Firstly I would like to congratulate the Amazon workers of Staten Island. You all did a great job, and all of your hard work paid off. As you’ve noticed, worker solidarity is the way forward. I congratulate and wish you all the best moving forward. You have as you have said many times, accomplished something very special here; You dealt a spade to the behemoth that is Amazon, a company created by the richest man alive, and in doing so you have spelled out a message in it’s blood for all workers to see far and wide: IF WE DID IT HERE, YOU CAN DO IT THERE NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE. Solidarity comrades, and thank you.
Many new unions are popping up across America right now, from the above mentioned Amazon workers, to Starbucks and countless others. Within these struggles a paradigm seems to be appearing – struggle radically for the system to function as class concession-dealing liberals wrote it to decades ago. Fighting through strikes just to get a company to acknowledge a union’s existence and be willing to bargain with them.
It’s important to remember one’s goals throughout all the twists and turns as the struggle rages on. Everyone needs a decent place to live, a career that suits their interests, to be taken care of by their nation’s doctors when in need, and to live in a habitable environment. Some of these things capitalism is simply incapable of providing us such as a habitable environment. Other goals capitalism is capable of providing but will only bother doing so once the working class has made it clear through action that we can and will move past capitalism if it’s benefitiaries refuse to address our needs.
It’s important to remember capitalism’s goal is what we see now in America – an owner dictatorship which sucks every last ounce of value from the working class. Under social democracy, capitalism’s attempt to appease workers who are able and willing to progress past capital, our needs are magically able to be met however it’s only temporary. Inevitably as the rate of profit falls and the class conflict lowers to a resting point, the capitalists begin to remove labor rights, lower pay rates, crush unions, and overall reverse the concessions they previously passed. Social democracy is not only incapable of attaining a permanent solution to the problems it fixes, it has innate limitations, the same limitations capitalism has, making it incapable of solving climate crisis and providing us with a habitable environment.
To work to achieve these goals as a worker must seek out and achieve labor liberation, to bring about workers power which alone is capable of enabling us workers to bring about the basic changes we all need in order to simply exist. Workers power is when the working class gain control of the government within the nation in which they reside. So long as the owning class hold the levers of power, our society will be forever chained to the interests of that class, interests which make long lasting changes and a habitable environment impossible. Private property and thus private accumulation and control over profits, the chaos of the market where resources are competed for instead of assigned logically according to human need, and the capitalist mode of production under which production of commodities is done to acquire an ever increasing threshold of profit laying waste to our environment in the process. It cannot continue, the only way forward is through worker liberation, and only worker power is capable of bringing these changes to our society.
Therefore a worker seeking worker liberation cannot settle with what the liberal system is willing to allow nor follow the guidance of that liberal system. Forming a union under legal requirements and performing union actions to achieve a labor contract will not suffice at achieving the goals of the American worker. As I previously explained and will demonstrate in a few paragraphs from a historical perspective, anything less than workers power will fail to achieve the most basic necessities for the working class.
A worker seeking worker liberation should seek not to achieve class concessions, but should act to spread the capacity of worker power. Our class’ power is excersized only through sufficient organization of workers and experience of solidarity, and is maintained and expanded beyond all limitations through radical education (by reading comrade Marx’ teachings and others). A worker seeking worker liberation understands a pay increase under capitalism is temporary and still only comes after a great struggle, and that the most strategic path is to instead focus on decreasing the barriers of the American working class to organize and act together as free from restraint as possible, understanding the permanent and so only genuine pay increase comes through worker power. The American trend of instantaneous gratification must be recklessly abandoned by all workers who seek worker liberation within the context of the class struggle.
*Striking as a single union or as multiple unions together with the stipulation of weakening not only of policy that hinders worker’s ability to organize, but also weaken the owner class and their enforcer’s abilities to hinder our class’ efforts to organize in the first place. A snake strikes when one’s back is turned, trusting our class enemy to keep their word has proven time and time again to result in betrayal.
*Organizing cross-union meetings in a planned, organized manner on a regular basis to discuss not only specific union needs but also needs of all workers represented in the discussion and of course the American working class overall.
*Create and maintain communications between unions across the nation.
*Coordinate efforts to extend our class’ capacity of workers power and work together as a class to achieve our class’ goals.
These are examples of actions which are consistent in seeking the liberation of the working class. These are actions any workers seeking worker liberation should adopt and further develop through education and consensus within a radical-orientated organized framework. (An organization or series of organizations whose sole purpose and objective is to achieve worker power and then go onto enact the changes we need in society. IE; to address and accomplish our class’ goals)
When seeking to achieve our collective goals, we must not fall into the mistakes our great grandparents made. I will now address my previously referenced historical context for the failures of Social Democracy at achieving the goals of the working class. When the Soviet Union was in it’s prime and Marxist-Leninist revolutions were sweeping the globe, American workers also attempted to join this emerging world of socialist republics. Unfortunately, although they did learn solidarity, and they did learn how to militantly utilize labor unions to achieve class goals, they failed to understand the exact paradigm I explained earlier in this post: That in order for any goals of the working class to be genuinely obtained and not merely remain translucent as class concessions to be taken away when the situation benefits the capitalist class, the working class must take power in that nation.
Our great grandparents had faith in the system, and trusted FDR to maintain these changes. Not only that, they misunderstood the dynamic of leverage each class possesses given the system of governance employed within a nation. They believed so long as they had unions and working class solidarity that they could maintain these changes even if FDR betrayed them while allowing capitalism to persist. As we can see by examining US working class history, this was not the case.
The capitalist class took back control in the 1950s with their McCarthiest witch-hunt which aimed at crippling the US labor force of it’s most radical elements – of which it was successful. The deathblow to the might of US labor, that same might that our grandparents incorrectly placed their faith into, came in the 1980s under Reagan regime which crushed what was left of the labor unions in America, and in the 1990s under the Clinton regime which shipped a majority of our proletarian (production) jobs oversees which not only granted the capitalist class super-profits, but also removed higher paying and higher leveraging jobs from the American working class. And just like that all of the changes our great grandparents fought for were erased, and we see where the path of Social Democracy leads to with the material conditions of America today. This is why reading radical labor theory is imperative, had our grandparents read and applied the teachings of comrade Marx and analyzed the Russian Revolution and proceeding revolutions at the time, they would have understood that so long as the capitalist regime remains in power the working class will never achieve our goals.
Comrades, I bring this to your attention as these events of the past are approaching as a fork in the road today. Just as our great grandparents did, we are beginning to learn our class’ abilities, and just as they did we soon will come to a series of decisions to make as a class. In order to prevent repeating one’s mistakes, one must study the past and learn from it. Through this post I have opened the history books for just a moment, however the full texts can be found online. Comrade Marx’ teachings are alive and well on Marxists.org, and one can learn about the history of the US labor struggle widely on the internet. We must not repeat the same mistakes our great grandparents made if we are to achieve our goals and liberate ourselves from the yoke of capital. We must choose the radical path of worker revolution, which begins with studying the past and applying the acquired knowledge to today’s material conditions.