Globalization, economic crisis & Obama

This report is based on the last part of a talk that WWP Secretariat member Larry Holmes made in Detroit to the local Workers World Party branch at a Feb. 9 meeting on Black History Month.

One of the important political contributions of Comrade Sam Marcy, the founder of Workers World Party who died 10 years ago, is known well by the comrades here in Detroit. That’s because Detroit was ground zero for the destruction of the auto and steel industries, the closing of factories, the laying off of thousands of workers.

A quarter of a century ago, Sam—and he was way ahead of his time on this—began to analyze the inevitable social consequences of the introduction of science and technology into capitalist production on a world scale and what has come to be known as globalization.

His assessment was that imperialist globalization, abetted by technology, would create a change in the character of the working class. At first he was looking at this country, but really it could be extrapolated worldwide, that the character of the working class would change in a revolutionary way. Up to the fore would come women and Black and Latin@ people in service jobs, low-wage or non-union jobs. And that would be the basis for a more revolutionary working class, a working class that did not have the baggage of chauvinism, jingoism, xenophobia, racism and sexism. They would not be fearful of their sisters and brothers on other continents around the world.

The working class would be globalized. More and more workers all over the world would look like each other and speak different languages and the distance culturally and politically between Johannesburg or Thailand and New York City and even Detroit would not be so great.

One of the biggest symptoms of globalization is immigrant workers coming on the scene and bringing back May Day. There was no way the U.S. labor leaders were going to bring back May Day. They crushed it.

Immigrant workers began organizing for the big May Day uprising in 2006. The party was working very closely with them around the country. What finally happened was probably the biggest one-day strike this country has ever seen. Docks closed down, industries closed down. But top union leaders couldn’t deal with May Day. They had offered to give immigrant organizers buses, infrastructure, if they would just have it two weeks later.

The immigrant organizers said no. They didn’t have those hang-ups.

Sam saw the emergence of this revolutionized global working class. And the bourgeoisie saw it coming in so many ways, too. And for a long time one of their big objectives has been to undermine it, subvert it.

We see on the horizon the biggest capitalist crisis since the 1930s. Many people think we’re in uncharted waters. The only thing you can compare it to is the thirties because everybody knows that was a worldwide depression. But we shall see.

The mortgage foreclosures and the banks writing off billions of dollars are the tip of the iceberg. Bankers and governments are meeting around the clock here, in Europe, in Asia—and not to stave off a recession. They have had recessions before. It is to stave off a collapse of the capitalist financial system. It is to save banks from going under like a house of cards. That is what they are concerned about.

The crisis of the financial system is happening at a time when there’s also a crisis of overproduction and the crisis of U.S. imperialism losing its hegemonic position in the world. To make things even more complicated for the imperialists, there is this war they can’t get out of. No matter how many times they say the surge is going well, they are still bogged down.

The question is, what will the workers do? What will the unions do? Will they stand up and fight these attacks or will they somehow be undone and allow the imperialists a big victory?

That is why we talk about Black and Brown unity. It’s a catch phrase for the Black community’s relationship to the immigrant and particularly the Latin@ community. The ruling class conspires to divide the Black community from the Latin@ immigrant community. If these communities were together on a class basis in this country, the gravity of that unity would pull in the whites. Everybody would be clear that what was going on has a lot to do with race and class.

And it is so important because if they can divide Black and Brown then it will be easier for the government to make those raids.

They just raided a plant in Los Angeles yesterday with two or three hundred workers. Last week they raided a union hall in Connecticut. This should have set off alarm bells throughout the labor movement.

This is clearly an attack on the working class. This is union busting.

In my neck of the woods, we have an organizing drive at FreshDirect—people who deliver food to you. Hundreds of workers, primarily immigrants. All of a sudden the immigrant police arrive and hundreds of workers had to leave their belongings, leave their jobs and go undercover. It is union busting.

It is the reason why on the Martin Luther King holiday in New York, in freezing weather, we organized a demonstration of over a thousand people.

We marched from the radio station that currently broadcasts Don Imus, who was kicked off the air for his racist sexist dis last spring. That was an issue of primary concern to the Black community, but also to women and progressives. We marched from there to CNN to target Lou Dobbs, who six nights a week bashes immigrants on this mainstream, worldwide television network.

All this should be making our class more militant, more class conscious, more internationalist, more understanding that they can’t fight their sisters and brothers, whether they be in India or China or in Mexico or down South.

On the other hand are the setbacks and defeats, the opportunism of most of the big labor leaders. Some are corrupt bureaucrats—you can’t say two good words about them. Some have a deeper problem: they have lost the will to fight because they don’t believe they can win anymore. They feel that capitalism is so strong that the best they can do is make a deal to save a little here and a little there. But somehow we’ve got to push that back.

Who the hell is John Edwards? He’s a charlatan, this rich lawyer who gets $400 haircuts and all of a sudden is going to be a champion of the working class. But he decided his best chance of running for president in the Democratic primaries was to have a populist approach and start talking about the corporations and the poor and workers’ rights and start finding picket lines to walk on. And the media and the bourgeoisie made a decision not to cover him, don’t help him—don’t do anything that helps anybody develop a class perspective. Help something else, anything else—any other diversion.

That is why in some respects we have Obama. Obama is complicated. There are some interesting things to say about the Obama phenomenon.

Let’s face it, in this country where racism is so strong, so systemic and so knee-jerk, to see a handsome Black man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama winning primaries, before you even analyze it politically, part of you is saying, damn, that’s pretty good.

Moreover we can understand why a lot of progressive people and certainly a lot of Black people would feel good about it. They feel proud and rightfully so, because of national oppression and racism.

But Obama is not Jesse Jackson. It is not that Jesse Jackson was ever a revolutionary. It is just that there is a world of difference in where Jesse Jackson’s election campaigns came from in ’84 and ’88 and where Obama’s campaign comes from.

Jesse Jackson’s campaign was a protest campaign, it was to protest racism and the lack of representation inside the Democratic Party. The revolutionary wing of the Jackson movement, as some of you recall, was hoping that after Jackson was spurned he would lead Black people out of the Democratic Party. That didn’t happen. Jackson stayed in because he stayed bourgeois.

But his campaign was a movement and it was fascinating to watch. Jackson was never concerned about women’s rights—that’s not where he came from. But he realized as he was building his movement that if he was going to get the whole working class behind him he had to become very interested in women’s rights and get the women’s movement out.

I don’t think he was particularly concerned with workers’ rights. But he realized that if he was going to pull people together, he would have to get together with the most progressive activists in unions. That made his movement a class movement in both ’84 and ’88.

Barack’s movement is a bourgeois movement. It was conceived of as a bourgeois movement and financed by Wall Street—Goldman Sachs in particular. You could interchange the advisers, whether on foreign policy or the economy, that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has with Barack Obama. It’s all about the same.

He raised more money last month. Some of that money may be coming from the poor, but most of it is coming from the bourgeoisie. So it is a bourgeois phenomenon. He’s running to the right of Jackson. He’s not running for a protest, he’s not running for inclusion, he’s not running for representation.

He’s running saying, “Race doesn’t matter, class doesn’t matter. Let’s all be together.” This wonderful nice dream.

They are not covering Cynthia McKinney that much. This is very interesting. It is a problem; it’s tragic, but we’ll do the best we can by it.

Cynthia McKinney, a former congresswoman, served several terms in the House before she was kicked out the first time, and at least one after she got back in and was kicked out again. She’s running for president with a fairly progressive program tied to the Reconstruction Party, which comes out of the Gulf.

She’s way ahead of anything that Obama is saying, way ahead of anything that Kucinich or any of the other bourgeois party candidates have been saying. Not one press conference. Not one article. Not one mention of her.

She wrote a critique of Obama. It is a little dated now but it still holds. It hit what a lot of Black activists were really concerned about in terms of the Obama campaign.

It said, Wait a second. Don’t say stuff that gives the impression that racism is no longer a problem. Don’t say stuff that makes people forget about the Jena 6 and forget about Katrina, and the fact that more of our youth are incarcerated than in college.

Don’t say stuff that lets people forget the fact that on every scale Black people are doing worse. Double unemployment, more of us are dying, more of us living shorter lives; we live in worse housing; we get worse health care.

How does doing that help the struggle against racism? It might make people feel good—even right wingers. “We’re so glad he doesn’t see race.”

His campaign is a problem for serious leftists or revolutionaries. But I think inevitably it will be more helpful than harmful.

Right now, things have been so difficult, almost anything that shakes things up is beneficial, because at least Obama has a lot of people thinking and talking and debating, particularly all these white people.

Bush has so alienated the world. He’s created a country at war with everybody—Latin America, Arabs, Muslims. Some people are voting for Obama as a way of trying to tell the world that we don’t hate them.

Bush has so horrified everybody that this is a reaction to it.

The Obama campaign shakes things up. Campaigns like Obama’s create expectations, but ultimately those expectations cannot be met, and then it is time for struggle. Actually that contradiction may come sooner than later because, as bourgeois as Obama is and as much as even a lot of right wingers say they like him, it is still a question: Do you think the imperialist ruling class will let a Black man be president of the United States?

If I was a part of that class and we were having a meeting at one of the mansions, I’d say, “Let him become president. Why? Because we’re going to have hell, we’re going to have an economic crisis, we’re in trouble. Once we have to take away Social Security and what’s left of Medicare and Medicaid, which you know we’re going to have to do if no one stops us, let it be him doing it!”

We are absolutely obligated to set up as strongly and widely as possible political and movement counterpoints to this bourgeois electoral stuff.

The layoffs are starting now. When manufacturing is down, they say we’re relying on retail. Heard the latest reports? Retail is in recession. People who thought they were middle class losing jobs, losing homes.

We have to be in the most serious period of preparation for the struggle that is on the horizon.