Globalization will lead to class struggle

Fred Goldstein WW photo: G. Dunkel

Speech of Workers World Party Secretariat member Fred Goldstein to WWP’s National Conference on Nov. 17-18, 2007.

We have called this conference based on the slogan, “Build worldwide solidarity in the struggle for socialism.” What is it that gives our party the confidence to declare the struggle for socialism in the U.S.? No party by itself, even one many times the size of ours, can establish socialism. This is a serious question. We should consider how we would answer it.

It will take a mighty force to root out a capitalist class that exploits hundreds of millions of people to enrich itself and would use trillions of dollars to destroy Iraq and Afghanistan and set up torture chambers from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib while its Black and Latin@ communities sink deeper and deeper into poverty, generations of youth grow up without a future and fill the prisons or die by police bullets.

But Workers World Party uses the revolutionary science of Marxism, the science created by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, updated by Vladimir Lenin, and enriched by leaders like Amilcar Cabral, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, and many other revolutionaries, to look at the destiny of capitalism and imperialism and see a revolutionary future. We look beneath the surface of this exploitative hell hole, this prison house of nations, where the Native people were dispossessed of their land and driven by force into Bantustans called reservations, where tens of millions of Africans were shipped across the Atlantic in sea-borne infernos bound in chains to create modern-day slavery here; where one half of Mexico was subjugated and annexed by the empire, as were Cuba, Puerto Rica and the Philippines, where Chinese laborers were brought across the ocean to build the railroads and were then persecuted and subjected to vile and violent racism.

When Marxists analyze the situation and where it is going, we can see the sleeping giant that can bring the system down—the multinational working class.

For over three decades now U.S. capitalist society has been relatively stable. Since the Cointelpro destruction of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, the massacres of anti-war students at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970, the suppression of the historic Attica prison uprising in 1972 and the crushing of the Wounded Knee occupation led by the American Indian Movement in 1973, the struggle has been up and down, but mainly in retreat.

These struggles were defeated in great part because the organized working class in the U.S. at the time, under the leadership of the white, male, labor leadership and its higher-paid base in the union movement, turned its back on those vital struggles of the oppressed. The anti-war movement and the oppressed were left to fight on their own, without the might and power of the organized labor movement. But this reactionary policy cannot last.

For one thing, the U.S. working class, as it was up until the early 1970s, no longer exists. It is now a class that is poorer, more downtrodden, more insecure, more in debt, more Black, more Latin@, more Asian, more women, more lesbian, gay, bi and trans. In a word, it is more under attack and is composed of greater and greater numbers of the oppressed.

Imperialism in its new stage of globalization is slowly and systematically transforming the working class in the United States, as well as other imperialist countries. For the most part of the 20th century when we, as communists, as Leninists, used the word imperialism, it conjured up the image of transnational corporations such as United Fruit Co. with plantations in Central America, Anaconda Copper taking the copper out of the mines in Chile or Zambia, Phelps Dodge plundering the tin mines in Bolivia or Malaya, Goodrich Rubber looting Liberia, Alcoa and Newmont Mining taking the gold from South Africa or Peru, Standard Oil plundering the Middle East, and so on.

But fast forward to the year 2007. These giant monopolies, many of which have new names and have merged with other giants, are still marauding the globe looking for raw materials, and with even greater intensity.

But alongside the race for natural riches, the giant monopolies like Dell Computer, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Ford Motors, General Motors, General Electric, Caterpillar, Citicorp, IBM, the Gap, Nike and hundreds of other giant as well as lesser corporations have set up their factories, offices, call centers, research centers and back-office banking operations in every corner of the globe. It is a new stage of imperialism. On top of the plunder of the workers in the mines, ports and railroads and on the plantations, they have conjured up an entirely new layer of workers in the oppressed countries around the world.

This has been orchestrated over the last decades as the capitalists developed their new technology. It was greatly expanded with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, together with the opening up of China to foreign capital. Some 1 billion to 2 billion workers have been added to the sphere of super-exploitation of imperialism. Technology in the hands of the capitalist class is always a danger to the working class. It is never used to make life easier for the workers as it could and should be.

The bosses in the U.S. use their technology to restructure many industries here and undermine the labor movement. And in the recent period they have used the computers, the Internet, high-powered software, communications satellites, fiber-optic cables, cell phones, giant container ships, computerized ports, jumbo transport jets and all manner of technology to create global networks of production and exploitation. Fragmented into different operations in different countries, it is all coordinated by the monopolies who control the final operations and sales and rake in the super-profits garnered from low-wage, oppressed workers all over the world.

This is transforming the global working class and specifically the working class in the U.S. Millions of workers in the U.S., whether on the assembly line or in the office, whether computer programmers or welders, now know that their jobs can be outsourced—and if not to China or Mexico, then to Mississippi or North Carolina–to some area of low wages. Office workers at IBM or Citibank must compete with office workers in India or the Philippines whose wages are a fraction of U.S. wages. Auto workers in Michigan must compete with auto workers in Mexico or Thailand in the same race to the bottom.

Workers’ wages in the U.S. have been going down since at least the late 1970s. The destruction of manufacturing jobs particularly has had a major effect in destroying higher-paying jobs. This has had a profound effect on the unions and the entire working class. Among other things, it has intensified the oppression of the Black community as a section of Black workers, who after generations of being confined to menial, low-paying jobs, the legacy of slavery, finally broke through the racism of the labor leadership and found a place in the industrial unions. Because of the “last hired, first fired” racist practices, millions of Black workers have been driven out of decent-paying union jobs, which had health benefits, pensions, raises, work rules, etc. This has greatly added to the poverty and devastation in the central cities.

In the global search for low-wage workers, the bosses in the U.S. have thrived on the massive immigration of Latin@ workers, mainly Mexican, and also large numbers of Filipino and South Asian workers, forced to migrate because of the impoverishment of their countries by U.S. big business. The entire undocumented crisis is a product of this reverse form of globalization.

In addition, women workers have been driven into the work force at low wages, not as a way of achieving economic independence, but because men’s wages have been falling with the restructuring and it is impossible for any household with children to live on one and often even on two incomes. There are now 70 million women in a workforce of 150 million, and most of them work at low wages.

Thus the working class in the U.S. is being transformed by technological pressure and union busting at home and by a world-wide wage competition abroad. Its old privileged layer is being whittled down year after year. The oppressed workers are hurt the most by the global restructuring, but the white workers are also losing their position along the way.

It is significant that General Motors, totally organized by the UAW, used to be the largest employer in the U.S. and the top-grossing corporation. At its height it had over 600,000 workers; now it has 70,000. Today, the largest employer in the U.S. is Wal-Mart, which is rabidly anti-union, low-wage with low-to-no benefits, with 1.2 million workers. Wal-Mart grosses $300 billion a year and is only exceeded in revenue by Exxon. This symbolizes the transformation of U.S. capitalism from high-wage (for white males mostly) to low-wage. This is what has been going on for three decades and is still in progress.

In fact, a major, dangerous threshold for the entire working class, organized and unorganized, has just been crossed at the negotiating table in Michigan. The UAW leadership has been pressured by the Big Three and Wall Street and signed contracts with all the auto companies containing ground-breaking concessions. First, the UAW has agreed to allow the corporations to transfer the long-term responsibility for health insurance coverage to the union. Second, they have agreed to a two-tier wage system. The UAW has allowed the pay of new workers to be $14 an hour, half the wage of those working now. And there will be no annual raises, just a flat annual bonus of a few thousand dollars. And a bonus can easily be taken away.

The UAW inaugurated industrial unionism and set the gold standard for wages, benefits, work rules, grievance procedures, and so on. It is the last bastion of industrial unionism from the previous era of momentous class struggle.

But when these contracts were negotiated the threat of plant closings and offshoring hung over the negotiation table like the sword of Damocles. The great argument of the auto bosses was the same argument heard over and over again across the negotiating table: “We have to remain competitive.”

There is only one way out of this situation for the workers. That is to reject the capitalist argument of competitiveness and to insist on the right to a job. The present workforce will have to develop a new class struggle approach. They must say no to the idea that it is the responsibility of workers, who have created all the wealth of the bosses, to guarantee their profitability. Workers have earned sweat equity in their jobs and in the plants and offices or wherever they work.

Furthermore, international class solidarity is the practical answer to international wage competition. A genuine working class leadership in an industry such as auto, or any occupation, must strive to bring representatives of all workers from around the world into the discussions about demands. It must be clear that the leadership in the U.S. is going to help fight for raises and conditions for all the workers, from Mexico to Thailand to Brazil or Indonesia, and not just for U.S. workers. The old slogan of an injury to one is an injury to all must be a cross-border slogan. Of course, such a new mind-set can only take place in an atmosphere of struggle. And it can only come from a militant, class-conscious leadership from below.

Once this ideology of genuine class consciousness takes hold among the workers, it will be possible, for example, to send mass multinational worker defense guards to meat packing plants in Tar Heel, N.C., or in Des Moines, Iowa, to defend undocumented workers against Homeland Security raids. It will be possible to mobilize the organized sections of the workers in the struggle against racism and to push back racist district attorneys, sheriffs and police. And it will be possible to start up an organizing drive at Wal-Mart and overturn the Taft-Hartley Law in life by having a class-wide mobilization of dock workers, teamsters and other logistics workers who could shut Wal-Mart’s “lean retailing” operations down.

And maybe things could start by organizing neighborhood committees to go to foreclosure auction houses and shut them down and put people back in their houses, the way they did during the Great Depression.

These are, of course, ambitious dreams. But they are dreams based upon the reality of what is happening to the workers in this country. As Marxists we believe that being determines consciousness. Consciousness may lag behind. But in the end, conditions make it catch up. The working class in this country will be forced by capitalism itself to become aware of its condition.

The workers and the oppressed have a long tradition of struggle and resistance. From the Indian wars against the settlers, to the struggle for Black Reconstruction, to May Day and the struggle for the eight-hour day, to the Seattle general strike of 1919 and the San Francisco general strike of 1934, the sit-down strikes of 1936-37, the Civil Rights movement, the Black liberation struggle, prison rebellions, rebellions in the military, urban uprisings and so on. The peace and quiet that has existed for the past period is exceptional—and the result of exceptional circumstances. Global capitalism is recreating the conditions that led to the rebellions and resistance in the first place. Only this time the struggle will be wider and deeper.

And then the sleeping giant I talked about earlier will awaken. When that happens, we can be on the road to the ultimate dream of the socialist revolution. But this cannot happen without a revolutionary party to help the workers get to where they must go—as Marx said, to expropriate the expropriators, take over the economy and run it for people and not for profit. Long live Workers World Party! Build the struggle for socialism!