03.03.2011

Middle East comes to Midwest USA

Jim Creegan reports on the class struggles in Wisconsin

Having read into so many past events promises of fundamental change that were never fulfilled, socialists should proceed with extreme caution regarding the possibilities of recent happenings in the Middle East. The present juncture does, however, put the ability of Marxists to rein in their wishful-thinking tendencies to an exceptionally severe test.

Here in the US, for instance, Rupert Murdoch’s fascistic media clown, Glenn Beck, was incensed in mid-February by a placard in the hands of one of the 30,000 state government employees then encamped or demonstrating outside the capitol building (seat of the state legislature) in Madison, Wisconsin. According to Beck, it read: “From Cairo to Madison, workers unite!” The placard was obviously carried by some leftwing group. But, sententious phrasing aside, the sentiment it expressed was not too far from that of the demonstration as a whole. Many in the crowd - apart from the lefts - reportedly referred to the capitol building and surroundings as “Madison’s Tahrir Square”. “The images from Wisconsin,” wrote one reporter for The New York Times, “evoked the Middle East more than the Midwest” (February 19).

The union action - still going on as I write, and spreading across the country - is the biggest mass protest in the state since the Vietnam era. It was organised by public-service unions, under strong pressure from their rank and file, to oppose a bill introduced in the Wisconsin legislature by Scott Walker, a Republican governor newly elected with Tea Party backing. Many schools were shut down for a week, as teachers called in sick to join the rallies, accompanied by thousands of high-school students who used their days off to come out in support. Rallies of hundreds and even thousands took place in small towns throughout a state often held up as an exemplar of middle-American political moderation, as bland as the cheese for which Wisconsin is famous.

The measure the workers are trying to kill would deprive unions of their right to bargain collectively with the state over everything but wages. Working conditions, holidays, benefits, work rules - all would be dictated by the employer; employees would immediately be forced to pay a much bigger percentage of their pensions and medical fees; workers would no longer be required to join the union or pay dues; contracts could last no more than a year, and an annual vote on union representation would be required, with the obvious purpose of encouraging employees to disaffiliate. The benefits unions would be forbidden to bargain for have compensated historically for wages that are on the whole lower than in the private sector for workers of comparable age and education (contrary to the rightwing propaganda now portraying public-service workers as living on easy street). The bill’s provisions are so onerous that its true intent - to rid Wisconsin of public-sector unions altogether - is widely acknowledged. Walker has threatened to call out the National Guard against demonstrators. An assistant attorney general in the nearby state of Indiana, where public workers have already been deprived of bargaining rights has just been fired for advocating the use of live ammunition against demonstrators.

To justify the legislation, Walker is saying that his deficit-ridden government can no longer afford its union contracts. This is a blatant lie. Of the many states facing fiscal crises in the wake of the 2008 recession, Wisconsin is one of the least hard hit. Last month, the governor and the Republican-controlled state legislature stopped crying poverty long enough to push through tax cuts for the rich and corporations that would make the existing deficit worse.

Among Walker’s biggest campaign contributors were the billionaire oil and gas moguls, David and Charles Koch (pronounced like the carbonated eponym for US commercial supremacy). Major benefactors of the Tea Party through an outfit named Americans for Prosperity, the Kansas-based Koch brothers own petrol-supply centres and a toilet-paper factory in Wisconsin, and are notorious for funding union-busting efforts throughout the country. Walker hatched plans with the Koch brothers to take on the unions before he was even elected governor.

The CEO of another Koch-backed rightwing group, the Bradley Foundation, managed his gubernatorial campaign. Now he is turning around and attempting to make workers pay for a shortfall he has deliberately increased at the behest of his big-business backers. As another placard (this one hand lettered by an actual union member) read, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining”.

(Walker’s complicity was exposed in a phone conversation he had on February 23 with a blogger from Buffalo, New York, pretending to be David Koch. Walker, who was completely taken in, spared 20 minutes from his busy union-busting schedule to talk to the impostor at the very time he was refusing all phone calls from Democratic state officials trying to reach a compromise on the bill. Responding to a suggestion from the Koch impersonator that he infiltrate the demonstrations in the capitol with provocateurs to create an incident, Walker said that he had thought about it, but decided the stratagem was too risky from a political standpoint. The prankster later promised to take a delighted Walker to California and “show him a good time” once he had finished dealing with “those union bastards”.)

Walker has enough votes in the Wisconsin legislature to pass the bill, but all 14 Democratic state senators boycotted the session before which it was to be submitted, denying Republicans the quorum needed to convene. To get around a law requiring them to attend all senate sessions while present in Wisconsin, the Democratic lawmakers fled to Illinois, where they have remained for over a fortnight at this writing. Walker is threatening to make redundant thousands of state workers if the legislators do not return and allow him to pass the bill. Narrow party-political considerations, more than solidarity with the unions, were probably their main motive. The fact that the Democrats have refused for decades to support unions in any meaningful way has not prevented labour bureaucrats from favouring the party with generous campaign contributions. The destruction of public sector unions in Wisconsin - the place where they were born in the 1950s, and have played a major role in state politics ever since - would thus deprive Democrats of a major funding source, and give Republicans, who rely almost exclusively on donations from corporations and the rich, an annihilating electoral edge. (Walker was careful to spare the only two public unions that supported his candidacy in November - the firefighters and the police - from the provisions of his bill. This did not prevent firefighters from joining the protest; the police were there too, albeit in the contradictory role of demonstrators and enforcers of the governor’s orders to curtail them. After mass support rallies in Madison and around the country on February 26, it was the police who blocked protestors from re-entering the capitol building, in probable violation of the state constitution.)

The Democrats want to continue collecting union money, but face an acute dilemma: any strong support for the Wisconsin labour action would compromise a source of institutional funding several-fold greater than unions: namely, the corporations - many of the same ones that donate to the Republican Party.

Thus, while some local Democrats may genuinely back union rights, the response of the national leadership was belated and equivocal. Not until four days into the protests did president Barack Obama offer up the mildest of rebukes to Walker on a local radio station interview. While he said the governor’s move “seemed like” an assault on unions, and that we should not demonise public workers, he also called for shared sacrifice in the face of the national fiscal crisis, giving credence to the falsehood that the Wisconsin governor is motivated by budgetary concerns.

The very next day the White House was bending over backwards to deny Republican accusations that the Democratic Party was behind the protests. This time it was telling the truth. What else but vacillation can be expected of a president who had just put before the US Congress a budget bill calling for major reductions in social spending, and had given the green light to the likes of Walker in December by announcing a two-year pay freeze for federal employees?

The party-political side of the Wisconsin confrontation, however, is a secondary aspect of what is shaping up to be perhaps the most important class battle since Ronald Reagan sacked striking air traffic controllers 30 years ago. (Walker himself recognised the parallel in the above-mentioned colloquy with the Koch imitator, when he said he viewed the anti-union battle as his Reagan moment. Reagan’s firing of the air controllers, he said, was the “first crack in the Berlin Wall”; from that point on, he continued, the Russians knew they couldn’t push Reagan around.)

Legislation similar to the Wisconsin bill is pending in several states, including Tennessee, Missouri and Ohio. Fifteen thousand protestors assembled last week in the Ohio capital of Columbus. The public speeches of New Jersey’s Republican governor, Chris Christie, sound three notes: bash the unions, bash the unions and bash the unions! The outcome in Wisconsin could therefore seal the fate of what is poised to become a national trend. Republicans have taken their November victory at the polls as a mandate for all kinds of anti-popular measures under the pretext of deficit reduction; governors with eyes on the White House in 2012 are now trying to outdo one another in union-crushing zeal. As the ranks of union members and their supporters at the Madison statehouse swelled from 30,000 to 80,000 in a matter of days, and Tea Partiers mounted a counter-demonstration of about 7,500, the unfolding confrontation in the country’s heartland became the main focus of national politics.

Last bastion

Here as in Europe, public-service unions are perhaps the most enduring redoubt of working class strength. In the US, 36% of government employees are union members, a opposed to about 7% in the private sector. Public unions have, in general, been less susceptible to neoliberal assaults than their private-sector counterparts because the governments that employ their members are not directly profit-driven, and hence less subject to the pressures of capitalist competition. Moreover, most of the services they provide - education, transportation and public maintenance - cannot be relocated to low-wage countries.

Public unions remain a thorn in the side of the ruling classes not only because the latter no longer wish to pay the tax bill for their salaries. They have also managed to maintain certain conditions of employment that are rapidly becoming extinct for most other workers. Their job security, seniority rights, vacations, grievance procedures, medical cover and ability to retire in middle age with sometimes decent pensions make them slightly less dependent on the whims of their bosses, and therefore less intimidated. Their existence is a standing reminder of how things were for larger swathes of the working class before the age of austerity, and how they could be again with union power restored. They must be crippled to finish the job begun 30 years ago by Thatcher and Reagan.

Yet the very things that make public unions strong also leave them open to rightwing demagogy. Their members are paid with taxpayer funds. If bus and train drivers have the power to paralyse whole cities and countries, the public is also greatly inconvenienced by transport strikes. If the benefits government employees enjoy can serve as a model for other unions, they can also be an object of resentment among those who have much less and may look upon public workers as privileged.

The success of efforts to turn opinion against public employees has varied depending upon the level of class-consciousness and political traditions in a given country. During what till now was the high watermark of resistance to neoliberalism - the French strikes of 1995 and after - such efforts failed miserably, as the workers garnered broad popular support. In the United States, on the other hand, divide-and-conquer tactics have been much more successful.

Rightwing politicians and the mass media constantly portray government employees as unwilling to share the burdens that all Americans must bear in order to reduce growing public deficits. The oligarchs who have been devouring an ever-growing share of national income for decades, who caused the financial crisis that produced the budget gaps in the first place and then received billions in government largesse to get them out of the mess they made for themselves are, of course, conveniently airbrushed from the picture. But many middle and working class Americans simply lack the intellectual armour to protect themselves against such duplicities. Reference to classes and class interests is effectively relegated to the left-liberal fringes of mainstream political discourse. Deindustrialisation, low union density and the ‘death of communism’ have given individualistic habits of thought a decided upper hand over the country’s already underdeveloped collectivist traditions.

Teachers targeted

Especially pernicious is the crusade that has been waged for years against teachers’ unions and public education itself. The pretext is concern over the alleged failure of the nation’s public schools (‘state schools’, in British parlance). And, because of the concentration of the white middle classes in suburbs and private academies, many urban schools are indeed little more than holding-pens for black and Latino youth.

But, rather than address the education gap’s main causes - overcrowding, underfunding and the impoverished, chaotic ghetto life pupils must face when they go home - champions of ‘school reform’ seek to lay the blame on bad teachers, whom they contend are protected by their unions. Anti-teacher attitudes are hammered into the public mind by an unrelenting propaganda barrage in the mass media. Here in New York City, the tabloid press offers up an almost daily diet of horror stories about teachers who show up drunk or abuse their sick leave. In the public schools the reformers are attempting to abolish ‘tenure’, which is in fact nothing more than a guarantee of due process before firing that teachers usually receive after several years on the job; they also insist on measuring student progress according to standardised achievement tests, and seek to replace union seniority rules governing pay, promotion and dismissal by a ‘merit system’, according to which pedagogues would be judged by how well their students perform on the tests.

The ‘reformers’ are also promoting charter schools as an alternative to standard, city-run public education. Charters receive public funds, but are founded by private, sometimes for-profit groups. They usually feature longer school days, lower pay, and are - in most cases and most importantly - non-union. Although the charter schools are on the whole no more successful academically than public ones, they are promoted by exaggerated claims, like those contained in a heavily publicised documentary film of dubious factual merit titled Waiting for Superman by Davis Guggenheim of An inconvenient truth fame.

The ‘education reform’ movement is being promoted by Bill Gates and other less public-spirited corporate CEOs and ‘conservative’ think-tanks. It is not only a rightwing cause, but has been embraced by many in the mainstream liberal establishment. It has won the backing of the Obama administration and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, a prominent ‘reformer’ in his previous capacity of superintendent of schools in Chicago. Last year, Obama and Duncan gave unqualified support to the wholesale firing (later rescinded) of scores of teachers from a Rhode Island high school with a poor academic record. The charter school movement is not only a battering-ram against unions, but a bridge to the privatisation of the educational system, using children as a cover. The long-standing anti-teacher campaign paved the way for the current denigration of all government employees.

Without a piston

The resistance of workers in Wisconsin and other states is not merely a response to union busting at home, but a ripple effect of the rebellions now sweeping the Middle East with tsunami force. It tells us that globalisation can cut two ways: both to the advantage of the ruling classes in the form of the greater international mobility of capital; and against them by making rebellion contagious across borders and even continents with unprecedented speed. These rebellions prove that neoliberal capitalism, with all its triumphalist bravado, cannot make the class struggle go away.

Wisconsin indicates that even the western world’s most complaisant workers have limits as to how much they will take from a ruling class so puffed up with arrogance that it is now being compared to the clique that surrounded Mubarak. Wisconsin also says that unionised workers, however decimated and demoralised, still have the potential to form the core of a wider resistance to neoliberal assaults. A broad union-centred mobilisation, supported by minorities, students and intellectuals could stop the Tea Party in its tracks. A recent New York Times/CBS poll records a significant shift in public opinion in favour of unions; 60% of respondents not only support the retention of bargaining rights, but also oppose cutbacks in worker wages and benefits.

But Midwestern workers also have a serious problem in common with the rebellious masses of Cairo and Benghazi: the almost total lack of conscious political leadership. Trotsky wrote of the October revolution that the Bolsheviks were the piston and the masses were the steam.

Due to the discrediting of socialism after the fall of the Soviet Union, combined with decades of free-market brainwashing, the current revolts in the Middle East are taking the form of a huge eruption of steam without a piston.

The communist, socialist and left-nationalist parties that would once have contended for the leadership of such spontaneous upheavals are conspicuously absent. Even if they misled the masses in the past, their very presence could at least pose questions as to what kind of leadership there should be. Today there is little such debate, and many on the left are lauding the leaderless, politically inchoate nature of these movements as a virtue.

The error of such thinking is apparent in the national class confrontation now brewing in the midwest. No radical organisations have led any section of the American working class, apart from a few maverick unions, since the 1930s and 40s. The few socialist groups that now exist number in the hundreds at most.

No grouping of this size can place itself at the head of a mass struggle, no matter how correct its programme. For their part, the Democrats are limiting themselves to their usual role of attempting to contain the confrontation, but without exercising any active political direction.

The leadership vacuum is therefore being filled by Democrat-loyal trade-union bureaucrats. The bureaucrats know that more is involved in this fight than the economic welfare of their members. At stake is ultimately the right of public sector unions, and perhaps even of private sector unions, to exist. The bureaucrats must therefore fight back in some way, for without the unions they would cease to exist as well.

But the resolve of the bureaucrats does not match the militancy of those who follow them by default. The former have already given away half the game by conceding to Walker all of the drastic economic givebacks he is demanding. In return, they ask only that their collective-bargaining rights be spared.

The governor thus far refuses to budge. The union leaders say that their capitulation on the economic issues demonstrates their willingness to share in the sacrifices necessary to balance the state budget; Walker’s intransigence, on the other hand, shows that his bill is not about budget-balancing, but union-busting. But is not a budget-balancing crusade that leaves the wealthy untouched a total fraud, no more legitimate as an excuse for savaging workers’ living standards than destroying their unions?

The bureaucrats have obviously conceded on givebacks to show the ruling class, and large sections of the public still in its ideological grip, how ‘moderate’ and ‘reasonable’ they are. But the bourgeoisie is in the end persuaded by power and nothing else; gestures of good will from intended victims avail nothing. One cannot expose the sham of sacrifice-sharing while simultaneously buying into it. To do so can only confuse and demoralise the rank and file and weaken their ability to prevail.

The absence of the alternative leadership necessary to bring mass struggles to a successful conclusion is the main reason why Marxists should remain guarded in their understandable optimism about events from Tahrir Square to the Madison statehouse. The possibility that these events are but the opening salvoes of a new epoch of resistance, and the potential of such resistance to revive belief in the class struggle and a socialist future - both prerequisites for building revolutionary parties big enough to intervene in the greater world - are, on the other hand, reasons why a certain optimism is not unjustified.