The following editorial appears in the latest issue, Fall 2004, of "Turning
the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education" from
Anti-Racist Action-L.A./People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART).
PART's Perspective:
One Million Workers on the March?
October 17 in Washington DC, labor takes an important step forward with the
Million Worker March (MWM), initiated by an ILWU local ('longshore' or dock
workers) in California and taken up by hundreds of union locals and labor
organizers around the country. Despite the name, organizers are expecting
about 100,000 marchers, far less than a million but still a sizable, and
indeed historic, independent labor rally around anti-war, social and
economic demands.
The March situates itself in the legacy of the Poor People's March
initiated by Martin Luther King in 1968. "The United States government,"
King proclaimed, "is one of the greatest purveyors of violence in the world
... and it is critically important for us as a nation and society to choose
a new path and move on it with resolution and courage."
The Mission Statement of the MWM declares that "the crisis facing working
people today is even more acute. Under the cover of systematic lies and
deception, wars of devastation have been launched at the expense of working
people everywhere. In our name, a handful of the rich and powerful
corporations have usurped our government. A corporate and banking oligarchy
changes hats and occupies public office to wage class war on working
people. They have captured the State in their own interests. The vast
majority of working Americans are under siege. Social services and
essential funding for schools, libraries, affordable housing and health
care are slashed and eliminated.
"This undisguised class war is waged without restraint against working
families and our children, enforced by anti-labor legislation and decrees,
and by courts serving our exploiters... The time has come to mobilize
working people for our own agenda. Let us end subservience to the power of
the privileged few and their monopoly of the political process in America."
This is a powerful critique of the current economic, political and
electoral system in the U.S., to which they have added a list of concrete
demands, including among other points:
Universal single-payer health care from cradle to grave
A national living wage that lifts people permanently out of poverty.
Cancel all corporate "free" trade agreements, including NAFTA, MAI and FTAA.
End privatization and the pitting of workers against each other across
national boundaries in a mad race to the bottom.
Repeal Taft-Hartley and all anti-labor legislation.
Fund a crash program to restore our decaying public schools, and a vast
army of teachers to unleash the potential of our children and adults.
Put an end to the criminalization of poverty and the prison-industrial complex.
Rebuild our decaying inner cities with affordable housing and eliminate
homelessness.
Increase taxation on corporations and the rich while providing relief for
the working class and poor.
End the poisoning of the atmosphere, soil, water and food supply.
Repeal the USA PATRIOT Act, Anti-Terrorism Act and all such repressive
legislation.
Slash the military budget and recover the trillions stolen from our labor
to enrich the corporations.
Aggressively enforce all civil rights.
Mobilize nationally against all racist and discriminatory acts in the
workplace and our communities.
Amnesty for all undocumented workers.
Effectively, these demands, and the willingness to engage in independent
mass action to push them, places these organizers and workers outside the
pale of corporate-dominated politics and the business unionism that has
historically tailed the Democratic Party and enforced labor discipline for
the empire. It is no wonder that the top ranks of the AFL-CIO (American
Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations) have attempted to
subvert the march. These are the most anti-establishment political and
economic positions adopted by a significant sector of U.S. organized labor
since the purges of union Communists during the McCarthy era, and the birth
of the post-World War II national security state.
But significant as they are, these steps are only a beginning. The Million
Worker March is not an end in itself. It must advance a process of
grass-roots social and political engagement in which organized labor, and
working people more generally, break out of the corrupt deal that has yoked
us to the empire. Demands must be translated into direct action for working
class economic, social and political goals, based on conscious
international solidarity and struggle against racism, colonialism, empire
and all forms of oppression and exploitation. It is time, not to defend the
New Deal, but to say - No Deal!
Not only US society, but the whole global system, is facing a huge crisis
which working people must take it upon ourselves to solve through our own
efforts and initiative. We are our own liberators! Whether oil production
has already peaked globally or not, global warming means that human and
planetary survival makes it imperative that we end the petroleum-based
imperial system.
While Kerry and Bush debate who is better suited to lead the empire, who
can "win" the war in Iraq, or hunt down and kill more terrorists, the true
nature of this system is nowhere to be heard or seen in this election. Bush
and Kerry both have their sights set on a collision course between the
so-called "American Way of Life," and the working, oppressed and colonized
people inside and outside the borders whose labor sustains it.
It's not enough to trade in the old emperor for a new model, or to demand a
seat at the table when the bosses carve up the globe. We need a new system.
The imperial system is dooming the world to disease, starvation and
catastrophic disruptions of the weather, the water cycle and the entire
planetary biosphere and ecosystem.
To uproot empire, we must reach back into its seed bed in the colonization
and genocide of indigenous people, the conquest and enslavement of African
people, and the settlement of European working people on stolen land. We
must self-critically examine and cast out the way that system has
manifested itself within our own thinking and practice. Unless we undertake
this task, the rulers of the US Empire will take us irrevocably down a path
to more and increasingly genocidal wars. Kerry is out-hawking Bush on Iran;
both ultimately plan on war with China.
Three things are equally important. First, recognize our exploitation and
the class war raging in this country and around the world. Second, see that
the power and wealth of the rulers is extracted from the people they
exploit and oppress, and from the planet they dominate. But also, we must
understand our own complicity in that imperial system. Steven Biko of
Azania/South Africa once said, the strongest weapon in the hands of the
oppressor is the minds of the oppressed. This system can use us and our
creative powers against ourselves, because capitalism rests on competition
among the workers. The key form our acceptance of the competition takes is
white supremacy.
We must go beyond maintaining or expanding our labor organizations. We need
strategies to organize the unorganized, "casualized" temp workers, the
homeless, the unemployed, mothers driven onto "work-fare," prisoners. But
even beyond that, to put an end to empire and to our own exploitation and
oppression, we must end the competition among ourselves. Unions,
particularly US unions that rely on racial exclusion, promote good
labor-management relations, and enforce the contract and labor discipline
on the workers, are functioning as mechanisms for getting only a more
advantageous position within that competition -- which is inevitably
self-defeating and self-destructive. All working people must commit
ourselves to de-colonization and to the emancipation of women, if we are to
free ourselves from drudgery and leave our children a planet that will
sustain life.
Ending competition among the workers means opposing empire, colonialism and
white supremacy. It means identifying with the masses of working people of
every nation and ethnicity, rather than identifying with "our" rulers on
the basis of skin color or the colors of a flag. It means supporting the
indigenous people of America and Africa, Palestine and Puerto Rico,
Afghanistan and Iraq. It means learning from the struggling people of Asia,
Africa and Latin America about how to build our own democracy, our own
autonomous institutions, our own systems of healthful, sustainable
cultivation, production and exchange. If we live in harmony with the
planetary ecology and water cycle, we will restore the forests and aquifers
that sustain life. The planet is bathed in enough solar energy to meet any
human needs.
It is only the war machine and the capitalist colonialist system of greed
that requires scarcity and poverty, and thrives on pollution and petroleum.
If we act now, we can reverse course before it is too late. But if we allow
racism, national chauvinism, patriarchy and other forms of hierarchy and
oppression to divide us, we may be dooming our children, and those around
the globe, to lives of darkness, misery and servitude.
Concretely, what actions can we take? The slogan "Educate - Agitate -
Organize!" points a direction. We need to learn more about the nature of
this system, about history and science, about the cultures and struggles of
people indigenous to this land and to the rest of the global empire. We
need to challenge and expose all the crimes of this system and its rulers,
and begin to convey a sense of the power of the people to hold them to
account and to transform society for the better. We need to create forms of
organization that respect individual and collective human rights, that are
non-hierarchical and deeply rooted in people's full human lives. Then they
will be impervious to infiltration and resistant to decapitation or
cooptation, the strategies that have been used successfully against the
people time and again.
We need to make an honest assessment of our strengths and weaknesses, our
resources and needs. Without abandoning struggles against the corporate
media, we need to build the people's own independent means of
communication. Organized labor can begin to apply its tremendous publishing
resources in the labor press by addressing in our union papers not only
workplace issues and union affairs, but all the issues facing the
communities within which we live and struggle. We need to expand the reach
of community, listener-sponsored broadcasting like Pacifica Radio and
low-power FM, and audio and video production and distribution.
We need to begin to act on questions of food and water supply and security,
and community self-defense. Real security will not come from a president
who talks tough and bombs the daylights out of other working people, or
from militarizing the borders or the local police, but from a
civilian-based solidarity that extends throughout our communities, schools,
neighborhoods and places of worship. We need to reach through the prison
walls to rehabilitate and reintegrate the incarcerated, and to defeat the
state's attempt to isolate and destroy political prisoners.
We need to stop living in fear! Political security will come from political
solidarity, ending the looting of the planet by the empire. Real energy
security will not come from occupying and dominating the dwindling oil
basins of the Middle East, Caspian, West Africa or Latin America. It arises
from building locally self-sufficient methods of raising and distributing
healthful food, preserving and replenishing water as a precious part of the
chain of life rather than a commodity and profit center, and creating
cooperative economic activities that allow to live and work within regions
on a human scale. And as the people of Iraq have shown us, we need to be
prepared to defend what we create against the armed might of a vampiric
dinosaur, that will try to take us down with it to extinction.
If you have responses to this essay, or want to discuss these ideas
further, please contact Anti-Racist Action L.A./People Against Racist
Terror (ARA-LA/PART), PO Box 1055, Culver City CA 90232 - 310-495-0299 or
by e-mail at antiracistaction_la@yahoo.com
You can also get a free sample copy of "Turning the Tide" (in the US) for
the asking.
At 03:32 AM 10/15/2004 -0400, AndyCA6@aol.com wrote:
A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind
Andy Griggs
AndyCA6@aol.com
310-704-3217 cell
Subject: C-Span To Cover Million Worker March
From: steve zeltzer <lvpsf@igc.org>
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
C-Span will be covering the national Million Worker March in Washington
D.C. The coverage will be from 12:00 Noon October 17, 2004 EST until the
end of the rally.
Please let all supporters and participants know and also make recordings
of the C-Span programming for use in report backs to your regional
organizations.
It will also be recorded by WPFW-Pacifica but will be replayed later.
In Solidarity,
For The Organizing Committee
Steve Zeltzer
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