International working class solidarity for the New Year

I am retired now and really miss not being around my co-workers.  Being the way I am, we always talked politics.  But workers talk politics at the first chance they get.  I remember when we used to go to a pub after work on a payday Friday and guys would say to me, "Alright, but no Union shit, no politics.  You really need to learn how to relax rich."  

But as soon as we sat down and had a beer the talk turned to work.  When someone mentioned something to me about this or that boss, I used to say at first, "I'm not interested in that I came here to relax a bit.  No politics please."  So many people associate politics with simply putting a piece of paper in a ballot box but politics is life itself, every aspect of it.

If we don't talk to each other, and particularly if workers activists, revolutionaries, don't talk to workers, we can't learn anything; we can't get an understanding of the mood.  That's why academics are often so boring; they think that there is nothing they can learn from talking to working people; they'll talk to Union officials though; consequently, they remain in the dark most of the time.

This is what they get when we work faster

I was at Safeway this morning for some items I forgot yesterday and the line to the checker was pretty long.  She was perhaps in her late fifties to early sixties.  She was working at a fast pace but also had to constantly tell people that the line extended down between the two aisles opposite her station because people would walk up to the last person at her station without seeing the rest of us down the aisle.

By the time I got close to her station, at the aisle running horizontal to the one our line was on and opposite her station, I said loud enough for others to hear:

"The boss doesn't pay you more for working faster even though you produce more.  Take your time."   

"Just the way I am," she responded, "I don't like to see you guys all waiting there like that."

A couple of us thanked her and I said that most of us are like that but the bosses take advantage of human decency and exploit it.
"It's all about money for them." I said.
"I know" she replied, "But this is the way I am, I don't do it for the boss."

Then the guy behind me said that they could hire someone to stand at the station and tell people that the line extended down the aisle so that the checker could do her work and wouldn't be so stressed, and I could see others agreed.

We eventually got on to the grocery strike from 2003 that was defeated due to the refusal of the Union leaders to spread the strike and make it national rather than rely on a friendly Democrat here and there and obey the law at all costs.  The top Union officials are the only people in society that have their members' obey the laws, the bankers, politicians, employers, break laws every day.  The checker knew what was going on as far as the bosses were concerned, but her humanity was intact, she was not kissing ass by working faster, she was helping other human beings out. But sometimes we have to control behavior that is very strong in us. When we recognize that the employer exploits basic human decency, like being as efficient as we can at our work, we have to become less efficient.

I was reading some US Labor history yesterday.  I am missing the workplace only in that it is the great educator.  Here is a description of the activity inside the Fisher body plant in Flint Michigan that was occupied in 1926-37:

"The workers immediately began to secure the plant against any attacker.  They moved scores of unfinished Buick bodies in front of all entrances to form a gigantic barricade.  With acetylene torches they welded a steel frame around every door.  Bullet-proof metal sheets were put in to position to cover every window, while holes were carved in them and threaded to allow the nozzles of fire hoses to be screwed into them.  Wet clothes were kept in readiness to be placed on the face as protection against tear-gas attacks.   Large supplies of metal parts were placed in strategic spots.  Paint guns for spraying would-be invaders were located throughout the plant." *

I have been to Flint, it is a ghost town.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that the history of Flint is not something the boss want us to know too much about.  Flint Michigan is a historic place, a place where great clashes with the capitalists took place. it was where the most powerful corporation in the world was humbled by workers willing to die in battle.  If we lived in a workers' democracy we would not allow such a place to fall in to disrepair.  They spend billions on shopping malls and commerial centers, but Flint is a bad memory for them, they could have lost it.

Paul Mason points out in his book (See below) that with globalization, the numbers of the working class have shifted from Europe and the US to Asia and the under developed countries.  India, China, and the former states of the old Soviet Union have over one billion workers compared to "the 460 million workers of the developed world." he writes.  Many of the factory workers are now women who have fought heroic struggles against the modern day textile and factory barons of the late 19th, early 20th century who have as their allies the giant retailers and tech conglomerates from Wal-Mart to Apple and the yuppie tech billionaires who attempt to convince us they are just one of us because they wee blue jeans and no tie.. Battles have been raging in Bangladesh factories as this blog commented.

The woman in Safeway, the imprisoned Bradley Manning, the textile workers in Bangladesh and the tech workers in China who Labor under the most abusive conditions are my brothers and sisters.  No one bats an eyelid when a person of particular race talks about "my people" meaning that nationality which, if you were American, would put a worker at Wal-Mart and Donald Trump in the same camp. Or id people say it about color, whites are "my people".  Some whites are for sure.

I am originally English.  Like the Queen, I drink tea, am white, and speak English (in a different manner than her though) our similarity ends there.  I have more in common with a Bolivian miner. But we must not talk of class in the US, it is taboo.  But Warren Buffet talks of class. he said that there is a class war in this country and his class is winning it.  He is right, mostly because our leaders are on his side and we are yet to amass the troops and reach out to our class internationally.

The capitalists propaganda tells us we are "one nation" but we are not.  All nations are divided.  It is not the troops of a foreign country that are denying US workers health care, education, a decent job or housing. It is not even Osama bin laden. It is "fellow Americans". The speculators, bankers and hedge fund managers and their politicians who are responsible for the present economic crisis. Anyway, this is my "season of buying message".  I want to end this blog on that quote I posted the other day by that most genuine of American revolutionaries, Eugene Debs:

"Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free"

* Linder W. The Great Sit Down Strike Against GM. Quoted in Paul Mason: Live Working or Die Fighting