Occupy Activists Try to Shut Down West Coast Ports
by Joshua Holland
On Monday morning, about 500 activists with Occupy Oakland braved a predawn chill to blockade the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest container port in the United States. The protesters broke up into 3 which which blocked the entrances to several shipyards in the sprawling complex, leaving dozens of trucks idling in line. Police eventually moved in to force open the gates; Oakland Police interim Chief Howard Jordan said that two occupiers were arrested.
The shut-down was part of a coordinated day of action on the West Coast. Protesters also reportedly caused disruptions at ports in Vancouver, Portland and Seattle for at least part of the day (details are sketchy as of press time). Occupiers clashed with police in Long Beach, Seattle Houston and San Diego.
On Monday evening, a second wave of Occupy Oakland protesters, this time numbering around 2,000, again marched to the port. During an impromptu “General Assembly,” protesters agreed to keep their promise to extend the blockade into Tuesday if other occupations faced police violence.
Meanwhile, a solidarity action against Goldman Sachs in New York led to as many as 18 arrests. Goldman owns 51 percent of SSA Marine, a leading shipping company, and Shippers Transport Express, a trucking company.
The goal of the day’s actions was to raise public awareness of the plight faced by dock-workers and truckers. As AlterNet’s Tara Lohan wrote last week, “Between the dock where the cargo is unloaded and the shelf from which you pluck your treasure, there are several critical lynchpins.”
Hilda Erickson, Joe Hill's love, wrote a letter that might explain what really happened the night of the killing.
August 26, 2011–At Woodstock, Joan Baez sang a famous folk ballad celebrating Joe Hill, the itinerant miner, songwriter and union activist who was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915. “I never died, said he” is the song’s refrain.
Hill’s status as a labor icon and the debate about his conviction certainly never died. And now a new biography makes the strongest case yet that Hill was wrongfully convicted of murdering a local grocer, the charge that led to his execution at age 36.
The book’s author, William M. Adler, argues that Hill was a victim of authorities and a jury eager to deal a blow to his radical labor union, as well as his own desire to protect the identity of his sweetheart.
A Salt Lake City jury convicted Hill largely because of one piece of circumstantial evidence: he had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest on the same night — Jan. 10, 1914 — that the grocer and his son were killed. At the trial, prosecutors argued that he had been shot by the grocer’s son, and Hill refused to offer any alternative explanation.
Mr. Adler uncovered a long-forgotten letter from Hill’s sweetheart that said that he had been shot by a rival for her affections, undermining the prosecution’s key assertion. The book, “The Man Who Never Died,” also offers extensive evidence suggesting that an early suspect in the case, a violent career criminal, was the murderer.
Hill, who bounced around the West as a miner, longshoreman and union organizer, was the leading songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, a prominent union that was widely feared and deplored for its militant tactics. He penned dozens of songs that excoriated bosses and capitalism and wrote the well-known lyric “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”
White racist crowd threatens and provokes sit-in demonstrators who are opposing whites-only lunchcounters.
This involves a critical assimilation of previous communist approaches. And it requires move off initial critiques toward new communist strategy around the anti-racist struggle for liberation within this prison-house of peoples. Recently we reprinted an initial discussion of J. Sakai’s work — which is concentrated in his book Settlers. Here is an interview with Sakai himself revisiting that work. This interviewed appeared on Kersplebedeb‘s site.
“Now, there obviously is a white working class in the u.s. A large one, of many, many millions. From offshore oil derricks to the construction trades to auto plants.
“But it isn’t a proletariat. It isn’t the most exploited class from which capitalism derives its super profits. Far fucking from it. As a shorthand i call it the ‘whitetariat.’ These aren’t insights unique to Settlers, by any means.
“Unfortunately, whenever Western radicals hear words like “unions” and “working class” a rosy glow glazes over their vision, and the Internationale seems to play in the background.”
An Interview with J. Sakai
EC: In the early eighties you wrote Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat, a book which had a major impact on many North American anti-imperialists. How did this book come about, and what was so new about its way of looking at things?
JS: Settlers completely came about by accident, not design. And what was so “new” about it was that it wasn’t “inspiring” propaganda, but took up the experience of colonial workers to question how class really worked. It wasn’t about race, but about class. Although people still have a hard time getting used to that – it isn’t race or sex that’s the taboo subject in this culture, but class. Read the rest of this entry »
Politics on the left is rapidly entering a period of hand-to-hand combat:
Where a demand will be made that any progressive must now fight for Obama’s re-election,
Where the “ultra-right” will be portrayed as terrifyingly close to the threshold of power, and
Where fundamental opposition to this White House (and the larger system) will be portrayed as sterile sectarian lunacy.
This calls for a protracted, detailed yearlong debate running parallel to competing forms of activity. The following essay is an early contribution.
We urge all our readers to write their own contributions to this debate, and to share with us links to writings that dig in substantively.
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2012 Without Illusions: Enabling Empire vs. Getting Real
by Jed Brandt
Checking around to see who is preparing for the 2012 elections by encouraging radicals to work for the Commander in Chief… So far, those “without illusions” are winning the prize for cynical support hands down. Who am I talking about?
Hint #1: They campaigned (and knowingly lied) for Obama, then blame you for what the President actually did! They traffic in illusions, then resent those who believed them. Priceless.
Ever since Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Republican Senators passed a bill aimed at decimating collective bargaining rights of public sector workers, there have been increasingly militant protests and calls for a general strike. What is a general strike? What is its history? Is it an effective strategy for revolutionary change?
Even though this pamphlet was produced before the bill was passed, it does speak to some of these questions. Without endorsing its views, we are posting it here for discussion.
General Strike Pamphlet
What Do We Face?
Walker’s bill, if passed, will strip public-sector unions of the right to collectively bargain regarding all workplace issues other than basic wages. Workers would no longer have a legal say in their pensions, their healthcare plans, workplace safety, or any other pertinent issues. Without collective bargaining, we have no legally-recognized way to influence how we are treated at our jobs. Workers with access to a union have an opportunity to make their workplaces more democratic. Think about how much time we dedicate to work and work-related activities. With so much of our lives spent in undemocratic workplaces, how could we have real democracy in the rest of our lives?
The impact of Walker’s bill reaches far beyond unions and public servants. Stripping public workers of their right to bargain affects the rights of everyone who works for a living. This attack on workers’ rights will not stop with the public sector or with Wisconsin. These anti-union bills are spreading around the country from Indiana to Ohio to Nebraska in an effort to serve the corporate elite by lowering labor costs and weakening all labor.
What Does Any of This Have to Do With A General Strike & With Wisconsin?
In the recently released prank call by a journalist pretending to be billionaire David Koch, Scott Walker said, “All week there’s been 15-30,000 [protesters] a day, but I remind our lawmakers that there’s 5.5 million people in this state and just because a bunch of guys who can jump off work because of their union[s]…doesn’t mean the rest of your people are with you.” The truth is that these protesters are not “guys who can jump off work” – they are students, activists, union and non-union workers from the public and private sectors, Wisconsin families, and members of the religious community. Additionally, unionized and non-unionized workers both risk job security by taking time to protest. Essentially, Governor Walker doesn’t think that the protesters represent the rest of the state. He thinks that the majority of Wisconsin agrees with his attempt to strip workers of basic rights. He is wrong. Despite facing opposition from millions, Walker still won’t budge from his position on this issue. It will take something bigger from the unions, and from the working-class as a whole: a general strike.
The Friends of Blair Mountain have been organizing to preserve the historic battleground — where an army of coalminers shot it out with an army of gunthugs. This is happening in the face of massive assault on these mountains by strip mining.
This battle, in 1921, was the largest armed battle within the United States since the Civil War.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – On Wednesday, March 9th at 11 am, in the UE Local 170 Hall (1591 Washington St. E, Charleston, WV) retired UMWA coal miner Chuck Nelson, author Denise Giardina, WV filmmaker of the year Mari-Lynn Evans, and a coalition of leaders from the Appalachian labor and environmental movements will announce the March on Blair Mountain: Appalachia’s Rising, a massive non-violent five-day march from Marmet, WV, to Blair Mountain in Logan County, WV.
Marchers will follow the same route that union miners took on their historic march to Blair Mountain in 1921.
The ensuing battle was among the largest labor uprisings in United States history. The miners who came through these struggles formed a rock-solid union culture. The history of Blair Mountain and the labor struggles in central Appalachia are the heritage of all union workers. It was this generation that built the unions and the middle class, and it is their legacy and efforts we defend today. These union families were the same ones who–beginning in the 1940s and 1950s and continuing through to today–migrated out of central Appalachia, bringing their hardcore union solidarity with them to the auto factories in Detroit, the steel foundries in Pittsburgh, and the mills of Ohio. They have handed down to us a union formed from struggle, sacrifice, tears, sweat and blood. We will not be the generation that falters in protecting and passing this down.
Said Brandon Nida, board member of Friends of Blair Mountain,
“As citizens in Wisconsin and across the country stand up to maintain their right to collectively bargain, Blair Mountain stands as a physical reminder of the struggles of previous generations of workers to establish those rights. It is a place where a new solidarity for the 21st century will be forged between all of those fighting for workers, communities, and our mountains.”
March planners believe that current plans to mountaintop removal mine Blair Mountain would dishonor the memory of the miners who sacrificed their lives for the right to collectively bargain. Citizens and organizers assert that if mining permits move forward on Blair Mountain, the most significant heritage site in Appalachia will be destroyed and the communities around Blair Mountain will be irreparably and adversely affected.
The march will begin on June 6th, 2011 in Marmet, WV. Participants will march 10 miles a day, and evenings will consist of workshops, cultural festivities, and music. On the sixth day, June 11th, a large rally will be held in Blair, followed by a march to the crest of Blair Mountain.
Labor group calls for general strike if budget bill is approved
by Steven Verburg
The 97-union South Central Federation of Labor voted Monday night to prepare for a general strike that would take place if Gov. Scott Walker succeeds in enacting his budget repair bill, which would strip most bargaining rights from most public employee unions.
The strike would call for union and non-union workers in large swaths of the workforce to stop working, said Carl Aniel, labor federation delegate from AFSCME Local 171.
It was unclear Tuesday how many workers would take part and how the strike might work.
Walker’s proposal, part of a bill to close a $137 million budget shortfall for the year that ends June 30, sparked days of massive protests at the Capitol and a walkout by Democratic state senators that has stalled action on the legislation.
The strike could affect schools, governments and private businesses, but crucial life-and-death services would not be interrupted, Aniel said Tuesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »
Statement to Workers of Wisconsin by Kamal Abbas of Egypt’s Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services
About Kamal Abbas and the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services:
Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic’s Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and attack by the Mubarak regime, and played a leading role in its overthrow. Abbas, who witnessed friends killed by the regime during the 1989 Helwan steel strike and was himself arrested and threatened numerous times, has received extensive international recognition for his union and civil society leadership.
This article from Fire on the Mountain is a follow-up to a previous piece that we also reprinted and that sparked a spirited discussion of the place of state and municipal budget battles within the class struggle in the United States and their potential, or lack thereof, to radicalize people.
“We should note another aspect of all of this that is impossible to deny: the Wisconsin resistance has been inspired by the militant spirit of the Arab revolt….
“This kind of thing is enough to make any old proletarian internationalist all dewy-eyed, and in a real rather than a sentimental way. Year after year we could bang our heads against the wall for international solidarity: end US military aid to Colombia; allow Aristide to return to Haiti; end US military aid to Israel and Egypt; and so on.
“Our efforts were worthy, but we could get nowhere until now because of the iron law — true no matter how much we fight to change it — that people only begin to see the need for international solidarity when they see how the liberation of others is bound up with theirs.”
Two, three, many Wisconsins
By Felix Dzerzhinsky
What a week it’s been! And it’s not even over. I’ve had people asking me whether I feel vindicated about my post of two weeks ago, where I said that the fight over public budgets was going to be the key front in the class struggle in the United States this year. I can’t say that I feel especially insightful; it took no genius to see the significance of these fights. But I am pleased — pleased, that is, to see that in this struggle, our side is now fighting back. Read the rest of this entry »
How do we understand the unfolding events in Egypt? Over the coming days, Kasama will be posting a series of articles analyzing the origins and implications of the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt. As always we offer these pieces in the hopes of prompting deeper discussions. While we may not agree with everything in these pieces, we do believe they contain valuable information and address questions that communists need to grapple with.
The left has also forged crucial ties to Egypt’s revived working-class movement. Over the past several years, strikes have become commonplace in a country where the official unions act as an arm of the state.
The center of the struggle is the textile town of Mahalla, which saw a lengthy strike and mass protests by workers in 2007. Between 2004 and 2008, some 1.7 million workers took part in 1,900 strikes and other types of protests. The tax collectors were able to form an independent union, the first such organization in decades.
Until the great demonstrations of January 25, the working-class movement was linked to the pro-democracy movement mainly through the efforts of the socialist left. However, the call for a general strike for February 1 looked to labor as the key social power to try and chase Mubarak from power.
The roots of Egypt’s uprising
by Lee Sustar
A CLASSIC revolutionary situation unfolded in Egypt in the last days of January, with masses of people taking to the streets and confronting military units deployed throughout the capital city of Cairo.
A deep crack has appeared in the Obama political coalition, as his more left-leaning supporters feel betrayed and abandoned on issue after issue — starting with the continuing wars, but now taking the form of continuing the Bush tax cuts for the rich. We have had our own discussion of this process, all along.
“The wording of the first paragraph is confusing. It can be read as if the people listed (Michael Moore, etc…) are the initiators of the letter, when in fact they are “the left establishment” that is being addressed by the letter. Also, while there is a list of signatories its not really clear who has initiated this. It would be great if Moore et al had the courage to sign on to something this frank. So far that is not the case.”
With the Obama administration beginning its third year, it is by now painfully obvious that the predictions of even the most sober Obama supporters were overly optimistic. Rather than an ally, the administration has shown itself to be an implacable enemy of reform.
“French unions have a long tradition of street protests, but the current strife is particularly worrisome because it has touched the vital energy sector and is drawing often volatile youth into the mix.”
French police fire tear gas at stone-throwing high school students
PARIS — Masked youths clad in black torched cars, smashed storefronts and threw up roadblocks Tuesday, clashing with riot police across France as protests over raising the retirement age to 62 took a radical turn.
Hundreds of flights were canceled and desperate drivers searched for gas as oil refinery strikes and blockages emptied the pumps at nearly a third of the nation’s gas stations.
A series of nationwide protests against the bill since early September have been largely peaceful. But Tuesday’s clashes, notably just outside Paris and in the southeastern city of Lyon, revived memories of student unrest in 2006 that forced the government to abandon another highly unpopular labor bill.
While this article, in keeping with the politics of many of the groups involved in this work, closes with John Sweeney investing faith in the Democratic Party, the coming together of these different sectors of excluded workers is an important development that revolutionaries need to relate to.
“Excluded Workers” Move from Shadows to Negotiating Table
By Bankole Thompson
The U.S. labour movement needs to be reorganised from the bottom up to include domestic workers, day labourers, restaurant workers, taxi drivers, farm workers, incarcerated workers, guest workers and those in the “right to work” states.
That is the message the Excluded Workers Congress, a coalition of labour groups, brought to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit this week. In addition to state-by-state advocacy, they are pressing hard for reforms at the federal level, particularly to the National Labour Relations Act.
The coalition held a fierce discussion at the Social Forum about the need for reform and how workers who are not part of the federally recognised labour movement in the country are being denied decent wages and benefits.
“We need to protect all workers under labour law. I think this is a historic demand because it’s about time the public recognises that you can’t respect some workers and deny others,” said Camilo Viveiros, director of Jobs with Justice based in Rhode Island. Guided by the mantra “We need a domestic bill of rights,” labour activists say they want to break down the legislative barriers that have made it difficult for some sectors of the workforce to effectively demand equal protections. Read the rest of this entry »
What’s the Difference Between a Radical and a Good Organizer?
“What’s the difference between a radical and a good organizer?”
I got that question twice in one week—from two organizers I respect a lot.
I was stumped. I couldn’t answer the question. So I asked a dozen workers and labor activists: Does the labor movement really need radicals and our politics?
Here’s what these nurses, teachers, UPS part-timers and union organizers had to say.
“Of course!” “Absolutely.” “F*** yeah!”
Every organizer and worker I talked to agreed that labor does need radicals. And they gave me six good reasons: we help link up workers with lessons from past fights; we challenge business as usual; we take on racism and sexism when other activists are afraid to address it; and a lot more.
Most important, the best of us are long distance runners, who stay with the movement—and keep it going—through good times and bad.
“In Forces of Labor the way in which some capitalist sectors are investigated in order to grasp their importance for workers’ power sharply contrasts with the reckless triumphalism Hardt, Negri and others show while conjuring new subjects out of a hat.”
Wildcat Preface: Beverly Silver, ‘Forces of Labor’
Wildcat Germany explain why they translated Beverly Silver’s book ‘Forces of Labor’, which traces workers struggles since the 1860s.
Comrades from Wildcat have just published the German translation of Beverly Silver’s book ‘Forces of Labor’. The book analyzes the development of workers’ struggles on a world-wide scale in the past 140 years, its relation to the expansion and re-location of industries, the political intervention of states and war, and develops concepts for a better understanding of struggles, e.g. the material basis of workers’ power in certain industries and the political impact on capitalist strategies. So if you haven’t read the book yet, get a copy and join the discussion! [Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor. Worker’s movements and Globalization since 1870, Cambridge University Press, 2002]
Why we have translated ‘Forces of Labor’ …
When the book was published in summer 2003 we emphasized its importance in a first enthusiastic review saying that it “provides a new basis for the discussions about the future of historical capitalism” (wildcat 67, October 2003). We knew that a translation into German could promote the debate on the book’s theses. The book’s “grand narrative” and its many small narratives are excitingly written workers’ and world history that will produce interest far beyond academic circles. At the same time this new vision on history provides new impetus for the – in the past few years newly inflamed – debates on war, globalization, capitalism and class struggle. Read the rest of this entry »
“If you look at discussions about the US labor movement in the 1920s, you see that the overwhelming consensus was that Fordism itself was producing a hopelessly disaggregated, weak, and atomized working-class: it was drawing in immigrant workers from all over the place who didn’t share a common language or culture, whose skill-based bargaining power was undermined by the new and alienating technologies. It was only post-facto, when you start getting the success of labor movements in the mass-production industries, that then the whole frame for understanding things changed. Now the advance of Fordism, instead of being seen as a labor-weakening process, was seen as a process that was inherently labor strengthening. Now, also with Postfordism everyone is going back to analogous types of argument to those being made in the 1920s, in which the new ways of organizing production and the new technologies are seen as clearly labor-weakening processes. But it is likely that there is also a process now going on, in which workers themselves are discovering where their bargaining power is in the new situation, where their leverage is – it takes time to figure it out. And once that kind of process of discovery is more widespread and generalized, and also acted on – that then we will get again another shift in the way that social sciences thinks about Postfordism, seeing it as actually opening up all sorts of new opportunities for struggles. But that will be a post-facto understanding based on an analysis of the struggles that come up themselves.”
Interview with Beverly Silver about her book, Forces of Labor.
In your book Forces of Labor you put a certain emphasis on the perspective that labor unrest is a kind of driving force of the development of capitalism. That bears a specific resemblance to an approach in Europe called workerism or autonomist Marxism. Are there any direct connections with that kind of thought or is this resemblance accidental?
The emphasis on labor unrest as something that is continuously transforming capitalism in part comes out of US traditions. I grew up in Detroit in the 1960s, and there was in the general understanding of the 1930s sit-down struggles in Detroit this idea of the structural strength of workers – that is, the idea that workers’ gains came in large part through their strategic position at the point of production. Read the rest of this entry »
While U.S. workers are seeing declines in real wages and the gutting of pensions and social services, workers in China are fighting for, and increasingly winning, large wage increases. The following article discusses the most recent events.
“It’s too early at this point to say whether we are looking at some kind of chain reaction.”
Honda Motors said Tuesday that workers at a parts plant had walked off the job just days after the company settled a separate strike by agreeing to substantial pay raises for 1,900 workers at its transmission factory.
The new walkout, at an exhaust-system factory in the city of Foshan, will force Honda to halt work Wednesday at one of its four auto assembly plants in China, the company said. Read the rest of this entry »
Puerto Rican Students’ Shutdown of Universities Nears Fifth Week
By José Laguarta
As the sun rose on April 21, hundreds of students approached the main gate to the University of Puerto Rico’s historic Río Piedras campus and chained it shut.
Thus began an occupation that has now spread to all 11 campuses of the UPR system and become the first-ever system-wide public university strike. It is also the longest-lasting strike action of any kind in this U.S. island colony since the Río Piedras student strike of 2005, which lasted 29 days.
The students’ three main demands are: repeal Certification 98, which opens the door to eliminating tuition waivers for honor students, athletes, and employees and their families; stop summer term tuition hikes; and open the university’s books to public scrutiny.
Río Piedras strikers have humorously dubbed their own internal struggle as “Vietnam and Disney,” with the front gates controlled by radical humanities and social science students as the former, and the gates at the back of the campus, controlled by more moderate law and natural science students, as the latter. The comparison was overheard from a cop who had been assigned to both gates.
In terms of negotiations, “Vietnam” sees the strike as part of a broader struggle for social change, and tends to favor a hardball approach, seeking concrete successes and guarantees upon which to build a long-term movement. “Disney,” on the other hand, tends to conceive the strike as a necessary evil in the search for a more just, inclusive coexistence with university authorities, and would rather secure the successes at hand than risk them by pushing for more.
TNL just posted links to a fascinating documentary — covering the Textbook Wars of West Virginia in 1974.
People were mobilized largely through their churches — in mine strikes, school boycotts and mass rallies — to oppose new progressive textbooks entering the public schools. It was a rearguard action for fundamentalist and racist views — and was an early battleground of the Religious Right in the U.S. And it was a focus of frantic counter-organizing by those of us who wanted to beat back this movement.
The episode also shows (as I argued in my piece of “Ambush at Keystone“) that the militant activism of workers does not automatically produce a progressive or radical movement — that the active workers are not always the advanced, and that there is a deep struggle over politics and ideas that has to unfold.
Communist Militants Against the Strike
Not only are these Textbook Protests largely unknown — but so is the role played by communist organizers in West Virginia — in stopping the spread of the Textbook strike among coal miners. I have discussed this briefly before — and want to add a little more now.
This strike broke out in 1974.. not long after we had created the Miners Right to Strike committee, and were trying to develop a pole of organizing among the more militant miners. We had, for the first time, contact with several networks of militants across the southern part of West Virginia. So it was a paradox that one of our first serious tasks was to use those connections to help suppress and constrain a reactionary rightwing strike — and convince the militants not to take it up.
The communists of the early Revolutionary Union worked with a circle of militant anti-racist Black Vietnam veterans in Beckley, W.Va. to produce and circulate an exposure of the rightwing Textbook protesters — to expose their lies about the Black literature and progressive textbooks being introduced in West Virginia schools.
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