Buenos Aires Subway workers punk capitalist bosses, state, and union leadership, winning major gains

In February 2005, the subway workers of Buenos Aires, Argentina, went on strike demanding an increase in wages amongst other things. This was a successful wildcat strike, conducted democratically by the workers through assemblies and elected delegates, without, for the most part, going through the official leadership or legal structures of the union. Below is a translation by an AS comrade of an article by the Socialist Workers Party of Argentina that tells the story of the victory. Below the translated article is a response by the translator to some possible critiques of the strike that another comrade raised semi-sarcastically. These responses are intended to spur further discussion and debate, so please chime in with your two cents in the comments section.

 AS is not monolithic and we struggle with our positions on many things. We see this as a sign of our openness, lack of dogmatism, and honest search for truth. This translation of an article by a Trotskyist group shows our sympathies for good work with good impacts on the working class’ revolutionary agency, no matter who is behind it, because we are not dogmatic sectarians. While we give props to all organizations and actors who contribute to the growing power of the proletariat, we do theoretically vacillate between support for state-recognized working class organizations like unions and rejection of them as co-opted vehicles that tie the working class to capital even as it appears to make “gains.”

 

 

Translated from http://www.pts.org.ar/spip.php?article814

 

The increases reaches 44% of payroll

Triumph of the Subway Workers

Friday, February 11, 2005

Socialist Workers Party of Argentina (Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas)

 

One can already follow the journey the metro workers accepted yesterday in the agreement that was announced in the middle of the night Wednesday by the UTA. Metrovías conceded 19 percent plus the 100 pesos the it gave the government by decree. With the rest added up, for the delegates the increase was 44 percent.

 

The subway workers achieved a salary agreement through which they earned 44 percent more than they were earning in December. Through a week of conflict in which services on the five lines and the Premetro ended up totally paralyzed, yesterday they accepted the agreement between Metrovías and the UTA, which set an increase of 19 percent, and they lifted the forceful measures. So you can understand what this means, the salary of a ticket seller will come to be over 1200 pesos, and that of an operator will surpass 2200.

 

“At the start of the complaint, we said that we wanted to lay the groundwork for future salary discussions. We understand that what was under debate was if the workers had the right to earn a living wage, that would permit access to education and culture,” said the delegates Carlos Pérez and Roberto Pinalli at the announcement of the strike’s end. “If was a difficult conflict, we started to win because we could explain to the public opinion that we weren’t ashamed to have salaries of over 1000 pesos in a country where there are people that make 400. The existence of 400 peso salaries, 300 peso retirements, and managers that make 40,000 pesos is what makes us ashamed.

 

The improvement adds two great items: on one side the increase drawn up by Metrovias, which will be 19 percent. On the other, the 100 pesos that the Government granted in a general manner, by decree, to all the workers in January. Additionally, it recognizes a bonus of one percent as compensation for unpaid night hours and holidays.

 

The addition of these benefits implies for the business an increases of more than 12 million pesos in payroll (a 44 percent increase compared to December). As such, from now on the lowest category, that had a salary of 681 pesos, will rise to 910, whereas the highest will go from 1530 to 1921. All the employees will receive, additionally, 200 pesos in ticket credit and 156 as a travel allowance. The seniority bonus will be calculated on a case by case basis for all conductors, with that as such the employee, be he a low-level laborer, will receive a minimum 1921 pesos for each year worked.

 

 

The minister of labor, Carlos Tomada, detailed that, “the agreement reached consists of a 19 percent that translates to 250 pesos, which we consider an important increase for the workers of Metrovias”. The explanation is linked to the fact that the magnitude of the wage increase is going to influence future complaints.

 

The agreement has, finally, two valued points in the sphere of the union: it doesn’t include a social peace clause, and neither does it mention the idea of installing more ticket-selling machines.

 

The full story:

 

The conflict between Metrovias and the workers had begun in November. The business is concessionary of service: it manages the functioning of the subways, but it isn’t in charge of capital investments, since the national State buys the trains and the government of Buenos Aires pays for the rail extension projects. The company receives transportation subsidies (last year they were 65 million pesos), despite its claim at the beginning of the complaint that it couldn’t grant salary increases because its balances showed losses.

The plan for struggle was for progressive stoppages. In the final week, services were interrupted three hours per day, then four, five, and finally twenty-four hours. But the tension wasn’t only put on that arm wrestling between Metrovias and the workers (such that to curb the departure of trains laid down on the tracks nine times), but also in the parallel dispute that the delegates maintained with the direction of their union, the Union Tranviarios Automotor (UTA), which is led by Juan Manuel Palacios.

 

The body of delegates is a combination of leftist independents, peronistas, and militants from MST and from PO. Palacios is the right hand man of the head of the CGT, Hugo Moyano. The delegates, who drove the conflict, had legitimacy in the eyes of the workers, but the UTA, with its status as the union, is the only entity legally authorized to sign agreements. This situation is the cause of friction and episodes of absurd overtones. The final one occurred at midnight that Wednesday. At the end of a day in which all negotiations had failed and a new forty-eight hour stoppage had been announced, Palacios called a press conference and announced in an unexpected manner, that he had arrived at an agreement with the business sector. Consequently, he said, the conflict was ending.

 

The director was surrounded by his peers from the UTA. “Why aren’t the delegates here?”, asked a reporter. “Not one came”, said Palacios. “But, are they aware of the agreement?”. “We’re just leaving to inform them”, answered Palacios. He had arrived at an agreement in an audience with only Metrovias and the Minister of Labor. From a legal point of view, he had done nothing wrong.

 

Urgent matters

 

The body of delegates heard about the new proposal from Metrovias watching the press conference and confirmed the strike. In the subways no one knew that they had signed and there were urgent assemblies in the five strike headquarters, with the people that were nearby being informed of the new development.

 

At one in the morning the UTA sent a copy of the business proposal to all five subway lines. A group of eight from the union arrived at Virreyes station. The delegates didn’t let them come down, although they agreed to come up to receive it. The delegate Nestor Segovia pointed out,“Its the rank and file and not the union who decides if the agreement is accepted.” A series of subsequent assemblies determined that the offer was favorable. The stoppage was lifted eighteen hours later, at half past seven in the afternoon, after all the shifts and sectors backed the agreement.

 

But according to the minutes Palacios signed it in a new hearing with Metrovias and the minister of Labor. And there was occasion for a new round of comedy, because the delegates, informed of the meeting, went to one of the offices of the ministry to join in the hearing. Followed by the TV channels and the radio stations, they were at the at the building at 100 Callao street where the final negotiations had been conducted and they didn’t find anyone. The agreement was being signed in the headquarters of the ministry of Labor, on Leandro N. Alem.

 

During the week that the conflict lasted, the company tried to put emergency services into operation operated by hierarchical personnel, but the trains’ departure was disabled by workers who laid down on the tracks. For this reason, Metrovias presented nine charges to the Ministry of Justice that will now follow their course, since the signed agreement did not foresee the withdrawal of the demands.

 

 

 One AS comrade:

 This is terrible, unions are the left wing of devalorization.

 Reforms and concessions are impossible in today’s crisis.

 Anyway, this is an exceptional example of worker militancy and a fighting union. It can’t be reproduced. They got lucky.

 We really need to smash all value relations, and settle for no less. 

 

Response by another AS Comrade:

 To respond to your devils advocate arguments,

 Your points are all false. 

 “This is terrible, unions are the left wing of devalorization.” This is false in the case described in the article because the union won a general wage increase, which increases the total wage bill, increasing the valorization of labor power, not devalorizing it as you spuriously assert. Even the workers’ desire to have a wage that affords them ‘education and culture’ is presumably valorized by this victory, an extraordinary victory indeed seeing as education and culture are outside the scope of the simple labor power that is usually exchanged. The union leader and the legal union entity, not the entire union which consists of the delegates and rank and file as well, does play a conservative role, but it is acting more as the right wing of a class conscious proletariat than the left wing of devalorization. I say this because, as the workers were about to launch a 48 hour shutdown of the Subways in Buenos Aires, the official union leader held closed door hearings with the company and the ministry of labor to come to a compromise that greatly favored the workers. In and of itself this isn’t even that conservative, as it sealed the deal on a large victory right when the company was ready to give in. But insofar as the workers were progressing towards proving to the proletariat that they have the power to paralyze capital completely for 2 days, and that was thwarted, this was a conservative stifling of the workers revolutionary agency, not a left wing face for devalorization. Additionally, the agreement was made without the democratic participation of the workers, so it contained the seeds of a Stalinist bureaucracy type degeneration of a revolutionary proletariat, not a liberal degeneration of capital. However, the union itself, meaning its delegates and memberships, were able to continue with their plans to shut down the city until they got each local to vote on the agreement, albeit one made by the union leader behind closed doors, showing that unions are not endemically folded into the left wing of capital, even when their leaders and legal structures are very conservative elements of the right wing of the proletariat, because the mass and body of the union can be the real leading force if it has politically advanced ‘delegates’ and is prepared to shut down the means of production. 

 As to the second point, “Reforms and concessions are impossible in today’s crisis.,” this is false in the immediate sense of the example given by the Buenos Aires subway strike because concessions, a 44% increase in payroll, were made. Reforms, i.e. changing the political economic structure, were not made as far as I can see, as the only win was a wage increase. When people say this they usually mean that in the long term, a general trend of reform that allocates increasing power and wages to the working class on average across the whole proletariat over an extended period of time, is impossible. This strike suggests that this is false because workers were able to make the capitalist power structure do something that it didn’t want to do, that went against it’s ‘long term trend.’ But there might be larger macro arguments for ‘impossibility’ that speak to how, in this example, the wage increase comes from government subsidies, which comes from taxes and/or state debt, which comes from profit which has a declining rate and is further removed from real value production, which causes a vicious cycle of economic destruction as fictitious values are circulated etc…. I can’t definitively deal with that one here, but I would say this example proves, concessions are possible and scores two points for reforms. 

 As to the third point, “Anyway, this is an exceptional example of worker militancy and a fighting union. It can’t be reproduced. They got lucky.” This example is extraordinary but not exceptional. The political economic conditions that produced this struggle, financial crisis in Argentina, more recent global financial crisis, wages too low to reproduce workers, years of struggle etc. are not exceptional. These are the conditions that workers across the globe are facing, albeit a few years behind the Argentinian curve. So if we hold that worker militancy and fighting unionism are caused by material conditions and subjective intervention, as opposed to particular cultural/psychological peculiarities or random outlier occurrences, then it follows that what occurred in Buenos Aires could occur in many other parts of the globe as material social forces develop in similar ways to how they did in Argentina. What is missing is the subjective intervention, which in this case took the form of a body of delegates who were mostly ‘ a combination of leftist independents, peronistas, and militants from MST and from PO.’ This strike proves that this kind of worker militancy that can be reproduced when the conditions are ripe and militants subjectively intervene at a strategic point in the structure of the working class movement, which is not the leadership or legal rights of the union, but is at the shop floor, above the ‘rank and file’ level, at the ‘delegate’ level, where the actual leadership of class struggle, i.e. shutting down a city and holding mass assemblies of workers, must take place.

 The final point you make, ‘we really need to smash all value relations, and settle for no less,’ is also false because it is a fallacy to think that any social reality can appear instantly from nowhere. A thing changes to another thing by going through gradual quantitative changes until those quantitative changes add up to a qualitative changes. For example, for a flower to appear, the level of hormone in the lateral shoot apical meristem must reach a critical quantitative level before the shoot irreversibly takes on the identity of a floral shoot. And the length of the night had to change by quantitative increments until it reaches that critical level where the plant makes just the right amount of hormone to induce flowering. Not to mention that the plant had to go through many other forms, from being the seed of an earlier plant, to germination, to vegetative growth and so on before it could get to flowering. To put it simply, change requires both a quantitative and qualitative aspect, and current value relations must change incrementally until they become something qualitatively different, or else something else besides value relations must be incrementally changed into communist relations of production. But even in the latter case, value cannot be smashed instantaneously, just as a building cannot be reduced to rubble instantaneously. To destroy anything requires a series, be it fast or slow, of quantitative changes that eventually produce the phenomenon we perceive as a qualitative change. When a piece of iron rusts and falls apart, it takes the oxidation of billions of Fe2+ atoms over months or years that eventually ‘destroy’ the iron, when really it has just turned to dust. When a bomb explodes it requires a series of chemical reactions that incrementally build up heat and pressure, albeit very quickly, until the container goes through the qualitative change of bursting open and sending forth shrapnel and hot gas at high velocities. So even if we seek to destroy value, we must do so my increments until the regulation of resource allocation by the exchange of equivalent congelations of socially necessary labor time is nothing but a memory or the subject of artists’ reflection. The challenge for us is to know what those increments are! And to chip them away as quickly as possible. 

  In solidarity,

 An AS comrade

 

 

Occupy Oakland: Advance the Struggle’s Political Reflection

The mass strike…suddenly opens new and wide perspectives of the revolution when it appears to have already arrived in a narrow pass and where it is impossible for anyone to reckon upon it with any degree of certainty.

                                                          - Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike.”

Occupy Oakland has reshaped politics not just for this city or the West Coast region where its impact has been greatest, but for the US as a whole and has given hope of revolution within the belly of the beast to millions of people around the world. Significantly, Occupy Oakland has injected a clear anti-capitalist current with the broader Occupy movement and has been able to implement an array of tactics to galvanize those politics. What are the lessons we draw from our young movement? The following is Advance the Struggle’s reflection on the movement. Comments, critiques, and discussion are welcome.

 

Table of Contents

I.    Fight for Space Morphs into Battle for Class Power

II.   Context of Occupy Oakland

III.  Political Origins

IV.  Attack: OPD Raids Occupy. OUSD Closes Schools.

V.   Counter Attack: November 2nd General Strike

VI.   November 19th: Unpermitted anti-school closure march

VII.  December 12th: West Coast Shutdown.

VIII. Class Struggle or Substitutionism?

IX.   Our Future

__________________________________________________

I.    Fight for Space Morphs into Battle for Class Power

Revolutionaries around the world often ask why the people in the US don’t rise up against its government. With the rise of the Occupy movement, a global audience has been glued to the unfolding events surrounding this struggle, and tens of thousands within the US have participated in perhaps their first political protest. Like most movements, Occupy has its contradictions; in fact, its contradictions have largely been celebrated as diversity of political opinion. Working out the political contradictions through action, movement, struggle – in short, through practice – is the only way that masses educate themselves, becoming more clear in their critique of existing social relations and participate more fully in the implementation of strategies for change. Occupy has been a success just as much for the learning process it has unleashed as for the victories it has gained against “the 1%”. In what follows, we attempt an overview of developments at Occupy Oakland and refer to some debates within the movement. We aim to preserve the tone of unity and broad inclusion that has made Occupy so remarkable. What will be explored below is the relationship between Occupy Oakland’s class composition, the tools it uses to formulate strategy and the tactics implemented in practice.

II.   Context of Occupy Oakland

The 2007-08 crisis has radically destroyed the public infrastructure of our society: schools, hospitals, public transportation, and parks have all been violently gutted. This is an expression of a much deeper crisis in capitalism that is pulling society into a downward spiral. The last 30 years we have seen an extremely rapid and unceasing technological revolution within commodity production, one that has devalorized labor-power so fast that the proletariat is being constantly expelled from the work process. As a class, the proletariat is thus unable to reproduce itself.

Occupy Everything Goes Proletarian: Revolutionary Strategy, the Occupy Movement and the General Strike

We On a World Tour

The occupy movement which started in North Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East, followed by Wisconsin, and blending with popular and labor movements in Southern Europe and the UK, has spread to the US with a vengeance.

In typical US fashion, the Occupy protest has remained a vague vision, a confused critique, and a couple catchy slogans. Despite its shortcomings the movement hits the populace in the solar plexus with the truth.

How can something come so true, yet be so cloudy?

Our occupation in Oakland has become a focal point for the global movement, gaining solidarity from Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Most recently, global solidarity has been expressed in the form of calls for strikes and renewed protest in solidarity with our decision to have a general strike November 2nd here in the Bay Area where we have a fighting spirit that we are proud to share with sisters and brothers across the country.

What are we fighting for? How do we clarify what we hold to be true?

Oakland Goes Commie

To everyone studying Capital right now

Recommended: Insurgent Notes Vol.4 – Focus on the Middle East

We welcome the 4h issue of Insurgent Notes – Journal of Communist Theory and Practice, offering  a series of  much needed Marxist analysis of the most important upheaval of our time – that of North Africa.

Today millions of working class people in places like Wisconsin, Spain, and most of all, North Africa are rebelling in the only ways that they know how to against an array of conditions that they are not fully equipped to overcome. We do not know how to smash through the limits presented by history, and reorganize society on a different tip.

The missing element is a theoretical system that can generate a coherent strategy, and apply it through a concrete form. We have the objective conditions of crisis. In a growing number of places, we have spontaneous participation in mass activity. But the crucial ingredient has yet to present itself – an international organization with roots deep in the proletariat and networks throughout it, putting forth a programmatic vision for total revolution that accumulates the lessons of all the existing struggles and processes those lessons back through its networks to reproduce a revolution world-wide. In other words, history has produced a revolutionary set of conditions, but we have yet to produce a revolutionary party on the basis of horizontal centralism. Weaving together that kind of consciousness through that kind of organization is the central purpose of Marxism and was the basis of Marx’s own practical work. To produce this party in this moment… this is a global task for all revolutionaries to face, now more than ever.

Featured in Vol. 4 of Insurgent Notes, is a very creative and comprehensive look at the Arab revolts that synthesizes political economic, linguistic, and historical analyes to treat the regional upheaval. Here’s the Introductory section to the article, The Arab Revolts and the Cage of Political Economy, by Benoit Challand:

“The wave of Arab revolts is the biggest political earthquake that shook this planet in quite a while. Sporadic massive protests did take place in the last decade (in Seattle or Genoa for G8 protests, in Greece revolts because of the economic crisis), but none took the regional and truly transnational scope of the Arab revolts of the last six months. Their aftermaths are still being felt far from its original epicenter, Madrid being the latest emulation of the type of spontaneous popular occupation initiated by Tunisians and refined by Egyptians in Tahrir Square (Madison was another one). As this is written, future spillovers of that wave might even be felt elsewhere in Europe (Georgia at the end of May), or more certainly in Sub-Saharan Africa (Uganda in particular), forcing us to reconsider the novelty and potential of these popular protests.

Yet, one should not be all too enthusiastic about these revolts. Even if they herald a new era where people have powerfully asserted their inalienable right to protest (and we hope they will continue doing so), the powerful cage of political economy has remained intact even after six intense months of protest. The intent of the imperial US power in the region, along with its allies Israel and the European Union (EU), remains unchanged.

We will review some of the reasons that sparked these revolts (§2), list some of the novelties of the revolts in comparative perspectives: what they are and what they are not (§3), and then proceed with an analysis of the possibility for radical political formations to emerge as full actors or not in the coming years (§4), before reaching a conclusion.“

 All revolutionaries must set aside time to study the North African rebellions and help other militants to do the same, in order to arm ourselves for the next cycle of struggle that will inevitably emerge right here, wherever you are. Whether or not the struggle advances to the level of Tunisia, Greece, or even Britain – let alone go beyond it – is up to you.

Let’s recall the limits of our ability to change history in the last major period of global upheaval that lasted from WWII through the early 70s, which was hemmed by theoretical models that fell short of the historical moment.  Truncated Marxist concepts for revolution that didn’t quite strike at the destruction of commodity production and value may have recruited a few thousand militants to revolutionary organizations in the US, but they located the crisis external from the economic contradiction and privileged the political aspects of imperialism only. Even when they succeeded in smashing bourgeois political rule , they could not succeed in ushering in a socialist society, dictated by proletarian consciousness, leading toward the abolition of classes. What will prevent the movements of today from meeting a similar end?

Conversely, ultra-lefts have churned out theoretical gems, but met zero success at integrating themselves into mass movements and seldom even consider the construction of parties and organizations of the working class to be viable projects. Theory is sterile, removed from spots of great ferment. What will it take to make militants out of such intellectuals?

A new generation of radicals have discovered the categories of Marx’s Capital but we still have an underdeveloped method to apply it in struggle. The interlocking nature of capitalist value in crisis, will create more rebellions around the world and more lessons for us to learn from. Transnational institutions like the International Monetary Fund, global corporations and banks, and blocs of states along with the normal circuits of accumulation which know no borders, and the internationalization of the proletariat through unprecedentedly massive migration, are all factors that weave us into one big revolutionary process.

The world of 2011 is much different from that of the WWII-1970s era. In the article, Anti-Imperialism and the Iranian Revolution, by Arya Zahedi, featured in Insurgent Notes Vol.4., this point is made very clear. The author discusses the demise of anti-imperialist ideology in terms of its supersession by the material conditions faced by an advanced working class that is confronting the same conditions faced by the proletariat of most of the countries  -First World and Third World alike – currently in revolt:

“We are faced, much like here in the US, with a young, highly skilled, technically advanced workforce. But when this force leaves the university and enters the ranks of the proletariat, there is no prospect waiting. There are more workers than positions. This is true not just of the “white collar” sector, but also for industrial workers, but for different reasons. Regardless, a precarious position awaits much of the population. The situation affecting a nineteen year old in Tehran is quite similar in many ways to that of her contemporary in Athens, Cairo or Paris. And we see the explosions taking place. The alienation, so commonplace, is not one that can be quelled by the emotional rhetoric of national independence.”

Insurgent Notes Vol. 4  is full of quality analysis like this, offering lessons for us to digest as we posit more and more programmatic documents to other revolutionaries for debate and the working class for consideration.

One of the lessons we may draw from previous cycles of upheaval within the US and abroad, is that nationalism ultimately produces divisive and oppressive regimes based on class collaboration. True liberation lies in internationalist proletarian unity. Capital’s own evolution into a more and more singular process on a global terrain has produced the material basis for a potentially unprecedentedly unified revolutionary program. We are fortunate today to be able to look to the actions of our sisters and brothers in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Greece, Spain, and Britain to California, Washington, Texas, Georgia, New York, and the whole USA.

One thing is certain – rebellions do not naturally turn into successful revolutions. Only through a revolutionary programmatic focus that combines the seriousness of Marxist categories with the lessons of real revolutionary struggles that millions of working class militants around the world can agree on will be able to build an international force with the potential to smash capital and the bourgeois state.

    Thank you Insurgent Notes for helping us all advance that struggle.

http://insurgentnotes.com/

rasta marxism

Power to the Jews and Therefore the Class!

SteveO writes:

One important component in the radical Left’s impulse for solidarity with oppressed people across the whole world is a condemnation of Israel’s relationship with Palestine, which is considered racist, colonial, fascist – a settler state par excellence. In our critique of Israel, we forget that nations are composed of antagonistic classes, and that the dialectic of class struggle in Israel-Palestine is not exclusively an anti-colonial one. The duty of a conscious Israeli to the world proletarian struggle for liberation does not lie in a self-sacrificing or suicidal “traitor-ism” wherein good Jews give themselves over to the Palestinian cause as a servant to it.

Israeli Jews have battles to fight of their own, bones to pick with other Israeli Jews, those who are their class enemies. Leftists in general, and Marxists especially, could consider the Jewish working class their sibling for once, rather than limiting our orientation to the contemporary Jewish question to the colonial aspect of the Jewish state. None of this is to say that we should stop criticizing and organizing against Israel’s apartheid regime. But we could and should consider a strategic re-orientation toward support for the working class Israeli, urging its alignment with its Arab counterpart, and forging a common interest between the two against racism, apartheid, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism.

This 7 part series serves as an accessible tutorial on the economics of Israeli Occupation:

These stories highlight some of the class contradictions between Israeli workers and capital, and the  action that Israelis are taking against “their own” government.

In May train workers wildcatted against the political arrest of union members for protesting privatization of the trains

On Tuesday hundreds of doctors in training (medical residents) walked out in response to a draft agreement with the Israeli Finance Ministry.  The strike has been happening since April, and a hunger strike is growing.

Power to the Women and Therefore the Class: Bread and Roses / Pan y Rosas

Many women of a feminist and marxist perspective are gathering this weekend to educate  each other and build solidarity/community amongst each other. We give a shout out to them all and must say that we are inspired by this crucial work. Power to the Women and Therefore the Class!

Determining a program for women’s liberation that can actually be into practice is no easy task. AS has been trying to figure it out throughout our short history as a collective. One thing has injected a fair amount of insight, a concrete manifestation of many of the theoretical conclusions we had started to come to grips with. That is the internationalist socialist women’s organization, Pan y Rosas.

A comrade of ours visited Argentina a while ago and ever since her return has been agitating AS around the politics of Pan y Rosas (Bread and Roses). So far, we are very impressed, and even though their strategy leans more toward the electoral than we think is merited, we have profound respect for their application of theory to practice which focuses on the women sector of the working class without embracing a “sectoralist” perspective that divides this work from that of the male sector.

PyR is an all-women’s socialist group connected to a Trotskyist party, the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas (Socialist Workers Party). In extremely patriarchal countries like Argentina and Mexico where reproductive rights are nearly non-existent and femicide is a huge and growing problem, PyR has implanted itself within factories and other workplaces to build women’s agency as workers and as women. They resist the boss and the state, in the process defying established gender norms and building women’s solidarity rooted in Third World reality.

Women are the majority of the paid proletariat, and most of the time, they are unpaid workers in the home (“the proletariat of the proletariat”). PyR sees women’s oppression in its totality, fighting patriarchy in all its manifestations without falling down that slippery slope of stage-ism wherein the primary task of feminism is perceived to be settling the score with men of their class, as a precondition to fighting the enemy shared by all genders: capital. Let’s hope that their male comrades are not abstaining from the struggle for women’s liberation under the false notion that according to the principle of “self-determination” only those directly effected by a particular form of oppression have a right or duty to fight against it.

PTS, the multi-gender trotskyist party, has its own video/news network called TV PTS  set up and has covered much of Pan y Rosas’ activism. In this video, a media mogul, Ricardo Fort, meets the resistance of his mostly woman workforce. He is also the owner of a factory where most of the workers are women who face terrible conditions and sexual harrassment. This patriarchal capitalist going down!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqw5wNxmSrM

more PyR in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqw5wNxmSrM

And finally, here is a response to the Pan y Rosas program by our comrade Sasha Yanga. Translation of program and this reflection to come in dedicated post, we just couldn’t wait to big up Pan y Rosas and put it out there that AS is engaging feminism from a proletarian perspective:

Behold! The Urban Miner

State minimum wage rules for all urban miners, now!

Note: The following was written in 1994 by John Imani, an organic intellectual genius, community member, and revolutionary from Los Angeles.

–

Below you will find an analysis of one of the workers of the informal economy–booted out of the ‘real’ economy (in the second circuuit, Production)–as capitalism can no longer use all of us as workers, i.e. the output of production outstrips the increase in population, more is produced with fewer workers.  The expelled, the exo-industrial, workers form ‘the reserve army of labor’.

These workers are called “scavengers”, “bums”, “dumpster divers” and worse.

And yet these workers cannot be fired.  They set their own hours and write their own checks .   We must recognize these workers as part of us.  We must salute these comrades who do this distasteful and dirty work that benefits us all through recycling. We must recognize and defend these workers and all workers in the ‘informal’ economy who are trying to scratch out a living, in this case, by ‘mining’ recyclables from our trash.

This paper was originally written in 1994 and there is nothing in it that I would change save that I would have added a call for state minimum wage rules being applied to this sector.  The industry itself is a product of the state with its imposition of the CRV.

Behold!  The Urban Miner:

THE URBAN MINER, AN EXO-INDUSTRIAL PROLETARIAN

 “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”[1]

Urban Miner Mr Joseph Kemp, 84, Los Angeles, CA

Three o’clock in the morning and the protesting squeal of unsteady metal wheels overcoming friction, gravity and a thousand miles of heavy usage grows louder and then slows to a stop.  This is followed by the squish of plastic bags being lifted, poked, probed and opened.  There is the clank of metal and the clash of glass.  After a pause…the by-now familiar sound of the bags as they are returned to their former environs.  Then the plaintive rattle of the wheels again picks up its solitary refrain and fades on into the night.  It is Tuesday.  Trash pick-up day.  Asleep before the chickens and now awaking the rooster up, an Urban Miner is at work.

 

“The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil…were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds…The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their  enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers.”[2]

 

He punches no clock but is obedient to the timepiece of necessity.  His stem is wound tight by the dicta of the pitiable piece-work wage he is paid.  He goes off to no factory, no shop, no store. Neither does he work at home.  His ‘office’ is the not-so-great-outdoors which if he is ‘successful’, that is if he is to continue to scratch out a living, he will navigate with both the wary skill of a frontier scout and the fears and dread of a gold-rush prospector who is down to his last biscuit, his last can of beans and winter acoming on.

 

He belongs to no concern and is of no concern to any corporation or company which would be obligated to, at the least, pay him the prevailing sub-subsistence minimum wage; which would be mandated to pay him for legal holidays, vacation days, sick days; which would be required to compensate him should he be injured while doing this dirty, dangerous job; and, which would have to provide the pathetic pittance of the unemployment dole when he is ‘pink-slipped’ by his own productivity and his services no longer needed.  He is naked.  Exposed to and the victim of both the elements and an economic system whose coat-of-arms hails the virtue of man’s inhumanity to man.  This ‘proletarian vagabond’ is at once the nightmarish avatar of the working class’ painful birth and, perhaps, the ominous harbinger of its dismal future.  Working classes are thus like sausages in that their makings are best left unseen.

 

“The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural population…supplied…the town industries with a mass of proletarians…In spite of the smaller number of its cultivators,  the soil brought forth as much or more produce, after as before, because the  revolution in the conditions of landed property was accompanied by improved methods of culture,…concentration of the means of production and because the agricultural wage laborers (were) put on the strain more intensely…[3]

                                     

The closing of the demesne, a process expedited by the simultaneous increase in the productivity and diversity of agriculture and the consequent increase in population[4] alongside the rise of manufacture which demanded more and more wool from ‘sheep-walks’ that once were piece-work cottages and subsistence farms transformed the newly ‘freed’ peasants into wage laborers and in doing so created a market for the products of such labor.  Another now produced that which the worker had formerly produced for himself; that which he formerly owned was now the property of that other which, if desired, had to be bought.  As manufacture grew not only in size but also in concentration, so was the newly born work force forced to transform itself from a proud rural diaspora into a debauched urban aggregation which bided its time with beggary, thievery and prostitution whilst fearfully huddled outside the doors of the factory hoping to be invited in.

 

As the increase in the productivity of agriculture ‘freed’ the property-less to go bravely into the new world of manufacture so now do mechanization, automation and computerization ‘free’ more and more of modern industry’s workers.  These workers have, to the greater extent been absorbed, albeit at generally lower wages by a service sector that has, until now, expanded geometrically, in inverse proportion to industry’s linear contraction as per cent of the nation’s workforce.

 

Number (in millions) of workers employed in the United States

YEAR	1932	1945	1950	1970	1975	1980	1985	1990
Agricul	10.2	8.6	7.2	3.5	3.4	3.4	3.2	3.2
Goods	8.6	17.5	18.5	23.6	22.6	25.7	24.9	25.0
Service	15.0	22.9	36.7	47.3	54.3	64.7	72.7	85.0

                        Source:  1992 Information Please Almanac.  Houghton Miflin.  Boston.  p59.

 

“…job creation has been anemic and the layoffs continue…Even prosperous firms are reducing staff. Fleet Financial Group, the 14th largest U.S. banking company is cutting 5500 employees or 19% of its workforce.  The bank says it needs ‘to be competitive,’ but not so much with other banks as with machines and toll-free numbers that now perform traditional functions of banking.

 

“This is technological unemployment comparable to that of the late 19th Century, when railroads and emerging industry created the modern corporation and transformed a work force then heavy with domestic servants and farm laborers.”[5] The service sector’s tremendous annual expansion rate of 3 per cent from 1975-1990 is predicted to drop to 1.6 per cent between the years 1990-2005.[6]  What is happening is naught but that which as occurred in agriculture and manufacturing: ‘productivity’ rears its head.  Laser bar codes have rendered obsolete the 10-key skills of the grocery clerk.  He is but a mere appendage whose job description consists of a motion of his arm and a mechanical “Hi!  How are you?”  The ATM endangers the very existence of the bank teller who eyes with suspicion the pending extinction of that rarest of service sector birds, the filling station attendant who is falling victim to pay-at-the pump self service.

 

This overblown giant, numbers in its ranks not only the above along with health care, municipal and education workers but also swells its ranks with stock brokers, insurance agents, advertising touts and lawyers, in short, blackguards of all ilk and stripes.  Service capital now emulates its predecessors and begins to grow leaner, meaner and trimmer. The era of ‘downsizing’ has dawned, or rather, has begun to set the sun on this sector’s day.

 “HMO’s tend to keep physician staffing to a minimum, employing one physician for every 800 enrolees (compared with a ratio of about 1:400 in traditional fee-for-service practices).  The Kaiser Permanente Foundation Health Plan is one of the most respected HMOs in the country.  But following industry trends, it is dramatically increasing physicians’ case loads.  For example, in the Sacramento region Kaiser is…increasing the ratio up to 2700 patients per doctor.” [7]

But growth in this sector has leveled off not only because of the increase in ‘productivity’ of its workers due to the modernization of equipment but also because of this sector’s very own derivative nature.  A substantial portion of the amount available to be spent upon service is a direct function of the industrial workers declining purchasing power.[8]  If the service sector can no longer absorb the worker who no longer ‘belongs’ to industry and who no longer ‘belongs’ to the land then where is he going to go?  What is he to do?

“Though a use-value, in the form of a product, issues from the labour-process, yet other use values, products of previous labour, enter into it as a means of production. The same use-value is both the product of a previous process, and a means ofproduction in a later process…

“Whenever therefore a product enters as a means of production into a new labour-process, it thereby loses its character of product, and becomes a mere factor in the process…the fact that (it is a) product of previous labour is a matter of utter  indifference…”[9]

There is a painting, “The Gleaners”, by Jean-Francois Millet.  The picture shows peasants pouring over the remains of a grain harvest.  Though there is no text to accompany, it is clear that the ‘gleaners’ are engaged in ‘scavenging’.  What is left of the harvest is not worth the wage that the owner would have to have paid hired help to salvage.  The ‘gleaners’, by definition, would produce no surplus value and would produce, really reproduce if fortunate or industrious enough, only themselves.  As with the past, so with today.  However, this modern farcical recapitulation of yester-year’s tragedy, the ‘Urban Miner’, does produce surplus value.  He is not a ‘gleaner’ but is an exo-industrial worker.  He is not a ‘scavenger, he is a (secondary) ore producer.  He does not forage at the point of production for ‘leavings’ that have no economic value but ‘mines’ at the point of consumption.  The fact that he produces a product which has lost its character as a use-value and is transformed through his labor into a means of production, itself means that he is a factor in the labor process, itself means that he is truly a worker.  Further, the labor he performs is socially beneficial in marked contradistinction to that of the stock-brokers, etc., who despite their aristocratic salaries are naught but the true scavengers, are naught but vultures and vampires who prey upon the corpse of congealed dead labor.

The Urban Miner is the new proletarian, the exo-industrial proletarian, the proletarian vagabond who has been ‘freed’ from the company, ‘freed’ from the job, from the clock and from the boss; but, simultaneously, he has been ‘freed’ from the benefits and protections of a ‘civilized’ society.  He is the product of capitalism turned full circle and is its chicken come home to roost. Capitalism, piece-work at its beginning and piece-work at its end.

“Markets are fragmenting, both in size and in time.  Product cycles have grown shorter, making total production runs smaller…The age of mass consumption may be drawing to a close; if it does, the age of mass production must end too.[10]

The Urban Miner is not alone in this class of exo-industrial workers.  This piece-worker is joined by a rising number of neo-day laborers who are being ‘freed’ at an ever increasing pace:  The street-corner contract laborer, the ‘walking man’ who places advertisements door-to-door, day maids and even the aristocrat of the class, the temporary office worker.  All are joined by the sharing of two distinctive features of this surplus labor pool:  First, they ‘belong’ to no company and hence, for the first time since the age of hunting, fishing and gathering, present us with workers who are truly free (though not from the pangs of necessity but) from the lash of the slave-master, the fiat of the lord and the order of the boss); secondly, because of the very nature of this freedom, the exo-industrial proletarian represents a subversion of the minimum wage[11]; in the case of the ‘temp’, an erosion in the ‘benefits’ portion of the surplus value extracted from labor; and, this type of ‘freed’ labor exerts downward pressure on the wages of workers engaged in similar pursuits (e.g. primary ore  mining).[12]  Finally, through the sheer inevitable increase in the numbers of workers who will continue to be ‘freed’ from the industrial and service sectors of the economy, the competition for ‘real’ jobs will impact negatively upon the general wage rates of all.

The Urban Miner is a proletarian whose interest lies not in the preservation of his job.  This is a worker who wants to destroy the conditions of his employment.  This is a member of a class whose interest is best served by its own negation.  He is a worker whose existence was called into being and thus is subject to negation by the elimination of two necessities:  His need to eat and the need to conserve natural resources.  The former negation will be accomplished by his integration into ‘real’ production (i.e. the re-organization of industry for production of product and not of profit; the latter, through bio-degradable packaging and consumer education.  It is to the self-interest of all workers to recognize and protect this exo-industrial proletarian for as Marx saw the vagabonds of the 15th and 16th centuries as the ‘fathers of the present working class’ so does the gaunt visage of the Urban Miner while staring us in our faces ghost-like shimmers in our mirror.

JAI                        

RAC-LA
https://lists.riseup.net/www/admin/newplanet-newlives

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[1] Marx:  Communist Manifesto as quoted in  Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto by D. A. Drennan.

Barron’s Educational Series.  Woodbury, NY.  1972.  pp 149-150.

[2] Marx:  Capital.  International Publishers.  New York. 1973. Chap XXVIII.  p 734.  http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm

[3] Marx:  Ibid. Chap XXX.  p 745.  http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch30.htm

[4] Yole, Cahill, et al:  Exploring Our World-Eastern Hemisphere.  Follett Social Studies.   California State  Department of Education.  Sacramento.  1978.  pp149-152.

[5]James Flanagan:  Today’s Top Job is Preparing for Employment Tomorrow.  Los Angeles Times.  March 13, 1994.  pD-1.

http://articles.latimes.com/1994-03-13/business/fi-33575_1_job-creation

In an excellent, if overly optimistic article, Mr Flanagan analyses the effects of technological change upon the work force.

[6] Source:  Statistical Abstract of the U.S.  U.S. Dept. of Commerce.  1993.  Table 648.

[7] Gordon and Shindul-Rothschild:  The Managed Care Scheme.  The Nation.  May 16, 1994.  p660.

[8] See, for example, Keigman and Lawrence:  Trade, Jobs and Wages.  Scientific American.  April, 1994.  p44.  An excellent debunking of the myth that foreign competition is responsible for the wage woes of American workers.http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=krugman-trade-jobs-wages

[9] Marx:  Ibid.  pp181-182.  http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm

[10] Oliver Morton:  A Survey of Manufacturing Technology.  The Economist.  March 5, 1994.  pp3-4 (Insert).

[11] Aluminum cans are paid at the rate of $.90/lb.  There being 27 12oz cans/lb. means that the Urban Miner must mine 135 cans per hr to make close to the minimum wage.  An almost impossible task.  Source:  ARC Recycling Centers, Los Angeles, CA.  Quoted May, 1994.

[12] In 1992, 38% of all aluminum used in the United States was recycled.  As recently as 1980 only 16.7% was recycled.  Source: 1993 Statistical Abstract.  Table 373.

Queer Liberation and Class Struggle Case Study: The Welsh Miner’s Strike

Can you imagine a 100% male industry of miners acting in solidarity with communities of gays and lesbians?  Can you imagine them dancing in queer spaces together, learning about each other over a beer?  Can you imagine these men marching behind members of the queer community and under a queer banner in a parade?  Seems hard to imagine . . .

Identity politics has long maintained that differences of identity along lines of race, gender, ability, and sexuality must be respected and tolerated.  This has often been counterposed to what is characterized as the “class reductionist” approach of class unity above all else.  The history of race riots, domestic violence, and macho heterosexism within the proletarian movement is all too real, and has provided the material basis for a form of postmodern politics in the 1980s towards today which has defensively fetishized forms of social difference.

Within this context, the communist movement has sought in various ways to reconcile the contradictions and move towards a higher plane of political unity.  Unfortunately, often times these moves have ended up reifying differences – bowing to forms of sectoralism which keep differences static, with each “identity group” staying safe within its own silo – or attempts to paper over the real differences and antagonisms which exist in society and amongst the proletariat in particular, which amount to reifying the differences from another angle.

As a young generation of communists coming up in this context, we are seeking to carve out a space which can account for difference while also aiming towards the pedagogical development of radical understanding and unity amongst people of different backgrounds and identities.  We seek out the common class interest amongst the proletariat in ways which facilitate the learning process amongst all its sectors – where male identified workers are able to break down the patriarchal values instilled in them since birth; where women workers are able to assert themselves amongst men and feel confident that they will not be silenced by a culture of machismo; where trans workers are able to occupy space with their fellow cis-workers and engage in radical dialogue that facilitates understanding between them, along with creating the space to strategize about taking down the boss.

What Communists Can Learn From Native Struggle: Sogorea Te and Primitive Accumulation

Driving North from Oakland, past West Berkeley’s smokestacks and Richmond’s industrial warehouses, you eventually cross the Carquinez bridge to the first city in what is referred locally as the North Bay – Vallejo, “The City of Opportunity.”  Vallejo is known as the home of Mac Dre, Sly Stone, and E-40 (amongst others), as well as to a sizeable Pilipino population.

The city bears the name of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, that piece of paper that codified the theft of over half of Mexican land. That treaty marks the transition from Mexican colonial domination over native american peoples, to an even more heinous form of racial domination under Anglo rule. Indians were the base of the productive system as slaves to Mexican and Anglo ranchers, producing wealth that carried California eventually to become the richest state in the richest country in the world. Today, Vallejo is known internationally as one of the first cities to go bankrupt during the financial meltdown of ’07-’08 and the native community is rising to assert their legacy, reclaim their history and resist capitalist development of one of their most precious ancestral burial grounds:  Sogorea Te, or Glen Cove.

Once More on Unions . . . Steveo’s reply

Editor’s Note:  Just to clarify:  Steve-O’s position on unions does not represent Advance the Struggle’s official line.  The process of developing programmatic approaches towards concrete realities of capitalism such as unions is something which is not cut and dry, and which needs to be continually clarified through struggle.  We’re posting Steve-O’s reply to Hieronymous on here in order to clarify the terms of the debate and acknowledge the reciprocal process of learning we’re all involved in here.  No fixed dogmas here – rather, we’re seeking to interrogate our positions and learning from debate is a crucial part of this process.  

Steve-O’s reply -

Heironymous said:

“All of us agree that it’s great that the rank-and-file longshore militants have done solidarity actions with Salvadorians, South Africans, Liverpool longshore workers, Palestinians, and in the struggle around Oscar Grant. So is the lack of solidarity with troqueros, workers they interact with on a daily basis, based on a lack of class consciousness? If so, how can they be internationalists and anti-imperialists, but not be in class solidarity with a workforce comprised mostly of Spanish-speakers, but also with many Chinese, Filipinos and even a few Sikhs (with many Sikh troqueros at the deepwater inland ports of Lathrop and Stockton) ? Or am I wrong and is the ILWU a narrowly self-interested sectoral craft union that is truly a “labor aristocracy”?”

ouch… you know what? that really hurts, Hieronymous. it hurts a lot to get blown up like that. You sure are a worthy debate partner. You know you are losing a debate when you start rooting for your opponent because you want to LEARN more! Maybe losing debates should be something more Marxists try to do.

Before I continue further, I do want to apologize for calling Heironymous’ politics racist. That was, as he said “so absurd…” Sorry.

But I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel yet.

In defeating my argument, I forced you to differentiate between radical unionists like Jack Heyman and the bureaucrats they butt up against. If I was defending the bureaucracy in my argumentation, I didn’t know it and maybe got so blinded by  the desire to win the argument that I didn’t even know what I was saying. So as a rejoinder of sorts, I’ll take one last crack at accurately stating my position.

Lessons from Domitila’s Experience

The following is less of a book review and more of an interpretation of the lessons which Domitila Barrios De Chungara’s classic autobiography, Let Me Speak, can teach us as a new generation of revolutionaries.  It was written by a Bay Area comrade and we see it as an important testament to the knowledge and wisdom we can gain from engaging revolutionary autobiographies and applying these lessons within our class struggles today.

I just finished reading Let Me Speak!, Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines. The book is a personal narrative by Domitila Barrios, where she explains her life’s struggle against poverty, sexism, exploitation, hunger…and capitalism in general. Domitila Barrios was the wife of a Bolivian miner in a region of Bolivia called Siglo XX. She breaks down their situation, detailing how the lives of miners are cut short due to overwork, bad pay, and silicosis, a lung disease mining people are all too familiar with. It’s a personal story which reflects on the historical situation of Bolivia at the time.

But I’m not planning on writing a summary of the book, but rather point out some of the major lessons Domitila’s experiences offer us.

Theory & Practice

One thing that really struck at me was how critical, undogmatic, and radical she was without having done much theoretical study. Whereas many of us radicals in the belly of the beast understand these conditions through political study, Domitila learned the contradictions of capitalism because they were brutally enforced on her and her people. She didn’t need to read State and Revolution to understand that the Bolivian military and police served the foreign and domestic capitalists, made all too clear through the frequent massacres, arrests, and deportations of people in struggle. She didn’t need to read Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism to see how American imperialism sucked Bolivia’s mineral wealth dry in order to build up its own economy and how this put Bolivia in a state of extreme dependence and subservience to foreign interests. She didn’t need to read the Communist Manifesto to understand that the workers and peasants were in a life and death class struggle against their oppressors. In fact, simply to exist, to eat, to work and to educate themselves required great sacrifices and political commitment. I love how Domitila insisted that if intellectuals and university folks were to come to help guide working people as to the laws of capitalism and the world situation, they’d better speak in terms the people can understand and not in their theoretical jargon. The concepts of class struggle, capitalism, and revolution can  be grasped by the oppressed in resistance if it is done in a way that connects the dots between their personal experiences and the objective laws of our society and is not done in an elitist or condescending manner. Not that she didn’t do any political study; the repeated brutality of the military and police against her, the accusations her of being a communist and liaison to Che Guevara’s guerrillas, and the knowledge that socialism, an alternative to capitalism, existed in other parts of the world during her time, prompted her to study socialism and communism and see it as the only real path towards human liberation.

Women’s Liberation

California Teachers Union Trying to Smother Rebellion

Last week marked a “Week of Action” called for by the California Teachers Association which was supposed to call attention to the “State of Emergency” which public schools are in.  Students, teachers, and workers from across California were supposed to engage in the week of action, which was to include an occupation of the state capitol in Sacramento as part of a Wisconsin-esque challenge to austerity measures directed towards workers.

Now, if you’ve been part of any of the anti-austerity movements on campuses in the past few years, you know that the question of directing protest towards Sacramento has been contentious.  Many have called out the “go to Sacramento” route as being a means to diffuse anger directed towards local institutions of the state’s power structure (university administrations, local school boards, etc) and re-direct it towards the institution that supposedly has the “real power.”

While many of us here have definitely been partisan towards fighting where we’re at – building walkouts, strikes and occupations at the point of reproduction – we were interested in seeing what this “Week of Action” in Sacramento might generate in light of the developments across North Africa and Wisconsin.

Unfortunately, it seems that the union bureaucracy played a predictable role, as outlined in our comrade Jack Gerson’s piece below.  He critiques the “short-term/long-term” strategy used by the union (not to mention many activists in general) as a cover for simply capitulating to the austerity program of the ruling parties – both Democrats and Republicans.

What will it take to develop a revolutionary program that seeks to issue meaningful demands that speak to the needs people are facing, while at the same time challenging the state power structure and calling our organizational and revolutionary attention to the fact that the bourgeois state will never meet our needs as workers?  Jack’s piece reminds us of the glaring inadequacies of protests confined within the parameters of the union officialdom and reminds us of the need to develop left-wing challenges to their co-optation strategies.

The California Teachers Association ‘Week of Action’… What The Heck Was Going On In Sacramento?

Jack Gerson – May 19, 2011

On the evening of Monday, May 9, 2011, 68 Bay Area college students, public school teachers, and their supporters chanting “Tax the Rich! That will fix the deficit!” were arrested for occupying and refusing to leave the state capitol building in Sacramento, California. Although this happened on the first day of a “Week of Action” called by the California Teachers Association (CTA) to protest cuts to state funding for K-12 education, CTA leadership walked away from the occupiers and literally pulled CTA members out of the Rotunda, saying that the protesters were “not on message”. Oakland Education Association (OEA) secretary Steve Neat, one of the arrestees, described it thus:

One of the May 12 arrests outside the offices of Republican leaders in California’s state capitol, Sacramento.”CTA leadership had the perfect opportunity to join a group of students and teachers fighting for real long-term change with direct action. They were very conspicuous by their absence. In fact they left and tried to usher CTA members away when we started chanting ‘Tax the rich!’ I guess that wasn’t quite on message enough.”