union as we moved on to negotiating the first contract. 

The first contract was hard bargaining. There was certainly a struggle over wages, but the real difficulty was that wages were all over the map. Workers were hired by the Red Cross at all sorts of different rates, often regardless of classification and experience. The result was we had people working radically different wage rates, within the same classifications, with an often 50% differential between workers. 

What the first contract achieved was a series of classification wage scales with a progressive wage structure, some  pretty good boilerplate language (“boilerplate” language is a short-hand expression for the union rights, workers’ rights, and non-economic portions of the contract). Some workers (especially low-paid) received some pretty good wage increases (on paper). The raises were in the area of 5% to 8% for the low paid workers. But, like we often joked, 10% of nothing is still nothing. And of course, the middle and upper waged workers got comparatively  much smaller raises. So, lots had not been solved with the first contract, and thus, the first contract had a short duration of one year.

The second contract came around pretty soon (one year contract). From the start, before the first proposal was written, before the bargaining team had been elected, the atmosphere around the second contract had escalated. At the first union meeting around the upcoming contract, I could literally feel and smell a strike in the offing; it was palpable,I knew a strike was going to happen, it was, as the expression goes, “in the air”. 

Most unions will go to great lengths to avoid a strike. For lots of unions, especially after the de-industrialization of the 1980s, including capitals’ use of permanent replacements (scabs) to bust strikes, a strike was seen as a very risky affair. Everything, the bargaining unit, the contract, the workers themselves, could be lost in a strike. Lots of unions looked on strikes as an existential threat to themselves, and management attorneys and companies knew it! This is still, even in 2021, the feeling of many unions when it comes to strikes.

Local 459, me, the workers at the Flint Red Cross knew better (and Lansing Red Cross, we’d struck the Lansing Red Cross on a number of occasions with very good results). The Flint Red Cross, in the event of a strike, was very vulnerable. If the Red Cross tried using replacements (permanent and temporary), they’d never be invited to run a mobile blood draw again in any union shop, and the UAW was still a big player in Michigan. Likewise, we knew that the Flint Red Cross was contracted to many hospitals in Michigan’s lower east region. We knew that if we could stop Flint’s mobile blood drives, they’d be forced to import the blood and blood products from the Lansing Red Cross and Detroit Red Cross in order to fulfill their contractual obligations to regional hospitals; a real economic blow to the Flint Red Cross! 

While everybody agreed that the first contract was insufficient, nobody was mad at the union, the bargaining team, or me. The bargaining team for the first contract was re-elected. I was welcomed back with open arms. I embraced the strike threat that was simmering among the workers and bargaining team, because the bargaining team and I agreed that we could indeed beat the Flint Red Cross!

Our bargaining proposals were a bit revolutionary as well. Instead of raises based on percentages, we decided we’d bargain wages based on flat rate dollar amounts. Thus, our initial wage proposal was for a flat rate of $1 per hour. We proposed flat rates because a flat rate structure is most effective in raising wages quickly for low paid workers and because percentage based wage increases lead to greater and greater wage differences between higher paid and low paid workers over time; something we didn’t want to do. We also proposed a series of wage differentials on top of the flat rate, as many of the drivers and phlebotomists were at work at 4 in the morning, or returning back from a drive in the evening.

The other thing we did which was a bit unusual was that we took a strike vote as bargaining was beginning. We asked members to authorize the bargaining team to call a strike if a strike was necessary. In a well attended meeting, members voted by over 90% to allow the bargaining team to call a strike. 

Bargaining was indeed slow and tedious. Our proposal for $1 per hour was met with a counter proposal for a 1% wage increase. As we got near the end of bargaining, the Flint Red Cross threw in an extra percent to 2%, and then, as things were meeting their climax, they threw in another whopping ½% wage increase.

The Flint Red Cross’s management kept talking about how they didn’t have the money to fund our raises; that we’d break their bank. In truth, they were in pretty bad economic shape after years and years of mis-management. On the other hand, we kept telling management that their economic problems were their problems and not ours. Our problem we told them was extremely low wages, and our position is that we were not going to continue to subsidize their economic mis-management on our backs. Management wasn’t budging, and we weren’t either. A war was in the offing!

The Strike Begins:

The Red Cross proposed mediation, and we agreed. We got a real good Federal Mediator, a woman who had spent decades as a negotiator for the Teamsters before becoming a mediat

But meditation didn’t work. The Red Cross’s lead negotiator was a hired management attorney named Gary (last name not used to protect Gary’s identi Seems that Gary held the opinion that workers and their union would never strike, period. Gary’s approach was that it was the 1990s, and unions didn’t strike anymore. Gary looked at a trend and mistook this trend for an absolute rule.

Even as we fine tuned strike plans in the presence of the mediator, I believe her name was Beth (we wanted Beth to be able to tell management that indeed a strike was imminent, which Beth dutifully did). All the same, Beth struck out too, in great frustration also calling Gary and managements’ team a bunch of idiots.

Truth be told, loose strike planning began almost immediately after the ratification of the first contract. My contribution to the strike strategy was a suggestion that we develop “flying pickets”.

Very simply, the Flint Red Cross collected most of their blood donations through mobile donation drives held throughout the Flint Red Cross’s region. The Flint Red Cross also had a substation for blood collection in Alpena, Michigan, about 200 miles away in the northern region of Michaigan’s lower peninsula. Alpena based workers were also part of the union and were active as well. 

The Red Cross never used temporary or permanent replacement workers. But the Red Cross tried to run mobile blood drives during the strike using management staff. Our “flying pickets”  would show up at the mobile blood drive, set up pickets, and basically reduced mobile blood drives to collection levels that could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Workers loved the “flying picket” concept!. The mechanics of the flying pickets were run by one of the drivers, Barney, who was also on the bargaining team. Barney made  contact with sympathizers in the Lab (outside the bargaining unit) and thus we had a little spy network who would tell us day by day where the mobile blood drive was going. From there, Barney would line up the picketers and drivers, and we never missed a mobile blood drive.

The International Union came through big time. With a strike vote of over 90%, the International approved the strike, which in turn opened up the International strike fund, which meant the Union covered healthcare premiums, and paid workers who picketed  $200 per week in strike pay for the duration of the strike. If readers remember, we had workers making as little as $5.80 to $6.00 per hour. If you do the math, $6.00 per hour, at 40 hours is a working wage of $240 per week. With a $200 strike benefit, lots of workers weren’t losing that much money. 

Secondly, the bargaining team and Union set up picketing requirements in order to receive strike pay, and strike pay was paid in cash on the picket line. You had to be an active striker to get the strike benefits. In practice, just about everyone did their picket duty happily….. Solidarity Forever was an active force in this strike.

And then there was the weather. As I remember, the strike began on June 1, in the spring going into summer. The weather was beautiful (Michigan is a hard place if you have to strike in winter). With workers receiving decent strike benefits there was no atmosphere of the wolf being at the door for any of the strikers. Thus, the picket line stretched out in front of the Red Cross increasingly took on the feel of a daily picnic and barbeque. A grill was out on the picket line every day. Sympathetic visitors were always offered a hamburger or hot dog. The umbrellas and sun shades were always set up. Workers were pretty impressed with what they were doing.

Last to mention is the contract campaign itself. Early in the strike planning stage, a woman named Maria was put in charge of the contract campaign. Maria didn’t make a big deal of the contract campaign. On the first day of the strike, Maria simply grabbed a few of the lower paid strikers and they just disappeared.

Maria and her delegation showed up again at the end of the day. Seems that Maria and her delegation made the rounds. First they visited the UAW CAP council. Not a big, planned meeting; Maria and her delegation just showed up with picket signs and asked the UAW to cancel all the blood drives scheduled by UAW and GM in the auto factories, for the duration of the strike. The UAW responded by canceling all of its blood drives.

From there, Maria and workers went to the Urban League and got the Urban League to endorse the strike as an anti-poverty action. Finally, the delegation stopped at the United Way. The United Way offered all sorts of help in keeping strikers solvent, which we really didn’t need. The Flint Red Cross was however a major recipient of United Way donations for its non-blood related services and the United Way didn’t want to be known as a social service organization that was funding an agency being struck for low wages.

 

For me, the whole experience of the Flint Red Cross strike was surprising in that it was such an easy strike for me, as the staff rep. From the start, the strike was run by the strikers. Once Maria and her delegation had done their diplomatic mission, and Barney had the flying pickets organized, the strike ran itself. Anyone on the bargaining team, or for that matter, anyone on the picket line was perfectly capable of speaking to the press, OPEIU Local 459 itself was an amalgamated Local with 44 bargaining units spread across Michigan’s lower peninsula. Thus, with only two staff reps, it just wasn’t possible for a staff rep to be on the picket line every day; which really didn’t matter because the workers were running the strike just fine.

The strike itself was a war of attrition. We knew we were impacting the Red Cross’s economics severely. Management and Gary were starting to figure out that workers were miles from being beaten. For instance, we had some bargaining sessions during the strike. Thus, I would occasionally need to talk to Gary to schedule the bargaining sessions. As time went on, Gary would make some sly comments looking for information; like, “Your folks must be getting desperate”. I’d respond to Gary, “Oh no, not desperate at all. We’re doing just fine, you should stop by our picket line sometime, and if you’re really nice, I bet the strikers would be happy to get you a hamburger or hotdog”. This was not what Gary wanted to hear!

Six weeks into the strike, Beth the Mediator, scheduled a bargaining session. This session was different. Management began agreeing to some of our economic issues like shift differentials, and another half percent on wages. We held firm on wages. Management then caucused for a long time. Late afternoon turned into evening. Finally, the Director of the Flint Red Cross, a guy named Fred Wilson, came in alone to meet with our bargaining team. Fred said simply this: “You win. I don’t know where the money is going to come from to pay for the wages, but this strike is killing us and it needs to end”. 

So this is how 60 odd strikers beat the Flint Red Cross.