Advance the Struggle News Brief

A common practice in our internal meetings is for a comrade to prepare a report on current events and present it in a 10 or 15 minute agenda point. This post was prepared from the report made in our last meeting.

 

Five IWW organizers were fired from Chicago-Lake Liquors in Minneapolis after a large group of workers there delivered a set of demands for higher wages to the bosses. They have held 2 informational pickets and are distributing fliers to customers in an attempt to get their jobs back. On May 4th, 2013, they held a hard picket and turned away ninety per cent of customers despite attempts by security and management to break the picket. There will be another big picket on the 24th of May. This seems to be the best possible way to deal with a situation of salts getting fired, short of a strike of the remaining workers or an occupation of the workplace.

Well-known Russian anti-fascist, Alexey Gaskarov, was arrested April 28th, just days before he was set to lead large protests. He is a member of the Coordination Council of Russian Opposition. The arrest came just days before he was going to be the head of a leftist, anti-fascist, block at protests marking the one year anniversary of the very large demonstrations last year against electoral fraud, which were violently repressed by the police. This is important in light of the large growth of fascist groups in Russia in recent years.

On April 25th, about 3000 anarchists marched in solidarity to Athens Indymedia and 98 FM that have been censored by the Greek State since April 11th. Six of the arrested protestors were charged with offending the Greek national flag by replacing it with the red and black flag of anarchism. The State censorship was carried out under the banner of combating terrorism, when in fact this censorship is simply an attack on independent media that has served as a center for organizing actions against the capitalist agenda in Greece. These protests are important because there have not been many large mobilizations against state censorship of the internet and media such as this one.

Hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike in Bangladesh on April 26th following the collapse of a garment factory there that claimed the lives of 1127 workers, making it the largest industrial disaster since the Bhopal incident. The plant’s workers were evacuated after cracks in the building were discovered, but then managers ordered them back to work the next day. Then the building collapsed with everyone inside. The building was owned by Sohel Rana, leader of the local Jubo League, the youth wing of the ruling Awami League political party. This suggests a close relationship between the bureaucracy of the state and the worst aspects of capitalism in Dhaka. Hundreds of thousands of workers protested and struck following the collapse, forcing factory bosses to declare a day’s holiday. Factories that tried to operate the day following the collapse were attacked by striking workers. Protesters smashed windows and destroyed cars at the headquarters of the main manufacturers’ association, demanding justice. A coalition of 18 parties led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party called for general strikes on May 2nd, following large protests and strikes on International Workers Day. It is problematic that a political party based on religion and nationalism is leading this co-optation of the workers struggle. Communists should support the development of internationalist, Marxist, revolutionary parties in Bangladesh that can lead a struggle for the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of the wage system. In recent years there has been a rising tide of worker militancy in Bangladesh where groups like the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity have faced brutal repression as they try unionize some of the 3.6 million garment workers employed in Bangladesh’s 5,000 garment factories. Research suggests that their average wages of 38$ US per month are not enough to provide adequate nutrition for even the one worker who receives them, let alone a whole family. Communists over seas should attempt to connect with embryonic workers organizations in Bangladesh to develop unity around an internationalist communist program, and find ways to materially support each other’s struggles.

Workers in England have been hit with a new bedroom tax and a cut in the council tax rebate. The Huddersfield Anarchist League made front page news after they had a protest at the town hall on the 21st of March, demanding answers from Labour party officials about whether the local Labour Council would haul people through the courts and evict people as a result of the policies. The policies mean that people on the dole (welfare) would have to pay 270 pounds sterling more per year, from the council tax rebate cuts alone. The bedroom tax has reduced the housing benefit for people with vacant rooms by an average of 23 $ US per week (1200$/year), driving some people to despair. In April, the Huddersfield group staged a protest in a Barclays bank. The bank manager set off the alarm and police came. Protesters staged an impromptu rally outside and had a positive response from the public, who actively participated in de-arresting two protesters that were targeted by the police during the rally. This shows some resonance in the working class for the program of this anarchist group. These worsening attacks on the working class highlight the need for organization that unites serious revolutionaries around the world to abolish the capitalist dictatorship that forces us to sell our labor as a commodity. The dispossession of workers from the means of subsistence by state protected private property forces us to sell our labor to capitalists in order to afford the necessities of life and alienates us from decisions about production, preventing us from rationally addressing issues such as disease, homelessness, starvation, or anthropogenic climate change.

In South Africa, the new Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) is winning over membership in the platinum and coal mining sectors. Senzeni Zokwana, the head of the Communist Party (CP), called the union a group of, “vigilantes and liars”. He also accused the AMCU of business unionism, saying that the AMCU president Joseph Mathunjwa owned five companies (the crowd greeted this assertion with shock and disbelief). Basically, the CP and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) feel threatened by the new union and don’t like its critical stance towards the ANC. The CP leader said that the NUM needs to serve its members more effectively to combat the new union. This is likely empty rhetoric, but it could indicate that the AMCU is pushing the NUM and CP to the left in some way. The growing AMCU just took a blow with the murder of the regional organizer of Amcu in the Rustenburg platinum belt who was shot 4 times in the back at a tavern on May 12th. He was just about to testify at the Marikana Commission of Inquiry about the massacre of 44 striking miners by police forces last year.

There will be a wildcat strike in South Africa by the Amplats miners on Monday May 20th by the same miners that struck for 2 months at the end of last year. These latest strikes are a response to the announcement of the layoff (retrenchment) of 14,000 workers made by Amplats in January, which was revised down to 6,000 after outrage from COSATU and the NUM. A leading member of the workers’ committee, Evans Ramokga, explained that the workers had been promised wage increases following their strike at the end of last year, but instead of wage increases they were greeted in January with news of these layoffs.

In Morelia, Mexico, on May 16th, students training to become teachers returned to the State four state police officers that they had held captive for 11 days. This returning of the officers was a precondition for the state to enter into negotiations with the students regarding their demands for the opening up of 1200 new teaching jobs. The students blocked streets on the 29th of April and took control of many buses and vehicles. They took the food and other necessities from the trucks and distributed them to the people. Apparently, the buses are being used by the students to transport themselves to the capital of the State. It seems that the buses were taken by the students from “la escuela normal indígena de Cherán”. Some of the issues that are decried in the pronouncement of the Organización de Normales Oficiales del Estado de Michoacán, which is a leading force to some extent in these protests and actions, are the following: reforms to the curriculum of the normal schools; the elimination of the telebachilleratos (a radio and TV educational program); and the current situation of diminution of matriculation in the universities due to the imposition of a new CENEVAL exam.

In their analysis the educational reforms are actually economic, labor, and political attacks whose only goal is the privatization of education. The curricular reform in the normal schools that the State wants to impose in 2012 completes the cycle of reforms that they have been imposing over the last 9 years.

This rough translation of some of the pronouncement gives an idea of their politics: (We reject the study plans based in competitions with competitive and productivist focuses, because they impede the harmonious development of education, and in their place we pose formative projects of teachers, that surge from the social necessities based in the linking of theory and practice, the discovery and construction of knowledge by way of creating climates of constant critique of inequality, strengthening capacities, abilities, skills and values of the human being needed to live with plenitude, coexistence…)

There were protests of about 10,000 people on the 15th of May against the education reforms that had a contingent of 200 electrical workers (who have been militant in recent years) and other workers joining the protest in solidarity. The protests were in the Zocalo in DF (Mexico City) and went towards the installations of Televisa Chapultepec where dozens of police formed lines against the protesters.

On the same day as the protests, the president had a big celebration of the primary school teachers of Mexico where he met with Juan Díaz de la Torre, president of the teachers union (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, SNTE) and 400 other teachers in attendance. That their union leader would meet with the president as such is a slap in the face to the movement against the educational reforms.

There were also strikes in the education sector in Spain, supported by Juventudes Socialistas de Martos among others, against “(the most conservative education reform that has been given in Europe)”. The reforms want to: segregate schools from a young age based on performance; eliminate Educación para la Ciudadanía which is a political / values education component in high schools that was created by the ‘socialist’ government of Rodriguez Zapatero; permit gender segregation in the classroom; and give greater emphasis to religion in education.

There has been a general strike in Bolivia for 10 days with the miners, teachers, health workers and factory workers at the head, with road blockages across the country. The strike is against the law of Pensions of the government of Evo Morales. The law, La Ley de Pensiones 065, requires workers to pay 97% of their rent, bosses to pay 3% and the government to pay nothing. Workers criticize the law because it would require the workers to be practically the sole financier of their pensions, which would come out to only 70% of the monthly salary they received while working. The law would also maintain 100% of salary pensions for military and police officers, a policy remaining from the Banzer dictatorship. Pensions in Bolivia currently range from 21$ to 29$ per month.  4,000 mine workers from Huanuni were at the head of the protests in the Plaza Murillo. The Church has called for the workers and government to end their ‘intransigence’ and come to some settlement, failing to clearly support the workers’ demands. Socialists from the Liga Obrera Revolucionaria-Cuarta Internacional are calling for the formation of a national strike committee to ensure the democratic participation of all the participating sectors and organizations in deciding how to overcome any obstacles to victory.

Ding dong . . . the “witch” is dead?

What follows is an email that a comrade wrote to members of a political listserv that he is a part of.  We offer it here due to the timely nature of the intervention around the way that we talk about Thatcher and her death.  

Witch Side Are You On?

I dont intend to attack anyone for their word choice, but would like to raise a little bit of consciousness on this word choice of calling Thatcher a “witch” as a form of insult.

Margaret thatcher was the opposite of a witch. By referring to thatcher as a witch, one denigrates the real witches of the late middle ages (and other women whose independence was slandered by patriarchy as witchcraft) whose genocide (witch hunts) was intimately bound up with the subjugation of the new proletariat and colonizing missions.

The witch hunts culminated in a triumph for the bourgeoisie, in the form of a division of labor at the heart of which was a stark divide between productive labor and reproductive (domestic) labor. Workers outside of the home (predominantly men, but women too) were waged slaves whose productivity was under-valued through the fetishism of commodities (money hiding the unequal exchange of equivalents). Workers inside the home (exclusively women) were not paid at all, the most extreme fetish (illusion) this new capitalist order would produce. At the heart of this illusion that women’s domestic/reproductive work did not merit a wage, was the false belief that women are genetically prone to do this work for free as loving mothers and loyal wives. Male wage earners were given a position, imposed on them and enforced by law, of domestic overseer with all the tools of coercion they might need, from the right to rape to the right to beat “their” wives who regarded as dependents on the man. Thus the male proletariat was coopted by the bourgeoisie in a scheme to keep the total wage bill of that class half of what it should have been. In this sense, all of us male proletarians have a duty to honor our sisters as pillars of the class at every available opportunity. Part of that is learning the history of women as workers inside and outside the home. That history includes the heroic chapter of witches’ resistance to capitalism at the very dawn of its existence. [the book Caliban and the Witch is a good place to start - click here here here here and here for links to that courtesy of some good people in Seattle.]

Margaret thatcher was a traitor to her gender. Witches were the most loyal members not only of their gender but also of a far reaching pan-european anti-capitalist/anti-patriarchy movement from the 1300s-1700s, that is, during the period of capitalism’s maturation as a world system.

Death to Thatcherism!

Long live women’s liberation and proletarian revolution!

Final Four: Does the Plantation Return to Atlanta this Saturday April 6th?

By Comrade Read

As college sports fans gear up for the culmination of the annual march madness NCAA division 1 men’s basketball tournament, this year to be decided at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, we offer two articles by Dave Zirin on the hyper-exploitation of top flight college athletes. The article paints the NCAA as a good ol’ boys network with corporate sponsorship, making millions, if not billions, off the labor of student athletes.

Last week, Kevin Ware of the Louisville Cardinals, suffered one the most horrific injuries I’ve ever seen on a basketball court. It was so shocking that CBS executives ordered the network to stop replaying the footage as Kevin received emergency care. How much will Mr. Ware receive for this game where he fractured his tibia in half to the point it was left dangling off the end of his knee? Nothing, not one penny, unless you’re like the good ol’ boys who feel that the scholarship he receives is “enough”.  With no income and very little time to find a part time job, these unpaid student workers often resort to taking money and benefits from boosters and fans of the school they play for.

Click this link for more context on the injury of Kevin Ware.

Terelle Pryor, formerly of Ohio State, now a quarterback for the Oakland Raiders – exchanged some sports equipment and jerseys, his own property unless you ask the NCAA, for some tatoo work. And because this happened while he was still working for Ohio State, he was kicked off the team and forced to give up his scholarship. For Terelle, who was planning on entering the NFL draft, this wasn’t overly devastating, but for the Ohio State football team he left behind, they were forced to deal with NCAA sanctions which put them out of contention for a national championship for a specified length of time.

That is the nature of the cartel formerly known as the NCAA. It is high time for these student workers/athletes to have an organization that represents their interest as students who work and generate profits for their University and this cartel (NCAA). Just like Graduate School Assistants (GSA) in the University of California recently organized under the United Auto Workers Union (UAW), student athletes need to unionize in order to demand proper compensation and benefits for their labor. Until this a reality, its safe to say the plantation will definitely be returning to Atlanta this weekend and every sports weekend of major NCAA sports. Tune in,  and check out the link to the article below for more context on this “wicked” (Desmond Howard quote) and hyper-exploitative system.

http://www.thenation.com/article/173307/ncaa-poster-boy-corruption-and-exploitation?page=0,0

Throwing away food while people line up hungry . . .

The video copied below shows goods from a closed down shop being thrown into a dumpster, while a crowd of people get pushed back from a line of cops as they try to pick up the goods in order to use them.

A lot of our well-intentioned friends and comrades think that individuals can be convinced to “do the right thing.”  The idea that politicians, bosses, and cops are neutral agents that can be talked into supporting workers, unemployed people, and communities of color in our struggles to live is prevalent among many well meaning comrades.

But the reality that radicals understand – those who see the root of society as the problem – is that society is not just composed of many individuals.  It’s composed of individuals who are tied together in webs of social relationships.

The two overarching forms of social organization that dominate our lives are those of the capitalist system and the state apparatus.

In basic terms, the capitalist system thrives on the commodification of everything – by assigning everything an exchange value that takes precedence over any given item’s usefulness.  It doesn’t matter if the food, clothing and other useful items laying in front of you could help your family out; what matters is that they’re private property, items to be exchanged or dealt with through the market, and not available for just “anyone” to use.  As the police in this video state, if people were to take what they needed from the pile of goods that were set to be thrown in the dumpster, it might “cause a riot.”

This is where the state comes in.  The repressive side of the state is composed of the courts, prisons and police.  Their main function in a capitalist system is to enforce capitalist laws – laws that protect private property and enforce the exchange of commodities on the market.  Whether or not an individual cop is a “good person,” the police force as an institution compels all individuals in its ranks to enforce capitalist order or be driven out.  Their job, as evidenced in this video, includes forcing people to keep the capitalist system running by keeping us in order – forcing us to work, day in and day out – and not allowing us access to the means of life if we don’t have money to exchange for what we need.

This video is just one example of the logic of capital and the state playing out in ways that continue degrading the lives of working class people.

What is AS up to right now?

Working on developing a communist theory and practice

We’ve had a wave of activity hit our blog in the past month due to the debates around “the union question.”  Due to this, we’ve been bombarded with many people’s quality positions regarding the question of whether or not, and how, to intervene in unions.  We’ve also received some critiques that the wave of blog posts around unions was not theoretically and historically rigorous enough.  We can only agree with this critique and acknowledge the limitations of our current position as a group to immediately churn out analyses that meet the academic standards of some of our graduate school comrades.

With that said, we’d like to emphasize a few points about where AS is at as a collective, as well as where our current thinking is at so that we can clarify for folks near and far.

Irish Insurrection 1969

We move from our last post which dealt with capitalist agriculture, specifically, dairy, to the topic of working class insurrection, specifically, Derry. The We Know What’s Up blog bring us a first-hand account of a militant of the Derry uprising in Northern Ireland in 1969.  Can a riot turn into a commune?

Capital milking its system – poetry from a comrade

When I lived briefly in North Carolina and Wisconsin, I worked as a farm hand and fruit picker in some very prolific farming communities. I worked alongside Amish, immigrants, and high-end industrial farmers and made a point to jot down notes every day from my conversations and observations. A few years later, I came across my old notes, and rearranged them into a longer stream-of-consciousness specifically about the Dairy-Industrial-Complex; a configuration of all the players involved in dairy production. The poem has no conclusion or clear ending; it is merely a commentary on the deterioration of health and food production for profit. This type of Industrial-Complex shows the absolute necessity for the complete unity of class struggle and ecological struggle.

In the Industrial-Complex, the global domino effect, in a global competition for greater profit, imported milk is condensed, canned, and distributed without charge to the poor countries of Mali, Niger, and Yap. The canned milk, though labeled “Nor forSale” in English, is sold in the local markets.

The amount of canned milk for sale worldwide depends on the economic conditions in North America, Europe and the South Pacific.

It depends on how much milk Nestle, Hershey or Kraft buys for their annual production and on the fluctuating value of the dollar, yen or Euro, which maintains its colonial ties to the CEFA in West Africa.

It depends on the consumption of milk in the rich countries; how hot the summer is and how much ice cream people eat.

It depends on the world’s annual yield of soybeans, one of the major competitors of milk products.

It depends on the consumption of corn for ethanol, for cow feed, for high fructose corn syrup.

It depends on Michelle Obama’s “War on Obesity” and the Department of Health’s concern for any diseases in raw milk.

It depends on the black market of raw dairy products, the costs of middle men, transportation costs and the popularity of whole foods stores.

It depends on the dairy subsidies and foreign aid appropriations made by U.S. congress; the food policies of the United Nations high commissioner for earthquake victims in Haiti and Pakistan; and the mercurial aid programs of religious and other private charitable organizations all over the world.

In the beginning, it started with the small farmer, bought out by a factory farm. The crops are then rotated annually- three years soy beans, one year corn, and again. The sprays; the pesticides.

It started with the land purchase. Forty acres and 30,000 cows, all walking around in their own feces; milking machines; tasers; small, confined spaces.

It started when the soil depletes and the factory farm moves to a different area. When a corporate hustler gives a high five to a politician who sells out their state’s land for a competitive profit.

And in the end, it changes the nature of the landscape, the culture of the towns, the priorities of local governments, monopolization of local economies. We see Walmart, green-washing, and cancer. The soil is sick and it runs off into the water. The people are sick and rush to Walgreens for prescriptions. The plants are sick- tomato and cucumber blight.

It ends with cultural phobias- bacteria is harmful and must be eliminated. Adding chemicals, taking out proteins, homogenization, pasteurization, skim, fat free; a culture of fat phobias.

When we get back to canned milk in Mali, we see advertisement. When Nestle suffers, they tell mothers that breast feeding is unhealthy. So buy our powdered milk products for life longevity, for child’s health!

A suffered profit perpetuates the war on the Global South, the class struggle, the prioritization of profit over decent milk in elementary schools, over growing cancer cells, over fractured communities, and brainwashed understandings of health.