Lenin's message to today's workers
By Milt Neidenberg
Retired Teamster
No matter how much the Bush administration and its loyal
opposition, the Democratic Party, whip up the war frenzy
against Iraq and the "war on terrorism" in the name of national
security, it is the economy that is preoccupying the workers
and the oppressed.
We need a strategy to turn around the "war on terrorism"
into a war on poverty--and the issue of "national security"
into job security.
Labor columnist Steven Greenhouse conducted an important
interview in the Sept. 6 New York Times with David J. Olson. It
illustrates the potential power labor can wield.
Olson is a professor, a founder of the Harry Bridges Center
for Labor Studies, and a consultant on ports and the longshore
union. Bridges was founder of the International Longshore
Workers Union and leader of the historic 1934 San Francisco
general strike.
Greenhouse asked Olson what the impact on the economy would
be if the longshore workers, who unload container boxes from
ships, conducted a short work stoppage.
Olson answered, "It would severely affect those companies
that depend on just-in-time inventory ... the whole gamut of
merchandisers [from] Wal-Mart to Sears, to name a few."
Olson stressed, "The container box is the warehouse for
modern-day business. ... The ports handle millions of parts
needed for assembly or manufacture. ... We're not talking about
goods flowing into the country, but also goods flowing out of
the country."
Picture ships from abroad landing on these shores filled
with containers. The containers are unloaded by dockworkers,
picked up and transported inland by trucks, railway and
airlines to their destinations, where the commodities are
unloaded. Then visualize the reverse: commodities being
exported from these shores.
Any disruption in this interconnected process spells
disaster for the employers. More than $300 billion worth passes
through the West Coast ports--7 percent of the entire gross
domestic product.
Now comes the introduction of a higher stage of technology
into the mix. It ranges from satellites to hand computers and
inter-modal shipments to increase productivity and speed-up.
Inter-modal means moving commodities by a combination of road
and rail.
In one swoop, the technology brings together a global
industrial workforce that includes service workers who plot and
record the movement of commodities. Marxists call this the
socialization of labor.
Some 10,500 longshore workers acting in unity can unleash
this power. It points up just how vulnerable the capitalist
economy is to the power of labor, which threatens U.S.
imperialist and globalization objectives. It's also important
to note that the longshore workers are very multinational and
have close ties to their communities.
Of course, the Bush administration would intervene in any
way it could to immediately remove this threat to the stability
of the capitalist system and its plans to dominate the
globe.
However, the threat of severe cutbacks in the living
conditions of the workers and the oppressed nationalities will
elevate the class struggle to another level.
There are huge hurdles to overcome, not the least of which
is the labor bureaucrats, with their political ties to the
Democratic Party, their defense of the capitalist system and
their hope for its reform. Nevertheless, they are not the
fundamental class enemy. The leadership is divided on many
issues and tactics over how to deal with the crisis of
imperialist war, recession, repression and racism, and the
anti-union assault.
It will be significantly easier to reach the rank and file
than it was in earlier periods during and since the Cold War.
If the government drags the reluctant workers and oppressed
into a war against Iraq, it will speed up their class
awakening.
Lenin offered today's workers an important lesson about the
transition to a period of a revolutionary perspective.
He wrote an essay entitled "On Strikes" in 1899, when Russia
suffered both repression and war. He began by discussing the
importance of the strike weapon:
"Every strike strengthens and develops in the workers the
understanding that the government is their enemy and that the
working class must prepare itself to struggle against the
government for the people's rights," he said. He called a
strike "a school of war."
He talked about wider and broader forms of struggle that
develop a revolutionary political perspective. "[We] look
forward to the time when all class conscious workers would
become socialists [and] will build a party that struggles for
the emancipation of the people as a whole ... from the yoke of
capital."
He ended his essay with a call that still rings with urgency
today: Workers and oppressed of the world, unite!
The enemy that U.S. workers face today is not in Baghdad. It
is in Washington and Wall Street, which rip off the wealth and
resources created by the multinational labor of the workers and
the oppressed.
Reprinted from the Oct. 3, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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