Contribution to the 15^th International Communist Seminar
"Present and past experiences in the international communist movement".
Brussels, 5- 7 May 2006
www.icsbrussels.org , ics[at]icsbrussels.org

Class Struggle in the United States

Workers World Party, USA

Comrades,

First, I want to report that, after decades of absence, May Day has returned to the land of its birth. International Workers Day was born in Chicago in 1886 in the fight by mostly European immigrant workers for the eight-hour day. That struggle that was not won in the U.S. until the Bolshevik Revolution and the birth of the world communist movement put the fear of revolution into the U.S. ruling class. It has been brought back by immigrant workers from Latin America, Africa, Asia, East Europe, from nations oppressed and colonized by the imperialist world economy, workers who are rising up against a new U.S.-style apartheid that is dragging down the entire working class. And because of conscious leadership, it is seeking to merge with the struggle of Black people inside the United States to give new hope for the entire working class.

On Monday, May 1, millions of immigrant workers and their supporters took to the streets in cities and small towns across the United States. A boycott and day of absence closed businesses in many working class communities, and even in small towns n the West and Midwest plants were forced to close. This mighty movement began in Los Angeles under militant leadership (the National Immigrant Solidarity Coalition deserves special mention) and is stronger in the West -much of which is stolen Mexican land - and the industrial Midwest than in the East. But I'm proud members of our Party worked hard in the coalition of organizations that mobilized hundreds of thousands to march from New York's Union Square, the historic site of May Day demonstrations in the past, to the Federal Building and the immigration prison. And in other cities as well. New York's march, though a majority Latino, was multinational. with African and Filipino workers playing a leading role. The lead banner in the New York march was held by African-American leaders, including Roger Toussaint, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, who had just spent a week in jail for leading a heroic transit workers strike last December.

The spark for the unprecedented outpourings of the past month are several "immigration reform" bills before Congress, especially the fascist HR4337CK, which calls for imprisonment of undocumented workers. The Bush regime is pushing a slave-labor "temporary guest worker" bill, which would force workers to leave after a specified time making U.S. capitalists richer.

The May 1 demonstrations equaled in size the April 10 immigration rights rallies organized by union leaders allied to the Democratic Party, though the May 1 organizers had much more limited resources. The April 10 rallies were also magnificent outpourings of the working class that, in effect, shut down several cities. But programatically they supported more "moderate" immigration-reform bills and pushed the election of Democrats in November under the slogan "Today we march, tomorrow we vote." The union officialdom also agitated against the May 1 boycott.

Supporting immigrant workers at all is a big change from the AFL-CIO position of the past and a recognition of the changed composition of the working class in the United States. For the unions movement organizing immigrant workers is a matter of survival.

But it is an example of the character of the union officialdom that funds were offered to the organizers of the L.A. boycott if they would hold it on a day other than May Day.

By contrast the May 1 demonstrations called for immediate unconditional amnesty-—full legalization, full rights for all immigrant workers. They condemned imperialist war and pointed to struggle rather than the support of murdering politicians as the path to victory. And while many workers carried U.S. flags as well as the flags of their own countries, pictures of Che Guevara distributed by FIST (Fight Imperialism Seize the Time) were much in demand.

The immigrant struggle, like the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s or the fight against apartheid in South Africa, is a battle for basic human rights. It is a fight for equality for workers who produce a disproportionate share of the wealth of the U.S. capital, workers themselves forced from their homes by U.S. imperialism. But its victory, by freeing millions of workers from a life of fear, would immeasurably strengthen the entire working class against capital.

I want to say at the outset that the word "immigrant" is not really accurate. The majority of undocumented workers in the U.S. are from Mexico and Central America, nations of Native people whose ancestors lived on this continent many millenia before Europeans immigrated here. And most of the western United States was once part of Mexico, half of which was annexed at gunpoint by the United States in the 1840s. As Mexicano workers say, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us." In the 1930s the U.S. government rounded up and expelled nearly 2 million U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. That's the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Of course the United States--and the U.S. working class--is very different than it was in 1886. For one thing, the then growing industrial working class, concentrated in northern cities, was predominantly European. The masses of African-American people, whose stolen labor enabled the United States to achieve its dominant position in the capitalist world, were agricultural laborers and sharecroppers. Most lived in the rural South under the reign of agricultural serfdom and lynch terror that followed the end of Reconstruction. And the United States, still engaged in genocidal wars of extermination against the Native people, had not yet emerged on the world stage as an imperialist power. It did that in the 1890s with the annexation of Hawaii, the conquest of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba.

For well over half a century, the U.S. has been the world's dominant imperialist power, the center of an unprecedented global empire. Its monopoly capitalist class has been fattened on a disproportionate share of the surplus value produced by the working class of the entire world, extracted at the point of a gun. And but 15 years ago, with the destruction of the Soviet Union and its socialist allies, it seemed at the height of its power, poised to begin a second "American century."

The flow of the world's riches into the United States allowed for a huge middle class and an unprecedented labor aristocracy. The post-World War II domination of the world market made it possible and worthwhile for U.S. monopoly capital to buy class peace at home with rising living standards. The earth-shaking, often Communist-led class struggles of the 1930s--the sit-down strikes and plant take-overs, the general strikes in San Francisco, Toledo and Minneapolis, the armed struggles by miners and southern sharecroppers--seemed to vanish from mass consciousness as the class-collaborationist trade union bureaucracy waved the red, white and blue and isolated U.S. labor from the international working class. This was magnified by the role that war production played in sustaining the U.S. economy. And Communists and militants were witch-hunted out of the unions.

But there was always another side to this story--the brutal super-exploitation of the poorer workers, especially those of oppressed nations inside the United States. The "American dream" flaunted before the working class of the rest of the world--especially in the socialist countries--was based on the violent oppression of African-American, Mexicano, Puerto Rican, Asian, Pacific and Native people, who constitute internal colonies inside the U.S. They have now been joined by immigrants from all over the world.

The U.S. agricultural bounty would be impossible without Black, Latino and Asian migrant labor. Thousands of Native people died in the mines to produce the uranium for the Pentagon's nuclear arsenal. Chinese workers died by the thousands building the transcontinental railroads and digging the gold mines of Calfornia. Many who survived were then deported. And the post-World War II U.S. industrial boom could not have happened without the Great Migration of southern Black workers forced off the land by machines and Puerto Rican workers brought to the U.S. mainland under Operation Bootstrap.

That oppression has only intensified with the decay of capitalism. Today one out of every three Black men in the United States spends time in prison, which amounts to preventive detention on a scale greater than even apartheid South Africa. In New York City 49 percent of Black men are unemployed. That's the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It was the struggle of Black people in the United States, held down by old-style U.S. legal apartheid at a time of economic expansion and rising expectations, that first broke through the postwar class peace at the heart of the empire. This movement arose in tandem with the wave of national liberation struggles that swept Asia, Africa and Latin America, including the socialist revolutions in Korea, China, Vietnam and Cuba.

The modern civil rights movement, beginning in the U.S. South with the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, was followed by the Black Power movement, the massive urban rebellions of the mid-'60s and the emergence of revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party. It was joined by militant Mexicano, Puerto Rican and Native movements. The Black liberation struggle spread into basic industry with the revolutionary union movements in auto and steel. And it aided the victory of Vietnamese liberation fighters by ripping apart the U.S. Army from the inside in Vietnam.

This movement smashed legal segregation and won great victories like affirmative action. But it was also met with brutal repression--frameups, imprisonment and the systematic assassination of activists by state death squads. There are political prisoners in the U.S. who have been behind the wall for decades. The best known of course are former Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal, who has been on Pennsylvania's death row since 1982 and American Indian Movement fighter Leonard Peltier, who is beginning his 30th year of incarceration. That's the land of the free and the home of the brave.

By 1970 the U.S. ruling class was on the defensive. The heroic Vietnamese people's liberation war was bogging down the U.S. military and crippling the U.S. economy. The freedom struggles inside the U.S. had been joined by a huge antiwar movement, and both were birthing revolutionary currents. Soldiers were rebelling inside the U.S. military. Military spending, once an economic stimulus, had turned into a depressant and weakened the U.S. against its capitalist competitors. Inflation was ravaging workers' paychecks. Strikes were on the rise.

The U.S., of course, was forced to pull out of Vietnam. And Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, in effect ripping off its imperialist rivals and the rest of the capitalist world. That led to the oil shocks of the 1970s, which Wall Street was ultimately able to turn to its advantage because of its dominance of the Middle East and the dollar denomination of oil.

This is not the place to go into the tragic consequences of the Sino-Soviet split in helping the U.S. to recoup its losses. But the ultimate response of the U.S. ruling class to its weakened position was the Reaganite reaction of the 1980s. The twin pillars of the Reagan regime were the massive military buildup against the Soviet Union, financed by huge cuts in social services, and an anti-labor offensive at home, heralded by Reagan's jailing of striking air traffic controllers.

Two factors made the Reagan's antisocialist, antilabor offensive possible. One was massive deficit spending, borrowing from the rest of the world, only possible because of the dollar's role as world reserve currency. The other was the "high-tech revolution," which the U.S. ruling class then called "reindustrialization." This was really the acceleration of a process that had been underway for decades--a steady weakening of the industrial working class and organized labor. In Black and Latino communities, disproportionately comprised of manual workers, the effect has been genocidal, as the figures mentioned above illustrate. The forced labor of workers behind bars--the notorious prison-industrial complex--has become a new source of superprofits. The high-tech revolution also depended on the superexploitation of workers on the global assemby line, from Mexico to the Philippines, from South Africa to China.

The antilabor onslaught continued unabated under the Democratic Clinton administration in the 1990s--millions were laid off even as the Democratic administration destroyed the welfare system. But the political orientation of the U.S. labor leadership and certain left parties that prioritize their ties to the labor bureaucracy remains to support the Democrats at all costs.

There is a prevalent myth in the United States that industrial production is declining, that "nothing is made in the U.S. anymore." Workers are being told to blame "foreign competition." In fact, even while the U.S. share of the world market was in decline, U.S. industrial ouput has steadily risen. But it is being produced by fewer and fewer people.

Allow me to give a concrete example. In the 1970s I worked in the mammoth shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, then the largest in the capitalist world. More than 40,000 workers, Black and white, labored in hellish conditions building oil super-tankers, liquid-natural-gas carriers, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. Wages were not high, but it was till one of the best jobs in the region, and workers traveled over 100 miles to work there. The yard was non-union then, but a six-month strike in 1998 forced the bosses to recognize the United Steelworkers of America. Today the yard is booming, producing more than ever, but there are barely 7,000 workers there. This is solely due to automation, especially the introduction of giant welding machines.

Automation--the increase of fixed capital over variable capital--is an inevitable process of capitalist production. But the scale of its acceleration in the United States was paid for by the vast accumulation of imperialist superprofits. The plunder that financed decades of economic expansion and stability, that paid for the world's largest, most backward labor aristocracy, inevitably turned into its opposite. It became a sword of capital against labor. How could it be otherwise?

The AFL-CIO leadership cheered on the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the criminal wars against Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, just as they refuse to oppose the slaughter of the people of Iraq. But the consummation these cowards wished for--the destruction of the USSR--was a global cheapening of the price of labor, they wished for--the destruction of the Soviet Union--was a global cheapening of the price of labor, a vast increase in the power of capital. The world's second-biggest economy is now the oversesas operations of U.S. corporations. Without a socialist alternative, without a brake on its expansion, with freedom to roam the entire world, with corporate profits soaring and fewer workers producing more wealth, why should Corporate America not ride roughshod over the U.S. working class.

Industrial layoffs rose in the 1990s even as the U.S. share of the world market rose for the first time since the '50s. Organized labor is today barely 12 percent of the U.S. work force, less than 7 percent in the private sector. The percentage of U.S. workers without medical coverage has doubled in the last five years, to 40 percent of the work force. By official figures, 12 percent of the U.S. workforce are now contingent workers. For the first time in U.S. history, the economy is booming but wages are falling. Personal debt has doubled in 10 years to an average of $20,000 per household. Over 2.1 million people filed for bankruptcy last year. The things we won in the '30s and '40s-pensions, vacations, sick leave, the eight-hour day and the minimum wage-are becoming things of the past. In union strongholds like the auto industry, as well as in airlines and others, the bosses are using the threat of bankruptcy to try and tear up contracts.

Nothing more demonstrates not only the vicious racism but the absolute decay of the U.S. capitalist class than what they did to the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the birthplace of the Black nation. They left the poor, the Black people of the region to drown, to die by the thousands. Police fired over the heads of refugees to force them back into the flood. Survivors were gunned down, imprisoned, forcibly dispersed all over the country and now they are being thrown on the street with no way to survive.

But the catastrophe was a bonanza for Corporate America--for the oil companies who jacked up their prices, for the real estate interests and contractors who are stealing the land for high-priced development.

This is the face of monopoly capitalism today, especially U.S. imperialism. From the Arabian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico, It can only expand by destruction. The so-called peacetime expansion of the 1990s was made possible by the destruction of the Soviet socialist economy. Today the bloody holocaust being inflicted on the people of Iraq, while a political and military crisis for U.S. imperialism, has pushed corporate profits to a 40-year high. From the point of view of capital, there is nothing irrational about this war or the Bush regime's plans to attack Iran. For U.S. imperialism today, war is a permanent state of affairs. It is a necessity.

But even in the increasingly parasitic U.S. economy, there are no profits without labor. And neither the boom of the '90s nor the record profits of the last quarter would have been possible without the new slave trade, the new apartheid, the superexploited labor of immigrant and especially undocumented workers. These workers are not only in agriculture and the service sector but increasingly in construction, transportation and manufacturing, especially meat packing and food processing. Thieir labor is behind of the real-estate boom that is pumping up the U.S. economy. It is undocumented workers, sometimes living in camps under lock and key, who are rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf, while the displaced people of the region are left jobless and homeless. That's the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I cannot talk about the class struggle in the U.S. today without saying a word about the heroic strike of New York city transit workers. This majority Black union shut down New York City for three days in December. Their president, Roger Toussaint, just finished a jail sentence for leading that strike and the union's finances are under attack by the courts. The workers are still without a contract. Workers penalized for the "crime" of refusing to work. That's the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The U.S. working class needs a revival of independent struggle. This is unlikely to come from union leaderships who are married to the Democratic Party. They seek to divert the mass movement into the electoral arena with slogans like, "Today we march, tomorrow we vote."

There are those on the left who support that alliance. They say that the prime task is to electorally defeat the ultraright, the Bush regime, to create more favorable conditions for the class struggle. They want to dream of a return to the New Deal policies of the Roosevelt administration. This is the tired theory of a divided ruling class, in which labor must unite with the moderates against the rightwing. It is absurd.

U.S. imperialism can not return to the days of the New Deal any more than it can turn back the clock to the era of competitve capitalism. The ultraright character of the Bush regime is a symptom of monopoly capitalism in extreme decay. Even if the U.S. ruling class is forced to dispense with the persona of Bush, there is no turning back from parasitism and war.

The survival of the U.S. labor movement, of the working class, depends on breaking with the U.S. ruling class and both its parties and uniting with the working class of the world, with the oppressed masses of humanity fighting for liberation. The immigrant workers in the U.S. and the oppressed nations are a bridge to the international working class, especially to the revolutionary developments now shaking Latin America, from Venezuela to Bolivia.

The U.S. working class needs independent struggle. But struggle is not enough. There must be a revolutionary program, a socialist program, a program that challenges property relations. A way must be found to do this, even in the heart of imperialism. There is no other way forward.