The Occupy movement has called for a general strike on May 1. While this is a positive development, it falls far short of the traditional communist holiday, a celebration for the international working class. May Day grew out of a real general strike in Chicago in 1886 (see page 5), one that shut off the bosses’ flow of profits — and not just for one day. For over a century, communists have organized around May Day’s revolutionary message worldwide. It has never stood for the reform of capitalism, which is what the liberal bosses want us to believe is possible. Rather, May Day stands for the overthrow of the profit system, a system that brings the working class mass racist unemployment, periodic depressions, poverty, racism, sexism and tens of millions of deaths in imperialist wars.
As we have witnessed in Italy and France, one-day general strikes are organized by pro-boss union misleaders who encourage workers to let off steam and then return to the workplace with the same unsolved problems. They barely touch the bosses’ profits. They’re more an inconvenience than a threat to the system.
The capitalist media will be sure not to cover our May Day marches for communist revolution. Our Party’s ideas contradict their class interest. But the rulers will eagerly publicize Occupy’s call for a general strike on May 1, as evidenced by their New York Times mouthpiece providing a link to Occupy’s Web page (www.occupymay1st.org), which both advertises the event and exposes the movement’s motives.
The page, sponsored by Occupy Los Angeles (OLA), begins:
In most European countries, May 1st is traditionally a Workers’ day – a day of Labor Solidarity, and a public holiday. In Los Angeles, it’s a day to celebrate and march in support of immigrant [and migrant] rights. In protest against the corruption of the worldwide marketplace, which has led to illegal foreclosures, mass unemployment, low wages, high taxes and a penalization of all those who do not own the “1%” of the world’s resources, and in solidarity with the immigrant movements of May 1st, OLA decided to declare May 1st, 2012 a People’s General Strike.
Hiding the Truth
Whoever leads the supposedly “leaderless” OLA is trying, hand in hand with the media, to misdirect the anger and militancy of rank-and-file Occupiers onto the fatal detour of reformism. In the leaders’ view, all ills stem from corrupted markets that could be cleaned up by “tighter regulations.” They deliberately hide the bitter truth: that unemployment, low wages and economic inequality are essential aspects of the profit system, and cannot be “reformed” away.
Even worse, Occupy’s “Workers’ Day” organizers omit mention of the deadliest scourges that capitalists inflict on our class: imperialism, fascism and racism. In their pursuit of maximum profit, U.S. bosses have murdered millions and impoverished billions around the world. Whenever PL’ers have raised the issue of racism at Occupy General Assemblies, or called for action against it in Los Angeles and New York (including a protest against racist murders by cops in those two cities), Occupy’s leaders have tried to shut us up, despite support for the discussion from the movements’ rank-and-filers.
The fact is that masses of Occupy participants honestly want to battle against the unavoidable ravages of capitalism — the racist inequalities in education and healthcare, the banks that rob billions by foreclosing on mortgages, the mass unemployment and declining wages. We in PLP also believe in fighting these profit-driven horrors. But we cannot fight and win by choosing one or another ruling-class faction. All of them — from the Republicans’ Tea Party to the dominant Rockefeller Democrats — must sustain the system that fosters them. They are bankrupt of solutions. We stand instead for communist revolution to overthrow that system and create a society run by and for the working class.
Even with the liberal bosses’ attempts to control the Occupy movement and fold it into this year’s presidential campaign carnival, many Occupiers have begun to stand up to oppose this exploitative system. From anti-war appeals to an anti-racist march in Los Angeles (led in part by PL’ers) to last December’s shut-down of Oakland’s port, rank-and-file militancy is on the rise. Anti-racism was front and center in the long-term occupation of a downtown Oakland park renamed Oscar Grant Plaza, after a young black man who was executed in 2009 by a local transit cop.
Who Bankrolled OWS?
At the same time, however, it needs to be clear that Occupy Wall Street owes its birth to Adbusters, an online outfit bankrolled by imperialist billionaire George Soros (see box). Liberal imperialists like Soros are pushing to steer Occupiers into “solutions” that solve nothing for our class. Their goal is to enlist the most militant workers into the rulers’ desperate fight to maintain their superpower status by holding off their imperialist rivals — in China, Russia, India and Brazil — in the competition for control of fossil-fuel energy resources.
Predictably, the OLA May Day manifesto falls squarely in line with the war needs of the biggest U.S. bosses. It champions immigrants’ “rights,” namely a Dream Act that would guarantee citizenship to undocumented immigrant youth in exchange for college attendance or enlistment in the military. Since most could not afford college tuition, the “choice” narrows into a back-door draft. If this legislation passes, young immigrants will give the U.S. Army brass the additional troops it needs to fight the capitalists’ imperialist oil wars. As a New York Times editorial noted, “The Defense Department, at least, understands [young immigrants’] value. Passage of the Dream Act is one of its official goals for helping to maintain ‘a mission-ready, all-volunteer force’” (9/19/10).
In reality, Occupy Wall Street’s attack on “marketplace corruption” is a call for drastic regulatory steps to put industry and finance on a more aggressive war footing. Two Democratic Party presidents, Woodrow Wilson and then Franklin Roosevelt, imposed strict White House control on domestic markets to pave the way for U.S involvement in the first and second world wars. (They are unlikely to be the last ones, as long as imperialism exists.)
U.S. rulers routinely use their electoral circus to lure the most disaffected workers into backing a war agenda. Obama’s 2008 victory — after promising “yes-we-can” solutions to workers’ problems — enabled him to perpetuate mass murder in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that was just the start. Obama used this mandate, plus his unmatched ability to pacify left-leaning workers and black and Latino workers in general, to spread lethal U.S. action into Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and places known only to the Pentagon and CIA. The incumbent president’s murderous track record has the main wing of the U.S. ruling class hoping for his re-election.
Ballot Box a Dead-end
The rulers’ concern is that a crisis-ridden capitalist economy has weakened their ability to funnel workers into the dead end of the voting booth, the bosses’ safety valve of choice to diffuse militant action. Millions fewer may vote in November than in 2008, and pundits are declaring that Obama will be toast unless job creation tops 150,000 per month from here on out. Black and Latino workers and youth, the people most victimized by the unceasing racism of police brutality, mass foreclosures, and brutal unemployment rates, are less than thrilled with Obama’s performance.
Elections exclude a significant portion of the working class, including those who are convicted felons, have been imprisoned or are immigrants, both documented and undocumented. However, election 2012 still looms as the bosses’ main event. All the conflicting camps of U.S. capitalists need a popular stamp of approval for their various anti-worker, union-busting and militarist programs.
As CHALLENGE reported (2/1/12), the presidential campaign revolves around assorted bosses choosing which wars to wage next and how best to mobilize for them. Rick Santorum, the recent winner of several GOP primaries, has come out of obscurity by endorsing motives for war with Iran and China.
Santorum serves on the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), an organization bankrolled by his top campaign donor, Foster Friess. EPPC proclaims itself “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” As Santorum’s own Website puts it, “China should be challenged on religious liberty.” As for Iran and the oil-soaked Middle East, it declares: “War with Radical Islam.”
Chanting “Onward Christian Soldiers” (though generously including the U.S. rulers’ staunch ally, Israel), Santorum echoes the racist rant in “Clash of Civilizations,” the book by imperialist darling Samuel P. Huntington. In posing a strategy for world war between Western imperialists and Muslim nations, Huntington makes an undisguised call for patriotic loyalty to an attack by U.S. bosses against billions of our sister and brother workers worldwide.
Blocked by its leaders from exposing capitalism’s built-in contradiction between exploiters and exploited, the Occupy movement cannot stop the plight of workers from getting even worse. The war-makers’ coming election is just as useless for our class. The profit system itself must be destroyed, and only a revolution for working-class rule can accomplish that goal.
Working Class the Key Force
Workers constitute the decisive force for transforming society. It is our class that produces all value in the course of production. The owners of the means of production have expropriated that value for their private profit, paying as little as possible to those creating that profit. The owning class cannot survive except by exploiting the working class, but workers definitely don’t need the bosses. Once masses of workers understand that we can throw them out and take state power, and are won to the Progressive Labor Party, the hell of capitalism will be ground into the dustbin of history.
Today, many have been won to Occupy’s leaders or Obama’s promises, even if only as lesser evils to the Republicans’ overtly racist ideology. Evil, yes; lesser no. It is now critical to work on all fronts — shops and unions, schools and campuses, churches and mass organizations, and especially among GI’s in the military — to expose and attack their leaders and advance our communist ideas.
On this May Day, it is to these ideas that PLP and our friends and supporters dedicate ourselves. We must win the participants in this upcoming one-day strike to turn it into something far more powerful and significant: a communist call for workers’ power.
*****
OWS Funded by One-Percenter?
While the rank and file of the Occupy Wall Street movement sincerely wants to expose the inequalities of U.S. capitalism, CHALLENGE has been reporting that — as the adjoining editorial indicates — the liberal Democrats and some OWS leaders are looking to use the movement’s militancy to re-elect Barack Obama. But what is a fairly well-kept secret, the origins of OWS may very well have received its initial funding from one of the world’s richest multi-billionaires.
The following is an excerpt from our November 2, 2011 editorial:
“The first call to ‘occupy Wall Street’ came this past summer from an online magazine called Adbusters, a beneficiary of the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation whose biggest sugar daddy is none other than billionaire imperialist George Soros.
“The ruling class media’s bizarre treatment of this link suggests just how much they want to conceal it. At 11:09 AM on October 13, mainstream Reuters’ coverage led with, ‘The group that started it all [OWS] may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest men.’
“By 5:25 PM, Reuters had changed the same article to begin, ‘George Soros isn’t a financial backer of the Wall Street protests, despite speculation by critics….’
“At 6:45 PM, Reuters had the original opener followed by a disclaimer from Soros & Co. In the face of the money-trail facts, liberal rulers spin the lie that only right-wing lunatics see an OWS-Soros tie.”
Of course, this is the same Soros who poured millions into liberals’ election campaigns in the Ukraine, Georgia and other Eastern European countries. Follow the money trail….
