2006 had two sides

Reality always has many sides. This is clear when assessing the year 2006 from the point of view of the worldwide class struggle. Simply by looking at the news covered in this issue of Workers World, the last in 2006, two opposing sides come into focus: the nightmare, and the hope of a new dawn.

The standard of living of the working class at home—indeed, everything having to do with economic security as measured by steady work, guaranteed pensions and health insurance—has come under relentless attack by big capital. It seems like a one-sided battle that capital is winning.

Yet the year ended with 75,000 unionists and supporters demonstrating across the U.S. and Canada in support of striking Goodyear rubber workers.

Racist police brutality is rampant across the country, punctuated by the gunning down of a 92-year-old African-American woman in Atlanta and a 50-shot fusillade fired at a car with three unarmed Black men in Queens, N.Y., that killed 23-year-old Sean Bell on his wedding day.

Yet this horror has aroused a massive response, including a march of 40,000 along New York’s Fifth Avenue and other actions planned to confront Wall Street as the root of racism.

December saw a vicious “Homeland Security” roundup of historic proportions of 1,300 working people, mainly immigrants from Mexico and Central America—those who do a major portion of the really hard, dangerous and unpleasant jobs in the United States. This blow from the repressive state apparatus caused the suffering of many.

But it did nothing to erase the potential shown by the millions who marched for immigrant rights last spring, culminating in the May Day strike and boycott.

In these three examples of class and anti-racist struggles at home—and there are many others—there is a common element: an unresolved conflict that is sharpening daily and that allows no easy compromise.

In Washington’s foreign policy—especially its wars of aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan—this sharpening has reached an acute stage that is bringing the war home. The U.S. has inflicted a nightmare of horror on the Iraqi people, killing hundreds of thousands and disrupting all of Iraqi society. Meanwhile, the 3,000 U.S. troops killed and more than 20,000 severely maimed also are victims of the U.S. war.

The U.S. capitalist rulers have finally recognized that they are losing the battle, that they will not wind up with Iraq’s oil, with military bases, with the promised strategic world dominance that the Bush administration convinced them could be achieved with its course of criminal aggression four years ago. Instead, the war now presents them with new, harsh realities. Two-thirds of the U.S. people want the war to end. Three-fourths of the Iraqis want to see U.S. troops killed.

Yet the Bush gang’s answer, facilitated by new Pentagon chief Robert Gates, is to increase U.S. troops in Iraq. The Democrats, elected by voters who wanted the war to end, have already betrayed their electorate by refusing to consider ending the war by withdrawing U.S. troops.

The unbearable contradiction of an unwinnable war—the Iraqis intend to resist for generations if necessary—and a U.S. regime determined to bet double or nothing makes an upturn in resistance inside the U.S. military both necessary and inevitable. It puts obstructions at recruiting centers, like those reported on from North Carolina and New York, on the order of the day.

Those are the two sides of 2006 as seen objectively: intensification of mass suffering and a growing fightback.

Now all those who understand this potential must make a subjective choice: to enter this great battle on the side of the workers and oppressed people, to help make sure that the struggles against war and racism and for immigrant rights are joined together with all progressive struggles—so that next year this space can report a big step forward for humanity.