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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the May 1, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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As injustices pile up: Unite & fight

By Deirdre Griswold

It's called the Presidents' Summit. Bill Clinton has invited George Bush, former Pentagon chief Colin Powell, and a herd of corporate CEOs to Philadelphia for a cynical exercise in public deception.

Their aim is to make government cutbacks look good.

Everyone is being called on to "volunteer" to patch up the gaping holes torn in social services.

But no amount of fine words or smiling photo opportunities can hide the truth. The government has joined the big corporations in an all-out attack on the working class. The leaders of both government parties are responsible for harsh new laws that further the big-business agenda.

The welfare law is ripping away the safety net for poor women and their children.

The immigration law is denying basic social rights to those who have toiled the hardest at the lowest wages.

These laws aimed at the poorest will have the ripple effect of destabilizing all workers.

Workfare, the first step of welfare "reform," is already forcing the unemployed to do all kinds of jobs for sub-minimum wages.

Imagine working in an office or park and finding that new employees are doing the same work as you for half the pay! And if these new workers refuse to be super-exploited, they'll lose their meager welfare checks and be left with nothing.

Gutting welfare comes after big budget cuts in federal, state and city services. Although workfare workers are not supposed to be replacing any laid-off worker, they are being sent to places where the work force has been shrunk through attrition and early retirement.

There wouldn't be so many people forced to rely on government assistance if they could get decent jobs with wages to support a family. But many of those jobs have been eliminated over the last two decades by corporate downsizing, restructuring and outsourcing.

The bosses have reorganized their companies-often just on paper-to eliminate union jobs, cutting wages and benefits.

And they call this a "strong economy"! Because what really matters to the bosses is that they're making money hand over fist-in corporate profits and also in stock-market speculation.

As demonstrators gather in Philadelphia April 27 to express their outrage over all these assaults on the workers and poor, the question is: What can be done about it?

Two words are key to any plan of action: UNITY and STRUGGLE.

Unity of the working class

Unite unionists with the unorganized, like workfare workers. Unite immigrants with U.S.-born. Unite African American and white, Asian and Arab, Latino and Native.

Unite lesbians, gays, bis and trans with straights. Unite the elderly with the young. Unite the disabled with the able bodied. Unite women, men and transgendered. Unite prisoners with those outside the walls.

Unite by respecting, listening to and fighting for the rights of all who suffer special oppression. Make their issues the demands of the entire movement.

This unity can be achieved even as the movement discusses and debates the many great social and political questions before us. Unity in action does not mean stifling debate. Rather, the discussion can take place on a much higher level once all those oppressed are in motion together.

Struggle to turn it around

The problem facing the working class is capitalism.

It's an economic system that allows a few to monopolize the wealth created by the many. It's an aggressive, expansive system that constantly seeks new markets, new labor to exploit, new resources to gobble up.It's a system that breeds competition and war.

Every strike is a struggle against capital. Every sit-in for civil rights takes on the vested interests of capital. Every effort to overcome racism, sexism and homophobia threatens the reactionary ideology underlying this system.

Workers in the United States have a glorious history of fighting the power of capital and winning great gains. May Day, the workers' holiday that will be celebrated next week around the world, started here with the militant struggle for the eight-hour day in 1886.

That was over a century ago. But how many workers right now wish they had an eight-hour day? How many have to put in forced overtime, or work two jobs to make ends meet, or commute hours each day to get a living wage?

Today the working class is much broader in scope than a century ago. It is women and men of all nationalities and origins. It is farm workers and teachers, flight attendants and clerks, sanitation workers and nurses. It is the many who spend years in abject poverty because they can't get a job.

Struggle can be our common language. Struggle for a better life. Struggle for what truly belongs to us. Struggle to share and enjoy the wonders we have created with our common labor.

Struggle not just to repeal a law, or influence a vote, or put a slightly less odious politician in office-but to change society, profoundly, so that the many can rule in place of the wealthy few.

It's not the dream of Clinton and Bush. But it's a vision the working class can make come true in this country of super-abundance and super poverty.

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