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Column: Workshop Talks by Htun Lin
One-sided unity
While workers all across the country continue to suffer from the ongoing
fall-out of the terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens, the Bush administration
wasted no time granting billions of dollars in corporate welfare to bail
out the major airlines. But these same companies in turn wasted no time
laying off tens of thousands of workers, even while posturing for national
"unity" in the wake of the disaster.
The CEO of Boeing told the WALL STREET JOURNAL he had enough "market
data" to lay off Boeing workers. Low-wage service workers in hotels and
restaurants in tourist centers such as Las Vegas, San Francisco and New
York City are being hit the hardest.
This is happening just when we have seen two decades of severe cutbacks in
the social safety net and when the prevailing ideology is that workers are
responsible for their own safety net. Now Bush is spending our Social
Security money on war. This was supposed to be our collective nest egg
secured in a "lock-box" during the Presidential campaign. Further,
Bush
wants more tax cuts for the rich.
Corporate media outlets are now editorializing against union workers, such
as the 230 members of AFSCME Local 3993 who threatened to strike against
BART, the San Francisco Bay Area's rapid transit system. The impasse is not
over money but rather workers' concern over eroding job security. As one
worker said, "What good is a raise without a job?"
The SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE on Oct. 13 slammed these workers for disrupting
vital transportation in a time of "financial slowdown aggravated by the
Sept. 11 attacks," accusing these workers of being "unaware...of the
war in Afghanistan."
A not too subtle effort is underway to use the victims of Sept. 11 as a
blunt instrument for capitalists to hit workers over the head with, making
us take responsibility for the financial decline caused not by us but by
capitalism itself. Workers immediately showed solidarity with the victims
of terrorism through their rescue actions and widespread individual
donations, coming even from many prisons in California. The corporate
rulers, however, are trying to use this unity to promote war and to justify
attacks on workers.
In Minnesota the two largest state employee unions--representing about half
the work force on the state payroll--went on strike Oct. 1. Some 23,000
workers, including highway maintenance workers, janitors, food inspectors
and computer professionals, struck over health benefits and inadequate pay.
After two weeks, an intransigent state government led by Jesse Ventura
finally settled.
Immediately, however, Ventura said he would meet with advisors to find ways
to cut jobs. During the strike Ventura had labeled the workers
"unpatriotic" in light of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the
sinking
economy, adding, "Everyone has to bite the bullet a little bit."
Bush is now going full speed ahead demanding "fast track" authority
for a
new round of World Trade Organization negotiations. He is having a love
fest with China's totalitarian rulers who are now being allowed to join the
WTO.
This means severe dislocation not only for workers in China. Capitalists
all over the world are excited by the opportunity to move even more of
their manufacturing to China from wherever they have encountered worker
resistance. They are attracted to China not only by the low wages, which
they can find elsewhere, but precisely because the high productivity in
China is a direct product of state repression.
This is happening just when the war is disorienting many leftists away from
the multi-faceted anti-globalization movement to focus narrowly on
"anti-war" activism. The war drive is also a drive to consolidate the
new
stage of capitalist production.
I remember a blue collar worker, Felix Martin, who was a sailor under
attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. In his March 1991 column in NEWS &
LETTERS he reflected "On the Gulf War: Capitalists Wars and
Production":
"Out of the rubble of war and terror, one can hear the early voices for
freedom, reaching for a new society. I worked for many years as a
blue-collar worker at General Motors, and what goes through my mind when I
see and read about this war is the assembly line. It seems like war and
production are produced in the same way. There are the officers and/or
foremen on the one side and in both places--the war zone and the
factory--on the other side are the workers, the 'grunts,' doing the
suffering and doing the dying."
An Iraqi-American shopkeeper attended a speak-out event after vandals had
sprayed his store with racist graffiti reading "Arab go home." He
said, "I
can't go home. I am already home." He also said, "I heard President
Bush
talk about a new kind of war for the new millennium. I agree there should
be a new kind of war. But it's not the kind Bush thinks. Our war should be
against poverty, ignorance, disease, racism, misogyny and oppression."
This concentrated effort to whip up a frenzy of hate against the
"other" is
part and parcel of alienating capitalist reality which workers face
everyday. However, workers have an innate drive to solidarize with each
other in order to unite the idea of freedom and reality in a new way. We
have already seen tremendous human solidarity in the midst of terror and
destruction. We need to dig deeper into the idea of freedom so that this
kind of solidarity becomes permanent and the basis for a new society.
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